Have you got the new look
The sheer insanity of the outfits alone at my workplace is enough to bust a gut laughing. There’s this theory around the blogspot that one’s fashion sense usually reaches an apex around the formative high school years and is subject to change slightly thereafter. But often the espouser grasps onto this sense of self and does not let go, inadvertently revealing a time capsule of the formative years in the process. Just today, for example, we saw a woman walking down the hall with tapered jeans and a neon green T-shirt, causing us to look twice. Because, really: who does that? Clearly this woman is ascending (descending) from the 1980’s, and invoking an era we are just totally removed from, in a painfully neon green get up. It’s as though she passed and in the meanwhile did not realize that people are now ironically appropriating her same outfit, in some strange turn of events which even we cannot fully explain. “I feel like I’m in a Brett Easton Ellis novel,” someone has recently said to me in a nightclub. And, uh, yeah: it’s 80’s night, every night. Also popular around the workplace is that strange variety of shirt we have come to refer to as the old-lady, which is basically any manner of shirt that demonstrates an illogical print thereon, like flowers and leaves. Yeah, we know you’re really into the seasons and all, but that shirt is the most insane thing we’ve ever seen in our entire lives, we want to shout. Although, in conjunction with our other random outbursts, that would almost certainly result in the well established opprobrium we’ve been cultivating around the office, and so we’ve taken to snickering at a low volume in the corners of rooms. When you really add it up, though,--beyond the awe-inspiring sweat-suited masses which, we swear to god, we see in work,-- nothing is more of an affront to the senses than that mall-boy kaki which so many of our peers seem to prefer around these parts. It is, really, the screamingly tacit suggestion of your utter vapidity, and we’re pretty much sure that it is an offense to humanity on some, uh, individual basis. So, please: try harder.

All of this, though, has resulted in some minor form of self-reflection, and the end result is equally grim-seeming. We like to think that we understand the nature of commodification of fashion, and basically everything, and we are so Above. But the sad truth is, that we often appear as though we’ve just crawled from a gutter. After chiding Kari Ann recently, she retorted by pointing out that we look well-suited for positioning outside a local Hannaford. But it’s probably just a problem of interpretation. Or something. That’s what I think, anyway.

Make love to the camera obscura
Doing a blog is a lot like signaling on a one-way road in the middle of the night, with no other cars around. Annoying blinker blinking, and for no other reason, you discover, than this is what you’ve always done, right hand turn and into the drive. Music blogs at least receive complimentary merchandise or tickets to a show. But outside of your own edification, doing a blog doesn’t really hook you up all that much. Mostly, it will serve as a record of how you have lived, day by day. And that’s scary. Your own memory at least gives you the liberty of forgetting. But writing things down offers you the virtue of permanence, indelibly chiseling things out and putting them down, for good (or bad—there are at least a handful of people who have totally alienated me over things that I’ve written about them. Although I guess that makes sense, because there’s no way to gingerly talk about someone’s mental state and their DSM situation without them getting really mad at you, even if you were only joking around. Sorry, dudes: I was totally kidding).

It is some other day in Information Systems, and I am clacking on the keyboard. There really is no other way of describing this sound than clacking. Alternately, I guess it could be interpreted as the sound of a crystal meth fueled hamster losing control of its limbs on the desktop, and I could support that analogy given that that’s the way I feel sometimes, in a coffee-addled state. But it would still broil down to clacking. And it’s nice that blogging is basically indiscernible from what I usually do all day, entering information into a computer. I could be writing the great American manifesto over here and it appears more or less like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s good. The weird part about my job is that I have no idea what all of this is tied to, and what difference any of this makes. The work I do is never checked, and nobody ever says a word about what I'm doing, casting an occasional glance in my direction when I stray from the site and peruse the Brooklyn Vegan. But that is it. Although, maybe it’s the whole 1984 aspect I always overlook, thinking I’m being overlooked. My last job had some rigorous monitoring system in place, and the same could be true of here. Some nerd could be upstairs right now, looking over my figurative shoulders. I don’t really know.

The whole upshot to what I do all day is that it requires virtually no thought process on my part. I have read that while viewing television your brain activity is one step reduced from sleeping, and sitting before a computer monitor all day must be one step beyond that, entering a state of all-consuming brain dead-ness. I have come to refer to this as the Time and Space Bathtub, as it is at once flowing and yet contained, although rarely very cleansing. Sometimes I find myself on the outer bounds of consciousness, ruminating on some theory before being called back by the voice of a coworker. “Don’t talk to him,” I hear someone saying today, “He won’t listen to you.” And it’s true. I won’t. I am far off, in the bathtub, the events of the past few days and weeks coalescing in there and floating to the top of my consciousness like a dream. I feel a tap on my shoulder and come to. It is my coworker Joy, her face itself appearing to me dreamlike and large. “Hey, sleepy: it’s time to go,” she tells me. Oh, ok: it is time to leave now.

Outside it is a jet-black night. I am going to the gym and it makes me feel domestic. We have come from our jobs, and have come to the strip mall plaza to work off a few calories lifting weights and riding the stationary bike. I am hustling in when I see Kristen, the girl from the temp agency who got me my job. “Oh, hey, what’s up?” I ask her, as she holds the door open for me. There’s nothing atypical about her, nothing divergent in her persona that I can put my finger on, and it makes me feel vaguely uneasy. She’s probably really upset that she’s missing Dancing With The Stars right now. “—Hey, Ryan,” she says to me, “How’s the job going?” The real answer might be something along the lines of the monotony is wearing me down, and I feel suicidal and grim, but I leave out the whole time and space continuum, giving her the straightforward answer. “It’s going well,” I tell her. “Everyone I work with seems pretty cool.” I’m startled to find myself saying this, and wonder simultaneously, even as the words are issued from my lips, who I might be referring to, but she seems to like it anyway. “Well that’s really great, because they like you too,” she says. “They called and said you were doing a really great job.” I almost cannot believe, and have to clarify. “Wait, the job I’m working at now called and said this?” She reassures me, telling me once more. “Yeah, they said you were a really great addition to their office. They seem to really like you over there.” She smiles at me and then disappears into the gymnasium, where a small gathering of people are gently hitting a volleyball over a net, leaving me dumbfounded.

I seem to be particularly locked in, for better or worse. It’s nothing to really situate your future on, and it doesn’t come with a sweet benefits package. But the voyeurs are really into it. And that’s something, at least.

