“Yo, son you think I can explain this shit?  What… what… yeah, that’s what I thought.”

On the toes it was Jordan IIIs, white and gray on the sticky, sticky black asphalt and the heat and humidity of being in the bathroom after a long shower had somehow leaked out into the summer and amidst the front of the red brick row houses it was cold high gravity lager and discussions and disses.

“What’s that smell?”  Reg began waving his hand in front of his face and shaking his head.

“Oh, snap son that’s the smell of all the mad shit you be talking.  Fucking ripe.  I think it’s past your bedtime, son, I think you got to take them drawers home and get back into bed, cause your shit is ripe.  Momma gotta take it out.”

“Kid, how you gonna be coming up in here and talking shit to my face, on my stoop, in front of my mom’s house, what?  Fuck you, you’re shit is stale.  S-T-A-L-shut the fuck up and recognize.”

Reg laughed and shook his head.

“Tom Baker, motherfucker, Tom Baker!  That’s the fucking doctor.  You don’t know shit about this shit, all saying that fucking Jon Pertwee is the man, what?  Old dude in puffy shirt, fuck he’s too busy dipping his balls in Rogaine to be saving the universe.”

“Oh wait, right… hang on… what’s that sound?  Yeah, it’s you running your mouth outta shit to say.  You be rolling on with your bullshit about Baker and his long ass scarves and you run out of shit to say… gah… gah… t-t-t-t-I don’t no what else to say!”

D-man reverted to a childlike voices and pretended to choke as he continued on.

“I-I-I-I can’t handle the doctor without jokes… I need my jelly babies.”

He switched to his normal voice and stepped into Regs side of the stoop, standing taller and arching his back.

“Pertwee, fucking fought the Daleks first, bitch.  Whatchoo got?  K-9, shit…”

“Hold up, hold up. Hold the fuck on up, Pertwee did not fight the Daleks first.  Fucking Hartnell was the first doctor to fight the Daleks, my cousin Bobby got me the tape.  I seen that shit.  You’re fucking wrong, son, wrong.”

The stared at each other for a moment, face to face, hands raised.  For a moment, the world slowed down as Reg looked into D-man’s eyes and contemplated his next move.  The kids sitting on the lower steps seemed to hold their collective breath as time slowly ticked away.

A car passed by.

A dog barked.

The sound of the ice cream truck rounding a corner.

“Shit, son.”

D-man let out his breath and hugged Reg, laughing.

Science fiction double feature.

I can’t explain why I like science fiction, though I know that my love is perhaps unhip.

Wait, start again.  There’s no reason to go into this with a defensive posture.

In my mind, there are two kinds of science fiction: the kind that utilizes space travel and technology to fuel action and the kind that uses the fantastic to say something else, perhaps transcendent of genre.

To be fair, science fiction can be a child’s game of ridiculous fantasy or it can be sublime and thought provoking and I like both.  Not all of either and just having the label “science fiction” and the dismissive mom voice that says “Oh, he’s into science fiction.  He’ll like anything with spaceships and lasers.”  It’s like the dismissive attitude where your grandparents say “Oh you like rock music, here’s a Nickelback CD” (that actually happened to me, thanks Grandpa Kleven).

While I may have read my share of pulpy science fiction, it’s always the transcendent varieties that moves my heart strings.

So, yeah, no secret, I fucking love Doctor Who.  It’s campy, but the cleverness and character of the doctor overshadow any complaints I might have about “bad costumes”.

Special effects don’t really do it for me.

I was going to make this a homage to science fiction I love: from Robert Heinlein to PK Dick, to JG Ballard.  But I’m not.

Here it is, bitch: we’re living in the future.  For reals.  We are the first generation to grow up with the rapid advancement of technology being the norm, so much so that jokes about “not buying something new because it will be obsolete tomorrow” don’t even register as funny… because there is no point to that attitude.  ”So what?” is about all I can muster when someone raises that point.

Some science fiction authors thought we’d be living on the moon and driving flying cars, but the more practical ones did not or they made “living on the moon” such an tenuous thing that they had to justify it somehow.  Because that’s just it: a flying car is a waste of energy and you’d have to have damn good reason to live on the moon.

What we do have are computers that we can take to the water closet (aka “toilet”, “bathroom”, “loo”, “magic throne of relaxation and contemplation that bends space and time”), phones that can tell you where you are, and all sorts of entertainment available on-demand, twenty four hours a day, without even leaving the house and it has made us all selfish and petty and lazy.

You get mad at your phone when it doesn’t work when you never stop to even think that fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have even had it.  You get mad when someone makes a comment you disagree with on Facebook.  I even told someone who I thought was being rude to “shut the fuck up” via text message and I am not one to think that a phone is appropriate media for such things.

(I still believe that technology allows us to be cowards and say and do things we would never do face to face… hell that’s not even a belief, that’s something psychologists have been studying too.)

It’s because you’re too used to the rapid advancement and intrusion of electronics and technology.

When I ride into work, on a bike that I would not have if it weren’t for the sub-subculture of fixed gear freestyle and the industry that has sprung up around a “bike forum” (and I’m not even kidding), I’m listening to an archived episode of This American Life and I can take calls and even let my boss know that I’m going to be late, without even stopping.  Could generation X-ers do that?  Could your parents do that?

No.

So next time your phone fails to work or your box of goodies from Etsy or eBay doesn’t show up right away, take a deep deep breath and look in the mirror.

Repeat after me:

“It’s the future, bitch, shut the fuck up.”

Really.

Or I’ll break your teeth out of your skull when I kick that iPhone in your mouth.  You’re a brat.  We all are.

February 19th, 2010 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

The pale, ghostly blue gray turf stretches as far as the eye can see, blending off into a pale yellow to equally pale blue sky somewhere where the sun hides at the end of the day.  It’s cold, but it’s dry and if you saw it in picture, captured for all time, you would not see temperature: it’s not frosty or icy and the sun isn’t visible.  It is a desert, but it isn’t warm.

“Hello?”

I don’t know how I came here, nor do I know what I’m doing here: I know that there is a path, of sorts, and I have this bike… it is an old Schwinn three speed from the sixties and the drum brakes are inefficient and the frame is spotted in rust, rust that peaks from between the time worn baby blue and white paint.  The springs in the saddle are brown thick with rust and the chain too.  The once chrome rims are spotted with little brown dots… the rust like zits on the face of youth.

It pedals, but it won’t go to fast and the rear rim is far from true.

“Hello?”

How did I get here, how did I come to this alien place with nothing but my clothes and a canteen, which dangles about my neck.  My hands are cold and I’m not sure what I’m doing here.

But I keep moving on.

Creak.  Creak.

Wobble.  Wobble.

I don’t know what time it is.  My watch is no longer working and the sun never seems to show, there is no bright spot anywhere in view.  It is light, but the source of the light is hidden and the sky contains nothing but a few wispy cirrus clouds: the breath of giants far on the wind.

Fuck me.

There is no music here, I have no headphones to aid me in my cadence.

I think of songs to sing, to keep my feet on the pedals, well what is left of the pedals, the plastic platforms are completely off of the right pedal, my foot rests on the spindle and the left is bound to give up the ghost soon.

“Twenty, twenty, twenty four hours to go…”
“Cigarettes they fill the gaps, in our empty days, in our broken teeth…”
“Ten minutes from downtown, is ten minutes too far…”

My hands burn with the cold and this need to move compels me to ride.  If the bike fails, I will walk, and if my legs fail, I will crawl… I will pull myself, by handfuls of earth, across the gravelly sand until I fail to draw breath.

I continue like this for what feels like hours, when the sky begins to slowly darken.

It’s getting colder.

I see a mound of rocks and, and what looks like a dead tree, just two hundred yards off the path.  If I can get there, before dark and somehow light a fire.  Maybe I can survive.

My arms are shaking and my teeth are starting t-t-t-t-to chat-t-t-t-ter.

“Goddamnit.”

The wind comes in icy sheets and I struggle to stand up.

I want to lay down and give up, let sleep and death take me.  An icy cold grave, but perhaps a few last thoughts: a dream where I am home and my girlfriend and I are riding bikes to a party with all of my friends and family.  The kids I grew up with, from Alberta and New York and Chicago.  The people I met in college and after, the people I knew in the city.  We drink gin and tonics and dance to all of our favorite songs and there is a mini ramp and a skatepark, somehow, out back behind our house.  And my old band is back together and we play for an hour, and then we air over a big hip and I pull one smooth clean tabletop and return to earth.  That night, my girlfriend curls up beside me and envelops me in warmth and calm, from her sweet breath, to her smooth legs and then, then the dream will end.

If I just lay down, I could be there now.

Just one more step, each impact seems to jar my brain.  My thighs feel cold and I shudder to think of the drop in temperature around my genitals… who have probably hidden away to survive.

My breath freezes before my eyes and I can feel the mucus in my nose harden with each breath.

“Fuck me. Fuck you.  Fuck!”

I fall over by the tree.  There is a lighter on the ground, and a patch of scorched earth where a fire has been… the ashes carried off by the breeze.

I fumble with the broken branches of the tree, my hands feel like clubs and I have lost the ability to feel.  They are these weird stumps that I control but I hit the ground with them and feel… nothing.

Somehow, in the cold and wind, I make a tiny fire and I get as close as I can.  My hands will hurt like they’ve never hurt before and my body will still feel icy… and somehow I sleep.

It’s hard up here, in the rarified air of genius.

Let me say that again: “It’s hard going, up here, in the rarified air of genius.”

God, that sounds horrible.

I was told, in not near as many words, that I live on a high horse… far too high for most mortals, and an oddly shaped horse at that: to accommodate my disturbingly short stout legs and long torso.  (Really it’s a monstrous tall bike.) But it’s hard living, it’s hard to breathe and it is cold, up here.

And, in a way, it’s true.

I had this idea in my mind.  An idea based on fantasy, where somehow each culture, each “thing” I loved and indulged in was composed of some fraternity that was beyond words: people who wouldn’t take advantage of each other and who respected each others differences and who didn’t care or bother to acknowledge the limitations of convention.

This is what happens when you live inside your head, for better or for worse.

I remember having this insane conversation with a girl I casually knew, when we were supposed to be studying for an E&M Physics exam.  She was talking about, oh your god, “jam bands” and I was defending “hardcore and punk”.  Instead of Ohm’s law, we were trying to superimpose “bro-ness” or some shit (come up with a label) onto the skeletons of people “into the same kind of music”.

It was all bullshit.

Sure, we talk about these things and we all know the lyrics to every Refused, Minor Threat or who have you greats of hardcore songs, but despite the message, how many bands sing about “being rejected by the scene”?

I thought at one point in my life that cycling was enough of a passion to override the baser, forgive me if I say it, “suburban white bread” relativism that parades under the guise of “Christian morals”.  Because to me, many of those people were hypocrites who flew under the flag of “the golden rule”…. let me digress for a moment:

The golden rule or “do unto others as you would have done unto you” or whatever variation you can think of (most major religions, despite other inconsistencies, have a variation on this theme) is a good starting point, but it isn’t enough.

Soren Kierkegaard had this problem with the golden rule, that humorist/philosopers  Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein summed up as “a masochist is a sadist who follows the golden rule”.

I won’t bore you further with the wording, but the real rule is “treat others as they would like to be treated”, kind of.  Because the mainstay Sarah Palin’s supporters of the world think they have access to a “higher right”.  That they know “the truth” and that “the truth will set you free” (oh, I know my Bible, kiddos, don’t fuck with me on Biblical knowledge, holmes… I will not hesitate to fuck your shit up, MacGuyver style).

So their golden rule is really more about what they think the world should look like, as dictated by their god, via their leaders.

It works for us too, sorry.

Whether you’re a hardcore kid or a fashion bound hipster or androgynously charged young bohemian, or even… yes, a cyclist.  We all want different things and none of us is really “more right” than the other.  We are, for a lack of better phrasing “more right to ourselves”.

(Lest we forget about the debacle with the “Boulevardier” near a year ago.)

Case in point: traffic signals.  I hate them, I hate that it stops me and because I do so much of my commuting on an inherently impractical fixed gear bike sans brakes, I spend more time trying to plan my route and I dislike having to track stand for a few minutes just to accelerate again.  I’d rather we adopt the rules in Idaho, where cyclists can legally treat a red light like a stop sign… and then I’d still run it.

But I’m wrong.

Yes, it’s one thing when drivers honk, spit, get too close and yell at me, that is just wrong (I pay taxes too, buddy).  But they are right to get mad at me when I blatantly run a red light.  No one likes stopping at red lights and my point of view is just that, “my point of view”… which means that I’m not instinctively objective, at all: I hate stopping, I hate starting again and notice how much “I” I’m using.  That’s because I’m selfish and, frankly, fucking wrong.

Maybe this is why people joke about my “high horse”.

Maybe.

This is also why I’m going to sidestep this entire accusation with one idea: I think there are things I can do to myself, there are experiences I can have that are good or bad.  This is subjective.  I think there is a part of me that can be changed by the things I do or do not and at the end of the day, I’m just trying to keep my conscience from torturing me.  If I fail to live by my own rules, if I fail to uphold my “golden rule plus plus”, I can’t sleep.  So it’s not a high horse, it’s not rarified air… it’s just wanting to sleep at night.

It doesn’t make me better than anyone else.

I can admit, though, that it’s a bit hypersensitive: as a child, when I still believed (or “tried to believe”) in god, I would often pray for everyone I knew, pray for every country I could think of and every political leader good or bad, historical or living until I would fall asleep.

I didn’t tell anyone this, I just did it because it’s the only way I could go to sleep, worried about all of those people I didn’t know going to “burn in hell”.

(Fuck you Pat Robertson, you ignorant, racist, xenophobic, out of touch, and even-though-its-pure-libel-and-probably-not-true-though-I’m-going-to-type it virginal son of a bitchfucker monkey rubber.)

Does that make me arrogant?  Does that mean I live in the “rarified air of someone who thinks they are a genius”?

God, I fucking hope not.

I mean, I’m still just this kid… this kid who obsesses over cheesy science fiction, bikes, vinyl records, Lego, computers, and energy drinks and sometimes gets a little carried away on this whole “hari-kari with a Smith-Corona”.  I still get nervous meeting strangers and too excited for things like a “new bike” or a night of reading a new book with my girlfriend.

If I seem arrogant, if any of this seems like I’m a self-appointed arbiter of morality or cool, then I should apologize.  I rant.  I like to talk about “big things” and I don’t think I’m alone.

I rant and judge and foam at the mouth, just because this crude “morality framework” keeps me from getting that much crazier.  It helps me sleep at night and it has nothing to do with anyone else.  All me.

It’s not a high horse, it’s a crazy horse (apologies to Neil Young) and just like you won’t find me riding tallbikes (unless that counts Pennyfarthings), you won’t catch me on a high horse.  Just a crazy, impractical fixed gear “freestyle” bike that’s mostly getting the better of me (yes, yes, I have many bikes, but you’re more likely to see me on that, whatever).

Ride your horse, however it looks, off into the sunset, but do stay away from the high desert of the elitists.  Cause, goddamn, god-fucking-damn, it’s kind of more pain than it’s worth.

