Emotional Cartography

My buddy Derek and I used to have a guarded relationship when we were first getting to know each other. Derek knew that he liked me, but he was also trying hard to “figure me out.” It didn’t help that when I moved up to his hometown, knowing next to nobody, and accepted his invitation to be his friend, that I was basically the equivalent of an emotional leper. I was going through one of those periods that you later look back at and realize that you were totally “off the map.” 

Where do you go?

Early on into our friendship, Derek would say things to me like, “I heard that you were moving up here and I didn’t really believe it. I have no idea why someone would wanna come live up here when they could just as easily be in New York or LA. Why are you here again?” And I would respond, “To become friends with you.”

But I had little to offer this friendship when I arrived. The only baggage I came into town with was the emotionally abusive relationship that I had decided should live here, in this town where no one would really know us. Maybe Derek could take this off my hands. He actually ended up doing just that. Years ago I realized that almost everything I say as a joke—sarcastically, ironically, whatever—is actually just as valid if taken in earnest, often moreso. When Derek and I were suddenly neighbors on our way to becoming friends, I basically said to him, “Take my wife here…No really, take her.” But no one was laughing and he actually did.

This might sound crazy, but I came to Portland to fail. I felt myself bursting at the seams and I refused to explode around the people who cared about me the most. The city should really start marketing itself this way. “Portland: The rain falls so easily up here, so why not you too?” It wasn’t a bad plan either. Most people didn’t know who I was nor did they seem to take notice of the ways in which I was wrecking my life. But that didn’t include Derek for some reason.

Derek’s an incredibly perceptive guy so I wonder if he could sense that something was wrong. I assume that he could. When most people detect that sense, they generally avoid the situation. I’m sure most of them don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing. You see the guy with the beard screaming to himself and you instinctively walk to the other side of the street with your purse held a little tighter. But Derek decided to be the guy that goes up to that bum and tells him that he likes his style, even if he’s taking the risk of getting clipped a couple times when the guy starts swinging wildly for no good reason.

The first night Derek went out of his way to hang out with me and my girlfriend, he took us to a party. I ended up insulting some friend of his by continually dubbing him “Awkward Guy” because the dude was in fact painfully awkward in how he interacted with almost everyone there. Sadly he was not “Oblivious Guy” and was well aware of the embarrassing social hang-ups he had and that I was choosing to publicly highlight. Then I pissed off the people whose house it was by peeing on the side of their place. Soon after getting to know me, Derek would have to have these talks with me, nicks on his chin still showing, where he’d say something to the effect of, “Hey man, the way you acted last night was really not cool.” And all I could say was, “You’re right.”

One of the biggest themes in Derek’s life is this ongoing fear that by sticking around his hometown, he’s created an obstacle for himself that doesn’t allow him to succeed in ways which he would like to, that Portland might be holding him back. But the biggest thing that keeps him around is having a girlfriend who lives there with him. That’s where their life is. Maybe it seems like going somewhere else would mean having a different life. I’m pretty sure that’s how I felt when I moved up near them.

A couple of months after being around each other in Portland, Derek and I went out for coffee one afternoon. It seems like something that would have happened a lot sooner in an area known for its coffee culture, but at the end of a day it really is a drinking town. Maybe they all are. But now he was getting serious. He said to me, “You know, I might talk a lot of shit, but at the end of the day, I really love my girlfriend and have no doubt in my mind that I’m gonna marry her.” He asked me if I felt the same way, assuming that I did. I told him that I didn’t. Now he seemed really stumped. Here he was, stuck in a place he often felt like he didn’t want to be, but grounded there by the girl he knew he wanted to be with. And now I tell him that I’ve brought a girl to that very same place—a place where I equally would rather not be stuck in—because I don’t wanna be with her. Off the map.

“Ya know, I think I finally figured out what your deal is,” he concluded that afternoon with. “You’re a guy who’s just all about being into his friends.”

