Yoghurt

“I’ma eat some motherfuckin’ YOGHURT up in this bitch!!!!”

My roommate, Chris, half-shouted this while bent at the waist, head inches from the top shelf in our fridge, left hand resting on the open french door as he peered around to the bottom right hand corner where the yogurt was usually kept. I don’t know how he managed to pronounce “yogurt” with an “h”, but he did.

“Wow, man...congratulations. I mean, seriously. I think you managed to speak a completely original sentence right there, you know, one that no one ever in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD had ever spoken before.”

He already had the foil cap off and was now rooting around for a clean spoon. “What?”

“I’m serious! Do you know how rare that probably is? I mean, just think about it...there are billions of people all over the world, talking about god knows what 24 hours a day, and it’s pretty likely that no one in the world had ever said that before you did, and might not ever again! I mean, even if you get strict about it and discount anyone who might have said the equivalent in a language other than English, that’s still a pretty cool thing.”

We had been living together for almost a year, which was the longest I had ever lived with anyone besides my mom and dad, at that point. He put up with my total lack of interest in housekeeping, and I put up with his total being a stupid fucking asshole. It was, as we say in the corporate world these days, a “win-win”.

I wasn’t being sarcastic, though, with the original sentence thing. Milan Kundera had this idea that there are so many people in the world, there aren’t enough gestures to go around. So every time you see your little cousin hold his head cocked slightly to one side when he’s confused, it’s not that he looks just like his grandpa when he does that, it’s that he looks like thousands, perhaps millions, of people; people scattered all over the globe that have stumbled, through some combination of nature and nurture, into that same gesture.

At least, that’s an idea that’s in one of Kundera’s books. I don’t have any idea whether he believed it or not. But I have to think that language works the same way. There’s a spectrum, I know; if you text someone “OMG LOL!”, that’s gonna be the high end of the spectrum, right, and if you say to someone at a party, “Yeah, my Aunt Gertrude’s dog Mr. Sniffles died of bone cancer too...it sucked,” then you’re pretty much pegging the other side, but still. The chance exists...there are a lot of fucking people out there.

Chris sat heavily on the couch and kicked his feet up onto the coffee table. “Deep, man. Deep.”

“It wasn’t my idea, really.” I ran my right hand through my hair, a few millimeters to the left of where I parted it, starting about an inch and a half above the top of my nose and continuing until my fingers cleared about three-fourths of the length of my hair as it swept backward, in a gesture that I knew, intellectually, belonged to millions, but that felt as intimate, as peculiar, as UNIQUE to me as anything I could imagine, and then I grabbed the remote before he could watch Springer “ironically” at me again, because I fucking hate that more than anything.

Doing a Facebook Quiz That's Mistakenly Been Left in Beta

Let's see...what's up over at Facebook this morning...

Welcome to Facebook! You have 1 new Friend Request.

Hmmm...better check that out...hey, HotTania_7337_HAXXORZ...I think I went to high school with her! Approved, bay-bee!

HotTania_7337_HAXXORZ has taken the "Which Famous Book Are You?" Quiz!

Wow, cool! It WOULD be kind of interesting to have a random piece of poorly written software on the internet give me a pandering, broad strokes assessment of my personality based on a few completely meaningless questions! Where do I click?

Welcome to the "Which Famous [Book? Tyler, do you know if anyone has done books yet? If so, what other stupid shit could we pick? Replace this in the final version LOL] Are You?" Quiz!

Would you rather be:
A sparrow or a snail?

Hmmm, wow, that's a toughie! I mean, sparrows are all cute, but snails are all like, "Don't be coming up in my snail house with all that stuff!" LOL. I think I'll take the snail.


Would you rather be:
A hammer or a nail?

Eh...hammer.

*singing*
if Leonard Nimoy had a hammer...he'd hammer your head in...he'd hammer your face off...all over this land!


Would you rather sail away, like a swan that's here and gone?


Well, sure! I wouldn't mind sailing away from some of these BILLS, I'll tell you that LOL j/k! :>P Maybe the kids, too! o_O

When a man gets tied up to the ground, does he give the world its saddest sound...its saddest sound?

Whoa, is this thing reading my mind? I'm going with "YES!!!"

Would you rather be:
A forest or a street?

OK already, blah blah blah, just give me what book I am already. A street, I guess.

Would you rather feel the earth beneath your feet?

Jesus...what is this, the hippy quiz all of a sudden? Yes, I'd like to feel the earth beneath my feet, while I stand there eating a hamburger!

Congratulations! We have determined What Famous Book you are!

To find out what famous book you are, click here to authorize the Famous Book application to access the entire contents of your FriendList, including (but not limited to): your friends' email addresses, social security numbers, home addresses, bank routing numbers, dates of birth, and mothers' maiden names.

Yeah, yeah... *click*

To continue, please acknowledge that the makers of the Famous Book application are hereby granted the right to email notices to any and all members of your FriendsList with attachments including (but not limited to): spam, viruses, worms, trojan horses, keystroke loggers, virtual anthrax powder, ACTUAL anthrax powder, and chain mail letters that will result in their horrific deaths and/or dismemberments if they do not forward them on to seven other people within three days.

Hmmmmmmm... *click*

Congratulations! You are The Harry Potter Series! Everyone likes you, but only because it's been quite a while since they've actually been around you, so they don't really remember what you're like at all. Either that, or it's because their kids told them how great you are, and we all know what morons kids are, am I right?

