Presidents of the United States of America concert/ Centralia

Oh geez.  I’ve had a long but very nice two days!  I’m exhausted so I’ll just be able to give the bare details:

Yesterday I had to work dayshift, so I had to do the usual 3am wake-up.  Worked until 3:30, managed to get to Mary’s (way out in the middle of Perry County) and then to Lancaster (if you’re from PA and you take into account I work in York and live in Carlisle, you’ll know what kind of odyssey I’m talking about).  We were in Lancaster for a show by the band Presidents of the United States of America (90s band famous for the songs “Lump” and “Peaches”).  We arrived what I thought was an hour before doors opened–but ti turned out doors didn’t open until 8 o’clock, whereas I was under the impression it was 7.  Oh well.  It was a very nice night out and we had a fine time just hanging out on the sidewalk there in Lancaster outside the Chameleon Club.  When we finally got in, we managed to grab front row spots, which at this point in my concert-going career, I all-but demand.

Long story short:  there were two opening bands.  The first, a local band called Slimfit, are telented musicians who wrote songs I don’t particularly care for and have a lot of work to do on their stage presence.  Nonetheless, the last 2 songs they played had very satisfying instrumental cresendoes that rocked me the fuck out, despite their obviously rehearsed and silly on-stage antics.

The second opener, Oppenheimer, was nothing short of amazing.  They’re a two-peice from Ireland who somehow manage to actually play the drums, two keyboards, and a guitar.  Their songs are intense, creative, and quirky without being worthless.  Also they gave a shout-out to Twin Peaks and used an air horn.  Check them out:  http://www.myspace.com/oppenheimer

Then the Presidents came out.  Now, I like this band, but I am not passionate about them.  I really, really liked their first album back in the day when I was first getting into rock music, and I think that (self-titled) album is still pretty dang good.  But the subsequent albums have been very hit-or-miss for me.  So I’d be lying if I said I was overly-enthused for the entire show; at times it wavered toward boredom for me (but damn if that crowd wasn’t banana sandwich for that band!  There’s a lot more hardcore Presidents fans than I’d have imagined!); that being said, there were parts of the show that made me damn-near giddy.  The setlist:

Main Set:

Lunatic to Love
Kitty
Volcano
Dune Buggy
Ladybug
Boll Weevil
Back Porch
Lump
Bad Times
Tiki God
Flame Is Fire
Nuthin’ But Love
Mixed Up Sonofabitch
Shreds of Boa
Ghosts Are Everywhere
Mach 5
Peaches
Kick Out the Jams

Encore:

Video Killed the Radio Star
Body
We’re Not Gonna Make It

“Kitty” as the second song waskiller.  Lots of improv, audience participation, very energetic.  Also, one of my fave PUSA tunes (PUSA being the preferred acronym for the band, despite it’s vague sexual undertone).

“Boll Weevil” is a song I’ve always been indifferent about but it owns in the live setting.

“Back Porch” was astonishing.  The arrangement was very different from the studio version, very extended.  About 8 minutes long (I checked my cell phone’s clock).  It was at this point that Chris Ballew (lead singer) first stepped onto the metal barrier right in front of me.  I have never seen this happen before.  Frankly, it was very dangerous, but very cool. The dude was not standing on the stage, he was standing on top of the metal barrier.  Directly in front of me, as I was stage center-right, which is Chris’ side. He leaned out over the audience and was actually hovering over me.  He repeated this feat a few more times throughout the show.

“Lump” ruled as much as you would think it would.

Apparently the songs between “Bad Times” and “Mixed Up Sonofabitch” were extreme rarities that we were all very fortunate to see, but I had never heard them in my life, and I thought they were “OK”.

“Ghosts are Everywhere” is the only song off the new album that I’m really into, and I was very pleased to see it live.

“Peaches” was spectacular.  Heavier than studio, and once again a very extended version.  Chris on the metal rail again (I have a picture of him over top of me during ‘Peaches’ on both my MySpace and Facebook accounts.)  Loved it.

“Kick Out the Jams”=perfect main set closer.  Actually, it should have been the show ender.

“Video Killed the Radio Star” is an unnecessary cover.  Sounded just like the original and didn’t have that “PUSA” sound.  A curiosity, at best.

“We’re Not Gonna Make It” is a rockin’ tune live, but should have been switched in position with “Kick Out the Jams”.

On the way out, I got a great Presidents show poster signed by all members of the band, for ten dollars.

Since Mary and I parked a few blocks away from the Chameleon Club, we drove away without hitting any traffic.  Stopped at a Sheetz for delicious food.  I had her home around 1am, and I got home around 1:30.  After shower and unwinding, I got to be around 3am–24 hours after waking up (an event that happens much too often to this 31-year-old).

My alarm went off 4 hours later at 7am.  My friend Amanda and I were going to Centralia today and needed an early start to make the most of this beautiful Sunday.  If you don’t know what Centralia is, may I suggest this informative primer before you continue with this blog entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

I’ve been meaning to go to Centralia for a long time, but it just hadn’t been working out.  Finally, I was able to go.  Long story short:  what none of the literature tells you is that on hot, dry days, there is almost no smoke or steam visible from the ground (although apparently the stench of sulphur never leaves the air).  The most surprising thing about the town is your ability to drive right past it without noticing.  After all the hoopla built up around it, you almost expect a hazy spectre to hang over the place, or some palpable pall of mystery.  The fact is,  it’s very much a normal-looking place until you realize all the open spaceyou’re seeing are vacant lots where houses once stood.  Again, this experience may have been different if the usual smoke had been coming out of the ground.  However, once Amanda and I were able to find the closed section of highway, things got much more interesting. Vacant highway+dying woods+lots of graffiti+smoking chasm in the highway+strange trash strewn about=cool and freaky.  Very eerie.  See my MySpace or Facebook pics.  Also, we explored many side roads and dirt roads and back paths that actually contained the true eerieness of Centralia.  Trash strewn everywhere, sulfur stench, utter silence, dirt roads leading nowhere, the occasional fellow wandering curiosity-seeker who also had no idea what the hell was going on, and just plain odd things (see my pic of the wig in a tree) and one could finally start to see how this place inspired the video game and (surpringly half-good film) Silent Hill.