If you close the door the night could last forever
The downstairs neighbor has erected a sign: Happy Halloween, it says, please take a handful of candy. A pleasant-looking jack-o-lantern adorns the message, and a bowl of candy hangs below. There’s something really endearing about all of this, standing in stark contrast with the proclamations I made last night. If people are coming to the door, I said, I’m just going to barricade myself upstairs, and turn the lights down low. I’ve had enough of Halloween one week ago. But our neighbor has gone the distance, actually putting out candy even though she’s not going to be there. She remembers, maybe, going to the dark-lit house as a child and the feeling it gave her. The flickering lights inside, and the damnation offered to those people shirking the spirit. I don’t know. But it touches me, inside. And somehow I come to take this as an example of not only the thoughtfulness of our neighbor but womankind as a whole. None of the male friends I know would ever do this sort of thing.

This feeling lasts for about twenty minutes, as I make my way downstairs at 6:00 O’clock to find the hallway shredded, the sign missing, and all of the candy gone. Out of doors a sea of miniature miscreants are everywhere, haphazardly making their way from house to house, as their parents stand in the street. Good god, I think: where did all of these people come from? And what the hell do they want with me. I feel totally encroached upon, and my late night proclamations validated. What is this age-old tradition? I remember my uncle telling me how they've recently adapted Halloween in Norway, and how the general populace was just about outraged by the ordeal. And here I find myself thinking in the same hackneyed language of a Norwegian: Nei! Go from our house, little ones. Get away from here. There’s the bell now. The lights are flickering inside, but there is nobody home, it appears.

Addendum****

You think you’re radical but you’re not so radical
We don’t usually apologize for posts, but at second glance we’re going to have to come clean and say sorry. That last one was a real crusher. We’re pretty much certain that it is our main aim to jettison our two readers and go away forever. But as it happens, we just keep on living and so forth. And then somehow all of that makes its way forward, to the Inter-Web, which elicits some overwhelming reaction in others. But the truth is, we think we were just mad about the way we spent yesterday afternoon, and were in a bad mood. And were a little freaked out about seeing our peers the other night, who seem bent on becoming depressingly middle aged, and so that’s why we were feeling so alienated. It was really good to see that one guy who kept giving us a complicated handshake between beers, and reminding us of ten years ago. Although, in truth, it was not too good. We will try and muster a smile now, eat a pill, get back to business. That girl will be walking by our window shortly, jogging in ten minutes late, and so that’s something. We have practiced our inflection in the bathroom mirror, and now we just have to work on the smile. So, uh, yeah: sorry.

It’s All Over But the Crying, The Sequel
Halloween is on the periphery and so the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer is playing on the movie channel. The main premise, from what I could gather, is that a bunch of teens who have really nice lives are about to have something really shitty happen to them. This is the main setup for most horror movies, but it’s also the standard plotline for classic literature as well. There’s usually some problem that occurs, some conundrum which has to be overcome. And depending on the mental landscape of the author, the novel will end either good or bad. This is how it happens in the aforementioned movie: it opens at a beauty pageant, and the portrayal of high hopes and dreams, all of which come to a halt when these totally unlikable people hit and run a fisherman walking down the road in the middle of the night (and then, in a total oversight by the people who wrote this sad act of subversion, decide inexplicably not to report it although the driver was not drinking and it was an accident, opting instead for discarding the body in the sea). From here on out, or for the next 20 minutes that I decide to watch this movie out of pure inertia, things get really bad as the main characters are haunted by the person they have hit. And you find yourself cheering for the destruction of these people and their nice lives. I never really do find out how it ends, but probably not without a whole bunch of bloodshed and at least one or two characters who survive, which has the built-in capability of a sequel and more bloodshed. They will rejoin, and things will be more or less OK as before, but not without the hint that something bad may happen again.

The main exception to the demonstrated plotline happens to be if you’re reading existential literature, which almost always begins and ends bad. If you’re reading Kafka or Dostoevsky or something like that, you can pretty much rest assured that it’s going to depress you in some all-encompassing way. Kafka’s Metamorphosis begins with the protagonist waking up one day as an oversized bug and then experiencing the ensuing torture and alienation from his family, who throw apples at him and taunt him before he dies a lonely and abject death. And it’s hard, in the end, to figure out which plotline is more honest and true to life. While the good, bad, good plotline seems most rewarding to read, it might be less true than the bad/ bad plotline. But it may also be a matter of perception, and require something of more of the reader. If you have an upbeat outlook you might be more prone to think that things end awesomely, in the end. And if you’re the proverbial half-empty kind of person, you might be more prone to reading the Existentialists. I’m not really sure.

It was in the spirit of horror that we went to a Halloween party last night. I looked futily for a costume before deciding on the following mantra that I told to anyone who asked: fuck Halloween. I really just cannot be bothered with all of this costume wearing. Although, the truth is, I really just cannot be bothered with much. And it was in this spirit, probably, that I found myself sitting alone in a corner, not costumed or having too much fun, which seems to be a fairly consistent with how I normally situate myself in a room with others. When people ask me where my costume is I tell them that I’m a raging alcoholic before swigging from a bottle of whiskey. I am, in truth, not the best houseguest. And it’s not too long before I realize, amongst the revelers, that this party may just be the preseason warm up to the high school reunion that’s coming. Most of these people look vaguely familiar from somewhere, but it’s disorienting because everybody’s in costume. And I probably wouldn’t recognize anyone anyway. The only person I really recognize is AL, but he’s not in costume anyway while continuously petitioning for the best costume award.

It’s hard to say what my deal is exactly. I continue to romanticize my life as though it’s taking place within a movie. And it’s always the epiphanic moment of realization, the static moment of crappiness which reveals itself to me. All I want to do is get the hell out of here—go back into my attic lair and get away from here. I am ruminating over a faux-headstone when some girl dressed as a vampire comes over and starts talking to me. We went to the same high school, although we have no apparent recollection of one another. She works for the state and takes the bus to work everyday, she ends up telling me. We talk a while before settling on nothing more to say. “Say,” she says before walking off, “you’re one of those loner-types, aren’t you? One of those guys who just hangs out by himself a lot. That’s the way you seem to me.” I have no idea of how to respond to this inquiry. Is it that transparent, showing right through my veneer of attempted civility? “—Uh, yeah, I guess,” I chortle, not knowing what to say, “—I guess I kind of am.” I check my watch once more before realizing, much to my horror, that the clocks get set back an hour tonight, and that this night is never going to end. Most of the revelers will interpret this as an extra hour of partying, but to me it has come as a sign from above that I have done horrible things in a prior life, as I have to give said revelers a ride home tonight.

The plotline of your own life, it turns out, is easily discernable in hindsight. It’s easy, in the here and now, to look and see, peeling back the curtain and taking a look, to know exactly where you have come from, and how things add up. And maybe it’s the future that’s not uncertain, usually indicative of the past. A random look at my bookshelf might reveal all kinds of things about me, but I haven’t really read anything in a while, opting instead for b-grade horror movies. I end up telling a friend what I did today, that I watched part of I Know What You Did Last Summer on TV. “Oh, that’s a pretty good one,” he says to me. “Did you know they made a sequel?—I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or I Will Never Forget What You Did Last Summer?” He thinks it over a second. “No, wait: I think it was called I Will Never Ever Forget What You Did Last Summer.” I cannot believe. It seems inconceivably bad, but I guess it could be true. Happy Halloween, motherfuckers.

