It could have been a brilliant career
The work at work has tapered off. My supervisor called an impromptu meeting with me one day last week. “Listen,” she said in the sotto voce of worldly wisdom, “The workload is running low, so take your time, slow it down a little.” Okay, I thought, I can do that. She then leaned in and imparted the nugget of wisdom only heard only in dreams and small corners of the eastern bloc: “Take a couple of days off if you want to.” There followed a succession of days off from work, fruitlessly sauntering around my apartment in a state of nervous agitation, unable to accomplish anything other than short treks to the grocery store, where once inside I would contemplate the nature of the human beings contained therein. This was a healthy diversion for sixty minutes a day, fixating on a new individual each time. I would construct a whole outline for said person before I got back to my house: where they lived, what their life was like, and if I had imagined they owned a pet, I would try and specify what breed it was, as per related by their persona—information quickly deduced from my trips through their checkout line. When this activity was complete, I would then pace some more and maybe watch a movie. Any number of days passed like this, one by one, until it seemed logical to go back to work. My job, at least, offered the welcome respite from a life gone out of control. There, at least, I could distract myself by clacking meaningless names and digits, information which corresponded to nothing in particular from my vantage point, the tiny pixels of my monitor emanating out, transcending my implacable skull, and neutralizing the contents contained therein. I would find myself in such a state that I had passed the outer-bounds of consciousness, and may have forgotten that I was a human being at all. This was a pleasant way to pass the time, and I reveled in a life with the complications sucked out. But now the work has run low again, and it’s all coming back to me full force, cruelly thrust from the vacuum. The contents of my life have been illuminated in lieu of the absence of the brain neutralization process provided by my job, the events hurtling through the atmosphere like particles of dust in a black-lit environ. The house I am living in has been sold, and my only acquaintance in life, a girl from the video store, has stopped talking to me days earlier, as per the derangement of my movie rental selections. When you objectively examined the facts, it seemed difficult to deny the fact that even my retarded neighbor had turned against me. Two weeks would no doubt find me sauntering around the dog park, with the bourgeois park dwellers and their dogs looking on in horror as I howled at the moon. And the worst part is, my whole employment situation is tenuous-looking, at best. Here’s my office director now, peeking over my shoulder. I had better get back to work before I get fired. It’s not much, I know. But really: it’s all that I’ve got.

Vacation’s all I ever wanted
Hey, look: there’s that girl from the gym, following too close behind as I try and walk to my car. Has she consulted the Inter-Web and read what I wrote about her? Is she going to accost me and make me listen to her prattle on about the Oprah book club for hours on end? I cannot take it, and narrowly escape her gaze as I hustle to my car. That was a close one, I think to myself. The magnet hum in my head has polarized the entire city, issuing the magnetic pull which has the crazies flocking in astounding number, when all I was really trying to do was conduct a little market research. But then, that begs the question: why pick up the book if you don’t really want to read it, and the cover illustration is all that you were really impressed with anyway? (Which is a topic worthy of at least an Oprah book club episode). Everyone I know seems marginally insane from my vantage point, and I always find myself asking the wrong questions, which signs me up for an eternity of discussion, weekends booked with torment as you develop the intertwined tentacles of association, strange alien feelings of compassion cropping up as you hold it up before you and think, ah: what is this strange thing we have here. Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s just me. Vacation’s all I ever wanted, the Go-Go’s sing, and I actually find myself singing this same song as I come in out of the cold, veritably ice-skating across the icy tundra of the sidewalk which stretches out indefinitely before me, garbage spackled right into its surface as I regain composure and walk seamlessly into a darkened bar for refuge. There are already a few people situated inside as I take a seat at the end of the bar and order a drink. A Samuel L. Jackson look-alike is talking to the bartender, killing me with his blue collar wisdom, as they run through politics and consumer items and the lottery. “—You hear ‘bout that Georgia couple that hit the jackpot?” he asks the bartender. “Two-hundred million,” he shakes his head. “What would you do with that kind of money?” The bartender’s answer is knee jerk and unthinking. “I know exactly what I’d do,” he says assuredly, but the Samuel L. Jackson guy is not having it. “No,” he says, “but after you bought everything you could buy, what would you do?” Throwing off the shackles of consumerist trappings, the bartender is perplexed in light of the question, has no idea what he would do. “—Shit, I tell you what I’d do,” the other guy says, answering his own question. “I’d go to outer space, --Go to Mars and shit.” His voice carries and everyone within earshot of the conversation has a good chuckle at this. But the guy is not messing around: a multi-millionaire from Russia has already purchased a ticket to outer space, he lets us know, and so why should not he? This then begs the question of what the quality of life on Mars would be, which on a skin-surface level would be pretty cold, I imagine. Cold and lonely. It makes me think of A Space Odyssey again and Beyond the Infinite, but instead of the regular actor inhabiting the monolith, it would be the Samuel L. Jackson guy sauntering around in an orange spacesuit, struggling against it as he swills a Budweiser and grins contentedly into the camera, revealing a gold tooth. After a while they adjourn to the back of the bar, where the bartender gets trounced in a game of pool. The Samuel L. Jackson guy produces with a large grin on his face. “Man," he chides, "maybe if we was on Mars you could beat me.”

One more drink and back out onto the sidewalk, with nowhere to go. I am impossibly shit-faced as I make my way up the street, walking too aimlessly for frigid weather. I could call xxxxxx right now, but that would only sign me up for an hours-long discussion of Superior City, pouring over the subtle nuance of disaster. No, I’ll just sleep in this snow bank, I find myself thinking. Somebody will find me later and take me home, like a swattling baby left on a doorstep. That’s pretty much the way I usually work it these days (which may just be some commentary on any relationship I’ve had in the last two months). Up the street some more, I am dressed in the most ludicrous winter-wear imaginable, layered and layered beneath a hulking coat, and dumb as fuck head sandwiched under a wool hat. My arms are limited in movement beneath my coat and grim inebriation makes me feel the part of the space traveler. Ryan Kemp: the first man on Mars, driving a stake into the frozen surface, a flag with a cartoonish representation of myself- which would be a stick figure with x’s in his eyes. But ah, well: things had been bound to end this way. They usually do. I’ll just keep winning the Lottery it seems, where the jackpot is a lump sum payment of despair and epic sadness and alienation from every girl.

