On the last day of your life don’t forget to die
One entry a day encroaches on self-absorbsion, and probably more acutely boarders on flat out narcissism. But you’ve got to love the blog: hundreds of thousands of hands out there, and millions more fingers, clacking away on the keyboard, transmitting some kind of message, something. To actually be published may appear to be that much more narcissistic: to maintain the belief that you’re worth believing in. But here in the blogosphere, where minute everyday occurrences are recorded with vigor and transmitted to the masses, is actually ten times more obnoxious. I like to think of the things that I’m transmitting as some sort of boomerang that I’m hurtling into the void, and which only I get any real satisfaction out of. But in the end, it’s strange to admit that that’s not entirely true. Two days away and the people are materializing in the void, sending things to my email inbox, in the pleading attempt of I don’t know what. Well, you get what you pay for, motherfucker, and as of one week ago, I noted I only had 10 cents in my bank account. Not exactly the prevailing wage, but I have time and my hands for another ten minutes, and so what do you know?

I’ve recently decided that I’m becoming uncomfortably American. I actually do things like watch portions of baseball games now. Whereas I may have tended to quote Chomsky, appropriating terms like pre-jingoism and other such non-sequiturs to annoy my parents, I now find myself actually watching an inning or so. I still have no idea what to make of basic television programming, opting instead to issue a confused look when the latest contestant of American Idol has been announced, but what do you want? That’s just right and natural. And if I ever find myself feigning interest in such things, I will know that I have banged a right hand turn that’s clearly taken me far from the road.

I honestly feel all around me, everyday, the cancerously malignant nature of this culture. Two kids talking on the radio today about hating America, and it’s hard not to get behind that sentiment. Things seem, simply, fucked. And it’s hard not to find examples on any front. A recent article in the paper cites an eighth grade child who is unable to spell America, erroneously producing, “Amarika” on a test and still receives a passing mark. It’s kind of funny, but it’s sad, too. And I think the best thing that you can do, truthfully, is transcend those delineations. To get away. Although, what does that even really mean?

On a recent trip to the dentist (which probably moves my bank account to the negative), the hygienist asked me, “What are you doing?” I gave her the short version, which actually is short, and while she has me there, supine, with her hands in my mouth, prattling on endlessly, the loneliest job in the world, she proceeded to tell me what all the other patients were up to. Apparently there is a lack of jobs among my demographic, I learn, which could have just been a nice ploy to mollify my own disconcerted explanation. But I learn all about who went to Harvard and who’s doing what. And then she deducts that nobody really seems to be doing anything. Even the Harvard student had a break down. Even the dentist’s son himself is working on some hippie commune in upstate, she says. What the hell? She wants to know. She has her hands in my mouth, so I can’t answer, and all I can do is produce a series of garbled grunts in agreement to what she’s saying. But the strange thing is, that seems to sum it all up.

On the way out, I notice an advertisement for some teeth-whitening agent, which features a gnarly set of teeth, with a caption that reads genetic teeth. Alongside that is the sparkly appropriation of bleached-white teeth that the product will afford you. “They now are making a product which makes your normal teeth appear inferior?” I say. “What’s up with that?” I want to know. She has no idea what I’m talking about, but tells me that I don’t really need that anyway. She says goodbye, and when I smile back at her, I imagine the gnarly teeth of the advertisement smiling back at her, which aren’t too bad, man.

Bartender says: hey we don't serve robots and the robot says no but someday you will
Bad hair day. The moisture in the air, getting right in there, infusing in the shaft of my hair, like some shampoo commercial with the accompanying diagram, and the end result has me looking pretty fucking insane. People will come up to me later, asking if everything’s alright, because I’m looking really frazzled today, and they won’t realize, all the while, that it’s just the hair. I come out in opposition to specific seasons, because it messes with my aesthetic. There are places on the planet where I just could not live because of the weather, entire continents which are just not conducive to my way of being. It’s kind of a familial thing. My sister, as a teen, had the same hair-managing issues. You could find her, her neck craned in some impossible yoga position, ironing her hair on the ironing board. What are you doing? People would want to know. And the answer, of course, was really simple: trying not to look insane.

