Non Plus Ultra

2010-04-16T00:12:00.003-04:00

These ages will go away/ maybe to turn to darker days

Nineteen Ninety-Eight, kaleidoscopic in the forgiving lens of hindsight, as per its representation of plaids on a trendy fashion blog’s website, was in fact a horrible year, marked by my lack of will to live. No more could I figure out what I was doing in the college I had ended up in, surrounded by concrete on every side, and my alien classmates, whose sallow skin threatened to decompose under the fluorescent lighting of a lecture hall, than could I refute a sociology professor’s warnings of the oncoming apocalypse. “It doesn’t matter what you do!” he would admonish with the crazy-eyed glare of a madman. “Screw until it hurts if you want to.” The students in attendance would perk up momentarily, interrupted by the realization of their sallow-skinned desk mates before going back to the task at hand, which was falling into a slumber under the tepid lighting system of EDU building, room 102. There were still three years left until the impending doom of the oncoming apocalypse, but everything seemed like it was taking so long.

The music of the band Bedhead appealed to me in an unquantifiable way during this period. I do not know how I discovered this music (although I have written about it before-somewhere, at the incomprehensible beginning of this blog, whose Byzantine trails you would have to follow to find it). But it was an incomprehensible time preceding the full on utility of the Internet, whose aspirations of becoming an electronic shopping mall were yet to be fully realized, and even its capability of efficiently transmitting information was subpar, at best (at least on the upgraded 486 machines my college was working with).

So it rationally concludes then, that there are psychic tides at work, compelling you to gravitate towards things and people with whom you are destined to meet and interact with, as per the dictates of some unknown deity who hides out behind clouds, drinking cherry-flavored wine coolers and positioning the moons. That’s the way I imagine it anyway. Because how else would you describe the things that end up in your life? And how else could you imagine, here and now, discovering any of these things in the absence of the Inter-Web?

The Bedhead album Transaction de Novo arrived that same year to the massive anticipation of me and some unfortunate record store clerk alone, whose pimply face would not be rendered any clearer by so many hours of preening in front of the washroom mirror. I preordered this CD from the website Insound.com, and it arrived in the mail three days prior to its scheduled release date, with a promotional poster, which was not too impressive of a poster, really, seeing as it was just some rendering of the bleak album cover art, which looked like a marker for a grave in a cemetery (as did the other Bedhead albums and eps, in an attempt at subversion of the garish album cover art of the times. See: Any Dinosaur Jr. album cover from the nineties for context).

The record begins with an uncharacteristic decibel-plunging bass line, which crawls into a lugubrious melody, before segueing into an entire album comprised of this sort of thing. It was not the “best” Bedhead album, with its high gloss Steve Albini production job, and “misses” factored in, but they had a lot to contend with from my critical perspective, as a music fan who had already channeled their entire catalogue into the soundtrack of my existence years before. It was a worthwhile addendum, none the less- something I could definitely make use of.

I was probably pondering the contents of the periodic table at the time, which contained elements I would never make sense of, illustrated in the weird semiotic code which I still find perplexing in some incalculable way, when I read on a related website that Bedhead was going to be on tour that spring. This was good news for me, because I knew that I would not kill myself for another few weeks, and that I would have a reason to “stick it out,” at least, until I could go to the concert. It would be a nice punctuation mark, I thought, the literal coda to a life lived but not particularly ‘dug’ very much. Who knows? I thought. Maybe I would even convince the band members to sign their initials on my arm and have those signatures tattooed, ‘for all time.’

I had consulted the necessary diagrams and maps in advance and planned out a route to the college where the show would be taking place. It seemed like a relatively simple route, since the destination was about forty-five minutes from my own college. But whether because the Internet was still in its infancy and prone to incalculable error or it was a practical joke played by some graduate students attempting to divert onlookers from checking out the setting of the latest Brett Easton Ellis novel will remain one of the great historical mysteries. Because a friend and I did inexplicably get lost that night, diverted to the outer bounds of some mountainous Vermont territory before arriving to said college as the band was packing their equipment into the van. I reeled in horror, like Marty McFly searching for the Delorean time machine which was nowhere in sight- or a skateboard, at least. But in the end all that I could locate was my own sad parody of a vehicle in the parking lot, and so we got back into the car and drove home.

The experience has resulted in a lifelong obsession with punctuality to rock shows, always arriving early enough to uncomfortably mill around and drink too much with the two other patrons of ye olde rock dive. Which then invariably results in getting too inebriated, and striking up a conversation with one individual or another, which nine times out of ten results in this person pointing his halitosis glazed breath in your direction and making you listen to the perfunctory proclivities of some rock douche for the duration of what seems like an hour.

Bedhead ended up disbanding the following summer; I never ended up killing myself, and that fall I transferred to a different college, which presented an entire onslaught of new problems to contend with. I moped about missing the Bedhead concert for a few more years until my pen pal who lived in Dallas, who had seen the band hundreds of times, told me to “get over it,” and so I did.

I had done so much “getting over it” until I may have forgotten about it entirely, when at ten o’clock this morning, the ye old hype machine revealed this particular performance to me, in full, recorded at said college twelve years earlier. Which seems unimaginable to me, (and which relates the de facto presence of deities hiding out behind clouds and tinkering with moons all day). It is all there: the set list comprised of the Transaction de Novo record which they were touring in support of that spring, followed by the catalogue favorites, performed with so much precision. The songs are acute renderings of the album versions, which is either a good or bad thing depending on one’s concert-going perspective. But either way, it is a time capsule, exhumed, and revealed for me to hear, so many years later. A moment lost, and now restored. (Which begs the question: Do I have to make good and suicide, now that I have heard the Bedhead performance? And what, exactly, are these deities trying to signal to me? That my neo-Luddite stances are just completely contradictory now that I have located the conceptual Delorean and actually not missed the Bedhead concert?)

It’s weird hearing this recording now, because it is the same time of year that the show actually happened, way back when. The songs seem to have an almost debilitating effect on me, and listening to them is like being instantaneously transported back to the late nineties, where I may just be in college again and forced to endure something horrible. But it also seems to point out the tenuous nature of nostalgia, because it relates that sometimes you end up missing the things you hated, just because they are gone. And it makes me wonder what I might miss ten years from now, just because it isn’t around anymore.

There is a song on the '98 live recording called “More Than Ever” which is the standard Bedhead track, all ennui in song form. The recording is quiet enough that you can hear the casual talk of concert-goers in the background, casually whooping it up during the show, possibly making plans for what to later that night. The guitar parts on this song are skeletal and descending above the inordinately clear vocal. "More than ever,” the singer sings, “it seems true to say that things won't always be this way.” Which, if songs could be equated to horror movies, would be the point in the rental where you stop to pause, because you know something really horrible or great is about to happen, depending on your propensity or tolerance for gore. The guitars keep scaling down, as the singer keeps singing lines which mine as well be being spoken from the precipice. “Are there any good things left to do/ are there any right ways left to be,” he asks. The answers to which are, of course, almost exclusively in the negative.

Momentarily, the guitars begin to intertwine, building to a crescendo, before the song comes to an end, which is a magnificent end, as endings can sometimes tend to be.

2010-03-30T15:30:00.011-04:00

Blame it on my wild heart

There is a mouse in the apartment. It seems to be lying in wait, listening nightly for the last click of the cathode to occur, until it can safely crawl from whatever recesses it is hiding in, to eat crumbs off of the floor and revel in its nighttime dwelling. I imagine this tiny creature hiding out behind the counter, biding its time as the Comedy Central channel segues into another program, impatiently checking out the clock until two minutes of silence occurs, beckoning it to come out from its hiding place, and eat microcosmic food particles that have fallen onto the floor.

We have purchased a "humane” mousetrap from the hardware store, which looks like some kind of absurd plastic coffin, and which the mouse has deftly avoided thus far, despite the veritable gourmet of care packages we have left inside for it to eat. I picture him rolling up, driven by pure olfactory intrigue alone, before taking one look at the trap and heading for the hills. "No way am I stepping foot in that thing," he thinks to himself, as he checks out the more assessable crumbs scattered all over the floor. And who would blame him? So transparent is the coffin-so insidious of a device-that we may well write MOUSE TRAP on the side in red Sharpie and sign the mouse up for literacy classes. Which it clearly may not need.

Fruitlessly checking the trap has become one in a succession on a calculated list of things to slog through on a daily basis, the reordering of which might just send me into a Rain Man-variety fit. I need these things, a continuum of events which offer the placebo-effect of order and OK-ness, so I don't freak out about my life and jump off a bridge. (Which begs the question, what would occur if one of these things were accomplished successfully? What would I do if I actually did catch the mouse? And where would I relocate it, to carry out its future days of meandering?).

In addition to totally failing at catching the mouse, I cannot seem to find a job in any tangible way, although many favorable reviews of my persona have been given. "You really do just seem to have a nice way about you," I have recently been told in a job interview. "Yeah," another interviewee chimed in, "You do seem to carry yourself well." I chortled, not knowing what to say in return, shrugging my shoulders in the aw-shucks mannerism of a southerner, which I am totally wont to capturing after so much practice.

Sadly, all of these spurious character affections are belied by my actual resume, which is so paltry a document, marked with such vast chasms in employment history and useless skills listed--that all of the great posture in the world could not compensate for, and in the end adds up to more of the same, scuttling around the apartment, like a mouse.

_________________________________________________________________________

It had seemed like a horrible idea, but I had to retrieve the stray mail which kept arriving to her apartment, and so I walked to El Smelldog’s on her day off from work last week. She had compiled the envelopes with my name on them, and put them into a plastic bag which had at one time contained the detritus of items from a shopping trip to Walmart.

Smeller met me at the door and handed me the mail, which she had tied up into an absurd little bow at the top of the bag and presented to me like a gift. “Thank you,” I said to her. “I know it’s a drag.” Which could have been a vague generalization about the chore of collecting my mail or any number of things. It had seemed like the kind of thing I might write on a T-shirt with a Sharpie, attempting futile connection with my fellow humans or alienate myself for all time. “I know, it’s a drag.” –Ryan Kemp

Smelldog and I had had a falling out sometime last fall, and since then an icy chasm of limited communication had occurred between us. It was probably the natural result of inhabiting a small space with me for any extended period of time-the natural disaster equivalent of being my roommate, tectonic plates of the interaction colliding until so much damage had occurred.

I still was not sure what Smeller was so upset about, but in retrospect it could have been any number of things: the night she emerged from jail and came home to find me naked in the living room, wielding a 40oz bottle of beer, with something tantamount to a party going on upstairs; the bitter and unspoken resentment directed toward me for having taken the “better” room. Or any number of things at all. But despite these things, she invited me in, to catch up.

On first glance the apartment seemed different, slightly skewed from my perspective, like familiar environments tend to look after not seeing them for an extended period of time . There were new curtains and furniture. A picture hung on the wall which looked like it may have been purchased at the yard sale of a now defunct funeral home- a painting of still life flowers, which ominously hung over a purple velvet couch that looked like it may have belonged to the Jimi Hendrix Collection of household furnishings.

In addition to the newish-seeming surroundings, there was an accompanying new roommate, who greeted me cordially, as he made his way to and from, shaking my hand in between cleaning all available surfaces with a cloth, the new roommie, Version 2.0.

Smeller and I talked between marveling at the manual dexterity of her new roommate, who had clearly been recruited from an online website specializing in robotic housemates. Occasionally, as if to verify that he was not a robotic cleaning machine purchased online, he would interject, inserting tidbits of unessential information into the conversation which made me wish he had stuck to the task at hand.

The new roommate made me look bad, contextually. He was a fully functioning citizen, who had a job, and cooked and cleaned. For all I knew, he may have conducted Sunday prayer sessions with the local youth group on weekends. Which contrasted horribly with my presence as a housemate, prone to disappearing for days on end, only showing up long enough to eat Smeller's groceries before disappearing again.

I bid adieu to the new guy, and Smeller walked me to the door. There was an awkward pause where I tried to figure out what sort of punctuation mark should denote this encounter. In the end, I opted for a hand wave, feeling particularly squeamish about hugs, and sauntered off in the direction of the exit, dangling the plastic Walmart bag between my fingers.

Things had seemed OK for The Smell. And that was something, at least.

My car has recently been stolen. Among the many automobiles which may at any given moment be situated in my neighborhood, it seems remarkable to me that my rather modest machine would have been the one chosen. But compliments of the exquisite thief, he decided to take my car, with the help of a fifteen year-old accomplice.

The event occurred as I was entertaining a night of fruitful debauchery, elsewhere. And so it occurred to me with great hilarity when I received the call from the Albany police detective that night.

“Ryan Kemp?” the detective conjectured out loud in the phone, “This is the Albany police Department.”

There seemed to be a hint of satisfaction in the police detective’s voice at having caught the thieves, and I thanked him for a job well done, before hanging up the phone and thinking it was all very funny. “My car got stolen,” I said mirthfully to Sare, like the more jovial equivalent of Nicolas Cage's character in the movie "Adaptation." “Isn’t that fucked up?”

Now, months later, with sobriety setting in and the broken window repaired, things seem less funny than they may have felt that night, and unfortunate for everyone involved. The theft was carried out by two fifteen year-olds, whose joy ride in my car lasted approximately twenty-five minutes before they were caught driving with a broken window, shards of jagged glass sticking out every which way, as they weaved in haphazard patterns around the neighborhood.

More compassion I would have had for the thieves if stealing my car was part of some pact, where they were caught en route to the nearest outbound highway, headed for some undetermined destiny which my car could never transport them to. But, in the end, I just could not get behind this very pointless act of cruising aimlessly around their downtrodden neighborhood, and listening to the local FLY 92. (Although hints of their well prepared statements of the prevailing Zeitgeist were taken in the form of my broken CD collection scattered all over the car).

A letter has recently arrived in the mail, on which appears the scrawled and illegible scratch of a now incarcerated fifteen year-old named James. “To Whom It May Concern,” it reads. “I apologize for what happened that night. I wasn’t thinking. But can you accept my apology and (what) I learned from the bad choice I made that night?”

“I promise to continue to improve on the negative to create the positive things happening in my life,” it continues. “My hope is if ever we do meet, you will see the better person I have become. I send my deepest apology.”

He signed his name at the bottom, followed by his last name, which was blotted out by the coarse smudge of a dried White-Out pen--so as not to be identified, and have the ass beat out of this fifteen year-old with the embittered rage of retribution.

But, OK, James: You have fucked up, at such a young age, making my own transgressions at the age of fifteen seem infinitesimally small by comparison. And you have fucked me particularly, because my insurance company did not want to pay for the damages incurred. Additionally, you will probably have to partake in some really lame community service-oriented events like picking up scraps on the side of the highway every weekend for the remainder of your youthful existence. If it was up to me, the punishment would have come in the form of constructing a manual of more creative acts of subversion. Or the mandatory penalty of formulating more of an outbound route.

But things happen, James. I get it, bro. I accept your apology, as illegible as it may be.

_____________________________________________________________

Spring has arrived, the common themes of hope and jubilation magically manifesting in the minds of the general populace, dotted by the occasional good weather pattern, illustrated by Tim Drawbridge on the local news. Except for today, which has shown by with cold rain on the day I am scheduled to walk to the hospital and give blood.

I hustle through the bad weather and then look at this same imagery reflected back at me on the LCD screen in the doctor’s office waiting room, the zoomed out shot of my city on the area weather segment, which is all looming fog and grey doom amongst the office buildings. Albs, New York: the apocalypse is upon us.

Distracting me from the looming apocalypse is the nurse, who comes into the waiting area and calls my name to the room of waiters, who are looking at copies of Good Housekeeping Magazine and Modern Men's Manual with the home address of some doctor torn off of their covers. “How’s it going?” she asks, as she proceeds down a hallway with a clipboard that contains information about me. “OK,” I tell her, shaking the rain from my still totally soaked rain jacket.

She leads me into the designated blood-giving area, and instructs me to sit down in what is the oversized medical equivalent of a La-Z-Boy recliner which you might put in your living room if this piece of furniture were not covered in an opaque vinyl material. “Cool chair,” I say to her, slapping the arm-rest for effect. “Yeah,” she says, “The older patients don’t like it, though, because it’s hard for them to get up out of.” And I can see that.

She takes my blood, and then double takes the outfit that I am wearing today, which happens to occupy every spectrum of blue on the color wheel. Which might reflect a total lack of caring on my part or a very calculated leaning toward conceptualizing myself as a smurf-like cartoon character, which makes things easier and less Intense in some roundabout way.

“Blue is your color,” she says to me. Which, when you objectively examine the facts, seems irrefutably true.

_________________________________________________________________________

So many weeks later, the resident mouse has eluded the plastic coffin, no matter what variety of treats we may be sticking in there. (Which have been along the lines of the cliché offerings of gourmet cheese. Which begs the very logical question, is this an alternative lifestyle-living mouse, and does it not consume dairy?).

I had even considered constructing a DIY-variety trap after consulting various manuals online. Some of which range from the insanely elaborate to the less foolproof offerings, with hand drawn diagrams shown. Although, in the end, none of these things seemed particularly plausible to me. No; I imagined that one day the gray coffin would have to do the trick.

A couple of calls on the job front. It probably won't be long, now.

2010-01-26T09:12:00.005-05:00

Don't I know you better than the rest

Albs 'man cave'.

2009-10-06T09:58:00.012-04:00

What did I do/ can you save me
Walking up the road, a smooth and inconspicuous walk, always keeping an eye out for some hackneyed acquaintance behind every street corner—someone I met in a bar the other night, or an ancient figure I attended high school with, who vigorously wants to sell me a life insurance policy, “Ground Hog’s Day”-style.

Down Hamilton and across Dove, a small black car is sizing up an impossibly small parking space, between two cars. I know this dilemma, live in this neighborhood, and experience it routinely (although, actually, I don’t have a job and am at leisure, like my seventy year-old neighbors, to move my car to either side of the street at twelve pm, when the parking limitations dissolve, giving a cordial wave to the geriatric set for effect). I realize this car has no chance of fitting into the tiny parking space, and offer to the driver my very choice parking spot which I will be momentarily leaving from, ten feet up the road. “Oh, really??” the driver of this compact automobile asks me, his face a veritable cherry of jubilee. I get into my car, and as I do, he issues one more demonstration of gratitude, as if I’m giving him thirty dollars and guiding him to the nearest liquor store. “Thanks again, sir!” he shouts from his window, as I hold up my hand in the air, which could be a gesture that says, 'you’re welcome' or may very well mean 'fuck you.'

It is not long before I am wondering about the implications of this nice gesture of giver-of-parking-spaces that I have just added to my cosmic resume and issued to the universe. Will something awesome happen to me in return for offering up my choice parking spot? I am only driving across town to go to a doctors appointment and realize that I probably will not find a similar parking space when I return, beating out new york state employees, who are charged at the most basic levels of DNA, veritably programmed to find parking spaces in my neighborhood, like Darwinistic champs. But I also realize, simultaneously, that self-conscious acts of altruism may not get you anywhere, trying to switch off this impulse of self-reflection, as though some giver of favorable karma is monitoring my thoughts. But ah, well, I realize: It’s probably too late. I’ve probably already been caught, which the very existence of a doctor’s appointment may go the distance to prove.

Into the doctor’s office, the mundane interior of the hallway giving way, through the coarse glass of the waiting room door, to the mundanity of the waiting room itself. A small, mousy-looking woman looks fearfully at me as I approach the reception desk and tell her my name. She flips through a pile of folders before finding a billowy manila folder which contains my chart and tells me to sit. There’s always some weird vibe in here, I realize, pervading the waiting area like a pestilent gas, noxiously filling the whole entire doctor’s office, and prolonging your wait into some obnoxious infinitum of time. I have some weird skin rash, but some of these people, I conjecture, are here for less benign-seeming things.

At the edge of the waiting room, a flannel-shirted man sits, tapping his work boot nervously, not reading a magazine, and just staring straight ahead. I wonder what he’s here for? I think to myself. He has knocked off at the construction sight for the morning, maybe, and instead of pounding nails or moving large pieces of steel which will one day comprise portions of a state employee parking garage, he has ended up here, instead (which, in a point of fact kind of way, would pretty much objectively sign him up for a lifetime of good karma, disproving my whole theory-of-parking spaces completely. But he has obviously not been building favorable things, it would seem, among which the doler of karma has included state employee parking garages). He was shaving one week ago, maybe, and discovered a patch of coarse and bumpy skin. And now he has ended up here, at the Terminus Point, waiting the wait, sans Time Magazine.

A woman exits the physician’s room before turning back to ask the doctor a question, and as she does the flannelled man issues to no one in particular, still staring ahead. “Sometimes I’d just rather not know,” he says into the air, as people look up at him from magazines, and then straight back down again, into TV Guide articles about the latest reality TV series which they will take in later tonight. “Maybe it’s just easier that way.”

Momentarily, I am called in to see the physician, tossing aside my own magazine, and simultaneously prolonging the flannelled guy’s wait for another few moments of not knowing. The doctor comes in shortly, and then I am pardoned, back out into the world. “Have a nice day,” she says cheerfully to me. “Okay,” I tell her, “you, too.”

Back in the car, driving ten minutes back to my neighborhood, I can’t help but think of the flannel guy, and hope everything turns out OK for him (as per the dictates of parking spaces created and cosmic influence). Maybe he is doing cartwheels in the doctor’s office right now, post-diagnosis. Maybe this is part of some grand scheme-of-things plan which doesn’t exist, and he will receive a new ‘lease’ on life, which he will forget about after ten minutes of formulating how he is going to live life differently, from that moment on. Who could say what is going to happen?

Back down the block, in the car. I know I will have to drive for twenty-five minutes, looking for a parking space. Up the block at a crawl, everybody is parked on the odd side of the street, because of the Monday parking restriction, which allows for the stoic street sweep, cleaning up the detritus of another week's-worth of life. Inching forward, and nearing my own apartment dwelling, where there, directly in front of the building appears, with rays of shine—astonishing even myself—a parking space directly in front of my door, which I lick my lips before nestling my car into.

Things are looking up, it seems. It’s a small recompense, I guess, but sometimes you have to take what is given, like a kiss on the mouth; pennies on a dollar, grit-encrusted copper coins which you will later deposit into a candy machine before blithely making off into the day with a sugary gumball to pop into your mouth, chewing contentedly as you avoid all ninety degree angles.

2009-04-22T15:21:00.005-04:00

The ice age is coming/ better get a sweater or something (pt 2)

Most days, on returning home from work, TD silently retires to her bedroom to smoke approximately four joints, before rather seamlessly rejoining in the main room, to carry on about the night in this self-induced state of amnesia. Whether trying to avoid this same fate or it was just grim stoicism at hand, I had remained unemployed and relatively sober for the majority of six months, content to get by on blistering anecdotes in exchange for handouts from passersby. This went on until about five weeks ago, when grim fate did intervene, like some inverse edition of the television show itself, fucking everything up, and causing me to seek out drugs. I would stumble from TD’s opium den-type quarters, a confused and hazy sheen having fallen over my eyes, in such a state of lurid confusion that I actually did report to work the next day—often times to the total consternation of myself, when at about eleven-thirty every morning I would wonder what the hell I was doing in such grim surroundings, at work.

My only saving grace was wondering about the content of my fellow coworkers’ lives in between trips to the bathroom. Most of the people there seemed to be in pretty reduced circumstances, having fallen on tough times, because of the “economic crunch”, or whatever (which had become a welcome euphemism in my mind for the collapse of everything, and/or a good excuse for never having a job). I tried hard to find somebody to align myself with, and because of my rather successful unemployment streak, chose to chat it up with a forty-something housewife. We had probably been leading similar lives, I thought to myself, and conjectured that we might have something to talk about.

“How do you like it here?” she asked me on my second day, solidifying the fact that she also knew, intrinsically, that we had something in common. “Oh, you know; it’s OK,” I lied, always trying to conceal the fact that what this person may have been doing every day for the last ten years is to you evocative the most grim variety of despair, and actually, made you think of diving lemmings and death. “Oh, that’s good,” she answered. “I actually just started a couple weeks before you did. It’s going really well for me.” “Yeah?” I asked her with some hint of amazement, looking deep into her frozen face for some sign that she must be joking and secretly thinking of lemmings, too—just joking around for effect—a joke which we would be laughing about, momentarily. But the punch line never came.

“It’s really coming along good,” she continued, “I just kind of dove right in” (sic). I couldn’t believe that she enjoyed the droning, rather repetitious tasks we were completing for eight hours a day and stared into her face for some indication of the joke, which then made her uncomfortable. She finally bid me adieu, and as she did I stood there at the precipice, trying to avoid all of the cliffs in my mind. On my way home that night, I had hoped that TD would be around when I got there, I knew I was going to need something.

It was sometime during my third week when I defected. For some reason the job we were doing seemed so horrible that taking two hour lunch breaks and infinite trips to the bathroom to hang around and make calls from as though it were my personal office, seemed like perfectly acceptable behavior to me. I was just returning from my “office” one day when my boss interrupted me. “Can I talk to you?” he asked seriously, motioning me into his own office, which smelled markedly better than my own.

“What’s this I hear about taking long lunch breaks?" he wanted to know. "We offer a half-hour lunch period and two paid breaks.” I kno! I said to him. It’s just not enough for me. I then erupted into a rambling characterization of the ineffectual nature of the job, before suggesting the movie rental “Modern Times”. My boss had never heard of this movie, but nevertheless he did not seem to appreciate my rental suggestions. Our employee/employer relationship had at this point not broached the point of movie rentals.

“Look,” he finally said, “maybe if you feel like this place is some kind of concentration camp, you shouldn’t be working here.” There was a brief silence, during which I stared back at him, waiting, hopefully, to be told that I was fired. But then, inexplicably, he said something else: “You know, it’s funny: at the other location, where people go out to smoke cigarettes in back, there’s a fence which runs around the perimeter, and last night someone said it looks like some type of prison camp.” We both had a good laugh at this joke, although I guess it’s not too funny.

Life is a raw deal, and employment pretty much blows— unless you’re SG, in which case you have everything figured out. It is my lack of ability to figure things out, I think, or my massive ability to sum everything up so well which seems to be causing Problems--all deductions figured out between marijuana cigarette breaks in TD's opium den.

2009-03-09T22:21:00.003-04:00

You sunk my battleship
In ten minutes, just to defy my normal routine of hanging out and listening to Thee Oh Sees with my roommate, I am going to abscond, just to see if I can go get robbed. I’ve never really been held up at gunpoint before, but I hear the opportunities for being mugged in the neighborhoods in front of the Delaware Price Chopper (sic) are rife with possibilities, another mugging just the other day. Me sauntering down the street, and an attacker just within sight, lagging momentarily behind. It will probably occur to imagined mugger with massive chagrin, as I have a life savings of about a dollar-twenty five in change in my pocket, but what can you do? It’s boring around. And I will accept any form of stimulation, be it a punch to the head or a stab wound to the neck, just as a deviation of routine.

I probably should get a job soon—I probably should get hit by a car. But these are alien thoughts, strange and disconcerting to the senses—such an anomaly of thought process that I almost don’t know what to do with myself. Rings of a tree, a simulacrum of simulacrum. I really probably should just go outside now.

