October 28, 2006

Hear Us

I pulled up behind a car at a stop sign the other day. The music from the car was rather loud. The bom-bom-boom of the bass was transmitting itself into vibrations in my car's metallic skeleton that resonated with a ziz-ziz-zizt noise from my rear view mirror. As I look behind me in the mirror the whole world seemed to rattle with the beat of the song.

It was a 80's model American car. I think it was a Buick. The windows were heavily tinted. The coloring was something forgettable like two-tone brown. And the tires which stook out two to three inches past the exterior of the vehicle seemed out of place both for their size and because they appeared to be more valuable than the entire rest of the car even with it's earth-shakingly powerful stereo.

Through the wide, dark, boxy windows I could see a human frame. It appeared to be male, with dark-ish skin and curly, shiny hair. This human male seemed as though he may have seen anywhere between 40 and 60 passages of his own birthday. I had the impression he was a human who had had birthdays pass that he could not bring himself to celebrate, dark passages of time, and birthdays where he couldn't help but celebrate because it was a miracle that he had made it through another year.

Praise Jesus.

It wasn't really the loudness of the music emanating from the car that piqued my interest. It was the bumper stickers. For those of you who have never seen bumper stickers they are curt, often trite, occasionally pithy and frequently inflammatory statements of personal belief printed on a piece of vinyl and backed with an automotive-grade adhesive. Belief magnets for your car as it were.

This two-tone car had roughly eight or nine bumper stickers. We didn't sit for long at the stop sign, so I only had time to read two of the gentleman's credos.


Keep honking. I'm RELOADING.

(Hands in the air.)

JESUS is the answer.

(Praise the Lord.)

I wondered as the Buick pulled away and as we played a ten-block game of 'red light green light' never quite catching each other whether he had chosen to put those two bumper stickers next to each other for a reason. I mean, had Jesus given him permission, personally, to shoot at people who use their emergency traffic noise-makers in his presence? I unrolled my windows in the hopes of catching some of the lyrics of his music. No luck.

I began wondering what kind of a gun this individual might have had in his car. Guns are accessories. Based on everything I knew about this particular human he liked his accessories to be over the top. At first, I thought, "shotgun." Shotguns are more bang than most people could ever truly need. The word 'reloading' seemed fitting.

But then I got to thinking. Everything about this car seemed fatalist; the trust in an omnipotent higher power, the suped-up tires, the decked out stereo, the black windows. It was if this guy knew he was never going to own a later model car, it wasn't part of God's plan for him. Maybe he felt it would be his plight, despite being an upright, God-fearing, honking-horn-hating, car-tax-paying citizen to be harassed by the police for driving a Buick that he bought second, third, fourth hand from a friend at church who had tinted the windows years before. So he went all-out on the peripherals.

I pictured a revolver. A revolver with a fabulously-long barrel. A double-barrel, in fact. A two-barrel revolver with an ivory handle and shiny metal rivets connecting the tang to the ivory. I imagined that this revolver had two bullets in it. One in each of the chambers. Two in waiting.

I could see a dark Sunday evening. A man is driving home from volunteering at a soup kitchen or a shelter. He still has on his church clothes. A car begins to follow him. It is dark, he can't make out the make of the car. It is dark, the car cannot read the clearly posted belief system on the back of the Buick. The man becomes nervous. He turns, his pursuers turn. He slows down. They slow down. He speeds up. They speed up, too quickly. He tries to steady his nerves and goes through a yellow light as it turns red. The trail car goes through the light in full red, and . . . blue. He is over run by his pursuers and forced to pull over. Two cops jump out of the car guns drawn peeking out from behind the flung-open doors.

Our man of god calmly places his revolver on his lap.

"PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR."

This is a no win situation.

"I SAID PUT YOUR MOTHERFUCKING NIGGER HANDS IN THE AIR GODDAMN YOU."

The ivory handle looks rich next to the deep dark metal of the barrels. He takes the corner of his purple church suit and polishes a dull spot. The gun is unregistered, an antique. There is pot in the glove compartment. He has an outstanding warrant for speeding. He is going down one way or another tonight. It is just his time. Praise the Lord. He cocks both barrels of the bun with a small but distinct click-click.

"PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE FUCKING AIR."

Bang. Trust Jesus. Jesus is the answer. Put yourself in God's hands. Heaven awaits you in the next life. Jesus died for your sins. He opened the pearly gates. Love the Lord. The Lord is good. Put you hands in the air. Waive them like you just don't care. God is good. Trust in the higher power. You will be free.

After we pulled away from that stop sign, my brand spanking new, bright red, foreign made zippy little hatch back shining in the sunshine I could only read that one word as I got closer and farther away. The big word. It echoed my thoughts.

Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.

Deliver us from our sins. Deliver us from evil. Forgive us our trespasses and let us not trespass on others. We ask this, oh lord, in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, in the name of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

October 23, 2006

Drama Clean



I needed shampoo. My preference was to get a shampoo that smelled good and that moisturizer. But as I stood in the shampoo aisle at the local discount warehouse-style grocery store I was overwhelmed with the choice I had to make.

The brand Herbal Essences was on sale. But in order to get that 50 cent mark-down I was going to have to put my finger on a bottle and say, "THIS one."

