Cloud ‘09

There’s something I’d like to confess to you.  It’s something I’m ashamed to admit.  Something I’m embarrassed about.  I don’t like Lost.  You know, the TV show?  Yeah, I don’t like it.  I wish this weren’t true.  The reasons are unimportant (mostly having to do with the way the characters speak.  I can’t stand it.  It distracts me from the story).  What is important is that way that my distaste for the show keeps me from engaging with the people around me in a small way.  I would like nothing more than to gather with my friends on Tuesday or Wednesday or whenever the show is on and watch.  I would like nothing more than to participate in asinine conversation about what exactly is going on with that stupid island and why.  But I can’t.  I gave it a shot.  I made it through 2 1/2 seasons.  When I started to see ads for the new season that began a few weeks ago, I made one last push to barrel through the remaining episodes and be caught up with the rest of the world.  I just couldn’t justify the idea of spending 20-30 more hours on something that would become the bane of my existence.  This is not something I’m proud of.  I wish, I wish, I wish  it weren’t so.  But a wish and 50 million dollars will make you financially secure for the rest of your life.  So will just 50 million dollars.  You can’t wish or hope or believe something into reality.

I wish I liked Lost because it is important to me to engage with the world through pop culture.  Some people think this is silly or frivolous, but I don’t.  I have a hard time taking people who don’t know what’s going on very seriously.  Pop culture is the easiest way to be involved with people.  I know that you should strive for a deeper connection with people, but you can’t get deep with someone before you get shallow.  Find common ground.  And popular culture is really the lowest common denominator connecting us.  It doesn’t require much thought or effort; it only requires that you pay attention.  Find out what people like.  In some cases you will be confused by what people like.  I often am myself.  But at least you’ll know.  And in a small way, the people you interact with will feel known.  As far as I can tell this is a good thing.

If you didn’t know that a little over a week ago Barack Obama was sworn in as the new President of the United States of America, I would like to meet you.  I have never met anyone who lives on Mars before.  But I’m not sure we could be friends.  We wouldn’t really have anything to talk about.  Especially if they somehow beam Lost into outer space, which wouldn’t entirely surprise me.

I’m not into politics, even a little bit.  But just like everything else, I at least try to keep up with what’s going on.  I was happy to see Obama elected mostly because everyone else was so happy to see Obama elected.  I have no idea whether his economic stimulus package will actually stimulate the economy, or if any of his other policy ideas are good or bad or nothing new, but I am glad he is getting a chance to try.  The coolest thing about Obama from what I can tell is that he means so many things to so many people for reasons that you can pretty much make up.  And so the reason that Obama means something to me is that I hope that his election will stem the tide of cynicism in our culture.  I hope this because I hope that it will stem the tide of cynicism in me.  Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change, but there is a problem.  Hope and change are entirely unrelated.  And the former certainly does not beget the later.  Hope, faith, belief…none of these things are important or even relevant when it comes to changing your life (all of this assuming change IS what you want right now, and I kind of do).  It turns out that the best advice you ever got was from your high school football coach.  The most important thing in life is winning.

I am convinced, after having several months to evaluate the situation, that the most important thing that ever happened to me was the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies.  Their World Series win changed my life in tangible, measurable ways.  Ways that no amount of faith, hope, or belief ever could.  You could make the argument that since I am not actually employed in any way by the Phillies that their winning the World Series did not actually happen to me, but I would counter argue that you are a big fat jerk and I hate your face.  So there.

Here’s what you may not realize.  I, without exaggeration, spend more time watching baseball than I spend eating.  This may explain that I have a head full of baseball-as-life metaphors and a body full of, well, not a whole lot.  Certainly not enough muscle mass to push an ordinary bathroom scale past the 135 pound threshold.  Anyway, I watched at least 150 of the Phillies 162 regular season games (and every single playoff game) in their entirety.  And digesting that experience from beginning to end taught me a valuable lesson.  Nothing in life matters until you get one.  You have to win.  The beauty of baseball is that like life, it happens every day.  There are ups and downs, homers and strikeouts, days you feel great and days you have to gut it out with a hang over.  It’s hard work and it can beat you down.  But when it comes to results, the tangible is far more important than the intangible.  Winning is more important than hope.  The distance between knowing you can do something and believing you can do something is miles, not inches.

My life has changed because I now know that my years of dreaming and hoping were a waste.  And maybe you’re right if you say that the Phillies World Series win didn’t happen to me.  But I was along for the ride and I know what winning looks like.  In my life now, I don’t care about anything else.  I saw the hard work that needs to be put in and I saw what the results should be.  I won’t accept anything else.  Hope is just a distraction.  Allow me to demonstrate further.

I coach a junior high basketball team full of wonderful kids at school for losers.  Seriously, the environment there is defeatist to the point that it is toxic.  The negativity and excuse-making coming from the administration does a terrible disservice to the kids.  They are constantly let off the hook, rarely forced to work hard at anything, and are basically told that they will never achieve anything in athletics so let’s not even try.  Now I understand that not every kid is going to take to every (or any) sport and junior high is a great time to try new activities and such.  I am by no means a coaching Nazi.  We set a goal at the beginning of the season to make the playoffs, which would be the first time it had ever been done at the school.  And we didn’t just believe or hope we could, we worked our asses off for it.  I am certain that these kids have never worked for anything this hard in their entire lives.  And you know what?  We started winning.  Slowly at first, but then more consistently.  As a coach, I knew we could do it because I saw the Phillies do it.  I didn’t believe, I knew.  When we finally clinched the first playoff spot in school history and I saw the looks in the eyes of nine kids who for the first time in their lives knew they could do anything they wanted to, I got a little jealous.  They don’t have to waste 12 more years hoping for something like I did.  They have it.  They have a season full of results, and their numbers are higher.  They don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore.  It’s been done.  Of course they can do it again.

