You should go see "Synecdoche, New York"

Seriously, you should. I know that I am given to hyperbole on occasion, but this just might be the most real, most human movie ever made by an American director. I don't want to overreach myself since I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies from all over the world, but if this movie doesn't speak to you about life in a way that makes you hurt, I would be greatly, greatly surprised.

If anyone has seen it and wants to post their thoughts as comments, and we could have sort of a book club style discussion of it, I would love to, because I have tons of thoughts about it rolling around in my head after having seen it, but I can't sit and formulate them right now, and I don't know that anyone would be interested in reading them without having seen the movie.

So, in conclusion, go see it. You won't be sorry, or if you are sorry it will be for all of the right reasons, I think.

Pecan Trees

She liked best to kiss me under the pecan trees that bordered the east side of her parents' property, when the long winter was just starting to blow in with the evenings. She'd put her hands around inside my jacket, beneath my shirt, leaning in to get out of the wind (if there was some) and sometimes tucking her hands in just below my belt in the back, making the ache I was already feeling for her just a little bit harder to bear.

We'd walk out most nights that I came over for dinner, or to study, or just to hang out and watch bad movies with her younger brother or something. I don't know why he always got to pick; maybe it was just that he was far more interested in the movies once they started than we were, and I guess it was in our best interest for him to be as engrossed as possible...I still can't flip past a scene from the Police Academy series on a Saturday afternoon without feeling a twinge, without missing her just a little bit.

We'd watch for as long as we could stand it, hands moving softly and slowly as we could manage so as not to call attention to where they were and what they were doing. Then she'd excuse herself for a moment-just to find her folks and let them know that we were going to "take a walk"-and we'd head out to cover the quarter mile or so, fooling no one who had even the faintest memory of their teenage years about what we wanted to be alone to do, but unable to be bothered about caring. It was innocent, after all; that's why her folks never objected, why my mom would have a smile in her voice as I called for the fourth afternoon in a row to let her know that I was going to abandon her for the evening once again.

All of this is in retrospect, of course; at the time we felt that we had the wool over everyone's eyes, that our time together was somehow stolen right from under the noses of everyone that we imagined would disapprove for some reason. The saying is that youth is wasted on the young, but that's not quite right...I'd say that a lack of excess introspection is happily granted to young people, that they may neither analyze every urge nor feel the need to rationalize every decision. The phrase "romanticizing one's biology" would never even have occurred to me as I held her head against my frantically pounding chest, there in that orchard, and I'm thankful for that small kindness every time I think back on it.

It seemed like an eternity, back then, but really it was just the fall of my junior year into the spring, and then she left in the summer to go to college while I fell briefly and passionately for a succession of other girls at my high school. She didn't come back that first winter break; I think her parents were more surprised than I was, but I was the most deeply hurt. I'd find myself staring at pecan trees whenever I ran across them, lost not in thinking about her, but in feeling the things I had felt about her, about myself when I was with her, about how good life was, about how beautiful the leaves were on the ground at her feet.

I didn't exactly "grow up" after that, I guess, but I grew to be different (like we all do) and I moved on (like the lucky ones get to) and now I am where I am, and my life is what it is; and if I have some moments in an orchard to become lost in when I need to remember the times when I could truly forget about the world, instead of a new sitcom or the bottom of a bottle, then I count myself among the truly lucky...to have known such a girl, and to have walked with her under the pecan trees, when I was young.

Myrna

I hadn't seen her since eighth grade graduation, but it would have been impossible for me not to recognize her. I was on Microsoft's site getting stock photos of office workers, then using GIMP to put them into photos of historical disasters...it was Thursday, that's what I do on Thursdays. Fucking Thursdays.

Anyway, it wasn't that she looked the same, because her face clearly showed every second of the twenty plus years that had passed. It was the expression on her face; I suppose she was aiming for "caught while glancing up from my laptop as I ponder some really important business decision" or something like that, but what I saw was "purposefully looking as though I don't know that you're looking at me", simply because that was the expression she had been wearing for, oh, I don't know, a year and a half STRAIGHT every time I looked at her in junior high.

I was never sure whether she managed to keep that look 24/7, or if she had some kind of freakish radar that allowed her to assume it just before my eyes moved her direction, hiding whatever she had been thinking behind the perpetual cool of put-on indifference.

I guess it doesn't really matter in the long run; we all create our own reality, and thus we have to live in it, no matter the cost. If you're too scared to let someone know you're vulnerable to them, you're safe...but safety can be very, very overrated.

I put her in the Whitman tower shooting; I guess the lighting matched the best on some of those photos, and I wasn't really up for a challenging night after the shock of having run across her again after all of those years. Her facial expression didn't really fit in, I guess, but it didn't matter very much in the finished product. I didn't have her taking a bullet or anything, after all, and there may have been people at that scene so lost in themselves that they still managed to maintain an assumed expression in the face of the chaos and the panic, who can say.

I put it up on my blog, and it got some of the most positive comments yet, actually. Maybe she'll run across it some day on the web, some random cross posting when she becomes famous as a model where some total noob posts it and asks, "WTF??? How old is thsi chick anywai???? lol" or something like that. Or maybe it will just take its place among all the other lost memories in the ether, random thoughts and moments from lives that don't even exist anymore (given enough time) in our new collective virtual eternity where we all get starring roles.

And, yes, I have done myself in a picture, but you'll just have to stumble across that one yourself.

Eyes

I didn't know how long I'd been looking into her eyes, then...in my apartment, with her in the middle of the living room and me in what passed for a formal dining room, I guess. I shook my head (it felt like I had been shaking it for a while, like windshield wipers for early morning fog), and it seemed as though she had just said something, or was waiting for me to say something, which is mostly the same thing, right?

They were black, and flat, her eyes, and her voice too when I guess she got tired of waiting for me to talk. "Why are you so obsessed with pictures?" she said, and I looked down at my digital camera then, pointed it at her and pressed the button again. "You won't find anything that you couldn't find right here, right now, that you couldn't remember yourself if you could just keep yourself here in the moment, you know..."

The eyes were the same flat black, but the voice was now coming from an impossibly low register, and I felt it wind its way up the long bones of my legs and into my stomach, my back...I was hearing Morse code now, reading her lips and interpreting seismographic scribblings instead of listening. It was easier, more intuitive...more intimate.

She didn't step forward but somehow she was in front of me now with her hand around the back of my neck, sending short electric shocks down to amplify the dying echoes of her voice below. I still couldn't put a word together as she pulled my head forward and burned the side of my face with her hair; I still can't remember whether I was even afraid.

-------

"So...you moving or something? Documenting stuff for your landlord?"

Nathan was sitting on the couch, paging through the shots on my camera again without asking, of course. There was football on the TV--college, I think--maybe USC or something like that.

"All these empty shots of the living room?" he continued, in the face of my blank silence. "Aren't you supposed to do that before you move in, though? Like on rental cars?"

"No...that's the girl I was telling you about, you know, that I've been going out with? That I met at the show?"

"What, that girl Veronica?"

"No, man, that was forever ago...I met this girl at the...well...shit, I can't remember who was playing, but it was down at Antone's, Thursday night?"

"Dude, that was two nights ago! You're not 'going out' with her...so she came back to your place that night?"

"It couldn't have...I mean...yeah, she...but it's been longer than...I mean, you met her the other day, right?"

"I haven't seen you since the other night, and you didn't answer any texts yesterday, either. Damn, what'd you do, skip work to stay here with her? No wonder you're still so out of it!"

"No, she...well, she left sometime, I can't remember really. No, here, let me show you this one picture; you can see her eyes really clear, you'll remember her then."

But the pictures were just of the living room, like he said...no girl, no eyes, just weird distortions of the flash in some of the pictures that almost made it look like there was someone's shadow across the floor. I guess it was hard to see on the small LCD screen, but when we uploaded them to my computer it was the same thing...zoom in to 800 percent and you still got nothing but pixellated emptiness.

He wouldn't let it go, kept asking me what she looked like, what she was like. All I had to give him were the eyes, and the voice, and the way she had of asking questions that made you feel like she had just finished putting the answers inside you a few minutes ago, just to peel them back out. Because I wasn't obsessed with taking pictures of her, and I don't have trouble being 'in the moment' or whatever, but when she was asking...well, it was all different then.

-------

"Mom?"

My mother had an annoying habit of immediately starting an elaborate story about someone from the neighborhood that I only vaguely remembered as soon as she got me on the phone, and I couldn't take it this time, I really couldn't. I had felt my way out of the dark bedroom to the bar, somehow knowing that I couldn't turn on any lights, somehow remembering (for once) exactly where I had left my cell phone. I noticed then that she wasn't telling a story (she wasn't saying anything, actually), and then I saw on the microwave that it was 4 in the morning, and I was lost for a few moments trying to work out if she was an hour ahead or an hour behind--as if it would matter--and then I was spilling out the recurring dreams of the girl and Nathan and her eyes and him sitting on the couch and his endless questions and always returning to the blood, always so much blood so everywhere...

