You sunk my battleship
In ten minutes, just to defy my normal routine of hanging out and listening to Thee Oh Sees with my roommate, I am going to abscond, just to see if I can go get robbed. I’ve never really been held up at gunpoint before, but I hear the opportunities for being mugged in the neighborhoods in front of the Delaware Price Chopper (sic) are rife with possibilities, another mugging just the other day. Me sauntering down the street, and an attacker just within sight, lagging momentarily behind. It will probably occur to imagined mugger with massive chagrin, as I have a life savings of about a dollar-twenty five in change in my pocket, but what can you do? It’s boring around. And I will accept any form of stimulation, be it a punch to the head or a stab wound to the neck, just as a deviation of routine.

I probably should get a job soon—I probably should get hit by a car. But these are alien thoughts, strange and disconcerting to the senses—such an anomaly of thought process that I almost don’t know what to do with myself. Rings of a tree, a simulacrum of simulacrum. I really probably should just go outside now.

I got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming

Chocolate chip pancakes with my sister, Kiki. Today is her birthday, and so why not schedule a hangout? It’s not often we get to do these kinds of things, mired down as she is in her job, and me, with my own goings on, or whatever.

As a child, my sister once bought me “cool clothing” with money she earned at her job as a checkout person at the local grocery mart. Later, she would drive me to high school, even though I was her annoying brother, four years younger, who would eyeball her friends with all of the fascination of someone witnessing the presence of some exotic jungle bird for the first time. She is, when it comes down to it, probably in a position to alienate me for all time, and with a lifetime of validation. That would make sense to me. But there she is, and here I am, eating chocolate chip pancakes in my apartment, after so much time passed by.

After breakfast, she relates to me about her job. I always find it weird that I don’t know what my friends and family actually do at work all day. I’m sure these people have explained these things to me, at one time or another, but I just don’t know how their job titles quantify. But then, maybe it comes down to the fact that most jobs, in my mind, broil down to answering phones and carrying out completely mundane tasks, for eight hours a day. And so it’s rather self-explanatory.

My sister works for a not-for-profit agency which is in the business of facilitating the wellbeing of people with mentally deficiencies. She explains how there is always some crisis going on with one of the facilities she oversees. “It’s always particularly unnerving when you have to explain to a family member how one of our clients has alleged that the hired staff has been smoking crack and touching himself in front of their son all day. That’s probably the most difficult part about my job.” Yeah, I say, “I could imagine that would be kind of awkward.” And if all that isn’t bad enough, recent legislation has been put in place which could hold people at the administrative levels of this rather unfortunate employment sector accountable for things which go on, miles away. “Hmm,” I say, at a total loss. I want to ask if she smokes a lot of pot, but think of something else to say at the last moment. “Have you ever checked out yoga?” I ask. “No,” she says, she hasn’t.

There is a conversational impasse at which point we look outside and realize it’s snowing again. “Hey,” I say, “See that pool house over there in the park? –On the other side of that is a gigantic hill, and if it snows enough, maybe I could go sleigh-riding tomorrow.” We have a good laugh at this, at how ludicrous and lightweight my life must seem (which is, when you objectively examine the facts, probably not unlike the lives of the people in one of the houses she oversees—the notable difference being not my lack of access to prescription meds, but markedly lower levels of group cohesion and poor choice of hair style).

I walk my sister out to her car and say goodbye, pointing out directions to avoid a sketchy neighborhood. And then she pulls off, away. On the way back in, I notice the snow is still coming down pretty good. Tomorrow seems hopeful to me.

Please let me be lonely tonight
My ye olde housemate/caretaker is cooking something including onions right now, causing my eyes to water and tears to stream down my face. I don’t really cry, I don’t think, having done away with tube socks and emotions ages ago, and so am confounded by the watery solution coming from my eyes today. Oh, man, I think, what is going on here? And then I realize: it’s the onions.