But there’s something else about winning that transcends sports or my career or whatever I want to win.  I’ll never forget Marcus, Jake, Wolf, Peter, Jasper, Mo, Kareem, Lucas, and Liam as long as I live and they’ll never forget each other.  Just like I’ll never forget Cole, Jimmy, Pat, Chase, Uncle Charlie and 21 other guys that I swear I could name off the top of my head but won’t to spare your retinas detaching.  But most of all, I’ll never forget the 2 million fellow fans that packed Philadelphia for the championship parade on that perfect Halloween afternoon.  Every single one your red-wearing best friend.  The camaraderie was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. No mere episode of Lost could ever bring people together like that, and like Obama it meant something different to each person there.  And it’s funny because that parade was what, back when all I knew was belief, I always thought church should be.  But all the faith in the world can’t top the tangible.  Phillies 4, Rays 1.  Yes we can.

King with a (Temporary) Crown

The first snow of the season is a truly beautiful thing until you actually have to venture out into it.  It should come as no surprise that I much prefer to sit in my ivory tower on the 5th floor and be mesmerized by the large heavy chunks of white as they descend to the earth below.   Today I will have no such luck.  Today my teeth have no regard for my preferences.

As today is the first snow, I decide that it is occasion enough to dig through my boxes and break out my winter attire.  I normally try to get by on sweatshirts and windbreakers for as long as possible and I suppose this is to prove to the world how badassI am.   Instead, I just end up shivering everywhere I go and getting sick twice by mid-November.  I guess someday I’ll learn my lesson.  In truth, the real reason for this is that I lived in Florida for five years and down there everyone walks around in parkas and mittens the second the temperature drops below 55 and for reasons that have nothing to do withthe weather I never, ever wanted to be associated with Floridians as long as I live.  So I deprive myself of warmth for two months every year.  I guess everyone does something.

I find my knit hat, my gloves, and my scarf.  The first two I am fine with; I have never figured out the last one.  I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to wear a scarf the way the hipsters in my neighborhood wear them, just flung casually around the neck.  I’m not sure how that’s supposed to keep you warm.  I sort of just wrap the whole thing around my head like a mummy, though I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that either.  At least it keeps me warm, but it makes me feel like an idiot.  What I don’t need right now is to go out into the world feeling like an idiot.  But then I’ve never needed a scarf to do that.  Any scarf wearing advice is welcome in the comments section.

Now fully bundled, I leave the house to do one of my least favorite things…leave the house.  My journey will take me ten blocks uptown to Union Square and then over to the West Village, where the streets ignore my preference to be numbered and intersect at right angles, and end with an emergency trip to my absolute least favorite place, the dentist.

I don’t have any kids that I know of, but I understand the feeling of doing your damnedest to take care of something its entire existence only to be be resented and let down later in life.  I have been a stickler for proper dental care since I was young and all I have to show for it is the inability to chew on one side of my mouth and a currently cracked, throbbing, and swollen molar on the other.  I often wonder why my body never filled out in my mid-20’s and I constantly overlook the fact that eating food hurts me in ways most people take for granted.  And it is right about the time I am feeling sorry for myself about all of  this that I step in literally the first puddle I come across, a block from my apartment.  It looked solid to me.  What was I going to do, watch where I was going?  Be more careful in inclement weather?  Please, I was wallowing in self pity.  I don’t have time for all that vigilance.  My right foot is now soaked and freezing, which is a problem as it was one of the two feet I needed to get where I’m going today.

And now is the part of the story where I complain about how I don’t get life and continue to feel sorry for myself.  But given that 2008 is ending in a matter of days, I remember a promise that I made to myself at the beginning of this year that things would be different.  I was lucky to make it out of 2007 alive and I promised myself I would never have another year like that again.  The thing is, if you don’t stand up for yourself and your mental posterity it can get away from you quickly.  Your comfort zone gets violated, the things that you rely on disappear, your tooth throbs, your feet are wet, and the next thing you know you don’t feel that much better about your life than you did at this time last year. 

I’ve always resented the cliche that life is a struggle and nothing is handed to you.  That you have to crawl before you can walk.  Before you can run.  I’ve always resented that I couldn’t just be happy.  That I wasn’t sure that anything would ever make me happy.  But completed my errands in Union Square and making my way to the dentist, my life flashed before my eyes and not just because I ignored the orange hand on the other side of the crosswalk warning me not to plod slowly to the other side of the street.  As an SUV blared its horn at me I realized that I had completely lost my fight.  In my younger years I was an idealist, full of piss and vinegar.  Not happy, but not giving up on the idea that I could be.  Years of right crosses and black eyes, years of blows to the chin with nobody in your corner to stitch your gashes can cause you to throw in the towel.  Take some time off.  Early retirement.  Eight long blocks from knowing whether or not I can eat Christmas dinner, my step begins to ever so slightly spring.  If you want something in life you have to fight for it.  That includes happiness.  Pardon me while I become a cliche. 

