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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.