Local Eyes In

In case you didn’t know, July is National Ice Cream Month. Don’t worry if you didn’t know. There’s still plenty of time to use it as an excuse to make a gluttonous pig of yourself. In my own personal quest to prove myself as “the guy most into ice cream of anyone you know,” I’ve been hitting a different spot on each day thus far.

In making sure that everybody is aware of my reputation, I’ve also been forcing the unnatural phrase “Happy National Ice Cream Month” into almost every conversation I have. It may sound clunky, but trust me—it goes places. Just yesterday while debuting it to my friend Pete Baker, an old buddy I grew up with in The Bronx, he got all excited. Because like everyone else I’ve told, Pete had no idea of the designation.

It turned out that Pete had just celebrated without even realizing it (because it’s summer and that’s what people do). He had been hanging out in a particularly touristy part of the city and got the urge for a milkshake upon spotting one of the many trucks that liberally use the Mister Softee model for their own rip-off version. No one cares about this of course because no one ever attributed any high degree of quality to Mister Softee in the first place. We all turn a blind eye to copyright infringement in in the name of finding the quickest way to recognize “ice cream on wheels.”

So Pete goes up to the fake Softee and asks how much a milkshake is. The guy in the truck says, “Seven dollars.” Outraged at this, Pete shoots back, “Well how much is it for locals?” The guy, sensing that Pete has been around the block (and unlock the rest of his customers, even further than that) senses that the only way he’ll make a sale is if he says, “All right, I’ll give it to you five. But don’t let anybody see what you’re paying me.”

Tales of a Sixth Grade Something

“Losing My Religion” was the song playing on the radio when Brenda Walsh and Dylan McKay went through their first epic breakup on Beverly Hills, 90210. Brenda fought back tears as she sat in the passenger seat of Dylan’s convertible, parked on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. And I did the same, alone in my bedroom in a night shirt and boxer shorts, wondering why my favorite song at eleven-years-old had to signal the end of something so magical. Oh no, I’ve said too much. I haven’t said enough.

As fifth grade at St. Margaret’s ended, the seventh and eight graders you were friends with—the Bobby Bailes and Kristine Browns—let you in on a little secret: sixth grade was going to be the best year ever. There was no clear reason why it was going to be so special—the girls would still be contained by jumpers and access to youth group dances was denied to us for another year until seventh. But they swore that you’d have to trust them: sixth grade was when it all happened.

Not long after New Year’s in the midst of “the big year,” I took my fist stab at having my own journal. It was triggered by a weekend that felt both monumental and yet totally ordinary. That Saturday, I had cried twice: once when my newfound favorite football team, the Atlantic Falcons, had been eliminated from the playoffs and once when Zack and Kelly had broken up on that morning’s Saved by the Bell. Kelly sobbed as she asked, “Can we still be friends?” Zack somehow held it together as he responded, “Forever.” Slater and Jessie terribly lip synched in the background. And as I watched in that same bedroom, I lost my shit. I wasn’t even 11 1/2 and here my heart was being broken left and right.

That weekend was one of the first times I remember feeling unsure just what to do with myself. It was the annual St. Margaret’s Holiday Invitational Basketball Tournament up at the gym, a major event on the social calendar. But that Saturday, face full of tears and it barely noon, I couldn’t bring myself to go. As of a month before, I had been expecting to play in the tournament with the rest of the St. Margaret’s Junior Varsity squad—well if not play, at least warm the bench and clown around for a packed gymnasium during time outs and halftime. But that was no longer an option since Coach Hanley had kicked me off the team for goofing around too much.