I think everyone has a higher opinion of themselves than they should.  Everyone thinks they are a good person and deserve good things.  And maybe I give myself too much credit when I say deep down I’m not a miserable person.  It’s just that I’m generally unimpressed with what life has to offer.  I’ve been waiting to be amazed by something my entire life.  It hasn’t happened and maybe it never will.  But in the meantime I’m building my happiness on small things.  Like the fact that I am a more agile human being than the vast majority of the population.  Seriously, you should see me move in this snow.  I navigate the ice and slush with a grace and agility that parents should be telling thier kids about before putting them to bed.  Even though a quarter inch of wet gross has accumulated on the bottom of my right shoe, I still move past flustered pedestrians at an absurd rate of speed given the conditions.  I am a force of nature, every step drawing me closer to inner peace. 

As it turns out, teeth like years, can be salvaged.  And relatively pain free if you find a good dentist.  I throw another haymaker in the general direction of my brooding dark with the knowledge that I will indeed be able to enjoy Christmas dinner with a set of nearly fully functioning teeth.  I have a temporary crown in my mouth that feels more like a tooth than anything I’ve had in years, with the promise of a permanent one to come after the new year.  It cost me more than I really had, but sometimes you have to dig deep for things like that.  Wallet, soul, teeth, happiness, I don’t know anymore.  As I make my way home, bounding over puddles mere mortals can only hope to find a way around, I have no idea if I can do this.  But I know 2008 was better than 2007 because it had to be.  Next year will be better than this year because I won’t let it not be.

How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You

I decided that the way this afternoon was going, I should take a walk.  It was a nice day, like yesterday, and I thought that I should not let two nice days in a row go by without being outside in them.  I had destinations in mind, errands to run.  But I abandoned most of those plans somewhere around 12th street and Avenue A.  The best course of action for this afternoon became wandering aimlessly.  As far as my scrawny legs could carry me.

All I really wanted was to turn my brain off for a while, but that never really works for me completely.  So I settled for turning off the part of my brain responsible for my self preservation and well being.  I wanted my eyes to glaze over.  I wanted there to be nothing behind them.  I wanted to walk slowly on crowded sidewalks.  I wanted to be the one in the way for once, instead of everyone being in mine.  I wanted to walk out in front of traffic.  I wanted to walk a hundred blocks up the east side and end up in Harlem.  I wanted to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes on the way.  But those things are like 12 dollars a pack now.  So fuck that.  More than anything I wanted to feel the kind of alone that can only be felt walking around on an island of a million people, and you don’t feel connected to any of them.

And then I had a disturbing thought.  You know what?  I should get a job.  Like a real job.  The kind of job you don’t have to lie to your parents about.  But what the hell would I even do with one?  I can’t imagine anything would last longer than a few months.  I think I’m just having a little crisis of confidence.

The thing is, we all know that everybody thinks they’re right.  We all necessarily think that we are right about the way we go about our lives, the stuff we value and the thoughts we think, otherwise we wouldn’t live that way, right?  I know there is a school of thought that says that you should just do what is right for you and that’s all well and good except that I just don’t see any way that can work.  I mean, not everybody can be right, can they?  Certainly not everybody is happy and if that isn’t the end in life I don’t know what is.  I mean, life isn’t supposed to suck, is it?  Oh, it is?  Well then.  Clearly I’ve been mistaken.  Clearly I’ve been wrong about a few things.  Which, in a way, kinda makes me right.

I don’t think I’m really trying to decipher between right and wrong right now.  I think I’ve made peace with that fact that I probably am never going to know for sure, which of course seems right and if you factor in the very real possibility that I could be wrong it just leaves me with a colossal mind fuck.  Another colossal mind fuck.  And I don’t think I’m really going to try to get a real job either, which just leaves me with that little crisis of confidence.

What I’m really trying to figure out is if life really isn’t supposed to suck or if that’s just something those of us who live in the first world have the luxury of believing.  I mean, probably at least 3/4 of the world would be envious of the position that I’m in.  I’m well educated.  Even with the shitty economy I could find a job and make 50k easy.  I had one of those jobs and I hated it.  It was soul draining.  I was miserable.  So at the beginning of this year I decided to write the novel I always wanted to write full time.  And now I wonder if I had a right to my misery.  I didn’t earn it.  I haven’t earned anything, really.  The thing is, I don’t think that I want a real just to have a real job.  I think I want a real job to be around people who aren’t me.  I spend way more time with me than I really think I should and I’ve had enough.  I’m kind of insufferable.  But I’ve spent enough time around most people to know that probably isn’t going to the trick either.

The truth is, whether I deserve to be having this little crisis of confidence or not, the problem isn’t that I am too selfish or that I should get a job.  The problem is that my imagination has slipped.  You see, it used to be that the thing that kept me going, whether I was working or writing or whatever, was that I could imagine something better.  I could imagine something good.  But I struggle to do that now.  It makes me feel old.  It makes me feel conventional.  It makes me think I should count my blessings.  I don’t know how to jump start it.  I don’t feel like I’m saying or thinking or feeling anything new.  It makes me feel less confident about the things that I’m doing now.