I am really fucking exhausted and very sunburned.

West North Street, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

It’s half—or maybe more accurately, a quarter—of a house.  It’s a nice place, probably a hundred years old.  The floors are hardwood, the walls a standard white drywall, flat paint combo.  It’s in a near-constant state of furniture re-arrangement; like the lives of the two men who live here, the apartment is fluid, grasping, ever on the verge of something.

 

The day I moved in with Duane was the day I moved back to Pennsylvania from New Jersey.  In my previous life in Pennsylvania, I hadn’t spent much time in this area of Carlisle.  I had visited Duane here a few times, and had always had trouble finding it.  This time, I found it easily, pulling up in my ’83 Ford Escort, with my life jammed into the tiny backseat.  At first, the house actually seems a bit towering and hulking, it’s front porch extending far into the world beyond the front door, and the porch roof arching upwards like the peak of a great barn.  The brown, white, and earth-toned exterior of the house makes it something you can and do easily drive past without noticing, but once you’re familiar with it, it’s comforting, like oatmeal, or sand.

 

The day I moved in was the most relaxed “move-in” in the history of the world.  Duane acted like I had already been living there forever.  After discussing where our individual “spaces” were, we settled in to just co-existing rather quickly.  I set my coffee maker up immediately.  That night, some old friends came over.  I felt ecstatically at home in these four rooms, with their hardwoods, their flux, their smell of socks.

 

After a few months, life here had become life, and it moved with an interesting rhythm.  I worked a lot, coming home late at night through the side entrance into our disgusting kitchen, and hibernating with well-deserved sleeps in the sizeable back bedroom I had taken over.  I went to a lot of AA meetings, and voraciously read the AA literature while laying on my twin bed, with my window open during this hot summer of 2003.  Life swam.

 

I furiously and studiously worked the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, and saw from them true change in my life.  It was magical and uplifting. 

 

The first four steps are easy.  Then you get to Step 5:  “Admitted to a higher power, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.”  This is where we take the “inventory” we made in step four—where we write down every shitty thing we did toour loved ones before and during our addiction—and admit them to whatever Higher Power we’ve chosen to take over our will (this can be, essentially, whatever you want it to be), fully admit it to ourselves, and (the tricky part) somebody else.

 

Ideally this should be someone else in recovery, but for some reason, I chose my friend Burke.  And I called him immediately after having finished writing down the fourth step—once again, laying on my twin bed, with my window open and a nice breeze blowing, during the hot summer of 2003.  I told him I needed him over there immediately.  Burke, being the great friend he is, was confused, but obliged.

 

Burke sat in the rickety wooden chair, at the over-varnished decades-old computer desk that Duane had given me, after he found it in the basement.  Instead of a computer, a typewriter sat on it.  I sat on my bed, cross-legged, and read to Burke from my notebook.

 

I told them I was going to work, but really…

 

Then I just left her standing there…

 

I never called back…they had no idea where…

 

…I just opened his wallet, really…

 

…screamed, yelled, I have no idea why…

 

It was hard, but it was also easy.  I’m glad I chose Burke.  He’s guileless, and despite his cynical exterior, there’s not a judgmental bone in his body.  I knew this could be between him and I (and of course, all my loved ones, when I went and admitted to wrongdoings from this list to all of them in the ninth step) and, of course, that room.  That home.  Although I’d never lived there before, it was a homecoming.  The end of something, and the beginning.  Those hardwoods, that drywall, that smell of socks, and great friends like Duane and Burke and everyone else who was around at West North: it was the time of my life.

Woodfern Road, Neshanic Station, New Jersey

I woke up groggy.  Or at least, I certainly must have.

            Leaning up on my elbow, I felt my lower extremities ache and scream at me, and my neck shot pain down my spine; and yet, I felt good: rested, revived, serene.  Now—where was I?

            A few seconds of adjustment brought recollection.  I was in a Motel 6 in Carlisle.  The story of how I got here with almost no money and no car, all by myself, was already fading fast from my memory as I focused on the task at hand.  Swinging my legs off the bed I had chosen (I had two to choose from!) I shuffled through my wallet and located my Long Distance calling card, picked up the hotel phone, and called my father.  He’d be on his way to pick me up shortly.

            As I sat the phone down, I noticed for the first time the can of Busch beer sitting beside it.  Lifting the can, I was aghast that it was still half-full.  Without a moment’s hesitation, I walked to the bathroom and listened to the brew gurgle down the sink.

            I got dressed (barely noticing the two Busch’s on the floor, still hooked into their plastic ring), gathered my scant belongings into that old blue suitcase, and headed for the door.  I would wait for Dad outside.

            He showed up right on time, as is his style, in his new Sebring convertible.  He was cheery, if a bit subdued, but it was nice to see him and we chatted amiably.  After all, it’s not like I had killed someone.  I’d disappeared for awhile.  Now I was back.

            If only it were that simple.  But that bright April morning, it almost did seem that simple.

            The drive from Carlisle to Newville is painfully short when you simultaneously feel like it is the first time you are making the trip, as well as the final time.  Everything looks so new, so hauntingly familiar, as if it had risen from a dream soaked in gruel, or was a projection playing on your living room wall: the familiar mixed with the alien, the known with the forgotten, the quantifiable with the quantum.  I never wanted that ride to end, and it also couldn’t have been over soon enough.

            We pulled into the driveway of the house I grew up in, on Oak Flat Road.  I had been here only a week before, but a man in a white van waited for me in the driveway while I went in, and he told me I only had five minutes.  That’s when I stole the old blue suitcase and a pair of Dad’s shoes. 

            This time it was different.  It was better.  I was with Dad.  I was in the Sebring.  I could almost feel at home in this moment.  I could almost see my tiny, hairless legs playing basketball on this driveway, my squeaky boy voice recording fake movies on this lawn, my hungry adolescent body getting laid by the big fur tree under the summer stars.  Almost.

            Of course Dad told me I could take my time, there was no need to hurry.  Of course, he offered me food and something to drink, because he is a good dad.  But he was wrong—there was no time, much as we all might have wanted there to be.  This journey finally had an end, and I really had to get there before something—gin, Busch, cooking wine—reached out it’s hand to stop me yet again.

