It's easy to sleep when you're dead
Driving on 9 and actually listening to the song “Drivin’ on 9”, by The Breeders, realizing for the fourth or fifth time that Kim Deal has the nicest voice you have ever heard in your entire life, a voice evocative of smiting your foes and washing away all of your fears. Or for two seconds anyway, before you realize that you are actually diving on Route 9, the most homogenized stretch of road in the entire world, dotted occasionally by a Walmart Super Center. From what I remember, this road will bring me from points south into Canada and further. And it is not long before I begin thinking, could I drive to the North Pole? It does not seem entirely plausible, especially because the automobile I happen to be driving periodically emits a strange smell and makes a funny noise on breaking. And it does seem like some type of geographical improbability. But there must be a way, I think. Why not drive to the North Pole? I could be the new age Shackleton of mundanity and despair. I’ll drive anywhere, beyond the infinite, Space Odyssey-style.

It really only is the fourth day of unemployment, but already I seem to have settled back in to my natural pattern of scuttling around and hanging out in coffee shoppes. I’m like some kind of gerbil that has been removed from its natural environment for a time and is now being reintroduced to that same place, settling in too comfortably. And while the general nature of this environment does seem to be lacking in basic function and OK-ness, it does seem to feature an alluring spin wheel, which is the rote existence of my unemployed life. Already, I’m having an anxiety attack. Being asked what I’ve been doing all day elicits such perplexity in me that I cannot even begin to explain. Layers upon layers of incomprehension are produced from my lips.

Talking to my mother the other day. “You really need to find employment,” she tells me, before inserting, “for the rest of your life.” We both laugh a little at the gravity inherent in this notion. I’ve been running laps and she’s suggesting a marathon. It really is a little daunting. “Well, at least something permanent,” she says. My social security statement arrives that same day in the mail. Checking over the figures. This cannot be right, I think indignantly, breaking out a pad and paper for the calculations. I have to double-check the numbers when I find out that I have made a sum total of $66,000 lifetime. 2003 was a good year, bringing in nearly $13,000, which, on the imaginary line graph of the mind, drops off significantly to $6,000 the following year, and even less thereafter. I run these figures by a friend later. “That means if I were to make a wage that would be considered pretty meager by most standards, I would be living like a king,” I tell him. I later make the completely outrageous suggestion that I will somehow be prosperous one day, but I think what I mean is that I will hopefully make $20,000 at some point.

Oh, man: is it hard to own up to the facts. I will probably be homeless and destitute in two years’ time. The early morning glare will find me staking out a spot outside the Central Avenue Hannaford and fighting the other homeless people for premium loitering positioning. I ruminate over the possibilities of my horrible future as I listen to the radio. And it’s funny how you can find yourself getting so carried away by your own thought process sometimes. You work out some extended rumination in your mind which has no limitations, have an imaginary dialogue with a friend, all the while driving your car around. A routine trip to the corner store finds you crossing state lines. I look up and realize, much to my horror, that I am actually in the suburb or Clifton Park, 20 miles outside the city limits. Not exactly the North Pole, but close enough.

There's nothing accidental in this song
Summer couture: a pair of pants I cut into shorts and a two-dollar assortment pack of different colored t-shirts. Walking down the road, brandishing an ice cream cone, and showing off your bony kneecaps to the world. It feels pretty good. The rain has decided to let up a day and you feel your urge to crumble turning into a veritable wellspring of hope and good intentions. Whereas two days ago you felt the urge to climb to the top of a very high place and plummet off, you now find yourself smiling on the world, not even minding when the neighborhood crackhead makes fun of your curly hair. Yes, you think: everything is going to be alright.

I don’t have a job anymore. Apparently, to score 11th grade science exams they want you to have some recollection of the periodic table, which is absolutely necessary to locate the right answer. How I managed to emerge from college without a solitary shred of this totally essential information on my transcripts is a complete mystery. But it is real and it is true. Talking to the kid who sat next to me for a bit, I had to deliver the essential information. “You’re an English major?” I said, “You mine as well go ahead and drop out now and learn a trade or something. Become an auto mechanic or a plumber.” He laughed it off, thinking I was joking. But I was at least one part serious. There is absolutely no point in going to college, the main premise of these institutions existing, essentially, as a way for aimless adolescents to become less poorly socialized and get away from their parents. Sadly, the particular college I went to didn’t even offer me that. Where my guidance counselor was in high school, I don’t know. But if I had access to this information, it may have saved me years of toil, student loan costs, and useless knowledge. Instead, here I am, completely broken and sketchy.

Walking down the street, swinging my arms lackadaisically, hanging limply like telephone wires. Some guy in a suit is yelling indignantly into his mobile phone on a lunch break. “You tell him I said so,” he says into the receiver. “No, you tell him I said so, though.” The person on the other end is not getting the idea, however, as he keeps emphasizing this one point. I try to imagine what it is that needs saying and the individual that needs to be reminded of the saying so. The linkage has been broken in the chain of command, and someone needs reminding of something or other. There is some executive order that needs carrying out, and someone not quite willing to do the carrying. Who could say what the problem is? The guy hangs up his phone and glares back at me as I lick my ice cream cone. Strawberry, my favorite flavor.

Sometimes I think I’ve never thought about anything
There is nobody left in the dimly lit bar. Everyone has wandered off, to some other destination. But we have made it. And in the drunken fog of another morning, it makes you feel vaguely triumphant to have reveled to the end, out-reveling the revelers. And as such, we are going to drink another drink. M. is working at the bar tonight and pouring us whatever. She has suggested a toast, and A. does the honors, producing forth the most soul crushing toast I could ever imagine. “Hopefully things don’t turn out too horribly,” he says, as we all hold up our glasses. The record has skittered from its grooves, as we look back at him. “What kind of a toast is that?” we want to know. Who says that? “OK, OK,” M. rejoins, holding up her glass, “To happiness,” she says sweetly. And then we drink to happiness, and things not turning out too horribly.

I am awake this morning to the sound of an alarm clock going off. It beeps repetitively, the most grating sound in the world. And then, after a few minutes, having listened long enough, the insidious beeping turns into what sounds like a mechanical bird coarsely squawking in the air. I listen to this for a while before the beeping begins to sound like an air raid siren. And then I can begin to make out the specific syllables, sending out the message in its encoded beeping, getupgetupgetup, for a full ten minutes. I guess there’s nothing else to do, I realize, as I’ve been staring at the ceiling for long enough to wake the neighbors. Putting two feet down on the ground, testing for footing, that your legs are going to carry you the distance again. I tentatively stride across the room and shut down the alarm clock, which causes a silence to hang heavy in the air. It is another day. Old man time has wound up another 24 hours of possibilities and failures and I don’t know what. That’s something, at least.

An article I’ve read recently points out the nature of nothingness. Even if you’re doing nothing, it relates, that’s still doing something. And all of that lack of something will impact both you and everyone else in the world at some point in time. I think this over as I go through the day. The girl I converse with outside of work today has just had her day altered in some short term way by the conversation I have had with her. Were it not for this back and forth banter, it might have caused another moment to occur, inside. She may have met the person she was going to marry coming out of the bathroom, but I have just altered her destiny by holding her up for two seconds, while I tell her nothing in particular. In that moment, her potential life partner has disappeared through the doorway of an entirely different outcome. It was my fault, totally and completely, for talking long enough for this moment not to occur. Although, I may have just saved her life as well, sparing her the sordid fate of a roof beam collapsing on her inside and crushing her totally. My completely spontaneous act of free will, which is the lame conversating back and forth, has in fact changed everything, but we do not realize. And just doing nothing alters things, too. There are no end to the possibilities of something-ness and nothing. “See you around,” I tell my coworker, as I watch her open the door and disappear inside, sending her on her way to a now altered future.

