Let's not wrestle Mt. Heart Attack
Saturday Night Live is chatting us up in Records Management today. She is sitting behind us at the fiche machine, while we proceed to make copies and copies, as she spontaneously bursts into song. She does the Chicken Dance Song, complete with the handclap part, and I am moved enough to ask about her workday enthusiasm. She is unequivicalably the most enthusiastic person here, and so I ask. “You’ve got to stay upbeat,” she tells me. “It’s the only way to be.” I goad her on by accident and as a result she ends up telling me her entire life story, as people often tend to do while in my presence for two minutes. That’s kind of the thing that I wonder about myself, in moments of deep self-reflection: one second you’re on the verge of tears because the lithium-addled woman on the fiche machine is doing the chicken dance song, and the next thing you know, she’s telling you about where it all went wrong. And that’s kind of the weird thing you tend to notice about comedians, is the fine line being walked between crying and laughing out loud. Look at Dave Chapelle if you do not believe: one moment he’s getting paid the prevailing wage, and the next thing you know he’s nervously chortling about his trip to Africa on Oprah. Things get blurred as Saturday Night Live gets into the details of her life, the musical theatre aspirations, the dropping out of school. The long road which has lead to this moment, talking to the guy making copies, who is me. I regale her a little by giving advice which I’m not exactly qualified to give but which still seems absolutely necessary. She is turning 40 next week, but it’s not too late for her, maybe. Beneath the piles of bills and lifestyle accoutrement payments there is a way, maybe. I don’t know. I’m just trying to make copies over here, really. In two seconds, though, it’s pretty much a moot point, as she’s right back at it again. People are walking by Records Management and wondering what the hell is going on in there, which if I could explain, carries a certain amount of complexity. She wants me to join in the clap, but I don’t really like the Chicken Dance Song. But, because Saturday Night Live is a friend, I do it anyway, which confounds me, as well as just about everyone in the office.

So many pills/ so little time to do them
The inquiries about our mental health have been pouring in. We would like to take this time to express our gratitude to those who have taken the time to wonder if we are going to jump off a bridge. The answer is, no. We have many important things to do, like eat dinner at the Sitar tonight, and we think we may go to see a favorite band play in Amherst next week. That’s what. And god knows what other activities we indulge in on a daily basis, which may fall under some broad headline of things we might consider “life-affirming”. Also, we have not yet had time to kiss all of the girls we would like to kiss, and so there are endless amounts of activities the B-rist Board of Directors has to carry out on planet earth, thank you.
**************************************************************************************

Yesterday at work, the afternoon bustle. I am hiding out in my cubicle, as per usual, doing an almost embarrassing amount of nothing. What my job basically entails is a good amount of spacing out. The interior walls of my cubicle feature a blue-green impressionist-type pattern, and facilitated by the fumes I breathe all day, it’s all just really interesting, from an art historical perspective. When I catch myself getting a little out of hand with the aforementioned activity, I sally forth and check in on some of my fellow employees, who may be doing any number of insane tasks. I will not lie in that I feel a large chunk of compassion for these people. What will have been a very temporary peek into the dark corridors of the dispossessed will in fact be a lifetime for these people. And it’s something that registers a very strange amount of sadness within me. As a final blow to not only the aesthetic, I notice that the customer service people are wearing these badges which say, “Let them hear you smile,” accompanied by a smiley face. This is just another articulation of the office place misery, which totally undermines the ability of spontaneous happiness, the very existence of the badge which points that out. What is that even supposed to mean? I have to ask someone.



It is Friday afternoon, 2 hours and counting. And believe me, we are counting. You catch yourself looking at the clock repetitively, get up, make some copies. Shortly, the floodgates are going to be opened, and we will pour forth into the 2-day expanse of time which will constitute the weekend, where we will do god-knows-what before returning Monday morning. People should be ecstatic with ecstasy over this moment. But instead it’s characterized by the banal. All of my co-workers are standing around bemoaning what a horrible day it has been. We are well enough acquainted now that I can chide them about their bad attitudes. “Well I’m having a pretty awesome day,” I tell them cheerfully. This comment does not go over well with the masses, and I am told that there is enough work to be done that it can very swiftly be made a different way. I shut up quickly.

Back in my cubicle, I am pouring over the merits of Impressionist art when Saturday Night Live comes around to give me one of the free toothbrushes she is handing out to people. Attached is customer service card message, Let them hear you smile. I contemplate the card a moment before pasting it on my shirt, if only to annoy everyone I work with. Because for the first time, I appreciate the message as a non-ironic gesture. Which is pretty heroic, at least in this environment.

*

Drink a lot of soda so they call me Dr. Pepper
I don’t know if it’s because every other CD I own is trapped in some netherworld beneath the front seat in my car, which may feature the collected detritus of many months worth of Taco Bell consumption, and the only album currently at my disposal in the car is A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, but this is what I’ve been listening to a lot lately. Listening to this album more acutely broils down to listening to the track "Buggin’ Out" on repeat over and over, which is a masterpiece of early ‘90’s hip-hop from my tremendously unversed understanding of rap music-- which is all about product endorsement from what I could gather. "Buggin’ Out" is more the type of song I can get into, the chorus eliciting in my sleep-addled brain early in the morning a bombastic break dancing funk of the synapses. While the whole album is insanely replete with references to the Arsenio Hall show and industry demands and stardom, "Buggin’ Out" is more definitively the track that doesn’t appear to have been exhumed from a time capsule buried in 1991 and part of an overall package which is just gut-bustingly funny. That’s kind of the thing you tend to notice about this genre, is that it is either so breathtakingly fast in its progression, making what sounds good one year by comparison just totally hilarious one year later, or the fact that it is so referential in its product endorsement that most of its potential becomes entangled with the fad it endorses, and thus its staying power becomes about as ephemeral as a pair of Air Jordans. Nevertheless, "Buggin’ Out", a song about freaking out in the face of industry stardom, happens to be the standout track on the album, if only for that same chorus, which just repeats, buggin’outbuggin’outbuggin’outyourebuggin’out. I get my day started to it everyday, appropriating a dance move which combines the traditional head-bobbing “rooster” with a horizontal back and forth shaking of the head which might look like someone affected with a severe case of Swimmers’ Ear. It really is pretty great. And additionally, it adds an almost thematic consistency to my day, because I actually am completely buggin’ out while on my way in to another 8 hour day. And that’s a sentiment which never seems to go out of style.