            I gathered up as much of my old stuff as I could think would be relevant in my new life (and as much as I could get before feeling like I was—somehow—running out of time) and Dad gave me the Mapquest directions he had printed out for me, along with—and I still cry sometimes when I think about how much this helped me, and how caring it was—each direction that I had to take written out in black magic marker on it’s own sheet of computer paper.  For instance, Turn Left Onto Rt. 15 was written in my father’s unmistakable handwriting in large letters on the paper.  Once I made that turn, I could simply throw that paper away and look at the next one.

            I loaded everything into Earl Grey, my 1983 Ford Escort, and—not without some excruciating pain—pulled out of the driveway onto Oak Flat Road, waving goodbye to my dad the way we always had when I was a kid, when I was a teenager.  Before I fucked everything up.

            Although my years as a ne’er-do-well seemed to take me all over the eastern half of the country, the prospect of driving all by myself to a state even as close as New Jersey seemed terrifying.  When you’re a drunk, you move around either with a pack of other drunks, orsober people who are putting up with you, or various forms of drug addicts who will drive you anywhere because they have to go there anyway, because the drugs dried up in Harrisburg.  When you wake up in Providence and you don’t know how you got there, the fact is that someone else took you there.

            Once I was on the highway, the fear relaxed a bit.  Just point the car and give it gas.  And there’s no bars on highways.  And the mind can roam a bit, ponder the concept of starting a new life, where nobody knows you, nobody thinks it’s great that you don’t stink today, or it’s a miracle that I’m clean-shaven.  Someplace I could start to be someone worth loving again.

            The sun lowered behind the horizon just as I crossed the border into New Jersey, and then things got trickier.  The directions took me off the highway.  Now I’m making all kinds of rapid turns and I’m having difficulty reading the directions in the dark—and if you think I own a cell phone at this point in time, you are just stupid.

            And then it started to rain, and then I got seriously into New Jersey, where traffic patterns are different than they are anywhere else in the world (things called ‘jug handles’ and ‘roundabouts’ are interspersed with standard intersections, and the yellow lights last forever) and, as I was wont to do just about all the time, I got really scared.

            I pulled into the first gas station I could find, and climbed out of Earl Grey into sheeting rain, brandishing my phone card and my 8 ½ X 11 piece of paper on which I had written the few phone numbers I could gather in the amount of time I had.  Trembling from the cold, the wet, and the fear, I picked up the stark black handset and dialed the two-thousand digits one has to dial when dealing with a phone card.  Finally I hear her voice.

            “Mom?”

            She’s there.  She’s worried.  She wasn’t sure I was still coming.  She didn’t know how long it would take me.

            “I’m lost.”

            She asks where I am.  I describe what I see.  And lo and behold, I am just a few minutes from her.  But she’d rather I don’t try to find her place on my own.  Stay put, she says.  I’ll drive there, and you can follow me.

            And she does meet me, pulling up in that trusty old Dodge Stratus.  It’s strange how in moments like these, your fear can subside as your shame billows.

            I follow her, and within moments I am pulling into a large stone driveway that is almost a parking lot.  I pull the old blue suitcase out of Earl Grey and follow her, with one huge sigh of relief, into the house.

            The entry room, which is unfinished, with plywood walls and a cement floor, smells like the basements I adored in my youth.  There are stacks of plastic storage containers here, and I immediately know they are full of Beanie Babies. 

            Through the first door we came to the laundry room, which didn’t just smell like a laundry room, but like Mom’s laundry room.  I almost wept with the knowledge that Mom herself did laundry here, and that soon, she would probably be doing mine, as well.  There’s nothing quite like regression to make you feel comfortable.

            And then up the stairs into the apartment proper.  The light brown stairs, with their swirly-wood-patterns, felt like home right away.  I wanted to walk up and down those stairs every day of my life (and I still want to).  As we emerged into the living room, there seemed to be a hearth-like glow emitting from somewhere; the lighting was soft, yet not dim, and coming from everywhere, like the first hour after a snow has fallen.  And the smell of cigarette smoke hung round the room like a welcoming committee—everyone in the world hates that smell but smokers; to us it is a nirvana of acceptance. 

            Turning, I see John, Mom’s husband, in his chair, smiling really wide at me and immediately saying something very hospitable and kind—the specifics of which I now forget, but my appreciation of that moment has not abated.

            And then the lovely clutter!  There is just stuff everywhere (just like their apartment in Dillsburg), but it is lovely stuff.  Books, movies, knick-knacks and gew-gaws to be fawned over, played with, turned around in your hand.  A roll-top desk is full of Blues CDs, a plastic TV tray overflows with Grisham novels and backscratchers, piled in a corner is the complete Ken Burns’ Civil War on VHS and a multi-volume set of reference books on fighter jets.  It’s like I had made a bunch of wishes to an only mildly confused genie.

            And then the cats greet me.  They remember me from the Dillsburg days, which is nice.  It’s always nice when animals remember you, and like you.  Li’l Bit, Baby Doll, and Angel—my saving graces.  I knew immediately, as they rubbed their soft fur against my legs and chased the red dot I made on the floor with a pen laser, that these darling creatures were going to save my life.

            I am lead to the kitchen and told to have whatever I want, to make myself at home—because I was home now.  The kitchen smells like Mom’s kitchen, with a little bit of whatever John’s kitchen smelled like thrown in for good measure, and the smell of cats and cat food.  The white Formica countertop, loaded with just-dried dishes and various snacks in various stages of consumption, draws me in like a psychiatrist’s couch.  I open the pantry door and am greeted by canned chili, three kinds of cereal, granola bars, Campbell’s soups, corn chips, ravioli.  I realize, for the first time in many years, I am hungry.  I started eating and, quite frankly, haven’t stopped since.

            Not much in life can compare to the first few hours you spend at an obvious end to a long and painful journey.  Even though the future is uncertain, it’s never as uncertain as the journey was.  It’s like being in a huge womb, waiting to be birthed again.

            I have no idea what we talked about, Mom, John and I, as we sat in the living room, probably with CNN on mute, smoking our cigarettes, stroking the cats.  But it was pleasant.  I miss those blue walls.  That Oriental shower curtain.  All those Grisham novels (though I’ve never read one).  We didn’t stay up long.  I think we were all eager to go to sleep, start the next day anew, see what life would be like now.