I try to decide whether I’m OK with all of the fortuitous life moments I’ve had lined up thus far. If I’ve utilized them to the maximum degree, and what exactly that means. There is no way to determine, really. It’s not like buying some consumer item, where you can compare and choose. And that leaves you in kind of a precarious predicament, lifetime future-wise. Because how do you really know? It’s probably the not knowing that ruins it for most people. The complete inability to compare, which makes you feel like jumping off a bridge, unawares. If I were really taken by the aforementioned girl, how would I know I would not be just as taken by someone else? And in turn, how would she know, not being able to compare an infinite amount of choices and possibilities, that she would not be more taken with somebody else. And one million other possibilities. I guess, though, too, you could assert the fact that you should be happy with what you have, and to stop being such a douche. Although, that would imply the ability to shut down any and all thought process, a concept which I find myself with the staggering inability to get behind.

Spying myself in the bar mirror, hair standing on end as I sit slouched down on the stool, and cackling at some absurd late night infomercial, it’s hard to make an argument for OK-ness. No, the only case I can really make is the de facto. And it does not look good. But it’s too late to work out the logistics, and so I just watch the infomercial, instead. Extremely fit-looking women on oversized exercise balls are doing insane acrobatic movements, as they smile enthusiastically for the camera. A room full of women thrusting their midsections upwards, in perfect synchronicity, off of the ball and then back down again. Who knew rigorous exercise could be such fun? I shake my head in amazement of the spectacle.

Finishing up at the bar, we have to call a cab to get home. M. has produced the theory, with her bartender's wisdom, that if you’re going to pay for a cab you should make it worth your while by being inebriated to the point that you cannot walk. And since I’m really just along for the ride, I listen up. I’m not even sure if we’re drinking to happiness anymore or just in lieu of the possibility of it. In the bathroom, I can hear A. throwing up.

There’s a message out tonight/ nobody’s looking at the sky
A bruise on my grandmother’s arm which needs documenting. She calls me up in the middle of the day to tell me. “It’s spreading,” she says, “and I think we should get a picture of it.” For what purpose, I have no idea. But I do this stoically, documenting her arm where she has had blood drawn. Someone has inserted the needle wrong and it looks infected. She has drawn a perimeter around the bruise on the first day, and now the purple mass of infected skin is spreading out from its center, surpassing the marks she has made around the edges. Once I have captured the pictures, she tells me that I can share them with family and friends. I imagine showing by a friend’s house and producing the photographs of my grandmother’s arm. “Hey, check this out,” I would tell them, “look at all of the black and blue.” What she is thinking, I do not know.

In the living room I sit down, seeing the room for what seems like the first time. It’s kind of a weird room, with a definite nautical theme: a mirror that looks like the window of a ship, and various other accoutrements, which include pictures of authoritative-looking captains and bizarre wooden statues of similar things. Among all of that are family pictures on various shelves around the room. Looking straight before me, I discover what appears to be an item I’ve never noticed before. Down on one of the shelves is one of those cliché collage-type pictures you give to someone as a gift. It’s sort of a cut and paste representation of various family members from over the years, at barbeques and other functions which no one really wanted to attend. Most of the pictures are careful cutouts of heads, incongruously pasted in there, any old way. And within the tornado of imagery, dead in its center, is a picture of me. It’s a carefully cut head, pasted in among the many smiling heads and torsos of the collage. But the weird thing is, I appear to be crying. What the hell is this? I wonder. On further inspection, I realize these are not tears but the bleed marks of a magic marker unsuccessfully attempting to cover up the redeye in the shot. A pool of black tears stream from my eyes, and are actually running down onto some of the other pictures below. “Are you kidding me?” I ask my grandmother. “What kind of picture is this?” She has no idea what I’m talking about, has never noticed the black tears before. I am incredulous at the sight of this. “Someone actually gave this to you?” I ask her. I cannot believe. It’s totally outrageous. I’ve never seen a more horrifying picture in my life. As a child I had professional pictures taken, opting out after the third grade, when I had a bloody nose which produced a bloody booger to be immortalized in that moment for all time on my parents’ mantle. And here, now: this is the end result of that subsequent refusal of documentation, black tears. How the forces seem to conspire against you.

Out of doors and shaking my head at the picture. What the hell is wrong with people, I wonder, gnashing my teeth at the whole world. And what is up with this climate? I find myself simultaneously thinking. One day tropical storms and the next day cold. I would not be surprised, actually, by a burbling volcanic eruption that came from the great beyond. Or a flood. Or basically, any sudden onset of death and destruction. Do not ask me why. It will be nothing like that at all, however, as Joan Didion points out in The Year of Magical Thinking. It will be more mundane than you could ever imagine, out of nowhere. It will come in the back of a bus, in transit to nowhere in particular. Or sitting in the armchair while you ruminate on some obscure errand you have to run. Or somewhere else entirely. I had better think of something else, I realize, before I get carried away. What am I even doing here, I wonder? And then I remember: I came to document a bruise.

Burn down the room when I'm asleep
Out into the night, moisture hanging in the air like cotton, causing little beads of moisture to produce on your furrowed brow, as there you are, walking with two wobbly legs out in front of you, into the wide open abyss of the world which is growing darker by the minute. Thunder coincides with your entry into the night air, crackling up above. It sounds like they’re conducting some kind of shock and awe campaign two towns over, and what you’re experiencing, actually, is just that. You find yourself ducking almost, when the air masses rub together, exploding in the sky, as though you’re going to be hit by a bomb. But then you’re not, and you realize: that’s just old man nature messing with your head, making you look like a dork. Some kid I went to high school with incidently got hit by a lightning and never was the same thereafter, always sporting some docile look. And so it’s that same fear, more or less, that has me lurching forward and into my vehicle, which is the safe haven in the wide open parking lot of the abyss.

It is with no reserve of self-congratulation that I find myself arriving at the gym tonight. The day looms large like some kind of Homeric Odyssey, and going to the gym is like literally tacking a marathon on to the end of the day, just because. It’s these kinds of behavior patterns which have me contemplating my actions, and wondering if I should try hallucinogenic drugs. But then, that’s not entirely necessary, either. The world, when looked at from the appropriate angles, (or really, just looked at at all) provides you with the succubus energy of others radiating out into the atmosphere, as you try hard to dodge and weave, not getting any of that on you, like some sort of nuclear radiation. It really is quite enough. Changing out of my clothes in the locker room today, I overhear a conversation. Two guys, probably about my age, are talking things over in the rank atmosphere which only a men’s locker room could facilitate. “My wife,” one guy says with an almost reverent sense of awe, “she can eat whatever she wants and not get fat. Me, though, man: I eat all the right foods and still, look at me.” The other guy thinks this over, perhaps contemplating his friend’s figure. “You’re not too bad,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.” Still, the guy with the not fat wife is unimpressed. “She eats McDonalds, Burger King, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I just fear the day that I’m going to wake up and there’s going to be a complete stranger lying next to me.” I don’t pick up on what this guy is saying until a few moments later, when I realize. What he is talking about is not some one-night stand scenario, where he actually would wake up with a complete stranger lying next to him, but the day when his wife’s body changes. When the years of frivolity have caught up, and all of those Big Macs and quarter-pound hamburgers consumed result in the aforementioned description of a stranger lying next to him in bed. I almost cannot believe, but then there is no end.