I felt my dry tongue stick to my lips, felt my parched throat working to make the sounds, and I realized that I had been whispering into the phone for hours, it had to have been hours. I took the phone from my ear and saw the dead blank screen, then the battery somehow over on the coffee table now, and her standing behind the couch as I guess I'd always known she had been, twirling Nathan's hair around her finger carelessly as she watched me again, waiting for her chance to speak.

"You didn't have to kill him, you know...there are other ways for these things to turn out. You're letting your imagination run away with you; you think you're something now that you are not yet, you feel the beginnings of hunger and you imagine that you're starving to death. You're too much inside your own head, even now, even faced with such an enormous reality as this...I think that you will overcome it with time, but for now, come to bed, it's time to sleep." Her words not a request, but not needing to be a command, her eyes showing the slightest spark of life as she took her hand from Nathan's hair and sucked half-congealed blood from her fingers.

-------

It was 1:30 before I woke up, shivering though the blankets were piled high on the bed. She lay as dead next to me, every inch of her covered by the blankets, limbs splayed out at the unnatural angles of dinosaur fossils, of the victims in mall shootings. It was hard to move now, for me...somehow there was too much light to think clearly, but I didn't have to think so clearly anymore, not for very long anyway.

I found my camping gear at the back of the closet, jumbled together in the chaos of the careless unpacking of an exhausted weekend. The silver canister of white kerosene for the cookstove sounded about half full as I shook it, but as I poured it over the bed and the girl with the eyes and Nathan pushed onto the bed beside her it seemed more like a gallon than perhaps a quart, spilling endlessly and filling the room in an instant with the smell of disaster. I had been afraid that all the activity would rouse her, but the juxtaposition with Nathan's body actually made her look more dead, somehow, not less...now that rigor mortis had passed he looked strangely peaceful under the dried blood, while her open eyes clearly spoke of an eternity of unrest, of perpetual yearning. She was right to live in every moment, I guess; it was the only option she had anyway, in the endless moments, an everlasting supply, somehow stringing together into much, much less than a life.

It took about a minute for the bed to be completely engulfed once I set it ablaze, and as I walked to the windows to open the blinds I wasn't sure if the flames were burning hotter and faster as they reached her or not...I dunno, maybe it was just my imagination again. I heard the screaming start, though...maybe it was me, maybe it was her from the fire and the sunlight in her eyes and the sudden realization of her fatal mistake; maybe it was the fire alarm. All I knew was the fire and the freedom that it promised, now, and maybe a cleansing too, and so I did the only thing that was left to me to do--I lay back down beside her, just to see if I could look one last time into her eyes, those eyes in all of that flame.

Sounds More Like the Ballpark to Me...

There was an ice cream truck that went through my neighborhood all the time when I was a kid...it had this crazy broken tape loop instead of just tinkling bells or anything like that. The music loop could cut out at any moment and start over, or sometimes it would just skip ahead 5 seconds, or back 10 seconds; it was completely unpredictable.

It actually was very good for the guy's business, because there was a strange sense of urgency created by that unpredictability...somehow, if you were at all in the mood for ice cream, the feeling of not knowing when the music might reset or jump to another part of itself would get conflated with a sense of unease about where the ice cream truck ITSELF was, physically. You might be able to go to a window and tell that it was still off to the right, or to the left, but suddenly you would feel a lot less sure that it hadn't already passed by your house, as if in skipping 10 seconds forward in the tape loop the truck had gone through some bizarre cherry popsicle version of a wormhole and had become unobservable to you for that time. You never seemed to have the familiar Doppler shift letting you know that, OK, now he's still approaching...OK, now he's past; there was always just a sense that if you wanted some ice cream, you'd better get your ass out there and see if you could get some, because nothing's guaranteed in this life, punk, especially nothing as trivial as ice cream.

The ice cream wasn't even very good, although as a child I didn't know that of course; now you couldn't pay me to eat something that a guy who likely is an ex-con digs out of a freezer with hands that could be described as "clean" only in the most charitable of senses. I guess I've lost that part of my innocence, or gained some measure of a self-preservation instinct, I'm not sure.

Dreaming of Cowboys

I ran back kicks with Ken Marlboro for nearly two years with the Cowboys. I say "ran back kicks" because that was the only part of our jobs that was even remotely glamorous. I guess he was listed as 5th string wide receiver and I was 3rd string tailback, but the only time we saw the field on offense was in preseason and at the end of complete blowouts.

Other than that, we were strictly special teams guys, and we both loved it. Running back punts, gunning in punt coverage, wedge busting, we did it all - and we were pretty good, if I have to say so myself. Not Bill Bates good, but still, solid, you know?

Anyway, Ken was a little older because he'd done a stint in the Army before making it in the NFL. Everyone knew that about him, and a lot of guys talked to him about it; I guess they were curious, or envious maybe.

So when he re-upped to go to Iraq, it was a big deal, obviously. He signed back up during the offseason, but wasn't assigned back to active duty until November 5th, so he got a fair number of games in before he left. He asked the NFL for a couple of exceptions for his jersey that year, and (amazingly) they let him have both of them; he changed his number to 5, for his intake date, and instead of his last name he wore "Last Tour of the States" on the back of his jersey.

It gave everybody on the team a little extra incentive, I guess, especially the special teamers. We went out for drinks as a group a little more often than we had before, maybe spent more time watching film together than usual; I think we all were trying to draw out our time with him as long as we could.

But the day of his last game arrived, of course, and he couldn't have picked a better sendoff game, let me tell you. Playing the Redskins at our place, really needing a win coming off being shut out by Tampa Bay the week before...we were 5-2, but 6-2 for the first half of the season would put us in a totally different place than 5-3, and we all knew it; Bill wouldn't let us forget it for a moment, that's for sure.

We were clinging to a 7-6 lead at halftime, and as much as we were going all out, for Ken, we hadn't really made a difference on special teams. Maybe we were trying too hard, I don't know. Anyway, Parcells wrapped up his halftime talk by saying, "Hey, Kenny, this is your last tour, remember? Go out there and give them something to remember you by, alright?"

Well, the locker room just erupted at that, and we charged back out to the field almost literally breathing fire. We got the kick for the third quarter, and the call was for a sideline return - our sideline, right in front of everyone who’d be living and dying with Ken if he got the ball.

The man himself, Jerrah, had come down to the sideline during halftime, his face pinched into the characteristic mask of anxiety that he always wore during games like this. He talked briefly to Parcells, and then to some of the marquee talent, but then he just paced, back and forth. There had been an ugly rumor in the locker room for a couple of weeks that Jerry already had started planning to put Ken in the Cowboy Ring of Honor if he were to, you know, not make it back, and even to take the unprecedented step of retiring his #5. It wouldn’t have been much of a loss as a number; the only guys to wear it before Ken were some punter and Clint Stoerner, who wasn’t Hall of Fame material even if he did come from the University of Arkansas. Ken didn’t seem to put much stock in it, but a lot of guys were pretty bent out of shape about what they saw as just another cynical exploitation of an opportunity by the king of the football dollar, Mr. Jones.

The kickoff finally came, and we couldn’t have asked for better placement for the return we had on. Ken caught the ball at the 3, took two strides toward the right and then cut sharply back left toward our sideline. He burst through a seam in the initial wave of coverage and then angled over toward the wall of blockers that was forming, and even as busy as I was, I could see that he had a chance. He picked up two good blocks, made the corner, and was suddenly in high gear down the sideline, with all the guys screaming at him, half the coaches losing their headsets, and the crowd absolutely deafening with their sudden roar.

There’s always a last guy that you have to beat on your own, and this time, as usual, it was the kicker. I don’t remember his name, but he was a young guy, still pretty athletic, and he had read the play well enough to keep a good angle on Ken, squeezing him toward the sideline as they approached each other. Jerry had paced down toward that side of the field before kickoff, and he started walking toward the sideline for a better view of what we all knew was going to happen; Ken was going to beat the kicker and score a touchdown. It was fate, or destiny, or Tom Landry’s ghost, whatever; but it was going to happen.

When you watch the replay on film enough times, you notice three things that happened almost simultaneously on the field, but that can be disentangled from each other in super slo mo. First, Ken’s head turns slightly to his right as he picks up the kicker - his position, his angle. Then, Ken’s head turns to the left for just a heartbeat, as if he needed to judge his distance from the sideline one more time.

Lastly, just as the kicker is preparing to square up for the tackle, Ken breaks stride - the classic hitch that inevitably throws the pursuer’s angle off, allowing for a cutback to the middle of the field, where only the end zone awaits. You can see the kicker stumble slightly as he tries to adjust, but he’s no linebacker; by the time he is a yard from Ken, he’s already closer to the sideline than Ken now is, clearly out of position for the tackle.

I wish there had been a camera better positioned to see Ken’s face at that instant; there was no TV camera that had a good shot of it and I’ve never seen anyone with a still photo taken with a good telephoto lens that caught that moment. If anyone has one, let me know, because I’d love to see it.

Because Ken kicked it back into high gear alright, but he angled back into the kicker as he did so, lowering his shoulder and CARRYING that motherfucker with him out of bounds.