I am a dreamboat/ goodnight for now
If my current living situation could be manifested in disaster, it would most likely be a natural disaster. An 8 point earthquake situated along fault lines, the earth opening up and swallowing the house whole. Or alternately, a biblical-style flood, with the proverbial news reel showing no survivors on the rooftop. Or maybe even a fire, but started in the most mundane of ways, like falling asleep with a cigarette while watching Love Connection. Which, at least, would be thematically consistent.

Everyone in my life is totally insane, which must make me at least peripherally involved. I dream in real estate: a one bedroom apartment, with a window. And a store down the road. Or maybe even a back porch for late night contemplating. Or a front porch, actually—to watch passersby. I would like that. It’s not too much to ask, I don’t think. And I still think the future is going to be rad.

Before you die, everything you know will be decimated into dust. It will be held up before you and chopped at like a cheap piñata, which will fall to your feet, revealing cyanide pills. It will be destroyed methodically and slowly, right before your eyes. But if you’re lucky, it will be rebuilt into something you will marvel at once again.

One false eye forcing him to miss
Walking McBeans through the woods after work today, I notice there are two people on the side of the path. This is not uncommon. There are always people, usually teenagers who have come to smoke cigarettes after school. But these people are not teenagers, and they are not running away as they see me approaching. They are full grown adults, a woman emerging from a hedge as I come up upon them. Getting right up close, I notice that she’s fashioning a homeless person’s haircut, all shaved down, with various patches that are completely missing and a long strand that hangs down in front. Her cohort is also sketchy. He’s kind of this Phil Ek-looking character, wandering around in the leaves. She gives him direction from the path, and then he moves in that direction, always looking down. It seems completely strange to me, and so I ask, “What are you doing?” They give a little sign of embarrassment and then explain: “We’re looking for a canister,” the woman tells me. This doesn’t really explain it all, and so I enquire. “You mean, like you lost a film canister out here or something?” “No,” she says, “It’s a game. Someone hides a canister and then we try and find it.” Some internet website dedicated to the retrieval of various treasures, I reason. Do you win a prize if you find it? I want to know. “No, there’s no prize,” she says. “It’s just for the fun.” The fantastic element of fun seems reduced, however, out here in the elements, with the onset of darkness coming soon. All of this really does seem pretty bizarre to me. But they do have some sort of compass-type mechanism and are in the process of looking for something. Although, this could be the cover for the actual activity of exhuming the body they’ve buried out here and forgot to disarm of its jewelry. Oh, man, the days are getting weirder. The woman goes on to explain that there is actually a whole underground community dedicated to these treasure hunts. “It’s pretty cool,” the guy says chiming in. “We actually just came from one up in Bennington, Vermont last weekend. You get to know some of the people in the community and it’s a real good time. ” I look at him with a moderate amount of amazement. “Do you think you're going to find it?” I ask them. "Well, we might have to reposition our coordinates," he says. Well, I hope you find it, I say. And the weird thing is, I actually mean it.

The pattern on this rug tells a story
Another day in the hive, cultivating a hunchback over the Microform Duplicator. I love the name of this machine: the Duplicator. It looks like some kind of archaic German design, like they rescued it from post-war Germany, when even then they realized this technology was out of date. What you do is put a microfiche reel in the press and it stamps out a duplicate, as its name indicates. You then take the duplicate and develop that in a machine called the Diazo Developer, which uses ammonia to complete the final process. Five minutes in, you are totally high off the fumes, people coming in and greeting them with a lurid smile. Half the time I don’t even know where I am, I’m so stoned off the fumes. And that’s OK, because I’m the least miserable person in the building. I stumble around, take a break, work some more. “There used to be someone who did that job full-time,” Ginny tells me today. Are you fucking kidding me? I want to ask her. Are they brain damaged? Are they covered on the insurance plan. Zoning out has taken on new proportions. People come around my cubicle to find me half retarded and muttering things to myself. “—Oh, yeah: sure. I’ll get right on that copy project,” I let them know, wiping the spittle from my lip.

I really should quit soon. My sense of sanity really does seem to hinge on it. The temp agency really did grasp this one from the bottom of the barrel. Somebody, somewhere is having a good laugh right now, I imagine. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Ginny says to me, “if you feel lightheaded, step away for a bit.” As if that’s the answer, which maybe it really is. She does, after all, have a lot of experience in this department.

When I’m not completely high, I’ve been spending vast amounts of time contemplating my coworkers and wondering just what’s Ginny’s deal? She really does seem to be harboring some incapacity that I can’t quite put my finger on, although it could just be the fumes. While outwardly she may appear innocuous and playful, she actually is some draconian caricature of the Skippy Peanut Butter mom, gleefully giving me things to do all day. As tends to be the case with completely subverted individuals, they end up carrying out similar acts of oppression, giving the poor temp worker endless variations of things to do. Even the smallest of tasks are explained in great detail, like how and why the envelopes are arranged just this way. Additionally, as a final blow, she has banned any and all music in our area, not even graced by the Muzak, which gives you the occasional Bowie number, which is something at least. Gracing the silence, you will sometimes hear her saying things like, “fiddlesticks,” as she date stamps the wrong document.