It is occurring to me today, for the one millionth time, that the city I live in blows, and it will continue to blow, forever (the greatest, most all-time crushing Albany moment I’ve experienced thus far, outside of some ludicrous/ embarrassing moments which hold little to no merit on account of the fact that I was too drunk to actually remember them, was looking at the LOB on Madison recently and being sent into a full-throttle depression over its scale size and color. The sky was some wasted ink cartridge color gray that day, stretching out interminably to nowhere, and the building and sidewalk parodied that color below, their mimicry taken directly in through my eyeballs and related to my synapses, sending me down. The architecture itself depresses you, and I knew the people inside of those buildings were doing something unnervingly depressing, making it a full on shit storm of depressingness. But then, maybe it’s just me, like usual). I was attempting to explain this same feeling to someone the other day, but I don’t really think they knew what I was talking about, impervious to the dour worldview of architecture and downward spirals.

Two enthusiasts of the rap music genre have recently moved into the apartment next door to mine. I encountered one of these individuals recently, on coming home one day. “Oh, you moved in next door?” I ventured brightly to one of them. “My name is Ryan,” I said, shaking the new neighb’s hand. “How’s it going,” said neighbor said. “My name’s True Master.” I took this in, thinking it over, before True Master disappeared behind the door of his rental compartment. It was a striking name, you had to admit, out-classing my own rather pedestrian name by twenty furlongs, which then (obviously) elicited some rapid fire succession of “street names” to replace my own. I was stuck between two, when the phone rang, snapping me from my reverie.

It was hard not to get caught up in the proactive nature of the new neighbors, planning events and shows, right here in the courtyard of our building. “All that’s really respectable,” I told El Smell on night, “but in the end I can’t help but think there will be some inherent futility involved with all of that. I mean, even if something really cool is created there will be no one to fully appreciate it, so it seems like a total waste of time. I mean, we’re living in Albany, after all!” I said, as some rhetorical punctuation point. As I said this, I thought simultaneously of a car signaling into a drive on a desolate country road, signaling repetitively into the night to no one in particular. But, when it came down to it, in the end, whatever ended up taking place, I knew I would be there. Which pretty much seemed inevitable- I lived there.

Everything blows, but what can you do? It seemed logical to try and have as much fun as possible, even if you were surrounded by lame ass motherfuckers at all times. Springtime couldn’t be too far off, I didn’t officially have a job to go to, and El Smell was making that onion dish right now. It wasn’t much, but it was something to hold onto. To keep yourself from spiraling—to keep yourself from tears.

This city has got me feeling like a motherfucker

Walking home from SG’s in the dead, glaring middle of night. It’s a nice night for this time of year, the temperature rising twenty degrees and tricking you into wearing lightweight garments. But all at once the cold comes rushing in, making you think twice about your threadbare jacket and the holes in your shoes.

Up Dove and down Jefferson, past the sketchy bar, with the faint cacophony of the goings on indoors, where people are reveling in throwing darts at a cork board, and drinking two-dollar drinks. This is what we do, how we pass the time. I think about going indoors and seeing if there’s anyone I know inside, but there’s no kind of refuge for me, tonight.

At home things are no less bizarre. El Smell has taken to locking herself in her room, interrupted only by short trips to the kitchen to get something or other, where my attempts at conversation are thwarted by monosyllables and grunts. Needless to say, things seem grim.

It’s a strange life, and a strange time to be alive. And it would be entirely possible to retrace your steps, to find out how you got here, from the womb, but that’s old news--something thought of, and thought of again, the thoughts themselves like so many layers of a tree, layers and layers removed.

At the threshold an empty plastic milk container rattled past my feet, like some absurd tumbleweed. And then I scurried indoors, like a rat, out of the cold.

The building I am living was considered to be some kind of an historical site. The Aqua Ducks tour bus told you this five times a day, when it drove by, and an internet website. It used to be an ice factory, used to construct square ice blocks. That had seemed about right to me.