In the sea of humanity that is an NFL sideline, it seemed like a miracle that the two grown men suddenly hurtling through it only took one person with them. Ken was the first one up - throwing the ball into the stands, then buried in the mass of teammates that had been sprinting down the sidelines along with him.

The other two figures were less resilient. The Washington kicker had raised himself to a knee and was being attended to by the Cowboy trainers as they waited for the Redskins crew to make it across the field. The other man was nearly unrecognizable from the blood streaming from his nose, but the shine on his expensive yet somehow hideous silver business suit instantly identified him as Jerry Jones, now unconscious on the turf of Texas Stadium.

The medical folks came and got Jerry, and other than the broken nose, he was pretty much okay; I don’t think he had more than a mild concussion. We won the game, and Ken got the game ball, but there was something beneath the raucous celebration that felt a little unsettling, as if there were some question that the team collectively wanted answered, even if they weren’t sure how to ask.

I sure as hell asked, though, even though I had to wait for more than two hours while Ken fulfilled the countless interview requests and finally returned to his locker. He sat down next to me and kind of smiled, and didn’t even blink when I said, “You saw him there, didn’t you? You fucking saw him there, and you traded a touchdown for…”

I didn’t even know how to finish the sentence; it was too crazy a thing to accuse a guy of doing. He stopped smiling then, and leaned in close. “I’m going to have more chances to get touchdowns after I get back, but some things you only get once chance at in life, and you just can’t afford to miss them.”

He made it back in one piece, and even got to attend a training camp with the Cowboys as a courtesy (I was in Denver by that time), but he never got back on an NFL field. I guess that spared Jerry the painful situation he would have been in had Ken bought it in Iraq, but I’m sure Ken didn’t begrudge him that given the alternative. I called up the Cowboys' front office and made sure that they sent Ken a DVD of that game that had all the television coverage as well as the NFL Films footage, everything that existed of it. He didn’t make too big a deal out of it, but every now and then I’ll go on YouTube and look for clips posted by “Last Tour #5”, whenever I want to see some slow motion goodness of Ken’s inspired burst off of the playing field and into the hearts of millions, MILLIONS of Cowboy fans.

late late august short story (part 2)

Tom walked into the cafeteria and was immediately struck by the level of noise. Conversations that normally would have been easily contained within the sonic space around the small formica tables spilled out today and washed out over the floor, sometimes merely interfering with each other out but most often reinforcing each other like sine waves, each table's noise upping the volume at its neighboring tables.

Tom could almost feel the eyes following him, almost hear the people thinking, "Hey, Tom is pretty close to Bill...he probably knows what's really going on," almost bring himself to give a shit about any of it, about all of it. So Bill finally got wise and figured out that there were better things to do with his life than work his life away in some little office, good for him. Tom couldn't help but start to laugh silently, covering his mouth with his hand to hide what he felt was surely a fairly manic smile.

"Hey, Tom, how's it going today?", Tom heard from behind and to his left, and he turned to see Victor with that smug half-smile that he couldn't seem to keep off his face. Of course; Victor was one of the most likely people to move up a rung if Bill had left permanently-he obviously wasn't going to be able to keep from trying to get the inside story from Tom.

"Hey Victor, pretty good...hey, did you hear about Bill?", said with a guileless look of concern.
"No...I mean, yeah, but nothing specific...is he just taking a sick day, finally?" Victor mirrored his facial expression, even managing to keep the smirk mostly under control for a moment.
"No, he's not just sick...I think that his boss came and took his stapler, and, well...everyone has their limits, you know?", said with the unshakeable conviction that the reference would go completely unnoticed.
"Whoa...he didn't quit or anything, did he?"
"Actually, I think I saw a letter or note from him on his desk when I poked my head in there this morning...maybe that would shed some light on things, I didn't read it myself." If it had been anyone but Victor, Tom probably wouldn't have gone this extra step, but he was curious as well, and not just about whether there was any note from Bill on the desk.

Victor immediately took his leave and headed for the elevators. Statements that the police gathered from people in the area later varied wildly, but the thing that no one disagreed on, and that no one could forget, was the chilling note in Victor's voice as he stood over the desk in Bill's office, talking loudly to seemingly no one at first and then screaming, begging really, his voice seeming to be completely separate from his body which stood completely unmoving, leaning over the desk propped on its hands, the voice urgent and panicked but not intelligible even to people who had been passing the very doorway to the office.

Victor's right hand was found to be clutching a note in Bill's handwriting that said, simply, "Do not disturb anything; I'll deal with it when I get back." It had been the only thing found in the office, oddly; the file cabinets that Bill had kept in such perfect order were now completely empty, the desk as well, wiped clean even of fingerprints, except for those that Victor had left in his final visit. The facilities coordinator felt it best to respect the sentiments expressed in the note, however; the office was never reassigned, and the door eventually sheetrocked over.

Late late August short story (part 1)

Bill worked in Accounting. Bill had always worked in Accounting; no one at GiantCorp could remember a time when he hadn't, somehow. Bill was a model of efficiency: any email sent to Bill between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm would be answered within 15 minutes (even during lunch), any action item assigned to Bill in a meeting would be completed impeccably well ahead of the imposed deadline, and any file left in Bill's inbox would appear, almost as if by magic, in his outbox or filing cabinet, with every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed.

One morning, as he stuck his head into Bill's office to say "hi" (as he had every morning for at least 8 years), Tom stopped dead in his tracks. It was 8:17 am, Bill's desk was empty, and the light in his office had not been turned on. Tom took a tentative step into the office, subconsciously torn between being unable to believe that Bill was in the office and unable to believe that he wasn't, and said (in a half-whisper that surprised even him with the raw fear that pervaded it), "Bill?"

There was no answer, but as Tom took another step into the office, he was struck by a wave of intense cold such as nothing he had ever experienced. Every hair on his arms and neck immediately stood straight up, and he felt goosebumps run the length of his arms and legs. This cold was the cold of the grave, the cold of planes crashed in the Alps, the cold of camps set up by early explorers on their way to the North Pole who had abandoned them, never been seen again.

Without quite knowing why, Tom repeated (a little more loudly), "Bill?", and as he did so he felt the cold probing his mind, as if it almost understood him but could not quite piece together what he meant by whatever he had said. Tom took one step backward, instinctively, and he immediately felt the cold withdraw and retreat (if that were possible) to the area behind the desk.

Tom left the office in a state of complete mental gridlock. He couldn't tell anyone about what he'd just experienced, but he couldn't bring any other single thing about his normal workday into his mind to displace it. He sat at his desk until lunch time, missing one staff meeting and making absolutely no progress on the deliverables he owed to his boss's boss by COB.

As he made his way to the employee cafeteria, he noticed a sibilant hush that pervaded all the hallways and stairwells. He overheard snatches of conversation as he passed groups of 2 or 3 people walking closely bunched, all wide-eyed and almost giddy with disbelief, and all with one name on their lips: Bill. Bill wasn't here, Bill had called in sick for the first time ever, Bill had secretly been stealing from the company for years and was in Aruba by now, Bill had passed away last night quietly in his bed from pancreatic cancer. Stories about Bill were ubiquitous and completely disparate; the only common element they contained was that Bill was not at work today.

Late August short story

He was a short man (he would grant anyone that) but he would die before he would admit to any of the symptoms of “short man’s syndrome”, that most annoying of afflictions which (he had always been informed by others) likely meant that he was a confrontational asshat.

So he proceeded through his days counting to ten before replying when he was annoyed or angry, purposefully adopting non-confrontational postures when interacting with tall men and women, and generally maintaining a vigilant watch over his own character and actions in order to stockpile the necesssary evidence with which he could defend himself from any such charge that he might, at some point, hypothetically face.

She was a woman generally described by those who knew her best as “striking” rather than “beautiful”; a woman who found that once she had achieved her late twenties, everyone she met somehow assumed that she was married even though she wore a simple ring with a piece of amber in it on the ring finger of her left hand.

She amused herself for hours sitting in bars that catered mostly to men who actually had a sense of right and wrong, watching different guys struggle internally all night, their desire to approach her stalemated by their inexplicable conviction that she was already married.

He met her in line at the supermarket, struck by her beauty and emboldened by her unique ring. “That’s quite a lovely bit of amber you have there,” he offered up, fortuitously just as she was turning her head slightly toward him to read a particular tabloid headline.

“Thanks, I’ve had it forever...are you a collector?”

“No, but I have seen Jurassic Park at least three times, although only once was of my own volition...that scene with the kid surviving the jolt from the electric fence makes me break out in hives.”

She was smiling as she loaded groceries onto the back end of the check-out conveyor belt, and glanced back as he finished his facetious remarks; she was half-surprised and wholly impressed to see that his eyes were meeting hers and not sliding greasily around her body as she stretched and leaned to pick things from the bottom of the cart.

“You shouldn’t watch the second one then...and definitely not the third one,” she replied, continuing to meet his gaze as all her groceries were slowly processed, bagged and re-carted. He was a little short for her, she thought, but there was something in his manner that made her decide, in that moment, to give him a chance.

“I’ll tell you what...give me your number and I’ll call you when I rent them, and you can tell me when the horrendously stupid parts are coming up, and I’ll...cover my eyes or something.”

