Wishing Upon a Darren Starr

“Some would keep saying I’m insane to complain about a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt.”-Beck, in the song “Loser”

Today seemed like a perfectly complacent morning. When I woke up, I thought that the clock said 7:00 which just did not make any sense. I was up working until two and was due to catch up on some sleep. But then when I adjusted my view, it turned out that it was actually just before ten and I had hit that magical eight hour of sleep mark, just like the health reporters want. 

The first stop was the bathroom because, ya know, I had to pee and all. And this presented me with an immediate dilemma: subject myself to the harsh bathroom light after being cooped up in my lightless cave of a room all night, pee with the light off and the door shut only to later deal with the consequences of how inaccurate my trail would inevitably be or leave the door open and pee with the slight anxiety that one of my roommates would wander toward the bathroom and be unhappy with the free peep show. Naturally the third option seemed best. It seems better to lean back on my exhibitionism than my carelessness. And I’ve been patient enough with my fellow dwellers’ “If it’s yellow, keep it mellow” attitude to feel that I have deserved the right to pee like a shameless Dad. 

Next up was a walk to the kitchen where I just stood with my head leaned against the one (yes, one) shared window in this four-bedroom apartment, the single-paned one that leads to the fire escape. I imagine that if there were no fire code, our landlord would have already divided the apartment up in such a way that it might not even have this. It’s a funny feeling to start wondering how close your living conditions are to the work environment of a Triangle Shirt Factory employee a hundred years before. 

Standing with my face pressed against the cold glass of the window glancing toward whatever hidden sun could be found makes me feel like I have a tropism. Tropism: I don’t know if that’s one of my favorite words or ideas. When we find something healthy, we’ll naturally start gravitating toward it. It probably doesn’t say much for my faith in free will. But you gotta admit that pre-serpent garden does sound pretty rich, if not a little dull. 

Well the only fruit tree that had much appeal in my garden this morning was the last quarter of my carton of Edy’s chocolate ice cream. Being that it was getting toward the bottom, I really couldn’t find any justification to defeat my overwhelming desire to (always. always) eat directly from the carton. So after letting it soften up for about five minutes, I did. And almost immediately, some of the half-melted ice cream that had found its way smeared down the side of the carton’s exterior rubbed up against my t-shirt—one of my favorites—my mint chocolate chip shirt (aka my beaver shirt). Suddenly I realized, “This is why you don’t eat out of the carton.” Another life lesson learned, twenty-eight years in. 

Last night I sat on the recliner in our living room, trying to make sense of a relatively dull story I was working on about the hoops that local and state government will have to jump through if they want to implement new tolls on bridges into Manhattan in order to fix their depleted budget. Being a late Sunday night, there was little on the basic channels we have to keep me company and I found myself watching Sex and the City. Carrie had been debating if she could really feel satisfied staying in a relationship with Mr. Big when she knew that he had no intention of marrying her. It had been a building tension in her ever since she went to a friend’s wedding recently. Much like me, she’s been tap-tap-tapping on the keys here at the old laptop trying to sort through her feelings about it. And finally it comes to a head and she confronts Big about it while they’re having a low-key date in his kitchen. She brings up it up right as he’s taking a wooden stirring spoon out of a pot of sauce and having her taste it. People on television are always tasting each other’s sauce. But they never show you how they get there. I’m assuming that it doesn’t involve for Four Cheese flavored jar of Classico that’s sitting dormant in the pantry to my right. 

There’s one genuine period of my twenties when I attempted to nest. After Erin and I broke up, I landed myself a studio in downtown Portland in a building centered around a courtyard, a sort of hipster Melrose Place. I was really happy with the furniture I had picked out for it—even received one of my first real housewarming gifts in the form of a pink and purple polka dotted shower curtain from my friend I worked with at the group home, Kate Needham. Oftentimes one of the highlights of my week was my frequent stops at Rite Aid, where I’d find myself spending thirty or forty dollars on everything from Swiffer wipes to my first wash cloth the Crest mouthwash I had been meaning to buy since reading an article about it on an airplane a year prior. 