Working environments are weird because you end up being paired with people you would never otherwise actually associate with. You end up spending more time with these individuals than you do with your actual friends and family, and in that sense these people become as temporary in your life as you are in theirs. I just don’t know about this place, though. Everyone here seems completely alien and strange to me. My favorite person turns out to be Raymond in the Life Department, who always seems upbeat and enthusiastic, or the woman who evokes the Saturday Night Live skit. Although, the disgruntled employees are equally amusing from a critical point of view. I’m not really sure where I fit in, or how much of a legacy I’ll be leaving when I do go. I’d like to think that I’ll impart my own sense of self which is totally inimitable, but that’s not really the nature of this job. And even if it were, these people don’t really seem very impressionable. I will be imprinted forever, though, irreparable, I already know. If I even end up remembering anything at all. The fumes really are pretty intense. “—Ryan,” I hear being called from afar, “Are those done yet?” Piles of fiche are everywhere, with the tiny microcosms of information which will be really large soon: Life Insurance, Disability Coverage, it’s all there. And nothing will be excluded. “Almost,” I tell her. “Almost.”

Fast cars and fine ass/ these things will pass
Answering the phone against better judgment at 4:00 am. “How about a game of Jenga?” a girl’s voice says. “Well, it is 4:00 and I’m not exactly—” I am cut off at this point and random points of derision are inserted about my dedication to the game of Jenga. I’ve heard a lot more crushing things, I have to admit. But I do not hang up without asserting that I am in fact the Jenga Champion, which may well be going on my resume.


Driving home. No one is on the road right now, but I’m pretty much sure that a car is going to come out of the ether, crushing and killing me swiftly for not wearing my safety belt. I have received a ticket for this very same thing earlier in the day, while driving home on a lunch break. “Well, I was kind of in a hurry,” I tell the police officer, before inserting the nugget of wisdom which has been inhibiting not only my safety belt-wearing but a whole bunch of other activities as well: “My coat is just too big.” The officer is not impressed with this line of reasoning, dismisses herself, goes back to the car to write a ticket. “You can appear at the following court to protest the ticket,” she tells me. “Have a nice day.”

Throwing off the cloak of rationality which would typically have me cursing myself, cursing the fact that I have a job at all to come home from on a lunch break, I have decided to take another route. Instead, I have decided to process this as a symbol of good fortune, something that may in fact change my criminally negligent nature of not wearing the safety belt while there are so many other careless drivers on the road. Especially at this hour. There is nothing good that can come of it. There is probably a 70% possibility that some fraternity brother, traversing the road at way too quickly a speed after 5 keg stands is going to bring my life to an abrupt end. It can happen at any moment, and especially in a town like this, which has been nationally recognized for its revelry in major publications. What this all broils down to is that bars are typically open later here than in other cities and states around the nation, and thus the possibilities for nightlife options are innumerably greater when you have longer to hang out for. Or at least that’s my deduction. But it is after hours now, and when you calculate in the fact that the public transit here in pretty much non-existent, it really just does not look good on paper.

Buckling up then, over the big coat, constricting me in a way that definitely inhibits any and all ability to maneuver, as well as the ability to comfortably breathe. Will it be fast? I wonder. And how will it happen? All of the degredations I’ve had to endure through the succession of days which have lead me to this specific moment. Oh, man, what a rip-off it’s all going to be, I think. And then suddenly, it all becomes clear, there is only one thing to do at the moment, and I find myself turning in the direction of the Jenga house. Because it's totally on, if it doesn’t fall apart first.

You are an airplane/ you are a strong and dangerous machine
The days while working proceed as though they were transpiring in a lock groove. The morning routine becomes ritual. You find yourself acquiescent, and are surprised by that same giving in. The alarm clock goes off and you obediently shut it down, with hardly a passing thought. You eat a meal of vitamin-enriched cereal, grinding the grains slowly and methodically between your clenched jaw, while looking at the front page of the paper. It is these calories that will propel you, forward, out of the door and into the world, where the woman on the interstate will be following too closely behind. In the rearview you can determine clearly that she is chugging a Mountain Dew Big Slam and is in a real hurry to get wherever she is going. Her job is pretty good, you imagine, pulling over and letting her pass. But for you there is no hurry. You know full and well what awaits. In a little while, it will be the grating voice of “Ginny,” and the contemplation of all the places which would be good to hide in. You will be moved to contemplate that same name, and will think of the infinite possibilities: did the curly-haired espouser of this name actually want to be named Jennifer, and thus the comparative-sounding value was just really attractive to her. Or alternately, is she just a big fan of late-period Tom Hanks films? And you will contemplate even further your own inability to pronounce this name, for the fear of bursting out laughing. Where you will be moved to a place of contemplating your own contemplation. When Ginny will suddenly snap you out of it once more, making your own alarm clock sound like the pleasant tinkle of a dinner bell, and something you are way less resistant to.

Oh oh oh is the job ever crushing. And the weird thing is, despite the continuous declarations to everyone around about how terrible this experience has been, and how it’s the worst job ever, somehow all of that has been misinterpreted into asking if we can come back again this summer. Our copying skills have evidently wooed them to the point that they are asking now about further services. “Yeah, well—uh, I don’t know.” You want to treat the situation delicately. I’ve worked enough temp jobs to know that you never want to march into a situation and declare that the life that these people have found perfectly acceptable is for you evocative of jumping out of a second story window. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I tell them. In the meanwhile, I proceed to make copies and copies, lose track of time, punch out and go home. My entire day is so rigorously set up that I have the minutes planned out. I have been totally subverted by the workday and it’s crushing. Can’t go out tonight. I’ve got an early day tomorrow. But it’s true. When you’re an alien to working like I am, you realize how fundamentally wrong it is. The 8 hour work day, the office environ. The automations plugging away on Automation Lane. You want to do something to break the horrendous cycle. Something jarring. You want to invoke the wrecking ball rhetoric which will break the implacable shell of this terrible subversion. But mostly, you’re tired and it’s past your bedtime.