           I lay in bed for some time after Mom and John went to sleep, watching cable television (I found that night that I was fond of American Chopper), stretching out and feeling my body, reflecting on nothing and everything.  Suddenly I rose from the bed and found the phone in the kitchen.  I got my phone card and my sheet of paper out of my wallet and called her.  She didn’t answer, and in fact, she’s never answered since.  And I can’t blame her, after everything we put her through, everything she saw.  And she was so young.  Some things, you never get a chance to fix.

            I lay back down, secure in the notion she’d answer the next day.  I put the DVD of the movie In the Bedroom in and lay down in the dark.  Li’l Bit appeared on the bed and cuddled up next to me.  Her purring was an elixir of love, and I petted her slowly, lovingly, knowing I needed her so much more than she needed me.  I am sick, and you’re gonna help me get better, I whispered to her.  I repeated it.  I am sick, and you’re gonna help me get better.  We fell asleep together.

Vine Street, Newville, Pennsylvania

Act I

 

The stage is sparsely decorated: we see only an old, tattered couch and a matching loveseat, a used, varnished coffee table (which is very low to the ground) and an entertainment center which seems to have been bought in the early Nineties.  The entertainment center houses a 19-inch television, a VCR, a stereo, and some books.  It is not important what type of stereo it is, except that it is big.  The rest of the stage is black.  Lights should be concentrated mainly on the set dressing.  Director and Lighting Designer use discretion when lighting the wings of the stage.  A feeling of barrenness should be achieved.  Also, we should be made to feel that the entertainment center is, in fact, the “center” of this tableaux.  An armchair can be added to the set, but it will not be used.

 

Enter Cassie and Willie, a young married couple.  Willie is in his early thirties, thin, Bohemian.  Cassie is in her mid-twenties, short, artsy.  The couple stand and look at the couch for three beats, in silence.

 

Willie:  I really don’t know.  He could have peed on it.

 

Cassie:  I really don’t know.  I didn’t think he was that absurd.

 

Willie:  Absurd?  He’s just a drunk.  That’s not absurd, it’s terrifyingly standard.

 

Cassie:  Smell it.

 

Willie:  Why should I smell it?  I took care of that teenager he got drunk last week.  She wouldn’t stop crying.  I had to hold her down to keep her from running into the street!  You smell it.

 

Cassie:  Oh, what a way to begin our New Year’s Eve!  Why don’t we just pretend it’s not there?  Everything goes away eventually.

 

Willie:  What a way to see the world.

 

Cassie:  It’s no different than the way you see it.  I just word it more simply.

 

Willie (sitting on the loveseat): Neither of us sees the world that way at all, and you know it.  Nothing goes away.

 

Cassie:  Not even farts?

 

Willie: Not even farts.  Every fart that’s ever been farted is still hanging in a major pocket of collective fart consciousness, above Greenland somewhere.  Where’s my tea?

 

Cassie:  You’re going to turn into tea.

 

Willie:  Yes, Mother.

 

Cassie:  Maybe that’s tea on the couch.  It leaked out of you because your body was fully saturated.

 

Willie:  You become more ridiculous with each passing sentence.

 

Cassie (sitting on Willie’s lap):  Isn’t that why you love me?

 

Willie:  No.

 

Cassie:  Then why do you?

 

Willie:  Because you’ve always been willing to smell the couch when we suspect our roommate has peed on it.  Oh, and those canned hams you keep in the back of your pants.

 

Cassie:  I can never decide if that’s cute or annoying.

 

Willie:  Things are usually both.

 

Enter Seth.  He is short—about the same height as Cassie–, squat, and slovenly, yet possessing of a tremendously handsome face.  He is unshaven, with a two or three day growth of hair on his face. (Under no circumstances should Seth be portrayed with an actual beard.)  He enters and sits immediately on the couch, precisely in the spot Cassie and Willy had been looking at.

 

Seth:  So we ready for this New Year’s Eve or what, folks?!  I am ready to rock this house!

 

Willie:  I’ve never cared much about New Year’s Eve.

 

Seth:  Nobody does!  That’s why it’s such a popular holiday.

 

Cassie:  I have no idea what to do tonight.  It always seems like everyone in the whole world has something amazing planned and I—we—end up having an essentially normal evening.  Just once I would like to feel as though I—we—brought the New Year in with some kind of grand style, some form of eloquence or transcendence, something larger than life, or—hell, something smaller than life, so long as it was different from life.

 

Seth:  Now you’re talking, Cassie!  Bring on the world, I say!  Just make sure the world has gin, menthol cigarettes and a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

 

Willie:  I really don’t know.  Our friend Jen is coming over.  I just hope she’s not as crazy as she used to be.

 

Seth: What?  Who is this vixen?

 

Cassie:  A friend of Willie’s from college.  We hadn’t seen her in a few years, then we ran into her at the guitar store last week and invited her over.  You’ll probably really like her, Seth.

 

Seth:  Oh yeah?

 

Cassie:  Yeah.  She’s—

 

Enter Jen.  She is chubby and short, yet wholesomely attractive.  She is dressed ridiculously—a tall, multi-colored, plush hat, bright green pants, a Confederate Army uniform shirt, and a pink, feathery scarf which she never removes, and shin-length brown Doc Martin boots.  Costume Designer should add little or nothing to this outfit.  Jen is loud and animated.  Her body movements are fluid yet exaggerated.  Jen acts as though she knows she is in a play.

 

Jen:  I am so totally here!  Bring on 2002!  Who wants to get drunk?  Who wants to get high?  Who wants to run screaming outside just to show the world we’re here, just to show them they can’t stop us, just to take that proverbial road not taken, to shake up the Misters and Ma’ams and goody-two-shoes and the Elvis lovers and the floor boards of that great stoic brainiac in the sky?  Who wants to fuck my boots and shit in my hair?

 

Willy:  I really don’t know.

 

Curtain

 

 

 

Act II

 

 

Two hours later.