White psychosis/white dementia

The chair on which I do my extensive computing is too tall, putting me nearly at knee level with the makeshift desk that my keyboard is on, causing me to contort myself into a near yoga-like position in order to accomplish whatever it is I do on a computer all day (searching for the ever-elusive job in between myspacing all new bands, which is simply the newest behavior pattern in an old pastime of some bizarre fixation having to do with an obscurity fetish stemming from my upbringing as a Marxist teen rebel, wanting to see the collapse of everything). This works out okay for a while, until on a trip to the coffee pot--to fuel the apparent goal of future computer-related tumors which will soon be festering in my brain-- I realize that I seem to be cultivating a particularly bad hunchback, the pain in my neck and shoulders developing into a pulsating throb evocative of a four-hour rub down—which may be suggestive of either my massive dedication to checking out new music or my determination to find a job. And, inevitably, the more germane failure at those things: my apparent lack of a job and bad taste in music.

Computer speakers sound like shit, and this is good for listening to noisy music. I have meticulously placed a speaker on a surface on either side of my head, and have turned up the volume as loud as it will go. On repeat, over and over, for days on end, I have been listening to a song called "White Psychosis". It seems to be the supple balm to a life which has gone off the tracks--so far from the road that the brush has covered, in grown weeds and vines barring the entryway, with no hope of being discovered again.

“Listen,” I tried to point out to el Smelldog last night, erroneously attempting to fill her in on my supple balm theory: “You have to place the speakers on either side of your ear,” I said, with all of the teaching of a trained expert. “Do you feel it?” I asked rhetorically, turning the music up for effect. This didn't seem to help much. “It’s a pantomime of simian creatures,” I explained of the music, “trying to break free of the shackles and concrete cages of industrialization and insanity.” She just shook her head, which was a gesture of not really getting it. It didn’t really seem like it mattered, though.

Today, as I was in the fervored throes of Supple Balming, I couldn’t help but note an extra drum measure in the "White Psychosis" web edit which I hadn’t previously heard before. I double checked, just to be sure; the band hadn’t retooled the song, and before long I noted that it wasn’t the song which had changed-- it was my rather irate-sounding neighbor pounding on the wall, demonstrating a complete lack of appreciation for my music selections at one pm. Sorry, I mutedly said to the wall, before turning the music down a measure. I wondered what it sounded like on the other side of the wall, and what my neighbor made of all that, despite his pounding. Our interactions had been limited to muted gestures on trips to the dumpster, to discard boxes which at one time contained microwave pizza slices. This unfortunate interaction would only add nuance and “vibes” to our future encounters, I thought. But wait—you just wait—, I thought, until next time you’re rocking your Phil Collins soundtrack, man. Because a retaliation is in order!

I got up to get something from upstairs, and as I did, I staggered off in the hunched nature of an ape, white knuckles scrapping the ground, and pawing at myself for effect. The music choices were not up for discussion, but I had probably find myself a new computer chair.

I've been dirt and I don't care

Humor in horror: there seems to be no end to it, the subtle nuance of disaster which starts with a chuckle and ends in an ache, tears streaming down your face as you grasp at your stomach from the pain. Life takes on the nature of a television sitcom sometimes, with the requisite laugh track in the back, the smallest indignities eliciting the stock laugh until you find yourself a master of comedy, a primetime television series in the making. It wouldn’t be all too impressive, though, in the end. It would probably just get people down.

Ivy seems to have snatched away my unemployment benefits, fucking up the entire weekend, and stretching out into the foreseeable future, like a stain on a tablecloth, stretching out from its center and seeping out into infinity, ruining a houseguest’s pants. But, ah, well: it was bound to happen this way. There was probably already a park bench with my name stamped on it, its existence situated solely on my own waking existence in the world, waiting precisely for this moment, when we would intersect. And some things are like that.

