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.