2009-03-02T13:30:00.004-05:00

I got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming

Chocolate chip pancakes with my sister, Kiki. Today is her birthday, and so why not schedule a hangout? It’s not often we get to do these kinds of things, mired down as she is in her job, and me, with my own goings on, or whatever.

As a child, my sister once bought me “cool clothing” with money she earned at her job as a checkout person at the local grocery mart. Later, she would drive me to high school, even though I was her annoying brother, four years younger, who would eyeball her friends with all of the fascination of someone witnessing the presence of some exotic jungle bird for the first time. She is, when it comes down to it, probably in a position to alienate me for all time, and with a lifetime of validation. That would make sense to me. But there she is, and here I am, eating chocolate chip pancakes in my apartment, after so much time passed by.

After breakfast, she relates to me about her job. I always find it weird that I don’t know what my friends and family actually do at work all day. I’m sure these people have explained these things to me, at one time or another, but I just don’t know how their job titles quantify. But then, maybe it comes down to the fact that most jobs, in my mind, broil down to answering phones and carrying out completely mundane tasks, for eight hours a day. And so it’s rather self-explanatory.

My sister works for a not-for-profit agency which is in the business of facilitating the wellbeing of people with mentally deficiencies. She explains how there is always some crisis going on with one of the facilities she oversees. “It’s always particularly unnerving when you have to explain to a family member how one of our clients has alleged that the hired staff has been smoking crack and touching himself in front of their son all day. That’s probably the most difficult part about my job.” Yeah, I say, “I could imagine that would be kind of awkward.” And if all that isn’t bad enough, recent legislation has been put in place which could hold people at the administrative levels of this rather unfortunate employment sector accountable for things which go on, miles away. “Hmm,” I say, at a total loss. I want to ask if she smokes a lot of pot, but think of something else to say at the last moment. “Have you ever checked out yoga?” I ask. “No,” she says, she hasn’t.

There is a conversational impasse at which point we look outside and realize it’s snowing again. “Hey,” I say, “See that pool house over there in the park? –On the other side of that is a gigantic hill, and if it snows enough, maybe I could go sleigh-riding tomorrow.” We have a good laugh at this, at how ludicrous and lightweight my life must seem (which is, when you objectively examine the facts, probably not unlike the lives of the people in one of the houses she oversees—the notable difference being not my lack of access to prescription meds, but markedly lower levels of group cohesion and poor choice of hair style).

I walk my sister out to her car and say goodbye, pointing out directions to avoid a sketchy neighborhood. And then she pulls off, away. On the way back in, I notice the snow is still coming down pretty good. Tomorrow seems hopeful to me.

2009-03-01T16:07:00.003-05:00

Please let me be lonely tonight
My ye olde housemate/caretaker is cooking something including onions right now, causing my eyes to water and tears to stream down my face. I don’t really cry, I don’t think, having done away with tube socks and emotions ages ago, and so am confounded by the watery solution coming from my eyes today. Oh, man, I think, what is going on here? And then I realize: it’s the onions.

It is occurring to me today, for the one millionth time, that the city I live in blows, and it will continue to blow, forever (the greatest, most all-time crushing Albany moment I’ve experienced thus far, outside of some ludicrous/ embarrassing moments which hold little to no merit on account of the fact that I was too drunk to actually remember them, was looking at the LOB on Madison recently and being sent into a full-throttle depression over its scale size and color. The sky was some wasted ink cartridge color gray that day, stretching out interminably to nowhere, and the building and sidewalk parodied that color below, their mimicry taken directly in through my eyeballs and related to my synapses, sending me down. The architecture itself depresses you, and I knew the people inside of those buildings were doing something unnervingly depressing, making it a full on shit storm of depressingness. But then, maybe it’s just me, like usual). I was attempting to explain this same feeling to someone the other day, but I don’t really think they knew what I was talking about, impervious to the dour worldview of architecture and downward spirals.

Two enthusiasts of the rap music genre have recently moved into the apartment next door to mine. I encountered one of these individuals recently, on coming home one day. “Oh, you moved in next door?” I ventured brightly to one of them. “My name is Ryan,” I said, shaking the new neighb’s hand. “How’s it going,” said neighbor said. “My name’s True Master.” I took this in, thinking it over, before True Master disappeared behind the door of his rental compartment. It was a striking name, you had to admit, out-classing my own rather pedestrian name by twenty furlongs, which then (obviously) elicited some rapid fire succession of “street names” to replace my own. I was stuck between two, when the phone rang, snapping me from my reverie.

It was hard not to get caught up in the proactive nature of the new neighbors, planning events and shows, right here in the courtyard of our building. “All that’s really respectable,” I told El Smell on night, “but in the end I can’t help but think there will be some inherent futility involved with all of that. I mean, even if something really cool is created there will be no one to fully appreciate it, so it seems like a total waste of time. I mean, we’re living in Albany, after all!” I said, as some rhetorical punctuation point. As I said this, I thought simultaneously of a car signaling into a drive on a desolate country road, signaling repetitively into the night to no one in particular. But, when it came down to it, in the end, whatever ended up taking place, I knew I would be there. Which pretty much seemed inevitable- I lived there.

Everything blows, but what can you do? It seemed logical to try and have as much fun as possible, even if you were surrounded by lame ass motherfuckers at all times. Springtime couldn’t be too far off, I didn’t officially have a job to go to, and El Smell was making that onion dish right now. It wasn’t much, but it was something to hold onto. To keep yourself from spiraling—to keep yourself from tears.

2009-01-23T01:56:00.001-05:00

This city has got me feeling like a motherfucker

Walking home from SG’s in the dead, glaring middle of night. It’s a nice night for this time of year, the temperature rising twenty degrees and tricking you into wearing lightweight garments. But all at once the cold comes rushing in, making you think twice about your threadbare jacket and the holes in your shoes.

Up Dove and down Jefferson, past the sketchy bar, with the faint cacophony of the goings on indoors, where people are reveling in throwing darts at a cork board, and drinking two-dollar drinks. This is what we do, how we pass the time. I think about going indoors and seeing if there’s anyone I know inside, but there’s no kind of refuge for me, tonight.

At home things are no less bizarre. El Smell has taken to locking herself in her room, interrupted only by short trips to the kitchen to get something or other, where my attempts at conversation are thwarted by monosyllables and grunts. Needless to say, things seem grim.

It’s a strange life, and a strange time to be alive. And it would be entirely possible to retrace your steps, to find out how you got here, from the womb, but that’s old news--something thought of, and thought of again, the thoughts themselves like so many layers of a tree, layers and layers removed.

At the threshold an empty plastic milk container rattled past my feet, like some absurd tumbleweed. And then I scurried indoors, like a rat, out of the cold.

The building I am living was considered to be some kind of an historical site. The Aqua Ducks tour bus told you this five times a day, when it drove by, and an internet website. It used to be an ice factory, used to construct square ice blocks. That had seemed about right to me.

2008-12-04T16:06:00.006-05:00

White psychosis/white dementia

The chair on which I do my extensive computing is too tall, putting me nearly at knee level with the makeshift desk that my keyboard is on, causing me to contort myself into a near yoga-like position in order to accomplish whatever it is I do on a computer all day (searching for the ever-elusive job in between myspacing all new bands, which is simply the newest behavior pattern in an old pastime of some bizarre fixation having to do with an obscurity fetish stemming from my upbringing as a Marxist teen rebel, wanting to see the collapse of everything). This works out okay for a while, until on a trip to the coffee pot--to fuel the apparent goal of future computer-related tumors which will soon be festering in my brain-- I realize that I seem to be cultivating a particularly bad hunchback, the pain in my neck and shoulders developing into a pulsating throb evocative of a four-hour rub down—which may be suggestive of either my massive dedication to checking out new music or my determination to find a job. And, inevitably, the more germane failure at those things: my apparent lack of a job and bad taste in music.

Computer speakers sound like shit, and this is good for listening to noisy music. I have meticulously placed a speaker on a surface on either side of my head, and have turned up the volume as loud as it will go. On repeat, over and over, for days on end, I have been listening to a song called "White Psychosis". It seems to be the supple balm to a life which has gone off the tracks--so far from the road that the brush has covered, in grown weeds and vines barring the entryway, with no hope of being discovered again.

“Listen,” I tried to point out to el Smelldog last night, erroneously attempting to fill her in on my supple balm theory: “You have to place the speakers on either side of your ear,” I said, with all of the teaching of a trained expert. “Do you feel it?” I asked rhetorically, turning the music up for effect. This didn't seem to help much. “It’s a pantomime of simian creatures,” I explained of the music, “trying to break free of the shackles and concrete cages of industrialization and insanity.” She just shook her head, which was a gesture of not really getting it. It didn’t really seem like it mattered, though.

Today, as I was in the fervored throes of Supple Balming, I couldn’t help but note an extra drum measure in the "White Psychosis" web edit which I hadn’t previously heard before. I double checked, just to be sure; the band hadn’t retooled the song, and before long I noted that it wasn’t the song which had changed-- it was my rather irate-sounding neighbor pounding on the wall, demonstrating a complete lack of appreciation for my music selections at one pm. Sorry, I mutedly said to the wall, before turning the music down a measure. I wondered what it sounded like on the other side of the wall, and what my neighbor made of all that, despite his pounding. Our interactions had been limited to muted gestures on trips to the dumpster, to discard boxes which at one time contained microwave pizza slices. This unfortunate interaction would only add nuance and “vibes” to our future encounters, I thought. But wait—you just wait—, I thought, until next time you’re rocking your Phil Collins soundtrack, man. Because a retaliation is in order!

I got up to get something from upstairs, and as I did, I staggered off in the hunched nature of an ape, white knuckles scrapping the ground, and pawing at myself for effect. The music choices were not up for discussion, but I had probably find myself a new computer chair.

2008-11-14T10:24:00.005-05:00

I've been dirt and I don't care

Humor in horror: there seems to be no end to it, the subtle nuance of disaster which starts with a chuckle and ends in an ache, tears streaming down your face as you grasp at your stomach from the pain. Life takes on the nature of a television sitcom sometimes, with the requisite laugh track in the back, the smallest indignities eliciting the stock laugh until you find yourself a master of comedy, a primetime television series in the making. It wouldn’t be all too impressive, though, in the end. It would probably just get people down.

Ivy seems to have snatched away my unemployment benefits, fucking up the entire weekend, and stretching out into the foreseeable future, like a stain on a tablecloth, stretching out from its center and seeping out into infinity, ruining a houseguest’s pants. But, ah, well: it was bound to happen this way. There was probably already a park bench with my name stamped on it, its existence situated solely on my own waking existence in the world, waiting precisely for this moment, when we would intersect. And some things are like that.

If you need me, you know where I’ll be, face paint and motioning to the masses, a real sad clown.

2008-11-13T13:15:00.007-05:00

Eyes lit on sharp threats from dark lips
Things have gotten out of control. I seem to be out of a job again, which seems to be my natural state, scuttling around all day, like a lobster, claw-like feet audibly scraping the sidewalk and naked pincers reaching at the sky for something, anything to grasp on to. Luckily, every other person in my life, with the notable exception of SG—whose frame of mind seems to border on a state of total serenity, like someone entertaining a perpetual ambulatory state on the shores of a white sand beach somewhere, with only the sensation of tepid wave pools gently touching against her feet, totally unawares of my own flailing—seems to be on the verge of a suicidal depression, and so it makes my own situation look OK, comparatively.

The only thing threatening this way of existence seems to be the temp agency, and a woman named Ivy from the labor department, whose been phoning me and telling me my unemployment benefits are in jeopardy because I have refused a job offer. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, although totally known by the people at the ye old unemployment division, someone has offered me a job which I apparently did not accept, which is an offense of the highest order at the labor depot. Ivy promptly has me on the horn about this matter at nine am one morning, my head still a contusion of cobwebs and confusion, completely unable to get my story together that I did not in fact refuse employment, and that I am, actually, at nine am, in the fevered throes of scrapping my way to the top of the food chain. Ivy is unconvinced, however—so versed in these matters perhaps—so used to dealing with lowly life forms like my own—that she mine as well be teleporting to my bedroom at home and beating me with a rubber hose until I get up and march out, onward, to my new job. She ploughs gracelessly ahead, asking me a succession of the same three questions over and over again, as I issue new and completely original answers each time.

“But so you did receive a call, and you did proceed to take the insurance agency job and then not show up?” she asks in the incredulous voice you use to talk to small school children. “Oh, man,” I whine. “Well, it’s hard for me to remember, because that conversation took place, like, over a month ago. And besides, I would never accept a job like that.” Answers like these only seem to press Ivy to a further state of irritation, and she begins to let me have it. “That conversation, mind you, was not over one month ago, and you can’t remember what was said??” I stammer, looking for the answer, finding little of merit in the overwhelming fact that I should be swept from the earth in a great cleansing flood, and then, almost simultaneously, I begin to feel a real sense of reverent awe for the psychic abilities of Ivy and her ability to deduce from our ten minute conversation the complete and utter transparency of my answers. And then, simultaneously, I begin to feel a real sense of compassion for her too, having to make these calls all day, dealing with people like me, the sloth-like visage formulating from the sound of my voice, and the naked imagery forming in Ivy’s mind as she stews over her coffee-stained desk calendar and the clacking of keyboards all around. It seems unreal to me that such a job even exists. And then I realize: Ivy was probably a real slack-off in a prior life, having been sent back to bestow the virtues of grinding it out, and threatening one’s very important unemployment benefits from her mighty throne as unemployment intermediary. That seems like a fair enough perception of the afterlife to me, although not a very reassuring one.

I try and sweet talk Ivy before the conversation ends, but things look bad for me. “—But so wait,” I ask her, before hanging up. “What happens now?” She informs me in no uncertain terms that it will take some discussion with her supervisor and then she will formulate an opinion, at which point in time I either will or will not continue to receive unemployment checks from the state. “But so you can’t tell me right now?” I want to know. “No,” she says firmly, “I cannot.” I hang up the phone and fall back into the gentle embrace of a sweet, if not slightly paranoia-tinged, sleep, as Ivy, simultaneously, goes back to her own situation, tinged with who could say what? I had hoped that she would show some compassion for me, and that she could see my side of the story, which was a sketchy side, I to admit, but a sometimes enjoyable, if not overwhelmingly money-less side, most of the time.

Before falling asleep, I thought of neon lighting systems and recycled air and perspired underarms on shirts buttoned up to the top, and then a concrete sleep subsumed me.

2008-11-11T12:49:00.002-05:00

No fun to hang around/freaked out for another day

Talking to SG’s friend outside of a bar Saturday night. It’s her first time visiting Albany and we are out for the night. She can’t help but note the particularly pungent smell of the watering hole we happen to be patronizing. “Can you smell that in there?” she wants to know, wrinkling her nose. “It smells like lavender and old people and grim death itself.” We have a good laugh at this. Scent, NPR has recently related to me, is strongly associated with memory, and I chide her that her olfactory association with Albany will be forever associated with sordidness and a putrid smell. And so there you have it, Albany, New York: grim death itself.

2008-08-27T21:31:00.009-04:00

You can put it out but I can't put it out
I seem to have picked up a new habit. It didn’t seem like a good idea to start smoking, but I do seem to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and so, what the hey? I thought to myself one night at a party. Why not ease the breakdown process with some carcinogenic cigarette smoke? I purloined one from a girl’s pack when she wasn’t looking, and borrowed somebody’s lighter. It was a nice social prop, at any rate, walking around with an unlit cigarette and asking somebody to light it for me. Other cigarette smokers will always be more than willing to aid you in your plight, and almost immediately I felt “in the loop,” and that much better about myself. I took two puffs and then almost passed out from a lack of oxygen, regaining composure against a wall, so as to not unnerve the other more experienced smokers in attendance. “Are you OK?” someone asked. Oh, yeah, yeah, I coughed, I feel better now. The cigarette had left me temporarily confused, jarred from the oxygen loss, but not in a bad way. Things were looking up.

As almost everyone has figured out, there seems to be no end to the unnervement process swirling around most people at all times. Like lunch hours with my mom might demonstrate, or the A&E television program “Intervention”—or BF herself, with her crushing good/bad ratio demonstration of the hopelessness of it all—life just isn’t that good, most of the time. You need to get high on industrial grade detergents or smoke a cigarette every once in a while. Things get you down.

I thought hard about my own situation and tried to figure out what was making me so uptight. My birthday was a little over one week away, my job situation seemed heavily precarious at best, and I was about one wisecrack away from having to construct a cardboard cutout and take up refuge with the bench dwellers in the park, who seemed to be entirely mistaking my presence anyway. So there was already an in. But this was unnerving, still. What were other people my age doing, I wondered? Nothing too good, by the looks of it. I knew people who were churning out kids en masse, buying cars and houses, or who knows what? Making the kinds of acquisitions which life in the first world guaranteed, which had something to do with the kind of chinos you wore from my vantage point, as per the subtle variation of khaki colors and how they related to your persona. I had no idea how any of this worked, obviously, but people all around me were clearly reveling in this set up, for all time, and so why should I be so hoiti toiti about it?

On a day off from work last week, I walked to the park. Said park dwellers had saved me a bench, apparently, and I nodded graceously to them before taking a seat. Within the hierarchy of park benches it was a good one, with plenty of sunlight, and a pleasant view of the goings on all around me. It seemed to be a leftover from when summer was in full swing, too hot in the sunlight to make it the prime real estate of park benches, but now the weather had become mild and its market value seemed to have skyrocketed unbeknownst to the homeless people all around me.

As I sat there, a man on a neighboring picnic table, lying fully supine, suddenly regained composure and sat up, urinating from his table without standing. When he was finished, he then zipped up his pants and readjusted his twine hobo belt before lying down again, resuming his nap in a near seamless transition. Amazing, I thought to myself. Is his table in such high demand that he was afraid of someone taking it? Or rather, did he just not feel like standing up? I pondered this for a while, although I may have been talking out loud, because simultaneously another homeless person walked by and began talking back to me. “Hey,” he said in the garbled speak of someone who had lost his dentures, “I was sitting there.” He waved a tired finger, motioning to the bench I was sitting on. Clearly he had failed to master the art of seated peeing and I had taken his bench in the meanwhile. “—Oh, well you can have it back,” I stammered, taking note of the other slightly more shaded benches on the periphery. “Nah,” he said, “you take it, but can I get a cigarette?” Having temporarily forgotten that I was now a cigarette smoker, and having failed to fully take this on as part of my Identity, I told him that I didn’t have any cigarettes, before, mid-sentence, I realized that I actually did, and pulled one from my pocket for him to have. It seemed like a fair trade, the going rate for a park bench evidently, where currency in these circles clearly manifested in the form of unlit paper cigarettes.

I watched him shamble off, and as I did, I lit my own cigarette. The trees blew in the wind, and the sun cascaded off shiny leaves. It would be fall soon, I thought between puffs of smoke, nature's entropy and all the rest of that stuff would soon be taking place. There would be a presidential election which a minority of the American public would take notice of, and my birthday would pass, uneventfully. I tried to make sense of these things. What did they actually mean? I wondered. Nothing: it was probably a matter of wardrobe. It was probably nothing more than a winter's coat. That didn't seem so bad to me. Or that's what I told myself between puffs of smoke.

2008-08-13T15:49:00.004-04:00

Kill me in my favorite clothes
The general populace seems to have taken issue with my summertime couture, which typically includes a pair of cut-off shorts at any given moment and a t-shirt turned inside out. Somewhere these people have aligned, setting up camp on some slow evening, before dispersing back out into the world again, where they are breaking down my will to smite consumerism in my own small ways, like looking like crap, and always refusing wear shirts which contain slogans or overt references to products and people (unless you could devise a shirt with, like, a friend’s name on it or something, with individual talent sets and statistics revealed on the back, like a baseball card, which I would endorse fully and which I suggest someone makes me, immediately). The snide commentary has manifested in everything from smug commentary to laughing out loud as I walk down the street. But that’s just the price you have to pay for avoiding the cash-transaction, which is my own microcosmic way of collapsing the economy entirely and sending things into such a wretched tailspin that we have to start running with wolves and seeking out caves to live in.

Somewhere between my righteous indignance for looking like shit and getting made fun of, I have decided to get on board and hook up some new clothes for the greater good. As some small compromise I went to the local Goodwill store this weekend. Those clothes, at least, wouldn’t be officially new, and so at least in my mind I wouldn’t actually be contributing to the proliferation of more shopping malls, and thus made everything ok-seeming. I walked around the store for a while, checking in on the ornate nic-nacs, before settling on two shirts. Satisfied with these items, I qued up in line behind three teen-aged girls, who were apparently entertaining their own acts of youthful transgression, ill-conceived as it was, weird bandannas and all. As I waited, a fraternity bro and his girlfriend also got in line, behind me. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” said bro said to his girlfriend. “I’m not some kind of fag, you know.” The university is down the road and these types tend to proliferate. That’s just the kind of thing you have to contend with, living around a place like Albany, New York, where the general population seems to consist almost entirely of students during the school year, sprawling and disconcerting to the senses. It seems superfluous and unnecessary to assign any individual character traits to these people, since they were all seemingly created in decanters, with very specific features assigned, so as to further cultural homogeneity and horribleness. I don’t have any say in this, really. It’s akin to living in a place with bad air quality. You have to know where to stay away from.

As I waited, and said line-waiter’s commentary became more and more outrageous, curiosity got the best of me, and I just had to take a look back at the person in question. As I did, his own eye caught my own, which must have caused such a jolt to his solar plexus that it caused his lip to curl in a Billy Idol-variety snarl—or what might alternately be described as the snarl of a wolf, teeth-barring and clearly out of its natural habitat. I still can’t tell if this was the most hilarious thing I have ever seen in my life, or if it was amazing because at any moment he was about to transcend himself and all of the limitations imposed on him, shredding his clothes in Teen Wolf fashion, before making an exit from the store. But beyond all of that, he probably just didn't dig my outfit.

The cashier eventually rang up my purchase, placed my shirts in a bag, and handed them to me. I then strode out into the world again on two legs. It was concrete and menacing.

2008-07-22T21:30:00.003-04:00

We are ready for the floor
My coworker Joy is standing in the parking lot today as I arrive at work, waving enthusiastically to me as I pull into a parking space, her legs beneath a large midsection, like the small appendages of a barnyard chicken supporting too big a body. “Hey!” she calls to me as I get out of my car, “Have you ever heard the song ‘Love Shack’?” Yes, I assure her, I have. That song played like a motherfucker on MTV when I was a kid, creating strange notions of adulthood and the enthusiasm for hanging out in a shack in the woods, which in retrospect is a pretty understandable notion. “Yeah, well they were just playing that song on the radio!” she says to me. “Isn’t it great?” My enthusiasm is lackluster and grim-seeming at this time of the day and all I can do is nod my head in some vague gesture of agreement. “-Oh, you’re too young,” she says to me. “We used to love that song.” I do not doubt it, I tell her. It’s a real rocker.

On the drive in to work this morning I devised a scheme whereby I would construct a cardboard cutout automaton which would take over my position here at the office, unawares of my coworkers, who would continue to have base interactions with who they thought was me throughout the day, while I would conduct more worthwhile acts of business out in the world, hanging around at the pool or who knows where. I run this idea by Joy, who is also in the market for a similar, if not slightly more obtuse, cardboard cutout. “Well, what would you do all day?” she wants to know. “Oh, I don’t know,” I tell her, “Probably hang out at the love shack.” She laughs at this and is quick to remind me that I do not have a girlfriend, thus calling into question the whole nature of the love shack. Is it a mutually exclusive shack? Or do the lyrics imply some type of sexual ribaldry which is currently lost on my coworker? These are the real questions, the ones which require a little more of you.

Look, I tell her, it’s right there in the song lyrics: I’ve got me a car and it seats about twenty/ so come along and bring your jukebox money. She doesn’t really know what I’m talking about, but it seems moot, anyhow. My car seats about four, uncomfortably, and that’s with all of the backseat detritus cleared out. Let’s just hope they have some killer jukebox selections when we get there. Now if I could only figure out the cardboard cutout situation.

2008-07-11T11:50:00.001-04:00

In twenty-seven years I drank fifty thousand beers
My brain is still sacked out in bed, in some concrete sleep, preceded only by my body, which is here at work, like a cartoon, making all kinds of erroneous decisions on not enough rest last night. And that’s the way it is these days. I don’t know if it’s the total absence of a brain which continues to cause me to ask questions like, why is the cashier at the mart telling the alien stranger of a customer in front of me about her husband’s psychological problems in the span of two grocery items? But I think it may just be some age old problem of mine, always asking too many questions when I just should keep my mouth shut and plow forward, like everybody else, hopeless and grim.

I really do need to be hit over the head with a baseball bat or for some surgeon to perform a minor lobotomy on me. Or something.

Last night I sat in a room full of strangers, dizzied and confused by the day within the week, which is only some microcosm of the years gone by. Some girl who was ridiculously stoned was telling us about how a neighbor would open up a nearby fire hydrant and let the neighborhood children play, which prompted the recollection of an entire litany of summertime stories. My own parents, bent on the illogic of the nineteen eighties, had a peculiar clown head sprinkler, called Fun Fountain (produced, amazingly, by a company called Wham-O. How could you ever deny a product which offers that quantity of fun, accompanied by a leering clown’s head, I don’t know). The main idea of this item was for water to pass through the clown’s head, which caused the hat of the clown to soar thirty feet in the air, at which point in time the participants would run under the spray of water. Perhaps as some oversight by Wham-O, however, the makers of Fun Fountain failed to realize what would happen when the clown’s hat came hurtling out of the sky from thirty feet above, maiming the young revelers below. Which was, invariably, the source of many bodily injuries and concussions. Which may explain some things. Nobody really knew what I was talking about except for the stoned girl. It didn’t really seem like it mattered, though.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Jj--y7nzkjo/SFkZ_-Pm8kI/AAAAAAAAD48/aLMx5ldL_Wk/s1600/whamo.jpg

2008-07-05T12:51:00.006-04:00

The youth is starting to change
I’m not sure why, but whenever I’m hanging out on Madison in Albany some future slash current twelve year-old Romeo shows up at two in the morning, brandishing some pretty impressive dance moves, and providing endless entertainment for the drunk and sidewalk strewn revelers on their way home right then. Often this individual shows up with his own cassette tape, contained on which are many of his favorite jams, and which he'll urge you to put on your stereo. Last night, however, not only did he bring the dance moves but also his own pyrotechnic display to accompany all of this, aided and abetted by one lighter-carrying person in attendance. And then, as quickly, he disappeared again, lighter in tow, and a gaggle of inebrients chasing him down the road, slapstick comedy-style.

Being young is no easy gig, but you mine as well make the most of things.

2008-06-24T09:49:00.004-04:00

Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Insanity at the beach-themed summer party. Somebody has parked a particularly sweet El Camino outside and once inside the loft I can’t help but start looking for Richard Prior. Because clearly someone’s dedication to summer fun has outdone my own: there is actually sand in a corner and a makeshift bar, with a bartender, who is not Richard Prior, sadly, but just some guy from my vantage point. A band has set up in the meticulously-created sand zone, and immediately they begin playing songs from an album I had been listening to earlier at a friend’s apartment, an album which I suggested we bring along with us, as we take over the stereo to play monotonous DJ. Every wish granted, clearly, Brewster’s Millions-style.