Some dude I used to work with last summer had the same problem. An awesome mane of frizzy hair, did he sport. One day, he came in and it was gone. “What happened to your hair?” we asked him. “I don’t really attach any real importance to hair,” he said. And it seemed like a pretty reasonable idea. In lieu of the humid weather, it just seemed to make even more sense.

It doesn’t matter if my hair is long or short; I tend to represent insanity anyway. And whether the result of having sisters or the actual weather, I’ve tried all the products: the shoe polish tins of grease coife, the sprays and gels, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that I can put through there, and then walk into a tepid wind, having me right back the way it started. It’s totally crazy. It’s as though the ideas in my head have coalesced, and have made their way out in mangled tendrils. There’s no hiding it. There’s no way.

Complaining about this same thing to a friend one time, he listened intently to my lengthy diatribe. (These are the things I talk about, it seems, which just might have something to do with my fledgling alienation from others). Finishing with the part about how I have to wear a hat around half the time, in what is, apparently, the only way of disguising my hair-like manifestation of crazy, he revealed to me the following wisdom: “At least you’ve got something to complain about,” before removing his own hat, revealing the glowering bald dome I had evidently forgotten about during my speech. There are always people, it seems, whose complaining would be even more validated than your own. Try asking my ex-coworker about the importance of hair in the absence of it, and see what all he has to say about that. I really should just shut up, I guess, and acquiesce— move to Florida, and embrace the afro. It’s all part of my ten point program of optimism, where I look at my qualitatively bad situation, and from another point of view, imagine how it could be that much worse. Which I guess it could be.

The summer is almost here, the warm moisture-carrying winds have arrived, and they are ushering in an entirely new landscape of tonsorial wildness. You can see it on the nightly news, the weatherman pointing at the maps, and wildly gesticulating at the air mass in wayward motioning of the hands. There’s no escape, things are warming, and you cannot run. Already, I can feel the matted down hairs on my head reaching toward the sky. There’s no hiding. There’s no covering up. It’s going to be nuts. It always is.

You can’t be against forever/ let’s not and say we did
I was talking to someone yesterday who was consolidating her record collection, had purchased an iPod with the maximum storage capacity and was selling everything. It’s kind of a difficult argument to come out against, in terms of reducing clutter and maximizing space. But this particular person was nearly intrepid. “It’s kind of a scary prospect,” she said, “but it’s something I’m going ahead with anyway.” It’s still sort of a weird thing to do, though, attached as we are to our things.

A few months ago, I was in a used record store in Albany, and I noticed there was what appeared to be a pretty cohesive collection of records that just had to be a part of some person’s collection. There were CDs in there, not promotional discs, that were just too finely preened, and too representative of a niche interest. At the time, this notion filled me with horror. This person had died, I had imagined, and I was looking over his stuff. His mom, maybe, went into his apartment, and had to dig through the collected detritus, and now there it was, all of that intertwined sentimentality, for me to blithely dig through and purchase secondhand. But why had that notion filled me with such horror? I don’t feign any real attachment with any particular consumer items outside of the food I eat everyday, but here I was having an anxiety attack in the record store.

I attach sentimentality to sounds recorded on tape. Somehow, I can remember where and when I purchased certain albums, and if they’re particularly good, it will come to represent an entire timeframe for me. Listening to a mixed tape is like experiencing the fast paced montage of a not-so-short-term history for me. Two bars will transport me to 1996, and I’ll be thinking about something I may not have otherwise remembered. Sometimes it just makes me sad. But mostly, it’s alright—the ability to transport.

This particular moment’s record is lightweight countrified-rock. It’s a quality album, and in ten years I might remember the moment: the telephone conversation I just had, the way the sky looked, and how the keyboard felt beneath my fingers lithely moving over them. Because it is that good.

We tend to chide ourselves here in the post-everything landscape we inhabit. Whatever interest niche you happen to be into, there seems to be something to purchase based on that. And music is just one subset of that ideology. It becomes debased as a part of the consumer process, but it’s so much more than that, too. Looking at that person’s CDs that day weirded me out, because there I was, digging through all of that discarded sentiment. And the prospect of that happening to me was really overwhelming right then. Giving up all of those albums is the equivalent to me of giving up all of the aforementioned sentiment. And I rather like the clutter, the towering avalanche of what those things provide for me. Thinking about that kid got me really down for about ten minutes, but then I realized: he probably just bought an iPod.