Try to remember always to have a good time
Another day, the smooth whirring of car tires pulling into the same parking spot at work. The wind lashes me, walking across the parking lot, like Mother Nature herself manifesting and slapping you across the face. Inside it is quiet, blocking out a whipping wind. I look up to see Eliot Spitzer himself leering back at me from his picture on the wall. It seems weird to me that I come to work five days a week and rarely notice this picture. His face is stony-looking and carved, the chiseled smile never quite transcending the austerity of that stony jaw. It makes you jump a little. Eliot Spitzer: watching your every move.

Brooke F. made me outline my workaday schedule for her last weekend. It was mortifying. I tried to avoid the subject, but she pushed and pushed. “But so you have a snack right after work?” she needed to know. I want to cut to the fun parts, but all I keep getting caught up in are the second-rate moments, like crunching intently on a candy bar after work, it makes you a little crazy. I find myself foraging for interactions with people, the insane spotlight of my mind searching desperately for some fucked-upness in the environ, just to validate the fact that we’re all residing on the same lunar continent, and that it’s not all carefully conscripted Giacometti figures and discontent. I decide to test this theory at the gym, where I stride over to some girl on the Lady Trainer (sic). “Hey,” I say to her, “how’s it hanging?” I don’t know if it’s the sheer insanity of the social gesture, the asking how’s-it-hanging to a girl I’ve never talked to before or my own sprightly form on the accompanying Lady Trainer, but she seems somewhat unnerved by my inquiry. We get talking a little. I’ve seen this girl around before. She wears all-black sweat suits, and I don’t know if it’s the monochromatic outfit choices, but I had hoped that she chain-smoked cigarettes and read existential literature. It turns out, though, that she works for the public sector and thinks the Oprah book club is really cool. Beggars can’t choose, though, and so I push and push, hoping for the full on itinerary. “But so you watch a lot of TV?” I have to know. “What about after you leave here?” I ask her. “What do you do then??” She becomes unnerved by my questions, gets uncomfortable. It suddenly dawns on me that she thinks I’m going to ask her out on a date or something, erroneously interpreting my research for a romantic gesture. “Don’t you ever just wonder about people, though?” I continue. “I mean, what about that girl over there, with the pinched face,” I motion. “Like don’t you just imagine she has a really horrible job or something? –Or is it that the mounting abyss has risen up before her and is crushing her totally??” She has no idea what I’m talking about. I try a change of tact: “So do you have a boyfriend or whatever?” I ask. “YES,” she says. “I do.” “Really??” I almost cannot believe. I imagine a couple situated in a restaurant, carrying on some insipid conversation in a booth somewhere, a real Olive Garden of the relational exchange. I want to ask about the boyfriend but don’t actually want to know any of the answers. A conversational stumper: In her eyes I see no tangible trace of evidence that we’re inhabiting the same platitude, nothing remotely what I was looking for anyway. Whatever that means. “Well, I’m going to beat it,” I finally tell her. The Lady Trainer comes to an abrupt halt, as she looks at my time elapsed. “That’s all you’re going to do?” she asks me. “Yeah,” I say. "Twenty minutes, that seems like more than enough to me.” She seems unimpressed. “Take it slow,” I tell her obnoxiously; I can’t imagine we’ll be talking again.

Before you die, the bad parts will crush you with an inherent sense of injustice, rolling over you like some kind of tsunami of the mundane, leaving your shoes filled with a coarse brine of boredom and slow death and ennui. There will be prescription medications and talk therapy and interminable yawns that leave your eyes watery around the edges. There will be insanity and suicide and a grim hopeless despair. That’s what will fill the spaces in between.

The years go fast but the days go slow
My parents have recently found a watch, tucked away among the detritus of some drawer in their house, and erroneously assumed it belonged to my sister. It’s a Swatch watch, with a lime-green wrist band, and some sort of art deco-style design featured on the face. It is, admittedly, the kind of watch that a young girl might wear, but it was mine from the fourth grade or beyond, enamored as I was by trendy wrist wear—staunch indoctrination tactics handed down by my older and more “stylish” sisters (both of who were responsible for passing on similar fashion faux-pas, like the rolled pant leg and popped shirt collar). And so it was either some act of nostalgia or the leftover predilection for fashions from the young-miss section that has me wearing it around again. The only chink in the plan is that the watch no longer works. I have even gone the lengths of having the battery replaced, producing the paltry wristwatch to the dude at the gazebo in the mall, who looked back at me with the grim determination that the thing was definitely not my own, and invariably belonged to some younger sister or something. He tinkered with it a moment before handing the repaired watch back to me, shaking his head in reverent awe of the metronome-making Swedes, with their inherent time-keeping capabilities, at which point in time I exited the store and it promptly stopped working again. And so now all that I’m left with is the relative sweetness of an awesome wrist adornment, which only keeps time for one minute a day.

It is another day in Info-Systems, the scattered scuttlebutt of a boss’s whereabouts, and not even the pleasant ca-chunk of a stapler going off today. It’s a slow one, too, moving in perfect step with my broken watch. You could even invoke the indie-rock icons and recite the line, the years go fast but the days go so slow, but in doing so you would also be invoking your own inevitable passage through time, like some kind of slowly drifting glacier being filmed in stop motion, and wrapped up in all of that would be your really bad taste in music, marked with the historical footnote of a time when things might have meant something.

A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend who knows someone who’s having a child. We talked about the feeling the announcement of a marriage or child creates in me. “It’s weird because what is a definitional life-moment for these people always elicits in me the utmost in depressive feelings,” I said to her. Thinking it over a moment, I added to what should not have been added to. “The whole thing is, is that it seems to symbolize the end of Options,” I said. “And I don’t think people shold be making that kind of commitment at such a young age.” “Well, you’re not that young,” she reminded me. “You’ve really only got a few years to get your shit together, because if you don’t work it out soon, everyone in your age bracket is going to be married and moved on, within five years.” I started, taking this new information in, falling away then from the old perspective of a 14 year-old girl. For some reason I had never contemplated this before. My life is on par with the average teenager’s, and that includes a self-imposed curfew. But man: time really is running out, I realized, the unambiguous tinge of paranoia creeping in around the edges. “—I guess I never thought about it like that before,” I said to her. “Well, you should,” she admonished, “because there’s not much time left.” In the distance I could hear the audible clunk of a door being shut, punctuated by the sound of a deadbolt lock. I wondered how long I would continue maximizing my options, or whatever. The indie-rockers had it right, in the end. But it didn’t really seem like it mattered much: my wristwatch was totally broken, and it didn’t really seem to be impressing anyone anyway.