I love you I love you I love you: what's your name
Listen: we have something to report up here in the headquarters: we are in love. Not with anyone we actually know, however, which is defeated by our x-ray vision, always finding the worst in people, but with a total stranger. Said person is a girl we see walking by our window everyday, and who, we are pretty much sure, does not actually exist, as we’ve never actually seen her outside of our window frame, veritably dashing into the hall every time we see her walk by, only to find no one. And, we know: this is a little creepy, as our coworkers have even taken note of our affections for said stranger, chiding us with this fact daily, but we do not care, because let us repeat: we are in love. It’s hard to say exactly what it is about this person that we find so appealing in particular: if it’s her not-quite-skinny that appeals to us-- which is just one in an entire sucession of late day predilections that we cannot quite explain. Or her being consistently fifteen minutes late to work everyday, which is also like us. Or the general sense of uncaring that she seems to demonstrate about this fact. The truth is, we do not know. But we intend to find out, erroneously dropping a line like, “—I see, sometimes, walking by my window,” scaring her away once and for all, as we sometimes do to people. No, we will practice something better in the mirror, actually, in the bathroom, and then we will set to work. That is how is should be. We will keep you posted.

It's all over but the crying
An invitation to my 10-year high school reunion has arrived in the mailbox. I pick it up, contemplating the small print. Please join your graduating class for an evening of dinner and dancing, it says. I try and think of a situation which would deliver more trauma, something conceptually more grim than this scenario, and have trouble coming up with anything. Even death itself can be less methodical and slow: a car crash can occur instantaneously, truncating your life abruptly and swiftly, but an evening of dinner and dancing could last for hours. I show Adam the invitation, who is also a member of my graduating class. “I’m not going,” I tell him. He chides and goads me on before I tell him more definitively, “No, it’s final.”

Life has turned out less than optimal. These gatherings only seem to provide a forum for putting on display lives that have turned out optimally, and then giving those people others to situate their own optimal-ness on. And I’d just rather not be a part of the situating process. My own life seems evocative of Kilgore Trout, and gargantuan portions of failure, which is not something I want to be showing around. Although it does occur that Trout touts his failing. And so maybe that’s something.

We are sitting in front of the house when Adam brings this up again. Drunk on a Wednesday night. We laugh at this fact. It is 2:30 am, and it feels pretty low. Shouldn’t we be somewhere else right now, doing something more adult? But it’s true that we need some kind of diversion from our jobs, which just happens to come in the form of a mid-week bender. “I’m going to go to the reunion,” he tells me, before offering up his carefully conscripted rationale. “I know it will be the worst day of my life. And that everyday thereafter—whether I’m at my job or in some other sordid scenario—it won’t be that bad, because I will have already experienced my life’s worst moments.” I soak this in a minute, taking in the optimism inherent in the gesture. It does sound pretty genius, I have to admit, so cripplingly low of an idea that it might just be true. And so it’s settled: we’re going, because things couldn’t be worse.

Sleeping is the only love
Sitting in the kitchen, in the gray light of a new day. This is the rote life of the routine. I read a week-old paper and depress myself with old news. On the cover is a picture of a train in ruins, totally ablaze. In two seconds, accompanying this imagery, is my housemate’s alarm is going off at full tilt. It’s one of those beeping-variety alarms which would have most people out of bed in moments. But I listen as it goes off for four minutes, and then 20. The beeping, at some unspecified point, begins to invert and turn in on itself, like syncopated drumming. And then on top of the syncopated alarming, his mobile phone’s alarm begins to go off, creating a symphony of the damned. I just sit there, not having the heart to go in and wake him. Silently, I go out of the door, closing it behind me with an audible thud. It is a new day, I assure myself, full of vigor and hope and optimism. Anything can happen.

Joy, my hapless coworker, is conjecturing over days off when I arrive. On her calendar she has the projection of making it one whole month without taking a day off, noted by a graphic x drawn in black sharpie on today’s date. “If I can just make it through the rest of this week,” she tells me facetiously, “I think I might be able to do it.” There is no possible way of this actually happening, but it’s a nice thought. Last week alone she missed two days, and it could be the guilt factor of not living up to expectations (nix), or just a futile nod in the direction of approximated rightness. But either way, I would not bet on her making it a month. Her only hopes of actually carrying out this outrageous plan are erroneously premised on the idea that we have one 4-day week coming, but she’s got it wrong. “Aw, shit,” she intones under her breath when she finds out they are full workweeks. She dials a friend, canceling her plans for that day. And when she’s had enough of talking, she tells the person on the other end of the phone that her court shows are coming on, and hangs up the phone with a clunk.

Everyday is the same, virtually. What changes mostly, are the conversations, inserting random greetings and garble before sending on my way. In 8 weeks I feel subverted totally, crushed into dimensions that are beyond me. My coworkers poke fun at me, laughing about how I don’t listen to their stories or remember anything. And it’s true. I can’t remember anything, and all I seem able to do is sit there with a docile stare, totally unable to understand. An article I have recently read about the Maine National Guard tells about how families were provided with life sized cardboard cutouts for family members in Iraq, and I keep thinking if I could just get one of those, weekend at bernies-style. That’d be good. In the meanwhile I could go out and do the things that I actually do, which are also shrouded in total mystery but are more or less horrific, clacking away on a keyboard somewhere.

The drizzle just seems to keep on coming today. And some days are that way. I see the receptionist seeing me on the way out. "Forgot your umbrella," she says to me, motioning towards the weather. They have the standard issue work umbrella, unimaginably. Oh, well, I tell her, before hustling out. Another day, another dollar. The alarm is sounding, but we are inert and lifeless and dead. The most unimaginable variety also, where the silence does not sound.

Go dangle your fishhook out in the gutter again
I am downloading the new Grizzly Bear album on a computer with a 50.60 Kbps connection. As you might imagine, it takes an insanely long period of time. I usually download one song per day, and it’s the whole instant gratification that you lose out on in the meanwhile. If the song sucks you actually did just waste that much time, but mostly you appreciate it more. You find something in there that’s worthwhile, to validate the fact that you did not just waste twenty minutes downloading a song, like it’s 1999. This is the whole neo-Luddite stance I’ve taken in relation to my computer. Yeah, I work with one all day and download songs and things, but it’s a compromise. In not paying for the ultra-fast connection, I am in fact skipping out on the insipient ADD and gratification that is part in parcel of a culture that has spun out of control. The future, you might say, is going to be dumb ã. But I have absolved myself, partially, while still only being able to hold marginal conversations with people, spacing out momentarily before rejoining or talking about something else entirely.