She flicked a business card out of her wallet as she replaced her debit card, flipped it over smoothly and wrote her cell phone number on the back with the pen chained to the ATM pad. “I’ll tell you what...call me before you rent a movie, and I’ll help you pick out one that’s worth watching, how about that?”

“It’s a deal,” he said, and as he watched her push her freshly bagged food toward the exit he felt a little lighter, as if the process of vigilant watchfulness and effort had left him a finished personality that he could relax into now, not waiting anymore for accusations of being any certain way, but just being himself.

It felt good...it felt very good.

poetry corner

I am the dying ember of a fire that was born banked
already hidden and glowing before it was sparked
left overnight to bridge the daylight hours
never alive, never a thing itself
only a pale reflection of what came before
and will never come after

Another August story

“Lemme tell you…Dave was the kind of guy that would call you up on Thursday night, all, ‘Hey man, let’s go downtown and get some beers, maybe meet some girls, it’ll be chill, man, c’mon,’ and then it would take about 45 minutes to figure out what place we were supposed to be going to, and then you’d get over to his place and he still wouldn’t be ready, and by the time he finished all his showering and hair care and all that stuff it’d be, like, one o’clock, and everybody would have crashed out playing Nintendo or something.”

Hunter was the kind of guy who liked to exaggerate his stories, sometimes creating entire personalities for people from his past out of a few tiny fragments of behavior. This little diatribe about Dave had sprung from the events of a single night, when he had arrived at Dave’s while the aforementioned showering and primping had been in progress and had amused himself by doing shots of Rumpelmintz until he had passed out on the couch, vaguely aware that Dave had tried to rouse him at one point but remembering that he had been completely unable to respond in any coherent way. He had awakened the next morning nestled in the couch, with the unmistakable sour smell of vomit now emanating from under the cushion he was using as a pillow.

He didn’t tell Dave about the puke, either; that’s also the kind of guy that Hunter was. But he was pretty harmless; not the kind of buddy that you’d call if you REALLY needed help, but the kind that you just sort of left in your E-vite distribution list because it seemed kind of wrong when you thought about taking him out.

So Hunter just kind of slid through the world as an adult; found a pretty good job, got married a time or two, had some kids, moved around the country a little bit, all the standard stuff. But THEN, on one very magical day, Hunter fell right into the role that he had been created for, that very few human beings on the entire planet were as qualified to do as he was.

Hunter retired and sat around all day, with either his grandkids or other kids from the neighborhood that were sent over by their parents for a little free babysitting, and he told them stories. Bowling stories, hiking stories, stories about guys he had known in college, stories about a car he’d almost bought one time in Omaha; it never mattered. The kids would sit, transfixed, unable to be coaxed from his side even by the siren’s song of the television. He was the Joe DiMaggio of telling stories, the Michael Jordan--he was the TIGER WOODS of telling stories to kids.

Unfortunately, he was also the Tiger Woods of eating fatty foods and not exercising, so he died four years into his retirement. But his LEGACY, man, his legacy lives on, in all those kid’s...um...hearts, or something. Yeah, their hearts.

Early August, early morning

There was a lot of darkness that night, somehow; I’m not sure if it was a new moon, or if there were just a couple of streetlights busted where I parked, but something ratcheted up the tension of parking along the street two blocks up from my condo at 4:30 in the morning. Usually just getting the car parked gave me a huge sense of relief; another trip home from somewhere way too far away under the influence of one thing or another (or several), a drive that even I couldn’t kid myself into believing was a good idea that hadn’t ended with me either sitting in jail or wrapped around a telephone pole.

Tonight, though, my nerves were still tight enough to make me drop my keys as I got out, which led to a solid two minutes of profanity-laced bending over, searching, crawling around, and near panic before my hand finally brushed one of my house keys, I think, and I was able to straighten up and start my stagger home.

I can’t even remember if I saw them first or heard them; two guys emerging from the alley in the middle of the block after I went by, the smell of a cigarette that one of them tossed into the street, an almost hypnotic rhythm of their footfalls and mine, counterpointed by their murmured conversation and the pounding of blood in my ears that was growing ever louder and more frantic.

I didn’t want to go into my building with them following, and I was quickly reaching a level of panic that I was afraid that I would no longer be able to contain, so I mounted the steps to one of the row houses that made up the block next to mine. I fumbled with my keys, both to give them time to walk by and because my hands were shaking uncontrollably, and I snuck glances at the two men as they grew closer. My heart stopped the same moment they did, less than five feet away from me, hard looks in both sets of eyes.

“Back off, man, I’ll call the cops...” I said thickly, trying to reach for my cell phone while not dropping my keys again, all the time thinking, “Is it ‘fire’ you’re supposed to yell if you want people to really respond to you? I know it’s not ‘help’...”

“Dude, are you high? This is my fucking house, so why don’t you get off my stoop before I call the cops,” the first one said.

Words like, “oh...yeah...shit...sorry...” all piled out of my mouth at the same time as I made a big show of looking at the number and “realizing” it wasn’t the right house. “I think I’m on the wrong block, man,” I ended on, weakly, and quickly resumed my walk home, risking only one glance back to see the two guys still looking after me in disbelief. I started laughing, and I couldn’t stop until long after I finally crawled into bed, a sick laughter that was equal parts relief and fear that persisted until it was finally overwhelmed, as I was, by merciful sleep.

because you're never too old for some angst...

It’s funny how it works
you never fit in
with the rednecks or the rockers
the nerds or the jocks or the drama kids
not even with kids who quote movies until they have
an incessant private language
but you work and work at it
to at least stop looking so out of place
to at least quiet the loudest laughter
to get left, finally, and at long last, the fuck alone
Until
one day you are (alone), and the only place left
that you’re out of place
and on the outside
and being judged
is inside your own head
and, suddenly, David Byrne
is smarter than anyone you’ve ever met
my god, what have I done, indeed
letting the days go by

And Your Voice is Everything (part 3)

Read part one

Read part two



I rode my bike home in a thought-induced haze, nearly veering into a moving car at one point to avoid one parked in the bike lane. Now that I was done waiting, that my chance meeting had taken place, no matter how briefly and unsatisfyingly, it seemed like it was up to me to make the next step happen; I just didn't have any idea what the next step should be or how to make it happen.

It wasn't going to happen if it had to happen at my house, that was for sure. I was living with two friends that I had met in school; they were both still enrolled, although Josh was thinking about switching majors again, I think. The point is, we were none of us neat freaks, and collectively we had brought our rental house to the state where no matter where you were about to sit - the couch, the floor, the kitchen table - you always took an extra second to survey the area before you sat down, just in case. In case of what was not always clear, but just in case.

Not that she would have known where I lived anyway, since I had somehow managed, during what might well have been my only opportunity to talk to her, to avoid telling her my name, to avoid asking for her number, to completely fail to execute any tactic at all that would have resulted in either me having learned more about her or her having learned anything at all about me. You have to remember, this was before every band had a website and all that stuff, so I couldn't just look her up online and "friend" her and generally become one of a sea of faceless semi-stalkers.

mid-July short story

"Billy, you can't go out like that...put on your hat and gloves at least, if you won't wear your scarf."

He was dreaming again, but his mother was calling him the wrong name in the dream. She had always called him Charles, and he had never owned a scarf that he could remember. But he brought it over dutifully to her, in the dream, and she wound it around his neck three times clumsily, brushing his face with the ends as it went past. He lay in bed, face twitching, nearly breaking the surface of sleep.

He went to the front door (it was now the front door of a house from much later, his aunt and uncle's house in Illinois) and opened it to reveal the snow that he had been waiting for, snow he had heard falling by the surreal muffled silence it brought with it. Flakes the size of silver dollars spiraled down in waves of pure white, powdering the ground and drifting up on the car, the porch, the shoulders of his jacket.

He involuntarily wrapped the comforter a little tighter, back in bed, maybe to shield his neck from a draft from the air conditioning vent. He had never been able to bring himself to get a cat, after his wife had died; she had been crazy about the things, but hadn't kept one since they lost two in quick succession to neighborhood cars. The only thing they'd ever been good for was as footwarmers, as far as he was concerned.

He felt the warmth ebbing from his toes as even the dry powder he was trudging through began to stick to his galoshes. It was just a little further down the road, though, to his dad's house, and then there would be all of his cousins, and his brothers, and dad would probably have hung stockings for all of them and stuffed them with all kinds of candy. He could almost taste butterscotch, in the dream.

When he got to the gate, though, it was the gate of his father's first house, from before the divorce, and as he made his way through he could hear his mother's voice from inside alongside all the others. He had not been old enough to remember that house, the house where he was born, but had studied the smiling family posed outside the front gate enough times to see it more clearly than he saw his own house when he was awake. He made a half turn, toward his left shoulder, pressing his face more deeply into the pillow as half-nonsense language started coming through from his dreaming.