Out into the actual gym. People are hustling in from the outside, as a storm warning is in effect, and the signs of that warning are manifesting in ominous gray clouds that stretch across the sky. The weatherman gesticulates wildly up on the TV monitors up above, as the warning repetitively flashes onscreen below him. We are on exercise bikes and treadmills and various artificial mechanisms for increasing the heart rate, watching the television monitors and simultaneously trying not to fall off of our stationary machines. And then, above the music, you can hear the rumble outside, and the onset of the storm. Suddenly, something overtakes me, as here we all are, looking in mirrors and contemplating our collective form, which really is so bad. I hope for a power outage that would turn this room to an ink black nightscape, little cartoon eyes hanging in the dark. Or maybe even something worse: A total blackout that would leave us all—you, me, and the two men in the locker room—reeling in the darkness of that particular illumination.

Creeping up into the sky
I was talking to a friend the other day and she said, “How was your day?” Taken aback by anyone who isn’t my mom asking me this question, I issued forth a confused look. “You’re actually asking how my day was?” I said. “Oh,” she told me, “well you usually don’t do anything and so I don’t want you to get all up tight about it.” That is, actually, an acutely stated character assassination of what my life has been like for the last few months. And so it was the not asking that was actually more representative of true concern. Thanks, G. I really do appreciate it. Because the canvas has been startlingly empty, and I do appreciate the not looking.

I tend to be the kind of human who thinks that life is life, and while there does appear to be various shades of prevailing and awesomeness, that is, incredibly, it. Sitting at a bar a couple of weeks ago with a friend, he looked over at me and offered words of shame and derision. “Look at us,” he said, “all slumped down in our beers, it’s totally pathetic.” Not knowing exactly what he was talking about, I asked for clarification. “What do you mean?” I said. “Where, exactly, should I be right now, and what should I be doing?” The whole sitting-at-the-bar slumped down in a beer was not quite the life-quantifying paradigm that he had imagined his Friday night to be. There was something better that he had worked out in his mind, but what I don’t know. He never answered my question.

While I may be pretty assured on the whole life-quantifying paradigm or the lack thereof, I understand the nature of boredom pretty well, and I think those are the delineations which most people try and transcend, most of the time. I happen to be particularly locked down right now, locked in the lock groove. You can feel it taking hold, the workaday workweek kicking it to you. It’s enough to make you want to get out of your chair, bounce your head off the wall, just to have something to talk about later. And so this I do, for no particular reason, just because. You can feel yourself at times, willing something into existence, like a ball of clay in your hand that you’re giving shape to, for no reason at all.

I am hustling out of work tonight when I see crazy N. It has been a long day and I’m practically running to my car when I spot her. I don’t know if it’s because we’re similarly bohemian-looking or if it was my strange declaration that we could have been brother and sister separated at birth, but we have become workplace allies. It’s nice. I wave goodbye to her as she approaches. “See you tomorrow,” I say. She makes fun of my lethargic goodbye. See you tomorrow, she repeats in the mock-appropriation of my farewell. I can’t help but laugh at her languid impression of me, which isn’t too bad. She asks me what I’m doing tonight, if I’ve got a hot date that I’m in such a hurry for. Sadly, I tell her that I am just going home. She cannot reciprocate any of my lethargy, however, as she tells me that she’s on her way to the park, to get drunk. “Are you serious?” I want to know. She produces from her car a large beer in a brown bag and tells me I should come along. I think this over for a minute. It has been a long day and I’m totally frazzled. Introducing something foreign to my nothingscape would be alien and unnatural. I just don’t know. It might wreak havoc on my tightly conscripted existence. But fuck it, I think, realizing this nice day. I’ll go, just because. And then, suddenly, all at once, you can feel it taking place, the amorphous ball of clay, and the narrative locomotion. Or whatever it is you call it.

Going places/ smashing faces
The grocery store by my work has a luncheonette that features two slices of pizza and a soda for $2.99, and so I can sit in there at lunchtime with the other workers of the world, the most unfathomably mundane place in the world. A ceiling-mounted television monitor plays nonstop deadpan drivel up above. It’s as though even the news is extra-mundane in the mid-day, nothing seeming to do much of anything. Still, though, there we all are, feigning attention, as there’s nothing much else to do. It’s kind of funny, this random cross section of workers: the postal employee and other uniformed workers of the world coalescing as one. I almost feel like there’s probably some fraternal handshake that I should be enacting before realizing it’s really only the fifth day, and I’m a temp. Already, I feel like I deserve a gold star. What the hell is wrong with me?

The way my job is set up is in numbers and production. Every exam you score is monitored, and while they like you to score efficiently, they want you to completely whip ass and do as many exams as possible, which isn’t entirely reasonable. One of my coworkers, I have been told, scores over one thousand questions a day, which desecrates my current total of about 250. I shake my head in light of this pronouncement. One thousand, I think, before totally spacing-out again. You end up grading the same question for days on end, and it starts kicking it to you. I have methods of breaking down the time, look at the clock, annoy the girl next to me, who has taken to punching me in the arm at full force. “Do you want me to move?” I ask her yesterday. “Nah, it’s cool,” she lets me know. Judy, the 70 year-old retiree, who is our supervisor, presides over us. “Do you want me to throw you out of here?” she says with authority. “Don’t think I won’t do it,” she says facetiously. Order is restored, which it often has to be.

Checking out some of the people in here. Everyone I work with seems to be in some state of transition, although such is the nature of temp work. There is no real stasis, and therein lies the beauty of it. A lot of these people are retires or recent college graduates, with nothing else lined up. I try and figure out exactly where I fit in. I’ve graduated college long enough ago that I probably defy the transitional student-type while still not being able to align myself precisely with the retirees. I don’t know. There does seem to be some kind of schism between the people who are really busting ass and the people who just don’t give a fuck, as evidenced by the numbers. I realize we’re all getting paid at the same rate, whether you score 200 or 1000 a day and so I take my time. Some vibe of paranoia manifests, though, as the monitoring system in place lets no mistake go unnoticed. One misstep and they’re calling you over to see why you erroneously scored that question a 2 when it should have a been a 4. No wrong move goes unnoticed. “Are you sleeping over there?” Judy wants to know. I’m probably about another day away from being fired, I realize, as my numbers are presumably low. Out in the hall, I see Judy and ask her, “Are my totals really that significantly lower than everybody else’s?”
“Oh, no,” she tells me, “they’re on average. I was only fooling around with you.” Oh, I say. I guess it’s settled, then. I’m not getting off so easy.

Like a brown bird nesting in a Texaco sign I got a point of view
A girl I know says things like this: “fuck this shit,” and, “motherfucker.” She will size up a given situation and then spontaneously issue forth the expletive of choice. It’s as though the burbling cesspool of emotion within her has become too much to handle, and she just cannot resist dispelling that feeling, little pools of ash and soot made palpable in the air. It’s similar to the reaction you have when you stub your toe on the living room furniture and just cannot hold back, which makes you feel that much better for two seconds. Such is the case when hanging around with people, you find their behaviors rub off on you. And I can’t help but feel some resemblance to the burbling cesspool of emotion in relation to this day: charcoal gray seems to stretch interminably across the sky, and perpetual rain clouds hanging over head, following you around, cartoon-like. You can’t help but think tersely under your breath, fuck this shit. There, that’s better, now.
_________________________________________________________________
I have explained my job to a coworker in the following way: “It transcends monotony,” I told him, “in a way that verges on actual torture.” He kind of laughed it off, opting instead to think I was explaining some Guantanamo Bay scenario, but he’s new yet and has all kinds of time to figure out how serious I am. Sitting before a computer monitor for large portions of the day does something to your brain. Aside from the cancerous tubers it’s planting in there, you find yourself on some distant island, the person next to you tapping on your shoulder as you, feeling the tap, respond a full five minutes later to her inquiry, the vibrations from the tap slowly making its way up your spine and into your brain, which is five minutes behind actual time. “Oh, did you say something?” you ask, as she looks at you with embarrassment for you over her question being answered ages ago by someone else. It’s quite a predicament. It’s a scenario which should have me thwarting all use of computers on my free time, but here I find myself, not getting paid, and sitting before the all-mighty compute. Tapping on my own keyboard has me thinking things, like, “Shouldn’t I be getting paid for this?” and, “Is it time for break yet?”