The past is a light train to unknown trash scapes
In the words of Steven Malkmus (just to get the indie rock reference out of the way), C’mon in: welcome to Riversource, the terribly-named insurance agency we’ve been temping for, which is so unabashed in it’s terribleness that we have been moved to self-congratulation over our four day stay. So terrible is it actually, that we can only revel in the experience and take it all in, to forget it forever (Although, to be really creative, and to invoke the name, which is hilarity-inducing to no end, we could say that there is just no end to the source of this river—which if we had to imagine it, is an interminable well of dirty dishwater-type substance that is ladle-fed to the employees in lethal doses each workday—which may or may not account for the look of massive chagrin everyone seems to wear around.)

These are our co-workers, who are evenly split between being so horribly subverted that they are no longer recognizable as human beings and those who have been taking massive doses of lithium and thus coming around and greeting us with all the enthusiasm of a Saturday Night Live skit. “Hey,” a woman says me today, “it’s the Ry-man,” she says. “The Ry-meister.” “You just really like saying that,” I say to her. “Yes,” she tells me. “Yes, I do, Ry-meister!” That’s OK, though, because while the robot faction of the workplace is interesting in its own right, the lithium-infused populace is just that much more entertaining, and so we will hang around with those people, if only to scheme cupcakes and other office delicacies from them, when we are not busting ass like never before. This is the lesson you learn right off while working for an insurance agency: they are efficient to no end. Never are you left unattended for one moment, with nothing to do. They are prepared to wring every last bit of production out of you. Oh, did you need something to do? How about that stack of copies over there? That’s OK too, though, because we have invented things more conducive to our skill set, like collating papers, which we do for hours on end while spacing out like never before. “Oh, yeah: I’ll only be another minute here,” we say, shuffling the papers up before dropping them on the floor and having to start over again. Alternately, we hide in the bathroom in a Fonz-like scenario, where we take comfort in the latrinalia scrawled on the walls, which feature such bon mots like “I hate it here.” Today was our fourth day. It probably won’t be much longer before we end up scrawling our own offerings on the bathroom wall. “Please kill me,” or otherwise.

Although, to be fair, within the miasma of dread which has been our everyday existence for the last few days, we take comfort in small glimmers of light. On the way in to work this morning, we see this electronic sign that features the message, Expect good things. We do expect good things, actually, because everything is bad. Probably the worst. But you need a context to ascend from, see. And we have found one. There’s only one way to go, and we are definitely down with that.

We go to sleep to shake a pee
Even if you’re a total recluse like I am, you can’t help but notice it’s a nice day out. The weatherman on TV looking smilingly into the camera and letting you know, “It’s sunny and 65,” which at least here in the icy chasm of upstate, is pretty nice. But weather actually does just exist to give people something to talk about. Even if you put some Christian fundamentalist into a room with a KKK member, they’d end up talking about how nice it is outside. “Oh, yeah: You can’t beat those nice days.” And even I find myself, with the polar cap of my head melted, just telling everyone about it. Say, how about this nice day we’re having? Kind of good Frisbee tossing weather; what about a walk? Oh, god: are we ever alienated from one another. A girl I know has told me that conversation is a lot like keeping a beach ball up in the air, and I guess this is the right weather for it. Or close, anyway.

Don’t mind me, though, because I’m just in a bad mood over the job I have to work at for the next few weeks. The gods have aligned, surely, and have doled it out from the bottom of the deck. Oh, let’s see, this guy, they contemplate: he’s been on unemployment, living off the fat of the land. Didn’t we catch him sitting in a tree last week? Let’s give him this one over here. –That’s cool. I knew in advance it would be this way. Was waiting for it, actually. That’s kind of the thing about expecting the worst, it always leaves room for these totally serendipitous moments to occur, and rarely are you ever let down. But this job seems to have crushed even all of my expectations. What it involves, essentially, is standing in a windowless room and making copies all day. The other portion of my time is spent before a machine named the Microform Duplicator, which a 1950’s style antiquated device for copying microfiche reels. The developing process involves ammonia, and the woman tells me, “You really have to watch out for those fumes.” It’s in a sordid haze that I tell, OK, I will.

The great part about my job, though, is that no one really hides their disdain for the workplace. No one here really seems to be holding on to the notion that this is what they actually wanted to do with their time, and so there’s no need to fake it. We walk around with nasty scowls all day long. I’m actually a little bit surprised that some of these people are even human beings at all, and not some sort of Aldous Huxley-style creations from a test tube. “Don’t look so down,” some woman tells me. “You’re doing a great job, and we really appreciate your help around here.” We talk things over a bit, and when the introductions are over, she imparts the following wisdom: “It’s going to be a nice weekend, at least.” Not exactly beach ball weather, but whatever. “Have a good one,” I tell her. “You too, Ryan!!!” she says. “You, too!”