"Mom! Dad! Hey everyone!" he called out as he pushed the front door open, the tapestry of voices seeming to recede as he listened into the kitchen. He took a step into the hallway and realized he hadn't taken off his overshoes yet; he couldn't go into the house with them caked in mud, as they suddenly seemed to be. His fingers fumbled with the thick gloves as he tried to tear them off, his scarf crept up into his line of sight each time he bent down to the galoshes. He realized the snow was falling again, suddenly, by the totality of the silence, the muffled dead quiet of the empty house.

He only shifted slightly in his bed, as the dream ended, drifting quietly down into another, deeper stage of sleep; mercifully, perhaps, still hours from waking, and perhaps not to remember the dream again, tonight. He would remember to throw a bag of butterscotch candies into his shopping cart tomorrow, though; he would remember that.

How to tell when you're the weird neighbor

"...if it wasn't for the crumbs, I mean, it would be totally better, it's just I have this thing about crumbs, and plus who can eat a whole loaf of bread in like, three days before it gets all stale?"

I had heard this whole line of reasoning, oh, I don't know, SEVENTY OR EIGHTY TIMES before, but I nodded and gave my standard line about the health benefits of using whole wheat and spelt and the total absence of the weird shit they put in there as preservatives these days, blah blah blah. I don't know why I'm so stuck on getting my neighbors warmed up to the bread I bake for them, it just strikes me as kind of odd that they both are left completely cold by the thought of getting something for free, when people will usually risk their lives, or those of their kids and pets at least, just for a chance at a t-shirt being thrown into the crowd at a ballgame or a free doughnut at a Holiday Inn continental breakfast that fifteen people have probably had their hands on already that morning.

Chuck appeared behind her at the door, glancing over her shoulder at me with my paper towel-swaddled potential present. "Hey, Steve, more bread? Is it quadrotriticale this time?" He snorted at that, like he always does, and headed back up their entry hallway. She finally took it out of my hands with a quick smile and a mostly sincere "thank you", but as she turned and swung the door shut I clearly heard, "What the fuck is with..." from the other room before the latch clicked and I turned to walk back home.

Fine. Let 'em go back to their Wonder Bread and mayonnaise sandwiches, to bread that you can leave in the pantry next to the Twinkies and never have to check the expiration date on either of them. Maybe when Chuck's blood pressure gets to that point where his doctor is "a little concerned", he'll come running over for a few pointers on wheat bran and steel-cut oats. But I doubt it.





P.S. Fuck hiatuses.

Hiatus

I think I'm going to take a little time off, at least from trying to post creative writing type stuff...everything seems like it comes out like I'm either depressed, or psychotic, or both, lately.

So, Stace, feel free to clear out some of your backlog of material that's just waiting for that final polish to be applied to it, and I'll try to chime in with some "real life" stuff now and then...let's see...

1. Work sucks
2. We have a couple of cute foster-foster puppies (we're just keeping them for a quarantine period for other foster parents because it's easier for us)
3. Work sucks

I think that about covers it! Let the hiatus begin!

It's "grande", sir...

"Ummmmm...I guess give me a large latte with an extra shot, and can I get one pump of hazelnut and a half pump of vanilla? And with half two percent and half skim?"

I didn't really like coffee, even, but what I did like was going somewhere and ordering something like that, just to see what kind of reaction it would get. You could always tell the real pro's; they didn't bat an eye, maybe they'd give you a "sure thing, sir!" or make a quick scrawl on the cup, but they never lost that air that they had just made seventeen of those in a row just before you walked in, no big deal.

The guy today was somewhere in the middle; I think he briefly entertained the idea of telling me they wouldn't mix milks like that, but he controlled it well and only let a little bit of frustration seep into his voice as he called it out to the girl making drinks. I could definitely tell that he noticed me not tipping; he didn't glare at me but he didn't have that generic friendly smile anymore either.

So I waited for a minute for the drink, and I saw this girl go by on a moped that I had asked out a couple of times just after college. She still didn't wear a helmet, which didn't really surprise me, but I couldn't tell if the half-turn of the head that she made as she went past the store window meant that she had seen me as well, or if it was just a coincidence. I looked a lot different then, with the hair and the flannel shirts and the hemp jewelry, but she looked mostly the same, blond hair gathered back in barrettes with loose ends whipping just over the place on the back of her neck that I'd never quite gotten up the nerve to rest my fingers on for a moment sometime, casually, even when we were both on the couch at a friend's party or sitting around a campfire at the beach at the end of the summer, collectively and unconsciously resisting the deepening chill and the specter of growing older with one of the oldest and most primal human technologies of all.

Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe she would have taken me up on a couple of dinners then, maybe we could have grown old together and vacationed in Maine in the summer and all those things; I guess it's possible. To me, though, the moped told the story better; she was going somewhere, and I may or may not have been part of the scenery on the way by, a bit of color and texture that helped make up the impressionistic memory of a short trip to somewhere very ordinary that would almost certainly be filtered from her mind as soon as she got there, only to turn up again in a dream, perhaps, or a vague impression of having encountered something familiar.

I wish I could say that I swung back by the tip jar on the way out and dropped a couple of bucks in, but instead I made a big fuss about the milk being scorched (it wasn't) and demanded my money back, which tied up things at the counter for a good three or four minutes. I could feel the eyes rolling and the impatient glances at watches and cell phones behind me, and it didn't feel good exactly, but inside I was saying, "yeah, ignore this, you fuckers, block this out of your morning memories...you'll get to work a little late or a little frazzled and you'll be telling somebody a couple of cubes over the story of the guy in the coffee shop this morning, and I'll be that fucking guy, and even though it won't matter to you, I'll get to tell the same story, and it'll matter to me, it will fucking well matter to me."

I also wish I could say that I don't look for girls on mopeds anymore either, but I do. God help me, I still do.

Haiku, just for you

Summer Texas sun
saps the strength of better men
(and women) than me

Inspiration drought
leads to longish silences
on an empty blog

One would meekly crave
indulgence of his readers
plural implies hope

Is there more to tell
on "Your Voice is Everything"?
Talk amongst yourselves

Speaking of...

fantasy football, just look what I came up with the other day when I was digging through all my old LP records!


What good times we all used to have, sitting around the fire, laughing together and eating hot buttered popcorn! It seems like only yesterday...

Or maybe that was just the virtual yule log they show on TV during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and instead of laughing together we were posting snarky things at each other on the message board, but still, we had a few laughs, right? Anyone? Bueller?

ENOUGH WITH THE POETRY ALREADY!!!!

Yes, I can hear your thoughts through the ether, I just wanted to get those three things up there because Stacey was kind enough to transcribe them from written versions that I sent her literally years ago now...I guess I write poetry at about the same rate I write songs, maybe one a year, I just got started a little later. I think they all tend to have close to the same arc or something, I dunno, maybe I'll write a term paper on my own poetry and see if I can get a Master's or something out of it.

For those brave souls that are just checking in every once in a while to see when the goddamn fantasy football league is starting up again, yes, it will start up, it may be a few weeks yet just so we don't have an interminable two months between starting up the league and starting to actually play games. And if you weren't, or if you've never heard of fantasy football, what the hell's wrong with you? You should play, it's fun, post a comment on here and I'll hook you up. All the cool kids are doing it, it's like jumping off a bridge. Except at the end you aren't dead, you just wish half the guys in the NFL were.

yet more poetry (old Spencer stuff)

We are students of the same subject, you and I
strangely quiet in our comfort
drowning ourselves
in the inexorable

When everything that has been
has been spoken, and everything that
cannot be is safely catalogued
we can still remain here, alone together
in the last chance of a dying moment
in pictograms and sonoglyphs
that give our histories the lie
and smudge our self-portraits

Will these heretical monuments
to an imagined circumstance
be rubbed and dated, reinstated
into canonical glory someday?

Listen, it's simple:
simply smile at enervated intervals
wait for the signal fire to light,
and in that crucial figure find a moment for yourselfish desires
the kind that roll around the tongue
and dance in desperate measures, full
to bursting with their own depravity
real enough for our time
and our time, too, is real enough
for the children that we were (not) to grow, old already
inside, far away

Concordia St. (old Spencer poem)

It wasn't even dark when you got back
I mean, it was dark -
But not as dark as it would be in five more minutes

When the street light nearest your house clicked off
as if by magic, by whimsy
When the halo that hung on the moon
felt the chill of the clouds
When the ash-end of my forgotten cigarette
finally winked out in the ashtray
When you closed the front door quietly
and put out the porch light

It was dark, I guess, as I was left
walking down the street away
but it wasn't so much dark as it was black

Lover (old Spencer poem)

The smoke curls gently against the ceiling
having parted slowly from your slightly parted lips
We both know that it's killing us
as we pass it, slowly, back and forth

(there is no urgency at three o'clock in the morning)

Weightless as the promises of happiness
sold by shameless hucksters
to the quiet, younger, gullible me
and the older, wiser, cynical you

For we have made those promises ourselves
tied them together with bundles of old books
Shared a bed and in the sharing of the darkness
discovered we could still see the differences
in outlines dancing without a pattern
without a hope for reconciliation
dancing in the slow breath of the shared room
to the flicker of a borrowed candle
lingering, beautiful, until it is exhausted
shadowing and foreshadowing the room itself
and you and I and our time and our time

There is no urgency at three o'clock in the morning
there is only you
there is only me
only time can teach us differently

SPANKED!!!!!!!