 

The stage is now set to resemble a front porch.  We see a white front door (with screen door), a white overhanging awning, two white plastic chairs and an ashtray on a milk crate.  Lighting should be even lower now, as we are out-of-doors at night.  We should feel intimate with a small set centered on the stage.  All four characters are present.  Willie and Cassie occupy the chairs, Seth and Jen are standing, although they are both frequently moving; their movements are short of pacing but more than fidgeting.  Everyone has a drink in their hands.  All four are smokers and occasionally light up. (Good luck finding a playhouse that allows this nowadays.  However, it is necessary.  ‘Miming’ the smoking will not do.)

 

Cassie:  But then where can feminism go from there?  I mean, is that it’s logical conclusion?

 

Jen:  Who knows?  Dworkin wouldn’t have it any other way, but of course, she’s dead now.

 

Cassie:  All the best ones die.

 

Seth:  Yes, and the worst ones, too.

 

Jen:  I just can’t get over the fact that your walls are white.  Off-white, no less!  I mean, c’mon, everyone’s walls are off-white!  I really pegged you two (addressing Cassie and Willie) as less conformist than that.  I thought I’d come over and find pink and camouflage and Sistine Chapel type stuff painted on your walls.

 

Willie:  They’re just walls.

 

Jen:  Nothing is just a wall!  A wall is a barrier or an enclosure, a comfort or a menace, a home or a prison.  You can’t just go through your life looking at what the last person who lived here thought was acceptable, was easy-on-the-eyes, was relaxing or comforting or homogenous or sane!  That’s like living someone else’s life—or someone else’s version of life, or what passed for life for some forty-year-old single mother with two kids who liked to watch Regis and Kathy Lee after she got the little squirts onto the school bus.  Did you keep her couch, too?  How about her shower curtain?  Willy, do you picture her face when you’re balls-deep in Cassie?  Of course not!  You’re not living her life, you’re living yours, so why do you want her walls?

 

Seth (to Jen): I’m in love with you.  (Nobody seems to hear him say this.)

 

Willie (to Jen): So what should we do about our carpet?  Rip that out, spend thousands of dollars just on principle?  Besides, we rent this place, we can’t do whatever we like.

 

Cassie:  And I quite like our carpet, anyway.

 

Jen:  Oh of course there are practical concerns here.  You have to live out loud, as far as you’re able.  I understand that.  But you’ve got to do what you can.  You’ve got to try to be heard.

 

Willie (to Jen):  Did you just use the phrase ‘live out loud’?  Because you can’t be Thoreau one minute, and Oprah the next.  If you’re going to be so on-message, you’ve got to choose your words carefully or you’ll dilute yourself.

 

Jen:  Thoreau?  I’ve never been Thoreau.  Seth, was I being Thoreau?

 

Seth:  I’m in love with you.

 

Jen:  See?  Seth thinks it’s more of a Kafka thing.

 

The lights all go down except for a spotlight on Seth.  The other three characters are now ‘miming’ having a conversation.  We see them, in the dark, talking and gesturing, but we cannot hear them.  Seth watches them for a full ten seconds, with visible beaming affection.  Then he turns from them and walks to the lip of the stage.  He now addresses the audience.

 

Seth:  Well, hello there.  I suppose this wasn’t much of a play, was it?  There’s not much of a plot.  It’s just some people talking for a few minutes.  We didn’t really follow those pesky “guidelines” (here Seth does ‘air quotes’) that people have set up for plays to follow.  Well—Act One is a rather nice, tidy Act One, but then it’s just like we got sick of pretense and just talked about our theme, like the playwright just wanted to get it over with so he or she could go take a long shower.  And I hope that they did.  But, what was our theme?  Was it about walls, or houses?  Or was it love?  Or roommates?  Or the change that comes with a new year, a new house, or a new love interest?  Well, I know, for me, I’ve gotta ask how much difference there is between Love, and a House, and Change, because maybe we’re dealing with just one theme, no?  I’m not suggesting there is no difference between a house and love—I’m just saying maybe it’s something we could think about.  Maybe it’s something we could put in our meat grinder and see if sausage comes out the other end.  Ah, I have no idea what I’m talking about anymore.  And I haven’t the energy to summon up a compelling and dramatic end to all this.  Thanks for being here and watching a caricature of a memory.  Now go home and paint your walls.  Or don’t.  That’s a choice that should always be up to you.

 

CURTAIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Bloomfield, Perry County, Pennsylvania

It’s a half a house, on the ‘main drag’ of this small country town.  New Bloomfield is a town a bit smaller than the small town I grew up in, with one main street and a few tiny offshoot streets, one diner, and a Uni-Mart.

The house itself is old; it’s red brick, and the wooden parts of it’s structure are a dirt-brown, but have been painted over so many times, they are thick with hidden layers.

The rooms inside are terribly narrow; this house was not designed to be split into two halves.  And since I’m essentially squatting here (with a married couple and an unmarried couple), the actual room for me to maneuver is minimal.  I have a couch (usually) and that is all; my room is the living room, which is also everyone else’s living room.

It’s a two-story house, with a tiny kitchen that I barely even remember, and a winding, death-defying staircase which I ascended as rarely as possible (but frequently, anyway, as the only bathroom was upstairs.)

My life in this house is partying.  I love to party here, and everyone else usually comes along for the ride.  Sure, I’m doing some depressed drinking alone late at night here, like everywhere else, but since this house has somehow become a gathering place for our ‘crew’ (which is odd, since we are at an outpost of civilization, half an hour from the closest supermarket and even further from where most of our friends live. Somehow, they make the trek out here often) I have found a renaissance of partying.  And we have all discovered “King Dickhead”.

King Dickhead is a drinking game that utilizes playing cards, but you don’t really play cards.  Certain cards and suits do things like give players ‘powers’, force other players to do things, or kick off other ‘mini-games’ within the game, such as “Never Have I Ever”, in which  the player who drew the card says something like “Never have I ever blown a dude,” after which everyone who has blown a dude has to drink.

These games could reach epic heights of ridiculousness in those days.  We were a group of people undergoing a stretching of our moral compasses, and the debauchery and elegant silliness that took place in that small living room was practically Roman.  During one particular game, I was made to sing “I’m a Little Teapot”, complete with all the body motions, completely nude in front of everyone, another friend was forced to disrobe, sit Indian Style, lean back, and place a lit cigarette in his asshole, for everyone to see.  That was gross. But hilarious.  And don’t get me started on the now-famous ‘parade of penises’.