Things have gotten out of control in my life. I don’t think it’s quite at the point where I need my friends and family to unsuspectingly appear in my bedroom, in some Leif Garrett-type intervention scenario, but I have taken notice. I woke up this morning with a gigantic phallus drawn in green magic marker on my hand and only a vague recollection of the circumstances which may have led to it being there. And some other random and haphazard events which lend no real congruity to the fact that I woke with a green penis drawn on my hand. But I do remember thinking, late in the night, just before sleep: people, they are the strangest thing, really. And there is no accounting for all of the strangeness and the problems they cause while together. Accompanying this thought was the imagery of sickly molecules coming together and going apart again. I still don’t know if it’s my abundant understanding of these strange people which cause me to be alienated and think thoughts like, I really just should keep to myself and stay locked up in the attic. But I continue to think them anyway, all the while reminding myself that I could have it wrong about someone, something.

More and more now I find myself in some horrible bar with a friend, talking over our pseudo girl situations, and better times. A character in a movie I have recently seen bemoans his fate, and how horribly things turned out, and here I find myself doing the same thing. It’s pretty embarrassing. “Why are all of the people we know such psychos?” I am asked. I don’t really know, I tell him, but I think it might have something to do with the internet.

Last night I happened on a grown woman weeping in a Dunkin’ Donuts at 2:30 am. She was sitting with her face in her hands, and her head drawn to the side. And then I realized, watching as people came and went, that she was crying. Her boyfriend had just broken up with her, I imagined, and had left her at the Lark Street Dunkin’ Donuts to run off with another woman. Or she had just lost a relative or a loved one. Or she is just really broken up over a world in need of repair, where its inhabitants are cracked and drunk and interchangeable. I sat there for a moment, wondering what I would do. I really would have liked to go over and offer her some form of consolation, buy her a doughnut or something, but in the end I opted not to. And so we sat there, and suffered some more. It is a long life, sometimes. And a cruel one. But it does have its redeeming factors. And then the song comes on that I have just downloaded. It was worth the wait. The singer sings: Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up. I would like her to hear it. And more than anything, I would like for all of the broken life form of the Lark Street Dunkin’ Donuts to stand up and break out in song, singing in unison in pretend microphone fists. Everything is going to be OK, I am at least partially sure.

Three Chord Blues
I watched that movie The Devil and Daniel Johnston last night, which is quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen all year. Check this out if you do not believe: there is a scene where Daniel Johnston loses his shit for the third or forth time in the film, removing the keys of the single-engine airplane he is flying in with his dad and throwing them out of the window, thoroughly and totally crashing the plane into the ground. They then cut to pictures of the plane in ruins on the ground and the survivors standing next to it, Daniel Johnston standing there with a big smile on his face. All of this, by the way, is elicited by some haphazard viewing of a Casper the Friendly Ghost comic. How’s that for action? You don’t really get this kind of thing out of your run-of-the-mill blockbuster. But what this scene sets up actually, is not only the ostensible crashing of the plane but the fiery and ruinous careening of mental state. And as things get worse, the songwriting gets better, and then just plain bad or non-existent, with the onset of meds. But we like our artists mad, veritable wrecks beyond belief. And that’s kind of the weird thing about Daniel Johnston, is the whole limbo of psychosis, the choice you have to make as art interpreter between mad person/ exploited individual and genius. But that’s what genius sometimes asks of you.

The last few weeks have been a tasteless feast of insipid banality. But for the most part I’ve been avoiding interpretive readings of Casper comics, insisting instead on drinking myself into a catatonic state and then asking for the mandatory ride home. That is, really, why drinking exists, I’m pretty much sure, aside from ease with which it facilitates late night banter. And as the vice of work becomes more prominent, so do the catatonic states and accompanying rides home. It seems pretty self destructive whichever way you look at it, but that’s how things broil down, I’m pretty much sure. I just want to break free from here, run into the tree-adorning meadow I can see from my desk right now, go straight edge. Listen to a Daniel Johnston song. That’s not so crazy, I don’t think.

Transmissions from the satellite parts
I went to a concert last weekend, in Boston, Massachusetts. The particular venue that I went to had a seating chart and seats, unlike so many of the other shows I may attend at any given time, in some sordid basement somewhere. And so it was my lack of demographic appropriateness which may have contributed to my overwhelming sense of confusion and inability to figure out the seating chart, presenting with all of the acuity of a backwoods hick contemplating a New York City map. Perusing my ticket, I noticed that it had a row and seat number, while blithely ignoring the “section” portion of the ticket in a dark light. Arriving to my designated seat, I was greeted by two people who were already sitting in the seats where we were thought we were supposed to be situated. “—Hey,” I said to said revelers, “I think you’re in the wrong seats.” A girl with straight hair and a plain face looked back at me, and registering as she did some far off hitch in my memory. “—No,” she shouted back at me over the music, “You must have it wrong. This is Row N, Seat 14.” I looked at my ticket again and talked to her some more. This exchange may have lasted for several minutes or more in the ill-lit pavilion, as I assured her that she must be the one who has it wrong. As anyone whose ever tried to communicate even the simplest gesture in an environment with loud music playing knows, it’s nearly impossible, and so I may well have been translating a complicated love letter or economic theory. It was totally pointless. And then, all at once—simultaneously—her eyes locked on mine, and there was a moment of clarity. I recognized this person as someone I knew—someone I had gone to high school with and had recently sat next to at a wedding. “You look like someone I know,” she said randomly. And then she did not believe. “—Oh, hey!” I shouted at her, everything coming clear. “It’s me!” But still, she did not believe. And then there were the ensuing moments of awkwardness where I had to convince her of my authentic self, and that I was not some guy who shows up at concerts playing some complicated gag on people. IT’S ME!! I shouted, convincing her some more. IT’S ME! I repeated this several times, until it seemed like I was convincing even myself, imagining almost, the reverberations of this statement eminating out, like a sound wave, throughout the pavillion, IT'S ME!
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They returned McBeans’ ashes in an obscene gray box this week. My grandmother has placed it by the doorway of her home, afraid of bringing it any further indoors. “What are you supposed to do with it?” she asks me. “I don’t know what to do.” I pick it up, contemplating the cold gray box in my hands. It seems weird to me for Mcbeans to be reduced to the pile of ash that I am holding in my hands. He was, it seems to me, just moments ago, a tail-wagging ball of energy and enthusiasm, and now this is all that is left. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” is all I can tell my grandmother. I’m not sure.

Life feels weird in the absence of McBeans. I enter dog licenses into a computer all day at work and so I think about it, show up to my grandmother’s, feel like I’m going to cry. The house still contains the peculiar smell of a cracker, and his leash hangs idly by the door. The difference is, however, there is no McBeans. Sometimes I go inside, expecting him to come charging out of nowhere, bowl me over with enthusiasm for another day, another walk in the woods. But there are no more walks, and there is no more enthusiasm. All I seem able to discern is the concrete weightiness of death, and how quickly it can come. And how much I miss McBeans.