The limitations are limitless/ they're floating through the air
All kids gravitate towards the snow strewn woods to entertain acts of youthful transgression, like smoking weed and drinking illicitly purchased bottles of gin, procured by a shadowy brother who knows the guy at the convenience mart down the road. That’s just the natural order of things. And so it’s no surprise then, that I’m faced with some such scene while walking McBeans today. Up ahead on the path, I see them before they see me, a phalanx of baggy pants wearing miscreants huddled around one another, exhaling large plumes of smoke into the air. One of them turns and sees me, and they all turn in the opposite direction and start walking. I want to signal out to them, to let them know it’s OK. That I was a teenager once, too. And that it’s “all good.” That we are part of some fraternal brotherhood of messed up-ness, who gravitates towards the woods to do god knows what. I happen to be entertaining the more adult contemporary existential themes of woods dwelling, but it’s cool.



I proceed to walk around, the frozen earth spreading out at my feet, spliced right down the middle by an icy stream. I’m listening to a song on headphones and pretending I’m in some kind of music video. The camera follows me along, with slow contemplative shots. I touch a tree, feel the jagged texture of bark beneath my hand, and then realize that I should climb into the tree, which I do. I reach up to a branch, propelling with my legs, and hoist myself on a limb. McBeans stares up blankly at me from the ground. This is nice, I think to myself. Sitting in a tree, in the frozen forest, with all of the world beneath my feet. This is the kind of thing I should do more often, hanging around in a tree. People would walk by and I’d offer them a prophetic wave, something like that. I am quickly pulled out of my reverie by the phone vibrating in my pocket. Someone would like to speak with me, in the tree in the forest. “Hello?” I say into the phone. The person at the other end erupts into a round of merriment, which is unnerving while sitting in a tree. I look around to make sure I’m not being watched. “—Ryan?” the voice says regaining control. “Yeah, this is Ryan,” I say. “Oh, hey, it’s Kristen from Kelly Services. I just wanted to let you know that we’re still waiting on the background check, so you’re not going to be able to start work tomorrow.” This place really does cover all the angles, I realize. I can’t really say that I blame them, though. I’ve worked with some real weridos, some real class acts. Oh, well: I hope they work it all out.

Hey little butterfly/ would you slip me some on the side
The homeless man on the street, talking jibberish, makes A. nervous. Itellyawhati’mthegirlyou’refuckingthegirlhe’stheman! We have come from middleclass families, with suburban neighborhoods, and do not know how to deal with this element, just standing there stupidly. I give the guy two bucks, enough to buy another beer. A. inexplicably gives $5.00. “Are you serious?” I ask him later. “You gave him five?” Giving two, I feel like I deserve a gold star. Something creeps up within me. I feel bad. The only thing separating me from being a homeless person is my parents continually giving free handouts, to more or less articulate solicitations. A. must feel really bad, I deduce.

Back in the bar, I see some guy I used to know. He’s slumped down in his beer, writing what could be the great American manifesto or just some kind of love letter. “How’s everything going?” I ask him. “Not too good,” he fills me in. “I just broke up with my wife.” I don’t know what to say. I haven’t even made eye contact with a girl in days. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell him. “That’s too bad.” He looks pretty broken up and I’m totally unversed in the etiquette of failed marriages to know what to say. I should have bought him a beer, maybe. I don’t know.

Walking back to my seat, I think of a picture I’ve recently seen in a book. It’s a photograph of William Burroughs seated before a gigantic placard, while smoking a joint. The text reads, Life is a Killer, in gigantic print. The homeless person and the divorcee are the same then, soaking up their sorrows in the brine of spirits and others. I don’t really have much of an excuse, I realize. I sort of feel alright tonight and so I buy A. the next one. On the way out, I tell the bartender, “Get that guy another one of whatever he’s drinking,” and she gestures magically to the end of the bar, where our acquaintance is scribbling away on his piece of paper, to where she will deliver the balm. Back out on the street, we hustle by the homeless person, who is now giving hugs to nervous bystanders, in exchange for a dollar.

It’s nothing new but it’s something I’ll get used to
The sky today, bulging at the seams. All billowy and white, fecundated with the material which will have northeasterners talking derisively under their collective breath, mumbling small curse words. Damn snow, you will hear someone saying later. It’s only a while longer then, before it hits. In the meanwhile, I am being one omnipresent motherfucker today, Map Questing all new locations around town which no one has ever heard of before, visiting places called Lear Drive and Automation Lane (I am not kidding about this, either: hey, where do you work? Automation Lane. Somehow, I can’t think of anything more hilarious). You discover the small nooks around town you never even realized existed, an office park squished into every location imaginable, named after the thing it has replaced.

The place I will be working for would like me to take a drug test. It’s nothing personal, they tell me, just standard procedure. What this requires is picking up the paperwork and then going to the analysis lab, which I arrive at just before lunch. There is a big sign on the desk saying, No admittance after 11:30 am. “Can you fit me in?” I ask an older woman at the desk, who looks like she doesn’t need this right about now. She fumbles with the paperwork, checking things over. “Can you give me a half a cup of urine if I asked you right now?” she needs to know. “Uh, well, yeah—I can certainly try,” I tell her. This is not reassuring, however. She becomes short with me. “No, that’s not what I’m asking you,” she says in small words. “Can you positively give me a half cup of urine, or if you’re thinking about it you’re going to have to come back in an hour, after lunch.” I feel a small school child, being yelled at like this. Trying not to laugh, in the most sincere tone I can muster, I tell her that I can in fact produce a vial for her, which then produces the pangs of self-doubt that has me wondering what will happen if I can’t. Will she beat me with a ruler? Give me detention? She leads me back into the receptionist cubicle, where she instructs me to take off my hat and coat, and asks if I have anything in there. A small vial of pee maybe, to mask the fact that I am actually a crystal meth-smoking maniac and have been out on a bender all night, tearing up the town. You immediately feel the part of the criminal element in this situation. “No, I don’t have anything in there,” I tell her. She sends me in to the bathroom, where I fill the cup plentifully, which she makes no mention of upon returning. A gold star for peeing, I was hoping for. A smiley face sticker. I sign the requisite paper work and am then set free into the afternoon. “Have a nice day,” she tells me, cheering up a little before lunch. “You, too,” I tell her. “Thanks for getting me in.”