It was after one of these particularly raunchy games of King Dickhead that a bunch of us were sitting around the living room, relaxing, in various forms of drunkenness, that someone pulled out an acoustic guitar and began strumming it.  Almost immediately, one of the females turned to my close friend P—, and said, “Ooooh, can you sing that Seven Mary Three song? What’s it called?  I love it when you sing that song!”

See, I had just recently introduced P— to the band Seven Mary Three, by way of the song that was being referenced, which is called “Lucky”.  For years I had been the only Seven Mary Three fan I knew, and I tried to convert just about everyone I knew, to no avail.  Everyone in that room had been subjected to my Just listen to this one! pleas and they had all summarily shot the band down.  Now, less than a month after P—‘s conversion, he is being enthusiastically asked to sing one of the band’s songs at a party! You can probably all see why this would be minorly annoying, but I was incensed beyond all belief.

I stood up from my seat on the floor and ranted immediately.  Everyone was justifiably shocked by the level of my anger (later they would become accustomed to this sort of behavior).  When it became apparent that my wrath was not going to cause anyone to say “Why, Seth, I had forgotten you liked this band first! Why don’t you sing us the song instead?” I stormed out of the room, up the narrow, winding staircase and stopped in the hallway at the top of the stairs.  I was incredibly drunk and could barely see straight, and my anger was absolutely boiling.  I punched a wood-paneled wall as hard as I could, but would not feel it until the next day.  I paced.  I said terrible things under my breath.  But I didn’t fall apart until I heard the first few chords of “Lucky” float up the stairs to me, and shortly after, P—‘s soft, understated voice charming the first few lyrics out of his throat…Mean Mister Mustard says he’s bored…of life in the District…he can’t afford…the French Quarter high…

 

I began to cry, to bawl, to sob, as I slid down the wall and sat with my back against it, my body heaving and snot running down my face.  I was as twisted as the staircase in those days, and as immovable.

Elliotsburg, Perry County, Pennsylvania

OK here’s where we’re going to start:

 

High above the ground, you see mostly green.  Textbook examples of rolling hills, spotty groves of trees, country-style roads that meander in ways which make no surface sense. The blue Appalachians rise, meekly, like the rolled blanket of a sleeping giant, in the periphery.  Amidst all the green, houses are almost invisible; they are rare, at any rate, in this farm country. Most of the land is divided into grand swaths meant for corn, cows, or waiting for corn or cows.  Outcroppings of non-farm dwellings are grouped into ‘towns’ of 6 or 7 houses, skirting pastureland.  As we descend from our perch in the sky, one such tiny outcroppings of houses comes clearer into view: Elliotsburg.  The town exists on one street, for about half a mile. The handful of dwellings are mostly white, about a hundred years old, and absolutely quaint.  From a hundred yards above the town, you can see that all the inhabitants are blessed with large back yards, usable front lawns, ample loose-stone driveways.  Everyone’s lawn is as green and lush as a newly opened golf course.  Sheds as big as barns, in shoddy, Termited disrepair, dot every-other back yard like fire hydrants in a drought city.

            Descend even further with me now, narrowing our view to this one particular house, whose address I forget, if ever I knew it.  We are looking at, from 50 yards above it, a one-story ranch house—white—with a large, almost one acre backyard.  At the rear of the yard sits a dilapidated barn, brown with age and water-logged.  An exuberant blue spruce dominates the smallish front lawn, and the slow rise of Appalachian foot hills can be seen just beyond the wooden fence which marks the back end of the house’s property.

            Now if we drop even further, you can see some details, which may or may not matter to you.  The red front door (never used; this is one of those ‘side door only’ houses), the wrought-iron hand-rails leading up the four side steps; the peeling paint everywhere, the lush lawn ravaged by dandelions upon close inspection.  Hover by the aluminum white side door as I open it for you.

            Inside, we see a house that is the picture of domestic normalcy.  The side door opens into a medium-sized kitchen, with a double sink, an eggshell dishwasher, bread on the counter.  The fridge is marked by homey magnets and drawings done by a very young child.  The patterned linoleum of the floor is straight out of Good Housekeeping.

            If we float on through the kitchen, we come tothe living room, with it’s blue carpet, it’s entertainment center housing a modest-sized television, VCR, and one of the world’s best stereos.  Two not-cheap couches hug the walls, and a never-used recliner perches in an inconvenient corner—another American case of having more stuff than space.  The glass coffee table is unclassy and out-of-place, yet in it’s barbarism, it’s statement within the room is succinct.

            Turning at a right angle, almost going back into the kitchen, we run into two bedrooms.  The master bedroom sports a large, almost luxury bed, a quality, almost-antique highboy (which I would later personally burn on a pile of trash), a small television, a bureau with an oversized mirrors. The only thing interesting to ever happen in this room, methinks, are things I was never privy to.

            The other bedroom—considerably smaller—seems unoccupied.  Blankets lay heaped in a corner, an open package of disposable diapers sits in the center of the room.  It is unfurnished and smells like baby wipes and tobacco.

            One thing that has been very noticeable and out-of-place to you since we entered the building is that a rock band is distinctly playing in the basement of the house.  Not a CD of a rock band, but a real, live one.  On the upper floor here, it is difficult to discern what exactly they are playing, or if they are any good, but the true concussive feeling of actual drums being pounded and a real man singing into a microphone is unmistakable.  We turn from the bedrooms and float back through the kitchen, almost back out the side door, but we stop just before leaving, making a left turn, and we are facing a brown, varnished wooden door.  I will open it for you.

            The rock music now blares into our faces, the fullness of it’s sound raising our blood pressure.  Float with me, will you, down these rickety, wooden basement stairs?