I usually regret anything I’ve written immediately after I finish it.  This might be the first thing I regret before I finish it.  It doesn’t make sense and it seems whiny.  But it’s the truth.  That can’t be all bad, can it?  And, um, I took all this time to write it so…

Let’s Pretend We’re in Antarctica

I’m sure you’ve noticed this by now, but life can be a dick sometimes.  It doesn’t have to be, but it is anyway and I suspect that it is because it is rich.  It has everything we could hope for and dream about and instead of giving that shit away because we both know it wouldn’t miss it, life makes you work for it.  To do something you like, you often have to do something you dislike.  It’s a quid pro quo arrangement that life insists upon.  But that’s how the rich get rich and stay rich.  They don’t just give shit away.

I mostly boycott life because I’m not a big fan of the arrangement we have.  It seems domineering.  I tend to resent that.  But every once in a while, if the price is right, I will do something I do not want to do in order to do something that I enjoy.  One of the things I really enjoy in life is coaching baseball at, well, let’s leave the name of the school out of this.  You’ll see why in a minute.  In order to keep coaching one of things I need to do that I don’t enjoy is maintaining my certification in first aid and CPR.  It’s a small price to pay, really.  But guess what I had to do the other day…

It’s not that first aid and CPR are bad things to know.  They’re not obviously.  It’s just that I don’t feel anywhere near qualified to be doing something like that even after taking those courses.  They don’t really teach you anything, and there are so many people there that you can sort of mask the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing.  At the end, they let you change your answers on the exam so you can pass and in this particular case the instructor was way more interested in hitting on the two somewhat cute girls in the class than teaching us even 20% of the material that we would later be tested on.  All in all, a waste of time.

As I was administering chest compressions and mouth to mouth on the CPR dummy, I thought to myself that there is no fucking way I would ever do this is real life.  I could never crack someone’s rib cage to get their heart pumping or stick my fingers in someone’s mouth.  It’s not that I think it’s gross (it is), it’s just that I’m not that kind of person.  I don’t get messy with people.  I don’t like getting my hands dirty.  I mean, I’d call 911 and everything.  I’d wait until help got there.  But I can’t start anyone’s heart back up.  I’m not touching anybody.  And for some reason, all that made me think of was this…

You don’t need to read the article, though it’s not that long and somewhat lacking in details.  Basically a guy is presumed dead for something like thirty years.  He didn’t fake his own death, someone just made a mistake.  And it’s not exactly what I fantasize about.  It’s not that I want people to think I’m dead.  But man, I’ve always wanted to just disappear.

I don’t know how that would work exactly, unless you really did die.  You could kill yourself, but I don’t recommend that.  Trust me, people get really pissed off about that.  Besides, it’s missing the point.  I don’t want to actually not exist.  I just don’t want people to know about it.  I don’t know where that desire in me comes from, but I suspect that it has something to do with failing as just about every relationship I’ve had for most of my life.  I’ve never been one to get my hands dirty.  I don’t want to hear ribs crack to get hearts started. But in the last ten months or so, I’ve endeavored to do better.  I think I’ve been able to repair a few failed relationships to the point where they are “acceptable” or in some cases even “good”.  Hopefully I can begin repair work on some more in the future.  And I’m sure that are some that have moved on without me, probably for the better.  I gotta say though, the thought of it all really just makes me kind of queasy.

I’ve been sitting on all of this today when I had a bit of an illumination as I was stretching in preparation for some exercise.  As I reached down  to touch my toes I noticed three scars.  One on my hand and two on my legs.  I know exactly what all of these are from and I’m not terribly proud of this, but they all involve alcohol.  Well, alcohol and being clumsy and hard objects that are for some reason in my way when I am, you know, clumsy.  Some people think I drink more than I should but I disagree.  For the most part I am pleasant when I’m drunk, insofar as any drunk person is pleasant.  I don’t get violent or mean, and I generally don’t go the other direction and get sad or weepy.  Mostly i just have a good time.  And it lets me be around people, which for some reason is exactly what I want.

I’ve never been very good at people and to be fair I’ve never been really good at most things in life.  I recognize that I don’t have it together and in most cases I can’t even find the box let alone try to put together the pieces.  I don’t think I’ll evolve nearly as much as I’d like to in my lifetime and when I die I probably won’t be even half of the person I should or could be.  I think I’m okay with that.  But sometimes I try to do better.  I try to be a better friend to people even though most times I would rather be alone.  Far away.  Where nobody knows me.  Disappeared.  Somewhere I don’t have to get my hands so dirty.  I don’t know where that instinct comes from.  But I know now that’s not the way things work in relationships.  Sometimes you have to break bones.  Sometimes yours get broken.  And I’m not there yet.  I still hate crowds and I still get short of breath in most social situations.  I’m still not that good of a friend.  So I drink.  And it helps.  It might seem irresponsible, but I’ve never claimed to be responsible.  It’s the price life makes you pay for things you want.  Hangovers? Liver failure? Eh.  And the scars?  Well, for someone like me, incomplete as I am, they seem worth it.

Love, The Kind You Clean Up With a Mop and Bucket

Everybody who is anybody knows that Myspace is so 2005.  Facebook is probably the very late now and Twitter or something like that will be the future.  But whatever.  I don’t care about the future.  In fact, I barely care about the present.  I’ve conceded the present to an uncertain and unguaranteed future and so all I’m left with is the past.  And the past may be through with me, but I surely am not through with past.

I had a dream last night that made me think of an old friend.  It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve been in touch with this particular friend and part of me thinks that when you haven’t spoken with someone for ten years it is hard to keep calling them a “friend”.  In fact, I have a suspicion that he might prefer I didn’t refer to him as such.  Our lack of communication hasn’t been for a lack of effort on my part, but it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.  The last time I asked someone who might know what he was up to I was told with a scowl, “I don’t know, probably smoking weed somewhere in Littlestown.”  Well, then.  That was three years ago.