February 15th, 2010 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

I did not know him, I did not know this character who was shirtless in his fringe vest and his moccasins.  I did not know him.

No.

But he stood there, without socks and smiled at me with his blonde hair slicked back and his brown beard neatly trimmed.  His eyes twinkled and he smiled a smile that showed all of his teeth.  He said nothing, but he handed me a little golden key… not merely a key that was golden in color, but a key of shining, gleaming gold.

I had been drinking, you see, drinking far too much… far too much since I had learned of my impending eviction and my lack of funds to prevent this course of action.

Shit.

He did, however finally turn to me and half whisper, on his way out,

“Find the song… Find… the… song.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

I knew things, I should say, I knew things about music that were important.  I knew never to buy a new guitar, unless it was built for you, because rock and roll was about soul and soul was something you could not buy but had to earn with sweat and rusty, rusty frets.  I knew that the best amplifiers were no longer on the market and were discovered in flea markets and garage sales and had dust deeply embedded in the tolex.

I knew that the best drummers had the smallest kits and that the best musicians knew how to mock themselves…

I knew this because I lived it.

Since I was fifteen, when my family had been forced to move into a tiny three bedroom apartment that cost $600 a month and in our malaise of living on top of and into and around each other, when I was ostracized and angry at them all (my family and the world), I could listen to the five records I owned over and over and over again:

Start Today - Gorilla Biscuits

Steady Diet of Nothing - Fugazi

Ride the Lightning - Metallica

Low End Theory - A Tribe Called Quest

24 Hour Revenge Therapy - Jawbreaker

Even though the nineties marched on and more albums would lift me, those were the ones that taught me… everything.  I stayed up late reading the liner notes and learning which bands I should love.

I did not know this man.

I did not know this man.

I wanted to find it.

I thought that perhaps the song was loud, perhaps it was brash, so I went to a metal show… but the kids there were all dressed in black, in costumes of battle jackets covered in patches from Slayer and Goatwhore and Early Man and they were not the song.  They forgot that Slayer had released ten years of bad albums and they forgot that being anything but themselves was an affront to rock and roll.

They lost the rhythm in concern with looking intimidating.

They had no song.

I went to a hip-hop show, looking for the verve the metal kids lacked and all I found was auto-tuned drivel.  Rhymes that were iambic in nature and focused on the cheapest, most bottom line images of sex and drugs and money and… power.

They had no song.

So I went to a punk show, where I thought the passion would carry the four chords and they, they had no song.  They were tight jeans and haircuts and horrible tattoos and they had no song.

No song.

I found a girl with purple hair, buying a leopard print thong, but she had no song.  She had revenge on her mind and her appearance was an affront to the world and it was not, was not the song.

I wanted the song.

I tried ska, I tried hardcore, I tried folk, I tried trip-hop and I found no song.

I wandered the streets alone, I rode a bicycle through traffic and I found no song.

Where was the song?

I sat down, in my despair, I sat down with a forty of malt liquor beer and aimed my hand at the sky and cried out as the light lit the golden lager up.

“Fuck it, I have no fucking song!”

It was heart aches.  It was head aches.  It was a lifetime of being alone and wanting what I could not have.  It wasn’t money, it was love and the want therefore of that kept me looking for the song.  I wanted to sing it, I wanted to be it, I just wanted to feel like I belonged.  She left me and I lost my job.  I cried everynight to a god that may or may not be real and I wanted to find the song.

I didn’t care about fashion.  I didn’t care about looks.  I just wanted to find the song.

If I could find it and make the chords with my hand, the G major and E minor and D7 strong.  Whatever it was, if I could play it, a solo, a tiny lead line.  The thread of a harmonic minor scale, a palm muted refrain, if I could find it… if it came from my hands… if it came from your hands…

I wanted a song.

I sat and I wept, on that curb in the growing dark, on a Saturday in August when all seems but lost.

And he sat down, the hippie, who left me this key.

He smiled and said that he had a present for me.

He pulled out a box and I unlocked it with my key.  He pulled out an iPod and left me to see.

I pushed play and what did I hear.

Songs upon songs.

Pure fucking joy to my ears.

Jawbreaker played Boxcar and I shouted along.  Violent Femmes played Kiss Off and I air strummed.  Hot Water Music played Turnstiles and I shouted to the sky.  Tribe played Can I Kick It and I lost my mind.  Botch covered Rock Lobster and made me smile.  Pulp played Common People and I stood in that grocery line.  Jeff Mangum sung in a closet in Denver about the King of Carrot Flowers.  John Reis broke down the groove and Rocketed From the Crypt.

I wanted more.

Somehow, these were the songs.

The music moved my soul and opened my mind and the lyrics came in and set things to fire.

This is all that I want for any of you.

Find your songs, the music that means everything, every damn thing to you.

I may not like it, but that doesn’t matter.  It really doesn’t matter at all.  Find your own music.  Find your own song.

February 5th, 2010 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

He looked at the dark teak table on which his keyboard rested, then leaned back and rubbed his eyes… his lack of sleep hurt, his lack of sleep hurt the sockets of his eyes and he felt as if a weight hung over him and a weight, perhaps his hubris was an albatross round his neck.

“I am a writer!”

It was a mantra, a plea to the universe, where in lieu of a god or some type of super intelligence, he still found himself praying in times of need.  He was sleeping in horrid cycles, horrid cycles of cold sweat and tossing and turning, the bedclothes bunching up and wrapping around and somehow, somehow falling off.

Sleep.

“Micah, I don’t know how to say this, but we need to talk.  I… this is just too weird.  Can you meet me in… shit… oh my god… can you… oh… this just gets worse.  Meet me at the cafe two blocks from you in an hour.”

In his dazed state, he must have missed the telltale vibration in his pocket, the phone pressed against his left thigh which he often thought he felt ring, but did not and, as fate would have it, when it did actually ring he always missed it.  He felt as if his nervous system was defective and neurons fired randomly in such a manner as to confuse his brain.

Maybe he shouldn’t have smoked so much weed when he was younger.

The call came in forty minutes ago, by the clock on his phone and he had scant time to make himself presentable.  He was sitting in slightly torn purple boxer briefs and cut off jean shorts, drinking a flat and lukewarm energy drink, with socks and shoes on… his pale white gut spilling it’s soft, dimpled form over the waistband.

Shirt.

Pants.

Shoes… yes, he already had that covered, but that was… well, that was weird.

He stepped out and the brilliant white light hit his eyes at the same time the sweet smell of cherry blossoms and the tweet of song birds hit his nose and ears respectively.  He squinted and mused out loud, as he pulled out a bent cigarette from a dented hard pack of Camels and started to light it.

“Fucking mornings, fuck off.”

His gait was irregular and he couldn’t quite feel comfortable with his strides, as if walking was a new sensation, or perhaps another sensation and what it actually was, was much more disappointing.  Sort of like the anticipation a young man feels over a first sexual experience which is nowhere near the pinnacle of existence that he has imagined it to be.  Sure, in time it’s fun, but at the moment people killing each other and starting wars over it seems… well, let’s just say that walking was somehow disappointing, moreso as he was caught reading a neon yellow flyer for a concert stapled to a phone poll which caused him to falter and nearly twist his ankle as he stepped off of the curb.

A car honked at him and he let his finger fly.

“Fuck you, I’m walking.”

As he approached the cafe he saw her, sitting out front: her normally combed and well kept hair was disheveled and frizzy strands shot off adding an odd halo to her form in the light.  She had thick sunglasses on and her gray, form fitting t-shirt was visibly stained: dark sweet rings forming around her arm pits.

“Hi, Carly, what…”

“Shut the fuck up and sit down.”

“Okay.”

He sat down and scooted the chair in to the table.  She was nervously clutching an open book and he couldn’t help but think back to a trip they had gone on to Vancouver five years when she had similarly wrung her hands when she lost her luggage.

“Stop.”

“What?  What is going on, Carly?”

“Tell me you weren’t just thinking about that time in Vancouver when I lost my luggage.”

“Uh no.”

“Shit, I knew you would say that, you’re fucking lying.  Tell me you didn’t sit around this morning in your purple underwear and cut offs, drinking luke warm Red Bull and that you didn’t say ‘Fucking mornings, fuck off.’ when the general cheeriness of spring pissed you off.”

“What, no… it was… it was Rockstar, not Red Bull.”

“Whatever.  Look at this!”

She handed him the book, her finger resting on a line and he followed her as she read out loud and guided her finger under the words.

“”What, no… it was… it was Rockstar, not Red Bull.’

‘Whatever.  Look at this!’

She handed him the book, her finger resting on a line and he followed her as she read out loud and guided her finger under the words.”

“What the fuck?”

She paused and looked at him…

“It gets worse.”

“What is this?”

“Apprarantly, we are characters in a book and this is that book.”

“That’s insane.”

“Do you want me to read you this conversation verbatim?  Because it’s there even what you’ll say next, which I will say exactly when you do.”

“Beatle fart magnet juice alabast-alabama sun tan cream ninja white boy!” They both shout at the same time, causing the waiter to drop his tray and reel in horror as Carly’s coffee fell, which Carly handily caught in her outstretched hand.

“Wow, I wasn’t sure that would work… but I read ahead and it had to.”

“Oh my god.”  Micah grabs his head.  This is too much for a Monday morning.

He looks up at her, “This is insane!”

This is the part of the story where we stop talking about the story and we start talking about reality and perception and who the fuck we actually are.

Identity is a funny thing, the popular notion is that identity, that is “who we are” is something ingrained in us, that the “us” of us or, rather the “me” of you is this spiritual, personality, experience thing that guides us to be who or what, rather, we are.  Is that true, do we exist in a state defined by a “soul”?

Turtles all the way down, my man.  Turtles all the way down.

We can join Descartes in the oven and the claim that codito ergo sum, is enough to prove that we are not characters in some book, and then (of course) this could slide off through the realms of phenomenology and, subsequently, existentialism, bolstering this with a healthy aside into Calvinism… but we still have this fundamental problem of identity.

In Being and Nothingness Jean Paul Sartre lays down this idea that “nothingness” is the state we exist in and choice forces us to create a disconnection between who we really are and the characters that we chose to portray: the bakery, the feminist, the cyclist, the asshole, the Matt… these are not “who we are” but a choice we have made to escape nothingness.  I’m handwaving here, because I can, but the gist of this is simple: we are not the roles we have in life, that is, you as “the reader” and I as “the writer” are conceits to achieve my end which is, entertaining you (because, despite all claims to the contrary this is entertainment more than it is education, enriching though it may be… no one is going to mistake this for a doctoral dissertation and that is perfectly fine).

(That’s sort of a heavy handed way of saying “don’t be fooled, blogs are nothing more than fun”, because it’s as true as a brand new Aerospoke… which is sort of a backhanded comment regarding the veracity of my own blog isn’t it?)

Right, okay, I’ll pull this back a few notches and somehow make this detritus of Sunday afternoon thoughts cohesive.

One of the grandly wonderful things about hipster Walmart (aka Urban Outfitters) is that often in a rush to change stock, they mark things down drastically.  This explains why I can pick up a $70 flannel for $19 and why you too can purchase a fuzzy version (not hazy, fuzzy as in literally covered in fuzzy faux fur) of Dave Eggers novelization of “Where the Wild Things Are” called “The Wild Things” for less than ten dollars as some other book surely needs to take it’s place.  To that end, I finally picked up a copy of the Merge Records book (for $4.50) and flipped through it (hey, I love music journalism and the history of independent music and I also enjoy reading such books because some of the bands involved, I was fortunate enough to be interested in during the time period of the book… so it’s a bit of reminiscing too, as I’m oft wont to do).

It was a funny thing, though… much of the book is interviews conducted more recently, with various indie music personas and retelling of stories well over a decade old and while I love the book, you have to wonder how accurate any of that is.  Are the players involved (from Lou Barlow to Jeff Mangum) really going to be objective about events that happened so long ago?  Duh… of course not.  That doesn’t even matter, but my point is that they are re-telling their stories through the lens of time and that who they were, the identity of the people involved, may have changed such that the story now, as it is told, is biased in some unforeseen way.

Let’s merge back with my other line of bull shit.

Social media, from blogs to social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc) allow you to project a version of yourself that you would like to be, not who you are.  I know, I’ve said this before, but I am fascinated by this… this thing, where here I sit, typing this and I’m this version of myself that I’m not in real life.  I am, though, a version of myself that I see myself as… sweet zombie Jesus, that is quite a few “myself”s in one sentence.  Take it back…

A.

Step.

Who I am in print, on line, and such is not who I am in real life, but… But!  But!  It is a character I’m portraying and the question is, is this person “ezweave the writer” someone I want to be or is it just an act?  What does that say about me?

I think it’s farcical to assume that you can be someone online that you really do not want to be in real life… method actors, the great ones, really have to submerse themselves in their characters, going as far as to staying in character all the time, adopting all of the character’s mannerisms, changing their physical appearance, and so on.  Writers, even when portraying demons (like Judge Holden in Blood Meridian), can only write believable monsters because they too can be monsters.  That sounds a bit ridiculous, but think of it this way: you as a human being relate to other human beings with an understanding of them that is internal to you.  There is no way you can explain every last detail of how you relate to someone.  It’s completely internal.  I can’t really get you to view others through my eyes, but if I am any good at writing, I can create characters that do things that seem believable (in context) because I can imagine how to think that way and, for the most part, I must “get in the head” of these characters.  So to be any good at it, I need to be good at relating to people.  Otherwise, Micah (the writer) and Carly, are just caricatures and my writing is probably shitty (okay, it probably is “shitty”, but I’m going to pretend I’m on the verge of greatness, just to assuage my tremendous ego).

Aside: the other day, I heard someone compare Dan Brown’s writing to a news ticker.  I have not cracked one of those ubiquitous paperbacks, because I have indeed judged them by their covers (or maybe more by their audience) and decided that it is stupid shit I don’t want to waste time on.  Not when there are so many other books that would actually make me look cool in coffee shops.

The end game here is that I think even when playing, even when you claim to be acting in jest, with the powers of disconnection afforded you by the Internet, you are still being you.  Who you choose to be, when you are letting a web page or a book or even a movie represent you, says something about who you actually are.  And of course, of course, you can just be someone who is not you: the nice guy who writes as an acerbic know-it-all, the forty year old insurance salesman posing as a fifteen year old girl… I mean Laura Albert pretended to be JT LeRoy (a Jim Carrol-esque character) and made “mad stacks” of cash before being figured out.  But even then… even then, who you are willing to pretend to be says something about you (and about how you consider others).

I don’t think I’m trapped in someone else’s imagination, but I can never really know that.  I can just rock back and forth, late into the night saying “codito ergo sum” and hoping… hoping I’m correct.

January 25th, 2010 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

A note to all the souls that wearily weave their ways across the invisible animal paths in the city: at least one day, one day we’ll all be dead, so with a smile lift that head.

This isn’t the story, but I remember the harsh white floursecent lights and the ever present film of dust in the science auditorium, where one interim when I was idly reviewing Dr Zhou’s students term projects I decided to venture out and ended up running into a one credit hour, two day course on the psychology of dreams.  The professor, being that this was a winterim class (that is a class offered between semesters), was dressed in a somehow “extra shabby” manner… something I had previously thought only computer science instructors could do, this though, did not prevent me from being drawn in.