If you need me, you know where I’ll be, face paint and motioning to the masses, a real sad clown.

Eyes lit on sharp threats from dark lips
Things have gotten out of control. I seem to be out of a job again, which seems to be my natural state, scuttling around all day, like a lobster, claw-like feet audibly scraping the sidewalk and naked pincers reaching at the sky for something, anything to grasp on to. Luckily, every other person in my life, with the notable exception of SG—whose frame of mind seems to border on a state of total serenity, like someone entertaining a perpetual ambulatory state on the shores of a white sand beach somewhere, with only the sensation of tepid wave pools gently touching against her feet, totally unawares of my own flailing—seems to be on the verge of a suicidal depression, and so it makes my own situation look OK, comparatively.

The only thing threatening this way of existence seems to be the temp agency, and a woman named Ivy from the labor department, whose been phoning me and telling me my unemployment benefits are in jeopardy because I have refused a job offer. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, although totally known by the people at the ye old unemployment division, someone has offered me a job which I apparently did not accept, which is an offense of the highest order at the labor depot. Ivy promptly has me on the horn about this matter at nine am one morning, my head still a contusion of cobwebs and confusion, completely unable to get my story together that I did not in fact refuse employment, and that I am, actually, at nine am, in the fevered throes of scrapping my way to the top of the food chain. Ivy is unconvinced, however—so versed in these matters perhaps—so used to dealing with lowly life forms like my own—that she mine as well be teleporting to my bedroom at home and beating me with a rubber hose until I get up and march out, onward, to my new job. She ploughs gracelessly ahead, asking me a succession of the same three questions over and over again, as I issue new and completely original answers each time.

“But so you did receive a call, and you did proceed to take the insurance agency job and then not show up?” she asks in the incredulous voice you use to talk to small school children. “Oh, man,” I whine. “Well, it’s hard for me to remember, because that conversation took place, like, over a month ago. And besides, I would never accept a job like that.” Answers like these only seem to press Ivy to a further state of irritation, and she begins to let me have it. “That conversation, mind you, was not over one month ago, and you can’t remember what was said??” I stammer, looking for the answer, finding little of merit in the overwhelming fact that I should be swept from the earth in a great cleansing flood, and then, almost simultaneously, I begin to feel a real sense of reverent awe for the psychic abilities of Ivy and her ability to deduce from our ten minute conversation the complete and utter transparency of my answers. And then, simultaneously, I begin to feel a real sense of compassion for her too, having to make these calls all day, dealing with people like me, the sloth-like visage formulating from the sound of my voice, and the naked imagery forming in Ivy’s mind as she stews over her coffee-stained desk calendar and the clacking of keyboards all around. It seems unreal to me that such a job even exists. And then I realize: Ivy was probably a real slack-off in a prior life, having been sent back to bestow the virtues of grinding it out, and threatening one’s very important unemployment benefits from her mighty throne as unemployment intermediary. That seems like a fair enough perception of the afterlife to me, although not a very reassuring one.

I try and sweet talk Ivy before the conversation ends, but things look bad for me. “—But so wait,” I ask her, before hanging up. “What happens now?” She informs me in no uncertain terms that it will take some discussion with her supervisor and then she will formulate an opinion, at which point in time I either will or will not continue to receive unemployment checks from the state. “But so you can’t tell me right now?” I want to know. “No,” she says firmly, “I cannot.” I hang up the phone and fall back into the gentle embrace of a sweet, if not slightly paranoia-tinged, sleep, as Ivy, simultaneously, goes back to her own situation, tinged with who could say what? I had hoped that she would show some compassion for me, and that she could see my side of the story, which was a sketchy side, I to admit, but a sometimes enjoyable, if not overwhelmingly money-less side, most of the time.

Before falling asleep, I thought of neon lighting systems and recycled air and perspired underarms on shirts buttoned up to the top, and then a concrete sleep subsumed me.