Through the throngs and over to the inebriation station, to where there is a small que of rowdy revelers assembled, waiting for a refill. I see an acquaintance in line who has heard a rumor that I’m recruiting for a non-existent, but very well should, bicycle gang (would be titled, BUI Gang, with the headline, “You won’t be needing a bottle-holder”). I play dumb and go along with it. “I’ll definitely get you on the list,” I tell him, before heading in the direction of the dance floor, sand in my shoes and a beach ball bouncing above my head. Dancing in an alcohol-induced fervor, with anyone and everyone. The winter is long and pulverizing, these people would relate, and now it was over. It seemed like as good of an excuse as any to whoop it. Not that anyone was asking.

The crowd finally thins and my dance moves whirr to a stop. I see some guy sitting down on the edge of the sand pit and try to direct him to a couch which doesn’t exist. “Are you OK?” I ask him, as he stumbles off, away.

Outside of doors and into the night with some girl who has agreed to drive me home. I cross my fingers that she is the owner of the El Camino, but once outside I remember that Richard Prior was probably still upstairs on the dance floor, white-suited and afroed, dolling out the fruits of summer fun and virtue.

I still have my Hawaiian lei on and zinc on my nose, I realize, and am amazed that anyone would actually find me acceptable material to drive home right at the moment. But then you never can underestimate the awesomeness of your own dance moves.

Inside the car, the girl is looking for a CD. She fingers through a case before settling on her jam and puts it on the stereo. It is invariably something from the dark metal genre but nothing I’ve ever heard before. It’s probably not the couth thing to do, but for some reason I can’t help but laugh at her bad taste right at the moment. Nordic dark metal is probably the antithesis of summer fun and jubilation, and I just can’t get into that variety of seasonal opposition at the moment. She gets uncomfortable and I try and stop, but it has already gotten the best of me. The uncomfortable soon turns to anger, which makes me laugh even more. It’s the whole cut-up-in-the-back-of-the-class syndrome. This girl has clearly suffused this music as the locus of her persona, and she thinks I’m laughing at her, which from one point of view I objectively am. She turns it up louder, as I tell her I’ll just get out here, thanks. But she has taken to ignoring me and blazes way past where I want her to stop. Oh, man, I think: see what happens when you accept a ride with strangers. One minute you’re en route to somewhere potentially more stimulating, and the next thing you know you’re afraid for your life. Clearly she is going to drive me to the tracks and carry out obscure acts of torture to the soundtrack of Norwegian dark metal.

Finally, after creating a near-Homeric odyssey for me to complete in this state of inebriation, she skids off the side of the road and instructs me to depart. “Get out,” I believe, may have been the parting sentiment, before peeling out, and leaving me a haggard but still giggling mess on the side of the road. Oh, well that’s just great, I say to the fading car, raising my fist in the air for effect—really first rate! And if all that wasn’t bad enough, I was a little under half way home when I realized I had lost my lei.

2008-06-09T16:17:00.002-04:00

We can't be contained
My mom has recently found a seven inch record by the band Cupid Car Club, in my old room at her house. Its cover features a veritable how-to manual on how to go about killing yourself, with each of the band members separately engaging in their own choice methods of suicide. Accompanying this are songs titled “Grape Juice Plus”, a song about a savory blend of cocktail meeting hasty ends, and a manifesto about “starting at the finish line”. Ian Svenonious, indie-rock provocateur and champion of the man-scream—would be professor of economics if he didn’t get distracted and start a punk rock band instead—is all but lost on my mother, however. Confounded by youth culture in the USA, a place which creates such alienation that the only reasonable thing left to do is jump off a bridge and join the Cupid Car Club in eternity, my mom is all but spazzing out on me. She produces the record, holding it up before me, as I try and explain. It’s weird, but I feel instantaneously transported to the tenth grade again, like she’s just found a humongous stash of weed in my closet and I have to point out that’s it’s actually oregano I’ve been using for my home economics experiments. I stammer, trying something about disaffected youth, but she has no idea what this has to do with starting at the finish line. “I want this out of the house,” she says to me, handing the record to me. Oh, man, I think; what a setback. I’m pretty sure my parents think I’m weird enough, but this is the kind of thing that’s going to send them over the edge. Family get togethers are going to be dotted with conversation about my weird suicidal tendencies, evidenced by my record collection, which will serve as just some small addendum to a lifetime of odd and unusual behaviors. “Oh, and that wasn’t all she found,” some vestigial aunt will stand up and say, “There was one by a group called Death Cab For Cutie.” Sometimes you just can’t win.

2008-06-05T12:20:00.004-04:00

Suddenly everything has changed
Wayne Coyne, one time employee of Long John Silvers and wearer of the accompanying Long John’s pirate uniform (complete with pirate hat and shirt), has famously related in reference to that particular job that 'mindless work has its merits.' Whether this first foray into the well-oiled gears of industry (oil which would invariably become coagulated and clog like the arteries of the people who eat this questionable fare) later translated into the costumery of the performer’s stage show will probably remain one of the great mysteries. But I cannot help but think that old Wayne, standing there in his pirate’s uniform and talking in the garbled gab of the Long John’s employee, addressing patrons as though they were actual deckhands on a pirated ship between shifts on the Fryalator, was somehow invoking me. If only my work shirts were so cool, and came with the accompanying pirate speak.

It is another day at the working place—another day among another day. This is life in the thirty-three and a third lock-groove theory. You get stuck in the same patterns, the needle repetitiously grooving, warbling out its muffled hiss, and never breaking free from its course. You get tired of the sound, get up, put another LP on. This is the way we live our lives. This is the way we spend our time.

I am looking over at my coworker now (pictured below), slumbering on a fifteen minute break, and wonder what LP she’s listening to. I think she’s into country music, but I’m not entirely sure. In the life as repetitious LP paradigm I would probably assign her something from the slow-core music genre. Or who knows what? (The obvious chink occurring when someone in the audience stands up and says, Hey, man: Lps are out, you guys need iTunes accounts).

Office work is a strange gig, a strange deal. It’s weird to spend a large portion of your time in an environment with all of the stimulation strategically sucked out. Any small hindrance becomes an arena rock concert of the sensory experience. Two weeks ago a rancid and coagulated coffee was found festering under my computer, causing my IT director to spazz out completely. This became the talk of the office for three weeks. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without someone coming up to me in the hall and really ribbing me for the admonishment received. But this line of work is not without merit, in a Wayne Coyne sort of way. And I almost can’t help but think what would happen if I came in to work wearing a pirate’s outfit, replete with sterling accents and a coarse yell, out-wayneing even Wayne himself.

2008-05-15T15:25:00.005-04:00

Don't bother playing dead
Another day, another dollar.

2008-05-13T13:05:00.002-04:00

There is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun
Much to the consternation of me and the rest of the viewing audience, bug-eyed and giddy on too many cups of coffee at eight am, Tim Drawbridge had a nervous breakdown during the morning weather segment. The weather maps showed gray gloom on the Doppler radar system, stretching out into infinity, when he began weeping and they had to cut to commercial break. Whether L. Trela was watching this same “weathercast” will remain one of the great historical mysteries, but one week earlier I had watched her have a similar breakdown as I took in a movie marathon on TV. What was wrong with these people, I had no idea. There were alien emotions welling up in people, wide and sweeping, and those emotions were overflowing onto horizontal surfaces everywhere, collecting into little puddles, and dispensing into saltwater oceans somewhere. Or that was my guess anyway, all conjecture formulated during five minute commercial breaks on TV.

It was a nice weekend, weather-wise. I spent the duration of Saturday shambling around the springtime festival with a bottle of Berkshire Mountain Spring Water which I filled with a turpentine blend of whiskey that threatened to eat away at the plastic container if I didn’t drink it fast enough. When people became unnerved with the current state of water pollution in the Berkshire Mountains, I assured them with a lurid grin that it was “all good,” and that the Berkshire Spring Water Co had just come up with a new marketing concept, to both shock consumers with trendy “green ethos” lifestyle ideology and indoctrinate young children, bored with drinking traditional-colored water. Why such a lengthy explanation was needed probably had something to do with the stained shirt I was wearing, or my own bad hair, sticking up every which way. Or any number of things, actually. Mostly, though, I think I was trying to distract myself from my current surroundings, which were currently filled with spurious life forms everywhere, fraternity brothers with coolers and their questionable companions, people who had the highest interest in bong vendors and tie-died shirts, prone to sad cultural acquiescence and failure. There was an entire aggregate who was apparently really into these things, and who were also really into the band the Spin Doctors. The only person offering me some respite from this point of view—that I was an alien inhabiting an alien planet—was BF and her bizarre friends, their quirks sprouting up like some insane bonsai stretching up and into the sky, grounded by the strange but familiar flora and fauna of this town. “You’re not unlike them,” she laughed, invoking her friends, as we discussed the insane foliage on a walk to the burrito place. I guess there were worse ways to be.

In line waiting for a burrito, we are having one more laugh at the fact that someone actually had the social gall to book the band the Spin Doctors. The kid in front of us in line catches wind of this, having no idea that his favorite group is in fact taking the stage as we speak. “The Spin Doctors are playing??” he asks us, overhearing. “—uh, yeah,” I let him know. There is a moment where it becomes unclear if he thinks that we’re sincerely talking about the Spin Doctors and he is making fun of us for this lowly reference, or if, to our own chagrin, he is expressing a genuine interest in the collective oeuvre of this musical group (a catalogue which includes two songs, I’m pretty much sure, the galaxy beyond which only people with weird facial tics and odd hang ups are well acquainted—a demographic which would seem to include myself but which I have somehow averted due in part to some apparent cult deprogramming seminar I attended somewhere along the line). This point is then made clear when he loses his place in line and sprints in the direction of the main stage, out-alienating even us. Clearly the mother ship had departed, and in the process had left me behind, standing there stupidly, with a tulip some girl had given me earlier in the day, and a similarly-tentacled counterpart, who was whooping it up completely, despite our lame surroundings.
..........................................................................................................................
Another day, the Central Hannaford palatial and awe-inducing from my approach in the parking lot. Inside there were rows and rows of foods, garishly-labeled bottles of spring water for my choosing as American consumer of fine mountain spring water products—which I would later fill with turpentine-like liquids, to alienate myself completely, and distract myself from the oft-espoused point of view that the mother ship had left me behind. Somewhere someone was dying.

Greeting me as I walked inside was the pleasant tinkle of the Muzak music system, which was currently in the process of segueing into a new song selection. The Muzak music player, trusty foe to offices and conduit to suicides everywhere, had never ceased to amaze me. It was clearly programmed to confound you completely, keeping you guessing for five minutes, with all the lyrics sucked out. The main idea of this system, it was clear to me, was to keep you confused and guessing about the song choice for long enough that you hung out around the store that much longer, and bought that many more things. I was at the check out when I recognized the song that was playing. It was the Spin Doctors, doing one of their hit songs. Amazing, I thought to myself. There's just no escaping it, it seems. This was then followed by a ripping version of “House of the Rising Sun”, appropriately enough. Clearly some hilarious diety was in the DJ booth, and she was cracking me up completely.

Back outside the weather was noncommital and gray. I wondered if Tim Drawbridge was feeling better. I found out what he was so sad about: He was leaving the news station and moving to a new city. What he was so upset for, I’m not sure. But when it came down to it, I couldn't help but feel that Tim Drawbridge was kind of a disappointment to me, personally. And furthermore, I couldn’t help but imagine that his iPod wasn’t too good.

2008-04-24T12:24:00.002-04:00

Have you even ever rented a room
Spring has shown by to the wholehearted jubilation of the entire populace, who has crawled from the cramped corridors of their rental compartments and sauntered out into the new day, with the possibility of anything. Your skin itself registers this fact on some surface level, its pours opening and soaking in the vitamin rays of the sun, which elicits the chemical reaction in your head that convinces you everything is going to be OK, and everything’s going to work out how you planned it. It’s impossible not to walk down the street and connect with just about everyone, because fuck: it’s nice weather out and nothing else matters. Unless, of course, you’re me.

I spent the weekend in a state of total inebriation, shambling and confused, the only thing separating me from the vagrant population hanging around downtown was the fact that I actually had a home to go to, sort of. Although that did not prevent me from actually going to it. I woke up on a grassy knoll one morning, my shoes and remaining life savings in tact, a dollar thirty-five from the previous evening still in my pocket, which I immediately began calculating for a future expense. I dusted off my clothing and headed in the general direction of my house, proceeding to discard the memory of waking on a tepid grass from my mind completely. It didn’t seem fair to officially count it, since I couldn’t remember the events which lead up to it, and so it seemed unfair to keep it around--which is the carefully conscripted rationale for things that happen in my life which I don’t want to own up to.

Any number of days may have passed like this until Sunday night came around. I walked into the Central Avenue Hannaford in a state of disrepair which nothing would ever again fix, praying I wouldn’t have a run in with that albino grocery bagger, an individual I may have been heard making fun of earlier in the weekend, and who was no doubt lying in wait for this exact moment, staying late and working overtime even--to see me in a state of disrepair that nothing would ever again fix—and to send me over the edge completely. I ended up running into Adam Lynch instead. His face appeared to me like an anchor of familiarity in a sea of faces floating like images in a surrealist painting I would never be able to fully comprehend. He had to call my name twice before I was able to recognize and then proceed to have the total meltdown that there he was and there I was, too. It wasn’t entirely special, though, because we were only standing in the doorway to the Central Avenue Hannaford, one of the more mundane cross sections in the world, and who really cares?

It turned out that he was also at the conclusion of a similar bender, minus the whole grassy knoll incident (unless, of course, he was outsmarting me by not telling me and thus not counting it as an event which had actually happened, because he could not remember the events leading up to it, etc, etc.). In fact, we had apparently been hanging out together earlier in the weekend, unbeknownst to one another, except that we had attended the same rock concert, and may have even arrived in the same automobile. An apology had seemed in order, but from who seemed entirely unclear.

We talked for a while about the house we were moving out of. It was also in a state of disrepair, and its own sketchiness could only exist as some overt symbol of the lives of the inhabitants living within—inhabitants who were currently standing face to face in the doorway of the Central Hannaford, and soon to be shot to opposite ends of the universe. For some strange reason entirely unclear to me he had chosen a sordid domicile across the river, which is a euphemism in my lexicon for we’ll-probably-never-see-each-other-again. But still, despite the inevitable denouement, the encounter left me feeling uplifted and ok-seeming. Adam was a good egg, a good friend, within an overarching solar system of broken yolks and cracked shells, tiny little umbilical cords sticking out of your omelet and making you throw up.

Before parting ways, it became clear to me that the people you meet in life are like cardboard caricatures, cartoon faces painted on and intricate detail. Sometimes you came across a cutout that may be imbued with something which vaguely resembles your own, with the inherent experience and frayed edges. It wasn’t a bad realization to have. I wondered if he was thinking about that, too. It didn’t really seem like it mattered much, though. Barring dramatic interpretations, at least we had the weather. I never liked Spring, but it seemed to be catching on. It seemed like it should.

2008-04-15T16:19:00.003-04:00

Good times keep rolling on Tuesday nights
I don’t know if it’s my own fascist tendencies speaking or just my strange predilection for nineteen eighty’s Brat Pack movies, but the Asian guy in my office has always reminded me of Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles (there was apparently a time in the late nineteen eighties when it was still perfectly acceptable, and actually really hilarious, to make fun of Asian people—something which at least in my mind, and in reference to the few Asian people that I actually do know, is still really fun to do). My boss is going over HTML with him right now, the Esperanto of the office, and throwing terms around like it’s the native tongue, which I guess it objectively is since we’re working in I-T. But any time I’ve ever had a verbal exchange with this individual, which has been limited primarily to greetings as I come or go, he seems totally perplexed and unable to understand. So how he’s able to grapple with the complicated acronyms my boss is hurtling at him right now, I have no idea. I suspect he may be only pretending to understand, since he seems to be constantly in trouble. From what I gather, his web designs are not too good. This is an unending source of entertainment around the office, the suppressed giggles which turn to a more audible laughing-out-loud when this person is called into the boss’s office. In fact, it has recently occurred to me that the solitary reason I’m working here now is banked on the future hopes for an office party, during which I would give this individual three beers and watch the ensuing debauchery that occurs (which would end in a variety of ways in my mind, but not surprisingly always comes back to the actual ending of Sixteen Candles. Except in my mind for some strange reason I keep taking on the persona of Michael Schoeffling when all that I think I'm expressing is my desire to wear plaid shirts). But then, maybe it’s just a veiled preference for another decade, another time. Who could really say? These are probably issues to be worked out in some Swedish therapist’s office at an unspecified future date, with the pleasant rays of some intricate lighting system cascading across my cracked and broken head.

I really just wish my coworker Joy would come back to work and face the music (which would be the warbling sound of a music box with the batteries running low). Apparently some agricultural ambassadors left an expensive chunk of cheese in the refrigerator, which is now missing. I came in to work yesterday to find a padlock on the refrigerator door, dead bolted shut. There has been a continuous stream of conjecture ever since, and the very critical testimony of a fellow coworker has surfaced. Said coworker apparently did in fact see the person in question nibbling on a large chunk of cheese, which she was overheard freely offering up to others throughout the day. Poor Joy, I think, completely unable to control herself. I imagine her sitting at her desk, the nascent yearning for saturated fats becoming increasingly unavoidable as she recalled the block of untouched of cheese just sitting in the break room refrigerator. There was perhaps a moment of vacillation before the insatiable and unrelenting urge for any and all lactaid got the best of her-- as she attempted to walk, not run, to the break room. Only to make the fatal error of sharing her five finger feat. Oh, man: poor Joy, I think to myself. An investigation has already been launched, and she can’t stay home from work forever.

So much happens every day. You could never make sense of it all. To do so would only be to take on the purported fate of my Asian coworker, pretending to get it. But even then your website would only be evidence of this complete and total lack of comprehension. No, it would probably be better to just drink some beers and wake up on somebody’s front lawn. Yeah, that sounds familiar. That sounds about right to me.

2008-04-03T16:20:00.006-04:00

It could have been a brilliant career
The work at work has tapered off. My supervisor called an impromptu meeting with me one day last week. “Listen,” she said in the sotto voce of worldly wisdom, “The workload is running low, so take your time, slow it down a little.” Okay, I thought, I can do that. She then leaned in and imparted the nugget of wisdom only heard only in dreams and small corners of the eastern bloc: “Take a couple of days off if you want to.” There followed a succession of days off from work, fruitlessly sauntering around my apartment in a state of nervous agitation, unable to accomplish anything other than short treks to the grocery store, where once inside I would contemplate the nature of the human beings contained therein. This was a healthy diversion for sixty minutes a day, fixating on a new individual each time. I would construct a whole outline for said person before I got back to my house: where they lived, what their life was like, and if I had imagined they owned a pet, I would try and specify what breed it was, as per related by their persona—information quickly deduced from my trips through their checkout line. When this activity was complete, I would then pace some more and maybe watch a movie. Any number of days passed like this, one by one, until it seemed logical to go back to work. My job, at least, offered the welcome respite from a life gone out of control. There, at least, I could distract myself by clacking meaningless names and digits, information which corresponded to nothing in particular from my vantage point, the tiny pixels of my monitor emanating out, transcending my implacable skull, and neutralizing the contents contained therein. I would find myself in such a state that I had passed the outer-bounds of consciousness, and may have forgotten that I was a human being at all. This was a pleasant way to pass the time, and I reveled in a life with the complications sucked out. But now the work has run low again, and it’s all coming back to me full force, cruelly thrust from the vacuum. The contents of my life have been illuminated in lieu of the absence of the brain neutralization process provided by my job, the events hurtling through the atmosphere like particles of dust in a black-lit environ. The house I am living in has been sold, and my only acquaintance in life, a girl from the video store, has stopped talking to me days earlier, as per the derangement of my movie rental selections. When you objectively examined the facts, it seemed difficult to deny the fact that even my retarded neighbor had turned against me. Two weeks would no doubt find me sauntering around the dog park, with the bourgeois park dwellers and their dogs looking on in horror as I howled at the moon. And the worst part is, my whole employment situation is tenuous-looking, at best. Here’s my office director now, peeking over my shoulder. I had better get back to work before I get fired. It’s not much, I know. But really: it’s all that I’ve got.

2008-03-06T12:15:00.003-05:00

Vacation’s all I ever wanted
Hey, look: there’s that girl from the gym, following too close behind as I try and walk to my car. Has she consulted the Inter-Web and read what I wrote about her? Is she going to accost me and make me listen to her prattle on about the Oprah book club for hours on end? I cannot take it, and narrowly escape her gaze as I hustle to my car. That was a close one, I think to myself. The magnet hum in my head has polarized the entire city, issuing the magnetic pull which has the crazies flocking in astounding number, when all I was really trying to do was conduct a little market research. But then, that begs the question: why pick up the book if you don’t really want to read it, and the cover illustration is all that you were really impressed with anyway? (Which is a topic worthy of at least an Oprah book club episode). Everyone I know seems marginally insane from my vantage point, and I always find myself asking the wrong questions, which signs me up for an eternity of discussion, weekends booked with torment as you develop the intertwined tentacles of association, strange alien feelings of compassion cropping up as you hold it up before you and think, ah: what is this strange thing we have here. Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s just me. Vacation’s all I ever wanted, the Go-Go’s sing, and I actually find myself singing this same song as I come in out of the cold, veritably ice-skating across the icy tundra of the sidewalk which stretches out indefinitely before me, garbage spackled right into its surface as I regain composure and walk seamlessly into a darkened bar for refuge. There are already a few people situated inside as I take a seat at the end of the bar and order a drink. A Samuel L. Jackson look-alike is talking to the bartender, killing me with his blue collar wisdom, as they run through politics and consumer items and the lottery. “—You hear ‘bout that Georgia couple that hit the jackpot?” he asks the bartender. “Two-hundred million,” he shakes his head. “What would you do with that kind of money?” The bartender’s answer is knee jerk and unthinking. “I know exactly what I’d do,” he says assuredly, but the Samuel L. Jackson guy is not having it. “No,” he says, “but after you bought everything you could buy, what would you do?” Throwing off the shackles of consumerist trappings, the bartender is perplexed in light of the question, has no idea what he would do. “—Shit, I tell you what I’d do,” the other guy says, answering his own question. “I’d go to outer space, --Go to Mars and shit.” His voice carries and everyone within earshot of the conversation has a good chuckle at this. But the guy is not messing around: a multi-millionaire from Russia has already purchased a ticket to outer space, he lets us know, and so why should not he? This then begs the question of what the quality of life on Mars would be, which on a skin-surface level would be pretty cold, I imagine. Cold and lonely. It makes me think of A Space Odyssey again and Beyond the Infinite, but instead of the regular actor inhabiting the monolith, it would be the Samuel L. Jackson guy sauntering around in an orange spacesuit, struggling against it as he swills a Budweiser and grins contentedly into the camera, revealing a gold tooth. After a while they adjourn to the back of the bar, where the bartender gets trounced in a game of pool. The Samuel L. Jackson guy produces with a large grin on his face. “Man," he chides, "maybe if we was on Mars you could beat me.”

One more drink and back out onto the sidewalk, with nowhere to go. I am impossibly shit-faced as I make my way up the street, walking too aimlessly for frigid weather. I could call xxxxxx right now, but that would only sign me up for an hours-long discussion of Superior City, pouring over the subtle nuance of disaster. No, I’ll just sleep in this snow bank, I find myself thinking. Somebody will find me later and take me home, like a swattling baby left on a doorstep. That’s pretty much the way I usually work it these days (which may just be some commentary on any relationship I’ve had in the last two months). Up the street some more, I am dressed in the most ludicrous winter-wear imaginable, layered and layered beneath a hulking coat, and dumb as fuck head sandwiched under a wool hat. My arms are limited in movement beneath my coat and grim inebriation makes me feel the part of the space traveler. Ryan Kemp: the first man on Mars, driving a stake into the frozen surface, a flag with a cartoonish representation of myself- which would be a stick figure with x’s in his eyes. But ah, well: things had been bound to end this way. They usually do. I’ll just keep winning the Lottery it seems, where the jackpot is a lump sum payment of despair and epic sadness and alienation from every girl.

2008-01-31T16:17:00.000-05:00

Try to remember always to have a good time
Another day, the smooth whirring of car tires pulling into the same parking spot at work. The wind lashes me, walking across the parking lot, like Mother Nature herself manifesting and slapping you across the face. Inside it is quiet, blocking out a whipping wind. I look up to see Eliot Spitzer himself leering back at me from his picture on the wall. It seems weird to me that I come to work five days a week and rarely notice this picture. His face is stony-looking and carved, the chiseled smile never quite transcending the austerity of that stony jaw. It makes you jump a little. Eliot Spitzer: watching your every move.

Brooke F. made me outline my workaday schedule for her last weekend. It was mortifying. I tried to avoid the subject, but she pushed and pushed. “But so you have a snack right after work?” she needed to know. I want to cut to the fun parts, but all I keep getting caught up in are the second-rate moments, like crunching intently on a candy bar after work, it makes you a little crazy. I find myself foraging for interactions with people, the insane spotlight of my mind searching desperately for some fucked-upness in the environ, just to validate the fact that we’re all residing on the same lunar continent, and that it’s not all carefully conscripted Giacometti figures and discontent. I decide to test this theory at the gym, where I stride over to some girl on the Lady Trainer (sic). “Hey,” I say to her, “how’s it hanging?” I don’t know if it’s the sheer insanity of the social gesture, the asking how’s-it-hanging to a girl I’ve never talked to before or my own sprightly form on the accompanying Lady Trainer, but she seems somewhat unnerved by my inquiry. We get talking a little. I’ve seen this girl around before. She wears all-black sweat suits, and I don’t know if it’s the monochromatic outfit choices, but I had hoped that she chain-smoked cigarettes and read existential literature. It turns out, though, that she works for the public sector and thinks the Oprah book club is really cool. Beggars can’t choose, though, and so I push and push, hoping for the full on itinerary. “But so you watch a lot of TV?” I have to know. “What about after you leave here?” I ask her. “What do you do then??” She becomes unnerved by my questions, gets uncomfortable. It suddenly dawns on me that she thinks I’m going to ask her out on a date or something, erroneously interpreting my research for a romantic gesture. “Don’t you ever just wonder about people, though?” I continue. “I mean, what about that girl over there, with the pinched face,” I motion. “Like don’t you just imagine she has a really horrible job or something? –Or is it that the mounting abyss has risen up before her and is crushing her totally??” She has no idea what I’m talking about. I try a change of tact: “So do you have a boyfriend or whatever?” I ask. “YES,” she says. “I do.” “Really??” I almost cannot believe. I imagine a couple situated in a restaurant, carrying on some insipid conversation in a booth somewhere, a real Olive Garden of the relational exchange. I want to ask about the boyfriend but don’t actually want to know any of the answers. A conversational stumper: In her eyes I see no tangible trace of evidence that we’re inhabiting the same platitude, nothing remotely what I was looking for anyway. Whatever that means. “Well, I’m going to beat it,” I finally tell her. The Lady Trainer comes to an abrupt halt, as she looks at my time elapsed. “That’s all you’re going to do?” she asks me. “Yeah,” I say. "Twenty minutes, that seems like more than enough to me.” She seems unimpressed. “Take it slow,” I tell her obnoxiously; I can’t imagine we’ll be talking again.

