It’s only the end
Was it just last week that I was motioning to the maps, pointing at the landmass and cutting my pants as some tacit suggestion of seasonal prediction? I guess it was. All of that seems far away now. The summer doesn’t officially end until sometime in September, but for those of us residing here in the Northeast, it actually ends a whole lot earlier. I would probably characterize the end of summer as the first succession of days in which the weather breaks and responsibility looms. Those are pretty much the characteristics first imbued upon you in grade school, when you find yourself at the end of August, the smell of new cotton and a falling heart. Or at least those were my associations with going back to school. I don’t know how it was for you.

Somehow I have managed to pass the summer away, not befalling much commitment to anything or anyone. In fact, I don’t even really remember much of it at all. Somehow, I seem to remember specific blips which will come to serve in my collective memory as a summation of that time. Those things might involve ending up at certain concerts or cities, but which ones or where all seems very blurry to me now. As it says in the bible, though, I think, all goods things must come to an end. And such is the prevailing sentiment. Everyone keeps asking me what I’ve been doing all day, and when I’m going to get my shit together, and it seems almost sensible to come up with some sort of an answer now.

I managed to get up early enough yesterday to see some rare presidential news conference. It’s amazing, really, how our world leaders seem so bent on hurtling us into world war 3. You hear a lot of rhetoric during these things, a lot of the same phrases being repeated over and over. And it seems barbaric, entering a tiny pocket of grim-ness beyond stupidity, to hear some of the things being uttered, like staying the course. What does that even mean? I wonder. And then I remember. You learn a lot just checking in on these things. And since the end is pretty much neigh, it gives being irresponsible a whole new profoundity. That’s what I think, anyway. Are there any good shows happening today? A dance party somewhere, where we can usher in the impending apocalypse to a throbbing BPM? Maybe I’ll see you there.

If I try I could fly right through that window
My sister Kari does social work. It seems like one of the only jobs a liberal arts major can latch onto with some modicum of success, and I know a lot of people who do this same thing. One of the words you can never utter around these people is the expletive “retard.” Back in the day, this was considered far less of a social faux pas. A videotape of some 1970’s news broadcast found at a garage sale confirms this, the stodgy news anchor looking into the camera and reporting that a retard had been found accountable for the crime. Listening to a report like that in the present day context, with all of its pc fitting, is just totally hilarious. And one of the many benefits of my sister working for an agency which acts as a sponsor for the mentally-challenged (or however you say), is all of the anecdotes I end up hearing about later. It’s kind of like adult babysitting and there never is a shortage of great stories. One of my all time favorite possessions, in fact, came from one of the people she works with, given to my sister as a parting gift. It’s a blank piece of paper, with incomprehensible words written in different colored ink on the front. It seems to sum everything up for me, in some all-encompassing way. It’s really great.


One of the stories my sister has recently related to me centers around one of the women she has to supervise. The woman, apparently sound of mind to live independently, has bouts of mild dementia, which is not unlike many people I know. The difference is, however, that instead of spending her time hanging out in bars and consuming toxic elixirs which become the rationale for such behaviors, this woman has to check in with my sister everyday. Part of this extensive checking also centers around contact with the owners of the apartment complex, where the woman lives. Recently, my sister has received a call from the owners, who have notified her of some extensive cleaning bill. The woman, apparently involved in the process of making a cake with decorative blue icing, proceeded to spill her creation on the floor, leaving a blue stain mashed into the new hallway carpeting. The culprit, however, made a hasty exit, leaving as it were a blue stain uncovered and uncleaned. The evidence of which produces in a surveillance video of the hallway, featuring said miscreant nervously pacing back and forth in front of the stain, in the attempt to cover or at least wish away the evidence. It proved pointless, however. And I cannot help but think of the evidence of the videotape, the besmirched blue carpeting, and the irrefutability of all that. It seems so crushing to me. Hours and hours did the woman foment an excuse, I imagine, when really, she should have remembered 9th grade reading, and Orwell.

My sister working at this job and being apparently so great at it has predictably lead to the totally insane suggestion that I try the same profession. At different points I even remember it being suggested by my sister directly. I think this over, recounting the details to my friend Adam one night. “Can you imagine the irony?” I point out to him, whipping up Washington Avenue in a car. “The whole point of the job, basically, is to find mentally disadvantaged people work. So basically, instead of doing all of those horrible jobs, I would be sending other people out to do them, and be paid the prevailing wage for doing so.” It just seems so wrong, we gathered, in all of the right ways.

While I cannot subscribe to all of the aforementioned character traits, I really just do seem totally bewildered lately. A recent trip to the grocery store has me scratching my head. A random survey of the grocery baggers may look at any time like a smattering of the bands being reviewed on pitchfork.com, and it makes me think, is pitchfork really that influential? Is their opinion so pervasive now that you can’t go anywhere without seeing its legions of card carrying members? It seems that way. It takes me a while to remember that the things I found culturally endearing are just everywhere now, making those same things a lot more reprehensible. There is no culture. It gets me all uptight. Walking through the line has me getting all upset in a way I cannot explain. I explain this to a friend one night, lying out my increasingly predicable dogma. And then he tells me, “Oh, those people are just retards.”

I could never do my sister’s job, of course. Custodial worker, grocery bagger, sure. These are professions that seem more aligned to my proclivities. And I’m totally down with vicariously experiencing the stories which may come along with this profession. Or even just receiving the accompanying gifts, which may manifest as incompressible words written on paper, incongruously scratched out any old way. It’s not a pretty assemblage, but it’s something. I guess you could call it that.