I am making a mixed-tape (CD) for someone, as a present. I did not think of this idea on my own, it was a request. And I am very obediently carrying out this request, as I do. Back in the day, when you would actually make a mixed-tape, with one of those Dolby noise reduction/ high bias cassettes, the process was seemingly a lot harder. You had to dig through your albums and find exactly what you were looking for, quing up the appropriate amount of space between songs. Exhausted and giving up in the end, the final product was the end result of being too tired to mess around with it anymore. But here, now, with every song you ever heard on iTunes, right there in front of you, the variations are endless. Endless possibilities and configurations do you have before you, to totally confuse and frustrate, making the old-school cassette model of the mixed-tape seem far less inferior, from an exhaustive effort point of view. I have actually been sitting in front of the computer long enough to have a sore neck. It’s a tough job, I reflect, and I’m not even at work right now. I should probably just go to the store and buy an actual present. But that would require venturing out into the day, where you will find me in a department store, with an entirely new series of problems, cursing out loud. Have we had the life as endless options via mixed-tape epiphany before? Yes, I think so. And it’s demoralizing to have to experience that again.

The tape (CD), on further inspection, despite time spent, is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life. If I were operating the decks, the patrons would be sprawled out on the ground and snoozing. Every song, even to me, has ended up sounding the same. My OCD was really kicking it to me, I realize, as I tried to match textures and fucked it all up. I’m contemplating all this as Kari-Ann makes an entry and hears what amounts to an aural funeral. “Kind of a gloomy mix,” she says. And she’s right: the worst. Leaving, really, only one response to this day, week, and year: Fuck this shit, motherfucker.

I could tell you things about this wallpaper that you’d never ever want to know
Two girls who sit next to me at work have made the acquaintance of one another. They have exchanged information, and have planned a night out somewhere. For some reason, I find this peculiar. Today is only the second day of the job, and from what I could tell they did not know each other previously. That means, in the time span of two days, despite little communication while actually working, which I’m there to observe, that would leave a period of time comprising a little over an hour for these two people to hash out a plan on lunch break, determine that they are compatible in some fashion, and then actually go about the process of hanging out tonight. It could be, though, admittedly, just my horrible social graces at work. I will be the first to admit that my sense of social etiquette probably needs a little polishing. I must have been absent during that class in grade school, and thus it could be that I am the one standing so far outside the proverbial loop in this situation that in my video camera of perception I have it all wrong. But I still find myself hard pressed to imagine a scenario at work where some prospective friend is sitting next to me, and who I make some plan with. I’m not ruling out all possibilities, but it seems unlikely to me, on day two.

One of those church-front billboards I see tonight offers the following words of wisdom: Make friends before you need them. I wonder which passage of the Bible that comes from. It seems like logical advice, however. Because you never do know when you’ll find yourself outside the loop, with no one, nothing.


I am hanging out with McBeans tonight. I’ve had a bad day today, and it is McBeans who elicits in me some modicum of OK-ness. It's probably akin to telling about how great your child is, when to the average onlooker, actually, the dog is a bedraggled and hairy mess, wagging its tail and slobbering all over you. But I love McBeans. If something were to happen to him, if he hustled the first path out of town on a neighborhood jaunt some night, I would be devastated. And this is something that I contemplate often. It debases things when you explicate them. But I realize that McBeans probably has no further recollection of me than as the person who comes to take him out at night, complimenting him with a bone once in a while. And in his bedraggled, tail-wagging enthusiasm for those things, I am probably horrendeously misinterpreting his need for food and strutting around the neighborhood. Something like this. It’s a matter of need-satiation, on behalf of both parties. Something is exchanged, but we call it something else, in disguise. The church sign points this out clearly, and at the same time articulates my shortcomings.

Most of the people I know are out on dates right now, eating and drinking in dimly lit establishments. And it’s funny how you find yourself alienated in your friends’ romances of the moment. I can’t really say I blame them. There are superior forms of satiation, obviously, which the church sign may or may not be alluding to. Whatever the case, I am totally fucked (not fucked), as I have no one. I look in my phone and realize there are people I could probably call up right now, hang out, drink a few beers. But these are peripheral friends, who would probably be weirded out by such an offer. No, it will probably just be the usual, I have decided; I’ll probably just hang out and listen to depressing music again. Drive around town, wonder where things went wrong.

In my head I chided those girls for their arrangement. It seemed so mechanical and weird to me. In those well conscripted plans, I had a glimpse of the bare-naked neediness in people. Human beings seem comprised of one hundred different compartments, and one hundred different needs. And it’s only in the absence of those things that they become staggeringly large and overwhelming, an astonsihing technicolor rainbow of sadness and despair. Clearly, those girls were way smarter than me.

Closed sign swinging in the window of a liquor store
You’ve got to love 88.3, the radio station that I’m listening to right now: one second they’re playing Meat Loaf, “Let Me Sleep on It”, with the famous play-by-play backdrop, which then insanely bursts into Huey Lewis and the News. Is someone messing with my mind? That does not seem far from plausibility. The Meat Loaf track you really just have to love, though. What may appear ostensibly as some completely obnoxious puritanical rant is actually, on further inspection, a horribly sinister attempt at “getting some” by saying what needs to be said. And then hilariously "wishing for the end of time" once certain promises are made, and the getting has been got. Pretty complex stuff at work there, you have to admit.

The first day of work, which also coincides with the nicest day of this spring. That is something, really: it has rained for what seems like a week, and now this, when I have to be sitting indoors, with not even a window to look out of. What my current employment scenario involves is sitting before a computer and scoring 4th grade essay exams, as part of some completely futile testing concern for the state of Massachusetts. We have been told at the outset that these exams do not figure into the students’ grades, and as you creep up into the higher grade levels, you see the complete lack of caring, little doodles and elaborate explainations of how you, the scorer, are a total “jack-off.” It’s pretty demoralizing.

Today’s questions is all about salmon, and how they’ve been displaced in the Sacramento River, in Asia. Years of pollution has sent the fish from their homes, and now they are attempting to reintroduce the salmon population to the dirty river. The scoring criteria is so low that most students receive at least some kind of score point for saying basically anything. But then, inexplicably, there are always those students who feel the urge to totally ignore the actual question, offering you instead some random digression which has nothing to do with anything, some kids foraying into the far off territory of exactly how much they like fish. That’s kind of nice, though, too, when you get an imaginative reply. Sometimes it’s as though they just cannot resist the urge, when the gears of imagination whirr up, and it’s not entirely their fault that they feel so totally compelled to tell you how cute salmon are. The days are long, and you these types of distractions. I hear a co-worker say, contemplating the clock today, “It feels like 20 minutes, and only 3 have gone by.” And it’s rough like that. I have to admit, though, I feel some vague amount of relief about this job, for ten more minutes. The carefully conscripted rationale for existing, which just does not present in the righteous declarations of, I didn’t nothing today. I have something now, an excuse.