Dreams.

It’s in the last phase of sleep, REM sleep, that we dream and dreams are never as long as they feel… your mind has a way of making you “time travel” and the mundane events of days blur by, as if on fast forward, and sure, if you pause you can observe a daily ritual, but it is lost in the shuffle and when the dreams are lucid… well… the illusion is complete.

I have this dream.

I dreamt it was summer and I was delivering sandwiches on my bicycle again.

The waves of heat that came up off of the pavement and my bare arms and legs, browning in the sun, mixed with that scent of tire rubber, exhaust, and body odor that was still, still somehow the hallmark of better times.

I don’t remember why I resumed this job… but there I was.  Broke, once again, broke in that way where I never have more than five hundred dollars in my bank account, and I am eating countless bowls of ramen and peanut butter sandwiches or Kraft dinner… but still, I smile.  I feel the bike lean into a turn as I ride with a bag full of sandwiches and my hands off the bars.  I can feel the road through the old chromoly frame.  I ride and then I read novels on my breaks and work on homework in the library after hours.  It’s exhausting and I never have money to do anything substantial, but my heart seems to sing as I skip along.

Funny that.

Today the alarm wakes me and I fumble for my phone… shit… it’s far too early for any decent fellow to be awake, but there you go.  It bleats at me and seems to be falling further into the nest of covers twisted at my feet.  What time did I get home?  Goddamn damn damn.  My mouth still half tastes like gin and my legs feel unsteady.  Oh and that horrible achy feeling that makes me want to lean over onto my knees and vomit?  That is the headache that exists where my brain should be.

Hot hot shower, braced for heat in the suds.

No shave.

No coffee.

Commute.

Now it’s forty minutes of public radio and that sweet burnt smell of dead human skin coming in contact with the hot air in the vents of my late seventies BMW 2001

and a long long walk to the front gate.  For some damnable reason the distance between the gate and the lab is far enough to warrant a shuttle service, but I could use the walk.  I usually walk.  With each thump of a step on the cold hard concrete, I somehow ease my way into hell.

Fuck.

Two years ago, I was a federally funded grad student, living off a meager stipend, teaching introductory computer science courses (”intro to programming”) to flocks of students who were either life long geeks or calculating, opportunistic bastards who thought that “this computer biz” would make them rich.  Half of them would drop out to much less theoretically intense “Information Science” degrees from the college of business and move on to work in IT departments in the basements of giant corporate offices while at least a quarter of them would decide that “this computer stuff was much harder then they though” and become communications colonels.  If they managed to complete assignments, their code would be poorly organized and inefficient, but that was to be expected… most of these kids were learning.  But there I was, working on my dissertation in computational linguistics… shit, I should explain this.

Many years ago… well “once upon a time” there was this bloke, you may have heard of.  His name is Noam Chomsky.  He was a professor of linguistics at MIT, in addition to being a political writer who oft debated human nature and protested the second Bush administration (perhaps before your time) in countless well thought out books, interviews and such.  Well, he wasn’t just a political crank.

He had this notion that all languages, conceptually, boil down to the same… let’s call them “idea patterns”.  There is a sort of mathematically parallel way to describe language processing, or at least syntactical rules, using series of numbers and symbols and letters.  This is called BNF or Backus-Naur form.  Chomsky, well one thing he did, was add further rules and named his “CNF” or “Chomsky Normal Form”.  I guess to keep the status quo.  Whatever.

Shit, I’m probably losing you.

Hang on, I hope it gets clearer…

Well he then theorized that all languages could boil down to a collection of these sort of “equations of language”… basically these rules could be written in such a way as to work with any language.  That there was a “universal grammar” that could express an idea in any language, regardless of weirdness of syntax or verb placement.  You just had to find it.

This was big news.

So how, you ask, does this mesh with pasty dudes in dimly lit rooms, pouring over lines of code beneath posters of anime icons with giant breasts and big watery eyes?

Well, there are lots of places where language processing matters in computers.  From predictive text (getting the language from users) to writing programming languages and building the tools to make them work.  So it is kind of a big deal.  A big deal.

Goddamn, I should have told a joke, but… well… I’m stomping into hell and the rhythmic and body jarring action of walking into work with this bag full of books on my back is forcing me to be more direct.  That and the goddamn hangover that feels like an act of god akin to the twelve plagues of Egypt.  So bear with me and I’m sure the story will pick up.

This is what I was working on, when, after a glorious eight years of the first black president, we got this idiot cunt-bitch hunter from Alaska.  Okay, I added the “cunt-bitch” part, but she certainly didn’t seem to be particularly well informed, nor particuarly adept at applying any sort of logic or rigor to her thinking.  Sad state of affairs, but her twisted logic and bumbling mind seemed to strike a chord with the similarly ignorant, logic phobic masses of middle America who had been whipped into a frenzy over “the real America” by years of reading poorly written books by right wing pundits (the same fuckers who run radio shows that even the FCC won’t classify as “news” but instead as “entertainment”… these are people who wouldn’t even know who De Tocqueville or Buckley are, but who really should).

Well, she came into power and cut funding across the board and there, there went my stipend and tuition.

I tried to finish my dissertation faster, thinking that I could take on work to pay for the rest of my tuition and then coast by teaching the required undergrad courses and not taking classes while I rode out the terms of the degree program (four years, minimum, even if you get all of your other work done).

It didn’t work.

I floated tuition on credit cards and sold records (original pressing of Jawbreaker’s “Want” album and a collection of first edition singles from K Records and Sub Pop that I made a fucking mint on, but still not enough) until I realized that my minimum payments on those stupid debts were going to make me broke as well.

I wasn’t alone, not at all… bloggers and coffee shop patrons alike bemoaned the “robbing of the intelligencia” (note to self: never use this phrase out loud), that the GOP’s heroes had set off.  Institutes of higher learning were closing down post-grad programs and the number of advanced degrees (masters, doctors, master of doctors, ninja) issued each year got startlingly low.  Other countries began to outpace us in technology and the “years of plenty” of my youth were drifting away.

The middle American folks cared little for math and science and cared much for god and low prices and sexual purity.  Oh and bad jokes, shit.

Of course, there was one sector where business was still booming!

The defense industry, or as Dwight D Eisenhower labeled it “the military industrial complex” (in his famous exit speech warning the country of the “danger of feeding that monster” and that came from a war hero).

Guess who wanted to work on natural language processing for battlefield computers?

It wasn’t me, but… there I was, one dissertation shy of changing the ‘M’ in ‘Mr’ to the ‘D’ in ‘Dr’ and debt and sadness and a newly found drinking habit.

I’m going to lose what little breakfast I ate (yesterday), if I don’t stop and collect myself.

How to wake up to the heroes morning:

Obtain a solution of grain alcohol and juniper berries.  Some folks call this gin.  I call it “brain gravy” and it makes it much easier to talk to people.  If it weren’t for “brain gravy”, I’d be a virgin with more money in the bank account and fewer incriminating pictures.  Now, take that solution and add… well, if you’re any kind of gentleman, you’d add dry vermouth and either a twist of lemon or an olive and stir, stir it and pour over ice.  This is called a “martini”.  The fat, classless, but rich housewives who fancy “martini’s” are really just spilling straight, but slightly watered down vodka all over their burberry sweaters and Chanel handbags.  Money may or may not buy you love (apologies to John, George, Paul, and Ringo), but it certainly does not buy you taste.  Or manners.

Anyway, I got lost, but drink about six of these concoctions and then prepare to wake up feeling like a million bucks.  Or like you owe somebody with a short fuse a million bucks.

I don’t know why I do it, but I hit that point of “being drunk” and I don’t stop drinking until I feel the room spin.  I don’t know, it seems like a good idea until the next day, when I wake up still drunk and with a hangover at the same time.  It’s my plan for a slow cowardly death, because, frankly, putting a gun to my head is a little much for me to take.

I mean, it would be romantic to go out in an Ian Curtis sort of way: listen to some excellent album (I think I would choose the brilliantly sad “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel), and hang yourself.  See the problem was and is that I have no legacy… I need to write a book or record some album or make an excellent contribution to computer science, then I’m cool with doing the deed.

Okay, so yeah, I took this job at this lab, the one I’m about to walk into and they offered to pay me enough to fix all of my problems… but it’s a Faustian bargain and everyday, every fucking day I hate it.

See this weird little out building I’m about to step into?  Looks kind of like a disconnected ATM, right?  Like I’d go in and deposit some money, take my receipt and head to… well whatever: this is the gate.  The fence goes all around the perimeter of the building and no, there is no other way in.

Hmmm… okay, I need to explain something so that this weighs in properly:  I got an email three months ago (I think three… let’s see it’s February now and this was in October… haha, wrong more like four) that addressed increased concerns over “activities in the middle east”.  Bullshit, of course, those fuckers are not going to bomb us and this ridiculous “war on terror” has been going on so long that it should be indicitive of it’s uselessness (eliminating terror is about as reasonable of an idea as eliminating jealousy or… fucking dust… it ain’t gonna happen), but hey, it’s the future, right?  So the base commander, a man by the name of “colonel Leo Vitelli”, became bent on exceeding (not meeting) the standards for security.

I will step into this little booth, where four sort of weird, exercise stand-looking things sit: a gray platform for your feet, a thick black pad for your waist, you put your bag on a little box in the front, stand and lean into the pad.  The idea being that whilst holding yourself up, you cannot easily cheat or manipulate the system.  When leaning forward, you can look out a glass pane and into the courtyard… well if you can see through the four guards on duty at all time, standing at the ready with loaded rifles.  See, they can shoot through the glass and if, if you fail to meet entrance criterea, they will shoot you.  No questions.  No fuss.

I do this every single fucking day.

It’s a weigh in, which tracks your weight for massive instant fluctuations, a retinal scan, a finger print reading, and an auditory test.  The booth is supposed to handle four people at a time, and it’s supposed to automatically “stop” intruders via non-lethal electric shock, but none of that actually works.  So its one person at a time, and a lead hand shake if you fuck it up.

They tell you this on orientation then, the orientation instructor (hey it’s a government job and they have people for everything) says to you, “don’t fuck it up”.

Ugh.

My only goal today is to make it to my office, a tiny, tiny room that was probably once a closet and, under the teetering beige painted steel bookshelves, look like I’m working.  All I’m doing for the next few months is programming this engine to take in audio and do pattern matching, to break up the audio into the appropriate “real words” for processing. I’m doing this using a neural network (a kind of program that builds virtual “neruons” and weights these pathways, via code… it’s for pattern recognition), and that is the part I’m writing.  The output of this will get hooked to my language stuff and figure out, when under duress or whatever, what the hell the battlefield computer should be doing.

You know, killing ill equipped religious zealots and such.

Anyway, very few people here understand what I’m actually doing, so I spend lots of time tucked away in my office, listening to cds (can’t bring in my phone with all of my songs on it) the old fashioned way and half working.  This always catches up with me and I have to work many, many late nights, but today… today is about getting back to bed, not about “getting anything done”.

I want to listen to “Damaged” by Black Flag, but I think instead I will pretend to be scrawling notes in a notebook, with my head being supported by the non writing hand… it’s a tough call, because this will mean that I inevitably drool down my forearm, but that is better than leaning back too far in my chair and looking at the ceiling.  At least then if someone important stops by I can pretend I was deep in abstract thought.

I jot down a few simple grammar productions and some sketches that make it look like I’m debating designs for my neural net and then… then I sleep.

The colonel occasionally stops by.

He calls me hippie and weirdo, but he does do it to my face.  His face, a pock marked, bright red thing is always in mine and he smells strongly of “Lectric Shave”, the same old brand of aftershave my grandfather used, so I know it well.  He’s a man who likes hunting and following the rules and he sees me, the cast down intellectual, with my tattoos and nerd glasses and t-shirts with Wookies on them as some sort of necessary evil.

“You weirdo eggheads are necessary, I don’t doubt that… heckfire, when dealing with a devil, sometimes you just need a few devils yourself.”

He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke and he runs five miles at five o’clock in the morning, has a quiet devotional, then has his driver take him to the base.  He tells me this, every time I complain about being “tired” or “harried” by late nights, because, as he says “Christ didn’t die for your sins, to let you complain to me about your weak will.”

This, of course, doesn’t precisely make sense, but in his overly enthusiastic manner, he will say this and then follow it with some other unrelated phrase, like “no that dog won’t hunt”.  Right.

Working on the base also means I get a litany of spam.  Messages making jokes about liberals that are factually incorrect or in some other way lame, conspiracies about how that last president, the black one, was not really an American and thus anything he did in office was/is/was null and void (easily debunked by professional debunkers on sites that are readily accessible).  That’s why I filter most email to “trash”.

The problem, of course, is that I miss emails I should read and that is why, as I throw my bag down and just begin to get situated behind my desk, I’m getting a phone call.

“Mr Elder, this is Sgt Jones from the entry portal.  We have a situation with one of your guests, please come down to rectify this.”

Shit.

I forgot that my exceedingly tall buddy was in town and had mentioned that he would come see me tonight.  I remembered that last night as I slurped down another gin and tonic, I was fighting with him.

“Well, you can’t just come down to the lab… it’s in a ’secure area’ and without a clearance and a host of other shitty red tape you can’t come in.”

“Right, you’re just saying that because it’s your passive-aggressive way of telling me you don’t want to see me.”

“No, I’m serious… god, what the hell?  Don’t do it, I’ll meet up with you later.”

“I’ve heard that before too, the ‘I’ll make plans with you and break them at the last minute’ trick is old hat to you, dude.”

“Look, I’m not trying to be a dick… you really can’t just ‘come down’.”

“We’ll see.”

We drank more and this continued on into the night.  I think I drank more because I was frustrated… probably… no, if I’m being honest, I definitely did that.  Glug glug glug.

Fuck.

I am racing down the hallway, sans jacket, and out into the long courtyard.  A crowd is forming around the dull gray brick wart of the gate building and I can see the soldiers are aiming at the glass.

Goddamnit, Ryan.

“What’s going on?  What did… what did he do?”

Fuck, I need to run more, I am out of shape.  The hangover is not helping me and now every heartbeat is echoing in my skull.

“Do you know this man, Mr Elder?”

“Yeah, he’s… he’s harmless, let me talk to him and I will send him away.”

“We are putting the gate on lockdown, you cannot exit the facility at this time.  We have escalated the base alert to ‘red’.”

Ryan is standing there, dumbly raising his hands above his head, straddling the entry apparatus the wrong way, with one leg over the pad.  I don’t know how he got in or what he thought he was doing, but the guards’ ire is up.

It’s a little crazy to think that this tiny base, with less than two hundred personnel, that is so far removed from the city has these ridiculous security measures that have never been tested.  Yes, that’s right, in the year I’ve been here there has never been an incident and the security folks brag about never having an incident.

This is certainly going to raise the…

“What in sam hill is going on here?  Elder, Elder is this your doing?  I’ve told you before about abusing the gates…”

The colonel’s bald head is extra shiny today and his eyebrows are looking very disheveled and his face, his face is as red as a tomato.