Herbal Essences has a new product line with cleverly shaped curvy bottles that interlock to save space in the shower. The curves are functional and sensual at the same time. The manner in which the bottles interlock suggests an intimate relationship between the shampoo and the conditioner which mimics the relationship between two lovers. I don't know which came first the interlocking concept or the sex concept, but I was dismayed at what choosing a bottle was forcing me to say about myself.



Here were my choices:

Body Envy
Volumizing Shampoo
nectarine & pink coral flower

Break's Over
Strengthening Shampoo
coco mango & pearls

Color Me Happy
Shampoo for Color Treated Hair
acai berries & satin

Dangerously Straight
Pin Straight Shampoo
honeyed pear & silk

Drama Clean
Refreshing Shampoo
berry tea & orange flower

Hello Hydration
Moisturizing Shampoo
orchid & coconut milk

None of Your Frizzness
Smoothing Shampoo
mandarin balm and pearls

Totally Twisted
Curls and Waves Shampoo
french lavender and jade extracts

I chose Hello Hydration which said on the bottle:


let us soak it to ya. we're all about the moisture, so let us quench your tresses with lush hydration.



Later that night I stopped into a QuickTrip for some gas and milk. Finally, there in the QT milk cooler someone had finally branded something for ME.

October 22, 2006

The Suck

It has been a somewhat hectic week here in Kansas. I am trying to get my head around the ever-increasing scope of the project I have been hired to work on. Originally I was supposed to be the conceptual artist and content creator for a certain major university's national network television commercial. Then, I was supposed to be the creative director for the commercial. Now, I am being asked to develop a media-neutral communications campaign strategy. This might be the worst case of scope-drift I have ever seen.

Additionally, I am beginning to fall victim to a phenomenon I call The Suck. The Suck is kind of like institutional undertow. It is a slow and steady force of institutional nature. It is a way in which an individual is gradually sucked into a myriad of projects, committees, initiatives, etc until they are inextricably tied up and can't actually get the things the need to accomplish done.

Here is an example of how The Suck works.

You are sitting at your unbalanced metal desk in a terribly uncomfortable chair bought from the local correctional facility. The fluorescent flood light above your desk flickers and hums. As you read the minutes from the most recent staff meeting you make a mental note to yourself to get on the committee in charge of fixing up the office. In the minutes you read that one coworker, let's call him Tom is working on a video project about research professors at your institution of higher learning. Another coworker, Page, is working on a series of public radio shorts about research in general at the university. A third coworker, Millie, is working on a viewbook for high-ability high school students. A fourth coworker, Fred, is working on revamping the website.

After reading the minutes you sit at your computer, intending to begin your own work on, let's say, a calendar of events. But you can't get over how little Tom, Page, Millie and Fred talk to each other even though they are working on very similar stuff. You wonder whether a grassroots approach or a top-down approach is the answer. You schedule two meetings, one with your boss the other with your co-workers to feel out both angles. You daydream for about 20 minutes about how either approach might increase productivity and strengthen our major marketing messages across all mediums. You fantasize about the way in which a clear marketing and communications strategy with defined and measurable outcomes could revolutionize the way you work.

The phone rings. Your boss is intrigued by the email request for a meeting and asks you to join an oversight committee. You are flattered and sketch away at some thumbnails for your calendar while she talks. As you hang up the phone you lament the fact that you don't have a Wacom tablet to input all of your sketches directly into your project folder on the server. You wonder how long it will take to locate a student to scan your drawings for you so that you can get on with some real work.

After a couple of hours of now sitting at a desk that is not the right height and a chair that is not built for comfort you take a walk out of your windowless, fluorescent office in search of a little back pain relief and daylight. You watch as the white, middle class college students poor up and down the main drag of campus, flipping their flops, bopping to iTunes and chatting away on hand held devices. None of them are carrying a newspaper. A quarter of them have laptops. You realize 1/2 the work you do in your office is outdated. And, the provost's charge to make the university a more diverse place - in every sense of the word - is a huge challenge that will require years of work.

You go back to your office and sketch a few more thumbnails before going to a meeting about how many cubicle systems to order. All you can think is, "NO, not cubicles, we need a more stimulating environment." But, you concede the need to think towards office growth and inadvertently make it seem as though you are with everyone else and pro cubicle. After the meeting you answer a slough of emails, several of which are from Page, Tom, Millie and Fred who really want to meet about something substantial, but are having a hard time fitting your meeting in between all the other meetings. The five of you settle on a date two weeks in the future.

Then finally you have an hour to design, but of course, now, you have no ideas and the bland slate grey second-hand office furniture you are literally surrounded by offers no inspiration. You muddle through, somehow, putting color, form, line back into your life. Putting meaning back into your life. Then you realize your entire day was awash. Another victim of The Suck.

It is coming for us all. Can you hear it. It sounds like an inverted train. A metaphysical wind tunnel in the back corner of the office building. Will we all be lost to it?

October 16, 2006

Ouchers

I have made it to Kansas. The trip was fine, at least, I thought the trip was fine until I got to Lawrence. I am supposed to be staying with a friend this week, but she was late getting back to town from Chicago last night. I couldn't get a hold of anyone else to stay with. So, I checked into the local EconoLodge. When I got to my room I was totally overwhelmed with the stench of Febreeze. I figured this was just because it is a dog-friendly room and I decided to suck it up for one night. My right back near my shoulder blade has been sore since yesterday and I decided to take my shirt off and rub on the muscle.