I had that dream where my teeth fall out
Mid-afternoon at the dentist’s. The hygienist is a bubbly woman whose been cleaning my teeth since I was a child, scrapping off the years’ worth of residue, so I can go about the process of meticulously recreating that same residue, like ancient cities of pixie sticks and coffee stains and grime, conducting the archeological dig of the crown molar. She seems somewhat off today as she sits me down in the chair. I read somewhere that dentists kill themselves more than in any other profession and it makes some amount of sense to me. It seems like an alienating thing, having your hands in someone’s mouth all day, in such close proximity but always so far away. She prattles on at length about her kid’s college and politics, asking me the type of questions which seem evocative of a senior thesis, but by the time I get to answer she’s racing off to other topics, and you just can’t win. But ah, well: it’s probably better if I don’t say anything. At least when you’re silent you can let the other people sell themselves out, with the incipient lack of sanity. And besides, I don’t really have anything to say.

Before leaving she asks me what color toothbrush I want, zipping off an entire color wheel worth of toothbrushes, before I settle on one. “Blue,” I tell her. “Does that say something about me?” Because who ever get the neon lime green, anyhow? “Once in a while someone chooses the lime green” she assures me, “but a lot of people like blue.” At the threshold, I can see her smiling back at me, clutching my new blue toothbrush. Another patient served. I wonder what my life will be like the next time I see her, and it’s always so hard to say. But then I remember: I’ll find out in exactly 7 days, I have a cavity.

Can’t you see a jaguar walks among you through your petty lives
Drinks with Gail S. We can’t decide where to go and then choose the pub with the most ridiculous-sounding name, which is the Lionheart. What this is supposed to represent, I don’t know, but at least the spurious student population is not around for one more week and so we can hang out in there and have a beer on a weeknight without too much fear of aesthetic disappointment. The guy working at the bar seems somewhat chagrinned to see us come in, interrupting what are apparently the very important affairs of presiding over an empty pub. He takes our drink orders and we laugh at the “bad vibes.” There’s something about this guy which seems highly resonant of high school ass-whippings and verbal abuse, having narrowly escaped the black trench coat and rifle and ended up here instead, to vibe out lowly patronage from his very important throne. He pumps the jukebox while Gail and I relate. We only see each other once every two months and so I have to catch her up on my Plan, which involves some sort of exodus. I tell her how bored I am, and then find myself bored with telling people this same thing. I’m old enough to understand the nature of repetition and don’t want to become one of those people. But Gail is nice enough to listen sincerely, as though she actually cares, and I am thankful for that. Momentarily we are distracted by the barman again, who is rump-shaking to his latest selection from the jukebox, which sends Gail totally over the edge. I have seen her entertained for hours on end with cosmic minutia, and so this is currency of the greatest value to her, a real bright star. When he disappears to smoke a cigarette, we look at the book he has left behind on the bar, which is Imajica: The Reconciliation, a fantasy novel. We have a good laugh at this, and being the jerks we are Gail flips the marker, losing our protagonist's page in the book, which I can’t help but feel some amount of compassion for. And therein is revealed the nature of the lion’s heart: It’s a strong heart, but an historically feeling one, which is often complexified with the consumption of alcohol.

I have lost my mind/can’t seem to find that dang thing

The Uber-weenie on television last night, giving his parents what for: “All that I’m suggesting is that I get to watch television whenever I want,” he says, intoning in the most painfully nasal voice. It’s a very important part of my life, and inhibiting this portion of my life would be most disruptive.” His parents try and reason with him. Maybe the television-watching could be limited to nighttime, but that would present the logistical concerns of missing Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. “I will not stand for it,” the weenie keeps saying. “Absolutely not.” This is part of a PBS documentary about Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition which produces an uncanny dorkinator of a child who, while unable to hold a job or conversation with someone, seems quite adept at watching TV and hanging out all day. His parents have the lowest expectations for him, hanging onto the common thread of hope he will one day be able procure a job somewhere, which he invariably gets fired from one after another. One job he shows up for at 9:00 am and is dismissed by 10:30 after asking if he can go home and watch TV for a while. The scene then cuts back to him in his bedroom at home, flopping down on the bed for the mid-morning showing of Mr. Roger’s, which he reverently orates over: “Mr. Rogers understands our concerns,” he says. “He knows that the world is not perfect, and that things do not always work out the way we planned.” It is cracking me up in the nighttime, busting a gut past my bedtime. There really is no hope for this guy. And so that’s one person whose competency level falls at least slightly below my own. Although a little research points out that the person in question is actually the son of the editor in chief of The New Yorker and thus will in all probability get to live out his ultimate dream of hanging out all day and watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood—out-dorking even me.