“This is serious.  You cannot bring your hippie friends in here, this base is like the holiest of holies and I am the high priest and this, this gentile is not allowed hack here.”

He points his stubby finger at Ryan, who is losing the color in his face as he realizes that those are not “prop rifles” that the guards are pointing at him.

“Get that idiot out of there or I will shoot him myself and send him to Jesus.”

This is where cliche is going to take over my internal dialog for a moment and I’m going to skip ahead.

Those shots, in action movies, where the car is about to blow up and injure the hero or his wife or his girlfriend or kid, and the shock wave knocks him to his feet… maybe it’s a moment of reckoning, it really depends on the relative quality of the script (always shitty, usually unintentionally funny), well those shots are always in slow motion, sometimes there is a yell… a cry…. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”

I think it started when a car backfired, but my internal video recorder isn’t always reliable, I do remember the glass breaking and far too many rounds being fired.

Oh my god.  Oh my god.

Oh.

My.

God.

Ryan was unhurt.  He clumsily danced until his lanky frame had maneuvered in such a way that the bullets just missed him and the inner pane of glass, as it filled with cracks, just seemed the obscure their view enough that they didn’t fire every shot as the first ones.  The glass, it seems, was more bullet resistant then they realized.

Ryan was going to be alright, or as alright as he could be.

Bullets, though, are still dangerous and find a way to hit things before they stop… I mean that is usually how they stop.  Hitting things.

This thing, though, is the head of a sixty year old cleaning woman named “Rosa” who’s only crime was being a little late for her mid-day shift and being in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time.  A little mist of blood came out the back of her skull and a similar spray of crimson came as her neck was winged by another round.

I am/is/am running through the door.

My god.

“Oh my fucking god.”

She is most definitely not alive and being this close to real, non simulated, blood and gore is a little much… that said, she was a human being and this, this was not what she deserved.

Ryan was given a ride home, after being harangued for eight hours in an interview room by the colonel’s men, but Rosa was…

The blinds are shut and the lights are off and I have foregone a glass.  There is a bottle in my hand and the television is on, the colors wash my face, and the sounds fill my ears… but I cannot escape.  When human beings first discovered that they could produce enough food to survive and establish sustainable nourishment, they found themselves with idle time and in the whole of the last two hundred years the ways in which that time can be spent has expanded and ever increased.  I’m not paying attention.

“Hello?”

“Mr Elder… are you going to come into work today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well, we will call it a sick day, but I expect you back in tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

The bottle is empty and I am barely dressed.  An old Archers of Loaf t-shirt and green boxer briefs.  The mailman looks at me oddly as I walk outside to grab the mail.  The light is bright and it is cold.  Fuck you, mailman.

“Fuck you.  Take a fucking picture.”

He looks at me and shakes his head.  Well, damn, mailman.  I didn’t know I had to wear pants to venture outside.  It’s no worse than a department store circular you might find on Sunday morning… except I’m fatter and hairier and more pale.  Deal with it.

Do I have any more scotch whiskey?  Whiskey…. whiskey…  I find a large, black, chisel tipped permanent marker and write “whiskey” on the inside of my door.  Three times.  The smell from the marker is pungent and it squeaks slightly as I write it.

“Hi… I know we haven’t talked in a while, but… I just heard.  That’s weird, are you okay?”

I have not talked to Anne in at least a year.  Things didn’t end well between us and she was the last human being I spent much time talking to.  She had a cute little turned up nose and a smattering of freckles across her fairy cute face.  She kept her hair short and loved books by Neal Stephenson and older music by Spoon and Built to Spill and The Get Up Kids.  Her favorite sandwich was tomato and feta on toasted rye bread and when she ate food that she found too hot she would start to hiccup.  She had a way of standing with her toes bent inwards and cocked at funny angles, her Chuck Taylor’s bending in odd ways and though she was a collage of these brilliant, beautiful idiosyncrasies, they are but the shallow easy things to understand about Anne.  None of these things really make up her… they are more of the bells and whistles that come with Anne, the selling points that fail to convey depth.

I’m going to bring her into this story to act as a bit of Deus Ex Machina… which is, of course, latin for “god from the machine” and is a plot device used to solve an insolvable problem.  This is a cheap way of resolving my conflict, but hey, I never promised that my story was any good.  I suppose it would do to provide a bit more characterization.

I finished my undergraduate degree and could not find work.  Anne, I knew for the past couple of years and we had hung out… there was a snowboarding trip to Breckenridge Colorado where we shared a room in a cabin, and there was a bottle of Malbec and very potent, medical grad marijuana and an afternoon watching Bergman films (her idea).  But that was… that was nothing.  It was that summer, when she house sat for a friend and lived right down the block from me that we spent every day together.  I’d bring over a stack of vinyl records and she would cook me food while I told her stories.  We tried to make banana’s Foster with cheap rum, but that did not turn out.  She made me a cake for my birthday, but had no frosting, so instead dumbed freeze dried strawberries over the top.

The rain had been coming down steadily and the world seemed to glisten, despite the lack of sun, but everything seemed green and fresh.  The air was slightly chilly, but it was… the best day of my life.  We listened to Jawbreaker records and as Bivouac ended, squealing guitars and the raspy voice of Blake Schwarzenbach coming to an end, she leaned over to me.  We were in a basement room, where a sliding glass door lead out to the backyard, which was full of flora: ivy climbed around the chainlink fence and water dripped off of the overhanging branches and the tiny pond in the back showed each drop and it’s rippling echo between the white water lilies.  Her breath was hot and sweet and she looked into my eyes and we kissed right there, on an old couch.  In my mind, we were meant to be… she in her quiet cuteness, full of the love of plants and never afraid to try something new and I, in my introverted cocoon of records, math, and computers.

She left a note on my doorstep.

I don’t know what I was thinking, yesterday… I don’t want to hurt you, you just seemed so charming and fun, but it’s not right.  It doesn’t feel right.  I can’t explain it, but I also can’t tell you this to your face.  I still want to see you, I still want you to come over, so can we just pretend this did not happen, can we just make it like the day before?  You’re a better friend than I deserve.

I stopped reading it at that point and crumpled it in my hand and, yes, I cried.  I went back inside and lay down on the cool hardwood of the floor and stared at the wall and cried.  I cried until it grew dark and then I just lay there.

I did not go back over.  I did not call her.  I couldn’t bear to look at her.

I think, or I thought… I loved her.

I wrote her a letter and I told her that I wasn’t mad at her, that I understood, but I felt like the universe had it out for me… to meet her and to have it fall apart in my hands.  I wrote all of this in a rush that night, but I never sent it to her and we, well, we lost contact.

So we didn’t talk until years later, and even then the meetings were short and I could not help but to feel this sort of tension and pain in my chest when I looked at her.

She wants dinner.

This requires me finding clothes that are somewhat clean and naming a restaurant, and perhaps sobering up.  Perhaps.  Truthfully, I’m not the best at holding liquor and I feel lightheaded and giddy and my face feels warm (though none of this is countering my other emotions at the moment) so I doubt I will be sober in a couple of hours.

She wants Thai and I find a Husker Du shirt and some jeans and a little bit of deodorant.

It’s cold and I don’t want to wear a jacket, so the heat is on high in her old Volvo and it begins to snow outside as we drive through the dark quiet streets.

“I know that you’re probably blaming yourself for all of this, but it’s not your fault.”

She’s trying, at least.

“Maybe.  I don’t know, I should be more forceful with people, maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“This all happened because Ryan wouldn’t listen to me, he insisted on coming to work.  Fuck.”

“That’s just unfortunate, he’s stubborn.  You can’t stop him from being stubborn.  He just doesn’t get introverts. You know?”

“Hmmm.  Maybe.  Still… I shouldn’t even be working there.”

“You’ll be okay.  You’re still going to go back to school, right?”

“I want to, but I don’t always see the point.  I live, for no reason, than to contribute to an economy that I care little for.  I am a sack of meat and viscera around a crude framework and I can’t help but feel truly ugly.  Both in spirit and in well, everything.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, I’d reassure you, but you have to be a little less needy.  You’re saying half of that just so I will reassure you, and normally I would, but I can’t help but wonder… well I wonder… no, wait.  What I’m trying to say is that you do this sort of thin a lot.  I remember when we last talked, you were joking about killing yourself, because the world didn’t need you.  The world doesn’t need any of us, you know?  We just exist and randomness, both who and what we are born to dictates who we are.  It’s nothing to do with you or the universe hating you.  I mean, the universe doesn’t really care, you know?  You’re just here.  And you are special to me, you know that?”

“I still love you.”

“That’s unfair, and you know it.  You can’t say that to me now.  I feel bad enough for you, this situation you’re in… not just the incident, but the whole thing.  Your… well, everything.”

We are at the restaurant but I do not feel like eating.  I sit and drink.  We are not talking now.  I said too much, I had never said that to her before and I know that she has a boyfriend.  But damn.  This has to mean something, right?

I look at her and see her pushing one last piece of chicken around in her curry.  She looks, despite my comments, happy and content.

I sigh.

I cannot say this to her, but I realize now, more than ever, that what she really wants to be is some type of mother figure… not in this “broken feminity” way, nor I in this “broken masculinity” way… it’s just that I’ve always been that one lost puppy.  Maybe that is just it.  She is happy, though, isn’t she?

“I am going to bypass the base commander and report this incident.”

“What?”

“You’re right, it’s not my fault.  It is, however, the fault of the base commander and his overzealous, ill thought out security.”

“Is that wise?”

“No.  He has it out for me anyway and I don’t know what he will do.  Maybe I will lose my job.  Maybe I will… I don’t know.”

“I hope you know what you’re getting in to.  I wouldn’t want to cross a military man.”

“It’s funny.”

“What?”

“Well, it sounds morbid, but I…”

“What?”

“It’s because I’ve seen too many movies.”

“You’re killing me.”

“I thought it would look more like a watermelon.”

“What?”

“Well… the bullet just went through and there was little blood.  I guess reality is just less glamorous.”

“That is pretty morbid.”

We leave the restaurant, still in silence and I go to sleep.  Drunk, of course.

Goodbye Anne.

I have not heard from Ryan, nor do I care.  She’s right.  He’s the kind of person who’s bored when alone and has to be around people.  I’m the kind of person who generally prefers to be left alone.  He probably won’t call for a while.

When I said I was using Anne as a bit of “deus ex machina” I sort of lied.  She didn’t solve my problems.  She did magically illuminate them.  Also… well, it doesn’t make sense, at least in the manner that I’m telling you this story, that I can make these asides, does it?  Chew on that for a while.

The walk in is harder this morning, and… well, sort of easier.  I have purpose, which allows me to almost ignore the cold, but the sidewalk seems harder and the vintage shearling jacket (orangish brown leather with a faux fur lining) does little to keep out the chill.

“Hi.”

I’ve made it to the security office and I need to find out how to contact the colonel’s superiors and I hate, hate, hate this place.  The lights are too harsh and since OSHA cannot go behind our fence, the hallways are all too narrow and crammed full of old goods and the buildings never have windows.  It’s a labyrinth of old monitors and server cases… a maze of shit and dust.

The chubby black woman behind the counter jots down a number on a canary yellow post it.

“Have your contractor number handy and call this number, they will direct you to where you need to go.”

“Thanks.”

I make it to my desk and throw my bag on the ground.  God damn do I smell.  I need a shower and my hair feels unwashed and seems to be clumping up in greasy strands.

“Elder.”

He’s here sooner than expected.  I have not called the number yet, but certainly someone in the security office would have notified him that I have asked for it.

“I’m inviting you to a dinner at my place.  I will have one of my staff email you the address, but I pray to God I see you there.”

He looks down at me, nods, and walks off, briskly.

What the hell?

He’s going to kill me.  He’s going to poison me or shoot me and blame it on… well, I don’t know.

As eight o’clock approaches, I’m trying to diagram a new layer in the neural network when an email arrives in my inbox.  I’m somewhere on The National’s first album and the music seems to oddly compliment the email.

Dr Elder,

The presence of your company is requested at colonel Leo Vitelli’s residence at 1861 Palamino Dr.  Light refreshments will be served at six o’clock with dinner at seven.  Please RSVP by Wednesday the 16th.

This is sounding more like a sounding board for the base and the colonel’s pride in the fact that he runs a research facility.  Shit, my stomach is clenching constantly and this coffee is not helping.  I need a fucking drink.

The phone on my desk starts ringing.

“Elder.”

The voice does not sound familiar, not even a little bit.

“Yes, who is this?”

“This is… well… nevermind.  I’m calling to warn you.”

“Warn me of what?”

“Recent events might precipitate the command of the base being revoked, if word got out.  In fact, in these economic times, a scandal such as this might result in the base closing.  Think about it.”

“What are you saying?  Is this… is this a threat?  Look, things have gone too far with this security stuff and I…”

“Just think about the repercussions of any actions you might take.  It’s one thing to think something, it’s another to let it out.  You’ll find that those butterflies won’t come back into the net, once they are released.”

“What?”

Dial tone greets me.

I know I’m the last one left in the lab, which means I have to check that all the doors are shut and secured and turn on the alarm.  It means that these twisty, narrow, creaky hallways are all empty and that only some of the lights are on.  It means that I’m pretty much alone… alone.

I peer out into the hallway, the lights at the far end flicker and around the corner it is dark.  Sadly, this is the way out.  I slowly make the rounds to check all of the external doors of the building and each sound, each shift of the building or creak of the floor makes me jump.  My stomach is hurting more now and my hands are shaky.  From lack of sleep and hunger, I hope.  I pause to look at my reflection in a window.  Yes, those dark purple bags are under my eyes.  Shit. Fucking cock-sucking shit.  I look horrible.  I mean, I was complaining about being fat, but now… now I look dirty and disheveled and, ill.  Gaunt.  Like a junky.

It’s been a long day.

I turn on the alarm and exit the building, making for the security booth, it’s distant light a beacon.  The hair on my neck is standing up and I quicken my pace.  I swear I hear footsteps, just off to my right, but it could just be a guard.  I don’t want to jump around, dropping my bag to the ground and scream “aha!” only to be greeted by a very confused looking soldier.  Hell, I might just get shot.  Shit… I almost forgot.

In my mind it’s much more vivid than I think it was.  Ryan, is smoother about dodging the bullets and the guards have larger guns…. I mean they didn’t upgrade to sniper rifles with depleted uranium charges (thanks, comic books and role playing games) or anything.  I mean, fuck… those things would be nuts.  Yet, the effect is the same.  Rosa’s head explodes like a watermelon being dropped off of a building.  Sometimes she just crosses her self and falls to the ground while Ave Maria plays.  Doves fly from somewhere.  It’s pretty shitty.  I mean it’s horrible and haunting that she died… hell, you know that.  But these images in my mind are so exaggerated and play off like so many horrible action movies.  It’s disgusting.

I’m disgusting.

It sounds like I’m making light of the whole thing, but I’ve been thinking about this all the time.  I hate it.  I fucking hate it.

I’m at the gate and the footsteps are gone… what?  I swear I heard someone.