Now, this is me we are talking about. I have bad luck. I started rubbing on my shoulder and felt a tick. Okay, I go hiking, camping, backpacking. I have one full-custody dog and two non-custody dogs. I grew up in New York, the number one Lyme state, and eventually moved to Kansas, the number two Lyme state. So, I am not one of those people who freaks out at the sight of a tick burrowed into her skin. But this was painful. My whole muscle is sore. It is tender the way a really bad inside the nose zit is tendered.

I removed the tick with some tweezers and put it in a jar. I went online. Most definitely a Deer Tick. I probably got it in Indiana when Pip and I stopped to go for a long walk in a park. It was most likely only attached to me for 30-33 hours, not long enough to transmit the little bugger bacteria that causes Lyme. Still, this hurts bad. I am going to have to get a doctor's appointment for my first day of work. Haha. Loser.

While I was stressing about the tick I went outside to have a cigarette. I hate smoking inside. I got a smoke-free room because I hate the smell of smoking rooms. (Yes, I realize this is probably what the inside of my lungs smell like.) So, I leave Pip in the room. I walk 15 feet away. Smoke. I come back in the room and notice paint all over the floor. The little bitch had scraped the holy hell out of the hotel room door. So, at midnight I drove over to a friend's house and borrowed a vacuum cleaner to get thepaint chips from the door up off the carpet. My thinking is that if the house keeping person throws open the door and starts working she might not ever notice the back of the door. Fingers crossed.

I am kind of worried about what the rest of the day will have in store for me. I am off to get car tags. Then I have to go to work and fill out my paper work. I might use the rest of the afternoon to look for an apartment. I feel a bit discombobulated. It is weird to once again be home, but not having a home.

October 13, 2006

Please Stay Tuned

Today I am moving to Kansas. The God's in their mysterious godly ways have decided to throw a few hurdles in my way. Tests, I believe they're called in Greek Mythology or trials and trib-you-lations in the American Christian church-going vernacular.

So, today I was to visit a girl that I dated for about 5 months earlier this year. I was going to stay with her tonight in Buffalo then take a nice leisurely twelve-hour stroll out to Saint Louis to stay with other friends tomorrow night.

Well, The National Weather Service sent out this little warning this morning:


444 AM EDT FRI OCT 13 2006
Lake effect snow warning now in effect until 10 am EDT

This warning effects the counties of Niagara, Orleans, Northern Erie, Genesee including the cities of Niagara Falls, Medina, Buffalo, Batavia

The lake effect snow warning is now in effect until 10 am EDT this morning.

A band of heavy wet snow over northern Erie and Genesee counties will continue to lift to the north this morning. Additional accumulations of 2 to 5 inches are possible bringing general storm totals to 1 to 2 feet from metro Buffalo to western Genesee county. Total accumulations of 6 to 12 inches are expected across Niagara and Orleans counties.

The combination of heavy snow and widespread downed trees will make travel extremely difficult across metro buffalo this morning.

Remember, in lake effect snow the weather can vary from locally heavy snow in narrow bands to clear skies just a few miles away. If you will be traveling across the region this morning...be prepared for very difficult and slow driving conditions. Stay tuned to NOAA weather radio and other radio and TV stations for further details or updates.

My Buffalonian gal pal summed it up like this: "Holy shit. (Loud excited roommate screeching in background.) There is a state-of-emergency. Trees are down everywhere. The thruway is CLOSED all the way back to ROCHESTER. You probably won't be able to get in today. Come tomorrow. Holy shit. Look at that."

To which I said, "Oh man. I can't. I have to work on Monday."

To which she said, "Oh well," as if she had just found out the grocery store was out of her regular brand of bottled water which mattered little because she had just seen a new megahydrating-ultracool-electrolyte-replenishing super-water for half the price.

So, I am now plotting a different course to Saint Louis and eventually Kansas City instead of driving up to Buffalo in anticipation of warm mugs of hot cocoa and snow ball fights to be followed at some point by I-will-miss-you-s which I now realize would not have been entirely heart-felt. A small part of me, the simulated happiness part, is telling myself, "Ah well, better to not have wasted your time with something that you know isn't going to last or be truly deeply meaningful." But, another part of me, the part the craves real actual chemically tangible happiness, is saying, "Who cares about forever?! Go up there and battle the elements, take side roads, strap on some skis and get your snowday on." In an ironic bit of self-awareness it is this side of my brain, the real tangible side, that is urgently, persistently reminding me "Meaning and happiness are what you make of them."

October 12, 2006

Ripe

My mom is a bargain junky. Correction, my mom is a self-identified bargain junky. It is the kind of thing that happens to a single parent struggling to make ends meet. She has always worked an insane number of hours. Even now she has two jobs one in town and one three hours away.

I vividly remember her coming home in the evenings laden with an odd assortment of groceries. My sister and I would help her put away the week’s food goods. Three bags of Twizlers, 3 dozen eggs, 2 bottles of pineapple salsa, 4 frozen pie crusts, 24 cans of diet seltzer water, 4 lbs of ground round and a bag of ice later we would wonder, in earnest, what the hell we were going to eat for dinner.

We were the kind of family that would have an excess of tube socks to wear but not a single socially acceptable pair of running shoes amongst us. We had toilet paper, paper towels, canned goods and huge white bloomers coming out the wazoo, but a decided lack of functioning motor vehicles. Though I am sure that if carburetors and fan belts went on sale or were available in bulk we would have an entire shelf of them in the garage.