The truth is, this guy was kinda hard to be friends with.  I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way (see the end of the last paragraph).  I was there with him through a lot.  There were a lot of people who were there with him through a lot more.  But he was by himself for WAY more than anyone could know about.  My old friend had a lot of issues.  Demons, he liked to call them.  And maybe they were.  Those are the kinds of words you use when you are raised in church.  Once, in a rare moment of vulnerability, I asked him why he couldn’t just let some of those things go.  It was a stupid question, but I was young when I asked it.  He was young when he answered it, but he told me something that made him seem old.  He told me that he likes his life better with his demons.  That he can’t image his life without them.  Ten years later I have no idea what has become of him, but I know this:  I don’t think you can blame people for their prisons.

Undeterred by my experience and spurred on by my dream, I decided to go hunting for my former friend in the only place I know where to find relics from my past: Myspace.  And some relics I did find.  I hardly use my myspace account anymore because like I said, it’s just so 2005.  But it is way easier to snoop and stalk people on myspace than say, facebook.  So I went looking through my friends list for people that might have some sort of a “friend of a friend” connection.  Nothing.  I searched a little deeper, thought of everything I could think of, still nothing.  I guess it doesn’t really surprise me that he doesn’t have a myspace, or at least one that I could find.  What did surprise me was everyone else I know who does.

It turns out that 90% of the people that I know are either married or have kids or both.  But not necessarily in that order.  And in a possibly but not certainly related story, most people I know look like shit.  I mean, they’re smiling and everything, but still.  Most people I know are fat and happy and have busted faces displaying thier families on myspace.  And good for them, I guess.  I just find I can’t relate.

I suppose that it is easy to make the argument that I am a lazy pathetic loser who never meets anyone because I refuse to leave the house and I don’t have any offspring because I don’t have nearly enough sex.  You’d get no rebuttal from me on that.  But something about this “settling down”, this having a family, a real job, a 401k, buying a house, it just seems so…so…foreign.  I just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility for me.  Like it doesn’t even show up on the radar.  I don’t really understand why.  I suspect that it has something to do with the adversarial relationship I have with happiness.

You know, I gave it a shot, the whole happiness thing.  It’s not a secret to those that know me that last year was not really a good year for me (odd numbered years rarely are).  But something strange happened almost as soon as the calendar changed.  I started to feel…different.  I started sleeping.  I got motivated.  I started the novel I always wanted to write.  I don’t know if that is what you call happiness, but it was definitely something.

But recently, a different old friend showed up.  He usually resides in the pit of my stomach and gets his excercise circling my brain.  You know, as bad as it feels it kinda feels good.  Like things are back to normal.  Like I’m right about the way the world works.  But the funny thing is that I know I’m wrong.  It doesn’t change anything.  And it made me think of my decade-lost friend and what he said about his demons.  I finally understand what he meant.  I’d like to say that we all have our prisons, but I don’t think everybody does.  I believe people now when I read the cliches they put on thier myspace page.  I doesn’t make me angry or jealous, it just makes me feel like I’m reading Japanese.  But inside my prison the temperature is perfect.  I have the baseball package on TV and wireless internet.  I write that stupid fucking novel when the writing’s good and other times I just play video games.  Everything is comfortable here, even the fact that I am relentlessly unhappy.

The Dark Night

They don’t have thunderstorms like that in the city.  To experience a storm like that you have to go out to god’s country.  The type of place that people who live there dream about leaving and people who leave pine for.  It’s the type of storm that makes you think your roof has fallen into your bedroom when the thunder claps at 4 in the morning and you are sound asleep.  The lightning doesn’t follow the thunder as much as it coincides, tricking you into thinking that bolt that lights up the sky is also responsible for making all that racket.  And it’s a good thing you don’t get storms like that in the city, because if you did that lightning would be striking someone’s apartment building or somewhere it would be similarly unwelcome.  Out there, you can rest assured that the lightning simply touched down in someone’s buffalo pasture, leaving nothing but burnt grass.  Although “rest” probably isn’t the word for what you’ll be doing.  At least not until that thunder shuts the fuck up.

Like roughly a bajillion other people last week I went to see the latest installment in the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight.  And while I won’t add to the countless breathless reviews that the movie has received (but yeah, everyone’s right, it’s good), one thing about the experience of the going to the theatre, if not the film itself, stood out to me.  Before the movie started there were the typical four or five trailers for upcoming releases.  And I know it had everything to do with marketing to the comic book/hero movie set, but every single preview was for a movie about the end of the world.  Every single one.  The world is coming to an end one way or another and somebody, preferably someone with some kind of superpower, please please please save us.  Otherwise, we’re totally fucked.  Either aliens are going to conquer and enslave us or a villain with diabolical intentions and the means to carry them out will do the same.  Or the earth will explode for one reason or another.  But whatever the case, please, please save us.  Somebody.  Anybody.

It’s apparent, with the current state of affairs on our lonely planet being what it is, that the end of the world is on a lot of folk’s minds these days, for a variety of reasons.  Some are convinced that earth’s days are numbered for religious reasons, some for political reasons, and others for environmental/scientific reasons.  Some of these reasons overlap.  But ignoring the fact that people have been fretting over the ultimate demise of our planet for centuries, everyday we are certainly closer to then.  How close, nobody really knows but definitely closer than we were at this time yesterday.  But that’s not the point really.  The point is, that it is going to end.  One of these days.

