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

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

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

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

Color me in

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

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