I remember me
American Gladiators on TV. This is the show which featured gym rats from Venice Beach made good, guys with receding hairlines dressed in ill-fitting spandex outfits taking on carpenters from middle America in the ultimate pantomime of modern day roman warriors. I remember watching this show on Saturday nights at a friend’s house. His mom would make us cheddar cheese popcorn in the microwave as we cheered our gladiator of choice. Many fans of this show would probably later go on to fight in actual combat, in some sketchy desert somewhere, with the inherent notions of heroism. Where my fanaticism for dudes dressed in patriotic spandex outfits verged, I don’t know, but it was probably somewhere around the time of adolescence—or when I read that first Chomsky book, or somewhere. The details are not very important, but it’s with no lack of consternation that I notice that some executive somewhere actually had the insane idea of putting this show back on the air again. “Gladiator party, man,” Adam tells me when I get home last night. We whoop it up in the cathode ray, a motley assemblage of people old enough to remember when this show was on the first time around. It’s funny how the gladiators are still those same guys with receding hairlines and hilarity-invoking names. A gladiator named Wolf-Man, a 40-something with a ratty beard, whose presence elicits in him a menacing wolf call every time he appears, makes us laugh and laugh. And it’s a real good time. You have to decide: do you really want to cheer for the firefighter from East Orange, New Jersey or do you want to see him fall from his perilous perch on the bridge as the Wolf-Man pummels him with an oversized sack of potatoes on a string? These are the important life-questions, the ones which require a little more from you. On a commercial break, I catch myself brainstorming an idea where they would retrieve actual Guantanamo Bay prisoners and pit them up against the American Gladiators for the ultimate exchange of freedom. If the gladiators were defeated they would be at the opprobrium of the general public as the Guantanamo prisoners went free. But if the gladiators won, it would just be more of the same for the Guantanamo prisoners, waterboarding or whatever. The only problem would be they would have to come up with a new name for the show. American Jingoism, I would like to suggest, but it's still in the beginning phases. I am silently working out the details when someone asks me what I’m muttering. –What? Oh, nothing, I say. Nothing, really: I promise.

Dancing for dollars
Standing on the front porch at 8:30 this morning and looking out at the frozen tundra which stretches out at my feet. The walkway is covered with snow and my precarious sneaker situation makes traversing the distance to the street difficult today. Should I shovel a pathway and be late for work? I have to decide. I vacillate on the notions of frozen feet, and then trek out into the snow, taking large steps in between, as though the larger footsteps are going to cut down on the amount of snow making its way into my shoes. Five steps in, I realize: fuck it-it doesn’t matter. I mine as well be barefoot or walking on hot coals right now. Where is my fascist neighbor with his workhorse son, I wonder, clearing the snow away as his dad stands behind him and tells him to hurry up? I don’t know, but even the mentally challenged seem particularly smarter than me today (as I contemplate the aforementioned whereabouts of my challenged neighbor—about whom the jokes abound—a nascent image presents of him, sitting indoors, feet kicked up as he swills Cherry Coke from a straw and simultaneously takes in an episode of Looney Toons).

I am listening to the The Knife’s Silent Shout on my car stereo today. I don’t know anyone who actually likes this album, but it seems relative to the vast frozen tundra, and I can only imagine its detractors probably don’t reside in the northeast. The great thing about Silent Shout, though, is that beyond the austerity, it’s an evenly measured dance album. And therein lies the awesomeness of this record for me, because not only could can you hang yourself to it, but alternately you could throw an all-night dance party (although that seems to posit the fact that it would be a pretty depressing dance party, where everybody feels suicidal and grim at the end, but I think what I was actually relating is the way I feel after 80’s night at the Fuze). I turn it up a notch in my car, and then try and imagine the appropriate dance moves to accompany the song I am listening to. People would ask me why I’m dancing so weird, and I’d tell them, it’s simple: my feet are frozen.

Pancakes for one are always depressing
My girlfriend has recently broken up with me, taking the opportunity to call me while driving home one night. “Can you hold on?” she asks me. “I’ve got to put my headset on.” It seems funny to me. Once everything is in place, she gets back to the task at hand, which is filled with so much grim foreboding. “It’s not that you’re a bad person,” she says, “It’s just that you lack any sort of drive. –I mean, you really do just seem to be coasting.” I latch on to that word, appreciating the syllables as they make their way off of my tongue. “Coasting,” I say contemplatively. “Yeah,” she fires back, “I mean, there’s just no sense of get-up-and-go.” It’s difficult for me to determine, but the verbiage being suggested really does seem evocative of the car ride: drive, coasting, get-up-and-go. I try and imagine the motions suggested by these words but am so far detached from these concepts that I actually have to ask. “So what you’re saying is that you’d be way more into me if I had a better job or something?” That makes some amount of sense, I have to admit. Going out to dinner or anywhere that involved any sort of monetary exchange was always a particularly awkward time, never being able to pay. And her parents seemed particularly unnerved with my lack of a 401K. “Yeah,” she admonishes, “TAKE A NIGHT CLASS, or do SOMETHING.” There is pause, where she tries to fiure out something else that I could do—the necessary locomotion a life should carry, the motions and movements which add up to time well spent in the arithmetic of civility. “What about that literacy program?? she wants to know. “Weren’t you going to do a literacy program?” Night classes, literacy programs: the shoes or hair I could actually concede to, but these things seem totally superfluous to me. But ah, well: I should have seen it coming. My life, on paper, is not very impressive. In the end, there’s nothing I can do but give in. “It’s all true,” I tell her compassionately. “I know exactly what you’re saying.” It seems weird to be able to achieve the level of detachment which allows you to see things objectively, but I seem to have done that: “I know I wasn’t always easy to deal with,” I tell her sympathetically. “I guess I’ll see you,” I say before hanging up the phone.

Lying back on my bed, it’s hard not to concede that something seems seriously amiss with me. And it wouldn’t be so bad except that I just had this same conversation with another girlfriend, five years removed. She recently called me up and rehashed some things. Iceberg, I think she may have said, before blowing up my spot totally with the very incendiary scather by-the-way of Destiny’s Child lyrics. All you can really do is shake your head when someone actually quotes Destiny’s Child lyrics to insult you. And then I remember what was fundamentally wrong with that situation: differing tastes in music.

On TV I take comfort in a rerun of Seinfeld. They are seated in the diner, when Jerry begins relating a near-death experience. –You always say that you’re going to live your life differently from that moment on, he says, but nobody ever does. And what would that imply? Elaine asks. WHAT ISN’T A WASTE OF TIME?? I MEAN, CAN’T YOU EVEN DRINK A CUP OF COFFEE ANYMORE? she says. And then I remember: my girlfriend hated that show, too.