The guards at the gate let me through and I head out to my car.

It’s what… tuesday.  The dinner is on Friday.

I’m going to quit this fucking job.

“Hi.”

“Uh… hi.”

“Anne, look.  I am sorry for laying this all on you.  I really am.  I know you’re happy.  I know I’m too much of a mess… shit, that;s not right.  I’m a mess, but that’s not it, you don’t love me.”

“It’s three in the morning, have you been drinking?”

“Of course.  I am hoping to pass out in a bit here.  Get a few hours of shuteye.”

“I don’t know how you get any work done in this state.”

“Me neither.”

“It’s not that I don’t love you.  It’s… I don’t know.  I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“I’m going to quit.”

“Really?  Are you going to report your boss?”

“I haven’t figured that out.  I’m starting to think he’s going to kill me, to save his post.”

“You need sleep.  You’re paranoid.”

“I’m serious.”

“Go to sleep.  Drink less.  Go for a run.  Read a book.  Don’t call me for a bit.”

“I’m fine.”

“Seriously.  You’re a wreck.”

“I prefer to think this is helping me maintain the status quo.”

The next three days go like this.

Alarm up.  T-shirt that smells sort of kind of clean.  The same jeans.  Deodorant.  Water on my face.  A can of Red Bull as I drive in.

My hands are pretty damn shaky.

My joints hurt whenever I stand up.

Long, walk to the desk.  The broken glass of the security booth was cleaned up fast, but I still find shards here and there that manage to stick to the bottom of my shoe.

Music.  Whatever.

I get nothing done, but I chew lots of pencils and bite my nails ragged.  I think I might be growing a beard.

Lunch at the desk, end up surfing the web for a few hours.  A couple of meetings where no one wants to sit next to me.  A conference call with some guys at MIT who are interested in my progress.  Staying late.

I still feel followed.  I don’t leave my house.

I drink.

I go through three fifty dollar bottles of Macallan Scotch Whiskey, two four packs of Guiness Draught, and two bottles of Hendrick’s Gin.  In three days.

I get a little over five hours of sleep between those three nights.  Really.

I write more notes in marker on the walls of my apartment when I’m drunk.

“Universal grammar.”

“I love the girl named Anne.”

“Ivy around the fence.”

“Footsteps in the dark.”

“Fucking extrovert Ryan.”

“Riding a track bike.  Riding a track bike.  Track.  Track. Stand.”

“Heat of summer on my face.”

“Fucked.  Fuck up.  Fucked.”

I scribble and I cry in the dark.  My stomach hurts more than ever and I can’t stand the sight of food.  I try to pick up a grilled chicken sandwich from a fast food drive through, but on first bite it tastes bland and I’m no longer interested in eating it.  This could be my last meal and it’s horrible.

Oh Anne.  Why won’t you hold me?  Why won’t you help me?

I cry uncontrollably.  My nose runs, mucus soaks my shirt as I rub my face.  I miss my father.  I wish he were alive to talk to.  I miss my sister.  I wish she didn’t live so far away.  I would miss my mother, but I never knew her.  I miss the mother I don’t have.  I need a blanket and a warm spot in the summer sun, to watch cartoons and kick my feet idly.  To eat otter pops before they are frozen and chase the jingling bells of the ice cream man.  I want to ride my bike again.  I want to see the sun.  It’s so gray out.  It’s so dark in here.  I think I watched DVDs of Dark Shadows the whole time.  Not sure.

Friday.

Home from work.

I’m still alive, but barely.  I find my tweed sport coat and put on some skinny dark brown jeans with some dark, coffee brown mocassin toed Clark boots..  A light blue shirt with a navy bow tie.  A dark brown belt.  My thick black glasses.

I drive over, looking at the cracks on the dash and tapping my wrist against the steering wheel in time to “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt 2″ by Neutral Milk Hotel.  I am going to talk to the colonel.  I have decided it is time.  At least afterwards I will feel relief and I have not felt relief in years.

The party is, well, boring.  Lots of new money republicans.  The type of folks that “done good” on their own.  Selling their parents farms to fund car dealerships and electric companies.  Dabbling in many things to make their way.  They aren’t bad people, we just look at the world differently.  Small talk wears me out, but thenkfully, despite the colonel’s teetotalling, there is a bar.  It helps some.  I can say semi intelligent things.  I avoid people for the most part.  The house is big and the rooms are filled with taxidermy and I am told that it has been in the colonel’s family for some time.

I’m shabbily dressed, but in an odd way.  These men think they dress well, but there is something of class they sort of miss… I mean they are wearing white button down shirts, and ties that certainly cost money (even if they are ugly), but… but they don’t wear undershirts and are blissfully unaware that their nipples look like dark little circles.  Slices of pepperoni stuck under their shirts.  It’s funny.  It would be funnier if I wasn’t getting fuzzyheaded and… I pat the pockets of my sport coat.  Yes!

I have a joint I must have rolled years ago.

I step out onto the deck.  It overlooks a dark, dark forest of a back yard that is really more of an acreage.  I’m told that he has horses.  Hmmm.

There is a woman on the deck, mid forties, she reminds me of Diane Lane.  She is smoking a cigarette and I’m caught looking at the plumes of blueish smoke rising from her nostrils.  She raises her eyebrow.

Fuck it.

“Can I bum a light?”

She blows out smoke and smiles.

“Sure, honey.”

Her voice is smoky and seductive and I notice how under her short fur coat her dress is sleek and she is slender and curvaceous.  I don’t know who’s wife this is, but she is an amazing looking older woman and from her tastefully small diamond earrings to her white evening gloves, she is portrait perfect.

She hands me a little silver colored lighter.

“Oh my.  Don’t let my husband catch you smoking that.”

“Who’s that?”

“My husband?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re in his house, dear.”

“Oh god… uh…”

“It’s okay, we’re separated.  I don’t know why I’m telling you that.  Leo is not a bad man, I’m just saying.  I won’t tell on you.”

“Okay.  Yeah.  No worries.  Cool.”

My stomach is bugging me again.

“Are you okay there?”

“No.”

“Well, explain it to me.”

“I…”

The weed is good and I’m drunk to boot.  So fuck it.  Fuck it.

“…I hate working for the government.”

“You must be Mr Elder.”

“What?”

“Oh he has mentioned you before.  The burnt out scholar.  I should have known.”

“Fuck.”

“Oh, he actually has nothing but good things to say about you.  He’s a lot of things, honey, but he’s not the devil.  He’s not even a republican.  His brother is gay and so is his son and he has never said an ill word about either.”

I’m having a bit of trouble processing this.  I cannot believe that this muscle head… no… this… fuck.  I can’t even think it now.

“I think I am completely wrong about him.”

“I think you should talk to him.”

I go back into the party.

I wander around in a daze, but I cannot find him.

Fuck.  Forget this.  I’m going to not even show up on monday.  I’m done.  This is all too much.

I walk out to my car.

“Elder.”

He’s sitting there on the front porch, far from his guests.

“Sit down.”

I oblige him and join him.  The night is cold, but not as cold as it has been.

He hands me a lighter and, and… one of those pipes that looks like a cigarette.

“Smoke up Elder.”

His weed is better than mine.

“Elder, I know what you want to say to me.  I know you think I am the reason that girl is dead.  I know you think that I am a part of this machine you hate.  I know you wish you were still in school, teaching and working on your degree.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you are thinking of reporting me, I’ve already done it.  I want this base to close, Elder.”

“What?”

“It’s a waste of money.  It all is.  The military is filled with waste.  I was thinking of keeping it going so you and others like you could ride out the wave of budget cuts that are keeping you out of school.  I thought that… I thought that and then I thought ‘that dog won’t hunt’.  You’re going to quit anyway, I know it.  I can tell.  I knew it months ago.  And I figured that I too can’t save the world.  Fuck it, for christ sake.”

“Sir I’m a bit taken aback by all of this.”

“What?”

“This whole thing.  You.  The… your wife.  It’s all too much.”

“Shit, son.  I’m mostly an act.  I do it to… I don’t know.  I don’t know why I’m in this game, but I think I’m nearly done.”

“Me too.”

“Fuck.  Don’t you go talking like that.  You will land on your feet.  But get out of here, this job is destroying you.”

I smile, I smile honestly for the first time in months.  It’s not a smile at a thought, but it’s a smile about life and about possibility.

We talked long.  All the guests had eaten dinner and left in a myriad of taxis and expensive foreign cars.

I want to tell you that this is the end.

I do.

But it isn’t.

I mean nothing is ever that simple, though it really should be.

I want to tell you that I quit and that I declared bankruptcy and somehow managed to get back in school and I get to that point where I have no money, but I’m riding my bike daily.  I want to tell you that I finish my PhD and that Anne comes around and we get married and make love every night after reading in bed for an hour.  I want to tell you that.

I want to tell you that the colonel and I actually had a father-son type relationship and he even came to my wedding.

I want to tell you that Ryan apologized and that we all raised money for Rosa’s family.

I can’t.

Because none of that will happen.

I won’t even quit.

I walk to my car in the cold and the engine fights to not start.

It does, and the heater takes forever to come on.  This is an old car.

I didn’t mention that this house is sort of out in the country, in a canyon surrounded by hills.  It is.  It didn’t matter as much before, but it does now.

I am still drunk.  I am still high.

I am still high as I round a corner and the electrical system in my car fails and a truck comes around coming the other way at this exact moment.

I am still high as I swerve back into my lane and the driver side front wheel drops off of the shoulder.

I am still high as we roll down the…

The sun is warm and I’m whistling the song “Common People” by Pulp as I pedal my bike through a grove, into the heart of a little college town.  I lean around cars and cut in and out of traffic and my t-shirt blows in the wind.  My stomach doesn’t hurt anymore and I’m pretty sure I can see Anne walking down the street.  I think we are meeting for lunch.

I smile.

She smiles.

January 20th, 2010 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

The cursor blinked steadily and he stared at it.  Through it.  Into it.

Black and thin and… unconcerned.

Frustration and the ghost of depression made it easy to anthropomorphize any and everything.

The silent, cold (cold as in “unemotional” and “detached”) refrigerator, staring him down, taunting him to eat.  ”Come on, fatty, just one more pudding cup!”  His dog, who, by refusing to sit still and demanding constant trips outside, was mocking him… sort of playing with him, every bark dripped in irony and sarcasm.  ”Come on, fat ass, look how much goddamn energy I have… and you can’t even write a sentence.”  Even his chair sought to anger him, making his legs fall asleep in such a way that seemed to say “you’re pathetic, look at you… chained to the chair by life, now your legs are asleep, haha!”

Nothing he seemed to write was funny, it was more… of the same.  As if his style of humor and his style of writing suddenly seemed stupid.  That moment when you no longer want the “latest toy” and realize that you’re becoming an adult.

Ev looked at the glass in his hand, it was now empty and the last pieces of ice, now partly melted, danced in his hand as he turned the glass… that sounded good.  The way the light mixed with the caramel coloring of the scotch and the weight of the glass in his hand… glass that traveled from a beach or a bank of sandstone to his hand.  He could write this, right?

The heating vent came on and he watched as particles of dust lifted into the air and danced.

Back to work, Ev.  Keep it up.

He began  describing the character now.  His mood and the room he was sitting in, the color of the walls and the grain on the desk.  Was this too much description to be interesting?  Fuck.  Backspace… wait… wait…

I wonder if anyone has commented on my Facebook status?  I feel this need for validation even if it’s not in person.  Maybe if I’m funny enough this sort of idle writing and song making could turn into serious money.  Fah, that won’t happen.  For the love.

For the love.

For the love.

Ev refocused on work… wait…

Just one new tab in my web browser.

That was it.

That was the plummet into unproductivity.  That one indulgence led to a night of idle surfing… looking at things he wanted to buy, but had no money for, reading articles that he intended to follow up on, looking for inspiration, but really just looking to avoid the work.

Because it is work.

Don’t let the naysayers fool you with their complaints about “your time” and the need for “help” on a myriad of projects.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not wrong to help your friends, in fact it’s noble, but Ev tended to let his friends run him due to some deep seated fear of rejection if he did not.

The old “you’d be cooler if you did…” line could get nearly anything out of Ev.  People knew this.

Yet this distraction was his alone, hell they all were “his” distractions… you can say “no” to people and perhaps being more forceful about it would be good for him.

In the string of blogs and comments and endless video clips, Ev felt the weight of this one, singular notion:

He would never be cool.

It happened when he stumbled across a story on a new coffee house and how the author was shocked at how “coastal” it seemed and Ev, being in a landlocked city, was certainly not coastal.  So… so the only currency of cool was being on the coast?  You had to be somewhere that cultures substantially different than yours interacted?

No, that didn’t make sense.

Ev spun the ice in the glass.

So if I’m in a non-coastal city, which is patently uncool, then what do I have to lose?

There is nothing I cannot write about, because, in the end, it doesn’t matter.  No one will read these words, but I’m not bitter.

Ev thought as he refilled his glass.

Ev couldn’t think of anything but reaction.

Fuck my city.  I escaped far worse to get here, but fuck it.  I won’t be cool unless I live in New York, but my life and my friends seem to be stuck here, despite my longing for sunnier skies and warmer days… does “cool” even matter?

Ev sighed and drank from his glass just as he began to feel an idea… a lose idea…

Fuck Denver…

He stopped… this had been done before, but it felt so right.  He wrote a scene around his little speech: the main character of his novel was being confronted by his ostracized wife in an all night dinner, in the midst of the midnight crowd in orange formica booths.  She would confront him about his drinking and his lack of motivation to fix things… how he hated the world he lived in, but was resigned to it, so instead of solving his problems just grew more and more bitter.  This was going to be towards the end of the novel, towards the end of the story and if Ev was lucky, he would have earned this declaration… his characterizations would have been effective enough to warrant the reader already feeling this and the wife is just being the mouth piece of those who have witnessed his character’s spiral out of control, spiral down down down fucking down towards the fucking bottom.

His character, instead, would rant about the city.  He would rant about being “stuck here” as his wife put it.

Fuck Denver.

Fuck you, you fucking mountain skirting cross town of cattle and minerals and bullshit.  Fuck you.

Fuck you, downtown.  Fuck you and your wool jacket, latte carrying actuaries and accountants.  Fuck you, Brown Palace and cathedrals.  Fuck you and your old stone.

Fuck you, lower downtown.  Fuck you and your brazilian steakhouses and post-industrial renovations.  Fuck you and your shitty bars filled with gelled up, juiced up, Jersey Shore of the mountains rejects.  Fuck you and your tapas restaraunts and your hidden bars.

Fuck you, hi-lo.  Fuck your boutique skate shops and bike shops and sneaker stores and trails.  Fuck you and your rennovated train garage stores and your Keen sandals and “high on REI” daytime shoppers.  Fuck you.

Fuck you, Five Points and your hipster art gallery and soul food and underground music venue.  Fuck you Larimer Lounge and Rhino, Crema and Andenken.  Fuck you, no grocery store around and gunshots in the night.

Fuck you, uptown and your overpriced restaurants and gay bars… get a fucking clue and shut the fuck down.  We don’t need anymore rainbow beer signs or cross dressing coffee shops, thank you very much.  It doesn’t go well with the new clientele: the gym rat women in Ugg boots waltzing around with soy mochachinos and oversized black sunglasses.

