Some things last a long time
Recently I have gained access to an email account which was previously made inaccessible to me for a long period of time. Opening this account was like opening some sort of sad tomb which probably shouldn’t have been tampered with. Contained inside were emails to people and references to jobs which had been half-forgotten about, discarded from long-term memory, outside of overt references to how much worse things were, then. After college, I had—as perhaps so many “young adults” do— (a demographic I find myself slowly slipping away from), experienced a period of crisis both wide and sweeping. Among many of the jobs I had then, I worked in a mailroom for a state agency in New York, where my main area of employ involved reading a lot of books and interacting with my insane coworkers. One of my coworkers was a mentally handicapped woman named Suzie, whose head I rescued from the clenching jaws of an elevator door, and who had subsequently invited me over her house for dinner (which, strangely, out of lack for things to do and people to interact with, I accepted). I met some other cooler people there, too, when I wasn’t being too hopeless and grim. Sometimes I wrote emails to them.
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hi, leah: i don't have aim, but i do have email and, sadly, a whole lot of time on my hands, seeing as I work, well, here in this office, doing god-knows-what. And because of all that, I’m a pretty dedicated emailist, I guess. And so that's something, at least. In the movie You Can Count On Me, Mark Ruffalo's character asks Rudy if he will write him back, and then proceeds to say, "Well, it'll be a pretty kick-ass deal for you, because i write one hell of a letter." But you have to promise to write me back, though, and give me constant affirmations of my genius or all deals are off.

merry christmas,

ryan*

I am at work right now, listening to a telephone conversation. Jerry is talking to his wife, indignantly affirming, You've got to come up with a schedule, THAT'S WHAT I KEEP TELLING EVERYONE!" He says this over and over, asserting this to his wife who presumably disagrees. It's amazing, really: they could be talking about anything at all--that rocks are lighter than air--and still he would maintain this conviction, that he is right, rocks are lighter than air. It’s ego, in its bare naked form, and he will not be wrong: "rocks are lighter than air"; "we've got to come up with a schedule," et cetra.

I've got to make a note, I keep telling myself, to capitalize on all of the awesomeness which happens in this environment. I keep thinking of bringing a tape recorder in, almost liking the idea of hearing my own voice and how it functions in this environment. Have I been totally subverted? Or am I, like i hope, completely transcendent? It's all so hard to say.
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another day, mail processing, 101. otherwise referred to in my secret mental file as carefully conscripted torture for people who have done horrible things in prior lifetimes. the radio blasts lionel richie, "everybody needs a little time away/ i heard her say," over and over and over, drilling it into you, three times a day. i can identify with that: everybody needs a little time away. with no vacation time on the schedule, however, and no where to go anyway, here i am, hiding in a corner, and writing maniacal emails to people who will never talk to me again as a result.

i hope all is well with you, though, glenna roach. sorry i have yet to make good on my promise to come visit you. this is just another item on the increasing to-do list of ryan kemp, including (though not limited to): tucking in my shirt and combing my hair, and working out a "plan" for future survival, although not quite as mundane as any of those things, i guess. i had better get going, though. 99.5 is lining up another music block, my hair is as frazzled as ever, and i'm not even half way through my to-do list.
see you,

ryan*


back to work. this is, apparently, the part in my day where kristen drinks some curious blend of met amphetamines mixed in her coffee, and then proceeds to berate the hell out of me with her latest tales of woe, even though i make every effort to display that i am in fact wearing headphones and reading a book, not listening. what is wrong with these people i don't know?
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hey, i'm sitting at my desk, at work. when i inherited this desk, a few months ago, it came with one of those desk calendars which looks a lot like a gigantic placemat, allowing both form and function. i eat lunch on it everyday, invariably dropping the remnants of whatever it is i'm eating all over it, so that the month of January is totally fucked, smeared with the chaff of weeks'-worth of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, and the droppings of whatever else it is i indulge in with the kind of wreckless abandon i tend to reserve for specifically these moments. i'm looking at it a few moments ago, remarking to myself even as i survey the damage, there really was just no way around this. and it's hard not to notice, sitting here now, the damage done. at least, i reason, it's almost over (rounding up another month which i'll methodically destroy).

-ryan*

hi, hot chocolate (don't ask). i wanted to write you one last time before you disappeared into the depths of whatever despotic third-world jungle you're venturing into, to roam around, because i would imagine you won't be having any internet access there, but who knows, really? they have roadside stands at truck stops in rural Iowa, where you can access anything you might be needing to check out while stopping at a roadside stand in rural iowa, if it's only a few lonely blurbs from some vestigial boyfriend alone in a house in Albany. but maybe Iowa is not so comparable, who knows?

Either way, i saw this program on abnormally large people last night, and i wanted to tell you about it, because it was especially profound, i thought, in a way which is not unspecific to, well, what i think is really specific and important, which is, uh, all pretty sketchy, i would imagine. in any case, it was kind of a winding delineation of how people grow, and especially the process of how people standing 8'9 get to be that way. in your head, there's something called a pituitary glad which secretes some sort of enzyme or another, all of which elicits the overall growth process, starting around the time of maturity, which is gender specific, occurring at different ages in males and females, etc. in some people, however, namely people standing really fucking tall, a tumor forms, causing the pituitary gland to secrete massive amounts of said enzyme, eliciting massive growth spurts, and in some cases, results in death. i was thinking that, in a way, we're attempting and avoiding. I hope you have a fun time.

ryan*


a letter from a., amid all of the junk mail and fodder. that's nice. and a bowl of Life cereal to boot. the breakfast experience just doesn't get much better than this. you have to pretend, at least, once you've thrown away all of your vices. and besides, i reason, you mine as well at least pretend you enjoy Life.
in any case, everything's happy and healthy. i got invited to go to norway this summer by my grandmother, but then realized you just can't get in on the whole international experience when you have your grandmother in tow, no matter how much she offers to pay for. but who knows? i have all of these vices to pick up on again. And what with the party atmosphere which seems to pervade my uncle's house ("we decided to just be friends," he tells me of his live-in wife. "you know, just do our own thing."), you can't be going wrong.

i'm going to XXXXXXXXXXXX this weekend, though, to see if that's somewhere more in line with my worldview, and better suits my criteria for long-term survival. mostly, i just wanted to check out if there are places in the universe where you can walk down the street and not have people circling back to get a closer look at you. although, to be fair, with the current proliferation of rock culture, i guess i've just been feeling a lot more mtv2 lately. i'm more at liberty to walk into any random establishment preceded by the imagery of the strokes, and then have some retardedly drunk asshole stagger up to me when i'm trying to get the high score on miss packman, telling me how atavistic i look (although, i guess when you're really rocking it on miss packman, what else do you expect?). fortunately for me, however, girls really seem to favor that whole m2 thing; there's probably a whole ten more mintues now until i'm just rendered totally passe.

i'll call you, though. i've got to get back to my cereal.

love, ryan*