When I moved home recently I found no fewer than 18 identical Eddie Bauer edition Nalgene bottles in the overstuffed kitchen cabinets. I asked my mom, the midwife, why she had so many water bottles. She said, “They were on sale.” And that was the full extent of her rationale.

My sister, the advertising executive, told me recently that she personally witnessed the storing of three, yes three, turkey ovens. These are not turkey trays that one puts in their normal oven, but rather self-contained miniature electric ovens that are designed for the express purpose of cooking a turkey, not a chicken, not vegetables, a turkey, or in our case three turkeys, without tying up the oven.

My mom once told me while we unloaded a trunk-full of sale hostas, “I have to spend a little money to save a lot.” Over the years my sister and I have tried to point out to her that if she were to say SAVE that little money upfront she might be able to invest it in quality, long-life products or (dare I dream) in stocks or bonds, but she has no interest.

The truth is she shops as a hobby. I have seen her on multiple occasions go to a friend’s house and look through mail-order catalogues for hours while everyone else drinks coffee or discusses the recent happenings in their lives. Sometimes, if she is on her way to visit a friend that doesn’t have the social sense to keep catalogues out for guests to peruse she will bring a stack of her own.

In an average week we will receive 10-20 catalogues and 3-10 magazine and professional journals. The journals go unopened, still in the plastic, into a box for ‘reference.’ The magazines go to the bathroom next to the toilet for ‘thumbing through.’ The catalogues go straight to the living room table where they are read until the ink is worn from the cover and the pages go limp and ragged.

Our mailman has the daily charge of getting all of her catalogues to fit in the box with the door closed. Occasionally he pulls his truck over and delivers the mail directly to the front door. I am sure this is a time saving activity. Several of our neighbors have opted out of getting our mail for her when she is out of town because “It takes up too much space.”

Recently my mom found a ‘lovely’ pop up greenhouse on sale in a gardening catalogue she subscribes to. I am thinking that this is what led her into her stint as a community gardener. New vegetable gardeners always fall into a certain trap. This is a kind of trap that my mom is prone to. The thinking goes like this. For the same price as a tomato I can buy a plant that will grow a bunch of tomatoes. For the price of a tomato plant I can buy a pack of seeds that will grow a row of tomato plants. All I have to do is a little prep work, some watering and viola, I will have a assload of tomatoes for the price of one.

Yeah, we pay farmers to do this for us for a reason. It is efficient.

So, this past spring before the frost lifted, I helped my mom put a million little seeds into seed starting packs. We put the seeds into the popup greenhouse. It was my job to make sure they were watered regularly while my mom was away working. She rented two community garden plots. One was here in town, the other was close to her work in Poughkepsie.

For a few months this spring my girlfriend and I would spend what should have been lazy, post cloital Saturday mornings riding up to the town dump with my mom. A couple of years ago she discovered there was free compost at the dump while saving money by hauling her own trash.

For most people trash day is a day during the week in which you have to remember to cart your waste to the curb before getting on with the rest of your life. In our house trash day is literally an entire day spent going to the dump.

My mom, unlike my girlfriend and me, loves trash day. Here is how it works. We load her old rotting Pathfinder, or as she drawls it, ‘the truuck,’ up with nasty, leaking, maggot infested, week-old bags of trash, some shovels and boxes of out-dated catalogues. We then drive 20 miles out into the country to the county landfill. At the entrance to the dump we pull over at the recycling bins and dispose of the catalogues. Then we get in line with all the dump “truucks” and wait our turn to weigh-in. After weighing-in we drive 300 yards to the ‘household waste’ containers. There are also containers for scrap metal, tires, batteries and refrigerators. We unload the trash. Then we would circle around again to the entrance and get back into line to be weighed. We pay on average two dollars to the lady in the window at the scale. My mom has become acquaintances with this gal in the way many people come to know their butcher or hairdresser. The lady gives us our receipt and a treat for our dog through the little metal drawer of propriety under the window. Then we would circle around yet again to the compost area and load the back of the truck with an insane amount of steaming bio matter while the dog scarves down her treat.

After loading up we treat ourselves to lunch at a local country farm. The thinking here is that we have saved so much money hauling our own garbage that we deserve a treat. The reality is we were always freaking hungry after all the shoveling. We take turns going into the farm store restroom to clean the trash ooze and compost dirt from under our nails. We eat out on the front porch and the dog usually gets another treat.

After lunch we go out to the farm orchards and pick a couple of bushels of whatever fruit or berry is in season. This is much more cost effective, according to my mom, than buying 1/2 ripe fruit at the super market. The copious amount of fruit is taken home and flash frozen for use in smoothies and pies hopefully to be accompanied by three turkeys. (There is currently so much frozen, freshly-picked fruit in our freezer that we can’t fit anything else in.) By the time we drive the 20 miles back to town it was usually well into the afternoon. My girlfriend would take her leave of us. And my mom would head out to her local garden plot where she would spend the rest of the day light hours fastidiously preparing immaculate rows of well-composted soil for her seedlings.

I don’t know who enjoyed trash days more my mom or my treat-laden puppy. While my mom was busy saving money and working on her little projects my puppy got to go to all the stinkiest parts of town. One day I turned around to check on my pup in the back of our compost-filled truck just as she squatted down and took a leak on the crest of her own private, motorized bathroom. None of us bothered to try and correct this behavior. After all, she was peeing in the dirt and the ‘truck’ already reeked from months and months of hauling rubbage. (My mom has asked me to point out that she put a plastic tarp under the compost.) The puppy loved it when we would unload the compost and she would frequently jump in and help with the digging. My mom usually left half of the compost in the truck to take with her later in the week when she drove to work and the pup would laze atop her kingdom of stench.

