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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.