What seemed like it could really balance the whole equation was if I could figure out a way to confidently start cooking for myself. I’ve probably prepared less than five percent of my own meals over the last ten years and those have primarily centered around peanut butter, frozen garden burgers and the occasional can of refried beans. I started to imagine what my life could be like if I just had my own soup—just one kind of soup—that I could prepare from scratch. The only solution I could come up with was an adult cooking class on the basics. And not for a lack of trying to track one down, but they apparently did not exist in the Pacific Northwest. Do they anywhere? So my staple meal for the six months I lived in that studio was the Happy Hour wonton nachos with beans from the Shanghai Tunnel and/or the one-dollar bowl of peppered edamame from XV, two of the three bars that lay directly below my floor. There were no dates with Carrie Bradshaw and thus there were no sauce-tasting moments. 

While there’s still no soup from scratch, I do have a tea I can call my own. It’s called “The Emperor’s White Tea” from a brand called “The Republic of Tea” and it costs around twelve dollars a canister. I first discovered it during the two weeks I lived in Jersey City with Erin a few Christmases ago. She wanted me to move in to her wonderful steal of a loft apartment that had all the charm of the my hipster Melrose Place pad two years later. I used to tease her that if we ever moved back to New York, it would have to be to Greenpoint where there seemed to be more excitement outside your door to bounce off of. 

Even during those two weeks, she was more inclined to have us cozy up in the loft, drink some white tea and even much to her chagrin put up with my insistence that she give reggae music a try (even though I secretly hated it just as much as her). But I was much more gung-ho to go out around the city, get tanked with the old comedy gang and find myself peeing in some guy’s winter hat I stole  just because he was being an insistent douchebag about forcing flyers for his band’s show on our table. I rejected the cozy Jersey City life and then I rejected the quaint downtown Portland life and now I clutch onto the white tea in order to escape the Triangle Fire of a life in Greenpoint I discovered instead. There’s plenty of excitement outside the door, but inside it’s all a mess.

Reading Rebel

I had very few goals when I got to college, but one of them was to be a part of the campus radio station. For Christmas a few years prior, two of my five cousins both unknowingly gave me books on Nirvana. Being fifteen, that provoked a silent reaction of “Wow guys, thanks for really getting me.” One of the books was just about Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, doing an analysis of every Nirvana song that had been put out. It was one of those glossy covers you spot cause of the weird font on the title is in that basically reads like the proposal that made a publisher green light it. Now that there’s the internet, any of us really could have written this book since it mostly was just the work of a guy who took the time to sift through years of interviews with the band and just sorted which quotes had to do with which songs. To be honest, that may even be giving the author too much credit. A lot of the book’s material may have come directly from the Michael Azzerod biography “Come As You Are” (which is totally legit.)  Not that I’m talking shit—the way that the lyrics books was written is actually not that far from what I do for a living now.

The second book, from my cousin Kirk, seemed like it was going to be a lot cheesier. It was called Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana by Gina Arnold. Route 666, yeah cause we’re all a bunch of devil worshipers who get depressed thinking of Kurt and fight back by getting into Marilyn Manson, right? Its title reminded me a lot of the book my Mom used to leave around the apartment a lot during my adolescence, Why Good Parents Raise Bad Children (sometimes stacked above Smart Women, Foolish Choices). But right after Christmas, my Mom and I were visiting my grandfather in Georgia and being that I turned out the lyrics book in about an hour and a half, I figured I might as well give this ooga booga Route 666 a try since I had nothing better to do.

Well the book’s not really about Nirvana at all. If the lyrics book just rode the coat tails of Nirvana’s post-mortem aura in order to get a book published–any book published, then Gina Arnold used it to get her book published. Being a teenager in 1995, the idea of “punk” was being sold to me pretty ruthlessly. Green Day and the Offspring were being hailed by magazine covers as the return of “punk rock” and had just sold about 13 million records combined. The way the story was told, these bands were a return to the last time the media had made a fuss about punk rock twenty years before when The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Ramones were making a name for themselves. But something about that scene felt corny to me in a hurry and after seeing Green Day at my first concert (fourteen years ago today actually,) I quickly jumped ship.  Now Nirvana would occasionally be referred to as “punk” as well—specifically in this tour documentary of them, Sonic Youth and a bunch of other bands I listened to called 1991: The Year Punk Broke, but I didn’t seem to understand the connection between the two punks. I knew I had been just a kid and all, but what the hell happened in the eighties? Gina Arnold filled in the gaps.