All-in-all my mom probably would have broken even on her community garden plots if it hadn’t been for The Flood and the ensuing state of emergency. The thing is commercial farms aren’t usually built in places like flood plains. Years of stealing land and ideas from the Indians has taught us where and where not to attempt to build farms. So low-lying areas that flood often become things like parks and they sport prime soil for community gardens. The amazing thing is that the garden here in town didn’t actually flood, her plot was above the flood line. The road leading to the garden did flood, however. We would drive by the park on the highway and watch day after day as the carefully constructed rows got more and more overgrown until after a few weeks the plants began to die off. By the time we could get back in the crops were pretty much a wash. Her out-of-town garden did flood. She was hoping to replant, but when she went to inspect her plot it was littered with dead, bloated rats. That pretty much marked the end of the growing season.

I asked her if she was planning on planting a community garden again next year. She said, “Actually, I have been thinking about a raised bed for that back corner of the yard that gets all the evening sun.” I can already see the whole process repeating itself. This time with the added excitement of hauling lumber and irrigation tubes.

My mom recently leased a new car. I know what you are thinking: LEASED? But because she is a midwife she can deduct “every penny” come tax time. In her mind deducting expenses, giving the government an interest-free wartime loan, is a better deal than saving money up front. She refused to trade in the truck. It is almost completely rusted out. It needs new brakes. It needs new everything, but I know she was thinking.

“Yes, I might get five hundred for trading this vehicle in, but just imagine how much I am going to save on tomatoes next year.“

In her defense there is nothing quite as wonderful as a perfectly ripe piece of fruit. Especially when you are related to it.

October 11, 2006

Shit.

My car is parked in a tow away lot. There is a police officer watching it. The tags are expired. I am wanted in the State of Nevada. I just had to bother someone for a ride home. I will have to wake my mom up in four hours to drive me over there to move it. I feel like a heel.

October 10, 2006

The Latest Craze

I have decided that the reason that people make life long friends in college has very little to do with the college experience. It is just so damned hard to make friends after college. First of all everyone has a job. I don’t know why people get these jobs, but they do. Jobs are serious impediments to friendship-building activities like staying up all night talking about life, breaking laws for fun, getting in fist fights, doing drugs and drinking copious amounts of alcohol for weeks on end. Second of all everyone gets married. Marriage kills friendship. Married people nest. Nesting involves forsaking other social activities to paint the living room a nicer shade of off-white or spending the weekend looking at saltshakers and bed skirts. Marriage also leads to kids and as much as I adore kids most of them stand out like a sore thumb at a gay bar or punk concert.

I have recently contemplated letting go of a few of my college pals. You know the ones. They never return your letters unless it is with some type of family newsletter. They make an effort to spare “an hour or two” when you come to town to visit them. They want to spend half of your trip looking at wedding photos. They suck.

The thing that keeps me from cutting them off entirely is the fact that I can’t replace them. Don’t get misty-eyed. This is not just sentimental. I literally can’t find available warm bodies to stand in for them.

I am starting work on my grad school applications. I have a twisted ulterior motive in going back to school. I want new friends. Smarter friends. Friends who are politically opposed to marriage, who are studying things that are unlikely to prepare them for a job and who are infertile. I want a cult of highly intelligent, jobless, childless, polyamorous pals to spend my thirties with.

It is with this sensibility that I am preparing for the next decade of my life. I am learning things that are likely to make me more interesting to aloof, sexually-liberated intellectuals with copious amounts of free time. For example, I have decided to take some Latin dance lessons. Latin dance requires practice. Practice takes free time. I am hoping to recruit my fellow grad students into the Latin-dancing craze. Another example, filmmaking. I am sorry, but you can only be into film if you have hours to spend watching it and considerably more hours to spend critiquing it. Filmmaking raises the stakes. Now one must also spend hours and hours writing, schmoozing, err, networking, directing, editing, promoting, etc. Hopefully, by this time next year my cadre of soulless dancing filmmakers will be well on its way to being established and I can turn thirty secure in the knowledge that I will never again spend a Saturday afternoon fielding text messages politely declining my invitations for grown-up fun.

October 9, 2006

Atlas



Last night I came out of my slump. I went to watch Little Miss Sunshine with Rose (yes, like the fucking flower). We were two of eight people in the theatre. I laughed loudly and uncontrollably.

We went to Karaoke. A friend, Michael, was there. His mother was ill. A gal began singing The Rose by Bette Midler. Michael got teary and told me that this was he and his mother's song. He had his heart broken at the ripe old age of 14 and his mother in a moment of infinite motherly wisdom told him, "Michael, honey, I think you are going to understand this song."

Years later, when he was in his thirties his mother said to him again, "The Rose, that is your song." He told me last night that his mother was ill having just suffered a brain aneurism. I stood with him for a moment not knowing what to say and realizing that it was perfectly fine to be quiet and just let him talk. He said that The Rose is their song. Afterwards I told him I felt very similarly when I hear my mom and I's song, Time After Time by Cyndie Lauper.