Fuck you, Capital Hill… fuck your hipsters stacked on top of each other, wanna be San Francisco, too many bars with PBR bullshit.  Fuck you with your non-existent parking and converted mansions and liquor stores with odd hours.  Fuck you and your vegetarian restaurants and your douche-tard tight jeans wearing mother fucking vintage clothes shopping on daddy’s money bullshit.

Fuck you, Civic Center park and the capitol building, the art museum and the library.  With all the fucking drunk homeless fuckers fighting and shooting up in the porta potties and with your stupid ass festivals that shut down the fucking streets so idiots can eat funnel cakes and spend to much on fucking beer tickets.  Fuck, fuck fuck you.

Take that, LeFavor! I'll teach you to try and rep Denver elsewhere... mad panda!

Fuck you, Sante Fe Arts District.  Fuck you and your cheap burritos and your galleries full of failed artists overprice shit, foisting it upon a fucking tasteless public who has no fucking clue what’s actually good and will buy any shit you sell.  Fuck you, with your untenable market and your King Soopers in a parking garage surrounded by near housing project style apartments that are filled with students or idiots.  Fuck you.

Fuck you Baker and all that surrounds you… with your hipster tattoo shops and pricey clothing stores and adult clothing shops.  Fuck you.  Fuck you and your crowded thrift stores and hipster bars with themes and old movie theaters with art deco revisions of Mayan art and your cheap beer on every damn corner and hipster music venues. Fuck you.

Fuck you, Wash Park and your crowded as shit paved path.  Fuck you, weekend ultra warrior with your carbon fiber, overpriced, won’t make your ass less annoying road bike and Euro team kit.  Fuck you rollerblading douche tard who can’t stay in one lane on the path, I’m trying to fucking pass you.  Fuck you, lady who lets her toddler stumble around on a path whilst bikes are whizzing by, maybe we will get lucky and something will connect and we won’t have to worry about your contributions to the fucking gene pool.  Fuck you and your expensive sushi bars and nouveau American cuisine.  Fuck you.

Fuck you, Colfax.  Fuck you and your endless string of converted theater and ballroom music venues.  Your homeless people stealing bikes they can’t ride and your suburban “in for the show, dude” crowds who can’t fucking park right and who drive the wrong way down one way streets.  Fuck you.

Fuck you, Cheesman and your thousands of buried bodies and your stupid ass hipster kids riding their bikes in the pavilion at night.  Fuck you.  Fuck you, high rise apartments and dogs and runners and other idiots who overtake the paths cutting through your green grass.  Fuck you.

Fuck you, Congress Park and your “grown up hipster” vibe, with your indie book shops and cupcake bakeries and coffee shops.  Fuck you.  Fuck you and your botanic gardens and fucking aggressive homeless people (fuck you, Chicago, fuck you for harassing girls and being a general creep) demanding change and money.  Fuck you.

Fuck you, street sweeping and bikes not on the sidewalks laws.  Fuck you and your wannabe cool kids with their Vans and their vintage clothes and their tattoos and their smiles and jokes and life.

And lastly, fuck everything I missed: fuck the art shows and the keggers and the drivers who don’t pay attention to bikes on the road.  Fuck the rich kids, fuck the poor kids, fuck the unwashed crust punks, fuck the drunken kickball players and the cooler than nothing fixed gear cyclists.  Fuck everything about this stupid fucking city and everyone in it, fuck them with a big rusty fuck stick and in the blood and the screams and the death and destruction and brimstone…

Fuck me, too.

It was that easy.  It felt good to write it, it felt good to read it.  It felt right and Ev couldn’t help but seeing the “fuck you”s as “I love you”s and the detail and knowledge of the city just implied that as much as he hated things about this place he lived in… he loved it.  It wasn’t perfect and neither was Ev, nor was his character.  It was his characters moment analogous to Spike Lee’s 25th Hour when Edward Norton tears apart New York, or when he pulled the same move in Do The Right Thing.

Love and hate, Mookie.  Ev thought as his fingers flew.

Ev would be out, the next morning, riding to work and yelling at the cars that ignored him as he skip skidded his completely impractical fixed gear bicycle (sans brakes) in and out of traffic as he rode down to his office and Ev would be screaming “Fuck You Denver” in capital letters.

He wasn’t coastal and he wasn’t coasting and as stupid as both of those were… he was fine with that.  He wasn’t coastal, but he was writing.  He wasn’t coastal, but he was painting images with his mind and dancing on words and keyboard keys and feeling, feeling quite fine.

Scotch and a smile and some time alone and Ev realized, not for the first time, but maybe… maybe fore the “best time”:

Everything sucks and everything is beautiful and that is just the fucking way it is.

Love.

And hate.

January 13th, 2010 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

The snow crunched underfoot as they made their way between the worn gray wooden fences and the torcheire style lights along the path.  Fat white snowflakes lazily floated down in the still quiet between the tall pine trees and underneath the eaves and trampolines and decks surrounding the path.  They laughed and cackled as they make their way under the dark rose horizon that cut off into whiteness fifty feet in every direction.  The shadows crossed and they shuffled through the snow.

Faces red and laughing.

“Hand me the bottle opener.”

It was the fifth or… sixth, maybe seventh (?) bottle of Everett’s night and his face felt hot and burning, but he felt happy in a way that he had not felt in some time, despite his lightheadedness.

“If you want it, you can jump for it.”

“Fucking give me the bottle, Steve or I’ll fucking smash your balls against your pelvis with my fucking foot.”

“Haha, I’d like to see you try, Ev you fucking dickless wonder.”

Steve’s face seemed to be all mouth, the lower jaw much larger than the top of his head, somehow… as if his mouth had been slit on each side to make the opening wider to accommodate his oversized bright white teeth.  He bobbed his head as he laughed, which he did, in a manner akin to a hyena or a jackal.  He didn’t invite Steve to come to their work to drink beer and watch television while they waited for a prayer meeting that never happened to end, but Steve was Nick’s friend and Nick was his friend so if Nick brought Steve, as he often did, Steve wouldn’t be going home.

Well, no one was going “home” home tonight, at any rate.

Ev had volunteered his dad’s basement to Nick and as Steve had come to pick up Nick, naturally Nick would be along.  They would watch his and Nick’s favorite movie of the moment, the worn VHS copy of THX 1138, and drunkenly consume chips and salsa if Steve didn’t say anything else stupid and if Ev didn’t decide to stand on Steve’s neck and stop the stupidity once and for all.

Steve.

Steve was the one who thought it was funny to fake stutter in front of Marc, a tall and goofy red headed kid who could barely get a word out and who spent most of his time conversing staring down at his shoes, and Steve was the one who thought it was a good idea to get high when he had the flu and vomit all over the side of Nick’s car, but that wasn’t why Ev loathed Steve.  Steve had no style.  Steve proved the old adage that “jocks and assholes still don’t know shit about aesthetic”.  Steve was like the jock who wore baggy jeans and puffy skateboard shoes but who didn’t actually skateboard and instead, instead preferred football and pornography to anything that didn’t provide immediate gratification.  Steve was the one who forced him and Nick to spend New Years at Steve’s friend Javier’s condo…. Javier a diminutive Mexican who had a pretty decent coke habit and who had invited Steve to what amounted to an orgy and had Steve take pictures while Javier made his way through several females and the whole affair still left Ev with a sick taste in his mouth at the thought, though Steve seemed to be quite amused by the incident, but by the way he licked his lips and chuckled, he couldn’t tell if Steve was being lustful or wistful or if he saw it more as beneath him.  This same New Years party had a surprise that Steve somehow thought he would appreciate: dancers from a local “gentleman’s club” would be attending.  When Ev found out, he called a taxicab and left of his own volition and Steve mocked him.

Steve memories were like stumbling in on your parents in the midst of… well, certainly not parenting, but somehow Steve memories were worse and Ev always shivered when he even thought of Steve or Steve’s escapades.

It wasn’t so much that Steve was evil or crude or that his morals seemed questionable at times (although he was really fucking filthy: his toilet was so dirty that the hair that had fallen over the seat gave the toilet an appearance of a five o clock shadow or the beard of some Hasidim).  Other than once stealing their thirty pack of cheap lager, he hadn’t really hurt Ev and to Steve’s credit Steve thought that the potential for a sexual liason with what he called “hot strippers” was somehow a good thing.  It was more that Steve always seemed to be there, fighting for shotgun or control of the stereo and it was that Steve seemed to always follow Nick.

Ev had met Nick in high school, when he had moved to town and they both had ended up as loners and they had basically grown up together, or as much growing up as can be done between sixteen and nineteen.  They had both been ignored by the same girls and both had the same problems making friends, though they were, on some level, quite different.  Nick was tall and Ev was short.  Nick was into weed and hanging out at head shops while Ev preferred dusty stacks of books and records.  Nick had not cared as much for hardcore punk that he loved, but they both could agree on some things musical and when Nick would stop playing 311 long enough, they would enjoy the Kinks or the Who or A Tribe Called Quest.  So maybe… maybe Steve was a better friend of Nick’s.  Maybe he was the outsider.

Steve had started tagging the wall of a tunnel going under the street, running ahead and starting with crude, fat letters.

“I’m calling this shit.  Step back, fuckers, I’m gonna rip this shit up.”

Steve painted his fat lines and began tracing the big electric blue wetness with thin black lines, adding perspective and laughing as he less carefully spray painted a large breasted woman with a thick dark thatch between her crudely drawn, black legs.

“Haha.”

He ran through the tunnel as his laughter and footfalls echoed through the night.

“Why are you friends with him?”

Ev was drunk, that was sure and he wasn’t sure he had just said that out loud.  He froze for a second and felt himself want to crawl back in, as if he could somehow reverse time and regain the feelings in his legs.

Nick turned to him, his long dark red hair falling around his pale face.

“What?”

“I’m sorry… I mean, nothing.”

Nick put his hand out and stopped Ev, pressing his palm into Ev’s chest.

“You asked me how I’m friends with Steve, dude, I fucking heard you.”

“Never mind.  Sorry, forget I asked.”

“No, we should talk about this.  I know you don’t really like Steve, and that you think you’re better than the rest of us because you’re going to the University and I’m at community college.”

“It’s not about that, I barely have the money for it as it is and besides, I’m not even in school now, my dad won’t let me go back this semester.”

“Whatever, you’re still going and you’ll still be going and Steve and I will be at the community college getting high on Steve’s shitty weed while you’re locked away in a library somewhere with books.”

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense, and yeah, I don’t like Steve.  I don’t hate him, he just does stupid shit and then we have to clean up after him and he made us go to that fucking awful stripper party and that is just… eww, I mean what the hell, Nick, what is happening to you?”

Steve had run far down the path and they were standing there, there breath coming out in vaporous clouds, in the misty light.  Ev wanted to hit Nick and yell at him and he felt his hands clenching.  Fuck you, Nick I don’t know how I got into school, I didn’t fucking try and I’m sorry… I didn’t make myself this way, I’d rather be athletic and good looking than smart, so fuck you, you stupid asshole.  Steve makes you worse, he brings out all the bad traits in you and I want to fucking kick his ass because of it. He wanted to feel his fist hit Nick’s face, to feel his hands hurt, to see Nicks blood on the white snow.  Fuck, to see Steve’s blood on the white snow.

Ev didn’t move.

Nick let out a loud sigh.

“Damn it Ev, I didn’t mean to come down on you like that.  Shit, I don’t know.  Steve is my homey.  We listen to the same music, we like the same movies, that’s just how it is.  Maybe it’s you and I that aren’t really friends anymore.  Fuck, I love you dude, but I don’t know what you’re saying half the time anyway.”

Nick shrugged his shoulders and shoved his hands into his pockets and kept going down the path as he stood there and the tears welled up in his eyes.  They stung as they ran down his cheeks and his vision blurred as he watched Nick disappear.

“Wait, Nick, I think, I think I forgot my wallet, back in the supply room.  I… I won’t be able to sleep unless I check.”

Nick turned around.

“Yeah, well I don’t really want to walk back to the church and besides, aren’t you opening it in the morning?”

It was actually Ev’s first Sunday morning off in months, the job, a janitor, was something that his father made him do on condition of him going back to school.  ”Work for a semester and save some money and get this partying out of your system, then prove to me that you can handle school.  I want you to go back, but I expect straight A’s and I don’t care how hard you think it is, but I’m not sending you to some liberal arts school to study drawing.”  So here he was, walking home during the worst blizzard the region had seen in ten years and suddenly, he didn’t want to go home.

“No, I’m actually off.  I don’t work until Monday… here…”

Ev handed Nick his house key.

“My dad won’t mind, just go into my room and keep it down, I will be back soon.”

Ev didn’t want to talk to Nick or Steve, instead he just wanted to curl up in bed and eat microwave burritos and read from the stack of science fiction novels he had just bought at a used bookstore… novelizations of Dr Who and Ringworld books by Larry Niven and it had occurred to him, as they stood there drunkenly arguing, that he may have been overzealous when pissing off of the roof of the church and that, perhaps, perhaps a yellow trail of frozen urine would greet the staunchly conservative septuagenerian parishioners of the church.  At least if he went back, he could dump water on it and besides, besides… at least by then Nick and Steve would have passed out.

Ev knew that he wouldn’t sleep with something like that weighing over his head and he definitely wouldn’t sleep well with Nick and Steve around, but shit… he had already extended the invitation and it was cold and the roads were unplowed and covered in over a foot of snow.

Ev angrily shoved his hands back in his pockets and turned around, to stomp back down the path.

“All right, dude… we will see you at your place.  Stay warm.”

Ev put on his headphones but didn’t turn on his MiniDisc player, instead just half watching the path while his mind was churning through thoughts and emotions.  He felt nervous and shaky about the thought of getting fired over pissing on the cross and even worse about how his father would kick him out of the house and how he had little possessions or resources to speak of and hated depending on his friends.

This, Ev realized, as he stomped through the deepening snow and as the trail became more exposed and the wind blew harder, was just part of his problem.

He had lost Nick.

Perhaps they had never been friends, perhaps their difference in interests had made them doomed from the start.  Maybe.

Ev still wanted to smack Nick and whip Steve, spank him with his belt like his father had, so that he would remember not to be such an… such an ass.  But then again, maybe he was the oddball and Steve with his freewheeling sexual escapades and disdain for literature was the norm.

It was more than possible.

Still, Nick needed to not fuck up his life and Ev imagined how he would do that.  Steve would live a boring life living in a shitty apartment, getting high and listening to Pink Floyd until Steve’s dad made him clean up his act, when Steve would become boring and suburban and his burnout phase that he called his “wild days” were behind him.  Nick, of course, would go along for the ride and they would both be golf buddies or some stupid shit like that and hadn’t Nick once been the guy who wrote “Chomsky is God, Cocklicker” in permanent marker right next to the NRA bumper sticker on their youth pastor’s Mustang after a long talk he had had with the boys about the evils of alcohol and liberalism?