No fun to hang around/freaked out for another day

Talking to SG’s friend outside of a bar Saturday night. It’s her first time visiting Albany and we are out for the night. She can’t help but note the particularly pungent smell of the watering hole we happen to be patronizing. “Can you smell that in there?” she wants to know, wrinkling her nose. “It smells like lavender and old people and grim death itself.” We have a good laugh at this. Scent, NPR has recently related to me, is strongly associated with memory, and I chide her that her olfactory association with Albany will be forever associated with sordidness and a putrid smell. And so there you have it, Albany, New York: grim death itself.

You can put it out but I can't put it out
I seem to have picked up a new habit. It didn’t seem like a good idea to start smoking, but I do seem to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and so, what the hey? I thought to myself one night at a party. Why not ease the breakdown process with some carcinogenic cigarette smoke? I purloined one from a girl’s pack when she wasn’t looking, and borrowed somebody’s lighter. It was a nice social prop, at any rate, walking around with an unlit cigarette and asking somebody to light it for me. Other cigarette smokers will always be more than willing to aid you in your plight, and almost immediately I felt “in the loop,” and that much better about myself. I took two puffs and then almost passed out from a lack of oxygen, regaining composure against a wall, so as to not unnerve the other more experienced smokers in attendance. “Are you OK?” someone asked. Oh, yeah, yeah, I coughed, I feel better now. The cigarette had left me temporarily confused, jarred from the oxygen loss, but not in a bad way. Things were looking up.

As almost everyone has figured out, there seems to be no end to the unnervement process swirling around most people at all times. Like lunch hours with my mom might demonstrate, or the A&E television program “Intervention”—or BF herself, with her crushing good/bad ratio demonstration of the hopelessness of it all—life just isn’t that good, most of the time. You need to get high on industrial grade detergents or smoke a cigarette every once in a while. Things get you down.

I thought hard about my own situation and tried to figure out what was making me so uptight. My birthday was a little over one week away, my job situation seemed heavily precarious at best, and I was about one wisecrack away from having to construct a cardboard cutout and take up refuge with the bench dwellers in the park, who seemed to be entirely mistaking my presence anyway. So there was already an in. But this was unnerving, still. What were other people my age doing, I wondered? Nothing too good, by the looks of it. I knew people who were churning out kids en masse, buying cars and houses, or who knows what? Making the kinds of acquisitions which life in the first world guaranteed, which had something to do with the kind of chinos you wore from my vantage point, as per the subtle variation of khaki colors and how they related to your persona. I had no idea how any of this worked, obviously, but people all around me were clearly reveling in this set up, for all time, and so why should I be so hoiti toiti about it?

On a day off from work last week, I walked to the park. Said park dwellers had saved me a bench, apparently, and I nodded graceously to them before taking a seat. Within the hierarchy of park benches it was a good one, with plenty of sunlight, and a pleasant view of the goings on all around me. It seemed to be a leftover from when summer was in full swing, too hot in the sunlight to make it the prime real estate of park benches, but now the weather had become mild and its market value seemed to have skyrocketed unbeknownst to the homeless people all around me.

As I sat there, a man on a neighboring picnic table, lying fully supine, suddenly regained composure and sat up, urinating from his table without standing. When he was finished, he then zipped up his pants and readjusted his twine hobo belt before lying down again, resuming his nap in a near seamless transition. Amazing, I thought to myself. Is his table in such high demand that he was afraid of someone taking it? Or rather, did he just not feel like standing up? I pondered this for a while, although I may have been talking out loud, because simultaneously another homeless person walked by and began talking back to me. “Hey,” he said in the garbled speak of someone who had lost his dentures, “I was sitting there.” He waved a tired finger, motioning to the bench I was sitting on. Clearly he had failed to master the art of seated peeing and I had taken his bench in the meanwhile. “—Oh, well you can have it back,” I stammered, taking note of the other slightly more shaded benches on the periphery. “Nah,” he said, “you take it, but can I get a cigarette?” Having temporarily forgotten that I was now a cigarette smoker, and having failed to fully take this on as part of my Identity, I told him that I didn’t have any cigarettes, before, mid-sentence, I realized that I actually did, and pulled one from my pocket for him to have. It seemed like a fair trade, the going rate for a park bench evidently, where currency in these circles clearly manifested in the form of unlit paper cigarettes.