It’s hard for me to define what was so special about my dog. And maybe it’s just really inappropriate to put into words. You can only pin things down for so long before you realize how much of a jerk you are. And sometimes you just have to let things stand for how they are, and how they make you feel, illogical as that may seem. And so that’s what I miss the most, I think, is everything I’m unable to put into words. It feels kind of weird to say. And it kind of makes me feel like a dork. But mostly, it’s the truth. I might have to convince you.

Mensch-Maschine
Dentists, I have recently read, take their lives more than any other profession, barring tollbooth workers and doctors. This statistic seems to make some amount of sense to me, seeing that what this profession mostly entails is standing over another person with your hands crammed down their throat as you ask them questions which can only be answered in monosyllabic grunts and garbled incoherence. So close, you are, but so far away. The same could be said of toll booth workers, who (with the exception of the dude at the Hudson exchange, where you pick up the Rip Van Winkle bridge, who mirthfully takes your change at 2:00 am as you make your way from Bard college, haphazardly ripping through the mountainside with reckless abandon) also have the most overtly pointless interactions with human beings. I think about this as I whiz down Washington Avenue in the back of a car last week, driving past the girl lifelessly waving traffic by whatever baroque construction they have set up there in the middle of the night. No traffic is on the road at this time, and no one appears to be doing any work, but there she stands, in her reflective orange uniform, waving your car through with an illuminated glow stick. “Is that what that girl does all night?” I want to know. “That’s totally outrageous!” I tell everybody. I cannot believe. It seems, at least, evocative of some kind of statistic, but mostly I use it as conversational fodder throughout the night, telling this to people who look back at me blankly and walk away.

Oh, man, I get so uptight about working conditions. I can’t believe a job like mine even exists, and that they haven’t refined computer systems to a point where they can more efficiently load that information in there. Charlie Chaplin made this commentary 80 years ago in Modern Times, but we don’t seem to be so up-to-date, here in modern times. What my job basically entails is entering dog-licensing information into a computer database for future referencing. I keep getting paranoid about sitting in front of a computer all day, the cancerous tubers it’s planting in my brain. And then I come home and look at my own computer, clack out an email, fret over another blog entry. It all seems pretty self-destructive to me. I explain this to my sister later, telling her all about how relaxed the actual job atmosphere is. No constraints are there in Information Systems, and no allotted work to be done. Mostly, it’s the job itself, I explain indignantly: the actual work, and the malleable worker robot drones who I have to work with all day. It’s kind of alienating. What is your problem, my sister wants to know. I don’t know, is all I can tell her. I don’t know.

Tonight is another night, the same as every other night. A light drizzle comes down, fogging over the windows in a car. I have to go to the bank, slicing through town, driving in a straight line past the capitol building to where I need to go. I end up see the girl waving construction through on Washington one more time, and I look out at her, my face pushed right up against the fogged window of the car. Her eyes lock on mine and she waves at me, sitting for moment that seems suspended in time. And then the light turns green and she motions to me with the bright orange glow stick of a wand she carries, magically, unenthusiastically.

Get me back on your leash
Office work coincides with respiratory illness. There’s something about the airtight atmosphere, built to minimize distraction by locking all productivity inside, and with it a host of airborne poxes, sweeping over me like easy prey. I’m new yet. I have yet to build up an immunity, and sick time. Joy, however, my porcine cohort and proletarian muse, has accumulated an entire onslaught of free days off with pay, and so it is with no indiscretion that she calls in sick once a week. There’s kind of an office in-joke about, with which I am greeted yesterday. “I hate work,” she tells me. “I guess I’m just kind of lazy.” I think this over for a bit, wondering what else I might have in common with this Frosted Flakes-consuming, popcorn-crunching co-worker. “I just like to lie in bed all day and eat,” she tells me cheerfully. And so it is with no surprise that she does not show up for work today. We knew she wasn’t coming, another coworker tells me. Whenever she brings her sweater and starts saying she’s cold that’s usually an indication that she’s not coming in the next day. She’s been doing this about once a week for years now. Apparently, two years ago, she went so far as to throw her work in the trashcan, which earned her a trail, whereby she got to spend the next two years at home with pay before getting her job back, and with it a whole bunch of vacation time. And so now, here she is, entering dog licenses into a computer and using her vacation time with all of the frivolity of a teenager with a limitless allowance. Such is the nature of working in the public sector, an environment where you can demonstrate your disdain for your job by actually throwing your work into a trashcan and not get fired. I spend my days in deep contemplation, peering out of a window that reveals a serene meadow. It will be fall soon, I think. Things will be changing.

Everyone I’ve encountered here is incredibly bizarre, but then I’m probably not the right person to be offering commentary on mental sanity. I like to think I have one up on other people because I’ve spent the entirety of my life avoiding situations precisely like this one, but I always find myself in the strange predicament of talking to these same people and wondering, why don’t I have any vacation time? A question which never reveals a whole lot of clarity. But I really just have to come clean and admit, this place is not too bad. Where else can you openly throw your work in the trashcan and be rewarded two years off, with pay? I read True Romance magazine in the break room and eat the free apples that someone has left. What’s so true about these stories, though, I don’t know. Today’s tale is all about the disillusionment of life in the big city, the dream gone astray, and the boy left behind in the small town. Is there any going back? Will he still be there on returning. I never find out, because I almost pass out from inertia.

Back in the office, my coworkers are still discussing Joy’s departure, and how unfair it is that they have to come to work. They’re getting all riled up and trying to get me to join in. I don’t really get it, though, honestly. Although her days off don’t affect any of us negatively (except for me of course, who is without humor for the majority of the day), they still insist on bemoaning the fact that she doesn’t come to work. “What do you think?” they want to know. But all I can do is blow my nose and cough out loud. I’d like a day off. But the whole thing is, I’m only temp. I don’t have any.

A spoonful weighs a ton
Coffee with G. at a Starbucks. Looking on as she fiddles with her chair, and then denounces the chairs altogether. What’s so weird about the chairs in here, I don’ t know. She makes fun of me some and then looks around for other people to make fun of, which there is apparently no shortage of in this environment. In the meanwhile, I size up G., looking on as she looks at everybody else. I’ve taken to the curious pastime of sizing up my various friends and trying to figure out where they would fit within the DSM-IV. What maladies would this biblical text render them with. My guess is some sort of confluent Bi-polar/ manic problem, with the corresponding medicine. What would it label me, I don’t know. I keep trying to figure out if it’s my own sense of stasis that offsets G.’s turbulence, or if I’m misinterpreting the situation altogether and it’s the other way around. Either way, it seems like one of us is not getting a favorable rating.