Well, didn't the little tart request Time After Time for us to sing. We did what I believe to be the most absolutely fabulous gender-fucked, heavy punk version of Time After Time . . . ever, which is a feat considering it is already a Cyndie Lauper ditty.

Last night, somehow, I just knew that I was done doubting myself. It is funny how one day you are just done with a thing. It was okay that I spent this time, a year of my life, not knowing who I was or what I wanted to do. It was another year. But man it felt so good to put the world down and be myself again.

October 8, 2006

Siblings

There were two men, brothers, that ordered before me. They drove an Astrovan. They ate on a budget of white bread and french fries. They critiqued restaurants on a sliding scale of dollars, cents and calories. Taste is skew.

These two watched me carefully, an alien in hiking boots with hairy legs and an odd elvis-presley-esque hair cut. I have yet to perfect looking human. My voice betrayed my sex or lack of sex and my accent betrayed my time on other planets. Interstellar diseases are difficult to anticipate and one should always be on his or her or its guard, these homeworld-tethered humans understood this innately.

They moved across the restaurant vestibule and talked, not loudly, but of a certain decibel that let others know: We are entitled to this conversation.

A heterosexual human female had called one of the brothers at a moment 5:00 am as it occurred at or near the longitudinal coordinates 42.1393, -75.8798, that is to say Binghamton, New York, United States, Planet Earth, Our Solar System, The Known Universe on his cellular phone to tell him something.

When he picked up the phone she realized from the sound of his voice that he had been sleeping as heterosexual human males tend to do at this time at these coordinates, being prone to a phenomenon known as circadian rhythms and thusly being strongly programmed to rest during the hours this side of the planet they inhabit has turned its back on the local star.

The heterosexual female apologized for waking him to which he said, “I am awake now." Well put, human.

He followed up with, "Tell me what you wanted to say.”

I couldn’t hear what it is she had to tell him. He finished the story too bored or lazy to inject any emotional value into the timber of his voice by saying, “Can you believe that broad calling me at 5:00 in the morning? I was tempted to get in the van and drive over to her house and give it to her right then at 5:00 in the morning.”

I deducted from body language that the 'it' he spoke of was his male sex organ.

I, resident alien, longed suddenly, urgently to be a human heterosexual man. I felt the desire drive an Astrovan and to be satiated simply because I felt like being satiated while the rest of my side of the earth was still sleeping. I longed for the hormone-bewildered female to get into an ancient animalistic pose and clean my erect genitals with her mouth before permitting me to copulate with her.

There was a time when I could have forgotten I was an alien. When I could have stayed on this planet and my family could have raised me as a human. My faux human sister and I could have dwelt away our entire existences in this small-sized, economically faltering, human military-industrial post.

It is like sadness to have seen other worlds. Elated sadness. To know one thing is to forget another. To know a lot of things is to not know any one thing well. I have forgotten how to be human, something I was once unquestionably. My sister is much better at passing in the human world than I am. The two of us could have been habitating here, driving around a motorized vehicle, copulating with humans, reproducing human-esque babies, dwelling out our life expectancies. It would not have been any different from intergalactic knowledge seeking.

To be a human's arm length from my sister may have been worth all the unhappiness in this tilting planet.

Trail

We spent the morning at the lake. The cool clear water lapped at flat rocks. My dog ran to water’s edge, to head above water’s edge and then ran further feet not finding rock. I walked along a felled tree trunk as if it were a dock a good 20 yards out into the lake and then my dog came running our tree trunk as well her too wet paw prints unrecognizable as a dog’s. We walked along water’s edge. Then we walked along creek’s edge over footbridge to bog. We looked at bog from a safe distance. We followed bog’s edge to road. We crossed road and found trail. We followed trail to fork. We fashioned an arrow to fork pointing way back. We followed fork to cabin. We went on cabin porch and sat in chair. We walked to front of cabin and followed road to bog, bog to lake, lake to car.

October 6, 2006

Just some words

After work last night I went to have coffee with a nice gal. I drove her home. We sat and chatted in the driveway. We kissed goodnight.

Before she got out of the car I asked her what her last name was and she said, "Rose, like the fucking flower."

I wonder if I will ever be able to look at a rose again and not think to myself, "fucking flower."

(More to follow . . . )

October 4, 2006

A Few Times Around the Track


Well, today (Monday) was one for the books.

The leaves have shown their first flashes of untrained brilliance, color popping forth in unexpected ways like nervous laughter, teasing us with flashes of metered poetry that will soon explode all about. Today the sun shown warm through the puffs of white cloud that clung to the hills moving like caterpillars. The woods smelled of near-autumn and the waterfall ran coldly, invigorated by the week's brisk rain and excited by the sound of itself splashing on cool rocks.

Today was the first day I did the old place up the way it should be done up. The way you can only do with an old friend or close sibling after years of having lived elsewhere.

My sister was in town for a long weekend.

We started off our adventure with a trip to a cider mill where we bought apples and a small pumpkin for Beaver, a great childhood friend. We ate breakfast at 3:00 pm sharp at a diner and lost all control at the diner happenings; a man dropped a forkful of raw onions on a table and ate them by hand, a couple sat eating spaghetti and meatballs not talking or making eye contact, a waitress indulged in an unusually big piece of pumpkin pie with an unusually big helping of whipped cream.