They don’t make lies like they used to
I will read anything left in the break room at work: True Story Magazine, which features the utmost in outrageous tales of domestic debauchery (fictional); out-of-date Rolling Stone magazines and obscure romance novels, with brittle yellow pages that have been left untouched for years; Entertainment Weekly, whose faux-New York variety editors churn out articles and lists—lists of anything—to validate the fact that yes, they are young and urban, and into indie-rock; or even Sound and Vision magazine, which panders exclusively to the bourgeoisie and whose featured “entertainment systems” cost more than my annual salary for the last five years combined. Advertisements, brochures, bulletins and obscure addiction pamphlets, with hilarity-inducing drawings accompanying descriptions. My job is so mind numbingly boring—such an affront to the senses on every available level!—such an assault to mankind in general!—clear out some knitting magazines from your recently deceased 84-year-old grandma’s coffee table and I will probably check them out for at least ten minutes of total sensory overload.

Today I am reading the Daily Gazette, which is a Schenectady, New York newspaper that saves you ten cents over the leading newspaper subscription. The only people I’ve ever met who actually subscribe to this paper are my dad and some chumps who live out in the middle of nowhere, so that the leading paper (e.g. The New York Times) does not deliver there. In any case, it’s a pretty worthless piece of trash, and I’m pretty sure you can read the entire thing, cover to cover, in no more than 15 minutes. Today I am reading, perusing like a motherfucker—actually going so far as to read the obituaries, because I have nothing better to do. Most of the obituaries I’ve ever read go to great lengths to point out the definitive life-moments of the individual, what schools they’ve attended, where they’ve lived, etc. In the case of some momentous trauma the editors at said paper and the respective families usually go the distance of providing such vagary that you, the reader, have no idea of what actually happened as the cause of death. But today I am reading and this obituary actually points out that this young person was a DRUG ADDICT, and that it got the best of him, in the end. It wastes no time in pointing this out either, not even sparing the proverbial five lines of lifetime dogma. It seems unreal to me. Can they actually get away with this?? I want to know. Can your family actually defame you in such a shrewd manner? It seems crazy, but it is real and it is true. Die doing something your family wouldn’t want you to, and they might chide you for your death-style (as if they actual living wasn’t hard enough—hence the existence of illicit drugs to begin with—now there’s all this to worry about). It stresses me out for about ten minutes, during which time I scroll my own obit, pointing out all of the finer achievements: Ryan Kemp, many memorable hairdos, unfortunate sneaker collection. I get uptight about it, and then I realize: it probably won’t matter too much in the end.

We need so many things to keep our stupid lives going
My shoes are cracked and worn, fucked with years of overexposure to manmade concrete surfaces covering everything. The laces have disappeared from the left shoe, and I never bothered to replace them, opting instead to walk around with the tongue absurdly flapping about. The other shoe is equally destroyed and has worn away at the front, where my toe is beginning to show through. Paired together they represent an incongruous mess of the falling apart, making the mad dash in unison toward total disintegration (a day which will show by with my shoes and clothing disintegrating off of me completely, leaving me naked and barefoot as I stride out into the new day). Additionally, the bottoms have begun wearing away in different sections, making them not particularly choice footwear for rainy days. Today the melted ice from the sidewalk accumulates and makes its way easily into the bottom of my shoes, saturating much of my socks and feet. I register this with the slight pulsating sting that occurs at the foot-level when the human skin comes in contact with cold wet substances and causes small curse words to come out of my mouth. Later, at work, my shoes have begun to dry and smell, much to the chagrin of my unfortunate coworkers, who have to sit within my immediate proximity all day. These same coworkers will later gather in the hallway, circling around and talking in hushed tones about the faint aroma coming from under my desk—a fear instilled in me years ago at a temp job, where a fellow-temp actually did receive a call from his agency, telling him to clean up his act. It was not the aroma of body funk, another coworker diligently explained, so much as it was the lurid reek of feet which did him in. All of which has rendered a lifelong fear in me, and which is made one hundred percent tangible moments ago when a coworker turns and asks, what is that smell, mang?? There is a moment of conjecture before Joy produces, with her Sauerkraut lunch, ready to eat.

I really probably should buy a new pair of shoes, soon. Because you never can underestimate of good footwear.

Some things last a long time
Recently I have gained access to an email account which was previously made inaccessible to me for a long period of time. Opening this account was like opening some sort of sad tomb which probably shouldn’t have been tampered with. Contained inside were emails to people and references to jobs which had been half-forgotten about, discarded from long-term memory, outside of overt references to how much worse things were, then. After college, I had—as perhaps so many “young adults” do— (a demographic I find myself slowly slipping away from), experienced a period of crisis both wide and sweeping. Among many of the jobs I had then, I worked in a mailroom for a state agency in New York, where my main area of employ involved reading a lot of books and interacting with my insane coworkers. One of my coworkers was a mentally handicapped woman named Suzie, whose head I rescued from the clenching jaws of an elevator door, and who had subsequently invited me over her house for dinner (which, strangely, out of lack for things to do and people to interact with, I accepted). I met some other cooler people there, too, when I wasn’t being too hopeless and grim. Sometimes I wrote emails to them.
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hi, leah: i don't have aim, but i do have email and, sadly, a whole lot of time on my hands, seeing as I work, well, here in this office, doing god-knows-what. And because of all that, I’m a pretty dedicated emailist, I guess. And so that's something, at least. In the movie You Can Count On Me, Mark Ruffalo's character asks Rudy if he will write him back, and then proceeds to say, "Well, it'll be a pretty kick-ass deal for you, because i write one hell of a letter." But you have to promise to write me back, though, and give me constant affirmations of my genius or all deals are off.

merry christmas,

ryan*

I am at work right now, listening to a telephone conversation. Jerry is talking to his wife, indignantly affirming, You've got to come up with a schedule, THAT'S WHAT I KEEP TELLING EVERYONE!" He says this over and over, asserting this to his wife who presumably disagrees. It's amazing, really: they could be talking about anything at all--that rocks are lighter than air--and still he would maintain this conviction, that he is right, rocks are lighter than air. It’s ego, in its bare naked form, and he will not be wrong: "rocks are lighter than air"; "we've got to come up with a schedule," et cetra.