Did he kick me off or did I quit? I’m still not sure. All I know is that I got kicked out of practice one day for showing up in roller blades and then throwing a behind-the-back pass to Robbie Abdelaziz during drills. I was too shaken and guilty to go straight home, so I waited for the guys to finish up practice over at Evelyn’s, the bodega across the street from school. When practice got out, Kev Brown and some of the other guys came over and told me that it sounded like Hanley wanted me off the team. After feeling stuck in a state of limbo and unsure what to do about it, eventually a few days later Kev Farrell came and talked to me. His brother Brendan was the assistant coach of the team (and no fan of my antics). I told Kev that I wasn’t sure if I was still on the team or not. He said that the coaches had heard from the other guys that I had wanted to quit (stupid Telephone game). So I told Kev that I guess I should give him my uniforms to pass along. Breakups and job endings have always seemed to follow this route ever since. “You can’t fire me cause I quit.” “Oh, it was a mutual breakup. I’m just not sure who gave up on who first.”

So by Sunday of the tournament weekend, I was too antsy about feeling like the odd man out and decided to face the embarrassment of showing up at the gym. I don’t think that I stayed very long. I mostly remember staying close to the baked goods table in the back where Mrs. Downey was selling brownies. That seemed like a good combo for feeling safe. The only member of the JV who crossed paths with me was Dave Hannon, a fifth grader who neither really liked me nor hated me. Thus he probably didn’t care enough to think that it was weird that I would show up to watch the team that I didn’t want to be a part of.

The only reason I remember a figure as neutral as Dave there is because I know that I mentioned it in that first journal entry. The only other line I remember was a play on words off a 3rd Bass song: “It’s ‘92, Jew. So something’s gotta change.” That may have been what was so special about sixth grade for me. It was the first time that I started feeling like all this wasn’t enough.

After my first breakup, right around that same era, I found myself in front of St. Margaret’s, sitting against a wall alongside Petey Donoghue. The other young couples of the time were doing their thing on the nearby steps. The only song that seemed to fit the moment was Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” incidentally the epic breakup song from Pretty Woman. Petey sang it with me, making it more funny than sad. And yet it also felt pretty forced. What made the endings of those teenage television romances so hard to take was not just letting go of these couples that I had invested so much of myself into. It was knowing how badly I wanted the chance to have my own heart so tremendously crushed.

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.’

Recycling Bad Jokes

The afterlife starts to seem like a much more appealing idea once you know someone who’s died. My cousin-in-law’s Mom passed away a few weeks ago, several years after his brother (her son) had passed away tragically at a young age. And even though I don’t know their whole family particularly well–just my cousin-in-law and of course his wife, my cousin–there was something especially cathartic about the funeral services. This idea was in the air that she got to be reunited with the son she had lost and you couldn’t help but have yr spirits lifted just at the hope that fills such a notion.

Recently I’ve begun to face the idea of my own death on a more frequent basis and it has become more of a presence in my life than a mere scenario for my brain to picture. I guess what I’m saying is that it has become less about picturing what my funeral would be like and more of who would be waiting for me on the other side if I was to reach such a place. I think about Nick and how he would be so excited to take me to all of the most fun parties.

It’s funny that Nick’s the one in this ‘imaginary’ role, that as of right now he’s really the only friend I have over there. It’s funny because he’s sort of so perfect for it—to be the guy to handle being at a party where he didn’t know anybody. All of my close friends in college met Nick just as this person who sort of showed up in our lives unexpectedly and just existed around us like he had always been there. He moved into our place senior year as a local friend of one of the guys who lived there and that guy who brought him in was barely around. So Nick was just this guy living with us that we didn’t know who we really had no context for. And he just dove right in. One night he was “joining the century club” (attempting to drink 100 cups of beer in one night) with our friend Josh. Another he gained the nickname ‘Jug Wine Nick’ by showing up (uninvited?) at a theater party and just absolutely wreaking havoc on it, making twice as many enemies as he did friends. But those friends who got in the face of the bitchy stage managers and said, “Hey, that’s not some guy who just puked up purple bile all over yr driveway. That’s actually the coolest guy here,”– well, they never left him.