            The basement is dark.  It runs the length of the house but is lit by only one small, practically useless lamp in a faraway corner as well as Christmas lights which are strung up the whole way around the room, all year round.  Tapestries line the walls, as well as occasional egg-crate mattresses, for sound-proofing.  Music equipment takes up the entire center of the room: multiple amps, guitars and guitar stands, a keyboard, a drum kit as well as piecemeal percussion instruments, mic stands, a small mixing board, pedals galore, and stuff I never understood.  Mixed in with these musical items are small ‘artsy’ artifacts, like a lava lamp, a Buddha bust, incense holders.  The basement, now like always, smellsdistinctly of damp must and incense.

            Four men are playing rock music—not typical rock music, but a dim, almost evil rock music, that meanders frequently from the pre-written songs into extended, intense jams which often sound like a slow ride into Hell.  They are talented men but destined for day jobs.

            Let us briefly turn away from the band, back toward the stairs we just came down.  You will see that, to the left of the stairs in a darkened corner sits an old ratty couch with an all-but-destroyed coffee table in front of it. Let us hover in closer to it.  Ah, yes, there I am.  I am sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette and drinking gin-and-coke, watching the band with much interest.  My unshaved face looks like gold divots have been pasted haphazardly to it.  I have on that patterned gray flannel; it feels like I wore that for years.  I’m wearing my gray derby hat, too.  Backwards, like I usually did.  This basement is my bedroom, and this couch is my bed.   

            I’ve been living in this band’s practice quarters for quite some time now, as well as accompanying them to local bars, helping carry the equipment, sitting through bands I didn’t give a shit about to watch ‘my’ band play.  And even though watching them practice is, to me, what watching television is like to other people (there is no television or even radio in my basement bedroom), I still eagerly watch them as though a very special private performance were being put on for me.  Sleeping isn’t a problem; I can drink myself to sleep even if a band is playing in my bedroom.

            Oh my.  I remember this moment!  Look, the singer is taking a break to go call his girlfriend, but the band continues jamming.  They’re just in a nice, quiet little groove, the bass throbbing in slow-time, the guitar in a sort of fuzz repeat, the drummer noodling along with the bass line. 

            I had been waiting for months for an opportunity like this.  I wanted to show the band that I was a creative fellow.  See, during their jams, I often made up impromptu lyrics to them in my head which I felt were a bit better than anything the lead singer came up with. It wasn’t that I thought I could be the band’s singer, by any means, but simply a desire to be accepted as a fellow artist.

            Watch me get up from the couchand walk to the lead singer’s microphone.  I stand there for a few brief moments, taking in the music, trying to feel what it is ‘about’.  The three band members don’t notice that I’m standing there yet; the bass and guitar player have their eyes closed, and the drummer is hidden behind his drums.  Then I open my mouth, and in my regular speaking voice I say:

            “You see that tree over there?”  I pause for four measures of the music, then: “I’m gonna chop it down.”

            A quick glance around will reveal that the bass player’s eyes are still closed, but the guitar player is looking at me with a sincere look of disgust.  I walk away from the mic stand slowly, nonchalantly, as though it had just been a minor lark.  But I don’t return to the couch, I walk up the stairs, outside, to walk around the countryside a bit.  I had never been so embarrassed in all my life.

Orange Street, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

It is the narrowest house ever built.  It is comically narrow, as if it were built for a surreal Hollywood production—perhaps the latest David Lynch film.  From the street, it is less than half the width of it’s neighbors on either side; it’s a free-standing townhouse.  It’s white aluminum siding is only white in the clinical sense; years ago it must have become eggshell, and then the ceaseless machinations of weather and time pushed it over the brink all the way into a yellow, sponge-like hue.

 

The interior is very dark, everywhere.  Dark– almost menacing–wood-paneled walls soak up almost all of the light in the downstairs rooms, and a deep gray carpet takes any light that’s left over.  The kitchen linoleum is the color of shit, a bold, sickened shit, perhaps let out by a man with rectal cancer; it is shit that’s almost blood.  The cabinets are of the darkest oak the builder (re-modeler?)  could find, their swirly grains almost undetectable in the near-midnight of their varnish.  It is dark down here, and not welcoming.

 

Up the stairs—the narrowest stairs ever—it becomes lighter.  The walls in the stairwell are wood-paneled, but they’ve been painted over in an off-white.  The stairs are steep.  They are too steep.

 

On the second floor, the walls are a white Formica.  There are three bedrooms and a bathroom, all done in white Formica with brown hardwood floors (again, the color of death shit).  The bedrooms are small, and mine is the smallest.  I have one tiny window that looks directly at a neighbor’s blank wall.  The window had a fan in it the whole time I lived there, anyway.  I don’t have a closet.  This is the most unadorned room I’ll ever live in.  My posters and artwork didn’t make the move from the dorm.  My clothes are all in a basket on the floor, and on piles beside that, as well.  My bed sits in one corner, my television in another.  This room is remarkable mainly because I had a mini-fridge all to myself in my bedroom, an odd childhood dream of mine that would only be realized in this abode.  It turned out to be not as exciting as a 5-year-old had imagined, but handy, at least, for an active alcoholic.

 

I didn’t know the guys I lived with, and even now, I could not tell you their names, and barely what they looked like.  The previous school year had been ending and I was out of a place to live (a lot of college students are scrambling for places to live at the end of the year) and some guy I vaguely knew through someone else was scrambling to find a roommate.  I did what I had to do.  When I moved in to the house on Orange Street, I was beginning the heaviest drinking phase of my life, my parents had just gotten divorced, I was still reeling from the loss of Her, and I was secretly not going to classes.  I was beginning the only actual ‘depression’ of my life.  Hence, I did not like the house on Orange Street.

 

I remember very little.  I didn’t live there long, and most of my time was spent in my room, laying on my bed, trying not to kill myself.  I remember, probably, the smell more than anything.  The whole house was musty, pleasingly moldy, like a drawer with slightly old bananas in a brown paper bag.  I remember the sound of steps on the hardwood floors, sqeezey-echoes, monotonous soft-taps, everywhere the same; there were no floor spots that sounded different, no squeaky stairs or thudding corners.  I remember the pot my mother gave me, in some high hopes that I was becoming an adult (this was the first place I lived with a kitchen) sitting unused, forever, in the high cabinet over the sink.  I wonder who has it, now?