I've got to make a note, I keep telling myself, to capitalize on all of the awesomeness which happens in this environment. I keep thinking of bringing a tape recorder in, almost liking the idea of hearing my own voice and how it functions in this environment. Have I been totally subverted? Or am I, like i hope, completely transcendent? It's all so hard to say.
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another day, mail processing, 101. otherwise referred to in my secret mental file as carefully conscripted torture for people who have done horrible things in prior lifetimes. the radio blasts lionel richie, "everybody needs a little time away/ i heard her say," over and over and over, drilling it into you, three times a day. i can identify with that: everybody needs a little time away. with no vacation time on the schedule, however, and no where to go anyway, here i am, hiding in a corner, and writing maniacal emails to people who will never talk to me again as a result.

i hope all is well with you, though, glenna roach. sorry i have yet to make good on my promise to come visit you. this is just another item on the increasing to-do list of ryan kemp, including (though not limited to): tucking in my shirt and combing my hair, and working out a "plan" for future survival, although not quite as mundane as any of those things, i guess. i had better get going, though. 99.5 is lining up another music block, my hair is as frazzled as ever, and i'm not even half way through my to-do list.
see you,

ryan*


back to work. this is, apparently, the part in my day where kristen drinks some curious blend of met amphetamines mixed in her coffee, and then proceeds to berate the hell out of me with her latest tales of woe, even though i make every effort to display that i am in fact wearing headphones and reading a book, not listening. what is wrong with these people i don't know?
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hey, i'm sitting at my desk, at work. when i inherited this desk, a few months ago, it came with one of those desk calendars which looks a lot like a gigantic placemat, allowing both form and function. i eat lunch on it everyday, invariably dropping the remnants of whatever it is i'm eating all over it, so that the month of January is totally fucked, smeared with the chaff of weeks'-worth of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, and the droppings of whatever else it is i indulge in with the kind of wreckless abandon i tend to reserve for specifically these moments. i'm looking at it a few moments ago, remarking to myself even as i survey the damage, there really was just no way around this. and it's hard not to notice, sitting here now, the damage done. at least, i reason, it's almost over (rounding up another month which i'll methodically destroy).

-ryan*

hi, hot chocolate (don't ask). i wanted to write you one last time before you disappeared into the depths of whatever despotic third-world jungle you're venturing into, to roam around, because i would imagine you won't be having any internet access there, but who knows, really? they have roadside stands at truck stops in rural Iowa, where you can access anything you might be needing to check out while stopping at a roadside stand in rural iowa, if it's only a few lonely blurbs from some vestigial boyfriend alone in a house in Albany. but maybe Iowa is not so comparable, who knows?

Either way, i saw this program on abnormally large people last night, and i wanted to tell you about it, because it was especially profound, i thought, in a way which is not unspecific to, well, what i think is really specific and important, which is, uh, all pretty sketchy, i would imagine. in any case, it was kind of a winding delineation of how people grow, and especially the process of how people standing 8'9 get to be that way. in your head, there's something called a pituitary glad which secretes some sort of enzyme or another, all of which elicits the overall growth process, starting around the time of maturity, which is gender specific, occurring at different ages in males and females, etc. in some people, however, namely people standing really fucking tall, a tumor forms, causing the pituitary gland to secrete massive amounts of said enzyme, eliciting massive growth spurts, and in some cases, results in death. i was thinking that, in a way, we're attempting and avoiding. I hope you have a fun time.

ryan*


a letter from a., amid all of the junk mail and fodder. that's nice. and a bowl of Life cereal to boot. the breakfast experience just doesn't get much better than this. you have to pretend, at least, once you've thrown away all of your vices. and besides, i reason, you mine as well at least pretend you enjoy Life.
in any case, everything's happy and healthy. i got invited to go to norway this summer by my grandmother, but then realized you just can't get in on the whole international experience when you have your grandmother in tow, no matter how much she offers to pay for. but who knows? i have all of these vices to pick up on again. And what with the party atmosphere which seems to pervade my uncle's house ("we decided to just be friends," he tells me of his live-in wife. "you know, just do our own thing."), you can't be going wrong.

i'm going to XXXXXXXXXXXX this weekend, though, to see if that's somewhere more in line with my worldview, and better suits my criteria for long-term survival. mostly, i just wanted to check out if there are places in the universe where you can walk down the street and not have people circling back to get a closer look at you. although, to be fair, with the current proliferation of rock culture, i guess i've just been feeling a lot more mtv2 lately. i'm more at liberty to walk into any random establishment preceded by the imagery of the strokes, and then have some retardedly drunk asshole stagger up to me when i'm trying to get the high score on miss packman, telling me how atavistic i look (although, i guess when you're really rocking it on miss packman, what else do you expect?). fortunately for me, however, girls really seem to favor that whole m2 thing; there's probably a whole ten more mintues now until i'm just rendered totally passe.

i'll call you, though. i've got to get back to my cereal.

love, ryan*

Everybody loves a good red scare
An interoffice feud has occurred. I entered on it the other day, the cacophony of voices which got louder as I approached, and then walked silently through its center and to my desk, taking my seat as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Today we are experiencing the silent nuclear arms race of the aftermath. The lines in the sand have been drawn, and I am being asked to choose sides. It’s all horrible craziness to me, though: everybody seems marginally insane from my vantage point, and I don’t even know what the argument was about. My coworkers have begun creating all new reasons for interacting with me, so as to get a feel for where I stand in the matter, attempting to tip the scales to one side or the other. Joy corners me in the break room and begins questioning me about drug paraphernalia, which she found in her grandson’s room. “Oh, I wouldn’t really know anything about that,” I tell her, so as to not implicate myself. “Oh, well I just thought you might know,” she says. We stare awkwardly at each other for the ensuing few seconds before parting ways. Meanwhile, back in the office, my other coworkers have taken to talking in hushed tones, reveling in the office scuttlebutt which is their raison d’etre. I can’t believe this is actually my life, I find myself thinking for the one-millionth time. I keep waiting for some obscure European relative to die, leaving me an inheritance which will absolve me from this petty existence, so I can carry out my ultimate dream of doing Nothing. But I just keep waiting and waiting.