The correct answer for the question, it turns out, is that the salmon will make it back up stream, and successfully integrate back into the river ecosystem. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, and it’s all pretty obvious. The student doesn’t have to say that, but that’s what they’re getting at. It seems like kind of weird plight, but there are probably worse ones. This is what I do all day. This is how I will be spending my time for the next few weeks. Think of me tomorrow, where I'll be wishing for the end of time.

I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men's room walls
I feel every bit the after-school special commercial that I’m representing today. Or alternately, the archetypal model of those anti-drug campaign commercials that were so popular in the 1980s, some half-bearded miscreant hanging around in his boxer shorts in the mid-afternoon, waving away the plumes of drug smoke hanging in the air, as someone makes an entry. It is, I am sad to say, a sordid and sorry scene. I hit people up with text messages all day, which only goes to confound our already convoluted relationships; they, usually at work and totally unable to fathom or deal with exactly what the hell I’m talking about: bizarre song lyrics and quotes, and things which can only really be determined on some Freudian level. It is, I have to admit, pretty fucking absurd, this existence I’m living. Any minute now, I know, some television camera is going to make an entry, or the law enforcement officials, like some Kafka short story, and I will be indicted on crimes against humanity.

That’s the whole thing, really. There’s that famous Lester Bangs interview, where he’s talking to Richard Hell, and he’s quoting Nietzsche, saying how blithe people laugh at everything and they don’t have emotions. As a child and thereafter I remember thinking everything was astoundingly funny, for whatever reason. And even now, this is how I work it. It’s easier to laugh than to cry, and a lot more fun. I do not know how other people work it. But I guess in lieu of all my hilarity, everyone seems startlingly serious. Or just plain sad, really.

Some girl I was talking to recently was telling me about how she didn’t sleep at night, because she was trying to maximize her free time by offsetting the time she spent at work. This had the added effect of being really tired in the daytime. I understand this point of view. I don’t know about other people, but I tend to conceptualize whatever you’re doing for 8.5 hours a day as your life. It seems pretty much statistically true that if you’re working 8.5 hours and then sleeping a recommended 8 on top of that, that means, excluding weekends, you’re only left with a little under 8 hours a day, and most of that time is probably spent running bizarre errands and standing in line at the post-office. I understand what she’s saying. You’ve got to take the power back, as both Chuck D. and, I believe, Iggy Pop said. But then, that’s really tiring.

Being ideologically opposed to other people sets up a dynamic of insecurity for others, especially when your point of view happens to reside in the minority. I experience this every time I go to someone’s house who happens to eat meat. “Oh, no, thank you,” you tell them, as they go to hand you a bib for the steak they’re preparing. Telling someone you don’t eat meat then segues into exactly why not, and this sets off the chain reaction which has them questioning their own sense of values (or the startling lack thereof). Laughing at other people’s lifestyle choices is the same thing. And living a life which is not in accordance with the way other people live, on any level, is the same thing. It calls into question they way other people spend their time.

I start scoring exams again on Thursday, which is what I do sometimes. I remember the last time I worked there, whooping it up with the people around me and getting yelled at, actually moving the woman who sat in the immediate vicinity to wear ear-plugs. It’s OK to do for a while; it’s something. I still don’t know I want to do with my life. I may never figure it out, but that's less funny now.

On the last day of your life don’t forget to die
One entry a day encroaches on self-absorbsion, and probably more acutely boarders on flat out narcissism. But you’ve got to love the blog: hundreds of thousands of hands out there, and millions more fingers, clacking away on the keyboard, transmitting some kind of message, something. To actually be published may appear to be that much more narcissistic: to maintain the belief that you’re worth believing in. But here in the blogosphere, where minute everyday occurrences are recorded with vigor and transmitted to the masses, is actually ten times more obnoxious. I like to think of the things that I’m transmitting as some sort of boomerang that I’m hurtling into the void, and which only I get any real satisfaction out of. But in the end, it’s strange to admit that that’s not entirely true. Two days away and the people are materializing in the void, sending things to my email inbox, in the pleading attempt of I don’t know what. Well, you get what you pay for, motherfucker, and as of one week ago, I noted I only had 10 cents in my bank account. Not exactly the prevailing wage, but I have time and my hands for another ten minutes, and so what do you know?

I’ve recently decided that I’m becoming uncomfortably American. I actually do things like watch portions of baseball games now. Whereas I may have tended to quote Chomsky, appropriating terms like pre-jingoism and other such non-sequiturs to annoy my parents, I now find myself actually watching an inning or so. I still have no idea what to make of basic television programming, opting instead to issue a confused look when the latest contestant of American Idol has been announced, but what do you want? That’s just right and natural. And if I ever find myself feigning interest in such things, I will know that I have banged a right hand turn that’s clearly taken me far from the road.

I honestly feel all around me, everyday, the cancerously malignant nature of this culture. Two kids talking on the radio today about hating America, and it’s hard not to get behind that sentiment. Things seem, simply, fucked. And it’s hard not to find examples on any front. A recent article in the paper cites an eighth grade child who is unable to spell America, erroneously producing, “Amarika” on a test and still receives a passing mark. It’s kind of funny, but it’s sad, too. And I think the best thing that you can do, truthfully, is transcend those delineations. To get away. Although, what does that even really mean?

On a recent trip to the dentist (which probably moves my bank account to the negative), the hygienist asked me, “What are you doing?” I gave her the short version, which actually is short, and while she has me there, supine, with her hands in my mouth, prattling on endlessly, the loneliest job in the world, she proceeded to tell me what all the other patients were up to. Apparently there is a lack of jobs among my demographic, I learn, which could have just been a nice ploy to mollify my own disconcerted explanation. But I learn all about who went to Harvard and who’s doing what. And then she deducts that nobody really seems to be doing anything. Even the Harvard student had a break down. Even the dentist’s son himself is working on some hippie commune in upstate, she says. What the hell? She wants to know. She has her hands in my mouth, so I can’t answer, and all I can do is produce a series of garbled grunts in agreement to what she’s saying. But the strange thing is, that seems to sum it all up.

On the way out, I notice an advertisement for some teeth-whitening agent, which features a gnarly set of teeth, with a caption that reads genetic teeth. Alongside that is the sparkly appropriation of bleached-white teeth that the product will afford you. “They now are making a product which makes your normal teeth appear inferior?” I say. “What’s up with that?” I want to know. She has no idea what I’m talking about, but tells me that I don’t really need that anyway. She says goodbye, and when I smile back at her, I imagine the gnarly teeth of the advertisement smiling back at her, which aren’t too bad, man.

Bartender says: hey we don't serve robots and the robot says no but someday you will
Bad hair day. The moisture in the air, getting right in there, infusing in the shaft of my hair, like some shampoo commercial with the accompanying diagram, and the end result has me looking pretty fucking insane. People will come up to me later, asking if everything’s alright, because I’m looking really frazzled today, and they won’t realize, all the while, that it’s just the hair. I come out in opposition to specific seasons, because it messes with my aesthetic. There are places on the planet where I just could not live because of the weather, entire continents which are just not conducive to my way of being. It’s kind of a familial thing. My sister, as a teen, had the same hair-managing issues. You could find her, her neck craned in some impossible yoga position, ironing her hair on the ironing board. What are you doing? People would want to know. And the answer, of course, was really simple: trying not to look insane.