So now I’m gonna totally negate my original point and realize just how unhealthy it is for me to fantasize about an afterlife where Nick is just waiting for me to join the party. But death is the failure of life, right? And if you truly believe that yr Life is a failure, then it seems like the natural consequence would be death, no? Because at some point, it seems that you just give a lot of lip service to the idea of being a failure at life (cough) unless you are truly a failure at life. Yet still, even at that point, I find my brain gravitating toward finding a glass half-full even in that dire of an equation. We still look for that glass half-full, right? We cry our fierce cries and then find some promise in how uplifting a good cry manages to bring relief when it’s all through. So even in picturing yourself as a failure at life, as someone who ends up giving up or just plain couldn’t do it, can you help it but think, “Well maybe I would be a success at death.”

What’s wrong with me? I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be an asshole who’s being so flip about his own life when I know that there are multiple people who will read this who don’t think that my life is worthless, who could probably point to ways in which I’ve affected their lives that would be hard for even someone as morbid as me right now to shrug them off. And if I go ahead and publish this, is it just one big cry for help? When does yr life stop feeling like one giant fucking cry for help?

I did stand-up tonight and here was a ‘joke’ I thought of: “My ex-girlfriend and I just got in a fight over instant messenger where we both told each other to fuck off. The fight was over a website we both go to and how well each of us knew the ins and outs of this silly web page. And as I hear myself try to explain to you what the fight was about, I wonder: how much pain has to exist between two people that a detail as minute as that has them (virtually) screaming at each other?”

How did I forget to tell that one? I’m sure it would have brought the house down. Instead I talked about how showing up at this open mic won out over going to an AA meeting. And why did I not go to an AA meeting? Because I don’t feel like my drinking is troubled enough to be worthy of calling myself an alcoholic. I just wanna stop putting myself in situations where I risk getting girls pregnant that I don’t wanna get pregnant. Because if that happens, then I’ve just become my Dad. And I don’t know of an easier way to truly, truly make myself feel like a failure.

 

Shop ’til You Drop the Pretensions

One of the least heralded but most influential additions to our apartment growing up was when my Mom bought our first set of TV stands, the miniature tables that come in sets of four and fold up conveniently where they can be stored together without taking up a great deal of space in the corner of a room. At around 6:00, I would unfold them and put them out once my Mom had finished preparing a dinner that often consisted of something along the lines of Corn Flake™ chicken and green beans from Green Giant. We sat on the living room couch at our respective tables and tuned the television over to Lifetime where we’d watch Supermarket Sweep on a nightly basis.

Supermarket Sweep was a game show consisting of two-person teams of relatives or friends that would compete over who had the greatest command of the products within the grocery store. The show took place inside an actual grocery store with the teams answering questions about brands names and slogans in a spot a little bit off to the side of the registers. After this came a round where one member of each team took a shopping wagon through the aisles of the market and had around three minutes to fill their cart(s) with the most valuable groceries they could get a hold of. Their partner merely cheered from back at base as they hustled through the store choosing the ideal path toward stocking up with high ticket items throughout the store. Baby formula and giant hams were staples of any winning Supermarket Sweep team’s wagon.

The pairs of players on each team also wore solid-colored and often ill-fitting matching sweatshirts that by most people’s standards would be fair to call “awful.” But there seemed to be something in subjecting themselves to the joint torture of appearing in these rags on what was in all likelihood these people’s biggest moment in the “spotlight” that really solidified the bond between the teammates. Friends came across as “besties” and couples genuinely did seem “happily married.” No other moment highlighted this better than the run through the store as one teammate frantically pushed a cart filled with heavy meats as the other would watch on patiently and yell to their partner things like, “Don’t forget the diapers!”

Without those stands, my Mom and I would have been robbed of the nightly pleasure we took in all this and in all likelihood been forced into a traditional setup of sitting together at a dining room table. Every now and then, you’ll read about a study that declares how families who eat dinner together on a regular basis tend to have healthier relationships. In addition to that, these studies will typically specify that when they say “eat together,” it’s implied or even said outright that these family meals should have the television turned off in order to maximize communication. Never in reports of these studies though have I seen a footnote that says, “Yes, in most cases, this setup we described would be ideal. But we do understand that if yr family simply consists of a teenage boy and a middle-aged woman, conversations are generally going to be pretty stilted. So we’ll toss you a bone: it’s probably best for you guys to check out what’s on basic cable.”