Ev was begining to imagine how he would get Nick back on track, and how Nick would soon be drinking boxed wine and watching Kurosawa and bitching about National Review and Ben Stein.

Ev would go back and poison Steve in his sleep… he’d find some way to kill someone while… no, no that was horrible.  Whatever Steve was, he was a human being and there was no way he could just end his life.  Steve was Steve and he didn’t deserve to die, that was lack of sleep and rage and childish violence.  No… he’d sneak in and wake up Nick and tell Nick about this girl that Nick would like at school and get Nick to come to school and date this girl and then Steve, Steve could go on being Steve and Nick could be his cool best friend again.  Yeah, that was it… or… maybe he would write a note and get Steve so drunk that he would sign it telling Nick about how he secretly loved him and how he couldn’t stop thinking about the outline of Nick’s legs and how he got an erection when he saw Nick dance without his shirt on… that would freak Nick out enough to not talk to Steve.  Being gay was okay by Nick, but coming on to someone who wasn’t was a “no-no” to Nick and he knew this.

That would be his way out, a forged letter that… yeah, he’d put it in Nick’s jacket and Nick, knowing Nick, that is, would discover it sometime later when he went to look for a pen to sign a check.

Ev picked up his pace and hurried back to the office.

Of course, there were no golden icicles on the brown, wooden cross hanging on the front of the sanctuary, but he did put his keys into the worn black deadbolt and key in the combination code as he knocked the snow off of his feet.

Onto the computer.

Text editor.

Nick,

I don’t know how to say this, man, I… look if you don’t know what I’m saying or if you don’t know how I feel, it’s cool… I’d just rather have you know, okay?  It has been burning in my heart for sometime and I just have to let it out.  I love you.  I really love you.  I don’t mean like a friend or like a brother, I mean… you know what I mean.  Don’t be afraid, I’m scared too, I just can’t watch you fall asleep again and not tell you that I see your thick ropy arms and I just want to curl up inside them and I want to feel your hot breath on my neck.  Really, I now it sounds… well, gay, but shit man, I can’t help it.  I just want to make love to you and lick you up and down.  I want to make you see god.  Don’t hate me dude, I just couldn’t live anymore without telling you.

Steve

Should he fake Steve’s signature?  No… Steve could type but he wouldn’t sign it.  He would just write it, and Nick would just…  Wait, would Nick believe him?

Hard to say.

Maybe he would.  Ev knew Nick, though, he knew that Nick was an advocate of gay rights in the abstract,but deathly afraid of homosexuals in real life and that the thought of male to male intimacy disturbed him.  Hell, Nick didn’t even like to hug his friends, no matter how drunk he was.

The printer was dot matrix and embarrassingly loud and slow as molasses on a cold day and he had to print two copies, just in case, in case one got wet or wrinkled.  He felt evil.  He felt good.  He felt… really fucking drunk.  Ev pulled his last beer out of his pocket and chugged the rest as he sloppily raced back home.  The more he drank the more it seemed like a good idea and the cold did not assuage him.  If it didn’t work he could play it off as a prank, in the same way that Steve had once tried to kick his door in and broken the frame and called it a “prank”.

The wind swirled the snow into little curlicues as it blew across the rooftops of the houses along the path.  His feet hurt him, his sneakers were not the best choice in the deep snow, though he tried to follow their tracks.  In the forty minutes since he left them the snow had begun to fall harder and he felt the beer bottle stick to the yarn of his cheap child sized gloves.

His breath grew heavy.

Ev finished the beer, and cursed himself as he heard his breathing deepen and grow louder in volume.  He was walking uphill now, closer to home, but he always felt that the universe had betrayed him and that his body was somehow inferior to the others… Steve, with his jockish physique never panted when they ran wild through alleyways, tagging up dumpsters.  Steve never got winded when he pulled some ridiculous prank, like the time they knocked over the portable chemical toilet and the blue wash of waste dripped all over the parking lot at the skate park.

He slowed down and began to regret his plan.

Steve was crass and crude, but Steve had actually been fun.  I mean, that was a great prank.

He stopped, just shy of the house, the lights from the basement the only lights being on as his father was probably similarly stuck at his office where he would no doubt sleep, being the pragmatic man that he was and having done that numerous times before.

He felt conflicted.

Steve was a flesh and blood human being with just as much right to exist as he had and Steve was not the devil.  Yeah, he had bad taste and didn’t understand that others could want something different, but he was human and he had feelings and maybe, maybe Nick really didn’t like Steve more.  Maybe Nick didn’t want to be like Steve.  Maybe Nick was just passive and Nick just hung out with whoever wanted to spend time with him and didn’t realize that their influence affected him.

But Steve was a misogynist who had once tried to show Ev’s sister his penis and who had joked about group sex and who thought it was okay to mock others for things they could not control, from the fat kids to the mentally handicapped.  Steve was a fucking wanker and if Nick ended up like him, the world would be a worse place.

Ev suddenly remembered that Steve would listen to bands like Gorilla Biscuits and Refused and Bad Brains and then make casual asides involving the words “nigger” and “faggot” as if he didn’t understand the words, but just cared for the loud, fast music.  Steve maybe didn’t get that this was offensive and inconsistent with what these bands were actually saying, but Steve needed to grow up and quit being such an ass and Ev would be fucking damned if he let Nick turn out that way: as some asshole who just grabs the most surface obvious things and who doesn’t appreciate what lies beneath: the substance of things, the weighty, good and important things in the world.

It was getting cold and Ev was feeling tired and no amount of drunkenness seemed to warm him or calm him down.

He would plant the letter and be rid of Steve forever and he cackled, in a thick black mustache nineteenth century villain sort of way.

He nodded to himself and began to make his way up the icy driveway, slipping and nearly falling only to catch his balance at the last second.  He stomped his boots off on the front porch and opened the door.

Ev stood for a second in the foyer, letting the snow drip off of his jeans and his jacket, standing there in the dark.  He kicked his sneakers off and tossed his jacket on the ground and stood, for a moment, over the heating vent while the hot air warmed his frozen feet.

He was going to leave this note and Steve and Nick would not be friends anymore and Nick would be cool again, right?  Right?

Ev made his way down to the basement to go to bed, cautiously stepping on the dark brown carpet, afraid to wake Steve and Nick.  Even if he was going to frame Steve as Nick’s long term stalker, he didn’t want to wake anyone.  Call it protestant kindness.

He put his hand on the doorknob and paused.

Maybe I shouldn’t do this.

Ev fought the urge to quit, the urge he was familiar with, from school to girls to, well everything… he always gave up if it wasn’t easy and maybe… it dawned on him.

He was failing in school because he just didn’t care to try when it got hard.  He was a virgin and, worse, single and damned to bachelorhood because he was afraid to be rejected, afraid to tell girls how he felt.  He was a saint to no one, because his “good deeds” were all quiet and, oddly, cowardly.  It wasn’t bad to not advertise his grace, but sometimes he needed to tell people, like the kid Marc, to stand up for themselves and that he wouldn’t always be there for him.

Steve’s letter and framing Steve was something he had to do, even if it backfired and fuck it, he might just tell Nick it was a joke and Nick probably wouldn’t care.

Probably.

It didn’t matter.  Ev had been a coward for too long and wasn’t going to let Nick become some jerk more concerned with his handicap on a par four than… well… than art, than life.  Sure this was kind of passive-aggressive, but it was the hardest most ballsy thing Ev had done in years and it was about fucking time.

Ev silently twisted the knob and then he opened the door.

Ev couldn’t recall later what he saw first, or even what he saw.  He never told a soul what he saw Nick and Steve doing.  He didn’t tell Nick that he even knew, not even years later when Nick and he had drifted apart and reunited at an In and Out burger by UCLA for a quick dinner when they discovered that as adults they didn’t like who each other had become over cheese fries and heartburn burgers.  Maybe Ev should have, because Nick would become an ultraconservative bigot and that would be ironic, considering what Ev saw that night.

What Ev remembered was this: Steve’s back was facing the door way and his back was… sans shirt and dripping with little beads of sweat.  His pants were around his ankles and… and Nick’s were too.  Nick was leaning against the wall and Steve had his hands placed firmly next to Nicks, pulling one off to stroke Nicks chest as they… as they made love, or fucked, or whatever they would want to call it.

The letter seemed sort of pointless.

Ev closed the door carefully.

He backed away and stood there stunned and breathless.

It was at that moment that Ev let Nick go or at least decided to let Nick go.  He sort of gave up the stress and stomach aches over losing his best friend or at least vowed to and… well, maybe this was better.  Maybe he had felt too strongly for Nick, I mean what sort of man has a best friend anyway?  Did Hemmingway need a homey?  Didn’t Sal Paradise roll alone as often as he rolled around with Carlo Marx?

Sure it was rude and bizarre that Nick and Steve had decided to… well, whatever they had decided to do, but… hell, maybe they had been doing this all along and Ev had missed it.  Oh well.  Ev believed in love and didn’t want to stop it.  Being a nineteen year old wimp didn’t stop that, it probably only reinforced his notions of romance.

Flowers and chocolates and passionate love by the fire.

He would sleep on the couch and the letter, both copies would end up being washed with his jeans the following day and never be seen again…

Wait, did he delete the file from his boss’s desktop?

Shit.

Ev climbed back up the stairs, feeling even more tired and drunken than before and he put his boots back on.

“I’m never going to get any fucking sleep.”

January 8th, 2010 | Category: F-f-f-f-fiction | Leave a comment

 

Dear Senor Wolf Marine,

Where the hell were you born?  Are you asexual?  Do you have a mother?

Signed,

Ron

PS If I’m right, I get tickets to a Cubs game and a Sports Illustrated Football phone.

There was this time when the Wolf Marine wrestled with Saturn.  True fucking story.  Saturn, as you may remember from the works of the masters… (that Spanish fuck Goya, for example) that Saturn was afraid one of his kids would like kill him and shits.  Yeah, so the story goes that the Wolf Marine gets fucking wind of this shit and is like, “Okay Saturn what you gonna do?”  The Wolf Marine says he walks up to fucking Saturn and Saturn was fucking eating a baby, no fucking joke, it was fucking nasty.  That son of a bitch.  So the Wolf Marine is fucking pissed as hell and fucking tells Saturn that his days of muching shit like that is over.  Fucking Wolf Marine rips his fucking jawbone off, like fucking Samson killing fucking Philistines with the jawbone of an ass and shit the Wolf Marine then beats Saturn with his own fucking jaw.  No joke.  Saturn survives, gets his jaw fucking wired back like he some Dennis Byrd (former defensive end for the fucking Jets, hallowed be thy names) and retires to Whippany.  What was you asking bout Ron, oh yeah… where did the Wolf Marine come from?  Don’t fucking matter, he been here forever.  He was kicking it with JC and wearing Cazal 607s before anyone else.  He’s old school.

Dear Wolf Marine,

There are a group of kids at my high school who always snicker at me.  Their parents are rich and they are into art and they get to go to all the cool shows and have cool clothes and such.  I’m tired of being left out, but every time I try to show up at a club or something I get laughed at.  What should I do?

Signed,

Alex Chilton

The Wolf Marine always says this one thing, whenever you can get him talking about deep shits(hint: get him some of that fucking Yuengling from Philly) and it’s really the only fucking time you hear him open up like this.  Rich people are cunts.  They don’t know, they just don’t fucking know.  You think that the cool motherfuckers ever come from fucking money?  Not really… you might say that fucking Edie Sedgewick or something was cool.  Maybe.  The Wolf Marine always said Warhol wouldn’t let him into the Factory and shit.  Even though the Wolf Marine is the one who came up with “Samo Was Here” and fucking Basquiat become Warhol’s bosom buddy in later years and shit.  Whatever, piss under the urinal cake and shit.  The Wolf Marine ain’t no bitter Pons and Fleischman, Tommy Lasorda type.  No, fuck those kids.  You think clothes make you cool?  You think getting into clubs at sixteen and doing blow scored off some skeezy old dude make you a worthwhile human being.  Fuck no.  Take a deep breath.  These broads be all rotted out bitches that ain’t nobody want when they older.  The dudes will be preying on kids and bitter that they ain’t matter to the fucking world no more.  They be like Clay’s friends in Less Than Zero, fucking raping people and doing really messed up shit to get kicks.  Stay inside, fucking read books and remember that you’re getting some fucking James Brown, Eddie Kendricks type soul that those motherfuckers will never have.  Do the Wolf Marine proud and keep your head up.  One day people the world over will hear some song you wrote (for example) and they’ll be like “I’m in love… what’s that song?  I’m in love, with that song.”

Dear Mr Wolf Marine,

I am in a pickle and when I say “pickle” I sure as hell don’t mean Claussen.  It’s this girl, I like her and I’ve told her this, but she doesn’t seem to like me.  Instead she insists we remain friends and maybe someday something will happen.  It tortures me, Mr Marine, every damn time I see her.  She is the image of poise and grace and everything lovely and I just don’t know what to do.  Should I tell her that we either have to persue this or that we can’t even be friends, because whenever I look at her, my heart hurts.

Thanks,

Richie “Lovesick” Deckard

The Wolf Marine tells this story, about the time he decided to climb to the top of the world.  Little did anyone know that he did it before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, cause he did it way back in the eleventh century.  He ain’t make a big deal out of it because it involved some fucking time travel so it ain’t exactly fair.  Plus, that fucker don’t brag about shit, you know?  He’s badass, he’s so fucking badass you can fucking feel it when he’s fucking looking into your eyes… deep brown pools of hugs and grill cheese and tomato soup by the fire side… wait, what the fuck was I saying, shit.  Okay, so anyway, the Wolf Marine is fucking in love with this broad, I won’t mention her name, but let’s just say she came back from a trip to the riviera with a tan and that supposedly kicked off the whole “tan is in” thing way back when.  Whatever.  Anyway, she didn’t want to give the Wolf Marine the fucking time of day, she fucking said “we’re just friends and shit”.  The Wolf Marine says his fucking heart cried, his fucking heart wept in the lonesome night and it hurt so damn bad whenever he saw her that he just had to fucking do something.  It wasn’t like the other chicks, it wasn’t like Jean Harlow when she blew him off, this was fucking serious.  So this broad tells the Wolf Marine to bring back the head of a Yeti to prove to her he was serious.  Well fucking hell, the Wolf Marine just so happened to have been poking around the Vatican library and found this thing about how the last living Yeti lived in the Himilayas and shit.  Bad news was he fucking died in the 1000s and the last people to talk to him were part of the eastern church and since the great schism in fucking 1054, no one heard shit about him.  So the Wolf Marine bribes the pope to use the holy time machine and fucking goes back and fucking climbs mount everest.  Alone.  But when he gets to the top, he nearly dies in an avalanche.  What saves him?  The fucking Yeti.  Turns out the Yeti is one cool mother fucker, his name is Bruce and he’s all chill, fucking into smoking weed and mediating.  Who knew, right?  So the Wolf Marine lets out his tale and the Yeti, Bruce, says, “I was in love once, you know.  They don’t talk about it, but it’s true.”  Bruce goes on to say that it wasn’t like that.  They both fucking knew right away.  So maybe, and Bruce couldn’t say that was the only way love worked, but maybe what The Wolf Marine felt for Coco Chanel, er… shit… well anyway what the Wolf Marine felt for that broad might not have been love.  Maybe the Wolf Marine was wrong.  Wolf Marine couldn’t fucking kill the Yeti now, so he went back and told Coco that there was no fucking Yeti and that if she loved him, he wouldn’t have to prove himself.  Same goes for you, this ain’t no fucking Gordan Gano song, but… don’t let the Wolf Marine be your voice.  Think about it, you know.