Some dude I used to work with last summer had the same problem. An awesome mane of frizzy hair, did he sport. One day, he came in and it was gone. “What happened to your hair?” we asked him. “I don’t really attach any real importance to hair,” he said. And it seemed like a pretty reasonable idea. In lieu of the humid weather, it just seemed to make even more sense.

It doesn’t matter if my hair is long or short; I tend to represent insanity anyway. And whether the result of having sisters or the actual weather, I’ve tried all the products: the shoe polish tins of grease coife, the sprays and gels, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that I can put through there, and then walk into a tepid wind, having me right back the way it started. It’s totally crazy. It’s as though the ideas in my head have coalesced, and have made their way out in mangled tendrils. There’s no hiding it. There’s no way.

Complaining about this same thing to a friend one time, he listened intently to my lengthy diatribe. (These are the things I talk about, it seems, which just might have something to do with my fledgling alienation from others). Finishing with the part about how I have to wear a hat around half the time, in what is, apparently, the only way of disguising my hair-like manifestation of crazy, he revealed to me the following wisdom: “At least you’ve got something to complain about,” before removing his own hat, revealing the glowering bald dome I had evidently forgotten about during my speech. There are always people, it seems, whose complaining would be even more validated than your own. Try asking my ex-coworker about the importance of hair in the absence of it, and see what all he has to say about that. I really should just shut up, I guess, and acquiesce— move to Florida, and embrace the afro. It’s all part of my ten point program of optimism, where I look at my qualitatively bad situation, and from another point of view, imagine how it could be that much worse. Which I guess it could be.

The summer is almost here, the warm moisture-carrying winds have arrived, and they are ushering in an entirely new landscape of tonsorial wildness. You can see it on the nightly news, the weatherman pointing at the maps, and wildly gesticulating at the air mass in wayward motioning of the hands. There’s no escape, things are warming, and you cannot run. Already, I can feel the matted down hairs on my head reaching toward the sky. There’s no hiding. There’s no covering up. It’s going to be nuts. It always is.

You can’t be against forever/ let’s not and say we did
I was talking to someone yesterday who was consolidating her record collection, had purchased an iPod with the maximum storage capacity and was selling everything. It’s kind of a difficult argument to come out against, in terms of reducing clutter and maximizing space. But this particular person was nearly intrepid. “It’s kind of a scary prospect,” she said, “but it’s something I’m going ahead with anyway.” It’s still sort of a weird thing to do, though, attached as we are to our things.

A few months ago, I was in a used record store in Albany, and I noticed there was what appeared to be a pretty cohesive collection of records that just had to be a part of some person’s collection. There were CDs in there, not promotional discs, that were just too finely preened, and too representative of a niche interest. At the time, this notion filled me with horror. This person had died, I had imagined, and I was looking over his stuff. His mom, maybe, went into his apartment, and had to dig through the collected detritus, and now there it was, all of that intertwined sentimentality, for me to blithely dig through and purchase secondhand. But why had that notion filled me with such horror? I don’t feign any real attachment with any particular consumer items outside of the food I eat everyday, but here I was having an anxiety attack in the record store.

I attach sentimentality to sounds recorded on tape. Somehow, I can remember where and when I purchased certain albums, and if they’re particularly good, it will come to represent an entire timeframe for me. Listening to a mixed tape is like experiencing the fast paced montage of a not-so-short-term history for me. Two bars will transport me to 1996, and I’ll be thinking about something I may not have otherwise remembered. Sometimes it just makes me sad. But mostly, it’s alright—the ability to transport.

This particular moment’s record is lightweight countrified-rock. It’s a quality album, and in ten years I might remember the moment: the telephone conversation I just had, the way the sky looked, and how the keyboard felt beneath my fingers lithely moving over them. Because it is that good.

We tend to chide ourselves here in the post-everything landscape we inhabit. Whatever interest niche you happen to be into, there seems to be something to purchase based on that. And music is just one subset of that ideology. It becomes debased as a part of the consumer process, but it’s so much more than that, too. Looking at that person’s CDs that day weirded me out, because there I was, digging through all of that discarded sentiment. And the prospect of that happening to me was really overwhelming right then. Giving up all of those albums is the equivalent to me of giving up all of the aforementioned sentiment. And I rather like the clutter, the towering avalanche of what those things provide for me. Thinking about that kid got me really down for about ten minutes, but then I realized: he probably just bought an iPod.

The only dream left worth believing starts with animal shapes
What does it reveal about your psyche when you actually like days like this? I know, I missed my meteorological calling, insisting instead on reducing myself to the most pedestrian things, like talking about the weather. But really: these days are more comforting, now; there’s nothing to really be won in them. Because it’s rainy and horrible, so how can you waste this day? It’s the lowest bar possible, where lying in bed all day is acceptable, because hey, man: it’s fucking horrendous out. Luckily, I have things to “entertain” me, some vague set list of things that I find acceptable, although I have to admit that I’m cultivating some sort of adult onset ADD. It’s all the garish imagery, the flashing lights, and aisles of grocery marts that I’ll blame it on. More and more now, I just can’t pay attention. It’s the fasted pace montage of modern day living, and it wears you down. If you’re talking to me, I may just wander off mid-conversation, being staunchly reminded, and grounded with the massive chagrin that has me apologizing, and saying, I’ve got the check, please. It’s not that what you’re telling me is boring, necessarily, it’s just that I’ve been hanging out in the grocery store, and what, really, is going to top that particular experience, in terms of pure and unquantifiable consumer experience? I could get a job in there, I guess. Grocery Packers, the local store is hiring. It was my first job of all time, actually. A cardboard caricature I made of it in art class, in the ninth grade. What it features, basically, is me standing there, with a horrible mock and long hair, wearing the traditional dork smock they insisted you wear. It was, probably, the worst job ever.

Sometimes they would let you go out of doors, to round up grocery carts, where you could sneak a cigarette and hustle a ride in a grocery cart, narrowly averting a customer’s car. Maybe they would take me back, along side the mentally handicapped people they have in there now. Those people seem to like it OK. I would get to know the customers, say hello as I deposit your lifestyle items neatly into a plastic bag. When the lights would become blindingly neon and begin giving you a spaced-look, they could send me outside. Hurtle myself across the lot in a grocery cart, where I would crash into a patron of ye olde store, busting and irrevocably damaging their knee cap, where I would have to spend the rest of my existence paying for their hospital bills. They would work it out with the store, and as penance for things done wrong in another life, I would have to serve out the eternity of all time by working at the store. By this time the lights indoors would become blindly neon, and I would cultivate an uncomfortable resemblance to my fellow handicap employees. My ADD would only worsen and the result would be more chagrin and horrible blog entries and future embarrassment. I had better get back to the drawing board, or whatever you call it. My drawing skills evidently need some honing.

Hold onto your genre/ your genre’s got a hold on you
There’s something irritating me today, and before long I realize that it’s the radio. I have written this same sentence before, I know, and I’m writing it again. It’s not a matter of pretension that has me thinking such things either; the radio really is just plain and terrible. I twitch a little bit in relation to its horribleness and then switch to something else. And then I change the station again. Every station has up for offer today some horrible simulacra of simulacra. Every group is some weird parody of a group that sounds like a group that sounds like Nirvana. And then, through the static, something weird happens. I switch to 103.9 (“The Edge,” a station named for its own sense of daring) and they’re actually playing something that I have some vague cultural affiliation with: an indie rock song. Which then has me positing the question, how “independent” can that band be, now that it’s getting commercial radio play? Is this station really that “edgy?” And furthermore, what does any of this really matter?