It has become obvious to me that whatever minute semantic issue is at hand, everybody is against Joy because she hates her job and says so, which hasn’t particularly ingratiated her among the other people who work here. Nowhere else in the free world could get away with watching Montel and distaining your job between fistfuls of popcorn than in the public sector. But whatever your feelings about her predilections for daytime TV you really just have to appreciate the sheer bravado with which she conducts herself around here, a sight to be seen. I try and sympathize with the other people, the vitriol which produces in gallons and buckets’ full. You can feel them trying to win you over, the bad vibes permeating the common airspace like some kind of mold spores. But like William Shatner said, “I can’t get behind that.”

I end up finding Joy in the hallway, roaming up and down, her newest refuge in an increasingly uneasy refuge. “Hey,” I say, walking over to her. “Don’t worry about it. Those guys are fucked up.” She looks at me incredulously. “You’re on my side?” she asks. It feels kind of weird to admit, but I guess if righteously subverting the man is the task work at hand, I actually am. “Yes,” I say to her, “I AM on your side. Now let’s get back to work.” And then, side by side, we walk back into the office, through two sets of doors that snakes right into the seething hot center of the lair, which is a bay of pigs or otherwise.

You ought to kick it to me and bite off my head
Last night, in the throes of inexplicable terribleness, I went to the liquor store and purchased a sizable bottle of red wine, which I then got home and proceeded to discover I had nothing to open it with. It seemed like some kind of hi-jinx performed by the gods above, who seem periodically bent on messing with my head. I turned the apartment over, looking for an opener, before giving up and sitting down, staring blankly at the bottle before me, as though by sheer will alone I could pop the top off. The very existence of the bottle, I conjectured, is the result of my ever crumbling girl situation, unraveling like a ball of twine that seems destined to just keep unraveling, forever. Small patterns disappear and are subsumed by bigger patterns, the singer sings. And that's the way it is with me. I remember when I was dating X., I became a particularly sordid brand of variety drunk, showing up to her house wrecked beyond belief. She would find me sitting on her porch, petting her cat, either too confused or apathetic to ring the bell, which may just pose the question, was it the drinking which crumbled the situation for me, or was it the situation itself which had me turning into a drunk? And further, if history repeats itself in the here and now, will I just continue to get worse, moving on to other balls of twine which will inevitably unravel? I was vacillating heavily on the larger implications when the sounds of the downstairs bell shook me from my reverie. Standing there, on the landing, was the downstairs neighbor's dude, stone-faced and hollowed out-looking, brandishing a plate of cookies. We were going through the greetings when the downstairs door flew open, where standing on the thershold was the ye old neighbor herself, with a face equally as grim. No sooner did this occur then I realized that I had found myself sandwiched in a particularly fiery brand of domestic dispute, and so I excused myself, promptly, and retreated back upstairs again. Poor guy, I thought: he had been experiencing his own brand of domestic dispute, probably, demonstrating any number of nervous tics which had presented--the kind which seemed innocuous and easily ignored at first but which over time sprouted into some ignoble bonsai of the nervous tic, and which, once discovered, could never be ignored fully and totally again, resulting in one thousand cold looks and sordid disputes and god knows what. Who could say what went wrong? It seemed like something, though, surely.

Romantic interpretation is a particularly sordid lot. Every once in a while two people will defy the odds in lieu of the urge to endlessly swap bodily fluids, working it all out in the end. And it is this triumph of the will which erroneously goads the rest of us on, resulting in the creation of one million romantic dramas of theatric proportions, both real and imagined. That's just my take on the subject matter. But you probably shouldn't listen to me; my record is not that great, and I can't even open a bottle of wine.

On my way out to buy an opener, I notice on the ground the batch of cookies sitting precariously by the door. The weight of this discovery crushes me. I look at the sad little pile of fresh baked goods, pathetically sitting there on the ground. Somewhere, out in the world, is this sorry sufferer and baker of homemade items. I feel like Sartre's narrator in Nausea, the only one able to sufficiently understand the Self-Taught Man. But ah, well: it's too late. He's probably already en route to the liquor store by now, in pursuit of the balm which will soothe his suffering soul. I stand there for one moment more, contemplating the cookies. It really does seem like such a waste, I think. And then, pulling back the cover, I reach inside and purloin one the sweet delicacies off of the plate, popping one in my mouth before striding off into the night. Not too bad, I think. Not too bad at all.

My baby served me love on a plate (paper)
An injured leg on the Lady Trainer (sic) at the gym is causing me to limp around all day. What did you do to your leg? People want to know. Oh, you know, I stammer: I fell down the stairs. One time in high school, I broke my leg during a rad sleigh-riding trick and the questions which subsequently followed were answered in all manner of creative ways. But the truth, as is the lesson of US foreign policy, was avoided at all costs. And here I find myself slipping up. But sometimes you just can’t help yourself, as is the case with most social boners (a sentence which, even as I write it, seems problematic and so terribly rife with sordid sub-textual ribaldry that I probably won’t sleep tonight. Which also—actually, never mind).

The root of my entire problem today acutely broils down to the fact that somebody brought in sticky bun pastries, which has me bouncing off the walls of my cubicle. There’s something so delectably sweet about them that when your coworker who brought them eyes you suspiciously on your third trip for more, you cannot help but ice that same person out, with the tacit suggestion of, get-the-fuck-out-of-my-face. But now that I think of it, the whole messy equation really probably will relate back to obsessively riding the lady trainer tonight, for an endless succession of pulled muscles and second rate excuses and social boners. Or however you say.

You've got your big cheese/ I've got my hash pipe
The day seems impossibly long after only a few hours. I called in late to work today, after a late night out. “Joy,” I say into the phone before she shouts back my name. “Ryy!” she says into the receiver, “HOW ARE YOU DOING??” And then, before I have time to answer, she’s off about how nobody’s on time today, and can I come in quickly? It’s not there’s a lot of work to do, or anything that actually necessitates my being there. No, the root of the problem is that she’s just really lonely. “I’ll do my best,” I tell her, before hanging up the phone and hastily falling back asleep.

H.’s wedding turned out not to be a total fiasco, although we did manage to alienate ourselves right off by admitting that we’re not fans of the rock group Phish. This was, strangely, one of the first questions posed to us, which, once unsatisfactorily answered, excluded us from the more illicit proceedings taking place out back all night. The moral being, if you want to smoke weed with the ex-hippies seated at your table, you have got to read between the lines and at least pretend that their musical predilections are not startlingly inferior to your own.