Before you die, the bad parts will crush you with an inherent sense of injustice, rolling over you like some kind of tsunami of the mundane, leaving your shoes filled with a coarse brine of boredom and slow death and ennui. There will be prescription medications and talk therapy and interminable yawns that leave your eyes watery around the edges. There will be insanity and suicide and a grim hopeless despair. That’s what will fill the spaces in between.

2008-01-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

The years go fast but the days go slow
My parents have recently found a watch, tucked away among the detritus of some drawer in their house, and erroneously assumed it belonged to my sister. It’s a Swatch watch, with a lime-green wrist band, and some sort of art deco-style design featured on the face. It is, admittedly, the kind of watch that a young girl might wear, but it was mine from the fourth grade or beyond, enamored as I was by trendy wrist wear—staunch indoctrination tactics handed down by my older and more “stylish” sisters (both of who were responsible for passing on similar fashion faux-pas, like the rolled pant leg and popped shirt collar). And so it was either some act of nostalgia or the leftover predilection for fashions from the young-miss section that has me wearing it around again. The only chink in the plan is that the watch no longer works. I have even gone the lengths of having the battery replaced, producing the paltry wristwatch to the dude at the gazebo in the mall, who looked back at me with the grim determination that the thing was definitely not my own, and invariably belonged to some younger sister or something. He tinkered with it a moment before handing the repaired watch back to me, shaking his head in reverent awe of the metronome-making Swedes, with their inherent time-keeping capabilities, at which point in time I exited the store and it promptly stopped working again. And so now all that I’m left with is the relative sweetness of an awesome wrist adornment, which only keeps time for one minute a day.

It is another day in Info-Systems, the scattered scuttlebutt of a boss’s whereabouts, and not even the pleasant ca-chunk of a stapler going off today. It’s a slow one, too, moving in perfect step with my broken watch. You could even invoke the indie-rock icons and recite the line, the years go fast but the days go so slow, but in doing so you would also be invoking your own inevitable passage through time, like some kind of slowly drifting glacier being filmed in stop motion, and wrapped up in all of that would be your really bad taste in music, marked with the historical footnote of a time when things might have meant something.

A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend who knows someone who’s having a child. We talked about the feeling the announcement of a marriage or child creates in me. “It’s weird because what is a definitional life-moment for these people always elicits in me the utmost in depressive feelings,” I said to her. Thinking it over a moment, I added to what should not have been added to. “The whole thing is, is that it seems to symbolize the end of Options,” I said. “And I don’t think people shold be making that kind of commitment at such a young age.” “Well, you’re not that young,” she reminded me. “You’ve really only got a few years to get your shit together, because if you don’t work it out soon, everyone in your age bracket is going to be married and moved on, within five years.” I started, taking this new information in, falling away then from the old perspective of a 14 year-old girl. For some reason I had never contemplated this before. My life is on par with the average teenager’s, and that includes a self-imposed curfew. But man: time really is running out, I realized, the unambiguous tinge of paranoia creeping in around the edges. “—I guess I never thought about it like that before,” I said to her. “Well, you should,” she admonished, “because there’s not much time left.” In the distance I could hear the audible clunk of a door being shut, punctuated by the sound of a deadbolt lock. I wondered how long I would continue maximizing my options, or whatever. The indie-rockers had it right, in the end. But it didn’t really seem like it mattered much: my wristwatch was totally broken, and it didn’t really seem to be impressing anyone anyway.

2008-01-17T13:12:00.000-05:00

I had that dream where my teeth fall out
Mid-afternoon at the dentist’s. The hygienist is a bubbly woman whose been cleaning my teeth since I was a child, scrapping off the years’ worth of residue, so I can go about the process of meticulously recreating that same residue, like ancient cities of pixie sticks and coffee stains and grime, conducting the archeological dig of the crown molar. She seems somewhat off today as she sits me down in the chair. I read somewhere that dentists kill themselves more than in any other profession and it makes some amount of sense to me. It seems like an alienating thing, having your hands in someone’s mouth all day, in such close proximity but always so far away. She prattles on at length about her kid’s college and politics, asking me the type of questions which seem evocative of a senior thesis, but by the time I get to answer she’s racing off to other topics, and you just can’t win. But ah, well: it’s probably better if I don’t say anything. At least when you’re silent you can let the other people sell themselves out, with the incipient lack of sanity. And besides, I don’t really have anything to say.

Before leaving she asks me what color toothbrush I want, zipping off an entire color wheel worth of toothbrushes, before I settle on one. “Blue,” I tell her. “Does that say something about me?” Because who ever get the neon lime green, anyhow? “Once in a while someone chooses the lime green” she assures me, “but a lot of people like blue.” At the threshold, I can see her smiling back at me, clutching my new blue toothbrush. Another patient served. I wonder what my life will be like the next time I see her, and it’s always so hard to say. But then I remember: I’ll find out in exactly 7 days, I have a cavity.

2008-01-15T12:23:00.000-05:00

Can’t you see a jaguar walks among you through your petty lives
Drinks with Gail S. We can’t decide where to go and then choose the pub with the most ridiculous-sounding name, which is the Lionheart. What this is supposed to represent, I don’t know, but at least the spurious student population is not around for one more week and so we can hang out in there and have a beer on a weeknight without too much fear of aesthetic disappointment. The guy working at the bar seems somewhat chagrinned to see us come in, interrupting what are apparently the very important affairs of presiding over an empty pub. He takes our drink orders and we laugh at the “bad vibes.” There’s something about this guy which seems highly resonant of high school ass-whippings and verbal abuse, having narrowly escaped the black trench coat and rifle and ended up here instead, to vibe out lowly patronage from his very important throne. He pumps the jukebox while Gail and I relate. We only see each other once every two months and so I have to catch her up on my Plan, which involves some sort of exodus. I tell her how bored I am, and then find myself bored with telling people this same thing. I’m old enough to understand the nature of repetition and don’t want to become one of those people. But Gail is nice enough to listen sincerely, as though she actually cares, and I am thankful for that. Momentarily we are distracted by the barman again, who is rump-shaking to his latest selection from the jukebox, which sends Gail totally over the edge. I have seen her entertained for hours on end with cosmic minutia, and so this is currency of the greatest value to her, a real bright star. When he disappears to smoke a cigarette, we look at the book he has left behind on the bar, which is Imajica: The Reconciliation, a fantasy novel. We have a good laugh at this, and being the jerks we are Gail flips the marker, losing our protagonist's page in the book, which I can’t help but feel some amount of compassion for. And therein is revealed the nature of the lion’s heart: It’s a strong heart, but an historically feeling one, which is often complexified with the consumption of alcohol.

2008-01-09T15:01:00.000-05:00

I have lost my mind/can’t seem to find that dang thing

The Uber-weenie on television last night, giving his parents what for: “All that I’m suggesting is that I get to watch television whenever I want,” he says, intoning in the most painfully nasal voice. It’s a very important part of my life, and inhibiting this portion of my life would be most disruptive.” His parents try and reason with him. Maybe the television-watching could be limited to nighttime, but that would present the logistical concerns of missing Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. “I will not stand for it,” the weenie keeps saying. “Absolutely not.” This is part of a PBS documentary about Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition which produces an uncanny dorkinator of a child who, while unable to hold a job or conversation with someone, seems quite adept at watching TV and hanging out all day. His parents have the lowest expectations for him, hanging onto the common thread of hope he will one day be able procure a job somewhere, which he invariably gets fired from one after another. One job he shows up for at 9:00 am and is dismissed by 10:30 after asking if he can go home and watch TV for a while. The scene then cuts back to him in his bedroom at home, flopping down on the bed for the mid-morning showing of Mr. Roger’s, which he reverently orates over: “Mr. Rogers understands our concerns,” he says. “He knows that the world is not perfect, and that things do not always work out the way we planned.” It is cracking me up in the nighttime, busting a gut past my bedtime. There really is no hope for this guy. And so that’s one person whose competency level falls at least slightly below my own. Although a little research points out that the person in question is actually the son of the editor in chief of The New Yorker and thus will in all probability get to live out his ultimate dream of hanging out all day and watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood—out-dorking even me.

2008-01-07T12:24:00.000-05:00

I remember me
American Gladiators on TV. This is the show which featured gym rats from Venice Beach made good, guys with receding hairlines dressed in ill-fitting spandex outfits taking on carpenters from middle America in the ultimate pantomime of modern day roman warriors. I remember watching this show on Saturday nights at a friend’s house. His mom would make us cheddar cheese popcorn in the microwave as we cheered our gladiator of choice. Many fans of this show would probably later go on to fight in actual combat, in some sketchy desert somewhere, with the inherent notions of heroism. Where my fanaticism for dudes dressed in patriotic spandex outfits verged, I don’t know, but it was probably somewhere around the time of adolescence—or when I read that first Chomsky book, or somewhere. The details are not very important, but it’s with no lack of consternation that I notice that some executive somewhere actually had the insane idea of putting this show back on the air again. “Gladiator party, man,” Adam tells me when I get home last night. We whoop it up in the cathode ray, a motley assemblage of people old enough to remember when this show was on the first time around. It’s funny how the gladiators are still those same guys with receding hairlines and hilarity-invoking names. A gladiator named Wolf-Man, a 40-something with a ratty beard, whose presence elicits in him a menacing wolf call every time he appears, makes us laugh and laugh. And it’s a real good time. You have to decide: do you really want to cheer for the firefighter from East Orange, New Jersey or do you want to see him fall from his perilous perch on the bridge as the Wolf-Man pummels him with an oversized sack of potatoes on a string? These are the important life-questions, the ones which require a little more from you. On a commercial break, I catch myself brainstorming an idea where they would retrieve actual Guantanamo Bay prisoners and pit them up against the American Gladiators for the ultimate exchange of freedom. If the gladiators were defeated they would be at the opprobrium of the general public as the Guantanamo prisoners went free. But if the gladiators won, it would just be more of the same for the Guantanamo prisoners, waterboarding or whatever. The only problem would be they would have to come up with a new name for the show. American Jingoism, I would like to suggest, but it's still in the beginning phases. I am silently working out the details when someone asks me what I’m muttering. –What? Oh, nothing, I say. Nothing, really: I promise.

2007-12-17T18:17:00.000-05:00

Dancing for dollars
Standing on the front porch at 8:30 this morning and looking out at the frozen tundra which stretches out at my feet. The walkway is covered with snow and my precarious sneaker situation makes traversing the distance to the street difficult today. Should I shovel a pathway and be late for work? I have to decide. I vacillate on the notions of frozen feet, and then trek out into the snow, taking large steps in between, as though the larger footsteps are going to cut down on the amount of snow making its way into my shoes. Five steps in, I realize: fuck it-it doesn’t matter. I mine as well be barefoot or walking on hot coals right now. Where is my fascist neighbor with his workhorse son, I wonder, clearing the snow away as his dad stands behind him and tells him to hurry up? I don’t know, but even the mentally challenged seem particularly smarter than me today (as I contemplate the aforementioned whereabouts of my challenged neighbor—about whom the jokes abound—a nascent image presents of him, sitting indoors, feet kicked up as he swills Cherry Coke from a straw and simultaneously takes in an episode of Looney Toons).

I am listening to the The Knife’s Silent Shout on my car stereo today. I don’t know anyone who actually likes this album, but it seems relative to the vast frozen tundra, and I can only imagine its detractors probably don’t reside in the northeast. The great thing about Silent Shout, though, is that beyond the austerity, it’s an evenly measured dance album. And therein lies the awesomeness of this record for me, because not only could can you hang yourself to it, but alternately you could throw an all-night dance party (although that seems to posit the fact that it would be a pretty depressing dance party, where everybody feels suicidal and grim at the end, but I think what I was actually relating is the way I feel after 80’s night at the Fuze). I turn it up a notch in my car, and then try and imagine the appropriate dance moves to accompany the song I am listening to. People would ask me why I’m dancing so weird, and I’d tell them, it’s simple: my feet are frozen.

2007-12-17T18:10:00.000-05:00

Pancakes for one are always depressing
My girlfriend has recently broken up with me, taking the opportunity to call me while driving home one night. “Can you hold on?” she asks me. “I’ve got to put my headset on.” It seems funny to me. Once everything is in place, she gets back to the task at hand, which is filled with so much grim foreboding. “It’s not that you’re a bad person,” she says, “It’s just that you lack any sort of drive. –I mean, you really do just seem to be coasting.” I latch on to that word, appreciating the syllables as they make their way off of my tongue. “Coasting,” I say contemplatively. “Yeah,” she fires back, “I mean, there’s just no sense of get-up-and-go.” It’s difficult for me to determine, but the verbiage being suggested really does seem evocative of the car ride: drive, coasting, get-up-and-go. I try and imagine the motions suggested by these words but am so far detached from these concepts that I actually have to ask. “So what you’re saying is that you’d be way more into me if I had a better job or something?” That makes some amount of sense, I have to admit. Going out to dinner or anywhere that involved any sort of monetary exchange was always a particularly awkward time, never being able to pay. And her parents seemed particularly unnerved with my lack of a 401K. “Yeah,” she admonishes, “TAKE A NIGHT CLASS, or do SOMETHING.” There is pause, where she tries to fiure out something else that I could do—the necessary locomotion a life should carry, the motions and movements which add up to time well spent in the arithmetic of civility. “What about that literacy program?? she wants to know. “Weren’t you going to do a literacy program?” Night classes, literacy programs: the shoes or hair I could actually concede to, but these things seem totally superfluous to me. But ah, well: I should have seen it coming. My life, on paper, is not very impressive. In the end, there’s nothing I can do but give in. “It’s all true,” I tell her compassionately. “I know exactly what you’re saying.” It seems weird to be able to achieve the level of detachment which allows you to see things objectively, but I seem to have done that: “I know I wasn’t always easy to deal with,” I tell her sympathetically. “I guess I’ll see you,” I say before hanging up the phone.

Lying back on my bed, it’s hard not to concede that something seems seriously amiss with me. And it wouldn’t be so bad except that I just had this same conversation with another girlfriend, five years removed. She recently called me up and rehashed some things. Iceberg, I think she may have said, before blowing up my spot totally with the very incendiary scather by-the-way of Destiny’s Child lyrics. All you can really do is shake your head when someone actually quotes Destiny’s Child lyrics to insult you. And then I remember what was fundamentally wrong with that situation: differing tastes in music.

On TV I take comfort in a rerun of Seinfeld. They are seated in the diner, when Jerry begins relating a near-death experience. –You always say that you’re going to live your life differently from that moment on, he says, but nobody ever does. And what would that imply? Elaine asks. WHAT ISN’T A WASTE OF TIME?? I MEAN, CAN’T YOU EVEN DRINK A CUP OF COFFEE ANYMORE? she says. And then I remember: my girlfriend hated that show, too.

2007-12-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

They don’t make lies like they used to
I will read anything left in the break room at work: True Story Magazine, which features the utmost in outrageous tales of domestic debauchery (fictional); out-of-date Rolling Stone magazines and obscure romance novels, with brittle yellow pages that have been left untouched for years; Entertainment Weekly, whose faux-New York variety editors churn out articles and lists—lists of anything—to validate the fact that yes, they are young and urban, and into indie-rock; or even Sound and Vision magazine, which panders exclusively to the bourgeoisie and whose featured “entertainment systems” cost more than my annual salary for the last five years combined. Advertisements, brochures, bulletins and obscure addiction pamphlets, with hilarity-inducing drawings accompanying descriptions. My job is so mind numbingly boring—such an affront to the senses on every available level!—such an assault to mankind in general!—clear out some knitting magazines from your recently deceased 84-year-old grandma’s coffee table and I will probably check them out for at least ten minutes of total sensory overload.

Today I am reading the Daily Gazette, which is a Schenectady, New York newspaper that saves you ten cents over the leading newspaper subscription. The only people I’ve ever met who actually subscribe to this paper are my dad and some chumps who live out in the middle of nowhere, so that the leading paper (e.g. The New York Times) does not deliver there. In any case, it’s a pretty worthless piece of trash, and I’m pretty sure you can read the entire thing, cover to cover, in no more than 15 minutes. Today I am reading, perusing like a motherfucker—actually going so far as to read the obituaries, because I have nothing better to do. Most of the obituaries I’ve ever read go to great lengths to point out the definitive life-moments of the individual, what schools they’ve attended, where they’ve lived, etc. In the case of some momentous trauma the editors at said paper and the respective families usually go the distance of providing such vagary that you, the reader, have no idea of what actually happened as the cause of death. But today I am reading and this obituary actually points out that this young person was a DRUG ADDICT, and that it got the best of him, in the end. It wastes no time in pointing this out either, not even sparing the proverbial five lines of lifetime dogma. It seems unreal to me. Can they actually get away with this?? I want to know. Can your family actually defame you in such a shrewd manner? It seems crazy, but it is real and it is true. Die doing something your family wouldn’t want you to, and they might chide you for your death-style (as if they actual living wasn’t hard enough—hence the existence of illicit drugs to begin with—now there’s all this to worry about). It stresses me out for about ten minutes, during which time I scroll my own obit, pointing out all of the finer achievements: Ryan Kemp, many memorable hairdos, unfortunate sneaker collection. I get uptight about it, and then I realize: it probably won’t matter too much in the end.

2007-12-05T12:19:00.000-05:00

We need so many things to keep our stupid lives going
My shoes are cracked and worn, fucked with years of overexposure to manmade concrete surfaces covering everything. The laces have disappeared from the left shoe, and I never bothered to replace them, opting instead to walk around with the tongue absurdly flapping about. The other shoe is equally destroyed and has worn away at the front, where my toe is beginning to show through. Paired together they represent an incongruous mess of the falling apart, making the mad dash in unison toward total disintegration (a day which will show by with my shoes and clothing disintegrating off of me completely, leaving me naked and barefoot as I stride out into the new day). Additionally, the bottoms have begun wearing away in different sections, making them not particularly choice footwear for rainy days. Today the melted ice from the sidewalk accumulates and makes its way easily into the bottom of my shoes, saturating much of my socks and feet. I register this with the slight pulsating sting that occurs at the foot-level when the human skin comes in contact with cold wet substances and causes small curse words to come out of my mouth. Later, at work, my shoes have begun to dry and smell, much to the chagrin of my unfortunate coworkers, who have to sit within my immediate proximity all day. These same coworkers will later gather in the hallway, circling around and talking in hushed tones about the faint aroma coming from under my desk—a fear instilled in me years ago at a temp job, where a fellow-temp actually did receive a call from his agency, telling him to clean up his act. It was not the aroma of body funk, another coworker diligently explained, so much as it was the lurid reek of feet which did him in. All of which has rendered a lifelong fear in me, and which is made one hundred percent tangible moments ago when a coworker turns and asks, what is that smell, mang?? There is a moment of conjecture before Joy produces, with her Sauerkraut lunch, ready to eat.

I really probably should buy a new pair of shoes, soon. Because you never can underestimate of good footwear.

2007-11-25T13:33:00.000-05:00

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*

2007-11-13T16:35:00.000-05:00

Everybody loves a good red scare
An interoffice feud has occurred. I entered on it the other day, the cacophony of voices which got louder as I approached, and then walked silently through its center and to my desk, taking my seat as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Today we are experiencing the silent nuclear arms race of the aftermath. The lines in the sand have been drawn, and I am being asked to choose sides. It’s all horrible craziness to me, though: everybody seems marginally insane from my vantage point, and I don’t even know what the argument was about. My coworkers have begun creating all new reasons for interacting with me, so as to get a feel for where I stand in the matter, attempting to tip the scales to one side or the other. Joy corners me in the break room and begins questioning me about drug paraphernalia, which she found in her grandson’s room. “Oh, I wouldn’t really know anything about that,” I tell her, so as to not implicate myself. “Oh, well I just thought you might know,” she says. We stare awkwardly at each other for the ensuing few seconds before parting ways. Meanwhile, back in the office, my other coworkers have taken to talking in hushed tones, reveling in the office scuttlebutt which is their raison d’etre. I can’t believe this is actually my life, I find myself thinking for the one-millionth time. I keep waiting for some obscure European relative to die, leaving me an inheritance which will absolve me from this petty existence, so I can carry out my ultimate dream of doing Nothing. But I just keep waiting and waiting.

It has become obvious to me that whatever minute semantic issue is at hand, everybody is against Joy because she hates her job and says so, which hasn’t particularly ingratiated her among the other people who work here. Nowhere else in the free world could get away with watching Montel and distaining your job between fistfuls of popcorn than in the public sector. But whatever your feelings about her predilections for daytime TV you really just have to appreciate the sheer bravado with which she conducts herself around here, a sight to be seen. I try and sympathize with the other people, the vitriol which produces in gallons and buckets’ full. You can feel them trying to win you over, the bad vibes permeating the common airspace like some kind of mold spores. But like William Shatner said, “I can’t get behind that.”

I end up finding Joy in the hallway, roaming up and down, her newest refuge in an increasingly uneasy refuge. “Hey,” I say, walking over to her. “Don’t worry about it. Those guys are fucked up.” She looks at me incredulously. “You’re on my side?” she asks. It feels kind of weird to admit, but I guess if righteously subverting the man is the task work at hand, I actually am. “Yes,” I say to her, “I AM on your side. Now let’s get back to work.” And then, side by side, we walk back into the office, through two sets of doors that snakes right into the seething hot center of the lair, which is a bay of pigs or otherwise.

2007-10-24T18:16:00.000-04:00

You ought to kick it to me and bite off my head
Last night, in the throes of inexplicable terribleness, I went to the liquor store and purchased a sizable bottle of red wine, which I then got home and proceeded to discover I had nothing to open it with. It seemed like some kind of hi-jinx performed by the gods above, who seem periodically bent on messing with my head. I turned the apartment over, looking for an opener, before giving up and sitting down, staring blankly at the bottle before me, as though by sheer will alone I could pop the top off. The very existence of the bottle, I conjectured, is the result of my ever crumbling girl situation, unraveling like a ball of twine that seems destined to just keep unraveling, forever. Small patterns disappear and are subsumed by bigger patterns, the singer sings. And that's the way it is with me. I remember when I was dating X., I became a particularly sordid brand of variety drunk, showing up to her house wrecked beyond belief. She would find me sitting on her porch, petting her cat, either too confused or apathetic to ring the bell, which may just pose the question, was it the drinking which crumbled the situation for me, or was it the situation itself which had me turning into a drunk? And further, if history repeats itself in the here and now, will I just continue to get worse, moving on to other balls of twine which will inevitably unravel? I was vacillating heavily on the larger implications when the sounds of the downstairs bell shook me from my reverie. Standing there, on the landing, was the downstairs neighbor's dude, stone-faced and hollowed out-looking, brandishing a plate of cookies. We were going through the greetings when the downstairs door flew open, where standing on the thershold was the ye old neighbor herself, with a face equally as grim. No sooner did this occur then I realized that I had found myself sandwiched in a particularly fiery brand of domestic dispute, and so I excused myself, promptly, and retreated back upstairs again. Poor guy, I thought: he had been experiencing his own brand of domestic dispute, probably, demonstrating any number of nervous tics which had presented--the kind which seemed innocuous and easily ignored at first but which over time sprouted into some ignoble bonsai of the nervous tic, and which, once discovered, could never be ignored fully and totally again, resulting in one thousand cold looks and sordid disputes and god knows what. Who could say what went wrong? It seemed like something, though, surely.

Romantic interpretation is a particularly sordid lot. Every once in a while two people will defy the odds in lieu of the urge to endlessly swap bodily fluids, working it all out in the end. And it is this triumph of the will which erroneously goads the rest of us on, resulting in the creation of one million romantic dramas of theatric proportions, both real and imagined. That's just my take on the subject matter. But you probably shouldn't listen to me; my record is not that great, and I can't even open a bottle of wine.

On my way out to buy an opener, I notice on the ground the batch of cookies sitting precariously by the door. The weight of this discovery crushes me. I look at the sad little pile of fresh baked goods, pathetically sitting there on the ground. Somewhere, out in the world, is this sorry sufferer and baker of homemade items. I feel like Sartre's narrator in Nausea, the only one able to sufficiently understand the Self-Taught Man. But ah, well: it's too late. He's probably already en route to the liquor store by now, in pursuit of the balm which will soothe his suffering soul. I stand there for one moment more, contemplating the cookies. It really does seem like such a waste, I think. And then, pulling back the cover, I reach inside and purloin one the sweet delicacies off of the plate, popping one in my mouth before striding off into the night. Not too bad, I think. Not too bad at all.

2007-10-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

My baby served me love on a plate (paper)
An injured leg on the Lady Trainer (sic) at the gym is causing me to limp around all day. What did you do to your leg? People want to know. Oh, you know, I stammer: I fell down the stairs. One time in high school, I broke my leg during a rad sleigh-riding trick and the questions which subsequently followed were answered in all manner of creative ways. But the truth, as is the lesson of US foreign policy, was avoided at all costs. And here I find myself slipping up. But sometimes you just can’t help yourself, as is the case with most social boners (a sentence which, even as I write it, seems problematic and so terribly rife with sordid sub-textual ribaldry that I probably won’t sleep tonight. Which also—actually, never mind).

The root of my entire problem today acutely broils down to the fact that somebody brought in sticky bun pastries, which has me bouncing off the walls of my cubicle. There’s something so delectably sweet about them that when your coworker who brought them eyes you suspiciously on your third trip for more, you cannot help but ice that same person out, with the tacit suggestion of, get-the-fuck-out-of-my-face. But now that I think of it, the whole messy equation really probably will relate back to obsessively riding the lady trainer tonight, for an endless succession of pulled muscles and second rate excuses and social boners. Or however you say.

2007-10-15T17:13:00.000-04:00

You've got your big cheese/ I've got my hash pipe
The day seems impossibly long after only a few hours. I called in late to work today, after a late night out. “Joy,” I say into the phone before she shouts back my name. “Ryy!” she says into the receiver, “HOW ARE YOU DOING??” And then, before I have time to answer, she’s off about how nobody’s on time today, and can I come in quickly? It’s not there’s a lot of work to do, or anything that actually necessitates my being there. No, the root of the problem is that she’s just really lonely. “I’ll do my best,” I tell her, before hanging up the phone and hastily falling back asleep.

H.’s wedding turned out not to be a total fiasco, although we did manage to alienate ourselves right off by admitting that we’re not fans of the rock group Phish. This was, strangely, one of the first questions posed to us, which, once unsatisfactorily answered, excluded us from the more illicit proceedings taking place out back all night. The moral being, if you want to smoke weed with the ex-hippies seated at your table, you have got to read between the lines and at least pretend that their musical predilections are not startlingly inferior to your own.

On the way out, I am practically sprinting to the car, when KD tells me to slow down. And it’s true, I think: why am I walking so fast? My whole life, I’ve recently conjectured, is a series of events that I’m ploughing through joylessly. Somebody else recently asked me if I was in a hurry to get going, and I realized, no sooner did I arrive at the bar the other night then I immediately began worrying about how I was going to get home again, the logistics involved, and sundry other concerns. What the hell is wrong with me, I don’t know. There’s so much getting through the things I need to get through, to get to the all of the other things which need getting through. And rarely is anything ever accomplished, when the work is never done. I am stressing out over the details in the car ride on the way home, when I realize: I really probably should check in on some of those jam bands.