These days, everybody is going “green” in what seems like a last ditch attempt to save the planet from eventual ruin.  Now I don’t begrudge these “green” folks that much.  In fact for a while there I was kinda into all that stuff about being healthier and making the world a better place.  I adopted many green habits, but mostly only the ones that were congruous with my current lifestyle and didn’t inconvenience me.  But now, I may be starting to rethink all that.

I hate to break this to you, but that earth is not on our side.  I don’t know if you realize this, but it’s trying to kill us.  If the lightning from that thunderstorm hit someone, they’d be dead.  Or at least you wouldn’t want to take your chances.  Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, they don’t like your stuff and they’re coming for you next.  Even been to the middle of the ocean?  Obviously not because you wouldn’t be reading this right now.  You can’t swim that far, and even if you could you’d be drowned by a rogue wave or eaten by a shark.  Lions, tigers, and bears?  They’ll eat you if they’re hungry.  They all run faster that you.  Alligators too.  Ever been to Antarctica?  Me neither, but I heard it’s way fucking cold.  Even in more habitable places like the fair city I live in now, homeless people die on the street die all the time in the summer and winter because of the temperatures.  The very air we breathe is only good enough to keep us alive long enough for us to lose the physical and mental dexterity of our youth and die a slow death as an old man or women, wondering why our grandkids never fucking stop by.

So why are we trying to save the earth?  What are we trying to prove?  What if we, as a generation, decided you know what, fuck it.  Let’s drill the shit out of Alaska, build super highways through fields of corn, and use the rain forests as our personal toilet paper.  Let’s dump all our shit in the ocean and hunt rare animals for sport.  What if, all things considered, we decided to go out on our own terms.  Sure, the parents reading this may be concerned for the future of their little frankensteins, but the earth won’t explode in our lifetimes and probably not theirs either.  Let’s leave them to sort out all the details after we’ve been long buried in the earth that sought do destroy us and one way or another, succeeded.  If our kids want to have kids of their own, fine.  But let’s leave them with the tab.  Most of the next generation isn’t even alive yet anyway.

I love the commercials for the Discovery Channel that say the world is just awesome.  For some reason those thirty seconds make happier than I should be about anything.  And they’re right, the world is awesome.  On TV.  They way that zoos are awesome.  The way it’s awesome to see things you haven’t seen before.  The world isn’t in it with us for the long haul.  We didn’t ask to be here, and mostly all we do here is survive.  We weren’t in control of the way we started out here, it just sort of happened that way.  But we can be in control of how we end things here.  Let’s consider ourselves a generation of suicide bombers, dynamite strapped to our chests ready to blow this hoagie stand to smithereens.  It’s just, at some point you have to realize who your enemies are.  At some point, you have to take action.

Tomorrow on Today

Nothing against Al Roker, but he can go fuck himself.

Before we go any further with this I should tell you something.  I kinda dig Coldplay.  I don’t think they would be anywhere close to the front of my mind if you asked me what kind of bands I like, but I think that they have 7 or 8 really good songs over the course of their career and that is more than a lot of bands can say, even bands I maybe would think that I like better than them.  Now I don’t know what you think of me now that I told you I like Coldplay, but I know what I would think if you told me the same thing.  Nothing.  Probably nothing.  If you told me you liked KISS I would think something.  If you told me you liked Rihanna I would think something else entirely.  But Coldplay is one of those few bands that are so popular that enjoying their sound says absolutely nothing about the listener.  I know for a fact that my mom likes at least one of their songs.  It really means nothing.  But Coldplay was the reason I was at The Today Show on Friday.  At 4 in the morning.  Coldplay.  The Today Show.  Peanut Butter.  Jelly.

The thing about going to stand outside of the Today Show, even if Coldplay is playing, is that it is far less fun than you would think.  For the life of me I can’t figure out why middle aged women from Idaho (or anyone else) would waste a portion of thier probably well earned vacation standing outside the NBC studios some weekday morning, no matter how big an unrequited crush they were harboring on Matty Lauer.  The thing about standing outside of the Today Show, even if Coldplay is playing, is that nothing happens.  Well not nothing exactly.

Sure, Al Roker makes an appearance and gives a weather report that no one in the crowd can hear.  Then he turns to the crowd, opens his arms, bellows to us like the rock star he isn’t.  And then nothing happening turns into something.  The crowd screams back.  Thousands of people, worshipping at the alter of Roker.   And just minutes later, after big Al has awkwardly high-fived a handful of his minions on his way back to the studio never to be out of the air conditioning again, you realize something.  This has nothing to do with Al Roker.  People will scream for anything.

Every so often a camera will pass by the crowd, and though it’s humid and congested and there is no place to relieve your bowels, people scream like they are having the time of thier lives.  And when two homely women from Idaho are chosen for a makeover that promises to make them marginally less homely, people cheer.  Nevermind that it was completely staged and we yelled because we were simply doing as we were told.  And the two women from Idaho hugged each other and jumped up and down because that was the reaction that the producers thought they should have.  Nevermind that we went nuts for a Coldplay sound check every 45 minutes as they played 3/4 of one of thier hits before apologizing for how bad it sounded.  Or that that when they actually played a song for real, our reactions no matter how genuine were cheapened by PA’s emploring us to sing louder or jump higher.   Or the look on one of those PA’s face when I politely refused to hold an inflatable guitar emblazoned with the name of whatever bullshit sponser was paying for this event.  And then this same PA looked at me derisively when I waved off his attempts to shove said blow-up trinket in my hands and asked, “What are you too cool?”