Operating in the real world, with its minute everyday degradations, is a weird place to be. Somehow, I feel absolved most of the time, just totally aloof in the small corner of the universe which I happen to occupy. But on occasion, just by matter of circumstance, you find it sucking you in, and subverting even the best of your intentions. Oh, well: I guess it’s something I’m going to have to get used to. Looking up in the sky, though, you can’t help but hope for some kind of celestial event. Or something to send the earth spiraling off its axis and into the blinding sun, which would bring about the great ice-age thaw we’ve all been waiting for. Or even less childishly, a snow day.

Anything you could grasp you could easily pass to the ashtray
I am startled to find that I have developed a Pavlov’s Dog-type reaction to hearing the ring tone on my phone. I first developed this nervous tic about a year ago, when L. would incessantly call my number day and night. Hearing the phone would create a wave of nauseous panic so thick that I would actually find myself flinching a bit. A steady diet of avoidance thereafter was enough to get back the courage to answer phone calls again, thinking it would not be her. But here, in the Ferris Bueller’s phase of my unemployment situation, it is reoccurring ten fold. The agency unrelentingly calls upwards of 3 times a day now. Additionally, they have taken to writing me emails upon not responding to their calls, which only goes to further my totally cringing and subservient nature. “Where have you been?” Sarah wants to know when I finally get around to calling them back. “Yeah, well, uh, I’ve been kind of I’ll,” I tell them. We are graceful—courteous almost—to one another on the phone, while behind the scenes we have taken up arms. They have hour-long meetings on how to break down the resistant and unemployed-insured employee’s will, with PowerPoint set ups and tactical demonstrations. Who could say what they’re doing?

The insanity reaches a crescendo today, when I find myself temporarily changing the ring tone on my phone so as to not have the nervous reaction. Things have gone too far, clearly. I am so busy with my defense strategy all day that it has become a full time job, and while it does come with a pretty spiffy benefits package, I have had enough. I will do anything. Just leave me alone, man. “What have you got?” I ask, finally calling her back. Working for the temp agency is a lot like reaching your hand into a gigantic jar of jellybeans and almost always coming out with the kind you didn’t really want. I’ve worked some OK jobs through temp, but mostly I hate jellybeans. “How do you feel about doing envelope work in an administrative setting?” she asks. A crusty kernel, it has revealed. I pop it into my mouth anyway. Because fuck it, I’ve run out of excuses, and my stomach is all upset.

Your feet aren’t walking/ because you’re too screwed up
An amorphous expanse of free time, reaching my hands out before me and blindly feeling for the perimeter of which there is none. Stumbling and falling on my face. I am currently in the process of making a mixed-tape (okay, CD. whatever). I have a beginning and ending point, the space in between those two songs to be determined. I pretty much verge towards the obsessive compulsive and so it drives me insane: I like the song endings and beginnings to share a least some common thread, and like caulking on a ceiling, mine always gapes. I will sit there all night obsessing over this gap, until finally I get up, leaving the room entirely. That’s the thing with me: the choices drive me crazy. It’s pretty much just right and natural that being a consumer you think of these things. Every purchase is wrought with the same challenge. Would I prefer the International Delights’ Southern Butternut Pecan or Vanilla Toffee Carmel? The conundrums abound, and considering the amount of time spent in grocery stores daily, going over these things, my psychological state is just really precarious. The cashier I see every day asking me. “You really like to grocery shop, don’t you?” she says rhetorically. I don’t really know how to respond to this kind of inquiry, which introduces a whole other layer to my thinking process: she thinks I like her or something, am in fact going through her line every day to check in on her. I’ll have to drive across town now, to do my vacillating at a different store, my ritualistic exercise of living in the first world, which gives me the options, endlessly, driving me totally insane. “Yeah, well, uh, I like grocery stores,” I let her know. “See you tomorrow,” she says brightly. “Probably,” I say. There are still some International Delights coffee flavors I have to check in on.

Out of the store and into the night. Driving through the Tech. Park and trying not to hit some guy putting packages in the drop. The temperature is easily below zero, as he shuttles along at top walking speed, attempting not to run, as his face slowly turns to a sanguine red. I used to do this same job, I remember, at any variety of office jobs I’ve had, running around, doing mundane tasks. That sucks. I turn up the CD I’ve made. Everything has come together pretty nicely so far. Not too bad, if I do say so myself.

I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half/ people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand
Hanging around in Albany, New York, the typical and now oddly banal stretch of Madison and Lark, cars lazily cruising by, with both somewhere and nowhere to go. There are only a few venues of entertainment that I will go into. More close minded, now. My current criteria for going somewhere, sadly, pretty much broils down to the fact that it must contain a Mrs. Pac-Man machine, which strangely, many places do. I will stay at that same machine all night, challenging passers-by to competitions, eliciting both strange looks and antagonism. Quarters lined up on the machine, jamming on the dial, right/ left, up/ down. The main secret, I think, is that you should never go for the fruit, which is something you learn early on. This is one of the things they teach you in religion class, and now I see this same virtue manifested in video games, making you think twice.

Out of the bar and into the night, taking cold air into my lungs and blowing it back out again, like a cigarette smoker. Down Madison, the architecture looming large in the night. Walking around the empty plaza in a suspended state, cars whizzing by and yelling things at me. You just cannot be in the presence of this kind of architecture and not be freaked out by it. Coming home from a road trip and up the interstate, it appears in the distance that some alien craft has landed and some War of the Worlds-type fantasy is taking place. And then you get closer and realize it’s just some weird egg. I remember my parents taking me here for fireworks as a child, and the awe that it inspired then, grandiose explosions taking place overhead. And now I just come to see it symbolically, with more or less explosiveness and awe.