2007-10-14T12:51:00.000-04:00

Let's drink a toast to all those who arrived alive
Mario S. walking through the shoppers’ mall, like an anchor of familiarity in a sea of the terrible unknown. “Oh, hey what’s up,” he greets me, recognizing my face. It’s always funny seeing Mario, because he’s fairly ubiquitous within the greater upstate area, and I always do end up seeing him in the most bizarre places imaginable, while doing nothing particular at all. The whole anchor-of-familiarity paradigm is probably lost on Mario, however, given that he seems to know everybody, and it’s probably more of a testament to his imagined magnetism which always tricks you into thinking you’re the anchor. We talk things over a bit and I tell him that I’m going to a wedding this weekend, and how I need something to wear. “Wedding’s are the worst,” he says, “I always tell my friends: ‘listen, motherfuckers: you know where I work, I can’t afford no present.’” We have a laugh at that, and then he continues to explain to me that weddings are akin to receiving a speeding ticket, an expense which you can’t afford. I misconstrue the original statement by adding that it would be more like a speeding ticket that comes with dinner and dancing, but Mario insists that it’s a speeding ticket all the same. And it’s weird how one of the most important days in two people’s lives becomes little more than an overwhelming chink in your well-constructed plans for the weekend. My formalwear situation is little less than happening, and the whole fact that two people younger than me are getting married elicits in me some kind of existential panic which just won't go. But ah, well: what can you do? Some people have to have lives which suggest that things are OK, and that it’s not all horrible and grim. And the food will be really good, probably. So that’s something, at least.

I walk out of the mall with Mario, past the pesky miscreant factions which seems to assemble by the entryways, which is somehow very logical hanging out corridors for 15-year-olds nationwide. I point out my car to Mario, which resides in a very choice spot, close to the entryway. He has no idea where his own car is in the interminable sea of similar-looking cars and then tries to remember if it’s even in this lot at all. We both shrug, and then say goodbye, until the next time. On the service road out, I see that Mario has found his own car, as he whips by me at impossible speeds, with his inimitable afro poking up above the driver’s seat, in full view of passersby.

2007-09-30T12:42:00.000-04:00

All my heroes are weirdos
Howard S. sits across from me at dinner, clean cut and well groomed. I first met Howard as a flunky in the grade school of some statewide test scoring concern, which was just one in a number of unending temp positions I have worked in my life. I remember talking to Howard then, and the unending vacillation over whether or not he should cut his hair, the symbolism of the event, and what it would all mean. Then he had intricate dreadlocks, which were creatively tied back into a large bunch. He was the type of individual you would imagine hanging around and listening to Kruder & Dorfmeister albums while high on pot. But today he is some dusted off version of his prior self, sparkling clean, with a mortage, fiancé, and a fenced in yard. It’s weird, hanging out with someone who has graduated from the trenches. Howard’s life stands in startling contrast to my own, which is haphazard and grim-seeming. My mom gave me the number for food stamps the other day and I copied it down enthusiastically. When did Howard rejoin? I wonder. And what turn did I miss, I find myself thinking, which put me on the collision course with impasse and total failure, like a train car rushing full force ahead into an implacable brick wall, destined to crash over and over again?

Howard invokes memories of the cast of characters we used to work with. “I hated all of those people,” I find myself telling him. “All of those pedantic fuckers,” I say, “destined for better things. –So completely obnoxious.” I find myself alarmed by the conviction in my voice, about seeming to care about something so vigorously. Howard laughs it off. “It’s pretty much true, though.” he confirms. We laugh at those same people, and wonder what they’re doing now. “I think you either become disillusioned by the process," I say of the temp world, “or you transcend it all together, figuring everything out in the end.” Howe has joined the ranks of the transcendent, apparently. And meanwhile I’m a train wreck, a wreck of all wrecks, destined for collisions, and references to arcane song lyrics which validate all of this behavior. When the check finally comes, I wonder if they take food stamps here.

2007-09-22T11:56:00.000-04:00

I was formed in the shopper's eye
It is just some random day, which could be any day. Have I written that sentence before? I’ll write it again. The weather itself is perplexing, clouding over long enough to trick you into thinking it’s going to be a crappy day, shortly before the sun bursts through again and you think, how manic the weather is. I actually find myself thinking about Tim Drawbridge again, and am then creeped out by my same obsession with this human being: is Tim Drawbridge married with children? Or is he some hanger on— the creep at the end of the bar who women, no matter his bizarre manifestations, latch onto the intangible charm beyond? These are the things I’m thinking about, I actually find myself thinking. And then I change the subject, the television channels of the mind, when the thinking about thinking becomes the thinking itself, so far removed.

I am listening to a punk rock song right now and experiencing the placebo of context. I remember this song, and my experience with it is transporting me five years or more, which mine as well be a century ago (which, at least in the currency of song form, actually is a century ago. Although, I guess you might make the argument that if a song means something, it might actually transcend the value of commodity, but that’s an argument better saved for a different time and place and author, who may not be me). I’m thinking about what my life was like then, walking around the art school campus and taking it all in. It seems, sadly, like I have not changed at all. Did I just hit the wall? I wonder—like when your body has matured to a point where it’s not going to mature any further. Or do you just begin to disintegrate, falling apart completely? Or are the changes more subtle and I’ve just forgotten completely, with the inability to compare? The only way to know, I guess, is if you write everything down, and unfortunately I do write things down. The blog itself is some paltry reflection of this, and there it is, laid out before me, to observe with no lack of chagrin. It could be worse, I guess. But the song at least, is still the same; it couldn't sound better.

2007-09-14T12:30:00.000-04:00

Wine in the moring and some breakfast at night
The window washers outside of my window meticulously wash in the morning light. They’re kind of a motley-looking duo, one of them sporting a decidedly Kid Rock-style moustache and the other wears a ratty ponytail that sticks absurdly out of the back of a baseball cap. The Kid Rock guy uses some sort of makeshift watering device, while the other guy goes behind him and cleans away the dirt. It’s kind of a nice, baggage-free profession, I find myself thinking—the kind which you’re amazed technology hasn’t made obsolete in some way already. Hey, what do you do for a living? someone wants to know. Oh, I wash windows. The clarity is refreshing (nix).

I’m experiencing my own moment of clarity right now, wrapped up in the whole seasonal miasma of figuring out exactly how things work. I had this same epiphany last year at this time, as I walked around downtown in a pouring rain. I’m not sure exactly what I figured out, although I’m not sure it was particularly earth shattering. But it’s kind of amazing how life works sometimes, when everything comes together and seems so well choreographed. You can’t help but be moved in some small way, and then be moved by that same movement, like ancient glaciers shifting within. It’s a long life, but you can’t help but be touched by the irrefutable glints of beauty produced around the edges.

Outside the Kid Rock guy has come back around again to inspect the windows and realizes he has missed a spot. There seems to be some flaw in one of the windows, and he goes to clean it again. It’s funny, watching him look directly in. The windows are tinted and I realize he can’t see anything but his own reflection as I look right into his eyes, not five feet from my own. I catch myself wondering what his life is like. Maybe he’s having his own epiphanies, I think, cashing in on the whole seasonal vortex of beauty and shine. Who could say what he’s thinking? The possibilities really are endless. When he’s satisfied with the window, he picks up his supplies and moves along to clean the next window for somebody to look out of with equal parts astonishment and wonder.

2007-09-13T13:24:00.000-04:00

Kaiser get in here right now
Ostensibly having lunch with my grandmother. Actually, I have no food or money and so I show up to her house unexpected to make a peanut butter sandwich, deciding to sit for a few moments before leaving. It seems like the couth thing to do, not just showing up to get some food and then leave again. She calls my motive, though, and on going to leave she asks me what's up. "Are you feeling alright?" she wants to know (it's always the inquiries with me, which only leads me to believe that my public persona needs some polishing. --A friend has recently spotted me standing against a wall at a show, totally lifeless and grim, later telling me how pathetic I looked. Thank you, L. Trela: you're always one for words. Although I guess I'll just chalk that one up to the proverbial touche--yeah, i know you read this blog, and may be refering to any number of incendiary things I may have said about you). "I guess I feel OK," I tell my grandmother, simultaneously amazed that she's asking about my well being. "Well you sure are acting strange," she says. I have no defense for acting strange, however, having given that up a long time ago. In the end we must be who we are, the singer sings, and there it is creeping up out of me, like some kind of insane bonsai. There is no hiding it. On my way to the door she holds up some grapes to give to me. I snatch them from her hand and pop one into my mouth, feeling as the sugary sweet tartness from the grape rushes over my tongue, like a piece of candy.

2007-09-04T09:32:00.000-04:00

We got old but we got good
Birthday extravaganza ’07 ensues with no casualties. That’s a good thing. Although I guess it depends who you ask: the compulsive drug abuser might actually prefer to die in the heightened state, where the meth-induced state reveals, with startling clarity, the essence of living. But for better or worse (pointing me out to be the first class weenie I am, on a myriad of levels), the only drug I’ve been abusing is my asthma inhaler. All other aspects of life fade away in the desperate morning, lips pursed as you gasp for air, dizziness ensuing as the oxygen in your blood dissipates and then seemingly disappears altogether. That’s the state I found myself in Saturday morning. And that’s the way it is these days. Oh, dear god, I think to myself silently, what did I do to deserve this, with the newly formed panic attack of the inoxygenated lung. But there are few answers in the life of the uninsured, and sometimes you just have to deal. “It’s OK,” I tell a concerned friend, keeling over and gasping for air. I’m actually getting used to living life on the verge of death. “Well, Happy Birthday,” she says tells me derisively. Happy 29th.

2007-07-25T15:13:00.000-04:00

This job is killing me
In what is apparently my ongoing attempt to reference 2001: A Space Odyssey as often as humanly possible, I’ve recently begun conceptualizing my brain as the HAL computer as it’s shutting down, pleading with no one in particular to stop the process. Please, I hear myself saying (in some kind of interior monologue, which is a voice not unlike that of the actual H-A-L computer, although slightly more suave if I don’t say so myself), don’t do it. The Walkmen sing, this job is killing me, and here I find myself with the bloody shirt stain wound and the dying. It’s just another day in Info Systems. All systems go.

2007-07-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

Trust your needs to feed you
Morning time at L. Trela’s. I cannot sleep and L. Trela is the only other person I know who may be awake at this hour. I dial her number to find out that she is in fact sleeping, but she invites me over anyway. I know there’s at least an 80 percent chance of receiving breakfast when I get there, and so I arrive moments later, jumping as she emerges from some bizarre entryway I’ve never noticed before and scares the shit out of me. What’s up, she says. What’s going on? Trela’s a funny one to pin down, because she’s one of two or three people I know over the age of 40 who righteously holds on to the ideal that she’s actually 17 years-old. That’s all well and good, but that worldview seems to come particularly unraveled when she’s hustling down Lark Street at 2:00 am, threatening to drive herself home after a night of heavy drinking. And that’s kind of the thing you tend to notice about L. Trela: it’s less that she’s in active pursuit of the imagined lifestyle of an adolescent and more that she seems to be holding onto some kind of death wish. All of her stories, you tend to notice, end in horrible disaster, and it’s not difficult to see through the active lifestyle veneer, which presents in crystal three dimensional clarity, a life out of control. Mostly though, she’s into it if you eat the pizzas she always making, and I can adequately fulfill that roll, looking up between bites, as I pretend to be listening to what she’s saying. But today I arrive to little fanfare. She looks at me blankly before asking what I’ve been up to. Oh, nothing, I tell her. I went on vacation to Cape Cod. The details are not very thrilling. We have no idea what to say to each other and the effect is unnerving. Gone today are Trela’s horrible anecdotes and misadventures. Even the things she’s telling me are benign and lightweight-seeming. What's going on here? I want to know. What the fuck? It’s no use, though, and so I leave after a short visit, feeling somehow defeated and grim, cast out into the day with a bad feeling. Thanks a lot, L. Trela; thanks for nothing.

Friendships are weird thing, situated as they are on so much precarious footing. Move one rock and the whole arrangement comes crumbling down. It’s easy to get swept up in the romanticism of a world built around good intentions, structured perfectly with people who care. But mostly it’s not like that. Mostly, it’s cruel and unusual. Although, mostly unusual. Back in the car, I realize why I’m feeling so strange: I’m starving.

2007-07-20T13:38:00.000-04:00

Goodbye stranger/ it’s been nice
I get phrases from movies and song lyrics stuck in my head. Short blips which correspond to nothing particular. My father was plagued by the same disorder: you hear something on the radio and the next thing you know it’s rattling around the cranium, bouncing around for days on end. My father’s problem was a lot more abstract, primarily intrigued by television commercials and Saturday Night Live skits. Often I would wonder if he was experiencing the onset of some sort of dementia, watching as he would spontaneously bust into song in front of my friends. Said friends would look at each other bemused, as I reeled in horror, often having no idea what he was talking about. Car rides to the mall were marked by the bad humor of my dad and the accompanying jokes which followed. It was a particularly sordid time, perplexed as I was by my dad’s precarious mental state. But here I find myself, impossibly enough, on a chance listen to the classic rock radio station, with Supertramp lyrics trapped in my head. Goodbye Stranger/ it’s been nice/ hope you find your paradise. The words and music cascade around my head, over and over. I whistle this in the office, the falsetto part sticking in your tar trap brain and eradicating all other contents. It seems weird whistling a song about a one night stand in the office, but soon others are plagued by its infectiousness, and everybody begins singing along. Which is unimaginable, even to me.

It is casual Friday, and the common people have brought out their duds, complete with white sneakers and general accessory. I have forgotten about this and am left looking not-so-casual, but that’s OK. My general affectation has already gone the distance of freaking out my coworkers, and I’m sure they have no desire to see my sneakers. But things are OK today: it’s enough to be stoked about the weekend, with its unlimited potential for nightlife and god knows what. The workaday mats you down; days and months accumulate, and your paycheck tells you 900 hours worked, which you look at questionably. Could I really have worked all of those hours, you think, seated at this desk? But all of that fades away. In three more hours the limitations will have been thrust off, and you will be impossibly seated at the blue collar bar. The next-day responsibility will have evaporated, and you will find yourself liberated totally and completely, ushering in the unlimited potential for who knows what. I see a coworker on her way out the door and she stops to talk. “Doing anything good this weekend?” she wants to know. “--Oh, I don’t know,” I say, perplexed by those same limitations being thrust off—the possibility of anything. “I’ll probably just,” I say trailing off, not knowing what to say. She looks back at me derisively, the disappointment of my complete lack of an answer. “Well, see you around,” she says. And then, a few paces away, at the threshold, she turns and tells me, “Goodbye stranger.” To which I can only shake my head. Hope you find your paradise.

2007-07-16T15:02:00.000-04:00

Color me in

Summer '07: it’s in effect. Outside of my window the clouds burst in the nebulous blue. An eagle coasts lazily in the sky, and the world seems perfectly colored in and alive today. So far advanced does it seem in its trajectory towards aliveness that it could not go any further. I see a bumper sticker that reads Life is Good, and I actually believe its message. It seems precarious and short-lived to me, but it actually seems true, today.

I am in my cubicle, hunkered down in the cube. It’s difficult to come to any other conclusion than you have lived wrong, to have ended up in a circumstance such as this one, watching as the perfect day goes by. At least with a window like this one. Although, that’s kind of funny, too—to always come to the same conclusion. Going over the pathways in your mind, and the decisions made: were they all the wrong ones? Is that a possibility: that the sum total of all of those decisions has lead me here, within four walls? I distract myself by doing work and come accross a license with the dog name Freedom. I can’t help but laugh at the inexplicable horribleness of that name, and the hilarious hi-jinx provided by the gods above. Didn’t they have anything better to do today, I wonder, than to send me over the edge. It doesn’t really seem that way. I put it out of my head, but I always come back to its terribleness, with all of its angles and points of light.

2007-04-12T22:38:00.000-04:00

The Blues Are Still Blue
If life replicates art, and art is some tedious movie (as has been explained by our dethroned hero), then this is the segue, with the flipping calendar pages (or Rolodex, depending on your bad movie montage of choice). The days roll by, and more significantly, the weeks and months. Constants during this period may include any one of the following, and often several at once: walking around in an un-induced trancelike state, being in continuous possession of a Belle & Sebastian album, and adult onset ADD. Some things never change, and here I find myself in the same office chair, with fellow coworkers floating lazily by my window, like pollen. Spring is also experiencing the delayed onset, and so maybe the whole movie segue/ pollen analogy is a bad one. It’s a passage, but one that often lends itself to nothing in particular. Tim Drawbridge, the tragically named weather person on the local station, animates this on the morning news, the flickering ghost images flashing on my walls in the early AM. I love this person because he’s a boring human in charge of making a boring subject matter entertaining, therein revealing its entertainingness to me. The other anchorperson has no idea how to deal with him, awkwardly passing the minute segment of time they have to fill together until the next spot. “It seems like we’re just going to have to put up with this frosty weather for a while longer,” he says dogmatically, as I laugh out loud.

At work they have reduced my computers’ functions to the space of a barely adequate hard drive, comprised of two fully functioning programs. I drink black coffee and clack ferverishly at the keyboard. It seems to create the perfectly lined vacuum which blocks out all outside stimulus. What exactly is accomplished in this state, I don’t know, but I can’t quite endorse it as therapeutic. “I just seem to be getting dumber,” I’ve recently explained to a friend. “I used to read the newspaper and things, but now I just sit listlessly in the corner.” “Well it seems to be working out pretty well for you,” he tells me, and I have to admit that seems at least somewhat true. No longer will you catch me standing on street corners speaking about the fascist tendencies of reality programming, choosing instead to take in the latest episode of Cheaters. Some tectonic plate seems shifted, within.
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Interoffice fashion critique with a coworker. “Boy, here comes your girlfriend,” she says. Coming up the way is the elusive girl, walking by my window everyday. Today she is wearing a peculiar aqua-colored dress which does not go unnoticed by my coworker. “Man, she’s wearing her Easter-edition getup,” she says. And it’s true: her outfit does seem unglaringly funny. Augmenting the aqua dress is a similar colored blouse, which only adds to the overall effect. All we can do is shake our heads at one another, the razor-sharp fashion critics, having missed our calling, and ended up here instead.

I try and examine exactly what it is that makes this so hilarious to me. The girl likely purchased this dress from the store, and possibly even stood before the dressing room mirror, before making the executive decision that this garment is perfectly acceptable for presentation to the outside world. At some point in time, she may have even checked the price tag, and determined that it was a worthwhile purchase. Meanwhile, it’s the most hilarious outfit Kalish and I could even imagine. It’s not so much the outfit itself but the dichotomy of perception which makes it so funny to me— the almost unfathomable outfit choice which seems to the espouser perfectly acceptable, while to me it denotes that the wearer may inhabit a reality completely unlike my own (which may also make some amount of sense, because I’m not a 23-year-old woman. But still, it’s invariably gut busting and funny.

I’m trying to become a ‘better person,’ I keep telling people, although that’s a concept which may just be shrouded in ambiguity and meaninglessness, even to me. A better description might describe changing without having finite terms in mind. I like that better; although that, too, is misleading. I try to imagine the movements which actual change might imply, and all I can come up with is an automobile routed firmly in tracks. For years I’ve been confused by the destination that change ultimately implies, conceptually or geographically. It all just seems like landscape and broken promises to me. But thinking in these terms hasn’t gotten me very far. And so I’ve decided that it’s probably better to place the emphasis on the act of change, and transit, without having such finite terms in mind. Whatever that may mean, which in my case is fairly complex and difficult to articulate to you.

Dina, the chef at Mezzo and apparent PR person, sits down next to me at a bar recently. “I’m just going to eat here,” she explains to me. “There’s no other tables available.” “—Oh. OK,” I say to her. A friend of hers arrives momentarily, and it’s not long before I find myself not knowing what to talk to them about, and so end up mercilessly making fun of their suntans instead (suntans which, here in the frozen tundra of Spring, seem inordinately vain and funny to me. Although, it occurs to me that maybe I’m just jealous that my own pasty and office-imbued complexion falls short of the invigorated skin of my sanguine-faced table dwellers). Shortly they are taking offense to this. “Are you making fun of us?” Dina wants to know. It does seem like particularly bad form, openly making fun of strangers like this, but I’ve had too much to drink and what can you do? “You shouldn’t do that,” she admonishes. “You shouldn’t prejudge. –She’s Italian, and it’s hot in here.” The way she says this to me, calmly, it’s clear that she’s not actually mad or upset, but sincerely instructing me on the dangers of making fun of humans with red faces. I try to imply the good-natured-ness inherent in my fun-making but before long the band has launched into some incredible assault of their Hootie and the Blowfish cover, and there is just no way to explain. And so there we sit, people of all varieties, red and white-faced, wildly coifed and inarticulate.

Sitting there, in the dim-lit bar, it’s hard not to realize that a band like this could only really exist in Albany, New York. Albany is, as anyone whose paid a visit, a vacuum unto itself, channeling in strickly vapid influence and hackneyed pop culture reference. Next to Cleveland, Ohio, it’s probably one of the most notoriously losingist cities on the map. And you can’t help but feel, listening to music in a place like this, the crushing weight of it all. It seems the perfect music for the hideous bar, within the confines of a hideous city, the layers of horribleness accumulating like the spackle on a wall that is crumbling beneath, and which can only be appreciated for the eyesore that it is. I can only shake my head at myself. It seems almost inconceivable to be so disconnected from an environment you’ve spent an eternity in, shambling amongst its inhabitants like an actual alien. There were people out there like me somewhere, I find myself thinking, even if I never found them.

Before leaving, Dina turns and thanks me for letting them sit with me, and that it was, actually, a good time. “I’ll see you around,” she says to me, as she cheerfully clinks my glass. It seems weird, but I can’t help but think something good has come from the encounter, and that some innate connection was made, even if she does have a real bad suntan. Maybe the whole personal evolution thing is not lost on me, after all, I find myself thinking; Maybe there’s hope for me, yet.
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Easter Sunday: what a day. Tim Drawbridge is probably pointing out the unseasonably terrible weather somewhere. I am meeting my parents for brunch on short sleep. I saunter over to the the mirror to find sleep-depraved eyes staring back at me, the maniacal visage of someone whose life is out of control. It’s embarrassing, really—not quite a look conducive to entering the public arena, with its dramatic angles and bad lighting. I realize I cannot present myself to my parents looking like this, and so a trip to the store is in order, to buy eye drops.

The Colvin Avenue Hannaford stands stark in the midmorning sunlight, the architecture itself issuing forth the magnetic hum which has vagrants of all sorts producing forth to hang out lazily in the morning sun. This has been my favorite place in Albany for some time now, if only because you cannot leave the premises without some variety of dull anecdote to relate to someone. And as if on cue, en route to the eye care aisle, I see Dina, the girl from the bar, walking straight towards me. She looks right into my eyes, and then through me. I almost cannot believe and so I say, “Hey, what’s up?” She fixes on me, and then all at once my face must prompt the imagery of the person she was sitting next to at the bar the other night. We exchange a lackluster greeting, and then depart, her through shadowy monolith of the grocery mart and me to my battered car, shaking my head once more at my own sense of transparence.

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At my parents’, I am early for once. The TV plays the meaningless banter of the national news people. It’s funny how much more urban these people seem by comparison to the square-seeming newscasters on the local station, whose lives, you imagine, are so much less exciting. They’re featuring a segment where they corner pedestrians and ask them about the significance of the Easter holiday. The masses seem perpetually confused, and totally unable to define why Easter is celebrated with any degree of correctness. And it seems unreal for people to be so dumb, from even a totally secular perspective. Neitche famously declared God is Dead, but here in the blinding light of the new dark age, he seems deader than dead, without even the mere suggestion of anything but more deadness. Although, that adds up, too, and I find myself hard pressed to defend things from any high moral grounds. It just seems kind of strange to be so disconnected--so dumb. But then, I've never experienced this variety of solidarity. I'll probably just get worse. It feels OK.

2007-02-27T20:18:00.000-05:00

You've got a right/ but I've got a right tonight
Excessive interneting has lead to an apparent zero tolerance policy on behalf of the ye old workplace. The leering “Know Your Employers’ Internet Policy” poster hanging by my desk for months went unnoticed, and so did the literature placed strategically around the break room. Now they have blocked my computer in what can only be viewed as some harsh Draconian consideration, clicking on a favorite website and receiving the message, in harshly defined block print. Meanwhile I have taken to pencil and paper, feverishly scrawling on a notepad; let them lock away my supplies and then what?? (You cannot take away my pencil and paper! I want to shout obnoxiously in earshot of the internet patrol team—a division that I have yet to pinpoint, but when I do will be met with swift action and icy looks). It’s weird, though, writing by hand, which is limited primarily to correspondence with a pen pal who never writes back. It’s like some kind of technological artifact from the dark ages. Your hand isn’t accustomed to this variety of strenuous activity, developing a dull ache between your thumb and forefinger. It’s kind of nice, though, too, at the same time, like unearthing your bicycle from a garbage strewn crawl space and realizing you can still pedal like a motherfucker. Sitting before a computer for hours on end has a dull, pacifying effect which has you mouth-breathing and on the verge of entirely differnet platitudes. Just today KJ was choking on a piece of food, and I watched on as though I were dreaming an unreal dreamw while various coworkers tried their hand at some variety of the Heimlich. At least four different people came up from behind her as pandemonium broke out in the office, people scattering everywhere. And all I could do was sit there, watching on as the translucent line which separates living and dying became boldened, and then perfectly defined, like the scrawling of somebody with a CAD variety number 2 pencil.

2007-02-23T10:57:00.000-05:00

I don’t smoke so I poke around
Coworker watch ’07: while nobody knows exactly who the four foot miscreant eating Mr. Subb in the break room is, or precisely what he does here, numerous people have seen him washing his face in the same break room sink, tiny hand towel particles stuck all over the countertop. Often times on getting coffee you will perchance to spy his particularly grime stricken countenance as he proceeds to scrub away with nonchalance, as though he’s not actually using the break room as his own personal grub shoppe. One might be moved to wonder if the pygmy hut he resides in does not contain the accompanying outhouse, with washroom amenities. Or if whatever back breaking nine to five schedule he works here does not allow the more traditional home-based personal hygiene measures. But whatever the case, it is freaking me and KJ out. An additional item on his agenda, apparently, is eating all of the Pop Tarts in the thrifty vend, as he seems always to have a half-eaten pop tart in his hands, which may just explain the incessant hand washing. Often times on looking in there, I ask myself just who eats this stuff, and the answer lies front and center, in the groveling hands of the four foot beholder. Although, sometimes the table he’s sitting at may include any number of items from the machine, and often times several at once. One more pastime and affront to the general sensibilities includes almost continuously hanging out with the jerry curled woman, and incessantly hanging around in the bathroom, as nearly 75% of the time I go in there, I will see him lazily hanging around in the corner (in some admirable late day appropriation of the Fonz--office portal as unofficial business/ rec-room). While many facts remain uncertain, one thing’s for sure and that is that there’s a lot of information to be ascertained, a lot of work to be done. And the weird thing is, I’m pretty much sure that we’re representing the same temp agency. Which could just be conversational fodder, and introductions to entire worlds unknown.