I watched him shamble off, and as I did, I lit my own cigarette. The trees blew in the wind, and the sun cascaded off shiny leaves. It would be fall soon, I thought between puffs of smoke, nature's entropy and all the rest of that stuff would soon be taking place. There would be a presidential election which a minority of the American public would take notice of, and my birthday would pass, uneventfully. I tried to make sense of these things. What did they actually mean? I wondered. Nothing: it was probably a matter of wardrobe. It was probably nothing more than a winter's coat. That didn't seem so bad to me. Or that's what I told myself between puffs of smoke.

Kill me in my favorite clothes
The general populace seems to have taken issue with my summertime couture, which typically includes a pair of cut-off shorts at any given moment and a t-shirt turned inside out. Somewhere these people have aligned, setting up camp on some slow evening, before dispersing back out into the world again, where they are breaking down my will to smite consumerism in my own small ways, like looking like crap, and always refusing wear shirts which contain slogans or overt references to products and people (unless you could devise a shirt with, like, a friend’s name on it or something, with individual talent sets and statistics revealed on the back, like a baseball card, which I would endorse fully and which I suggest someone makes me, immediately). The snide commentary has manifested in everything from smug commentary to laughing out loud as I walk down the street. But that’s just the price you have to pay for avoiding the cash-transaction, which is my own microcosmic way of collapsing the economy entirely and sending things into such a wretched tailspin that we have to start running with wolves and seeking out caves to live in.

Somewhere between my righteous indignance for looking like shit and getting made fun of, I have decided to get on board and hook up some new clothes for the greater good. As some small compromise I went to the local Goodwill store this weekend. Those clothes, at least, wouldn’t be officially new, and so at least in my mind I wouldn’t actually be contributing to the proliferation of more shopping malls, and thus made everything ok-seeming. I walked around the store for a while, checking in on the ornate nic-nacs, before settling on two shirts. Satisfied with these items, I qued up in line behind three teen-aged girls, who were apparently entertaining their own acts of youthful transgression, ill-conceived as it was, weird bandannas and all. As I waited, a fraternity bro and his girlfriend also got in line, behind me. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” said bro said to his girlfriend. “I’m not some kind of fag, you know.” The university is down the road and these types tend to proliferate. That’s just the kind of thing you have to contend with, living around a place like Albany, New York, where the general population seems to consist almost entirely of students during the school year, sprawling and disconcerting to the senses. It seems superfluous and unnecessary to assign any individual character traits to these people, since they were all seemingly created in decanters, with very specific features assigned, so as to further cultural homogeneity and horribleness. I don’t have any say in this, really. It’s akin to living in a place with bad air quality. You have to know where to stay away from.

As I waited, and said line-waiter’s commentary became more and more outrageous, curiosity got the best of me, and I just had to take a look back at the person in question. As I did, his own eye caught my own, which must have caused such a jolt to his solar plexus that it caused his lip to curl in a Billy Idol-variety snarl—or what might alternately be described as the snarl of a wolf, teeth-barring and clearly out of its natural habitat. I still can’t tell if this was the most hilarious thing I have ever seen in my life, or if it was amazing because at any moment he was about to transcend himself and all of the limitations imposed on him, shredding his clothes in Teen Wolf fashion, before making an exit from the store. But beyond all of that, he probably just didn't dig my outfit.

The cashier eventually rang up my purchase, placed my shirts in a bag, and handed them to me. I then strode out into the world again on two legs. It was concrete and menacing.