After breakfast we decided to hit a few balls at the batting cages. It has always been a dream of mine. It is the kind of thing all the real boys did. It was also the kind of thing real girls didn't do. When my sister suggested it I nearly jumped into the car. The whole ride out I fantasized about the feeling of connecting with something, of twisting, of ripping a ball to the back end of the nets.

When we arrived at the spot where the sports complex and attached batting cages had always been we looked around stumped. "Perhaps it was on the other side of the driving range?" And, "No it was right here. There is the minigolf course, or what is left of it."

The batting cages were wiped out in the flood. Deflated we circled the parking lot and got back on the road.

Since we had nothing better to do we decided to drive by our old place on Clearview Avenue (so called because it has a clear view of the Susquehanna River) that was just a mile or two from the sports complex.

We noticed right away that something was off about the our old street. It was quieter than ususal. The yards were overgrown. The mailboxes were missing. The houses looked crooked or slanted and shorter. When we pulled in front of our old pad there was a big neon orange "X" sprayed on the front. We broke out in uproarious laughter when we realized that our house, like most of the buildings in the neighborhood, was condemned.

We pulled into the driveway and parked. When we finally checked our jocular laughter. My sister, the advertising executive, said, "Man that is a great tree." She was referring to an old oak at the front corner of the driveway. The tree was rooted atop a 4 or 5 foot embankment that led down into the side yard of the house which is the size of an entire lot. We called the attached lot 'the soccer field.' This tree shaded a good tenth of the soccer field and would drop leaves across 1/2 the yard that we would rake into various patterns in the fall. My mom had taught us a game as youngsters in which we would we would play house or office using leaves for walls.

When we got out of the car we inspected a pile of flood-damaged junk at the back of the driveway. We haven't lived in this house for close to 15 years, but there in the pile were things of ours - baskets, tables, bikes, toys - mixed in with things from other families and caked in river mud. Our things. Their things. Mud.

I guess it isn’t surprising, in theory, that our old house was sacked in the flash flooding that rocked the town. The soccer field usually flooded a couple of times a year. Not only did the street have a clear view of the river it had a clear role as a flood plain. In the winter there would be times when the flood water in the soccer field froze and we would lace up ice skates and go trolling across our 50 foot wide by 2 foot deep pond, tripping over frozen sticks and roots from the tree.

We went to the back door of the house and looked in the three little square windows. The top window, my sister pointed out, was still the original glass, which was at eye level and had a Celtic-looking painted design. The second window was also glass, but with no painted design and it was at navel-level. The third window down was at knee-level and Plexiglas. Unlike the more recent tenants of this house and unlike the owners, we knew exactly what had happened to those windows and why there was only one original left.

The bottom pane had been knocked out several times by roughhousing in the rather large kitchen the back door leads into. My mom, in frustration, eventually put the Plexiglas in because she was tired of going to the hardware store and spending her evenings replacing the pane. The middle pane had been knocked out twice, that I can remember, once by myself in the dead of winter when I forgot my keys and once by a couple of neighbor girls, who broke into the house while we were on vacation.

The window next to the door was open and the screen had fallen out. My sister and I discussed the pros and cons of going in the window. Finally I told her with a shrug, "I can't fit." And that was it. I can' fit through that little window any more. We decided to forget about breaking in and walked around the side of the house. There was the beautiful old Rhododendron. There were dozens of hen-and-chicks that had grown from the two or three my mom had started. There was the ledge that the old frog used to sit on and pick off bees from the swarm that infested the underside of the front porch. The front porch that was now slanted from the flood and was papered with signs that read "enter at your own risk" in several languages.

So we did.

After all that time we had spent contemplating going in the window it turns out the front door was wide open. We gingerly walked into the front room of the house, half expecting the floor to collapse.

Except for a lot of mud and mold it was just how we remembered it. It felt smaller, of course, the two of us having grown at least a foot each, but it was just the same in every other way. I turned to my sister and said, "We were really happy in this house. MOM was really happy." And it is true. I could not remember one time living in that house when any of us were sad for a prolonged time, except at the very end when my grandfather was ill. Every place I looked I remembered happy things, and the things that were a little sad just seemed funny now that the place was so much smaller and covered in silt and rat terds.

There was a random tricycle in the front room and as far as we could tell it was the only thing left in the entire house other than a nightlight. The same exact nightlight that had been there when we left. We walked through the kitchen where we had played many a game of kick the can and my particular favorite: armoral the floor and sock-slide to the door. Then there was the bathroom, just as we had left it. The linen closet. My sister's room. There was the TV room, the living room and the two upstairs bedrooms. Tiptoing around we started to feel like kids again. Teasing each other. Goofy awkward laughing, running our fingers along the walls.

When we got back outside, my shiny car awaited us in the driveway with the Kansas tags still on it. It is the first new car any of the three of us have ever owned. It seemed so out of place, so impossible.

The first day I moved to this house I paced this drive way enumerating all the reasons I would never love living here as much as I had loved living in our little apartment on Chenango Street. First of all we had switched rivers. Second there was no playground, there was no school parking lot for stickball and wintertime games of king of the mountain atop snow bluffs. There was no school to scale the walls of and jump off the roof of. I had no little gang of hoodlums to run around with. There was no Day and Night gas station to steal candy from. There was only happiness and space to play and run and shout with joy. I had thought I would hate it there.

I was overcome in the driveway with the need to snap a photo and no way of doing so. It was an amazing moment. The two of us back in our old house, looking at a part of our lives we never thought we would see again. But we had no camera so this will have to stand as our record of the time we got to go home again for an hour.