My birthday was this week. My mom made a big lasagna, and so I’m going to hang out around. I feel pretty bad about it, and I articulate this same thing to G., who gives me a weird look. My mother keeps producing the most bountiful spreads even imaginable, and all I can think about is how quickly all of that will give me a heart attack. The woman loves ingredients, I tell you: saturated fats, butter, cheese. It’s all in there. I grew up in a veritable bakery, the kitchen a production center for cookies and pies and cakes, all of which are now currently lost on me, here in the present day. It’s no big deal. It would probably take someone who was never allowed to eat these things by their parents to make them truly appreciate—the kind of person who thinks they’re putting one over on somebody by eating fast foods—the same behavior patterns which make people smoke cigarettes and snort industrial grade cleaners in the bathrooms of public bathrooms. I’m becoming increasingly stoical, I guess, but it seems like there are worse ways to be.

I end up arriving too late for the festivities, the dinner already a done deal, my parents having gone ahead and eaten without me. Minus one for me. My mom harangues me for missing dinner. Sorry, mom. You know, I mixed up the time. I’ll make it up to you, I swear. I keep expecting my parents to disown me, change the locks on the house, pretend they don’t recognize me in a crowd. They never do, but it seems like they should. A lifetime of bizarre behaviors and lifestyle choices does not seem to deter them, however. And I am thankful for that. Because actually, they really should. My mom packs up a spread that I bring home to my little domicile—cake, lasagna—the whole bit. I give these items to A., which he devours with no restraint, as I look on in amazement.

It seems easy to get down about another birthday, another year. Sometimes your life comes to resemble an unraveling ball of twine, which just continuously comes on undone. And your birthday only serves as a continuous reminder of the unraveling. But that’s only one point of view. And I keep thinking that maybe I could just elude the aforementioned descriptions of the DSM for a while longer, dodging and weaving. I contemplate the uneaten portion of birthday cake that my mom made for me sitting on the counter, the massive chunk of cake that I’ve been trying to give to everybody. I look at it sitting there in its plastic wrap, the fancy blue decoration around the perimeter all smooshed up against the plastic. I pick it up, unwrapping as I do, and mash a big bite into my mouth, the vanilla frosting sweet and light. It’s pretty good, actually. I probably should indulge more. Or at least increase my caloric intake.

You are now in a deep sleep
As just one more event in the vast and interminable nebula of agitation that is my waking life, the people who live next door to me are rebuilding the Boo Radley construction that under some broad definition might be considered a house. Not only have the rats scuttled from their collective domicile but an entire miasma of radon and god knows what has been floating in the air, causing me to wheeze. The whole situation has forced me to realize what a recluse I’ve become. With the onset of symptoms, I have come to the conclusion that with the exception of a three-hour period that I left to do some obscure errand, the symptoms have not disappeared. And that, actually, I’ve been spending way too much time at home lately. You have to get out every once in a while, soak up whatever insane stimulus the outside world has to offer you—which just happens to manifest as an outdoor barbeque that is by all turns short on insanity. Since I can hardly breathe, however, I check in on the festivities, showing by with all the gracefulness of a one-winged bird.

I enter the backyard to little kids scuttling around and their parents gathered around a picnic table, who are people I know. The crowd gives a general nod in my direction, registering my presence after a one-year absence. These are mostly friends I went to high school with, people I end up seeing annually at best. What’s going on, man? How you been? You process the scene after a 365-day absence, realizing the subtle changes, the addition of a new vehicle or child. It seems weird to me that people my age are having kids, getting married—entertaining anything, basically, which is not completely self-serving in some unambiguous way. It just seems right and natural to me that you would choose self-direction as the only direction. But then, they seem happy, I reason, checking in on their children, making sure Johnny doesn’t spill his sordid orange juice box down the front of his shirt like he is currently doing. I try and imagine myself in this same kind of role, and then realize there just are no real reference points. No—when I think of the future, I imagine a one-bedroom apartment on the periphery of town somewhere, a stack of books, and some unending supply of doom and despair. But then, it’s probably a worldview like that one which has me issuing forth statements like I commonly do, offending people’s sensibilities. I’m talking to a friend about a mutual acquaintance we have both recently seen. “—Yeah, she’s married, with children and stuff,” I say derisively, in an audible range of every other person here, who is married, with children. The needle skitters from the grooves as I realize my error, the tone of voice which is suggestive of the complete and utter insanity of such an idea. But there is no taking it back. My words have hung there in the air long enough for everyone to hear, and for a friend to shake his head at me. The eating then resumes and the moment passes, but it has been marred. A little ball of soot has it been adorned with it now and there is no taking it back. Ah, well, I think. It could have been worse. And it’s not like I’m intoning racist jokes like the guy sitting at the end of the picnic table. Who invited that guy anyway? I think to no one in particular.

The night ensues, to more or less fanfare. It feels like September out, I think, before realizing, oh, wow—it pretty much is September. People are drinking domestic beer and talking about their lives as the sun goes away. I am sitting at the edge of the table with Adam Lynch as he contemplates the whole situation, with more or less of a positive spin. “I need one of those,” he tells me, looking down at the cooler. “What?” I ask him, not understanding. “Another beer?” He just laughs at me, ignoring the wife as inanimate object and/ or Budweiser beer connection that he has just made. What the hell are we even doing here? I want to know, contemplating the domestic living scenario. It’s totally freaking me out. I talk to Adam some more and he tells me about this bar around the corner from his house that he wants to go to. It’s more of a neighborhood bar, he explains, out of range from the increasingly annoying downtown establishments, filled with the vapid masses. “Yeah,” he says, “It looks pretty good. I must have driven by it like a hundred times before noticing. I guess it’s sort of an older-person, more relaxed-type place.” And then he adds, “I guess I just don’t really fit in anywhere.” It seems somewhat true, I have to admit. There’s nowhere good to hang out around anymore. But I don’t know if he understands the implications of that statement. And I don’t really want to be a part of all of that, while realizing at the same time that I probably am. Or at least I will be.

Life, it turns out, is a lot like the mold spores originating in the Boo Radley house. You end up floating around a bit before sticking to something indefinite. And it’s the sticking which ends up defining you, with more or less fanfare and agitation. But all I seem able to do is float and not breathe. And since I can’t go home or anywhere else, I’ll probably just end up checking in on that pub later.

It’s only the end
Was it just last week that I was motioning to the maps, pointing at the landmass and cutting my pants as some tacit suggestion of seasonal prediction? I guess it was. All of that seems far away now. The summer doesn’t officially end until sometime in September, but for those of us residing here in the Northeast, it actually ends a whole lot earlier. I would probably characterize the end of summer as the first succession of days in which the weather breaks and responsibility looms. Those are pretty much the characteristics first imbued upon you in grade school, when you find yourself at the end of August, the smell of new cotton and a falling heart. Or at least those were my associations with going back to school. I don’t know how it was for you.