2007-02-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

I look through transparent things and I feel OK
I have reached the end of the walkway this morning when I hear my oft-appearing neighbor David calling from the doorway of his home. “Hey!!” I hear someone saying, as I look around to see. “Over here!!!” I turn back and am astonished to see him on the porch in full sleepwear regalia, telling me to have a good day. His voice resonates for everyone within a five mile radius to hear. It’s some curious mélange of Kermit the Frog and someone with a severe case of dementia, and there really just is no way to sufficiently respond. I raise my hand firmly aloft, signaling to him from the street, a gesture which is intended to imply that I have received his transmission, and am returning that same well wishing, with earnest and sincerity. And then in one swift motion he disappears behind closed doors again, vanishing within the entryway of the home, to do who knows what.

I am at work, having arrived this morning with the over exuberance of someone whose eaten a large breakfast. The sugar of Cap’n Crunch cereal coagulates somewhere in the intestine and disperses to more or less obnoxious behavior patterns. Already today I have discussed the program Wifeswap with a coworker, talked over the perils of drinking exorbitant amounts the night before a coworker’s liver exam, and have been told that I’m stupid for the one hundredth time by one KJ, who resides in a neighboring cubicle. More and more now, she does this, and I never can tell if she’s being serious. It seems at once to denote endearment and derision, and confusing things further is that she’s never consistent. Just a while ago, for instance, I was telling her how to maximize free time away from work, which has something to do with doing the exact opposite of what you normally be doing at work, which is sitting under neon lighting and sitting before a computer. It’s particularly liberating, I explained, because we process dog licenses, and what could be more demoralizing than that? She processed this information, thinking it over a moment before having no apparent idea what I was talking about, and then issued forth, predictably, “Boy: you’re so STUPID.” And either way, really.

2007-02-19T16:28:00.000-05:00

I don't make no jokes about bombs or guns because they take them seriously
ONE day off from work, and no idea what to do with myself. I am not a creative person and left to my own devices turn inward and grim-seeming. Last night L. Trela told me that I seem to be declining steadily and firmly, and this point is reiterated by a two-day old friend who makes fun of my hair. “Being unkempt is one thing,” she said, “but this is something else entirely.” And it’s all true: if the outward appearance is some signal of what is happening on a more cognitive level, everything’s a mess. I walk around with a mountain man shirt on all day and the accompanying sense of ennui. There’s no solid deduction that I could offer you, no firm answers which wouldn’t crumble under tenuous footing. I need some sort of vacation, I think, but I don’t really like to travel.

A couple of months ago Adam Lynch and I inexplicably attempted to lie our way into Canada, en route to Montreal. The whole idea being that we appear to be sketchy terrorists and it would circumvent the whole interrogation process if we said we were going to visit a friend, totally unprepared for the interrogation which would follow when we did in fact deliver this excuse. Two oversized Canadian officials produced and searched the car, holding up a bottle of half-empty whiskey before wanting to know the address and phone number of our imaginary friend. Adam stammered a bit before producing a phony contact number and then proceeded to turn an almost sallow color that skin is wont to produce. We talked over the myriad possibilities in the hard chairs of the border waiting room, the actual telephone number of the person he had just given, the confusion it would elicit, and the grim shadowy descending these answers produced. The border patrol person returned moments later, with the grim determination of finding out our real business in Canada, which is blowing up buildings and destroying landmarks. We noted the handcuffs and gun as we stammered to find something to say. He fixed on us boldly, before asking something more typical of third grade classrooms. “Do you know what happens to liars?” he asked rhetorically. Oh dear god, we thought, are we going to be taken away and locked up under some obscure Canadian law? We paused a bit, thinking of the possibilities before he issued forth an answer. “THEY GET SENT BACK TO THE USA,” he said, pointing at the prominently displayed USA sign, with the little U-turn symbol that is the international symbol, apparently, for you just fucked up the whole trip. I snickered uncontrollably in full earshot of the patrolman, and then we turned the car around and headed back across the imaginary line, with the clear and articulate direction of the sign. And so some things you just can’t escape, it seems.

2007-02-16T10:09:00.000-05:00

At the gate I said goodnight to the fortuneteller
Sporadic and cagey energy from being snowed indoors, watching as the street adorning autos are snowed over, inch by inch, before disappearing completely from sight. I have a new pair of headphones that I listen to continuously, carrying my listening device around the apartment in a tightly sealed vacuum of caterwauling guitars and violent noise. It’s kind of a pleasant effect. My roommate is at work and aside from an occasional phone call, I haven’t had sufficient contact with anyone for what seems like several days, sauntering from kitchen to bedroom and back again. When you can’t hear yourself, and even your own thought process seems inordinately blocked, you begin to question whether or not you actually even exist. In the absence of mirrors you forget your face, and the same seems true of audible sound, as you find yourself disappearing altogether. Strange thoughts begin skittering across your head. And when you’ve reached the bounds of acceptable thought process, you go outside and shovel the walkway, because there’s nothing better to do, and it seems like a swift strategic maneuver, if only for the sake of sanity.

Out of doors is a nightmare of the panoramic landscape. Everywhere are people frantically shoveling snow in the attempt to unearth their cars before the plow comes back around again. Street teams have assembled to dislodge motorists who have gotten stuck, and a police office stops to help an older couple. It lends an almost pleasant air to the disaster of the storm, watching the community come together like this. Momentarily I find even myself joining in the effort, shoveling some gaggle of frat kids out of the street corner. I work diligently, taking away the snow, before pushing at the car from behind. The wheels spin, with the smooth whirring sound of the rutted tire, before the car becomes free, and as it does spraying me in the brown cumulus that is the street snow. God damn, I say under my breath, as the car disappears without as much as a wave of thanks. Those bastards, I curse indignantly. Fuck all this, I realize, before returning indoors, where the soundtrack to forgetting and being forgotten is angular, and somewhat Slinty.

2007-01-31T14:33:00.000-05:00

The church is filled with losers psycho or confused
The breakfast cereal that I eat, with the rather nondescript packaging, now features indie-rockers on the box. I make this discovery at 8:00 am, as I crunch whole grains. The indie-rockers are taking over the world. And there’s nothing they won’t try to sell you anymore without some vaguely familiar song etching its way into your subconscious. I rustle around in the box a little looking for the new Shins’ cd, but all I find is an insipid fistful of protein twigs (sic).

A couple of weeks ago I told A. that I’m going to start listening exclusively to Norwegian dark metal, a proclamation that has sadly fallen by the wayside. Norwegian metal is where it’s at, I told him enthusiastically. It’s like a cleansing of the pallet. And do I ever need some cleansing. The only question now is which breakfast cereal to eat. Although, that seems easy, too: Capn’ Crunch, which could easily be the name of some Nordic Metal band, and in all probability is.

2007-01-29T15:38:00.000-05:00

Everybody say whoop-di-doo
New York City in a flash, dressed down in every article of clothing imaginable, as you run from train to the venue and back again. And as always, the completely arbitrary left hand turn into the best restaurant you’ve eaten at in weeks, since the last time you were here. I keep thinking I should move to New York, and then all I can think of is getting squashed like a bug. There’s something inherent about the getting squashed that just nixes the idea altogether.

At the show two NYU students from Middletown, New York cornered me and began asking me questions of all manner of intensity and inquisitiveness. Where are you from? What do you do? What are your goals in life? I found the whole interrogation rather disconcerting, I have to say, and they turned away with at least some slight hint of chagrin.

2007-01-23T09:37:00.000-05:00

Jagged brain slow refrain
My coworkers are talking about reality programming and I’m telling them how I should be the next bachelor on TV. “You totally should,” my coworker Melissa tells me, “You’re way better than that prince guy.” But I just don’t know: the last person to demonstrate some romantic interest in me, I ran away from, literally. I forget the exact dynamics of that conversation, but I remember specifically jogging away. I’m like some kind of inverse bachelor, with a built-in repellant mechanism, intentionally keeping people away, like mosquitoes. Although, there are always people who just end up misinterpreting the signal, the transmission showing up with some entirely different code. Some girl I see at the gym jumps on the treadmill next to me last night. It’s weird to talk to someone after seeing them around for so long. You end up developing all of these theories about them, tangling them up in all types of unfair preconceptions which they invariably break down, for better or worse. “Hey, what’s up?” I ask her. “Oh, nothing,” she tells me. Right…I trail off. And then, despite my wholehearted attempts at articulating what a horrible human being I am, and how I should be swept off the earth in some great cleansing flood, there is the invitation to, among all things, a hockey game. I stammer, looking for an answer which will absolve me, before coming up with something along the lines of, “I’m not really into sports, is the thing.” An answer which, at best, presents with a whole lot of transparency. But the whole thing is, since I’m already on the treadmill, I can’t run away.

2007-01-22T12:00:00.000-05:00

Everybody meet Mr. Me Too
I have had a run in with the retarded neighbor. For months I could hear an incomprehensible yelling while washing my face, and I had imagined that the neighbors were harboring some Goonies, Sloth-style monster in there, all barred and caged in their living room. One day, I had imagined, I would come home from work and a mad person would dash by me, followed by a throng of torch-wielding men (an illusion which may just be facilitated by the elephantine man I see stumbling up Washington by the university on my way home from work everyday, an experience which no passerby fully covets. His face appears caved and deformed as he shambles up the road like a drunk person. I have conferred with several other people, and it seems to be the general consensus that it is the most cage-rattling, horror inducing experience one can have, driving down the road in the midday, second only to roadside explosions and ten car pile-ups). My neighbor shows by far more innocuously, making his way up the pathway as I’m coming home one evening. I give him a general nod, never having seen him before. But palpable alarm bells of warning emerge when he sees me going down the alleyway which separates our houses, to retrieve the garbage. It is this solitary act which separates me from a random visitor he has never seen before to the more sketchy-seeming burglar that I appear to be—imagery provided by the emboldened notions of Good and Evil engrained somewhere along the way. “HEY!!” he says in audible arena rock concert volume, “WHO ARE YOU?? WHERE ARE YOU GOING??” I wonder momentarily what will happen if I’m unable to sufficiently explain, but the situation is quickly diffused when I tell him that I live here now, and then receive the spontaneous weather report at top volume. “AT THIS TIME LAST YEAR IT WAS SNOWING!!!” he says. “AND ON EASTER ONE TIME, TOO!!” Hmm, yes, I tell him: maybe it did snow on Easter one year. He’s into the weather. And so we have one thing in common, at least.

It’s all slate grey and snowing today, the way a bad day should be.

2007-01-02T10:04:00.000-05:00

He walks like his legs are broken and he talks like he’s never spoken
State employees are all a-gripe today after governor elect Eliot Spitzer failed to reward them with a day off for the death of President Ford. “Aw, man,” my coworker Joy intoned loudly, having heard the radio report on Friday. “I knew I shouldn’t have voted for Spitzer. That JERK.” Meanwhile, federal employees have procured an additional day off, extending the New Year’s holiday for one more day. News reports of Gerald Ford’s death were followed by the hilarity-producing descriptions of his mediocrity and the accompanying footage of how clumsy he was, the BBC providing you with a montage of Ford falling down the stairs of Air Force One, and random other acts of clumsiness. As an additional coup to his tenuous legacy, the BBC then showed the Saturday Night Live clip of Chevy Chase falling over his desk and onto the ground, in some slapstick portrayal of the late president. “That just goes to show you,” I told A., “no matter what you do you will always be remembered for the ways you mess up.” The video clips articulate this perfectly, and the nightly new ingrains this in the national consciousness indelibly. And the state employees are just way less forgiving, I can assure you. As I write this, my coworker Joy is intoning small curse words under her breath as she date stamps the wrong document.

It is a new year. I woke up in bed New Year’s morning with the vague feeling of chagrin as I remembered the events of the night before, and then tried to forget. When the clock struck 12:00, I got up, passing some girl in the kitchen, and retired to my room to vomit in a garbage bag. It seems like a particularly sordid way of bringing in the new year. And it seemed to imbue a sickly sense of things to come. Future outlook: le bad. It’s nothing presidential, though, I guess. But I could have used another day off.

2006-12-26T10:54:00.001-05:00

5 movie marathon/ nine times the same song
Presents given and received: one pair of L.L. Bean slippers (Green); 1 Sylvania brand 20” Flat Screen Television; 2 Bottles of Jack Daniels, with initialed flask (thanks, L. Trela); Sony MDR-EX51LP Headphones; H&M gift card; 5 scratch off Lottery tickets (all losers); 1 notebook; Phillips brand DVD player; fancy magnets; 1 Borders gift card; travel mug; 1 Hannaford gift card; 1 Valvoline Oil Change gift card; 1 Deerhoof ticket for Irving Plaza; 1 pack of Orbit Wintermint Gum; One mixed-tape, featuring The Blow; Flaming Lips The Fearless Freaks DVD; iTrip; 2 Pairs of Thorlo brand running socks; Little Miss Sunshine DVD; Target gift card; 1 Olive Garden Gift Card (regift); 1 Cars movie blanket; cash, food, and various household accoutrements.

Christmas ended up being pretty rad this year. I went out to dinner with my parents on Christmas Eve and discovered that I’m still prone to bouts of junior high school variety embarrassment while hanging out with the parental units. Some things never go. Although it may have something to do with my father’s inexplicable outfit choices and his penchant for obnoxiously critiquing the meal in fine detail when asked how he likes it (which begs the question: which is more of a faux-pas, the pleated pants or the restaurant review? And even further, is my own scathing review of my father’s review just some inherent character flaw, floating around in the Kemp family gene pool, waiting to be passed on to further generations of now non-existent Kemp family lineage?). But mostly it’s a good time. The family unit is more conceptually akin to a banged up car that doesn’t really look too sweet but still gets you around OK. And it’s the getting around that can be a good thing.

Kari Ann made breakfast the next day while I just sat there. It’s the spirit of giving, I told her, which really makes the holiday season. And so that’s why I’m just sitting here, being so generous to you. “Well, you should get more into the holiday spirit,” she chided me, which is a point that rings true with bells of validation. And so I set the table, which is not much. But it’s something, at least.

2006-12-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

Christmas in a submarine
My coworkers are huddled around a computer monitor when I come in to work this morning, looking at the latest gaming systems on the internet. This is the great diversion in an endless system of diversions. Which one is best, they want to know, but I have no idea. I don’t play games, I tell them. I don’t do anything, really. My life is more like an endless hustle through a monotonous maze of banality and meaninglessness. I don’t tell them this, but they deduce enough from my mood, I’m sure.

I finished my Christmas shopping last night, with the dexterity which seems to characterize success for me. The main objective, I have gathered, is to make it out of the store before the neon lighting imparts the state of confusion that has you making illogical choices and buying things they sell to you on late night tv. And so I have economized my time spent among the masses, mirthfully wrangling a parking spot from the old guy with a clenched jaw. Ha! I want to shout out at him. You suck.

Getting back to the house, I flop down on the couch and deliver to my roommate what is apparently my sense of holiday cheer. Fuck Christmas, I tell him. It really is so gross. And you always end up getting the wrong things for people, as they in turn give you items evocative of laughing out loud. “Well, what do you want?” he asks me. Oh, dear god, I think to myself. I don’t really know. Intangible things, mostly: a kiss on the mouth, a piece of mind. I try and think of an answer that doesn’t verge on making me look totally pathetic. I can’t really come up with anything. But it occurs to me now that I should ask for a gaming system.

2006-12-18T09:10:00.000-05:00

So stuck up/ I wish you’d to stick it to me

Three things that happened this weekend, in no particular order:

Some girl at the Palais Royale enacted a top rope Superfly Snooka wrestling move, jumping from the pool table onto our head, crumpling our form all together and imparting some sort of cranial injury to our already cracked and world weary head. For some strange reason we have taken to furthering such acts of debauchery, and goaded her on to further jumping on people, calling out some complicated chant from the chair she was standing on before plummeting on the unfortunate victim below. When asked by a patron why she was engaging in such perilous behaviors, she supped from her drink and encouraged them to do the same, which we did.

Having exhausted the entertainment value in sending some girl over the edge, we departed for some other den of ill repute. What at first seemed like a rather childish waste of time at the ye old watering hole number 1 actually turned out to be time well spent, as we narrowly avoided being shot in a drive by shooting on the walk to the Fuze Box. Clearly, had we left moments earlier, we may have been victims in a rather senseless act of transgression which had the whole block crossed off and three victims sent to the hospital. It seemed to cast a bad light on an already sketchy night, and defeat seemed imminent. However, once inside all was quickly forgotten. And it’s funny how one minute you can be contemplating the crushing nature of death and the grim imminence with which you will likely be crushed like a bug, and the next moment all logistical consideration is thrown out the window as you enact insane dance moves on the dance floor. We will admit: we are new to dancing and so do not understand the prevailing etiquette with which this ritual is situated on, and so were pretty psyched to be able to just kick it to you right there on the dance floor. It’s the whole Less Talk, More Rock tenant we were supporting, presumably, and we will continue to do so vigorously, as long as you, uh, don't feel like talking to us.

Saturday, at some thrift in Suburban Place Point 2000: a 5 year-old girl in a Salvation Army seized on us and offered up what is apparently her sizable dismissal of the male gender. “Eww,” she said, “You’re a boy.” This precipitated an impressive demonstration of her ability to count to nine, brashly standing at our feet and doing this repetitively, over and over (and later, some guy who was apparently her dad spontaneously tackling her older sister, much to the consternation of everyone in sight. “I’ll always be bigger than you,” he remarked, picking the girl off of the floor. “So don’t you forget it.” Clearly this person missed his calling in the NYPD.) It's a scary time, sometimes. But such are the perils of locating sweet pants.

2006-12-12T14:37:00.000-05:00

I had trouble getting started from a shell
Our work production has come to resemble a turtle and the hare scenario, whereby we kick ass and complete a good portion of work in the morning, and then look at the Inter-Web all day, only to realize, with ten minutes to go, that we did not do enough work that day. As per the general sentiment around these parts, however, nobody really seems to give a fuck, and that’s nice. Because if they did, we suspect a greater part of the workforce would be fired tomorrow.

Today we have unearthed a particularly brine-bestowing piece of sediment which manifests as Albany crit, and we are all over that. Check out the Parenthetical Girls' website, which features Albany architecture reviews and audience member critique (we were at this show, and we can assure you: Johnny Neon, the video camera wielding, spiked-hair entrepreneur, was an audience member like no other. Several times throughout the night we heard audience members say, get that guy away from me). When you’re done with that, The Unicorn’s Tear gives Albany a two thumbs down, which makes us laugh and laugh. Can you imagine hurtling forth in your over loaded van, packed down with gear, only to arrive at ye old capital, to find the human detritus of New Scotland Avenue asking you for change. It seems pretty bad, and we can attest that it actually is. One of the blogspot’s favorite possessions is a T-shirt which contains the message, Albany is Eggcellent. And thus we reveal to you, further perceptions of its Eggcellence.

2006-12-11T10:04:00.000-05:00

You're in a cut up world with the goodbye girls
Monday morning, the building looms large against the palatial backdrop of doom and despair. The woman entering before me holds the door. “Oh, I just hate Mondays,” she says dramatically. It seems like such an obvious suggestion that I have no idea how to respond and can only agree that, yes, Mondays are a real blower. Although, from another point of view, it could be Monday morning in Rwanda, in which case you’re infinitely worse off. Or: alternately, you could be in the rock group documentary that we watched last night, getting harangued by reporters. “I could never deal with that sort of treatment,” A. says. But I could deal with that sort of treatment a lot easier than I could deal with my actual job, I say. And so Monday morning, I guess, from converging points of view. I try and take the high moral ground, imbuing some kind of good, and mostly i suck at guitar.

Pizza at L. Trela’s last night. “Could I get a cup of coffee?” I want to know, just as she’s about to serve dinner. I then spend the next 20 minutes complaining about how slow the coffee pot is, and how my own coffee maker is infinitely superior. “You know, you really do suck,” she says to me. And it’s true: I’m not a very good house guest. All I can demonstrate is a bad posture, a really bad form. After dinner, I outrageously suggest that everybody retires to the other room to watch reruns of the show Growing Pains, and am promptly thrown out of the house. But somehow I keep getting invited back, and keep eating everything in sight. Thank you, L. Trela: you are a good person. The world needs more people like you.

Later I tried to call back all of the people I’ve been meaning to call back. But mostly, nobody seemed to be at home. The no answer situation lead me to contemplate all of my past behaviors, and how I could have been better. But in the end I conspired a theory that some disaster had occurred out in the world, some calamitous event, and that’s what was preoccupying everybody. It’s probably not true, but it’s best to stay positive.

2006-12-06T14:39:00.000-05:00

Killing with flange and with tape and with Hendrix
Hey: you know what’s annoying? When you’re on the bus or train, or wherever it is you see the masses hanging around in transit with their iPods on, and you actually see someone rocking out, doing a little drum routine on their lap as they listen to the latest Nickelback song. It’s a sad little demonstration of self, we are prompted to conclude, like putting bumper stickers on your car, and it makes us at the blogspot want to punch you right in the face. The only real exception to this rule, however, is if you happen to be us, in which case you’re veritably burning calories at your desk doing these same things, toe-tapping like a motherfucker, and only resembling someone with a severe case of mental retardation. One of my coworkers turns to me today and says, “You’ve had too much coffee again.” And the answer is an obligatory, Yes, we have, practically shredding the adrenal glands in the process. And it’s kind of sad to admit, here at the unambiguous age of Adulthood, that really, we just want to rock.

2006-12-05T09:58:00.000-05:00

I got stuck in Goshen and that was sad
Drinks in Schodack, New York, because it’s my friend’s sister’s birthday and she works out there. Where are we? I want to know. I’ve never been out this far before, I say, like we’re encroaching the outer boundaries of some undiscovered territory, like they do it in A Space Odyssey. And we really are. It always suprises me that places like this exist, and that’s not to posit the fact that Albany, New York is the most exciting place on the face of the planet, but it’s potentially better than watching a bunch of bravado stricken men talk about running their pickup trucks into a ditch. “This place is kind of the end-of-the-line,” I offer, surveying the bar. “It’s like that scene in the movie where the character realizes he has failed and things are over, and that nothing is going to work out how he planned it.” More and more now, I find myself saying things like this, which to me seems very hilarilous, while all of the while occuring to other people as some great offense. Although, it occurs to me too, that maybe I’m just hanging out in the wrong places.

/ D Bm C - / / / Bm C D - /

At some point everybody disappears to smoke cigarettes in the frigid weather, as I sit listlessly at the bar and contemplate the life of the bartender. She knows everybody here, and I end up constructing a life for her in my head, which is fairly depressing. She dreams of bigger things, maybe, and what life would be like outside of this horrible bar. And then, through the din, a song by the classic rock machine Journey comes on. The opening chords sound and then the lyrics: “When the lights go down in the city/ and the sun shines on the bay/ I want to be there”. It seems almost inexplicable that somebody would play this song right at this moment, and I don’t know whether it’s my general sense of confusion over this song being played or the fact that I just don’t want to understand the implications of it which has me utter, “—What is this?” when what I was really conjecturing is, who would play this song in a place like this? The bartender comes around, and with equal parts indignance, delivers an answer to me: “It’s Journey,” she says, “Everybody knows that.”

2006-11-30T09:04:00.000-05:00

A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid
No revelations to report on today. But it’s not even 9:00 am, and so you have to keep an open mind. The only half-way coherent thought skittering across the cantaloupe cranium of my brain comes at around 8:00 am today, as I watch the local news and think to myself, these people are total chumps. They seem to affect the strangest affectations, coming across as some parody of what they believe normality to be, and it freaks you out. A couple of years ago, I remember reading about how CNN was thinking of introducing Ebonics into their newscasts, getting their lead anchors to drop slang to spice up the evening news. And it kind of makes you wonder. But in hindsight they may have just been underestimating the president and his penchant for international debacle, making watching the nightly news as entertaining as your favorite sitcom, with more of an apocalyptic bent. Because, can it get any worse (the president is currently en route to the USA after the puppet elected Iraqi prime minister ducked out on meeting with him, basically, because he didn’t feel like it)?

On my way in to work this morning, I drove by the Christian Brothers Academy, like I always do. It’s basically some kind of training center for future Abu Ghraib war criminals, from what I could gather, and they do this flag raising ceremony out in front of the school. What this features is 3 younger-looking kids lackadaisically standing around the flagpole as one of the older students shows them how to raise the flag. And I always note as I drive by the unambiguous distraction I must be in their very important proceedings, cruising in to work ten minutes late, with NOU blasting from my car stereo. What if one of these kids were to ascertain a copy of 13-Point Program to Destroy America? Would years of military training unravel instantaneously? Would they show up the next day with a now-altered uniform, the arms cut off to reveal the scars of a new tattoo? It seems unlikely to me, but you never know. And you have to leave room for revelations, of which there is just no lack of in this landscape.

2006-11-29T10:08:00.000-05:00

I only meant half the things I said in the end
Hanging out with Melissa, the downstairs neighbor, and looking on as her three-year old son Lucas runs around the apartment. This is his main method of transportation, as he darts from one end of the apartment to the other, stopping long enough to deliver some random fact to us about the cartoon he is watching. We marvel at his energy, and it kind of begs the question: at what crucial point do you stop sprinting and begin the more lackluster trudge from one place to another? I don’t really know, but it’s sometime, somewhere along the way. Or is it just that the distances increase, forcing you to chose different methods of transport? He sprints into the kitchen one more time, accompanied by the sound of a steam train, whoo, whoo. “Mommy, this is Ryan,” he says two times in a row, pointing at me. “This is Ryan.” “I know,” she says back to him, “I realize that.”

It has been a pretty good week, in retrospect. Old man Vonnegut says that you should point out the good when it’s there to be pointed out, and so it seems right to do so. It’s just that it’s easy to forget against the vast tapestry of bad. But sometimes the cosmos align in your favor, and you can’t help but point out how rad everything feels, if only for a fleeting moment.

Last night I could hear A. playing “Bach’s Six Suites” on guitar in his room. It’s all high to low, and perfectly melodic. And I’ve never heard a song draw such an exact in between before, simultaneously making you want to cry and not cry. And I had the feeling, just before sleep, that everything was going to be filled with radiance and sunburst potential if you would only let it.

2006-11-28T14:44:00.000-05:00

20 darts into your backs
You really just have to appreciate Joy’s outfit today: she is wearing a T-shirt, with some haphazard blue swirling print, which contains the message, Land of Liberty. It seems almost hilarity invoking as she sits there, slumped over on her desk, reading True Romance Magazine. The worker who distains work, and flat-out refuses. Where else on the planet could you be employed to do this? You really just have to love the public sector, with its collective distain and lurid scowls, walking by my window all day.