What the...? Hey, come on now! Let's try this again...

*answers questions again, slightly differently*

Congratulations! You are The DaVinci Code! Back in the day you used to be really popular, but then everyone figured out that you weren't really as cool as they had thought, and they turned on you viciously, until now the mere mention of your name brings the most bitter recriminations from the mouths of those that were once closest to you!

God damn it! Stupid quiz...

*answers questions for tenth time*

Congratulations! Look, I know that you think if you keep answering these questions that eventually you're going to get something cool, like Ulysses or Lolita, but it's not going to happen, OK pal? You're going to have to live with The Bible or Letters to Penthouse or whatever you've gotten so far. Loser.

*answers questions for eleventh time*

Congratulations! OK, you win. You are The Catcher in the Rye! You are the perfect mix of charm, style, smarts, sass, and rumpled unconventional good looks! You are funny, witty, likeable, and ultra-cool, yet simultaneously soulful and poignant! You are pretty much the apex of western goddam civilization, if you want to know the truth!

All right! I can't wait to post this to Facebook! HotTania, you are all but mine...

The Iceman Cometh

It was cold outside, the hard cold of shotgun steel against your cheek, with wind like a broad, flat knife that...had been laying next to the shotgun, wherever it had been, you know, to get so cold. Charles Bronson was sitting on the stoop of one of the rowhouses on the set, lost in a fog of fatigue, steam from his coffee, and the smoke of the day's first cigarette...these 4 a.m. shoots were getting to be too much; he made a mental note to look for scripts that mostly took place in the daytime from now on, or inside maybe.

One of the caterers wandered over and shyly asked him for an autograph. She handed over a Sharpie and an 8X10" glossy that turned out to be a promotional still from "Big House, U.S.A."...Bronson gazed at the youthful face in the picture for a long minute, idly wondering both how this woman had come to be in possession of the print, and what his character's name had been in the picture. He gave up both pursuits at roughly the same instant and signed (as he always did) only his name, in a quaintly elegant and readable script that clashed more grotesquely every day with his craggy and careworn face.

He was tired...tired of being typecast, tired of everyone thinking of him as this old tough bastard who was too famous to be approached, too self-important to be funny. His mind spun back briefly to some of the times they had had on the set of "Big House"...he had always kept most of the crew in stitches, back then; what the hell had happened to him? When was the last time he had done something really CRAZY like that, something that made people realize that he wasn't someone they could just stick labels on?

Bronson stood and stretched his arms above his head, slowly, but inside his emotions were completely awhirl. He let his eyes play around the set, not searching for anything in particular, just sort of casting about. They fell on a prop shovel (leaning in the alley across the street for all the world as if left there by accident) that he would be using in one of the fight scenes this morning against some of the bad guy's henchmen. Jesus, this script...he made a mental note to talk to his agent about this whole macho man bullshit, then abandoned it as inspiration suddenly struck.

Within fifteen seconds, Charles Bronson emerged from the alley with the prop shovel whirling impressively at arms' length. whoosh...whoosh - it sure sounded like a real shovel, and it was definitely having the desired effect on all the nearby members of the crew. Most were standing completely still now, with their mouths agape; a few spoke with a noticeable degree of panic into walkie-talkies or started moving his direction uncertainly.

"I AM THE GREAT CHARLES BRONSON, AND I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS CRUEL, CRUEL WORLD!!!!!! ROLL FILM, YOU DEMON GODS OF HOLLYWOOD, AND RECORD THE END OF YET ANOTHER LIFE YOU HAVE DESTROYED!" The words just came to him, he wasn't sure from where, but the glee coursing through his veins intensified as the eyes only got wider, the jaws only further dropped open. He stopped the shovel's arc directly in front of his body, lowered its spoonlike end to the ground, and, amidst cries of, "Chuck, for God's sake!!!", hammered it upward with all of his might into a seemingly devastating arc that ended at his own forehead.

Later, in the hospital, the phrase, "That's NOT the prop shovel!!!" slowly wormed its way into his consciousness.

Splat

It was just like thousands of other videos on the web...a gangly teenage boy surfing on the front of what could only be his parents' car. As the car approaches the cameraman, you can see the boy realize in an instant that he has irretrievably lost his balance, his eyes seeming to preemptively glass over as his body anticipates the shock that awaits it.

For the next second is all too predictable. As the boy attempts to launch himself into the grass of the front yard he's currently passing, as he braces for the impact to his torso with both elbows and forearms drawn up instinctively, as one lower leg fails to clear the curb with a sound that can scarcely be tolerated even when heard at such a low bitrate and having been recorded on a camera phone; you can't look, but it's far too late to look away.

Then, of course, the camera swings wildly for a moment (also instinctive), and shocked snorts turn to aborted hysterical barks turn to "holy SHIT, dude!" and the running toward the figure that at last lies still, perhaps still conscious to scream or perhaps face down and motionless in the grass that still looks so impossibly soft for a landing.

One presumes that the boy has become inured to the horror of the video, watching it again and again until it's just Joe Theisman being hit by Lawrence Taylor...failing to align in pixellated form with the sensory overload that (if he is lucky) his brain failed to record with any clarity as the moment itself took place. Even on YouTube, it seems, there is never one single version of the truth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.