Somehow I have managed to pass the summer away, not befalling much commitment to anything or anyone. In fact, I don’t even really remember much of it at all. Somehow, I seem to remember specific blips which will come to serve in my collective memory as a summation of that time. Those things might involve ending up at certain concerts or cities, but which ones or where all seems very blurry to me now. As it says in the bible, though, I think, all goods things must come to an end. And such is the prevailing sentiment. Everyone keeps asking me what I’ve been doing all day, and when I’m going to get my shit together, and it seems almost sensible to come up with some sort of an answer now.

I managed to get up early enough yesterday to see some rare presidential news conference. It’s amazing, really, how our world leaders seem so bent on hurtling us into world war 3. You hear a lot of rhetoric during these things, a lot of the same phrases being repeated over and over. And it seems barbaric, entering a tiny pocket of grim-ness beyond stupidity, to hear some of the things being uttered, like staying the course. What does that even mean? I wonder. And then I remember. You learn a lot just checking in on these things. And since the end is pretty much neigh, it gives being irresponsible a whole new profoundity. That’s what I think, anyway. Are there any good shows happening today? A dance party somewhere, where we can usher in the impending apocalypse to a throbbing BPM? Maybe I’ll see you there.

If I try I could fly right through that window
My sister Kari does social work. It seems like one of the only jobs a liberal arts major can latch onto with some modicum of success, and I know a lot of people who do this same thing. One of the words you can never utter around these people is the expletive “retard.” Back in the day, this was considered far less of a social faux pas. A videotape of some 1970’s news broadcast found at a garage sale confirms this, the stodgy news anchor looking into the camera and reporting that a retard had been found accountable for the crime. Listening to a report like that in the present day context, with all of its pc fitting, is just totally hilarious. And one of the many benefits of my sister working for an agency which acts as a sponsor for the mentally-challenged (or however you say), is all of the anecdotes I end up hearing about later. It’s kind of like adult babysitting and there never is a shortage of great stories. One of my all time favorite possessions, in fact, came from one of the people she works with, given to my sister as a parting gift. It’s a blank piece of paper, with incomprehensible words written in different colored ink on the front. It seems to sum everything up for me, in some all-encompassing way. It’s really great.


One of the stories my sister has recently related to me centers around one of the women she has to supervise. The woman, apparently sound of mind to live independently, has bouts of mild dementia, which is not unlike many people I know. The difference is, however, that instead of spending her time hanging out in bars and consuming toxic elixirs which become the rationale for such behaviors, this woman has to check in with my sister everyday. Part of this extensive checking also centers around contact with the owners of the apartment complex, where the woman lives. Recently, my sister has received a call from the owners, who have notified her of some extensive cleaning bill. The woman, apparently involved in the process of making a cake with decorative blue icing, proceeded to spill her creation on the floor, leaving a blue stain mashed into the new hallway carpeting. The culprit, however, made a hasty exit, leaving as it were a blue stain uncovered and uncleaned. The evidence of which produces in a surveillance video of the hallway, featuring said miscreant nervously pacing back and forth in front of the stain, in the attempt to cover or at least wish away the evidence. It proved pointless, however. And I cannot help but think of the evidence of the videotape, the besmirched blue carpeting, and the irrefutability of all that. It seems so crushing to me. Hours and hours did the woman foment an excuse, I imagine, when really, she should have remembered 9th grade reading, and Orwell.

My sister working at this job and being apparently so great at it has predictably lead to the totally insane suggestion that I try the same profession. At different points I even remember it being suggested by my sister directly. I think this over, recounting the details to my friend Adam one night. “Can you imagine the irony?” I point out to him, whipping up Washington Avenue in a car. “The whole point of the job, basically, is to find mentally disadvantaged people work. So basically, instead of doing all of those horrible jobs, I would be sending other people out to do them, and be paid the prevailing wage for doing so.” It just seems so wrong, we gathered, in all of the right ways.

While I cannot subscribe to all of the aforementioned character traits, I really just do seem totally bewildered lately. A recent trip to the grocery store has me scratching my head. A random survey of the grocery baggers may look at any time like a smattering of the bands being reviewed on pitchfork.com, and it makes me think, is pitchfork really that influential? Is their opinion so pervasive now that you can’t go anywhere without seeing its legions of card carrying members? It seems that way. It takes me a while to remember that the things I found culturally endearing are just everywhere now, making those same things a lot more reprehensible. There is no culture. It gets me all uptight. Walking through the line has me getting all upset in a way I cannot explain. I explain this to a friend one night, lying out my increasingly predicable dogma. And then he tells me, “Oh, those people are just retards.”

I could never do my sister’s job, of course. Custodial worker, grocery bagger, sure. These are professions that seem more aligned to my proclivities. And I’m totally down with vicariously experiencing the stories which may come along with this profession. Or even just receiving the accompanying gifts, which may manifest as incompressible words written on paper, incongruously scratched out any old way. It’s not a pretty assemblage, but it’s something. I guess you could call it that.

More than ever it seems true to say things won’t always be this way
Throwing off the shackles of unfashionable existentialism, I produced forth to my sister the other night alien phrases. We were driving east, in the wayward direction of Boston, Massachusetts, with the check engine light coming on in her car, as I spewed forth things I may have fully believed in a coffee-addled state. It’s easy to do, really: living in the first world, you have all sorts of examples. There’s no deep digging to be done, really. If you want something to make you feel really great about your life, just try rigging up some construct about South Africa, and how bad the people there have it. Sure, you say, tearing yourself from a lowly state, those people have it really bad, and comparatively, it makes you feel really awesome for two seconds. But I think I may have actually meant some of those things. Some conceptual shift has taken place, and I’m able to recognize the minute good sometimes. It’s all part of my late day paradigm shift of not jumping off a bridge, and I can feel myself backing from the precipice. “Things aren’t all bad,” I told my sister that night, much to her own befuddlement, wondering if I had not been replaced all together with someone who shared a striking resemblance. “Not everything’s going to end in a horrible disaster,” I said cheerfully, “We’ve had OK lives, good parents.” I went on at length, showing off a little, like a guitar player adding in a tricky little solo for effect. But I could tell, even as I said these things, that I had produced a spell. Surely something bad was going to happen now that I had said these things. A car crash, imminent death, I did not know what—something, though, surely. That’s the power of positive thinking. There are people in charge. That’s the basis of most superstition, really. Some benevolent figure, you imagine in your head, is waiting there all the while, to will something into existence. The converse is true too, obviously; just find yourself saying or doing the wrong thing, and the next thing you know things are slipping away—the framework of benevolence and good turns to rot and decay, and it all comes unrelentingly crashing down around your head.