The Celtics are my new heroes and best friends!!! Not only did they beat the Lakers, they spanked them into oblivion and made them look stooooopid! I am soooooo happy!
Plus...they play great ball! They have crazy mad passing skillz and actually make their free throws! They're ... my God!...fun to watch!!!
Man, I'm having amazing sports watching luck! What yummy goodness can FOOTBALL hold in store!

Speaking of...Spence...when do the dreaded/longed for Uncle Rico's festivities begin? I'm almost recovered from last season and ready for my new fate. Almost!

short story June '08

It's always the same dream, except it isn't the same, in the details...it could be a street where lots of people that I know from junior high are hanging out, or a baseball field where my dad and I are playing ball together, even though we never played baseball and didn't have any baseball fields in my neighborhood. But it's always the same door, with some kind of off white color paint that's just starting to get the faint lines that are going to turn into cracks, before it starts slowly peeling away.

I always notice the door after a while, things are maybe going well in the dream or maybe my teeth are all starting to feel loose or I'm starting to feel like someone is chasing me, or whatever, but then I notice the door and it could be attached to a house that's somehow there all of a sudden or it could be a utility shed that I hadn't noticed but it's the door always, first, with a handle made out of some glass or crystal like my grandparents' house had, and the door is always shut tight without any cracks at the bottom or at the side for any of the darkness behind it to get out, but I always know that the darkness is there behind it, just in that way that you know stuff like that in dreams.

And so then time pretty much stops in the dream, and I usually go up to the door with something like fear, or not fear but something like a nebuluos fear, a general fear, I guess dread or something like that, and I always understand that I'm going to end up going through the door, no matter what. And so it doesn't matter as much what the details are from dream to dream; sometimes the door is locked and I rattle the handle for a while, and sometimes the knob is hot or cold to the touch, or maybe those are things that you can't even know in dreams and I just always fill them in later, I don't know. But the door always eventually opens, and then the dream is over because behind the door is always


nothing


and not in a way of the blackness that I knew (or thought that I knew) was behind the door before I opened it and not in just a blanket of whiteness that blots everything out but just in the way of not feeling and not seeing anything, just knowing that there's not anything anymore, behind the door

The wierdest part is that I don't always feel the same way about it, sometimes it's the scariest thing you can think of and sometimes it's almost a comfort, knowing that the door is always there for when you're tired and you just need to get away from everything for a while, I guess, and sometimes it's not either of those things, it's just peaceful, or not even peaceful but just there's nothing at all anymore, to think about or be pissed off at or to be worried over, everything is just done, and it's OK.

I think those might be my favorite door dreams of all.

A Miracle?

I may have witnessed a miracle over the last two days.

Two words: Exciting. Golf!?!?!?

That's all I'm saying. Discuss!

And Your Voice is Everything (pt 2)

Read part one of the story


Or maybe I should start with me, back then, late twenties and still without a real job, making do with help from my mom and dad for “college” and stocking groceries overnight from Sunday to Thursday. I had the t-shirts and the blue jeans, too; we all did, I guess, although I didn’t wear things ironically back then, not trucker hats and especially not t-shirts. I wish I still had some of the t-shirts that got turned into rags during those summers, I could probably find some online if I really felt like it, even-cheaper knockoffs of things that already were made to fall apart; I might get a couple of wears out of some of them, but just putting the shirts back on wouldn’t help me recognize myself anymore.

Because that was the me that fell in love with her from the third row, as it were, even though none of the places she played had any seats; most of them were doing well to have walls and ceilings that looked like they could pass a fire inspection. Because it was love if anything is ever love these days, and the fact that it happened over both the physical distance that I was standing from the stage and the infinitely greater distance created by the fact the she didn’t have a fucking clue who I was, had never laid eyes on me in her life, that wasn’t something that I thought about much. It was just the reality, but it didn’t always have to be, and since my general life plan seemed to be based mostly around a lot of waiting for things to happen, I think some part of me was expecting an encounter over brunch, or at a coffee shop or record store, or any and all of the other clichéd opportunities that I could possibly picture for that thing that was going on for me to move out of my head and into the world.

But none of that helped very much when it happened.

Spencer's Peeve o' the Week!!!!!

Yes, I'm shamelessly co-opting Stacey's peeve thing here, but she's not using it anymore, and there are children over in Africa starving for peeves! So we're just going to have to box up your extra ones that you didn't use and send them on over there, aren't we?

Today's peeve is all about WAITING ON HOLD!!!!! Yes, I know, in today's digital world, you well might wonder why in the Sam Hill any company would knowingly subject its customers to such an antiquated system as the telephone? Or, once they start down that dangerous path, why not go all the way back to telegraph, or teletype, or smoke signals, or faxing back and forth series of pencil drawn hieroglyphs or photos of drawings we each do, in turn, on the walls of caves?



The way I see it, there are 2 big plusses to allowing/encouraging email interactions with customer service:

1. You let people have time to actually write out what their problem/complaint/wish list actually IS at their own pace, and you automatically have a written record of it so they can't change what they said or were complaining about!

2. You no longer have customers who are SO PISSED OFF AFTER WAITING FOR 45 FUCKING MINUTES ON HOLD THAT THEY WOULD JUST AS SOON STRANGLE THEIR PET CAT STEVE AS THEY WOULD EVER SPEND ANOTHER THIN DIME ON ANY OF YOUR LOUSY ASS SHIT PRODUCTS, THAT'S FOR DAMN SURE!!!!!!!

So as you can see, it doesn't take a business degree from Harvard to lead a person to believe that, hey, for those of us with the magic of the interwebs at our fingers, yeah, verily 24 hours a day, why not give us a chance to interact with your great and mighty...um...ness at our own convenience?

And, yes, in case anyone's wondering, I have been on hold for quite a while over the past few days, thanks for asking.

DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!

I've been foiled by the googlewebs...so Stacey and I thought we'd get all fancy-pantsy and get a real got-durned web address of our very own, The Karmic Desk, we thought, it'd be the ticket to huge readership, fame and fortune.

Unfortunately, somehow the process of registering a domain through Google itself didn't work for us, even though they promised it would be easier than falling off a greased pig that was standing on a log! Curse you, lady Technology, for your come-hither stare and your easy indifference to the human suffering that you yourself have created! Except that I guess we created you, meaning Technology, so the metaphor is not quite right there, somehow.

Nonetheless, if anyone out there has any idea what CNAME's are and/or how I can actually point my spanking new domain name to our pitiful, creaking old blog, there's a shiny new nickel in it for you! And by nickel, I mean absolutely nothing. And by THAT, I don't mean that I don't mean anything by it, I just mean you'll get absolutely nothing, which people seeking nirvana would seemingly greatly prefer to a nickel anyway, so just think of it as my way of helping you become enlightened. Although, to be honest, if I'm coming back to this planet through reincarnation, I think I'd rather take my chances for a while as somewhat lower lifeforms, what with the global warming and the potential for radiation and pollution and whatnot...how much wrong do you think I'd have to do in one lifetime to come back as a cockroach?

actual update!

Well, I got some good news today, the biopsy was all clear, so I'm good to go for now. Thanks to everyone for your thoughts!

Let Them Eat CAKE!!! Lots Of CAKE!!!

So, the big news, about the thing that may or may NOT have happened...
Well, it DID happen, and Amy and Walter got married!! They semi-eloped to the hills Memorial Day weekend, taking a small, elite force of aiders and abettors with them.
In case you don't know who the Hell I'm talking about, Amy is Nadi's sister, and Walter is some guy she met, who is a lawyer BUT A NICE LAWYER, and they have a cute dog named Goldie. The "hills" that they escaped to are formally known as "Crested Butte", and it's a beautiful place, as you can see from le photoes. So, here's some pics, take a look and eat a piece of cake in support of their union!

So: here's the happy couple on the way up to the site. They and 2 of the guests biked it, us and 2 of the guests hiked. It wasn't any faster either way, they just REALLY like to mountain bike. TOO much, some (me) might say.

Here's a picture of me w/ the flower girl/ring bearer Goldie! (Hey, stop staring at my John Lynch arms and look at the doggie!) Definitely the cutest/best behaved F.G./R.B. I've ever come across. Goldie, not John Lynch. In case you were confused.


Here they are on the way to seal the deal. I don't think we got an actual smooch shot, but that's yucky, anyway! That guy that married them is Walter's buddy Jim, he got ministerized over the internets so he could do it. I might do that, too, one of us kids has to make my dad proud, ya know.




And here's Nadi and I doing a little posing 4 teh cameeeera. I know, it's not OUR wedding, but this is a MEcentric blog and I gotta give the peoples what they want. And what they want is me in GIANT FLUFFY SHOES!!!!!


Happy Wedding Amy and Walter!!! No pressure to make lotsa babies now! Unless it takes some of the pressure off of me! Then you'd better get after it.

Hi there!