By the look in your eyes I knew you were born to lose
To the gym. The “Silver Sneakers” aerobics class has just finished, forcing me to wade through the throngs of elderly, who have just completed their lightweight exercises and are headed out to the diner now, to hang around. “How you doing, big guy?” some of the older guys address me. “Have you found someplace to work yet?” they want to know. This is the daily locker room banter. I am out of place here, at a time when most people my age are in office places and all manner of different work environments. They gather around me as I bring them up to speed on my life in two seconds. “You ever play any basketball?” Ron wants to know. Being tall, apparently, qualifies you to do certain things, and this is a question I’m asked relatively often. Still, I find myself unable to sufficiently reason my way out of exactly why I do not play basketball. “No, not really,” I let him know. “No reason, really.” The answer disappoints. He has a grandson, apparently, taller than I am, and he plays basketball. What can you do? Slipping into my Public Enemy T-shirt, I excuse myself to go do some aerobic exercises.

What I typically do is annex the private room, which has its own stereo system, and although a sign strictly admonishes, “do not change station,” I waste no time in making a b-line right for that same stereo and turn it to the station I like. The 12:00 college radio show is about to come on and I turn it up all the way. What at first seems like a fairly innocuous playlist is then hyper-amplified in the company of the middle-aged women who also end up making their way into the room. I cringe a little when they play the killer new rock track and an older woman comes in. Falling away, for the first time, is my own staid perception, and I hear the song for the first time from an alien point of view, as I often do when listening to music with others. The guitar part is big and the singer screams, shocking as it does this woman, who probably thought the Partridge Family were pretty insane. She wastes no time in turning it not only down, but all the way off.

Heading back out into the main area of the gym, there are an inordinate number of jacked-up men in here today. I feel out of place, like I just stepped off some type of liner destined for some alien continent and am now experiencing the life form indigenous to the mainland. The weird thing is, I have pretty much always been a native. It’s kind of funny watching these guys taking sideward glances at me in my PE T-shirt, and wondering what they think of all that. If they feel bad about my lack of cultural appropriateness in the same way that I feel bad about theirs. I eavesdrop on their conversations between sets, amazed by the subject matter. They’re playing that Green Day song, where it goes, “walking down the lonely road/ the only one that I have ever known”, and the guys are expressing a real reverence for this song. The Green Day track is where it’s at, man. I like listening in on this commentary, because I’m pretty much sure that it wouldn’t matter what is being played ten times a day that would garner a reaction like this one, and liking the Green Day track is pretty much proof positive of this. What cult-deprogramming center I’ve been attending that they have apparently missed out on, I’m not sure. But it was something, somewhere along the line, which made me detach and let go completely. And now here I am, and there they are, walking down the only road that I have ever known.

Getting on the treadmill, I can see myself in the mirror on the opposite side of the gym. Walking at myself, into myself. The Public Enemy shirt, with the crosshair design on the front in perfect view. I stand before myself, incredulous at my own sense of alienation from my fellow human beings. Turning up the speed on the treadmill, running faster now, into myself, although never really getting any closer.

In two more weeks I'll be in Dallas Fort Worth/ in one more minute I'll be gone
I have recently seen a license plate reading, “Chilax”, a confluent term combining “Chill” and “Relax,” and so I will relate to you that I am chilaxing at the moment. We used to use this same term last summer, working at the university. “Chilax, man. You’re going to have a heart attack.” Or: “You’re doing way too much work,” we would say to the new person, “fucking chilax.” Thereafter my work criteria always seemed to include this term. Although, it’s entirely possible that it has always included this terminology and it was the term which took so long in catching up to my slack behavior. I don’t know. But we are indeed chilaxing today, and being paid the prevailing wage to do so. What exactly that wage turns out to be, I have no idea, as I failed math 1 and never really recovered thereafter. It’s the word problems you think you’ll never have to use later which you end up cursing yourself for not remembering. If the temp agency fires you, having been paid on average about $350.00 a week, for a sum total of 35 weeks, what will unemployment insurance pay if it’s an average of your previous weeks’ earnings? The answer, it turns out, is not that much, but I totally cheated and what are you going to do?

It’s not a bad arrangement, though. It’s kind of the ghettoized version of that Win For Life lottery ticket you see in the stores, except that it only pays about 200.00 bucks, and life, it turns out, is only a few months long. It’s a test run, I reassure myself, hoping simultaneously that I don’t turn into a compulsive gambler. Blowing the scratch off dust away from my ticket, I realize that the prize is an endless expanse of free time, and then I proceed to have the accompanying anxiety attack over what to do with the earnings, sitting, waiting and wondering—hoping that I don’t waste it all.

I remember having this same conversation with someone at that same temp job I worked at last summer, and asking him what he’d do if he won the lottery he was always talking about. “If I ever won, man,” he told me, “I would buy a big house in the middle of nowhere, with a gigantic television set and just eat anything I wanted and have sex with all kinds of women all day.” I processed this answer, attempting to ignore the nihilism inherent in that type of reply. Because that’s exactly that kind of complacency which I think you want to avoid. “Chilax,” he probably would have told me, had he known what I thought about all that.

Today’s unemployment theme, it turns out, is positivity, which I’m not sure is actually a word—which makes me laugh. But I feel OK. “Feeling OK,” I have recently read in a book, “is the sum total of not paying too much attention and being totally distracted by everything you do all day.” I seem to have embraced this formula, I think, staying relatively busy for the most part. And it’s kind of nice. I do this as creatively as possible all day: running errands, hanging around in the coffee shoppes, make a phone call, go play guitar. Everything feels lightweight and nice. It’s what lies at the end of all that distraction which has me worried. And it’s that which I’m not looking forward to.