Hanging out in a bar in Albany, New York the other night, for what seemed to be some kind of record release party for a “punk rock” band. The band, fashioned in the way of your latest hipster aesthetic, was a group of 18 year-olds doing some parody of that Sum 41 version of punk that has gone some distance towards totally killing music as of late. The kids were into it, though. There was a circle in front of the stage, where crazified young men with muscles did a dance involving no shirts and running around in circles. My companion and I looked at each other in vague amusement. It’s always at least somewhat amusing when a bunch of people get together and run in circles while doing a flapping arm motion, even while horrible music plays. Although, what better music is there to accompany dancing that is so bad?

I’m easily confused these days, out in public. I’m not quite at the age where I feel the complete and total disconnect that has me saying things like, “crazy kids,” but I can definitely see the chasm, the pulling away of the ship from the docks, and the distance between. I can more easily recognize the ornate cultural mishmash, the various shapes and forms, and their corresponding titles. A review I read today on Pitchfork.com reads, “If you’re lucky enough to see this band when you’re sixteen, it’s going to change your life.” And it kind of makes you wonder if all of those labels weren’t there all along, taking so long in your 16 year-old head to catch up to the amorphous forms of what you were experiencing then. I remember talking to my friend Suz Massen about this same thing over dinner a couple of months ago. “Being into indie rock in 1995 was a totally subversive thing,” she said, “and there’s not really anything like that anymore.” And I guess I side with the amorphous and undiluted interpretation of experience inherent in her description of that period in time. But everything’s changed around these days, in the post facto, everything goes type of landscape we seem to be inhabiting. It’s weird, turning on the television set and seeing how your (sub) culture has been incorporated into primetime television. The music you thought was somehow subversive was in fact just waiting for the proper moment, the appropriate test market, and the corresponding labels that would push the product form.

A fanzine that I’ve recently read has touched on this same issue 10 years ago. The revelation was that when your subculture becomes commodified, and the people who were beating you up in high school start hanging around at the venues you do, how do you react to that specific set of incidents? Do you abandon your stances and jump ship, or do you stick to your guns? (Do you, in other words, start wearing khaki pants and playing lacrosse?) The malleable mainstream marketplace will listen to and embrace any trend or fashion thrown down the cultural conveyor belt. They will stand there with open arms, and even if it’s something that had those same people deriding you years before, they will consume blithely and plainly. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you were to contact a polling company and set up a test market with a total hoax of product form, selling the repetitious beating of a jack hammer on pavement, it would be enthusiastically purchased by the masses in time. This has already been proven with any number of “artists” you see and hear daily.

I’m not sure where I was when my revelatory experience occurred to me. It could have taken place at any number of all-ages shows, in the absence of a mosh pit or much of a crowd at all. The music coming through the speakers occurred to me then, and it had me looking around and thinking, this is where I belong. These are my people. Because outside of these four walls, in the world, with its everyday degradations, this is where those people are not. But what kind of revelation are these kids having, I wonder? They’re probably really big fans of The OC. And revelatory experiences, I think, should fall outside the timeslot of primetime television. But mostly, what it broils down to, is I don’t want to be associated with those kinds of people. Even after all these years.

Watching the band at the bar the other night, I tell C., “This sucks, I need to get out of here,” which we do. On the way out, some tricked out rock guy makes eye contact with me from the distance, mistaking me for someone else. “Oh, sorry, man, I thought you were my friend,” he says to me. It’s cool, though. I can take it. I give this whole thing another five minutes in the limelight, until it’s all really outdated, when these haircuts are considered really passé, and things get back to normal—which is already such a horribly compromised word.

This is the worst vacation ever/ I’m going to cut open your forehead with a roof shingle
Romantic notions I attach to certain work situations. It’s hard not to look at the librarian, stoically putting away books, and think that must not be too bad. Or the postal worker delivering mail on a sunny afternoon, showing up at your place of employ long enough for you to be envious of that same person disappearing back out of doors and into the afternoon, little glints of sunshine coming down and through the trees. And it gives me hope. There must be something out there that’s worth doing.

It is with this mantra in mind that I tell myself I am going to apply for a job at the Book House today. Here is what is good about this work environment: there are two coffee shops in the immediate vicinity; there is no dress code; there is no small modicum of attractive women going into the hair salon right next door, and some of them must read books, too. Additionally, I imagine, there must be some faction of people within the actual bookstore who may even share in a similar interest set (whatever that means). Which begs the question, who would be an ideal co-worker? Someone like me? Maybe yes and maybe no. I’m the kind of person who is hardly tolerant of other human beings, as has been recently been pointed out to me by my sister. “People like you, you asshole, but you always think everybody sucks,” she admonishes. That’s not entirely true. It’s not that I dislike others as much as it is that I cannot fathom why these people haven’t attended the same cult-deprogramming center that I’ve attended, which has them preening interests that seem to me worthy of laughing out loud. Although it’s hard, in lieu of this same discussion, not to think of Sartre, and his axiom-crusher of a proclamation, “hell is other people.”

___________________________________________________________________

I gave myself a sweet haircut today, in anticipation of a potential job interview. It’s a totally haphazard process, and whether the ensuing result has me looking more employable is up for discussion. It does seem to be shorter, however, and so that’s something. Also, I do not iron, and so I put a jacket on over my wrinkled shirt, so that I am, at least to me, thoroughly employable-seeming, which is a nice illusion. When I find myself satisfactory, the smooth veneer of a young go-getter complete, I depart for the bookstore. Somehow, despite the fact that I could be there in minutes, I decide on taking the roundabout way of getting to the bookstore. A recent myspace bulletin has astutely pointed out that there are various ways to Stuyvesant, and why I take the longest way possible from my house is a total mystery. For the effort, I tell myself, despite having a lifesavings of $11.50, that I will reward myself for filling out the application by buying an album that I want, which is sadly tantalizing, but which propels me forward nonetheless.

Arriving to the store, I am almost promptly run over by a passing car. My own passing is something which fills me with horror, more now than ever. I imagine my paltry and wasted life put on display in some obituary somewhere and the thought of that fills me with the kind of legwork that has me dodging the vehicle and hustling to the curb, where I contemplate this some more. A human life, once passed, is measured in the most base and intangible ways. So condensed, it is, once gone, the small type print hammered out onto paper is all that is left. My life "accomplishments” might be meted out in the way of various schools I’ve attended. And that is, incredibly, it. Not exclusive would it be of things that actually mattered: the sweet dance moves I’ve cultivated over the years, a homeless person’s aesthetic, a magnetic hum which attracts women over the age of 40.

Shaking off this train of though, I go inside the store. My romanticized notions of hip bookstore clerk are quickly grounded with the sight of various older-looking woman, who stare at me as I enter. Quickly, I make a b-line for the non-fiction aisle. There are various people looking around the store, who are probably on a lunch break, languidly scanning the science fiction. Occasionally, a worker breezes by to put something away. And I suddenly realize, all at once, that this is the most mundane bookstore of all time. Not even the tinkling of jazz graces the store today, just the occasional customer ignominiously asking for a book he can’t find. And I realize, I cannot work here! This is horrible, which elicits another thought: Initially thinking of filling out the application has quickly segued into some vast rumination about filling out an application, and then that becomes one more layer detached as I think about all of that. It’s like the third tier of unemployability, which seems like it should come with a pretty good insurance plan. But it doesn’t, and even though there’s a record store on the corner, I realize, since I suck so thoroughly and completely, that I won’t be making a purchase today. And probably not tomorrow, either.