Well, probably not too cool, but definitely too something…

I shouldn’t begrudge Al Roker. It’s not his fault people cheer for him. If I knew people would cheer for me I would solicit this reaction all the time. Maybe not. But a few times at least. I shouldn’t begrude the people who cheer for him either. But I do. It’s not really thier fault either. It’s mine.

I have a hard time living in the moment. In fact, I’ve never actually been fully into anything I’ve ever done. My head is always somewhere better, or somewhere that I think is better. A future that will never come to pass or a past that never existed at all. I can’t scream for TV weathermen because if I do then I did that, if that makes sense. It’s part of my history. It’s one of the things on my resume and frankly I’d prefer that it not be. But if I keep waiting for the moment or the day to be perfect, to be transcendent, then I really won’t be living anything at all. And the truth is that Al Roker fucking sucks. So does Coldplay, especially when they play 3 songs in 4 hours. But at some point I have to be able to think about moments that actually happened rather than ones that I make up. So I missed a moment last Friday, but when the next one comes along I’ll be ready. Then again maybe not. I mean, the Today Show fucking sucks.

Welcome…

If you’ve stumbled here from god knows where…um, here you are.  This is the new blog where I will write things that are not my novel.  So for the foreseeable future things may be sparse.  But I hope it won’t be that way forever.  So things don’t looks so empty, I moved a few of the less event-specific posts over from the old blog.  By the way, looking at some of things I wrote last year…holy crap I was suicide-y.  Sorry about that.  Glad that’s all over.  Hopefully things will take on a bit of a different tone around here.

This Ain’t a Crash…

The weather is getting chillier and that’s going to be a problem for me.  I don’t want to catch a cold.

Sleep and I sort of have a tenuous relationship at the moment and the truth is that it’s been this way for a long time.  It’s some parts intensity and more parts deprival and it seems like there is no in between.  But it’s the intensity that I can’t live without.   When I sleep I dream vividly and in resplendent detail and on the rare occasions when this occurs I wake up and have no idea where I am for a good 30 seconds.  Sleeping like this is often the best part of my day.  And my bliss is being threatened.  I need to figure this out.

For the most part I’ve always been a light sleeper, the result being that most of the time my dreams elude me.  Most of the time I lie awake or fall asleep in short unsatisfying bursts until I get so annoyed that I just get out of bed.  Good morning to you too.  But the last few month have been different.  I’ve been sleeping.  It’s been surreal.  But the chill in the air is threatening to put an end to all of this.  It all has to do with my fan.

During the months when it was warm, I was sleeping.  The reason was because nothing was waking me up.  Nothing was stirring.  The whir of my fan created a controlled environment which blocked out any distractions and created an ideal temperature for sleeping.  Combine this with new, comfortable sheets and I’ve been dreaming the dreams of kings.  But now the fan makes me too cold.  I’ve had to turn it off.  And now I hear everything again.  My controlled utopia is crumbling piece by piece and falling faster than the leaves from the trees.  It turns out that I needed that constant noise to keep me from hearing what was happening outside my bed.  Mostly silence.  The only sound you can’t drown out is the silence.  I’m starting to think that this isn’t a story about fans.

To say that the last two months or so have been surreal would be to maybe not use enough word.  I don’t know what word is the next logical progression after surreal, but that would probably be the right word.  I feel like I’m in second 27 of the 30 seconds it takes me to realize where I am after a really great dream.  I’m afraid that in three seconds I’m going to realize that I am in the exact same spot where I laid my head the night before and nothing has really changed since I last saw the sun.  I’m a day older but not a day closer.  And I’m just so.  fucking.  bored.

And I’m starting to think that this was the real reason all long.  For all of it.  It’s my cowboy phase.  I’m just running out of stories.  I had nothing left to say.  And in three, two, one I have to start talking again and I’m just not ready.  I’m not ready to realize where I am and realize that it’s that same boring shit as it was the day before.  I’m not ready to be disappointed again.  I’m not ready to give in to the realization that the life that happens in my imagination is so much better than the one that happens when when I leave my aprtment.  I don’t understand how I got here.  I don’t know how this happened.  Any of it.  But I sure don’t remember anyone asking for my input on the subject.

I really didn’t want to write anything that wasn’t sushiney anymore, but I also promised I wouldn’t keep all of the dark inside anymore either.  It’s no good for me.  While I was away someone told me that I knew how this story starts and that I should stick around and see how it ends.  But I was never told to write my own ending and that makes more and more sense to me.  I’ve always struggled with endings.  I think it’s because I can never write one that is believable.  I have good ideas that just fall apart in the end.  That seems to be my through line.  But maybe this isn’t my story to write.  It just sucks when your life story is written by a shitty writer.  My Life by Dan Brown.

I don’t know whether I’m off the hook for this ending or not.  That doesn’t seem to be the issue.  The issue is that I’m afraid that no matter how it turns out it’s not going to as good as I can imagine it could be.  Like whether I’m writing it or not, I should be.  And all I know is that I’ve been laying here for 27 seconds after a night of whatever is just above surreal and in three, two, one I’m going to realize exactly where I am and I’m going to have no choice but to get out of my bed and go back to it.  And there’s going to be nothing in it that makes me happy or gives me any reason to want to do anything but go back to sleep.  No more whir to comfort me.  Distract me.  Nothing but the silence.  Three, two, one.  The only sound you can’t drown out is the silence.