We left our house and my sister asked me if I would have any interest in go-carting. "Would I ever." I had been begging people to go go-carting with me for sixth months, but there was never a taker. We sat out front of the go-cart entrance for a good ten minutes working up the courage to walk in and say, "Uh, yeah. We are two grown women and we would like to risk life and limb to race the shit out of each other in little tiny cars."

All the dudes hanging around out front smoking cigarettes looked like seasoned veterans. They stuck to the place like folks who had been going there so long, every Monday for so many years, that they ceased needing senses to navigate. They knew by muscle memory, where to stand, when to light a cig, when it would be done, how far to throw it, how many paces to the front door, what line to follow on the track to win, how high to hold their dicks while pissing in the latrine . . .

We walked up to the girl at the counter. I later described her as the goddess of the speedway, and it was me who said, "We have never done this before. How do we get started?"

The goddess told us we would need to get our racing license which is a laminated piece of paper that costs three bucks. She explained our package options with unusual confidence for a person with such an array of different size, shape and color teeth. I say this not to be mean but because it was fascinating. She was a goddess to the speedway boys and my sister and I later wondered how many guys had gotten their pirates* snagged on a particularly pointy incisor she sported on the upper right hand side of her mouth. The thought occurred to me that the tooth might leave quite the mark and that the mark might be a sign of passage in this odd insular community. This is all fantasy and none of it is founded in any kind of truth accept that deep sort of intuitive feeling you get sometimes about a place and the folks in it.

It cost us $50 for two licenses and 12 minutes each of track time. It takes several minutes for the photo IDs to print and the snaggle-toothed goddess suggested we come back and pick them up after we raced. She must of flagged us as novices because we got put on a deserted track together with two old jalopy go-carts. Afterwards my sister told me she never took her foot off of the gas pedal and I believe it. It wasn't so much racing as wasting time. After the fourth lap we were both trying to invent ways to make it more fun. We would pass each other and make wild hand gestures or cut each other off and try to make patterns as we rode. After a while we just kept going around in circles because we felt obligated to use up all of the time we had bought.

My sister did get excited in about the tenth lap when she passed me from behind. Her mildly pointed nose jutting forwards against the smiling, backwards flung corners of her mouth. Her long blonde hair was streaming behind her hunched shoulders and pinched elbows, She told me she felt like Cruella Deville. It was almost like old times, except I had no desire to catch up with her. It was too fun to watch her win.

After our time was up we went inside and watched the "pros." They were men between the ages of 15 and 45 that were going around a flat track at much higher speeds than us. It seemed to matter to them and to the crowd which color car was in the lead. My sister professed a disgust for NASCAR that was born in her a few minutes earlier while we anxiously looked forward to being told our time was up.

There were two guys behind us in line when we had come in. They bought two hours worth of races each. The only thing more unfathomable than riding around a little track for two hours was paying $100 bucks to do it. These were not rich guys and we wondered how they justified throwing down that kind of dough on go-carting to their wives or mothers.

The goddess gave us our licenses. They were brilliant. I look handsome, Julie looks beautiful. Okay, we both only look mildly human, but they seemed wonderful to us.

We went to Friendly's and my sister got herself an ice cream. Then we went to our new house. Which isn't really either of our's now and we took a nap.

There is nothing left for me to do in this town now. I have gone to the batting cages, though they were gone, I have gone on the go carts, I have had sex in a public place, I was poster child of the month at the gay bar. I just can't think of another thing I would like to accomplish here and it is time to move. This coming week I will be leaving for a long long time, now that I have had one more go at the old place and discovered I am too old and too big to call it home again. And I don't know when the eternal footman will wave me back into port. Me a ship that has sailed to places unmentionable by name and unfathomable to my former self who was shorter in stature and foresight.

*I met a school teacher a few weeks ago who told me that a boy on the playground ran up to her cupping his genitals and said, "Oh, man. I just got kicked in the pirates." So now I prefer to say pirates over privates.

October 2, 2006

Here we are now, Fukazawa

First, please excuse the title of this post. It is a difficult illusion. I will give an A+ to anyone who can guess intelligently about why I named this post after a Japanese translator, though.

So, for the past ten years, almost, I have felt this incredible nostalgia for my home town. Every place I have lived there was always a twinge of disappointment that there weren't more hills or more trees or more lakes. I lamented the lack of cheap diner food and distrusted the newness of everything. I missed knowing how all the ridiculous non-sensical streets secretly fed into one another.

I missed knowing a place through and through, smells, sounds, emotions, everything.

Having been back in my hometown for much longer than I ever intended I can now say with a large dose of confidence: I will not be overcome with nostalgia again.

Right now I miss healthy food. I miss open-minded neighbors. I miss cultural happenings. I miss old friends. I miss these things far more than I have ever missed anything. I will be leaving soon and it is with only a mild regret that I say, honestly, I may never come home again.

October 1, 2006

Fire Pit of Shame

I just threw the most shamefully unattended bonfire of all time. Julie and I invited friends from high school and a few folks I know from the bar and whatnot. FOUR PEOPLE CAME. Kudos to those four for sticking it out as long as they did. I would feel bad, but it was so ridiculous that all we could do once the crowd cleared was laugh at ourselves uproariously.

Credits

In the movie version of my life the sound track will be the asshole song.

I'm an asshole. That's me.