Hey everyone, just wanted to check in here with a non-update...apparently my endocrinologist likes to keep the suspense thing going as long as she can, because she insists that everyone come into her office to talk about biopsy results in person, whether positive, negative, or unclear, or whatever, so I'm having to wait until Friday to hear the results.

I'm trying to look at it like I'm in a giant funhouse ride at Astroworld, or something, Come ride the Death Defying Doctor Consultator X400! Thrill to the endless anticipation! You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll become intimately acquainted with your insurance representative!

Also, I want to give a quick shout-out to Heidi, for putting up with me for THREE YEARS TODAY! Happy anniversary, sweetie!

Actually, I can't say that I spend that much time anticipating this Friday, because I'm still anticipating the NEW EXCITING POST that Stacey promised about 3 months ago. Tempus fugit, big chief. :P

And, on that note, later chumps.

poetry corner

One for the roads, collar off the cuff
lightening the ties that bind and
tightening the lies that blind
in a synchronistic euphony
"Oh, la la la" and so forth, onward
(quiet, damn your non-soul, quiet
lee the wind inside yourself
and it can still the panic)
highly liquid sounds are flooding
chambers of quiet
who is next to fill and be filled?
there isn't enough room here
for simulspontaneous steps backward
three tries, just like the carnie barker said
who is next to take their chance?
if I still walked in the evening
like the first man, taking the guard in
with some summer scheme
I'd want it to be just like this
not forever, just for now
with four winds raising dust from
non-existent corners and piling it up,
dune-like, in a mound big enough
to be buried in
in deed, in heritance enough
for me

Happy Fun Comment Thread!

EDIT: Well, apparently you guys are all well-stocked with Blue Star Ointment or something, because no one seems to be itching to comment after all. So I'll just let this post slide down into electronic obscurity like the rest of them, and may flights of angels something something something.


Hi everyone! I bet there are a lot of you who are just ITCHING to put up a little comment like, "Hey y'all, how's it going?", or, "Howzit goin' down there in the ATX?" or, "Please cease and desist before we are required to take further legal action.", you know, whatevs!

But you're held back by the fact that you don't want to post something unrelated to the topic, or you feel like you'll say something stupid and everyone else will laugh at you. Well, your thread is now HERE!

So post anything you want, and we'll just keep this at the top of the page for a while and see what comes up. Let your mind lead, and your...uh...not mind will follow, or something. Or maybe it won't follow, and you'll end up walking around doing stuff with no mind. Either way, it'll be a good time for everyone involved.

Personal post!

I haven't been real big on putting up personal stuff on here, unless you count the 142,000 posts about one of our animals, but I thought I'd share a little medical stuff that I've been going through lately just to see if we can all get a good laugh out of it, or something.

So I've had hypothyroidism for a while now, and it seems as though now my thyroid gland has decided to ENLARGE itself (2nd level mage spell, I believe) to the point that my endocrinologist ordered an ultrasound on it. Turns out I have MULTI-NODULAR GOITER, which, besides sounding like I contracted it in 1845 along with consumption and the vapors, means that nodules have formed on my thyroid gland as well, the two largest of which they decided they wanted to biopsy!

Now, I don't know about you, but nothing puts a shine on my weekend like hearing the word "biopsy"! Luckily for me, my doctor said that the nodules in this type of situation are almost never cancerous, and even if they were, the treatment success rate would be extremely high, so there's almost no chance that this will affect me in any meaningful way, except for the fact that I'll be writing posts for a while going forward from debtor's prison, due to the huge bill even AFTER my insurance. I hope they have Macs in debtor's prison!

Anyway, yesterday I got poked in the neck a bunch of times with a really thin needle, and today I'm back at work, busting my hump for the almight dolla. Good times, good times. I'll keep everyone updated once I hear back about the results, of course, and feel free to post well wishes, homeopathic goiter remedies, tales from your OWN successful bouts with cancer (Randy, Lance Armstrong), or general derision at the fact that I've obviously already reached the age where I'm having "procedures" every couple of months. If I can just keep that daggum lumbago from acting up...

And Your Voice is Everything (pt 1)

I guess I should start with the first time I saw her away from the stage. She was still wearing the uniform (tattered baby-doll t-shirt worn ironically over old-school jeans that were obviously faded by a combination of time, cigarette smoke and spilled beer rather than some corporate dipshit’s prized chemical “treatment”), but it looked shabbier in the mid-morning sun. She looked shabbier too, or maybe just older – the sun was unforgiving to lines that cracked outward from her eyes, her mouth.

Maybe that’s why I could talk to her then, with her mantle of divinity obviously cast aside for the morning, sipping on a Dr. Pepper and looking over the selection of omelettes and pancakes like any other regular bar patron on a Sunday, nursing a hangover that wasn’t quite as bad as they’d hoped it would be. Or maybe it was the lack of the deafening throb that ordinarily would have been interfering, rendering any attempt at speech at least inaudible, if not completely meaningless.

“I’m sorry if I’m bothering you…I just wanted to tell you that I think your music is amazing,” I said, and I meant it too. The last time that I had seen her play (with her band, Pedophile Smile), I had experienced something like an out-of-body, near-death, epileptic’s epiphany sort of moment, and it wasn’t even brought on by high doses of pharmaceuticals. She could just pull you in with her, to the middle of this vast emotional maelstrom of merciless drums and pounding guitars and her voice (always that voice) and hold you there until you were desperate for some kind of release. It was like holding your breath late at night as a kid, knowing that eventually you’d have to let it out but imagining that somehow you’d never need to, that you could just exist forever in some kind of strange stasis that would exclude aging and death and God and all the other things that were making it impossible to sleep in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.

She pushed her sunglasses down over her eyes, releasing a small cascade of black hair that had been aimed at jet but had ended up somewhere between burnt umber and crayon black. “Do I know you? Are you friends with Jay?”, she said, and while that was hardly the most encouraging reply in the world, it sure beat “fuck off” or a hasty gesture to the waiter for help.

“What, Jay like ‘Jay and Silent Bob’? I always kind of wanted to meet that guy, you know, just to sort of bask in that whirlwind of energy - but now he’s apparently given up drugs and all that, so I bet he’s not nearly as fun to be around anymore.”

She half-snorted. “No, Jay like one of our roadies. His friends are always coming up to me at random times and saying random shit like that. I think, for those guys, it probably is the drugs. So…what’s up? You want me to sign your tits or something?”

I thought back to the last time that I’d done more than five push-ups without stopping. “No, it’s cool, I’ll leave you to your food and everything, I just wanted to say, you know, that I think that what you do is worth doing, you know, and I hope you make it, you know, if you want to and everything. To say ‘good luck’, I guess.”

And in a burst of eloquence, I was gone. At least I had had the foresight to pay out before I went over, otherwise I would have had to imagine her bemused half-smile following me around the place for minutes instead of seconds.


read part two of the story

Road Trip!!

Heyya! Nadi and I went on a road trip to see my parents recently, and I took a few crummy photos. I wish I were more the photo-journalistic type, but I'm kinda not. So here's a few, just to give you an idea...
Turli and Trogdor are ready to go! This was Turli's first trip in the Scamp! Trog's peeking out to make sure everything is safe and we're not being attacked by food-stealers. That's his job.



This is how Turli rides in the truck, asleep in Nadi's lap. She weighs a thousand pounds... I wouldn't let her sleep on me very much when I was driving. But she's a big Daddy's Girl so she really didn't care.
This is probably the coolest place we camped. I think it was in Tennessee. Every Single Campsite was like this, where you camped out on a pier type thingy. Trog is usually REALLY scared of bridges and so on, but he was o.k. w/this for some reason.
So, that's really all I got. Told you I suck. There were poppies all along the freeway in N. Carolina but my pics of them are lame, you couldn't really stop so I had to resort to the old "take a shot out the window while you're driving" method, which doesn't really work. ah, what the hell, here's one of those. Good luck actually seeing a poppy!

There you have it! Just to tantalize you further... there MAY be some very exciting surprise photos up after this weekend... we shall see! And check back soon for my new column to (at least temporarily) replace my "Peeve O'the Week"... Guaranteed to shake your brain right outta your head. I just have to take a nap so I can write it...

new story for May (final part)

read the first part of the story...

Derek paced into the hallway, into the den, and stood in front of the couch for a moment, not sitting but not not sitting either, exactly, just in a kind of stasis until gravity caught and pulled him down. He had just been to give his blood sample two days ago; he hadn't expected anyone to call about it so soon, he wasn't quite ready to hear what they had to tell him. It had been raining, two days ago, the silvery parking lot walk reminding him very much of the night they had met, the downtown streets mirroring all the lights that had then seemed so exciting and so endless, hiding all the dirt and the everyday and leaving just a reflection of the night sky perfect down to the smallest of the stars that were out, now that the rain had passed and the clouds had fallen away.

He hadn't been quite ready either, that night, to see her walking toward him arm in arm with a girl he couldn't have described later beyond her gender, even to save his life, as they stopped in front of what just happened to be his favorite bar, on that street at least, but he was ready enough to follow them in and lose himself in watching her over half a beer, and ready enough to walk over to their table and say an entire evening's worth of anythings and nothings in a desperate and unparalleled (for him) fending off of what he couldn't help feeling was inevitable, when she would go home and he would go home and the next time he looked down at the wet streets he would see only the oily mud and the cigarette butts.