 

Bringing Sissy Back

Part of the reason the fan stays on in my room overnight, even in these days of a winter chill sneaking into the overnight air, is that the button on top of it that controls the level of blow strength has one blue light for each of its three settings. With a window that is boarded up and a door that needs to be kept shut lest a strange dog come join me in the middle of the night, those tiny blue dots are the only source of illumination within my room throughout the night. But are they enough?

When people ask me what it was like living in Portland, one of my stock answers is that it’s a great town for self-starters, but it was easy to wallow as someone who generally needs a kick in the pants to get things going. Lately with it becoming more and more frequent for me to roll back into bed as my hours of sleep sometimes approach the double-digits, I wonder if the sun might be the kick in the pants MIA from my mornings right now.

Sometimes acquiring some great handicap seems like it would be the greatest gift in the world. That suddenly putting me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life would be just the springboard I need to get things going. “Hey, who was that dude in the wheelchair who kept talking about how he wants to hatefist nerdy Jewesses and then have them carry him into bed after sex while he makes them suggest how many other names Tina Fey considered before she settled on ‘Liz Lemon’? That dude was something else. He was really onto something.”

But then one day I was seriously thinking about what it would actually be like. I was in the deep, deep tunnel of the 168th Street Station waiting and a 1 train began approaching as I spied its arrival from the front of the platform. It was late at night and I had been waiting there for a while after taking the elevator down from the A train that I had just transfered from above. “This could be it. Yr big chance. Jump in front of this train as it’s slowing down and cripple yourself. Be the guy who talks about how he jumped in front of a train not in an attempt to commit suicide, but just in order to put himself in a wheelchair as the perfect setup for telling this story to you listening to it now.”

Then my eye caught focus of the puddles on the tracks, the ones that form between the rails and serve as baths for the pigeons that call 168th Street a home. And it dawned on me that being in a wheelchair might be a little like when you step in a puddle. At first it’s the only thing that you can think about. “My foot is wet. It’s getting wetter. I knew it was time to get new shoes. My foot is now cold and wet and it is only going to get cold and wetter. Anywhere that could rescue me out of these wet shoes and socks is miles away and it’s just a reality that my second-best foot forward will be one that feels like it is an abandoned orphan.” Eventually you get used to it and go about with yr day. But a puddle is serious business and does not let you forget that it has done some damage to you. 

“How are you doing today?”

“Oh, I stepped in a puddle.”

“What’s been going on with you lately?”

“Still dealing with this whole wheelchair thing. You’d think after five years I wouldn’t feel so ashamed that I need to wait for someone else in order to get out of bed every morning.”

Why am I so convinced that life is just a serious of variables that is awaiting one factor that can truly make or break it? Thus with each new one that comes along, I put stock in this one change as the one that is about to fix or cripple my life. A window with sun coming through it, a new girl in my life, joining a gym–these all create the illusion for me that they will be the permanent lift out of the fog of overall dissatisfaction. That is until they become the window that never stays clean, the girl who I must just be incompatible with, and the gym membership that’s a waste of money–then they are the burdens that are keeping my days down. 

Right now it feels like my life would be better served if it was less clunky. It ended up this way because I decided that it needed a little more clunk. When does the train coming in stop appearing to be the light at the end of the tunnel and when does the light at the end of tunnel stop turning into the train that is coming right at me?

Right now it feels like my life would be better served if it was less clunky. It ended up this way because I decided that it needed a little more clunk. Build it back up. Scratch that. Tear it back down. Stomping the sand castle is not enough of a pallet cleanser so you go to a different beach. Then you give up building sand castles altogether. At some point it seems that you’re bound to just really throw yr hands up and see where the tide drags you out to, even if it means you wind up right back at shore, only now washed up.