We are ready for the floor
My coworker Joy is standing in the parking lot today as I arrive at work, waving enthusiastically to me as I pull into a parking space, her legs beneath a large midsection, like the small appendages of a barnyard chicken supporting too big a body. “Hey!” she calls to me as I get out of my car, “Have you ever heard the song ‘Love Shack’?” Yes, I assure her, I have. That song played like a motherfucker on MTV when I was a kid, creating strange notions of adulthood and the enthusiasm for hanging out in a shack in the woods, which in retrospect is a pretty understandable notion. “Yeah, well they were just playing that song on the radio!” she says to me. “Isn’t it great?” My enthusiasm is lackluster and grim-seeming at this time of the day and all I can do is nod my head in some vague gesture of agreement. “-Oh, you’re too young,” she says to me. “We used to love that song.” I do not doubt it, I tell her. It’s a real rocker.

On the drive in to work this morning I devised a scheme whereby I would construct a cardboard cutout automaton which would take over my position here at the office, unawares of my coworkers, who would continue to have base interactions with who they thought was me throughout the day, while I would conduct more worthwhile acts of business out in the world, hanging around at the pool or who knows where. I run this idea by Joy, who is also in the market for a similar, if not slightly more obtuse, cardboard cutout. “Well, what would you do all day?” she wants to know. “Oh, I don’t know,” I tell her, “Probably hang out at the love shack.” She laughs at this and is quick to remind me that I do not have a girlfriend, thus calling into question the whole nature of the love shack. Is it a mutually exclusive shack? Or do the lyrics imply some type of sexual ribaldry which is currently lost on my coworker? These are the real questions, the ones which require a little more of you.

Look, I tell her, it’s right there in the song lyrics: I’ve got me a car and it seats about twenty/ so come along and bring your jukebox money. She doesn’t really know what I’m talking about, but it seems moot, anyhow. My car seats about four, uncomfortably, and that’s with all of the backseat detritus cleared out. Let’s just hope they have some killer jukebox selections when we get there. Now if I could only figure out the cardboard cutout situation.

In twenty-seven years I drank fifty thousand beers
My brain is still sacked out in bed, in some concrete sleep, preceded only by my body, which is here at work, like a cartoon, making all kinds of erroneous decisions on not enough rest last night. And that’s the way it is these days. I don’t know if it’s the total absence of a brain which continues to cause me to ask questions like, why is the cashier at the mart telling the alien stranger of a customer in front of me about her husband’s psychological problems in the span of two grocery items? But I think it may just be some age old problem of mine, always asking too many questions when I just should keep my mouth shut and plow forward, like everybody else, hopeless and grim.

I really do need to be hit over the head with a baseball bat or for some surgeon to perform a minor lobotomy on me. Or something.

Last night I sat in a room full of strangers, dizzied and confused by the day within the week, which is only some microcosm of the years gone by. Some girl who was ridiculously stoned was telling us about how a neighbor would open up a nearby fire hydrant and let the neighborhood children play, which prompted the recollection of an entire litany of summertime stories. My own parents, bent on the illogic of the nineteen eighties, had a peculiar clown head sprinkler, called Fun Fountain (produced, amazingly, by a company called Wham-O. How could you ever deny a product which offers that quantity of fun, accompanied by a leering clown’s head, I don’t know). The main idea of this item was for water to pass through the clown’s head, which caused the hat of the clown to soar thirty feet in the air, at which point in time the participants would run under the spray of water. Perhaps as some oversight by Wham-O, however, the makers of Fun Fountain failed to realize what would happen when the clown’s hat came hurtling out of the sky from thirty feet above, maiming the young revelers below. Which was, invariably, the source of many bodily injuries and concussions. Which may explain some things. Nobody really knew what I was talking about except for the stoned girl. It didn’t really seem like it mattered, though.

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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.