He hadn't heard a sound from the kitchen for ten minutes, twelve minutes, and he slowly pushed himself up from the couch with his right arm and walked back, into the kitchen. Martha still had his cell phone open in her hand, the screen helpfully informing no one about its status and remaining battery life while her face leaned against her upturned wrist below it, fat tears running down the side of her chin and falling to her arm, running down to the top of the table and pooling, shining like the silver parking lot or the city night in the reflected light of the toaster and the cheap chandelier.

She shook soundlessly, his hand on her shoulder now and the sobs starting to come alongside the inevitable curse words, the recriminations against an idea of fate or luck or something else even that she wouldn't have believed she could create there in a moment, out of whole cloth, but for the words from the phone and the way they had just changed everything, changed everything in a moment like a chance encounter except that this time there wasn't a jukebox and there wasn't a beer to buy or a girlfriend's arm to hold, this time there was just the bottom falling out and the cursing, shouted now, and his hand on her shoulder and in her hair and pushing out the small pool of tears into a patch of pure shine to remind him of the city street and the smallest star and to catch the light that was retreating far too fast from the kitchen, now.

Nostalgia

Remember when everything was just like it is now, except crappier?  You probably don't, even though it probably was.  That's the way we all are, remembering things as being better back then before we all sold out to the man, etc.

Well, sometimes you have cold, hard proof to back up your idyllic remembrances, and sometimes you have what I now have, which is cassettes of your old musical "performances" that you can now dump onto your computer and share with the world.  The mp3 player at the top left of the blog is now filled with six of our earliest "demos", back when we were calling ourselves Disturb the Universe.  Listen at your own peril.

Just to add insult to injury, the seventh song on the playlist is a medley of "The sound of silence" and "Bridge over troubled water" that Randy Wuensche, Chris Wenz and I did for our senior year band/choir recital type night.  The best part is the piano playing, which was actually done by another student, not a teacher,  I can't recall her name at the moment, but she was really good.  Maybe Mark will chip in with a comment and give us her name...

So, listen and weep, chumps.  : )

New story for May (part 1)

The smell of honeysuckle was not overwhelming, at 11 am, but stronger than you would think given its proximity to the street and the residual exhaust fumes and the glare of the Texas sun. Honeysuckle is a plant of the evening, of the morning, of gentle breezes through quiet backyards or of stifling southern humidity, but as the man walked by in the near heat of almost noon, the smell made him mentally catalogue the pungent yellow-orange of the overly ripened flowers and the white-yellow of the newly opened, each with their own scent that he could not describe but remembered intimately, like the position of his boots by the bed in the morning or the pull of his belt as he fastened it at the third notch.

He was a man of the south, raised in the suburbs that were slowly turning everywhere into anywhere but hadn't yet, couldn't ever fully, I think; and so the honeysuckle, and the crawdads in standing water in his front yard during week-long summer rains, and the hint of an accent that he still carried as he reached his front door, unlocked the deadbolt and entered the house.

"Martha," a question without a question mark, a sound to reassure the speaker as much as the audience, answered from several rooms away with, "I'm in here, sweetie, what is it?"

The tone of the answering voice was as complex as the honeysuckle scent, with notes of fear and hope rising slightly above a pervasive musk of fatigue and despair.  Martha emerged from the spare bedroom with several towels on one shoulder, dried and awaiting folding, her eyebrows pulled slightly together into a universal sign of concentrated attention.

"They called me at work, on my cell phone, and left a message saying how to call up this number and get the results, but I..."  Derek's voice trailed off as he fished his cell phone from the pocket of his work khakis and held it out in an open hand, an electronic oracle that he couldn't bring himself to consult.

"Well jesus christ, Derek, give it here and let me call...what's your voicemail password?"

Emmett

So this was Emmett, he lived for about a year and was rescued out of a tree in Dumas, TX, and he did a lot of stuff that cats do and brought immeasurable joy to the people that met him, and now he's gone. He ate part of a lily that was brought home as part of a bouquet, and died of acute kidney failure due to the extreme toxicity of lilies toward cats.

I don't know what else to say, except thanks to everyone who has been there for us through this, the sharing of sadness makes it not lighter, I think, but easier to carry, somehow, and we have been helped more than we could express.

Emmett update

Well, Emmett spent all last night getting IV fluids, and all today as well, and by 3:30 this afternoon, when they did a blood workup on him again, he was doing a little better. Everyone at both vets have been encouraged by how he looks and how he's acting and how his blood work turned out, so we are hopeful.  I think his official prognosis went from "grave" to "guarded", which is probably worse than "serious" but not as bad as "critical", one would hope. So thanks to everyone who's thinking about us and about Emmett, and keep those fingers crossed, and if you have on a lucky shirt or pair of underwear, for god's sake don't change them now!  If you've never considered growing a playoff beard like they do in hockey, that probably wouldn't hurt either.  Unless you're female, or just can't grow a beard, like me.

life is stupid and it sucks

I have had the extreme misfortune to have had the opportunity to write premature eulogies lately to two pets now; one of which became tragically appropriate a few months later, and one which we're still hoping to make irrelevant.  Our cat, Emmett, is at the vet being treated right now pretty much around the clock, and the prognosis is still not good, although he's hanging in there.  What follows is the result of an overabundance of grief and the effects of recently having read William Faulkner.  Please keep Emmett, and Heidi and I, in your thoughts.  I'll update on his condition as we keep being updated ourselves.



it was bright pink flowers and some bright yellow like daffodils and the green of stems in a birthday bouquet and the corpse white of lilies thrown in and it was perfect for what it was and for six ninety-nine or eight it was what it was and the flowers were nice in a vase with the stems trimmed maybe a little too short and arranged to where the white and the pink and the yellow were almost irresistible and so they maybe were on the first night and getting home to the cats' mess of them and the bleed of pink into the water like chum for sharks it wasn't real the bright pink petal was a carnival poster come-on color washing out into a pink like blood in the water and there wasn't much mess after all a little bit eaten and a few petals fallen down now white like paper with the lily white of the flesh damaged too but not much not too much but enough to so the cat (the youngest one) plucked from a tree in a small town in Texas took a mouthful of the lily of the valley of the shadow of a few bites maybe at the most but it was more than he needed and more than he could have known because who could have known and who didn't know that it was in his blood now and it was real now like the pink in the water acute renal failure was what they called it but it was Emmett on the counter and the lily flesh white and the carnival pink and it was real enough now and too late to know too late that lilies for a small Texas cat are pink in the water like blood like corpse white now

short, short story (conclusion)

forgotten what happened in part one of the story?

Richard shifted his weight from one hip to the other while he desperately tried to figure out the thing NOT to say to make the two cops even more interested in him. The trick was, of course, managing not to say it after having thought of it.

"OK, so if I tell you guys where I think he went, will go you at least talk to him and see if I'm crazy or if he is? I'm pretty sure that when he leaves here, he walks down to the Starbucks on Maple, because I've been down there myself a couple of times after seeing him around here, and he was hanging around over there the same way."

"That Starbucks is on Jefferson, not Maple," the older cop offered, and the younger one chimed in with, "Yeah, we'll go by and see if he's there, see what's up with him giving you the stank eye and everything." And in a cloud of amused chuckles, snarling snatches of radio static, and the squeak of new leather, the cops finally left.

Richard went down into the basement that night at home (he hadn't done that in a dog's age) and just made sure that everything was still where he had left it, undisturbed in its peaceful dust and harmless tarpaulining. Maybe it was time to get a storage space for everything, now, with those stupid cops and all...there were still places on the north side where you could rent for a handshake and $25 a month cash, without all those annoying legal documents and required pieces of identification. And if that old guy kept hanging around, staring...well, it just made more sense to do than to not, overall.

He clicked off the light as he reached the top of the stairs, making a mental note to ask around at work tomorrow to see if anyone could swap him a pickup to use over the weekend. The snap of the lightswitch nearly echoed, comfortably, in the endless new restored darkness.

The Heretic Bard

So I was thinking about what you said, "Peeve-Poetry" or something, so I decided to try it out. It's terribly terribly out of line w/what Joe Public thinks. It's awesome! So here's my attempt at pop culture peeve poetry...

We Will Outlaw Nature's Law

Miley Cyrus fell from grace
because she showed more than her teenage face
and a tightly jean-clad bottom...
It was the naked back that got'em
smooth and white and completely bare
forget that the girl has pubic hair
and has no doubt gotten her menses
Society puts up fences
between "woman" and "child"
So we will not dwell
on the fact that at twelve
her body was probably ready for mating
Our society says dating
should wait and degrading
oneself with sex tapes and such
should be done at a later date (if not much)
And if she hungers for touch
let her feel shame
if her body cries for sex
let her feel shame
if she masturbates in the darkness
let her feel shame
because we say she isn't ready.
Now, make her pretty
and put her back out on the stage
make sure she acts her age
flirting sweetly, gently
saving the split beaver shot 'til she's twenty.