I have just returned from a 30-minute lunch break, which I very explicably stretch into an hour-long break, messing around on the computer and wolfing down a sandwich. My grandmother’s house is right down the road and so I can go over there and make lunch and then leave again. I actually find myself fist pumping today when I notice her car is not in the garage, and am alarmed by this same reaction. After about 20-minutes, as I’m preparing to go, leaving behind a literal bread crumb trail of what is my apparent lunch-making experience, she comes through the door. “—Oh, you would never believe,” she starts in, no introductions, as usual. It makes you feel inanimate and not there, always being talked at like this. But then maybe I’m just uptight, always needing some kind of formality. Why not just cut to the chase, to the heart of the matter— of whatever matters? She was sitting on a bench in the mall, apparently, preparing for the Homeric trek to the car, when she met someone of a similar ilk, with a similar aged grandson. “You would never believe that her grandson works with computers and makes $84,000 a year,” she says with great exuberance. “And his next promotion is going to bring him over the 100,000 mark.” Oh, I tell her, non plussed. That’s good. This is the great leveling fact, and grandma has brought it around, gift wrapped in a special package to reveal to me. There is some sort of club maybe, where grandmas of the world unite and have trading cards of their respective grandchildren, inclusive of statistics and salaries and life achievements printed on the back. Can’t I just be left alone, make lunch in peace and not be distracted by all of this? I’ve almost come to the point where I can block out what I don’t need to hear. But I can hardly ignore this kind of scather. “Why don’t you work with computers?” she wants to know. But the whole thing is, I already do.

2006-11-27T10:03:00.000-05:00

Make your mark on a darkened dance floor

This weekend was crazy. All that I seem left with now, in the flickering movie theatre of the mind, is a curious montage of various dance partners, both willing and not. There’s something funny about being turned down by somebody, revealing your gesticulating movements long enough for the potential dance partner to figure out that you are a deranged lunatic who warrants all out alienation. But equally as funny are the people who end up misinterpreting all of that as you lure them up from their booth at the side of the floor to dance to “Beat It”. It's probably safe to say there are certain places around town that i should no longer be permitted entry.

2006-11-13T11:03:00.001-05:00

Have you got the new look
The sheer insanity of the outfits alone at my workplace is enough to bust a gut laughing. There’s this theory around the blogspot that one’s fashion sense usually reaches an apex around the formative high school years and is subject to change slightly thereafter. But often the espouser grasps onto this sense of self and does not let go, inadvertently revealing a time capsule of the formative years in the process. Just today, for example, we saw a woman walking down the hall with tapered jeans and a neon green T-shirt, causing us to look twice. Because, really: who does that? Clearly this woman is ascending (descending) from the 1980’s, and invoking an era we are just totally removed from, in a painfully neon green get up. It’s as though she passed and in the meanwhile did not realize that people are now ironically appropriating her same outfit, in some strange turn of events which even we cannot fully explain. “I feel like I’m in a Brett Easton Ellis novel,” someone has recently said to me in a nightclub. And, uh, yeah: it’s 80’s night, every night. Also popular around the workplace is that strange variety of shirt we have come to refer to as the old-lady, which is basically any manner of shirt that demonstrates an illogical print thereon, like flowers and leaves. Yeah, we know you’re really into the seasons and all, but that shirt is the most insane thing we’ve ever seen in our entire lives, we want to shout. Although, in conjunction with our other random outbursts, that would almost certainly result in the well established opprobrium we’ve been cultivating around the office, and so we’ve taken to snickering at a low volume in the corners of rooms. When you really add it up, though,--beyond the awe-inspiring sweat-suited masses which, we swear to god, we see in work,-- nothing is more of an affront to the senses than that mall-boy kaki which so many of our peers seem to prefer around these parts. It is, really, the screamingly tacit suggestion of your utter vapidity, and we’re pretty much sure that it is an offense to humanity on some, uh, individual basis. So, please: try harder.

All of this, though, has resulted in some minor form of self-reflection, and the end result is equally grim-seeming. We like to think that we understand the nature of commodification of fashion, and basically everything, and we are so Above. But the sad truth is, that we often appear as though we’ve just crawled from a gutter. After chiding Kari Ann recently, she retorted by pointing out that we look well-suited for positioning outside a local Hannaford. But it’s probably just a problem of interpretation. Or something. That’s what I think, anyway.

2006-11-06T14:31:00.000-05:00

Make love to the camera obscura
Doing a blog is a lot like signaling on a one-way road in the middle of the night, with no other cars around. Annoying blinker blinking, and for no other reason, you discover, than this is what you’ve always done, right hand turn and into the drive. Music blogs at least receive complimentary merchandise or tickets to a show. But outside of your own edification, doing a blog doesn’t really hook you up all that much. Mostly, it will serve as a record of how you have lived, day by day. And that’s scary. Your own memory at least gives you the liberty of forgetting. But writing things down offers you the virtue of permanence, indelibly chiseling things out and putting them down, for good (or bad—there are at least a handful of people who have totally alienated me over things that I’ve written about them. Although I guess that makes sense, because there’s no way to gingerly talk about someone’s mental state and their DSM situation without them getting really mad at you, even if you were only joking around. Sorry, dudes: I was totally kidding).

It is some other day in Information Systems, and I am clacking on the keyboard. There really is no other way of describing this sound than clacking. Alternately, I guess it could be interpreted as the sound of a crystal meth fueled hamster losing control of its limbs on the desktop, and I could support that analogy given that that’s the way I feel sometimes, in a coffee-addled state. But it would still broil down to clacking. And it’s nice that blogging is basically indiscernible from what I usually do all day, entering information into a computer. I could be writing the great American manifesto over here and it appears more or less like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s good. The weird part about my job is that I have no idea what all of this is tied to, and what difference any of this makes. The work I do is never checked, and nobody ever says a word about what I'm doing, casting an occasional glance in my direction when I stray from the site and peruse the Brooklyn Vegan. But that is it. Although, maybe it’s the whole 1984 aspect I always overlook, thinking I’m being overlooked. My last job had some rigorous monitoring system in place, and the same could be true of here. Some nerd could be upstairs right now, looking over my figurative shoulders. I don’t really know.

The whole upshot to what I do all day is that it requires virtually no thought process on my part. I have read that while viewing television your brain activity is one step reduced from sleeping, and sitting before a computer monitor all day must be one step beyond that, entering a state of all-consuming brain dead-ness. I have come to refer to this as the Time and Space Bathtub, as it is at once flowing and yet contained, although rarely very cleansing. Sometimes I find myself on the outer bounds of consciousness, ruminating on some theory before being called back by the voice of a coworker. “Don’t talk to him,” I hear someone saying today, “He won’t listen to you.” And it’s true. I won’t. I am far off, in the bathtub, the events of the past few days and weeks coalescing in there and floating to the top of my consciousness like a dream. I feel a tap on my shoulder and come to. It is my coworker Joy, her face itself appearing to me dreamlike and large. “Hey, sleepy: it’s time to go,” she tells me. Oh, ok: it is time to leave now.

Outside it is a jet-black night. I am going to the gym and it makes me feel domestic. We have come from our jobs, and have come to the strip mall plaza to work off a few calories lifting weights and riding the stationary bike. I am hustling in when I see Kristen, the girl from the temp agency who got me my job. “Oh, hey, what’s up?” I ask her, as she holds the door open for me. There’s nothing atypical about her, nothing divergent in her persona that I can put my finger on, and it makes me feel vaguely uneasy. She’s probably really upset that she’s missing Dancing With The Stars right now. “—Hey, Ryan,” she says to me, “How’s the job going?” The real answer might be something along the lines of the monotony is wearing me down, and I feel suicidal and grim, but I leave out the whole time and space continuum, giving her the straightforward answer. “It’s going well,” I tell her. “Everyone I work with seems pretty cool.” I’m startled to find myself saying this, and wonder simultaneously, even as the words are issued from my lips, who I might be referring to, but she seems to like it anyway. “Well that’s really great, because they like you too,” she says. “They called and said you were doing a really great job.” I almost cannot believe, and have to clarify. “Wait, the job I’m working at now called and said this?” She reassures me, telling me once more. “Yeah, they said you were a really great addition to their office. They seem to really like you over there.” She smiles at me and then disappears into the gymnasium, where a small gathering of people are gently hitting a volleyball over a net, leaving me dumbfounded.

I seem to be particularly locked in, for better or worse. It’s nothing to really situate your future on, and it doesn’t come with a sweet benefits package. But the voyeurs are really into it. And that’s something, at least.

2006-10-31T21:46:00.000-05:00

If you close the door the night could last forever
The downstairs neighbor has erected a sign: Happy Halloween, it says, please take a handful of candy. A pleasant-looking jack-o-lantern adorns the message, and a bowl of candy hangs below. There’s something really endearing about all of this, standing in stark contrast with the proclamations I made last night. If people are coming to the door, I said, I’m just going to barricade myself upstairs, and turn the lights down low. I’ve had enough of Halloween one week ago. But our neighbor has gone the distance, actually putting out candy even though she’s not going to be there. She remembers, maybe, going to the dark-lit house as a child and the feeling it gave her. The flickering lights inside, and the damnation offered to those people shirking the spirit. I don’t know. But it touches me, inside. And somehow I come to take this as an example of not only the thoughtfulness of our neighbor but womankind as a whole. None of the male friends I know would ever do this sort of thing.

This feeling lasts for about twenty minutes, as I make my way downstairs at 6:00 O’clock to find the hallway shredded, the sign missing, and all of the candy gone. Out of doors a sea of miniature miscreants are everywhere, haphazardly making their way from house to house, as their parents stand in the street. Good god, I think: where did all of these people come from? And what the hell do they want with me. I feel totally encroached upon, and my late night proclamations validated. What is this age-old tradition? I remember my uncle telling me how they've recently adapted Halloween in Norway, and how the general populace was just about outraged by the ordeal. And here I find myself thinking in the same hackneyed language of a Norwegian: Nei! Go from our house, little ones. Get away from here. There’s the bell now. The lights are flickering inside, but there is nobody home, it appears.

2006-10-30T09:13:00.000-05:00

Addendum****

You think you’re radical but you’re not so radical
We don’t usually apologize for posts, but at second glance we’re going to have to come clean and say sorry. That last one was a real crusher. We’re pretty much certain that it is our main aim to jettison our two readers and go away forever. But as it happens, we just keep on living and so forth. And then somehow all of that makes its way forward, to the Inter-Web, which elicits some overwhelming reaction in others. But the truth is, we think we were just mad about the way we spent yesterday afternoon, and were in a bad mood. And were a little freaked out about seeing our peers the other night, who seem bent on becoming depressingly middle aged, and so that’s why we were feeling so alienated. It was really good to see that one guy who kept giving us a complicated handshake between beers, and reminding us of ten years ago. Although, in truth, it was not too good. We will try and muster a smile now, eat a pill, get back to business. That girl will be walking by our window shortly, jogging in ten minutes late, and so that’s something. We have practiced our inflection in the bathroom mirror, and now we just have to work on the smile. So, uh, yeah: sorry.

2006-10-29T16:08:00.000-05:00

It’s All Over But the Crying, The Sequel
Halloween is on the periphery and so the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer is playing on the movie channel. The main premise, from what I could gather, is that a bunch of teens who have really nice lives are about to have something really shitty happen to them. This is the main setup for most horror movies, but it’s also the standard plotline for classic literature as well. There’s usually some problem that occurs, some conundrum which has to be overcome. And depending on the mental landscape of the author, the novel will end either good or bad. This is how it happens in the aforementioned movie: it opens at a beauty pageant, and the portrayal of high hopes and dreams, all of which come to a halt when these totally unlikable people hit and run a fisherman walking down the road in the middle of the night (and then, in a total oversight by the people who wrote this sad act of subversion, decide inexplicably not to report it although the driver was not drinking and it was an accident, opting instead for discarding the body in the sea). From here on out, or for the next 20 minutes that I decide to watch this movie out of pure inertia, things get really bad as the main characters are haunted by the person they have hit. And you find yourself cheering for the destruction of these people and their nice lives. I never really do find out how it ends, but probably not without a whole bunch of bloodshed and at least one or two characters who survive, which has the built-in capability of a sequel and more bloodshed. They will rejoin, and things will be more or less OK as before, but not without the hint that something bad may happen again.

The main exception to the demonstrated plotline happens to be if you’re reading existential literature, which almost always begins and ends bad. If you’re reading Kafka or Dostoevsky or something like that, you can pretty much rest assured that it’s going to depress you in some all-encompassing way. Kafka’s Metamorphosis begins with the protagonist waking up one day as an oversized bug and then experiencing the ensuing torture and alienation from his family, who throw apples at him and taunt him before he dies a lonely and abject death. And it’s hard, in the end, to figure out which plotline is more honest and true to life. While the good, bad, good plotline seems most rewarding to read, it might be less true than the bad/ bad plotline. But it may also be a matter of perception, and require something of more of the reader. If you have an upbeat outlook you might be more prone to think that things end awesomely, in the end. And if you’re the proverbial half-empty kind of person, you might be more prone to reading the Existentialists. I’m not really sure.

It was in the spirit of horror that we went to a Halloween party last night. I looked futily for a costume before deciding on the following mantra that I told to anyone who asked: fuck Halloween. I really just cannot be bothered with all of this costume wearing. Although, the truth is, I really just cannot be bothered with much. And it was in this spirit, probably, that I found myself sitting alone in a corner, not costumed or having too much fun, which seems to be a fairly consistent with how I normally situate myself in a room with others. When people ask me where my costume is I tell them that I’m a raging alcoholic before swigging from a bottle of whiskey. I am, in truth, not the best houseguest. And it’s not too long before I realize, amongst the revelers, that this party may just be the preseason warm up to the high school reunion that’s coming. Most of these people look vaguely familiar from somewhere, but it’s disorienting because everybody’s in costume. And I probably wouldn’t recognize anyone anyway. The only person I really recognize is AL, but he’s not in costume anyway while continuously petitioning for the best costume award.

It’s hard to say what my deal is exactly. I continue to romanticize my life as though it’s taking place within a movie. And it’s always the epiphanic moment of realization, the static moment of crappiness which reveals itself to me. All I want to do is get the hell out of here—go back into my attic lair and get away from here. I am ruminating over a faux-headstone when some girl dressed as a vampire comes over and starts talking to me. We went to the same high school, although we have no apparent recollection of one another. She works for the state and takes the bus to work everyday, she ends up telling me. We talk a while before settling on nothing more to say. “Say,” she says before walking off, “you’re one of those loner-types, aren’t you? One of those guys who just hangs out by himself a lot. That’s the way you seem to me.” I have no idea of how to respond to this inquiry. Is it that transparent, showing right through my veneer of attempted civility? “—Uh, yeah, I guess,” I chortle, not knowing what to say, “—I guess I kind of am.” I check my watch once more before realizing, much to my horror, that the clocks get set back an hour tonight, and that this night is never going to end. Most of the revelers will interpret this as an extra hour of partying, but to me it has come as a sign from above that I have done horrible things in a prior life, as I have to give said revelers a ride home tonight.

The plotline of your own life, it turns out, is easily discernable in hindsight. It’s easy, in the here and now, to look and see, peeling back the curtain and taking a look, to know exactly where you have come from, and how things add up. And maybe it’s the future that’s not uncertain, usually indicative of the past. A random look at my bookshelf might reveal all kinds of things about me, but I haven’t really read anything in a while, opting instead for b-grade horror movies. I end up telling a friend what I did today, that I watched part of I Know What You Did Last Summer on TV. “Oh, that’s a pretty good one,” he says to me. “Did you know they made a sequel?—I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or I Will Never Forget What You Did Last Summer?” He thinks it over a second. “No, wait: I think it was called I Will Never Ever Forget What You Did Last Summer.” I cannot believe. It seems inconceivably bad, but I guess it could be true. Happy Halloween, motherfuckers.

2006-10-20T10:11:00.000-04:00

I love you I love you I love you: what's your name
Listen: we have something to report up here in the headquarters: we are in love. Not with anyone we actually know, however, which is defeated by our x-ray vision, always finding the worst in people, but with a total stranger. Said person is a girl we see walking by our window everyday, and who, we are pretty much sure, does not actually exist, as we’ve never actually seen her outside of our window frame, veritably dashing into the hall every time we see her walk by, only to find no one. And, we know: this is a little creepy, as our coworkers have even taken note of our affections for said stranger, chiding us with this fact daily, but we do not care, because let us repeat: we are in love. It’s hard to say exactly what it is about this person that we find so appealing in particular: if it’s her not-quite-skinny that appeals to us-- which is just one in an entire sucession of late day predilections that we cannot quite explain. Or her being consistently fifteen minutes late to work everyday, which is also like us. Or the general sense of uncaring that she seems to demonstrate about this fact. The truth is, we do not know. But we intend to find out, erroneously dropping a line like, “—I see, sometimes, walking by my window,” scaring her away once and for all, as we sometimes do to people. No, we will practice something better in the mirror, actually, in the bathroom, and then we will set to work. That is how is should be. We will keep you posted.

2006-10-19T14:56:00.000-04:00

It's all over but the crying
An invitation to my 10-year high school reunion has arrived in the mailbox. I pick it up, contemplating the small print. Please join your graduating class for an evening of dinner and dancing, it says. I try and think of a situation which would deliver more trauma, something conceptually more grim than this scenario, and have trouble coming up with anything. Even death itself can be less methodical and slow: a car crash can occur instantaneously, truncating your life abruptly and swiftly, but an evening of dinner and dancing could last for hours. I show Adam the invitation, who is also a member of my graduating class. “I’m not going,” I tell him. He chides and goads me on before I tell him more definitively, “No, it’s final.”

Life has turned out less than optimal. These gatherings only seem to provide a forum for putting on display lives that have turned out optimally, and then giving those people others to situate their own optimal-ness on. And I’d just rather not be a part of the situating process. My own life seems evocative of Kilgore Trout, and gargantuan portions of failure, which is not something I want to be showing around. Although it does occur that Trout touts his failing. And so maybe that’s something.

We are sitting in front of the house when Adam brings this up again. Drunk on a Wednesday night. We laugh at this fact. It is 2:30 am, and it feels pretty low. Shouldn’t we be somewhere else right now, doing something more adult? But it’s true that we need some kind of diversion from our jobs, which just happens to come in the form of a mid-week bender. “I’m going to go to the reunion,” he tells me, before offering up his carefully conscripted rationale. “I know it will be the worst day of my life. And that everyday thereafter—whether I’m at my job or in some other sordid scenario—it won’t be that bad, because I will have already experienced my life’s worst moments.” I soak this in a minute, taking in the optimism inherent in the gesture. It does sound pretty genius, I have to admit, so cripplingly low of an idea that it might just be true. And so it’s settled: we’re going, because things couldn’t be worse.

2006-10-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

Sleeping is the only love
Sitting in the kitchen, in the gray light of a new day. This is the rote life of the routine. I read a week-old paper and depress myself with old news. On the cover is a picture of a train in ruins, totally ablaze. In two seconds, accompanying this imagery, is my housemate’s alarm is going off at full tilt. It’s one of those beeping-variety alarms which would have most people out of bed in moments. But I listen as it goes off for four minutes, and then 20. The beeping, at some unspecified point, begins to invert and turn in on itself, like syncopated drumming. And then on top of the syncopated alarming, his mobile phone’s alarm begins to go off, creating a symphony of the damned. I just sit there, not having the heart to go in and wake him. Silently, I go out of the door, closing it behind me with an audible thud. It is a new day, I assure myself, full of vigor and hope and optimism. Anything can happen.

Joy, my hapless coworker, is conjecturing over days off when I arrive. On her calendar she has the projection of making it one whole month without taking a day off, noted by a graphic x drawn in black sharpie on today’s date. “If I can just make it through the rest of this week,” she tells me facetiously, “I think I might be able to do it.” There is no possible way of this actually happening, but it’s a nice thought. Last week alone she missed two days, and it could be the guilt factor of not living up to expectations (nix), or just a futile nod in the direction of approximated rightness. But either way, I would not bet on her making it a month. Her only hopes of actually carrying out this outrageous plan are erroneously premised on the idea that we have one 4-day week coming, but she’s got it wrong. “Aw, shit,” she intones under her breath when she finds out they are full workweeks. She dials a friend, canceling her plans for that day. And when she’s had enough of talking, she tells the person on the other end of the phone that her court shows are coming on, and hangs up the phone with a clunk.

Everyday is the same, virtually. What changes mostly, are the conversations, inserting random greetings and garble before sending on my way. In 8 weeks I feel subverted totally, crushed into dimensions that are beyond me. My coworkers poke fun at me, laughing about how I don’t listen to their stories or remember anything. And it’s true. I can’t remember anything, and all I seem able to do is sit there with a docile stare, totally unable to understand. An article I have recently read about the Maine National Guard tells about how families were provided with life sized cardboard cutouts for family members in Iraq, and I keep thinking if I could just get one of those, weekend at bernies-style. That’d be good. In the meanwhile I could go out and do the things that I actually do, which are also shrouded in total mystery but are more or less horrific, clacking away on a keyboard somewhere.

The drizzle just seems to keep on coming today. And some days are that way. I see the receptionist seeing me on the way out. "Forgot your umbrella," she says to me, motioning towards the weather. They have the standard issue work umbrella, unimaginably. Oh, well, I tell her, before hustling out. Another day, another dollar. The alarm is sounding, but we are inert and lifeless and dead. The most unimaginable variety also, where the silence does not sound.

2006-10-08T20:15:00.000-04:00

Go dangle your fishhook out in the gutter again
I am downloading the new Grizzly Bear album on a computer with a 50.60 Kbps connection. As you might imagine, it takes an insanely long period of time. I usually download one song per day, and it’s the whole instant gratification that you lose out on in the meanwhile. If the song sucks you actually did just waste that much time, but mostly you appreciate it more. You find something in there that’s worthwhile, to validate the fact that you did not just waste twenty minutes downloading a song, like it’s 1999. This is the whole neo-Luddite stance I’ve taken in relation to my computer. Yeah, I work with one all day and download songs and things, but it’s a compromise. In not paying for the ultra-fast connection, I am in fact skipping out on the insipient ADD and gratification that is part in parcel of a culture that has spun out of control. The future, you might say, is going to be dumb ã. But I have absolved myself, partially, while still only being able to hold marginal conversations with people, spacing out momentarily before rejoining or talking about something else entirely.

Things have gotten out of control in my life. I don’t think it’s quite at the point where I need my friends and family to unsuspectingly appear in my bedroom, in some Leif Garrett-type intervention scenario, but I have taken notice. I woke up this morning with a gigantic phallus drawn in green magic marker on my hand and only a vague recollection of the circumstances which may have led to it being there. And some other random and haphazard events which lend no real congruity to the fact that I woke with a green penis drawn on my hand. But I do remember thinking, late in the night, just before sleep: people, they are the strangest thing, really. And there is no accounting for all of the strangeness and the problems they cause while together. Accompanying this thought was the imagery of sickly molecules coming together and going apart again. I still don’t know if it’s my abundant understanding of these strange people which cause me to be alienated and think thoughts like, I really just should keep to myself and stay locked up in the attic. But I continue to think them anyway, all the while reminding myself that I could have it wrong about someone, something.

More and more now I find myself in some horrible bar with a friend, talking over our pseudo girl situations, and better times. A character in a movie I have recently seen bemoans his fate, and how horribly things turned out, and here I find myself doing the same thing. It’s pretty embarrassing. “Why are all of the people we know such psychos?” I am asked. I don’t really know, I tell him, but I think it might have something to do with the internet.

Last night I happened on a grown woman weeping in a Dunkin’ Donuts at 2:30 am. She was sitting with her face in her hands, and her head drawn to the side. And then I realized, watching as people came and went, that she was crying. Her boyfriend had just broken up with her, I imagined, and had left her at the Lark Street Dunkin’ Donuts to run off with another woman. Or she had just lost a relative or a loved one. Or she is just really broken up over a world in need of repair, where its inhabitants are cracked and drunk and interchangeable. I sat there for a moment, wondering what I would do. I really would have liked to go over and offer her some form of consolation, buy her a doughnut or something, but in the end I opted not to. And so we sat there, and suffered some more. It is a long life, sometimes. And a cruel one. But it does have its redeeming factors. And then the song comes on that I have just downloaded. It was worth the wait. The singer sings: Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up. I would like her to hear it. And more than anything, I would like for all of the broken life form of the Lark Street Dunkin’ Donuts to stand up and break out in song, singing in unison in pretend microphone fists. Everything is going to be OK, I am at least partially sure.

2006-09-26T13:01:00.000-04:00

Three Chord Blues
I watched that movie The Devil and Daniel Johnston last night, which is quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen all year. Check this out if you do not believe: there is a scene where Daniel Johnston loses his shit for the third or forth time in the film, removing the keys of the single-engine airplane he is flying in with his dad and throwing them out of the window, thoroughly and totally crashing the plane into the ground. They then cut to pictures of the plane in ruins on the ground and the survivors standing next to it, Daniel Johnston standing there with a big smile on his face. All of this, by the way, is elicited by some haphazard viewing of a Casper the Friendly Ghost comic. How’s that for action? You don’t really get this kind of thing out of your run-of-the-mill blockbuster. But what this scene sets up actually, is not only the ostensible crashing of the plane but the fiery and ruinous careening of mental state. And as things get worse, the songwriting gets better, and then just plain bad or non-existent, with the onset of meds. But we like our artists mad, veritable wrecks beyond belief. And that’s kind of the weird thing about Daniel Johnston, is the whole limbo of psychosis, the choice you have to make as art interpreter between mad person/ exploited individual and genius. But that’s what genius sometimes asks of you.

The last few weeks have been a tasteless feast of insipid banality. But for the most part I’ve been avoiding interpretive readings of Casper comics, insisting instead on drinking myself into a catatonic state and then asking for the mandatory ride home. That is, really, why drinking exists, I’m pretty much sure, aside from ease with which it facilitates late night banter. And as the vice of work becomes more prominent, so do the catatonic states and accompanying rides home. It seems pretty self destructive whichever way you look at it, but that’s how things broil down, I’m pretty much sure. I just want to break free from here, run into the tree-adorning meadow I can see from my desk right now, go straight edge. Listen to a Daniel Johnston song. That’s not so crazy, I don’t think.

2006-09-18T21:15:00.000-04:00

Transmissions from the satellite parts
I went to a concert last weekend, in Boston, Massachusetts. The particular venue that I went to had a seating chart and seats, unlike so many of the other shows I may attend at any given time, in some sordid basement somewhere. And so it was my lack of demographic appropriateness which may have contributed to my overwhelming sense of confusion and inability to figure out the seating chart, presenting with all of the acuity of a backwoods hick contemplating a New York City map. Perusing my ticket, I noticed that it had a row and seat number, while blithely ignoring the “section” portion of the ticket in a dark light. Arriving to my designated seat, I was greeted by two people who were already sitting in the seats where we were thought we were supposed to be situated. “—Hey,” I said to said revelers, “I think you’re in the wrong seats.” A girl with straight hair and a plain face looked back at me, and registering as she did some far off hitch in my memory. “—No,” she shouted back at me over the music, “You must have it wrong. This is Row N, Seat 14.” I looked at my ticket again and talked to her some more. This exchange may have lasted for several minutes or more in the ill-lit pavilion, as I assured her that she must be the one who has it wrong. As anyone whose ever tried to communicate even the simplest gesture in an environment with loud music playing knows, it’s nearly impossible, and so I may well have been translating a complicated love letter or economic theory. It was totally pointless. And then, all at once—simultaneously—her eyes locked on mine, and there was a moment of clarity. I recognized this person as someone I knew—someone I had gone to high school with and had recently sat next to at a wedding. “You look like someone I know,” she said randomly. And then she did not believe. “—Oh, hey!” I shouted at her, everything coming clear. “It’s me!” But still, she did not believe. And then there were the ensuing moments of awkwardness where I had to convince her of my authentic self, and that I was not some guy who shows up at concerts playing some complicated gag on people. IT’S ME!! I shouted, convincing her some more. IT’S ME! I repeated this several times, until it seemed like I was convincing even myself, imagining almost, the reverberations of this statement eminating out, like a sound wave, throughout the pavillion, IT'S ME!
__________________________________________________________________

They returned McBeans’ ashes in an obscene gray box this week. My grandmother has placed it by the doorway of her home, afraid of bringing it any further indoors. “What are you supposed to do with it?” she asks me. “I don’t know what to do.” I pick it up, contemplating the cold gray box in my hands. It seems weird to me for Mcbeans to be reduced to the pile of ash that I am holding in my hands. He was, it seems to me, just moments ago, a tail-wagging ball of energy and enthusiasm, and now this is all that is left. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” is all I can tell my grandmother. I’m not sure.