You're watching TV/ I stay up all night
Biblical buckets full of rain coming down, standing on a street corner, just because. And then, moments later, being snapped out of your reverie by people, who are your fellow humans, hustling on by to some obscure destination. Particles of moisture are collected in cloud formations and then released, to fall hundreds of feet down and get on your jacket as you jog to a lunch appointment, where you will be shifting in your seat because of that same water saturation. “Hey, what’s your problem today?” your companion will ask, and you will be at a loss for what to say— Not realizing, all the while, that it relates back to the soaked jacket you have on, your irritated skin, and moisture particles.

The balmy early spring weather of last week has been harshly juxtaposed with a duo of rainy days, encompassing your brain and making you wish for some small respite, a kiss on the mouth or otherwise. And I don’t know if it’s the weather, but everyone I know seems horrendously depressed. In fact, I can’t think of one person I know who hasn’t expressed a sentiment within the last few days that isn’t totally certifiable. And believe me, the bar is low. But even then we find ourselves with our legs just all caught up in it, falling to the surface and not too amazed by the results.

How can that be possible? Antidepressant commercials have broadened the diagnostic spectrum to include just about everybody in the viewing audience. No one, actually, is absolved from at least one of the symptoms they’re describing, as the cartoon iconography garishly dances around the screen, the lugubrious blue blob of a figure demonstrating a sad frown before being given the pill that has it smiling like a motherfucker. And it’s not hard to imagine that, before long, we’ll all be there, too.

One girl I know who used to take the aforementioned medication describes her experience in the following way: “It neutralized me to the point that you could have exploded a bomb next to my head and I wouldn’t have minded one bit.” And so I guess the consequence is yours (ours). The morning paper today reports that the USA comprises 5 percent of the global population and consumes a quarter of the world’s resources, making this country the most accommodated place on the face of the earth. In relation to that statistic, it’s kind of unnerving to realize that this same country spends in excess of 6 billion dollars a year on antidepressants. It’s pretty weird.

Meanwhile, as I stand there in the rain, a middle-aged man comes by. He looks familiar from somewhere, like a child star in older age. He has been through the wringer, maybe. The initial success of his sitcom did not entirely pan out. And now he is here and there I am. He looks twice as he’s about to pass by and then asks, “Buddy, are you OK?” Yes, I assure him, I am. But he is not assured. “Well, you were standing there the last time I walked by, and you’re all wet.” I was just about to go, I tell him, which I do, walking away, and realizing for the first time that I’ve never owned an umbrella.

School is out/ what did you expect
Nothing facilitates the springtime weather like Pavement coming through your well lubricated speakers, garnering that dumb as fuck dance step you do. You can almost see the specific notes coming through the air and making their way into your cranium, and as you do, making things cartoonishly OK. I’m old enough now to have seen some these albums reissued, and I’m sure admitting that I listened to Pavement back in the day is no better than listening to them now. But whatever. There’s a lot of messed up things in my life that I don’t want to own up to, and one of which is, well, never mind. One of those things, though, sadly—now that I can see you’re interested—is the fact that I missed the only Pavement show I had ever planned on going to, in the summer of the 11th grade, by sneaking out of the house to, among all things explicable, hang around outside a Grateful Dead concert. I can’t really relate the specific circumstances surrounding the executive decision to go to the Grateful Dead concert, but it may have had something to do with the fact that my best friend Jorge was living with my family at the time, and we had to keep our streak of 100 consecutive days of pot smoking alive. Either that or the more simple fact that it was really easy to sneak out of the house and there were two bicycles readily available and nothing better to do. We pedaled through a bad neighborhood that night, narrowly escaping the more literal stoning of rocks, and then stashed the bicycles in a hedge, to entertain the prospect of illicit drug purchases. This was my first revelatory cultural experience involving sucking the air out of a balloon, which had the ensuing result of walking out into traffic so plainly and calmly. Escaping the situation alive is in hindsight the real revelation.

Showing up at home the next day, languidly pedaling our way into the neighborhood as dawn crept into view, something definitely did not feel right. My mom, in the McGruff rime dog way of all-knowingness, had sniffed us out (asserting a certain paranoia towards the 1984-style of governing right off—my mom always had some amazing penchant for total omnipresence. There was really nothing you could get away with as a young juvenile, skipping school or anything else. If you had the car, it was pretty much assured that she would be at the stoplight next to you). Somehow, the missing bicycles, the disappearance, all added up to revoking the planned trip to New York City, and thus the prospect of seeing Pavement was dashed. It’s cool, though; Pavement will probably regroup in one of those lucrative late day career moves which has so many of your favorite groups getting back together. They’ll probably suck by then, but it’s cool because I won’t have to demonstrate my dance move, although “Summer Babe” will always make me think of far away things. Which, actually, aren’t too far away. And that's pretty good, I guess.

In a horror movie when the car won't start you give it one last try
The family unit seems to have sufficiently dissolved. When this happened, I do not know. One second it seems like you are ten and taking vacations to tropical southern locales, and the next thing you know it’s Easter Sunday 17 years later and you’re calculating the coordinates of disaster. The family unit is probably more closely akin to a burning building, now. I tend not to notice until it’s a holiday, and then it all becomes clear. I still hang out, make a go of the Easter brunch, but it’s hard looking at the fledgling form and the coming apart at the seams. “We are definitely a lively bunch,” I offer to the table today. Which may just elicit the kind of responses I’m more used to getting around the house these days. “Oh, it’s you,” my mom has said to me on entering recently. She doesn’t mean it, really. It pretty much all just broils down to her secret desire to run off with some sketchy hillbilly, and my further solidification of the overarching identity as Failure. It’s cool, I can take it—for about the duration of time it takes to get yelled at for eating all the pancakes. “See you around,” I say before making an exit.

Out of doors and into the sunny afternoon. Thankfully, there seems to be one location open today, as everyone I know seems to be involved in the intricate webs of social obligation and backyard barbeques that tend to characterize this holiday. That’s one thing I happen to be liberated from at the moment while simultaneously being burdened by at the same time. Border’s bookstore turns out to be my refuge. I can hang around in there, blend in with the sketchy vagrants, listen to albums I cannot yet afford at the listening station. That kind of thing. They are playing Cesaria Evora throughout the store today, and immediately I’m experiencing the placebo of context. The first girl I ever loved was into this album, and I remember listening to it on the floor of her dorm room at the elaborate liberal arts college she attended. The window was open and looked out over a courtyard, with the faint aria of college students coming and going. It did something to me, that song, which I had never heard before. It was a lightning rod of emotion that seemed to transcend genre and style and language, and hit me right between the eyes. And as we sat together on the floor that day, we cried and cried. And now, as a result, whenever I hear this song I tend to have the type of reaction that has me jogging for the exits. I know from my own experience a couple weeks ago that other human beings do not want anything to do with others who are offering up some wanton emotional display. And that’s understandable. So it’s out of the doors and into the world, crashing into people who are making an entry through those same doors, and getting in the car just in time to experience the paroxysm of emotion that seems to accompany listening to International music for me.

There seems to be no room for me outside of sadness today, on a day that is supposed to be about rebirth and rising up. I see a bumper sticker today that reads, Life is the school and love is the lesson. But mostly, the lesson seems to be alluding me. Or at the very least, showing up in song form long enough to remind me how sad things end up being. The gods, clearly, are messing with me, and they seem to be demonstrating a proclivity for Cesaria Evora. They could have better taste. But then, they could have worse, too.