Who knows, maybe love… maybe love takes time?

Dear Wolf Marine,

What’s the worst band you’ve ever heard?

Signed,

Ryan S

Ryan S, you ending this thing on a sad note.  The Wolf Marine has his opinion sure, but it’s always changing.  One day he says that fucking the Beatles were the best and “shut the fuck up”, the next day he says that fucking Zeppelin or fucking Pavement was the best.  There ain;t no best, you know?  If you just want to be snobby and pretend you’re better than other people okay.  The Wolf Marine understands that some people need to be snobby just to feel good about themselves.  It’s okay, just accept it.  Why you want to be such an ass about this shit?  Let it be what it is, you know.  If some dude wear stupid clothes and a dumb band shirt, let him be.  Maybe you give him a Uncle Tupelo CD, maybe you tell him that there’s more to the world, but shit, no one is perfect right?  The Wolf Marine fucking never listened to Radiohead, you know that?  He was fucking into Saetia and Small Brown Bike and fucking watching the Jets lose another few seasons when those dudes made OK Computer and Kid A, you wanna make fun of him?  Whatever.  Don’t be a douche.  Shit.  I’ll say it if no one else will, you a bigger asshole than that dude that caught that ball during that pennant race cubs game a few years back.  You know, somebody turned you on to Vice magazine and shit.  You weren’t born cool.  Some people don’t even have access to them shits.  Internet don’t fix everything.  You just sound like you were born with two assholes: the one you shit with and the one you shit out words with.  Grow the fuck up.

December 10th, 2009 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment

My stomach churns as the bus bucks and sways on it’s merry way.  Whenever I ride the bus, I feel like a rat on a log, just caught in the stream.  Sure, I can hop off wherever I chose to, but I am not the master of my craft.  The heat, cramped quarters and the general smells that accompany the bucking bus certainly recall my mother’s method of driving (when they still allowed her to drive) in the mid nineties: she would crank the heat up, even in the summer, blasting it on my face, while her teacup full of tea and/or coffee with raw spaghetti dipped in it (I have no idea why she did this, but we found them hidden all over the house as if she were some weird Johnny Appleseed attempting to grow pasta) slid all around the dashboard.  This combined with her refusal to make a left turn (make three right turns and you’re going the same way) and the general bucking and swaying and horrible acceleration (and last minute deceleration) made car rides with her an exercise in the control of ones digestive tract… well, either that or swallowing vomit, which is a horrible thought to think of.  Seriously, I just thought of that acidic burn in the back of my throat now and well… ick.

He pulls for my stop.

Yes.

I now don’t have to worry about missing it.  Sort of.

Rat exits log, and out… out into one of the coldest nights of the year.

Foot fall, foot fall.

I’ve been listening, since I boarded the bus, to Crystal Castles partly because they are such a great little band/group/duo and also because it is mostly instrumental or when there are vocals they are easy to ignore.  This is good because I am reading when I ride the bus and I don’t want to get caught up in a rousing chorus of “Turnstile” by Hot Water Music nor do I want to be seen weeping to “Two Headed Boy” by Neutral Milk Hotel (and I do).  I’ve been punishing my eardrums today because I have decided I’d like to use the social networking power of the ontology behind Last.fm to find new music.

Really.

So I made a play list of all the tracks I love by all of the artists I have thus far ripped into iTunes.  There are gaps, of course… vinyl takes a while to rip so I do it only a few times a year and there are loads of embarrassing records I haven’t ripped: either very dated skate punk in the vein of Propaghandi and The Suicide Machines or just embarrassing records I have purchased in an attempt to develop a love for popular artists.  It’s not that I don’t like popular music (see The Beatles or The Who… god I love the Who), it’s just that no matter how many times I listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 311, or Rage Against the Machine I just don’t like it.  There are a few tracks I can admit I like such as Beautiful Disaster or the Rage cover of “In My Eyes” but that’s just it… I’d rather listen to Minor Threat’s version.

I’ve thus far compiled about three days worth of music.

Of course, after poking around on Last.fm I realize that their algorithm is not going to take into account my “loved” tracks as much as they are just going to compare my library to other users’ libraries and that should indicate whether or not we are musically compatible.  Never mind that I am not really much of a fan of Holy Fuck or Primus, even if I like a few tracks.  Of course, this means nothing.  We can like totally different bands and be friends.

Unless you hate Jawbreaker, then “fuck you”.

It’s while doing this that I have realized a few things about music and about myself.

• I will never love anything new as much as I love Fuel for the Hate Game, Goddamnit, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, The Blue Album, Pinkerton, Reinventing Axle Rose, or Minor Threat: First Two 7″s and such.  It’s not that I don’t love newer records or records I missed… it’s just that those records meant something to me when I heard them and I won’t even pretend for a moment that I didn’t fall asleep reading the liner notes to the Op Ivy album when I was sixteen or so.  It happened.  Albums like that are there for you when you really need music.  When you’re at your lowest and your most frustrated, those songs ring true and make you feel less isolated.  That music is a part of my cultural DNA.  Fuck.
• Music is basically my surrogate for religion.  I come back to that notion over and over again, but it’s true.
• My old bands were horrible.
• Music doesn’t really matter to anyone as much as it matters to me, or you.  It matters in some sense and we certainly have commonalities, but like religion it is a farce, a substitute for society and a substitute for love.  I love music and I love certain kinds more than you would care to know (to the point of buying Matt Skiba and Chuck Ragan solo albums, and out of print Rumbleseat singles).  It matters to me, fuck it does, but we don’t have to like the same shit and it doesn’t really make me a better or worse person for having the influences I do.  It certainly meant something more when I was “forming” as an adult, but it’s too late for it to change me now.  So maybe it’s better to say that it no longer matters, not like it did.
• I like being a snob.

The last point is something I concluded after I let myself poke around on Last.fm.  I should say this first of all, before we proceed: I am not cool because I hated popular music more in 1995 than I do now.  I was a loner.  I was uncool.  I turned to music for very valid reasons, but it didn’t mean I was a better human being than my peers, nor did it mean that they were assholes.  They were assholes no matter what I was listening to at the time.  I would like to thank a few of the jocks and preppy kids at my high school for getting me to get over Green Day PDQ (I would listen to Dookie after Start Today and Insomniac before and I regret it to this day, oh well).

I looked up Nickelback.

Hatred… is worthless, really.  The logical decision to avoid something or someone because you disagree with their ideology or they make you uncomfortable or you just don’t care for it, is completely valid.  Hate, though… hate is usually something else and the lesson of countless works of fiction (from Almayer’s Folly to Oliver Twist to Silas Marner… okay that was three, but I can think of more) is that hatred is all consuming and will destroy you.

I don’t hate Nickelback.

I will never give them money or listen to them and if I go somewhere where I hear them, I will undoubtedly leave.  They sound big and stupid and jockish and misogynist and… well, really bad.  What was that old Soundgarden song “Big Dumb Sex”, odd that I’m sure that’s one of the NB’s influences, but that describes that band to a “T”.

At this point in writing this, and perhaps you having read enough of my tripe, you know that I was born in the same tiny farm town of Hanna, Alberta that the NB hail from.  That would give me extra reason to hate, but ultimately I think I am beyond caring.

It’s more funny than anything.

This is where the snob part comes in.

I like being able to laugh at bad taste.  There is no reason for it, it is, in it’s own way, prideful and selfish and stupid.  “Look, look at the fools and their Wal Mart and Juicy Couture and Limp Bizkit, ha ha ha ha!”  It’s not really that satisfying, but it’s the reason why peopleofwalmart.com is funny.  You must be cool in some way if you can laugh at the bad tastes of others, right?

Maybe.

Or… not.

The critics are wrong, because NB has sold over twenty million records and if democracy matters (”and fuck yeah my Bible says it does!”) then the NB should be the presidents of rock and roll.  Nope, sorry Paul Westerberg or Bruce Springsteen.  Better luck next time, Ian Mackaye.

The people have voted and they want NB.

No one reading this likes NB, you’ve made it too far to worry about that and while I’m sure my problems and writing may be funny or even quaint in their own way, I say “meh”.  I’m happy with my tastes and I love discovering new bands or the roots of a sound, the ones that came before, but to do so to say “I was there first” is really blase.

And here comes the tie-in.

I was on the bus, I was listening to Crystal Castles and thinking about how easy it is to mock those with bad taste and when the track “Untrust Us” came on, I finally had an answer to a question that Pitchfork and The AV Club and Stereogum have all been trying to answer: what is the album of the 00s?  What is the sound of the aughts?

That could mean many things, vato.

It could be the album you liked the most in the last decade or it could be the one you listened to the most.  It could be the one that was the highest artistic achievement.  I say “you” because that’s what they are, or should be, doing.  No media outlet can tell you what the best XYZ of your life was, that is asinine.  They can state what they thought was best and that is, that is precisely what we should do.

When I was trying to think of my album of the aughts, many things occured to me.

This was the decade that made me.

I finished college (twice) in the aughts.  I got my first tattoos in the aughts.  All of the music I loved in the nineties was the influence for the best sounds in the aughts.  I moved to a real city in the aughts.  I started a career and left a big corporate job to do what I do best at a place I love in the aughts.  I fell in love with a girl in the aughts.  I played in many bands and began singing in public, on stage, in the aughts.  All things that I never thought I would do.  Really.  I wish I could say I lost my virginity in the aughts, but it will comfort you (dear reader) to know that it didn’t really count for much and I was single so long afterward that I think I earned it back.

That or the University of Colorado can show you two pieces of paper they gave me that might as well make it so.

If you don’t believe me, try to read the Aho “Dragon Book” on compiler design and realize that, that is just the tip of the ice berg in Computer Science. (Girls or computers, pick one.)

I needed an album that was not pretentious and that expressed the decade to me.  Not to anyone else, but to me.  The album that would sum up my transition into adulthood.

Pitchfork picked Radiohead.

I was inspired and reminded by Crystal Castles, because the song “Untrust Us” samples it (how meta are we, eh?) and no, it’s not even an LP.

My album of the aughts was, without a doubt, Death From Above 1979’s first EP “Heads Up”.

It’s short, it’s only 13.8 minutes long (or so iTunes tells me) and it’s rougher than the more accessible (shit, I’m talking like a snob critic) “You’re A Woman, I’m a Machine”, but it’s more representative of the decade.  Facts about “Heads Up”:

• It’s loud.
• It’s rough.
• It’s punk as fuck.
• It’s heavy as fuck.
• It’s dancy as fuck.
• It’s smart (and sometimes a little dumb).
• It’s tongue-in-cheek funny.
• It’s a little bit sexy.
• It’s fucking perfect.

Who love punk?  Me.  Who loves hardcore and heavy music? Me.  Who loves to dance?  Me.  Yup, DFA is probably the band of the decade, and their first EP, while not quite as good (in a way) as their album, is a better choice for me.  You can say what you will, but it’s my pick.  It’s quick, it’s over before you know it, but it gets you hyped to dance, to run around… it’s just that good.  And, like any brilliant band that releases flawless albums (Jawbreaker, Botch, Refused), they broke up and there is no chance of a reunion, which makes them even more credible (as a snob) and it verifies the maxim that I used to live by: everybody likes good music if they just turn off the tv/radio and listen to it.  Which, of course, isn’t true at all, but nearly everyone likes DFA when they hear it.  It just sounds like punk genius and if you can appreciate any sort of punk (no matter how much I would hate it) you can see the appeal in DFA.

From songs about dirty coke head girls in clubs who aren’t exactly wife material, to casual social betrayal, to being honest with yourself, to the fine line between “just friends” and something more… it’s funny, it’s sometimes stupid, and sometimes much more insightful than you would think.  All told, it’s fast, it’s catchy and just a bit less polished than the somewhat superior “You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine”, but that’s my point… it’s raw in that way that seems earnest and heartfelt, even if misguided and the sound and feel of it is so aughts (to me) that it edges out their full album.

There is one more component to this I have neglected: I played in a band that was partly inspired by DFA and a part of me felt like Jesse was in my brain, stealing my thoughts because I remember hooking up a Boss DS-1 to a crappy guitar amp and running my bass through it in 2001 and wondering what a band of just bass and drums would sound like, if you had more structure than Lightning Bolt (who rock, for the record, but use very weird tunings, banjo strings, and have a very unconventional drummer… no snare and no hi-hat).  That said, they did it far better than I could have, so it’s not a pang of jealousy… it’s a pang of memory.  Jesse Keeler used PA speakers in his bass cabinets and old Peavey solid state bass amps (which had their own drive channel).  He used vintage Ibanez stereo chorus pedals and played a Gibson Grabber (the coolest of all basses and played by Brian Cook of Botch and These Arms Are Snakes… it just has such a sick sound) or a completely rewired Rickenbacker 4004, in the tuxedo color (the second coolest of all basses).  I would never have come up with that setup, which was integral to their sound.  He was a seasoned musician, I was just a kid, so it’s vanity to think I would have ever approached it.  I wouldn’t have.  I was playing computer games.  He was touring the world (I have a series of bootlegs from Portugal).  They were sexy and cool and there I was, practicing in the basement of the house I lived in with a friend from South Carolina who had previously been in bands that were part of that Christian metalcore scene that spawned Norma Jean.  Giant bottles of Mountain Dew being alternated with cheap beer.  My own noisy rack setup.  The underwhelming mush sound from a vintage Big Muff pedal.  Noise complaints.

I spent quite a few years in the aughts writing and recording my own music in wave after wave of forgettable bands and that, to me, was an essential part of my time in this decade.  It’s the dark horse in reasons for picking “Heads Up” but it’s valid none the less.

Anyway.

The most important thing of this decade that I am taking out of it is, what I hope, a sense of humility.  Because I’m just never going to be that cool that I know all of the “awesome” bands before they are even used in a sentence by Ryan Schreiber and that’s fine… because neither are you or any of us, really.  Nope.  I’m snobby, because it’s fun and because I suck up information like a sponge and hunt down the history of bands, art, etc like a Mormon kid hunts down Red Bull or Kate Moss hunts down coke.  Yet all that doesn’t make me cool.

I remind myself of this daily.  I get up and then I look in the mirror and say, “Matt Weaver you are a chubby, naive, arrogant asshole and you just won’t ever be cool, so get over yourself”.

Like what you like and forget, forget what everyone else tells you.  If you do, in fact, like the horrid NB, well more power to you.  I can’t fathom why, but just like Tool fans and Republicans, I hope you have your reasons.  God (or Satan) bless you, motherfucker.

I thought of this, as I struggled to not get sick on a dark bus ride home.  God, warm up, it’s not even really winter and I haven’t ridden my bike to work in a week.

December 9th, 2009 | Category: WTF | Leave a comment