McBeans is not going to live. I should have known as much. The fancy little chart in the examining room of the veterinarian’s office tells you his age in human years. 88-years-old, it lets you know, sizing up any potential ailments. You can do the math, figuring things out in your head. And you can tell, on a walk, that his legs are not good. But nothing can prepare you for his immediate collapse, the festooning tumor in his stomach that was there all the while. Or for your own inexplicable response to this series of events, lying down on the floor of your grandmother’s kitchen and praying in the light of a new day beside your sick dog. Please, do not take McBeans away from me. It makes me feel like Candy in Of Mice and Men, groveling over his old dog. It makes me really sad.

The veterinarian explains the situation to me in detail, illuminating the x-ray in the examining room. He outlines the dense mass all around the spleen, and the crippling arthritis. There is not long, he explains compassionately. And it makes you contemplate the nature of his job. Not everybody could do it. You would need a sense of compassion that goes well beyond general human suffering and forays into entirely different realms. Not everybody is capable. But this guy has toiled away in the pursuit of this, and it makes me feel some gratitude toward this total stranger, telling me my dog is going to die. I look over at the dog on the examining table. He’s there all the while, completely absolved from his own predicament. No idea does he have of what we’re even doing here. And when the anemia has temporarily vanished from his system, when the toxicity has been reabsorbed, he holds the leash triumphantly in his mouth and wags his tail. All I can do is shake my head. It seems weird to take example from a dying dog, but then it could be worse, too.

The kids just off from basketball beat me in my head
I feel like my life has degenerated into one of those weird movie shorts they show you between programs on the IFC. All I seem able to do is saunter around in a pair of cutoff shorts and complete mundane errands, gathering no real conclusions from any of these activities. I keep waiting to work out the secret algorithm, the sweeping statement which will sum everything up for me. But more and more I realize that there are no answers. It’s a confusing movie, totally abstract in scope, and all there is are dramatic angles, awkward pauses and bewildered looks. I’ve got that much worked out, at least.

Grandma fell on her face today. She called me up in the early am to tell me so. I have no idea how to react to this situation so early in the morning and find myself drifting off, mid-conversation, ignoring all of the actual details. The overarching question remains: how exactly does one fall on her face? Some obscure thought process takes place, and instead of sticking out your hands, your face goes first. Doesn’t that confound natural instinct? Defy the laws of logic? I guess not, because my mom experienced a similar mishap a while ago (although, I guess that does little to further the statistical probabilities). How this happens, I cannot fathom. I go over to my grandmother’s house to check things out. Most of the time I cannot take the things she says seriously as she constantly attempts to wring the maximum amount of attention out of every occurrence. But she did in fact fall in some way, as there she is sitting limply in a chair, with the beginnings of a bruise on her arms and face. “Is there anything I can get you?” I say with futility. “An ice pack or something?” It makes me think of grade school, where the panacea for any number of maladies is one of those squishy icepacks that they give to you in the nurse’s office. You tell them about your stomachache and end up walking away clutching an icepack, unctuous blue ooze dripping from the inside. It makes you feel alright for two seconds, the placebo effect of remedy. Well, let me know if you need anything, I say to her.

Back out into the day, jingling the leash for McBeans, who comes trotting along. Man, I think, contemplating McBeans’ form; he really is the greatest. The dog can hardly walk, but there he is, hustling right along beside me. We’ve had to reduce our walks lately out of concern for his failing legs, but mostly he’s still vibrant. I try and take inspiration from this, but mostly I keep waiting for some external force to come and crush me. Or at least the camera crew for the Dr. Phil Show to come hustling around the corner, taking me off for a special taping of an episode titled “responsibility and those who shirk.” It’s a nice day out, though, and so I decide not to sweat it- for one day at least. A blue sky stretches out indefinitely in every direction, and a warm wind dances across your skin. Things are good like that. In a bold declaration of seasonal commitment, I cut another pair of pants into shorts the other day. And it makes me feel weird to recognize my own commitment to such frivolity. I’m listening to that Fiery Furnaces song “Benton Harbor Blues” on headphones, and I’ve come to recognize this song as the soundtrack for my summer. Over and over, I find myself listening to this one song, striding around the neighborhood in the most ludicrous outfits imaginable. It’s kind of a carefree tune, the repetitive little keyboard part almost warbling out into the air. It’s the transitional, action sequence of the b-movie you’re watching, and the character is doing all of the things she’s singing about in the song: riding a bike through the snow, heading down to the mini-mall. It’s totally fantastic. An ice-cream truck comes rolling up the street, and I order a Nutty Buddy ice cream treat from the driver. Thank you, I tell her, watching as the bright orange vehicle pulls away from the curb, emitting as it does the peculiar music, which strangely resembles a Fiery Furnaces' song.

Sometimes you catch yourself spontaneously recounting the details of your life, reflecting in the totally subsuming way which encompasses the pathways and corridors that have lead to the precise moment. I catch myself doing this more and more, sitting on a stoop or anywhere at all. And it’s in such moments that you find your life taking on the dramatic quality of cinema. It’s a strange movie, with all manner of narrative flaws. But mostly, I realize it’s wrong to characterize life as some pretentious art film. Because actually, it’s an action movie, the camera cutting away, with all matter of dramatic angles. It’s a flailing figure, I imagine, arms extended, and it appears to be falling swiftly, steadily.

K-I-S-S-I-N-G S-E-X-I-N-G C-A-S-I-O B-O-K-E Y-O-U M-E I
Watching, in a detached way, as my finger presses the doorbell. Over and over, it makes this connection, which causes the circuit to close, emitting this peculiar sound. The dog goes into a frenzy as I do this, wildly barking to no end. It’s pretty funny: he’s outside of the door, watching as I do this, but still he cannot refrain. You learn about Pavlov’s dog early on, and here I see this manifesting in real life. Won’t he ever learn, I wonder? How long could I stand here ringing the doorbell to produce a different reaction? And what good would it really do, anyway? Some intruder would end up breaking in and the dog would just lie there on the ground, not frightening anyone. The house would be robbed and it would be all my fault. I ring the bell once more, and my grandmother makes an appearance in the doorway, asking me what I’m doing. “—Oh,” I say to her, “I’m just kind of ringing the bell.” She shakes her head at me and walks away. She will later relate this anecdote to the rest of the family as the latest piece of evidence in the overwhelming case of insanity she is building against me. Clearly, something seems to be wired wrong up there.
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New York City, you are a big city; there’s probably room for me in you. I like saying shit like this. I’m getting older, now- not quite at the age where I start spontaneously singing commercial jingles like my dad, but old enough to issue forth ridiculous nonsense, addressing places as though they were actual people. And then, hurtling up I-87 and producing forth obscenities as the nonexistent Albany skyline comes into a view, which is, actually, a shopping mall. It’s all plain and natural, now. It always was. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.