The New Adventures of Old Fall Me

I’m thinking about going pumpkin picking on Friday. It’s my the last Friday for a month that I’ll have the day to myself, which means that it’s the last “weekend” day for a month where I’m not tied up. The summer went by and I didn’t go to the beach once. There wasn’t one day trip to the Jersey Shore, no miniature golf, no walks along the shore where I was convinced that I had it all figured out. On top of that, I have access to a car for the next month, so I might as well take advantage of it. Plus I think that I’ve arrived at one of those places where it would be a good idea to “get away from the city,” if just for a day. I don’t think that I have any real problem with the city. Oh, aside from being part of a culture that won’t leave a cop alone for accidentally tasing a retard and then holding guy up to the stake so much for a week that he became so overwhelmed, broke down and shot himself on his birthday, despite being a husband and father of three. Okay, well maybe it really is time to catch a breath from New York life, drink some cider and have some teenager dressed up like Freddie Krueger come running out of the woods at me as I pretend that I’m frightened.

This fall was the first year in many that I got excited by the new fall season arriving on television. I sprinted home to catch the premiere of the new 90210, I teared up on my bed watching the return of my favorite show The Office and I’m counting the days until I get to re-enter the universe of my newest fixation, Liz Lemon on 30 Rock. It all gives me such a warm feeling in my gut. I wish I had my fourth grade cafeteria table back where Matt Loonam and I showed up Thursday mornings ready to gab about the original Beverly Hills, 90210. I look back and regret not getting in on the dialogue of Twin Peaks Wednesdays. You don’t realize that you only get to experience a weekly existential nightmare as a ten-year-old once.

I bet that I had already had another show in the Twin Peaks block. Let’s see. Fresh Prince and Ferris Bueller (which became Blossom) led into to Monday Night Football on Mondays. 90210 was followed by The Wonder Years and I wanna say Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis in Anything But Love on Wednesdays before 48 Hours (where I’ll never forget how hypnotized I was by watching people do ecstasy at night clubs–or the concept of “Love at the Laundromat” for that matter). Friday was obviously TGIF (Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers and my favorite Just the Ten of Us) that led right into 20/20. Although maybe Full House and Growing Pains had moved to Tuesdays by this point and Dinosaurs or some other junk had become part of the TGIF lineup. Thursdays were Cosby, A Different World, Cheers and what–Dear John? Night Court?–I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it didn’t get me to stick around for LA Law because at 10:00 Knotts Landing was on. Tuesdays that year may have started out with Saved by the Bell: The College Years. I didn’t watch Falcon Crest. It seems like a night when Brooklyn Bridge would have been on or maybe even my Mom still watched Beauty and the Beast with that creature of a man who looked like such a lion that he had to live below the streets. And yet he was such a romantic. Quantum Leap I bet! Okay, that would be fair if I missed out on Twin Peaks because of Quantum Leap. Ten-year-old Billy, you are forgiven.

In fifth and sixth grade, I had a reputation of being able to tell you what show was on any given half hour of prime time on any of the major networks. Sometimes the things in my life that I’m proud of feel so few and far between that I feel the need to go back there to at least try to regain that. So here I am, rushing back home from dinner with friends so that I can see if there’s any chance of something taking off between me and The New Adventures of Old Christine. One of the main reasons I’m writing today is because I told myself that if I get something down, I can then watch a couple episodes of Mad Men online, the newest show in my life. Dominic had me over last week for pizza, whiskey and Menthols just so he could show me the pilot from last year before we tuned into the new episode that was airing that night. It felt like a perfect Sunday night.

Sometimes I seriously consider trying to sneak into the monthly dances that still go on at my high school. Occasionally things like that will be my primary motivation in wanting to be a high school teacher. Maybe Friday I’ll invite along Sean, one of my oldest best friends. Maybe we’ll even steal a pumpkin.