I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half/ people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand
Hanging around in Albany, New York, the typical and now oddly banal stretch of Madison and Lark, cars lazily cruising by, with both somewhere and nowhere to go. There are only a few venues of entertainment that I will go into. More close minded, now. My current criteria for going somewhere, sadly, pretty much broils down to the fact that it must contain a Mrs. Pac-Man machine, which strangely, many places do. I will stay at that same machine all night, challenging passers-by to competitions, eliciting both strange looks and antagonism. Quarters lined up on the machine, jamming on the dial, right/ left, up/ down. The main secret, I think, is that you should never go for the fruit, which is something you learn early on. This is one of the things they teach you in religion class, and now I see this same virtue manifested in video games, making you think twice.

Out of the bar and into the night, taking cold air into my lungs and blowing it back out again, like a cigarette smoker. Down Madison, the architecture looming large in the night. Walking around the empty plaza in a suspended state, cars whizzing by and yelling things at me. You just cannot be in the presence of this kind of architecture and not be freaked out by it. Coming home from a road trip and up the interstate, it appears in the distance that some alien craft has landed and some War of the Worlds-type fantasy is taking place. And then you get closer and realize it’s just some weird egg. I remember my parents taking me here for fireworks as a child, and the awe that it inspired then, grandiose explosions taking place overhead. And now I just come to see it symbolically, with more or less explosiveness and awe.

By the look in your eyes I knew you were born to lose
To the gym. The “Silver Sneakers” aerobics class has just finished, forcing me to wade through the throngs of elderly, who have just completed their lightweight exercises and are headed out to the diner now, to hang around. “How you doing, big guy?” some of the older guys address me. “Have you found someplace to work yet?” they want to know. This is the daily locker room banter. I am out of place here, at a time when most people my age are in office places and all manner of different work environments. They gather around me as I bring them up to speed on my life in two seconds. “You ever play any basketball?” Ron wants to know. Being tall, apparently, qualifies you to do certain things, and this is a question I’m asked relatively often. Still, I find myself unable to sufficiently reason my way out of exactly why I do not play basketball. “No, not really,” I let him know. “No reason, really.” The answer disappoints. He has a grandson, apparently, taller than I am, and he plays basketball. What can you do? Slipping into my Public Enemy T-shirt, I excuse myself to go do some aerobic exercises.

What I typically do is annex the private room, which has its own stereo system, and although a sign strictly admonishes, “do not change station,” I waste no time in making a b-line right for that same stereo and turn it to the station I like. The 12:00 college radio show is about to come on and I turn it up all the way. What at first seems like a fairly innocuous playlist is then hyper-amplified in the company of the middle-aged women who also end up making their way into the room. I cringe a little when they play the killer new rock track and an older woman comes in. Falling away, for the first time, is my own staid perception, and I hear the song for the first time from an alien point of view, as I often do when listening to music with others. The guitar part is big and the singer screams, shocking as it does this woman, who probably thought the Partridge Family were pretty insane. She wastes no time in turning it not only down, but all the way off.

Heading back out into the main area of the gym, there are an inordinate number of jacked-up men in here today. I feel out of place, like I just stepped off some type of liner destined for some alien continent and am now experiencing the life form indigenous to the mainland. The weird thing is, I have pretty much always been a native. It’s kind of funny watching these guys taking sideward glances at me in my PE T-shirt, and wondering what they think of all that. If they feel bad about my lack of cultural appropriateness in the same way that I feel bad about theirs. I eavesdrop on their conversations between sets, amazed by the subject matter. They’re playing that Green Day song, where it goes, “walking down the lonely road/ the only one that I have ever known”, and the guys are expressing a real reverence for this song. The Green Day track is where it’s at, man. I like listening in on this commentary, because I’m pretty much sure that it wouldn’t matter what is being played ten times a day that would garner a reaction like this one, and liking the Green Day track is pretty much proof positive of this. What cult-deprogramming center I’ve been attending that they have apparently missed out on, I’m not sure. But it was something, somewhere along the line, which made me detach and let go completely. And now here I am, and there they are, walking down the only road that I have ever known.

Getting on the treadmill, I can see myself in the mirror on the opposite side of the gym. Walking at myself, into myself. The Public Enemy shirt, with the crosshair design on the front in perfect view. I stand before myself, incredulous at my own sense of alienation from my fellow human beings. Turning up the speed on the treadmill, running faster now, into myself, although never really getting any closer.

In two more weeks I'll be in Dallas Fort Worth/ in one more minute I'll be gone
I have recently seen a license plate reading, “Chilax”, a confluent term combining “Chill” and “Relax,” and so I will relate to you that I am chilaxing at the moment. We used to use this same term last summer, working at the university. “Chilax, man. You’re going to have a heart attack.” Or: “You’re doing way too much work,” we would say to the new person, “fucking chilax.” Thereafter my work criteria always seemed to include this term. Although, it’s entirely possible that it has always included this terminology and it was the term which took so long in catching up to my slack behavior. I don’t know. But we are indeed chilaxing today, and being paid the prevailing wage to do so. What exactly that wage turns out to be, I have no idea, as I failed math 1 and never really recovered thereafter. It’s the word problems you think you’ll never have to use later which you end up cursing yourself for not remembering. If the temp agency fires you, having been paid on average about $350.00 a week, for a sum total of 35 weeks, what will unemployment insurance pay if it’s an average of your previous weeks’ earnings? The answer, it turns out, is not that much, but I totally cheated and what are you going to do?

It’s not a bad arrangement, though. It’s kind of the ghettoized version of that Win For Life lottery ticket you see in the stores, except that it only pays about 200.00 bucks, and life, it turns out, is only a few months long. It’s a test run, I reassure myself, hoping simultaneously that I don’t turn into a compulsive gambler. Blowing the scratch off dust away from my ticket, I realize that the prize is an endless expanse of free time, and then I proceed to have the accompanying anxiety attack over what to do with the earnings, sitting, waiting and wondering—hoping that I don’t waste it all.

I remember having this same conversation with someone at that same temp job I worked at last summer, and asking him what he’d do if he won the lottery he was always talking about. “If I ever won, man,” he told me, “I would buy a big house in the middle of nowhere, with a gigantic television set and just eat anything I wanted and have sex with all kinds of women all day.” I processed this answer, attempting to ignore the nihilism inherent in that type of reply. Because that’s exactly that kind of complacency which I think you want to avoid. “Chilax,” he probably would have told me, had he known what I thought about all that.

Today’s unemployment theme, it turns out, is positivity, which I’m not sure is actually a word—which makes me laugh. But I feel OK. “Feeling OK,” I have recently read in a book, “is the sum total of not paying too much attention and being totally distracted by everything you do all day.” I seem to have embraced this formula, I think, staying relatively busy for the most part. And it’s kind of nice. I do this as creatively as possible all day: running errands, hanging around in the coffee shoppes, make a phone call, go play guitar. Everything feels lightweight and nice. It’s what lies at the end of all that distraction which has me worried. And it’s that which I’m not looking forward to.

Hanging out this morning, I explain to a friend what the night sky looked like in Saratoga Springs Friday. They were having a blackout, and the sky was perfectly illuminated in the absence of manmade light. Walking around outside, with no one around, the big empty sky occurred to me with perfect clarity. The grandiosity of that sky so large and staggering that I stared up at it for 30 minutes, until my neck was sore. And then I was afraid at its grandiosity and my infinitesimally small existence. Then the lights came back on and I forgot all about it.

I really probably should find a job soon. It’s only a matter of time, now. I think. In the meantime, I’ll take comfort in license plates and all manner of other bizarre things, I imagine. You can call me if you want to.