Dependence Day

“You don’t have to fill that if you find you don’t need it, ” he says to me as I suppress the urge to giggle with glee.  I have just been given a perscription for 15 oxycontin and I wonder if this man knows something I don’t, or if he is just the best dentist ever.  Fifteen oxycotin for a root canal?  Seems a bit like overkill, doesn’t it?  And why don’t they give these out before the procedure.  That seems like the more approprate time to do it.  I should back up.

It is 11 am and I am debating perhaps permanently putting off a procedure to alleviate the pain on the right side of my jaw that has been there for 18 months.  It is really now or never, as my health insurance runs out in seven days.  I got fired from my job again (that’s 2 for 2 since I graduated college, if you’re scoring at home) and I doubt employment that offers health insurance is in my near future.  My appointment is at 2, so I have three hours to decide.  Fuck it, I’m going.  But as the hour approaches I find that my nerves are getting the best of me.  So I do what I normally do when I don’t want to deal with reality.  I just think of something else.  Usually something that doesn’t exist.  My feet know the way.  My brian doesn’t have to be along for the ride.

I sit in the dentist chair and the assistant reclines it so that I am now flat on my back.  Then she leaves.  I sit there for about 10 minutes wondering if I should just lay here like a prat or if I can get up and wander around for a bit until they are ready for me.  I should have brought a book.  When the dentist enters I learn that this will be the first root canal his assitant has seen.  Terrific.  Did she go to dental school?  What do they teach there if not root canals?  Fortunately this dentist is a pro ( I guess technically they all are) and the only thing this assitant needs to do is make sure not to drop the burn instrument on my face.  Oh, and this procedure apparently involves a burn instrument.  I am not calm right now.

I make the dentist give me a double shot of novocaine.  I don’t want to feel this at all.  Not even a pinch.  I am a baby.  I don’t care.  I going to my happy place with my spirit animal.  That shit better work.

I’d love to tell you a story about how painful this fucking thing was and how tough I am for enduring it, but it would not be true.  It actually wasn’t that bad.  But in a related story, I also cannot feel my face right now.  And this is where that perscription comes in.  I make my way to the nearest Duane Reade, resisting the urge not to jump in the air and click my heels along the way.  Fifteen oxycontin.  I don’t want to know what happens when I can feel my face again, but in a way I kinda can’t wait.

Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of our nation, and I choose to celebrate by leaving planet earth for 24 hours.  After about two hours, I regain feeling in my lower jaw and immediately am thankful for the 15 magic pills in a bottle next to me.  I take the first one and then it is nap time, but for some reason I can not bring myself to fall asleep.  I sort of fight it for the next few hours and half watch tv.  This is odd.  After a while I decide I need something stronger.

I get in to my bed and put in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a movie I have never watched sober and perhaps not surprisingly, have never finished.  I have read the book however, and I am acutely aware that perhaps everything I have ever written and everything I will ever write is a direct rip off of Hunter S. Thompson.  In fact I think that much of what you see in current pop culture is the evolution of this man’s ideas.  Gonzo journalism has now evolved into reality television, blogs, youtube, all of that.  The idea that you are the story, that I am the story, has changed the way we think and interact.  The idea that I could write anything outside of my own head is foreign to me in the sense that I am pretty sure I could not do it.  I don’t know how Stephen King or Tom Clancy write.  I could never do that.  They have a talent.  For right now, I have a bottle of gin.

I never really liked gin until right now.  I haven’t had it in years.  This bottle was given to me.  Kind of.  But right now, the taste gives me an idea.  I bet I could cut this with Absinthe.  And some lemon and seltzer.  Excellent.  The label on my bottle of oxycontin tells me that is may cause drowsiness and that alcohol will exacerbate this feeling.  It is almost midnight.  Almost independence day.  Sounds like a plan.

It occurs to me that I have not eaten anything all day and that this might be a bad thing at this point.  I am not going to eat anything now, because my mouth is not ready for it, but I will make some jello for tomorrow.  I boil some water and take a seat.  As I wait, I realize that I can no longer see straight.  That’s kinda fun.  Before I know it, the water is boiling and it is time to mix this all up.  By the time I get the jello in the fridge I am so nauseous that I need to lay down on the couch.  After a few minutes it goes away, so I decide to make my way back to bed.  Wow.  Apparently horizontal good, vertical bad.  I barely make it into bed.  I’m starting to wonder if this was a bad idea, but before I can give my choices a thorough evaluation I fall asleep.

My dreams are predictable in the sense that they are all over the place and extremely vivid.  I enjoy dreaming like this.  I like it better when there is a storyline, but on this night none emerges.  All I can remember is that a seahawk was involved.  Whatever the fuck that is.  It is was bold and sleek and it was my job to tell the world about it.  So that’s what I’m doing.  Not sure what else to say.  I wonder if my subconscious is telling me that it is okay to draft Shaun Alexander if he is available in fantasy football this year.  That’s the only thing I can think of.

I awake about 14 hours later.  It is July fourth.  There will be no fireworks for me today.  I emerge from my dungeon of a room into my cave of an apartment and I discover that the sun will not be shining for me today.  It’s just as well.  I’ve got twelve pills left.  I’m going back to bed.