On the way out, I am practically sprinting to the car, when KD tells me to slow down. And it’s true, I think: why am I walking so fast? My whole life, I’ve recently conjectured, is a series of events that I’m ploughing through joylessly. Somebody else recently asked me if I was in a hurry to get going, and I realized, no sooner did I arrive at the bar the other night then I immediately began worrying about how I was going to get home again, the logistics involved, and sundry other concerns. What the hell is wrong with me, I don’t know. There’s so much getting through the things I need to get through, to get to the all of the other things which need getting through. And rarely is anything ever accomplished, when the work is never done. I am stressing out over the details in the car ride on the way home, when I realize: I really probably should check in on some of those jam bands.

Let's drink a toast to all those who arrived alive
Mario S. walking through the shoppers’ mall, like an anchor of familiarity in a sea of the terrible unknown. “Oh, hey what’s up,” he greets me, recognizing my face. It’s always funny seeing Mario, because he’s fairly ubiquitous within the greater upstate area, and I always do end up seeing him in the most bizarre places imaginable, while doing nothing particular at all. The whole anchor-of-familiarity paradigm is probably lost on Mario, however, given that he seems to know everybody, and it’s probably more of a testament to his imagined magnetism which always tricks you into thinking you’re the anchor. We talk things over a bit and I tell him that I’m going to a wedding this weekend, and how I need something to wear. “Wedding’s are the worst,” he says, “I always tell my friends: ‘listen, motherfuckers: you know where I work, I can’t afford no present.’” We have a laugh at that, and then he continues to explain to me that weddings are akin to receiving a speeding ticket, an expense which you can’t afford. I misconstrue the original statement by adding that it would be more like a speeding ticket that comes with dinner and dancing, but Mario insists that it’s a speeding ticket all the same. And it’s weird how one of the most important days in two people’s lives becomes little more than an overwhelming chink in your well-constructed plans for the weekend. My formalwear situation is little less than happening, and the whole fact that two people younger than me are getting married elicits in me some kind of existential panic which just won't go. But ah, well: what can you do? Some people have to have lives which suggest that things are OK, and that it’s not all horrible and grim. And the food will be really good, probably. So that’s something, at least.

I walk out of the mall with Mario, past the pesky miscreant factions which seems to assemble by the entryways, which is somehow very logical hanging out corridors for 15-year-olds nationwide. I point out my car to Mario, which resides in a very choice spot, close to the entryway. He has no idea where his own car is in the interminable sea of similar-looking cars and then tries to remember if it’s even in this lot at all. We both shrug, and then say goodbye, until the next time. On the service road out, I see that Mario has found his own car, as he whips by me at impossible speeds, with his inimitable afro poking up above the driver’s seat, in full view of passersby.

All my heroes are weirdos
Howard S. sits across from me at dinner, clean cut and well groomed. I first met Howard as a flunky in the grade school of some statewide test scoring concern, which was just one in a number of unending temp positions I have worked in my life. I remember talking to Howard then, and the unending vacillation over whether or not he should cut his hair, the symbolism of the event, and what it would all mean. Then he had intricate dreadlocks, which were creatively tied back into a large bunch. He was the type of individual you would imagine hanging around and listening to Kruder & Dorfmeister albums while high on pot. But today he is some dusted off version of his prior self, sparkling clean, with a mortage, fiancé, and a fenced in yard. It’s weird, hanging out with someone who has graduated from the trenches. Howard’s life stands in startling contrast to my own, which is haphazard and grim-seeming. My mom gave me the number for food stamps the other day and I copied it down enthusiastically. When did Howard rejoin? I wonder. And what turn did I miss, I find myself thinking, which put me on the collision course with impasse and total failure, like a train car rushing full force ahead into an implacable brick wall, destined to crash over and over again?

Howard invokes memories of the cast of characters we used to work with. “I hated all of those people,” I find myself telling him. “All of those pedantic fuckers,” I say, “destined for better things. –So completely obnoxious.” I find myself alarmed by the conviction in my voice, about seeming to care about something so vigorously. Howard laughs it off. “It’s pretty much true, though.” he confirms. We laugh at those same people, and wonder what they’re doing now. “I think you either become disillusioned by the process," I say of the temp world, “or you transcend it all together, figuring everything out in the end.” Howe has joined the ranks of the transcendent, apparently. And meanwhile I’m a train wreck, a wreck of all wrecks, destined for collisions, and references to arcane song lyrics which validate all of this behavior. When the check finally comes, I wonder if they take food stamps here.

I was formed in the shopper's eye
It is just some random day, which could be any day. Have I written that sentence before? I’ll write it again. The weather itself is perplexing, clouding over long enough to trick you into thinking it’s going to be a crappy day, shortly before the sun bursts through again and you think, how manic the weather is. I actually find myself thinking about Tim Drawbridge again, and am then creeped out by my same obsession with this human being: is Tim Drawbridge married with children? Or is he some hanger on— the creep at the end of the bar who women, no matter his bizarre manifestations, latch onto the intangible charm beyond? These are the things I’m thinking about, I actually find myself thinking. And then I change the subject, the television channels of the mind, when the thinking about thinking becomes the thinking itself, so far removed.

I am listening to a punk rock song right now and experiencing the placebo of context. I remember this song, and my experience with it is transporting me five years or more, which mine as well be a century ago (which, at least in the currency of song form, actually is a century ago. Although, I guess you might make the argument that if a song means something, it might actually transcend the value of commodity, but that’s an argument better saved for a different time and place and author, who may not be me). I’m thinking about what my life was like then, walking around the art school campus and taking it all in. It seems, sadly, like I have not changed at all. Did I just hit the wall? I wonder—like when your body has matured to a point where it’s not going to mature any further. Or do you just begin to disintegrate, falling apart completely? Or are the changes more subtle and I’ve just forgotten completely, with the inability to compare? The only way to know, I guess, is if you write everything down, and unfortunately I do write things down. The blog itself is some paltry reflection of this, and there it is, laid out before me, to observe with no lack of chagrin. It could be worse, I guess. But the song at least, is still the same; it couldn't sound better.