Hanging out this morning, I explain to a friend what the night sky looked like in Saratoga Springs Friday. They were having a blackout, and the sky was perfectly illuminated in the absence of manmade light. Walking around outside, with no one around, the big empty sky occurred to me with perfect clarity. The grandiosity of that sky so large and staggering that I stared up at it for 30 minutes, until my neck was sore. And then I was afraid at its grandiosity and my infinitesimally small existence. Then the lights came back on and I forgot all about it.

I really probably should find a job soon. It’s only a matter of time, now. I think. In the meantime, I’ll take comfort in license plates and all manner of other bizarre things, I imagine. You can call me if you want to.

Cashout

I have to go to the Latham Mall tonight and cash a check. I always get the uneasy feeling that I’m going to get beat up or something when I go there, and so I usually try and do my banking elsewhere. The place seems to be some kind of hub for the Albany bus system, and the shady characters abound. It’s routine that you’ll hear some guy yelling at his woman, telling her to shut the fuck up while she cradles a suckling infant in sub-degree weather, because there’s just no way she’s getting a bite of his Slim Jim. And so it doesn’t surprise me tonight when I actually do hear this. I process the scene from a distance: The half-lit entrance sign of the mall bathes the bus stop in a neon glow, illuminating white cigarette tips and gum spackle and garbage encrusted in the ground. Hours and minutes that compose lifetimes have been spent staring at this same ground, and at this same garbage, waiting for the next bus to arrive, for the next trip out of there. The sum total of which has just been totally kicking it to our Slim Jim-eating protagonist, sending him completely over the edge. I hustle by and into the bank.



Waiting in line, I can see that most of the stores in the actual mall are totally closed up, barred by rattley chain fences. In fact, the whole entire length of the corridor, from my vantage point, seems totally closed down. It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on the Latham Mall, and so I decide to up the ante on the getting-jacked-up-factor and take a walk around. As a teenager, I remember my parents used to drop me and my friends off here on a Friday night for the standard go-round of juvenile debauchery. We would steal CDs from Caldors and smash the plastic theft guard on rocks in back of the mall, celebrating with illicitly purchased beer and cigarettes. The “theft guard,” while being large and unwieldy, was easy to put into a large jacket, and never seemed to set off the alarm. I still have some CDs from that period. I don’t know. There was also a KB Toys which was a favorite place to steal from, and a food court with an arcade. Mostly everything else is closed down now. What the mall is rife in, however, is unisex hair salons staffed by young-looking women who you see smoking cigarettes out in front of the bank. Why the mall needs three unisex hair salons is something which is beyond my comprehension. But there are in fact three of them. It could be some marketing scheme on behalf of some young go-getter, trying to capitalize of the vast faction of vagrant-types walking around in need of some grooming. I think about getting a Hair 2000 haircut and wonder exactly what that would entail (do they give you an outdated haircut, too? I wonder.). $10.50, a little out of my range. Another store you see a lot of are these faux-urban places, typically called “New York Style” or something, beckoning the young masses with garish-looking clothing adorned with blunt logory. The sketch factor rises. My favorite place turns out to be the dollar store, which features ski masks right in the window display, a whole barrage of them, just in case you want to jack someone up in the parking lot. What suprises me is that there’s not some kind of vendor selling malt liquor at a kiosk in the middle of this place. It would blend, I think, seamlessly, with the rest of the surroundings. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone with a brown paper bag walking around while shopping for the appropriate ski mask.

The entire rest of the mall is in some phase of disrepair and probably only has a few more years left. They will bulldoze it and turn it into a strip mall or something, only to create future ruins. But it’s kind of fun to revel in this moment of decline. And to take it all in. It’s nice to see this in the community that I live in. It’s kind of the inverse gentrification you see taking place in other cities around the nation. Except this is suburbia. My parents live here, and doctors and lawyers probably live in the backyard of this place. It’s pretty wild. There’s probably only a few more minutes left, though, so you should check it out while you can. We can take a field trip, even. I’ll buy you a soda from Hot Dog Charlies and we can play a game of Mortal Combat or something. It’s a good time, if you don’t get killed first.

The smell of you/ that's the lowdown

I am working at my 2nd job today, delivering holiday gift baskets for my aunt. It seems to combine the two things I don’t mind doing, driving and listening to music, and so it’s OK. Mostly, though, it makes me feel like the biggest loser. I take a turn and the baskets in the backseat topple over and onto the ground, the contents spilling out all over the mud-encrusted floor. I pick them up off the ground and compile what is to me, in my unversed understanding of the art of basket crafting, a basket which looks acutely like I ran it over with the car. Showing up to some random office, I produce the most hackneyed-looking arrangement even conceivable. “Oh, thanks,” the woman tell me trailing off, as I hustle for the door. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” I tell her.

I like these things, though, these kitsch arrangements, featuring coffee cups and sundry dollar store items. I like to imagine the people they are going to, and today, wondering about the kinds of relationships they’re having. The largest basket I deliver today goes to a walleyed-looking housewife who stoically answers the door, not returning any of my well wishes. “Bye,” she says, unimpressed. Whatever. Sometimes you look inside the cellophane wrap and see some pretty magnificent stuff, which could just be to compensate for the lack of splendor in the relationship. Although, maybe all those crossword puzzle books and coffee mugs with inane phrases only go to underscore the amazing-ness contained within that relationship. Who could say what those things signify? It feels nice, though, to make someone’s day. Even if I only am vicariously experiencing the moment, producing a basket that looks like it got run over by a train.