Life feels weird in the absence of McBeans. I enter dog licenses into a computer all day at work and so I think about it, show up to my grandmother’s, feel like I’m going to cry. The house still contains the peculiar smell of a cracker, and his leash hangs idly by the door. The difference is, however, there is no McBeans. Sometimes I go inside, expecting him to come charging out of nowhere, bowl me over with enthusiasm for another day, another walk in the woods. But there are no more walks, and there is no more enthusiasm. All I seem able to discern is the concrete weightiness of death, and how quickly it can come. And how much I miss McBeans.

It’s hard for me to define what was so special about my dog. And maybe it’s just really inappropriate to put into words. You can only pin things down for so long before you realize how much of a jerk you are. And sometimes you just have to let things stand for how they are, and how they make you feel, illogical as that may seem. And so that’s what I miss the most, I think, is everything I’m unable to put into words. It feels kind of weird to say. And it kind of makes me feel like a dork. But mostly, it’s the truth. I might have to convince you.

2006-09-14T21:25:00.000-04:00

Mensch-Maschine
Dentists, I have recently read, take their lives more than any other profession, barring tollbooth workers and doctors. This statistic seems to make some amount of sense to me, seeing that what this profession mostly entails is standing over another person with your hands crammed down their throat as you ask them questions which can only be answered in monosyllabic grunts and garbled incoherence. So close, you are, but so far away. The same could be said of toll booth workers, who (with the exception of the dude at the Hudson exchange, where you pick up the Rip Van Winkle bridge, who mirthfully takes your change at 2:00 am as you make your way from Bard college, haphazardly ripping through the mountainside with reckless abandon) also have the most overtly pointless interactions with human beings. I think about this as I whiz down Washington Avenue in the back of a car last week, driving past the girl lifelessly waving traffic by whatever baroque construction they have set up there in the middle of the night. No traffic is on the road at this time, and no one appears to be doing any work, but there she stands, in her reflective orange uniform, waving your car through with an illuminated glow stick. “Is that what that girl does all night?” I want to know. “That’s totally outrageous!” I tell everybody. I cannot believe. It seems, at least, evocative of some kind of statistic, but mostly I use it as conversational fodder throughout the night, telling this to people who look back at me blankly and walk away.

Oh, man, I get so uptight about working conditions. I can’t believe a job like mine even exists, and that they haven’t refined computer systems to a point where they can more efficiently load that information in there. Charlie Chaplin made this commentary 80 years ago in Modern Times, but we don’t seem to be so up-to-date, here in modern times. What my job basically entails is entering dog-licensing information into a computer database for future referencing. I keep getting paranoid about sitting in front of a computer all day, the cancerous tubers it’s planting in my brain. And then I come home and look at my own computer, clack out an email, fret over another blog entry. It all seems pretty self-destructive to me. I explain this to my sister later, telling her all about how relaxed the actual job atmosphere is. No constraints are there in Information Systems, and no allotted work to be done. Mostly, it’s the job itself, I explain indignantly: the actual work, and the malleable worker robot drones who I have to work with all day. It’s kind of alienating. What is your problem, my sister wants to know. I don’t know, is all I can tell her. I don’t know.

Tonight is another night, the same as every other night. A light drizzle comes down, fogging over the windows in a car. I have to go to the bank, slicing through town, driving in a straight line past the capitol building to where I need to go. I end up see the girl waving construction through on Washington one more time, and I look out at her, my face pushed right up against the fogged window of the car. Her eyes lock on mine and she waves at me, sitting for moment that seems suspended in time. And then the light turns green and she motions to me with the bright orange glow stick of a wand she carries, magically, unenthusiastically.

2006-09-12T17:41:00.000-04:00

Get me back on your leash
Office work coincides with respiratory illness. There’s something about the airtight atmosphere, built to minimize distraction by locking all productivity inside, and with it a host of airborne poxes, sweeping over me like easy prey. I’m new yet. I have yet to build up an immunity, and sick time. Joy, however, my porcine cohort and proletarian muse, has accumulated an entire onslaught of free days off with pay, and so it is with no indiscretion that she calls in sick once a week. There’s kind of an office in-joke about, with which I am greeted yesterday. “I hate work,” she tells me. “I guess I’m just kind of lazy.” I think this over for a bit, wondering what else I might have in common with this Frosted Flakes-consuming, popcorn-crunching co-worker. “I just like to lie in bed all day and eat,” she tells me cheerfully. And so it is with no surprise that she does not show up for work today. We knew she wasn’t coming, another coworker tells me. Whenever she brings her sweater and starts saying she’s cold that’s usually an indication that she’s not coming in the next day. She’s been doing this about once a week for years now. Apparently, two years ago, she went so far as to throw her work in the trashcan, which earned her a trail, whereby she got to spend the next two years at home with pay before getting her job back, and with it a whole bunch of vacation time. And so now, here she is, entering dog licenses into a computer and using her vacation time with all of the frivolity of a teenager with a limitless allowance. Such is the nature of working in the public sector, an environment where you can demonstrate your disdain for your job by actually throwing your work into a trashcan and not get fired. I spend my days in deep contemplation, peering out of a window that reveals a serene meadow. It will be fall soon, I think. Things will be changing.

Everyone I’ve encountered here is incredibly bizarre, but then I’m probably not the right person to be offering commentary on mental sanity. I like to think I have one up on other people because I’ve spent the entirety of my life avoiding situations precisely like this one, but I always find myself in the strange predicament of talking to these same people and wondering, why don’t I have any vacation time? A question which never reveals a whole lot of clarity. But I really just have to come clean and admit, this place is not too bad. Where else can you openly throw your work in the trashcan and be rewarded two years off, with pay? I read True Romance magazine in the break room and eat the free apples that someone has left. What’s so true about these stories, though, I don’t know. Today’s tale is all about the disillusionment of life in the big city, the dream gone astray, and the boy left behind in the small town. Is there any going back? Will he still be there on returning. I never find out, because I almost pass out from inertia.

Back in the office, my coworkers are still discussing Joy’s departure, and how unfair it is that they have to come to work. They’re getting all riled up and trying to get me to join in. I don’t really get it, though, honestly. Although her days off don’t affect any of us negatively (except for me of course, who is without humor for the majority of the day), they still insist on bemoaning the fact that she doesn’t come to work. “What do you think?” they want to know. But all I can do is blow my nose and cough out loud. I’d like a day off. But the whole thing is, I’m only temp. I don’t have any.

2006-09-05T17:23:00.000-04:00

A spoonful weighs a ton
Coffee with G. at a Starbucks. Looking on as she fiddles with her chair, and then denounces the chairs altogether. What’s so weird about the chairs in here, I don’ t know. She makes fun of me some and then looks around for other people to make fun of, which there is apparently no shortage of in this environment. In the meanwhile, I size up G., looking on as she looks at everybody else. I’ve taken to the curious pastime of sizing up my various friends and trying to figure out where they would fit within the DSM-IV. What maladies would this biblical text render them with. My guess is some sort of confluent Bi-polar/ manic problem, with the corresponding medicine. What would it label me, I don’t know. I keep trying to figure out if it’s my own sense of stasis that offsets G.’s turbulence, or if I’m misinterpreting the situation altogether and it’s the other way around. Either way, it seems like one of us is not getting a favorable rating.

My birthday was this week. My mom made a big lasagna, and so I’m going to hang out around. I feel pretty bad about it, and I articulate this same thing to G., who gives me a weird look. My mother keeps producing the most bountiful spreads even imaginable, and all I can think about is how quickly all of that will give me a heart attack. The woman loves ingredients, I tell you: saturated fats, butter, cheese. It’s all in there. I grew up in a veritable bakery, the kitchen a production center for cookies and pies and cakes, all of which are now currently lost on me, here in the present day. It’s no big deal. It would probably take someone who was never allowed to eat these things by their parents to make them truly appreciate—the kind of person who thinks they’re putting one over on somebody by eating fast foods—the same behavior patterns which make people smoke cigarettes and snort industrial grade cleaners in the bathrooms of public bathrooms. I’m becoming increasingly stoical, I guess, but it seems like there are worse ways to be.

I end up arriving too late for the festivities, the dinner already a done deal, my parents having gone ahead and eaten without me. Minus one for me. My mom harangues me for missing dinner. Sorry, mom. You know, I mixed up the time. I’ll make it up to you, I swear. I keep expecting my parents to disown me, change the locks on the house, pretend they don’t recognize me in a crowd. They never do, but it seems like they should. A lifetime of bizarre behaviors and lifestyle choices does not seem to deter them, however. And I am thankful for that. Because actually, they really should. My mom packs up a spread that I bring home to my little domicile—cake, lasagna—the whole bit. I give these items to A., which he devours with no restraint, as I look on in amazement.

It seems easy to get down about another birthday, another year. Sometimes your life comes to resemble an unraveling ball of twine, which just continuously comes on undone. And your birthday only serves as a continuous reminder of the unraveling. But that’s only one point of view. And I keep thinking that maybe I could just elude the aforementioned descriptions of the DSM for a while longer, dodging and weaving. I contemplate the uneaten portion of birthday cake that my mom made for me sitting on the counter, the massive chunk of cake that I’ve been trying to give to everybody. I look at it sitting there in its plastic wrap, the fancy blue decoration around the perimeter all smooshed up against the plastic. I pick it up, unwrapping as I do, and mash a big bite into my mouth, the vanilla frosting sweet and light. It’s pretty good, actually. I probably should indulge more. Or at least increase my caloric intake.

2006-08-27T20:46:00.000-04:00

You are now in a deep sleep
As just one more event in the vast and interminable nebula of agitation that is my waking life, the people who live next door to me are rebuilding the Boo Radley construction that under some broad definition might be considered a house. Not only have the rats scuttled from their collective domicile but an entire miasma of radon and god knows what has been floating in the air, causing me to wheeze. The whole situation has forced me to realize what a recluse I’ve become. With the onset of symptoms, I have come to the conclusion that with the exception of a three-hour period that I left to do some obscure errand, the symptoms have not disappeared. And that, actually, I’ve been spending way too much time at home lately. You have to get out every once in a while, soak up whatever insane stimulus the outside world has to offer you—which just happens to manifest as an outdoor barbeque that is by all turns short on insanity. Since I can hardly breathe, however, I check in on the festivities, showing by with all the gracefulness of a one-winged bird.

I enter the backyard to little kids scuttling around and their parents gathered around a picnic table, who are people I know. The crowd gives a general nod in my direction, registering my presence after a one-year absence. These are mostly friends I went to high school with, people I end up seeing annually at best. What’s going on, man? How you been? You process the scene after a 365-day absence, realizing the subtle changes, the addition of a new vehicle or child. It seems weird to me that people my age are having kids, getting married—entertaining anything, basically, which is not completely self-serving in some unambiguous way. It just seems right and natural to me that you would choose self-direction as the only direction. But then, they seem happy, I reason, checking in on their children, making sure Johnny doesn’t spill his sordid orange juice box down the front of his shirt like he is currently doing. I try and imagine myself in this same kind of role, and then realize there just are no real reference points. No—when I think of the future, I imagine a one-bedroom apartment on the periphery of town somewhere, a stack of books, and some unending supply of doom and despair. But then, it’s probably a worldview like that one which has me issuing forth statements like I commonly do, offending people’s sensibilities. I’m talking to a friend about a mutual acquaintance we have both recently seen. “—Yeah, she’s married, with children and stuff,” I say derisively, in an audible range of every other person here, who is married, with children. The needle skitters from the grooves as I realize my error, the tone of voice which is suggestive of the complete and utter insanity of such an idea. But there is no taking it back. My words have hung there in the air long enough for everyone to hear, and for a friend to shake his head at me. The eating then resumes and the moment passes, but it has been marred. A little ball of soot has it been adorned with it now and there is no taking it back. Ah, well, I think. It could have been worse. And it’s not like I’m intoning racist jokes like the guy sitting at the end of the picnic table. Who invited that guy anyway? I think to no one in particular.

The night ensues, to more or less fanfare. It feels like September out, I think, before realizing, oh, wow—it pretty much is September. People are drinking domestic beer and talking about their lives as the sun goes away. I am sitting at the edge of the table with Adam Lynch as he contemplates the whole situation, with more or less of a positive spin. “I need one of those,” he tells me, looking down at the cooler. “What?” I ask him, not understanding. “Another beer?” He just laughs at me, ignoring the wife as inanimate object and/ or Budweiser beer connection that he has just made. What the hell are we even doing here? I want to know, contemplating the domestic living scenario. It’s totally freaking me out. I talk to Adam some more and he tells me about this bar around the corner from his house that he wants to go to. It’s more of a neighborhood bar, he explains, out of range from the increasingly annoying downtown establishments, filled with the vapid masses. “Yeah,” he says, “It looks pretty good. I must have driven by it like a hundred times before noticing. I guess it’s sort of an older-person, more relaxed-type place.” And then he adds, “I guess I just don’t really fit in anywhere.” It seems somewhat true, I have to admit. There’s nowhere good to hang out around anymore. But I don’t know if he understands the implications of that statement. And I don’t really want to be a part of all of that, while realizing at the same time that I probably am. Or at least I will be.

Life, it turns out, is a lot like the mold spores originating in the Boo Radley house. You end up floating around a bit before sticking to something indefinite. And it’s the sticking which ends up defining you, with more or less fanfare and agitation. But all I seem able to do is float and not breathe. And since I can’t go home or anywhere else, I’ll probably just end up checking in on that pub later.

2006-08-22T12:17:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-20T12:52:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-16T00:36:00.000-04:00

More than ever it seems true to say things won’t always be this way
Throwing off the shackles of unfashionable existentialism, I produced forth to my sister the other night alien phrases. We were driving east, in the wayward direction of Boston, Massachusetts, with the check engine light coming on in her car, as I spewed forth things I may have fully believed in a coffee-addled state. It’s easy to do, really: living in the first world, you have all sorts of examples. There’s no deep digging to be done, really. If you want something to make you feel really great about your life, just try rigging up some construct about South Africa, and how bad the people there have it. Sure, you say, tearing yourself from a lowly state, those people have it really bad, and comparatively, it makes you feel really awesome for two seconds. But I think I may have actually meant some of those things. Some conceptual shift has taken place, and I’m able to recognize the minute good sometimes. It’s all part of my late day paradigm shift of not jumping off a bridge, and I can feel myself backing from the precipice. “Things aren’t all bad,” I told my sister that night, much to her own befuddlement, wondering if I had not been replaced all together with someone who shared a striking resemblance. “Not everything’s going to end in a horrible disaster,” I said cheerfully, “We’ve had OK lives, good parents.” I went on at length, showing off a little, like a guitar player adding in a tricky little solo for effect. But I could tell, even as I said these things, that I had produced a spell. Surely something bad was going to happen now that I had said these things. A car crash, imminent death, I did not know what—something, though, surely. That’s the power of positive thinking. There are people in charge. That’s the basis of most superstition, really. Some benevolent figure, you imagine in your head, is waiting there all the while, to will something into existence. The converse is true too, obviously; just find yourself saying or doing the wrong thing, and the next thing you know things are slipping away—the framework of benevolence and good turns to rot and decay, and it all comes unrelentingly crashing down around your head.

McBeans is not going to live. I should have known as much. The fancy little chart in the examining room of the veterinarian’s office tells you his age in human years. 88-years-old, it lets you know, sizing up any potential ailments. You can do the math, figuring things out in your head. And you can tell, on a walk, that his legs are not good. But nothing can prepare you for his immediate collapse, the festooning tumor in his stomach that was there all the while. Or for your own inexplicable response to this series of events, lying down on the floor of your grandmother’s kitchen and praying in the light of a new day beside your sick dog. Please, do not take McBeans away from me. It makes me feel like Candy in Of Mice and Men, groveling over his old dog. It makes me really sad.

The veterinarian explains the situation to me in detail, illuminating the x-ray in the examining room. He outlines the dense mass all around the spleen, and the crippling arthritis. There is not long, he explains compassionately. And it makes you contemplate the nature of his job. Not everybody could do it. You would need a sense of compassion that goes well beyond general human suffering and forays into entirely different realms. Not everybody is capable. But this guy has toiled away in the pursuit of this, and it makes me feel some gratitude toward this total stranger, telling me my dog is going to die. I look over at the dog on the examining table. He’s there all the while, completely absolved from his own predicament. No idea does he have of what we’re even doing here. And when the anemia has temporarily vanished from his system, when the toxicity has been reabsorbed, he holds the leash triumphantly in his mouth and wags his tail. All I can do is shake my head. It seems weird to take example from a dying dog, but then it could be worse, too.

2006-08-10T15:00:00.000-04:00

The kids just off from basketball beat me in my head
I feel like my life has degenerated into one of those weird movie shorts they show you between programs on the IFC. All I seem able to do is saunter around in a pair of cutoff shorts and complete mundane errands, gathering no real conclusions from any of these activities. I keep waiting to work out the secret algorithm, the sweeping statement which will sum everything up for me. But more and more I realize that there are no answers. It’s a confusing movie, totally abstract in scope, and all there is are dramatic angles, awkward pauses and bewildered looks. I’ve got that much worked out, at least.

Grandma fell on her face today. She called me up in the early am to tell me so. I have no idea how to react to this situation so early in the morning and find myself drifting off, mid-conversation, ignoring all of the actual details. The overarching question remains: how exactly does one fall on her face? Some obscure thought process takes place, and instead of sticking out your hands, your face goes first. Doesn’t that confound natural instinct? Defy the laws of logic? I guess not, because my mom experienced a similar mishap a while ago (although, I guess that does little to further the statistical probabilities). How this happens, I cannot fathom. I go over to my grandmother’s house to check things out. Most of the time I cannot take the things she says seriously as she constantly attempts to wring the maximum amount of attention out of every occurrence. But she did in fact fall in some way, as there she is sitting limply in a chair, with the beginnings of a bruise on her arms and face. “Is there anything I can get you?” I say with futility. “An ice pack or something?” It makes me think of grade school, where the panacea for any number of maladies is one of those squishy icepacks that they give to you in the nurse’s office. You tell them about your stomachache and end up walking away clutching an icepack, unctuous blue ooze dripping from the inside. It makes you feel alright for two seconds, the placebo effect of remedy. Well, let me know if you need anything, I say to her.

Back out into the day, jingling the leash for McBeans, who comes trotting along. Man, I think, contemplating McBeans’ form; he really is the greatest. The dog can hardly walk, but there he is, hustling right along beside me. We’ve had to reduce our walks lately out of concern for his failing legs, but mostly he’s still vibrant. I try and take inspiration from this, but mostly I keep waiting for some external force to come and crush me. Or at least the camera crew for the Dr. Phil Show to come hustling around the corner, taking me off for a special taping of an episode titled “responsibility and those who shirk.” It’s a nice day out, though, and so I decide not to sweat it- for one day at least. A blue sky stretches out indefinitely in every direction, and a warm wind dances across your skin. Things are good like that. In a bold declaration of seasonal commitment, I cut another pair of pants into shorts the other day. And it makes me feel weird to recognize my own commitment to such frivolity. I’m listening to that Fiery Furnaces song “Benton Harbor Blues” on headphones, and I’ve come to recognize this song as the soundtrack for my summer. Over and over, I find myself listening to this one song, striding around the neighborhood in the most ludicrous outfits imaginable. It’s kind of a carefree tune, the repetitive little keyboard part almost warbling out into the air. It’s the transitional, action sequence of the b-movie you’re watching, and the character is doing all of the things she’s singing about in the song: riding a bike through the snow, heading down to the mini-mall. It’s totally fantastic. An ice-cream truck comes rolling up the street, and I order a Nutty Buddy ice cream treat from the driver. Thank you, I tell her, watching as the bright orange vehicle pulls away from the curb, emitting as it does the peculiar music, which strangely resembles a Fiery Furnaces' song.

Sometimes you catch yourself spontaneously recounting the details of your life, reflecting in the totally subsuming way which encompasses the pathways and corridors that have lead to the precise moment. I catch myself doing this more and more, sitting on a stoop or anywhere at all. And it’s in such moments that you find your life taking on the dramatic quality of cinema. It’s a strange movie, with all manner of narrative flaws. But mostly, I realize it’s wrong to characterize life as some pretentious art film. Because actually, it’s an action movie, the camera cutting away, with all matter of dramatic angles. It’s a flailing figure, I imagine, arms extended, and it appears to be falling swiftly, steadily.

2006-08-07T00:49:00.000-04:00

K-I-S-S-I-N-G S-E-X-I-N-G C-A-S-I-O B-O-K-E Y-O-U M-E I
Watching, in a detached way, as my finger presses the doorbell. Over and over, it makes this connection, which causes the circuit to close, emitting this peculiar sound. The dog goes into a frenzy as I do this, wildly barking to no end. It’s pretty funny: he’s outside of the door, watching as I do this, but still he cannot refrain. You learn about Pavlov’s dog early on, and here I see this manifesting in real life. Won’t he ever learn, I wonder? How long could I stand here ringing the doorbell to produce a different reaction? And what good would it really do, anyway? Some intruder would end up breaking in and the dog would just lie there on the ground, not frightening anyone. The house would be robbed and it would be all my fault. I ring the bell once more, and my grandmother makes an appearance in the doorway, asking me what I’m doing. “—Oh,” I say to her, “I’m just kind of ringing the bell.” She shakes her head at me and walks away. She will later relate this anecdote to the rest of the family as the latest piece of evidence in the overwhelming case of insanity she is building against me. Clearly, something seems to be wired wrong up there.
__________________________________________________________________

New York City, you are a big city; there’s probably room for me in you. I like saying shit like this. I’m getting older, now- not quite at the age where I start spontaneously singing commercial jingles like my dad, but old enough to issue forth ridiculous nonsense, addressing places as though they were actual people. And then, hurtling up I-87 and producing forth obscenities as the nonexistent Albany skyline comes into a view, which is, actually, a shopping mall. It’s all plain and natural, now. It always was. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.

2006-07-30T22:59:00.000-04:00

I packed my suitcase and threw it away
These are the following observations that we have about The Hold Steady, who played at Valentine’s Saturday night:

1. They are total dorks. While listening to a Hold Steady album may provide you with similar information, the lead singer sounding like some agro version of Pee-Wee Herman, we were definitely not prepared for these doses of nerdom. Although, with song lyrics like Charlemagne in Sweatpants and overt references to “Stevie Nix,” I guess, what did you really expect?

2. They have weird fans. I have never seen the kind of disparity of audience members as I saw in attendance at The Hold Steady concert last night. While one might have expected sweaty drunk men, one got sweaty drunk middle-aged and mustachioed men, as well as their totally confounded-seeming female companions. Making it, I guess, not quite unlike certain other venues around town.

3. Dual encores are pretty dope.

If I did not know better, I would think that these guys worked at Last Vestige and were all from Albany, and lived in their mothers’ basements. Seriously: there’s not much to do around, and so it’s not that hard to imagine the following scenario, which is that these dudes hang out at the Palais all night, talking about Thin Lizzy and how great it would be to start a band. Just think: we could combine our love of Budweiser (sic) and strange affinity for 1970’s classic-rock bands and come out with a concept record. And so it makes perfect sense to me that people turned out en masse, and were getting just totally crazy, wildly hooting, and jumping in that unconditional way that seems to denote either massive approval or retardation. What distinguishes The Hold Steady from some wack-ass jibs from Albany, however, is that these guys actually carried this insane plan out to its logical conclusion. They did record an album and go out on tour, which has resulted in the terminus moment of the guy in front of me popping the top of his beer all over everyone, to the apparent lack of chagrin of anyone I can see. There seems to be a corresponding audience for this sort of thing anyway. It was pretty good. Maybe you know.

2006-07-29T18:57:00.000-04:00

Your city's a sucker/ my city's a creep
Saratoga Springs, New York: it’s not that great. Some people come here in the summertime for a weekend repreive. If you’ve ever read Flannery O’Connor, or know that dude from the Kelsey Grammer show, maybe you’ve heard of it. There’s a decent liberal arts college here and an OK record store. The bagel shoppe is actually pretty decent, too. But most people come for the horse racing. Mostly, I just like to check out the insane fashions and the Bourgeoisie (which often seem to go hand in hand).

The ticket window is a scene of pandemonium at post-time. One time my dad took me here as a child and I got lost at the ticket window, which may or may not have something to do with my present day ambivalence regarding this place. Today it seemed an environment in a perpetual state of agitation, as people were trying to stay clear of bursts of rain. Mainly, I was trying to avoid the scent of testosterone and listen to the new DJ Kicks album on headphones. It’s pretty good, I should let you know.

Today was also hat-day. This clever hat was advertising pantomiming art as representing animal life. It was, basically, some appropriation of a Bud Light 12-pack made to look like a horse's head. It was pretty nice. I think it took 1st place.

These guys are what my aunt would explain as exercise riders. Their main job is to escort the actual race horses to the starting gate, making them some variety of the chump horse. It all seems a little redunant to me. She's the horse trainer, though, so I don't know.

I didn't win this race. In fact, I didn't win any race at all. My main source of business on the day was consuming Italian Ice and agitating Kari Ann, who chided my betting-style, which has nothing to do with consulting the confusing statistics they give you in the racing form and more to do with picking cool-sounding names. That may have something to do with my startling inability to win.

Aside from getting in your car and driving from the middle class neighborhood of Loudonville and ending up in Arbor Hill a scant two minutes later, the Saratoga race track is probably the most overt demonstration of class dichotomy available to you in Upstate New York. The box seats are preceded only by the bleacher rows, where they imaginably serve you food followed by a hot towel. These people, I think, were in the wrong section. Or rather, their aircraft had crashed, like in Brave New World, and they were checking in on the savage life below.

Senator and rumored presidential candidate Hillary Clinton showed by, sans Bill, and was escorted by some pretty heavy duty-looking people not featured here. She seemed graceful enough, I guess, snapping a picture with some nicely coutured people. Sadly, I was unable to get a picture with her. My afro-charged hair and tattered shirt may have been the deal breaker.

Afterward we went out for Mexican and I a huge burrito that fell apart in my hand. I was down on the race I didn't bother to bet, which ended up winning. That race featured a 1 and 1a horse, meaning that if either of those comes in you win. Which just goes to show, sometimes you've got to go with the statistics.