She did it as a fly in the wall. The book was not some exploration of “the underground rock movement” by someone who became fascinated in finding out where grunge came from. This was the tale of the girl who had bands sleep on her floor when they came thru town throughout the decade, who sat in the college station in Olympia and watched the Sub Pop guys do their weekly show and who sat across from the apple of her eye, The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg and played hangman with him (making him guess the title of his opus, “Unsatisfied”.) And aside from flipping back to the title page and writing down the name of just about every band Gina mentioned (with an understood “note to self: get into all of this”), the biggest thing I took away from Route 66 was that this was definitely the sort of life I wanted to live. Someday I wanted to be a small part of something that might never be a big deal to begin with.

So when I got to college, one of my first orders of business was to seek out the radio station. Just that summer KSCR had gone from sending out its signal on 104.7 throughout campus all the way into downtown LA to getting kicked off the air and becoming an internet only station (which in 1998 pretty much guaranteed it next to no listeners). The show I got assigned to intern at was on Friday afternoons from two to four. The first hour was run by this dude named Keenan who would always wear a fitted baseball cap backwards, play some poppy punk and goof around with Jed and some of his other buddies who would come down to the station. The second hour, this girl Kara would take over the controls. She would often seem bummed out, the way that teenage girls are depressed in sitcoms. One week a news Belle and Sebastien album came out (The Boy With the Arab Strap?) and she spent her hour just letting the whole album play. And we all just sat there in silence, listening to this exercise in melancholy, as no one else did.

And yet that was about the best thing I had going for me at the time.

Consumption

Tomato soup never gave up on me. Once every couple of years growing up, the idea would get stuck in my head, “Boy would some tomato soup be delicious right now,” (except that I never really spoke in that tone, inner monologue or not.) But I would be eating at my Grandma’s, like I did more days than not, and the urge would come over me to ask her if I could have some tomato soup with dinner. I would imagine how delicious the warm orange coating would be going down my throat. I’d picture the line of identical Andy Warhol Campbell’s cans in the grocery store and decide that it only made sense that one of them was a good match for me, since there weren’t any other kinds of soup I’d request. And I’d wonder, “How have I gone without tomato soup for so long?” Asking my Grandma for it didn’t just seem like a move toward instant gratification, it felt like the first step on a journey: my new life with tomato soup.

 

By the time I ate it though—wait, do you eat soup or drink it? This kind of thing drives me crazy. I feel like I eat something if I use a utensil the whole time I consume it. But once I pick it up and slurp it, it’s officially drinking. Like after I eat my cereal, I drink the leftover milk from the bowl. I’m trying to make this grand orchestration of a point about how I convinced myself time and again that I wanted tomato soup, only to realize that I had no particular taste for it whatsoever. And yet all my brain can think about is whether or not soup gets eaten or drunk. I suppose that’s fitting. We become so convinced and focused on what we’re certain that we want that we become distracted from things that start to genuinely matter to us.

 

But that’s just how it is. I spend two nights in a row watching DVDs of TV shows I rented and I begin to wonder if it’s time to go back to school and get my Masters, studying television—and really sinking my teeth into it, not half-assing it this time. I once made a pledge to myself that I would stop talking about ideas that I had of things that I hadn’t yet done. I could only talk about what I’ve accomplished. But that’s just another idea that sounds better than it works out. When I was getting ready to take my train trip this summer, it was thrilling to have something to talk about with just about anyone I encountered. People were always eager to plot out with me what route I was thinking of taking, what sorts of places I would stay in, and how I’d spend my time on the train. Everyone loves the sense of possibility. In a way, people almost feel like maybe they are gonna take that trip with me. They start co-navigating as if they need to think about what they’ll wanna get up to in Madison while I’m off lingering outside Lorrie Moore’s door. And you know what, maybe they will join me. There’s nothing saying they absolutely can’t.

 

But after you slurp that bowl of tomato soup, that’s it. ‘So how was it?’ Oh, not as good as I expected. It was kind of plain actually. I don’t even think I finished it all. So honestly, I’m not sure whether I’m an official tomato soup slurper or not.

 

‘But it’s definitely ’slurp’?’

 

‘Yeah, I think I’m pretty stuck on slurp.’

 

‘Well at least we have that.’