 

I remember, once, walking downstairs in the middle of the night.  Why? I can’t remember.  I stood in the darkened kitchen, listening to the sounds of the house, the sound of my heart beating, the sound of my brain churning.  Unexpectedly, I opened the door to the basement and went down.

 

I had only been down there once before, when I first moved in.  I had had to put my dresser down there because it wouldn’t fit up the stairs.  This basement is beyond an ‘unfinished’ basement.  It is a glorified crawl-space, with mud floors, stone walls, cob-webs, the works.  The furnace and water heater are down there, and that’s all it existed for.  That, and to store my dresser.

 

I stood there, halfdrunk, on the mud floor, with the tiny light of the bare swaying bulb casting moving shadows everywhere.  I didn’t have much time to soak it in, however, because moments after I flicked the light on, a bat flew out from behind the furnace, right past my head.

 

Of course, it scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t run out of there.  I turned to see where it had gone, but it had disappeared.  I distinctly remember smiling and feeling somehow content.  At the time I didn’t analyze why this should be, why I should feel this way.  Looking back, I suspect it was a comfort to know that something, at least, was alive in this house.

College Park Apartments, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Where you look for meaning, you will find it.  Where you look for symbols, you will find them.  If you dig deeper, more will come.  Look.  Look.

 

 

Every college has it’s “famous” apartment complexes which reside just off of campus, where Freshmen and Sophomores who are stuck in the dorms go to party.  At Shippensburg University, there are the Big Three: Bard, Chateau (I know, right?), and College Park apartments.  College Park is (or at least was) the most famous of these, as it sits right on the edge of campus, separated from University property by a mere 15 or so feet and an 8-foot-high chain-link fence.  It was into this famous apartment complex (with which I already had a rich history as a visitor) that I moved, following the house on Orange Street, with two of my buddies I had befriended while living in the dorms at Naugle Hall.

 

These weren’t bad apartments, nor were they great.  Fairly standard, three-room, one bath apartments with full kitchens.  Standard, flat-paint white walls, a blue-green loop carpet, ten-foot high ceilings.  The designers had taken great care to make each room have a bit of “shape” beyond a mere four-cornered room.  For instance, our living room was slightly “L-Shaped”, while my bedroom (which I shared with the other single roommate; the roommate with the girlfriend got his own room, which we all found to be fair) was not really a shape as much as it was a 6-cornered room.

 

I smoked in this apartment, though I was the only smoker who lived there.  We all drank there (we were all 21, and off-campus), although certainly I drank much more than them.  We listened to loud music all the time, watched great movies over and over (it was here that I discovered Magnolia; thank you Rob!), we played golf with Wiffle golf balls. We watched on CNN Headline News with apprehension and beers in our hands as George W. Bush got elected for the first time. I listened to live Pearl Jam bootlegs while playing air guitar on golf clubs for hours on end, while one roommate was playing computer games (or the Hollywood Stock Exchange online…feel like a real geek? Check out http://www.HSX.com) while the other did homework on one of our two horrible, horrible couches.  I have no idea whose couches they were.

 

The kitchen was, of course, a wretched disaster, as all male (and most female) college kitchens tend to be.  Dishes would pile up and just sit there, until the stench and the visual evidence of vile mold would drive somebody to wash them.  The refrigerator had everything we had decided to use on a regular basis pushed up front, while unwanted foodstuff got pushed to the back, gestating for months until, once again, the tell-tale signs of mold forced someone to do something about it.  And I have never seen anyone use a toaster oven as much as one of my roommates did; frankly, until I lived there, I had suspected toaster ovens were a myth.

 

These were most certainly my “wacky college days”, the kind of time I had always hoped to have in college which hadn’t materialized until now.  Nevermind that most of the time at this apartment I was more depressed than ever, and more debauched than ever (Henry Miller would blush…really), but at the same time, there was more lighthearted goofiness and exploration of our adulthood/childhood bridge than I had experienced yet.  I often slept on the couch in the living room, and this gave me great opportunities to fuck with the other guys as they slept in the bedrooms.  I was a big fan of finding new and inventive ways to make it impossible for them to open their doors in the morning.  Once I even upended both couched and put them both (standing on end) in front of Rob’s bedroom door (he was the one with his own bedroom), and then I went and slept on my bed.

 

It was also the only place I ever lived where we had our own beer pong table, which made me finally feel ‘college’.

 

One day, about halfway through our living adventure there, we got a call from the front office.  Some students who were interested in renting an apartment there next year would like to walk through one to see what they are like on the inside.  Could they walk through ours the next morning?  Sure, we said, and that was that.

 

Now, our apartment was not disgusting on the whole.  If it had been just me living there, it would have been, but my two roomies were not filthy. They were not clean, neat-freaks either, just standard guys who didn’t want to live in squalor.  We balanced each other out in a fairly democratic way; there were never fights about cleanliness, because there was not a huge gulf between our sensibilities, but there was a large enough difference to keep the apartment in a sort of “cluttered but not gross” stasis.  So it didn’t occur to us (as it most certainly would occur to me now) to clean the apartment for such a visit.

 

Late that night, the three of us were spending some leisurely hours watching television, sprawled out between our two couches and one obscenely large chair.  At some point, I said something like this:

 

We should do something that’ll really fuck with those people tomorrow morning.

 

The roommates agreed, but wondered what I had in mind.

 

We should, like, build a tower of stuff from the floor to the ceiling, right in the middle of the living room.

 

This intrigued them, and in fact, in my memory of the event, one of them was off his chair looking for stuff the moment the words were out of my mouth.

 

At first, we pulled the coffee table into the center of the room, with the intention of building from that as a sort of head start.  But after some deliberation we decided that building off the table would take away some of the effect.  We wanted the people (hopefully prissy Sorority chicks) to walk into this apartment and be greeted by a complete, narrow, impossible-looking tower of everyday items reaching from the floor to the ceiling…and we wanted it touching the ceiling.

 

So we started building on the floor.  First, a wall calendar to level out the carpet.  Then, on top of that, our largest text books.  The text books alone got us quite a bit of height, and a sturdy base, as well. 

 

It’s difficult to remember what all we made the tower out of.  I know there were some empty two-liters in there, as well as empty half-gallons of White Tavern gin (what I almost exclusively drank) which gave the tower quite a sad but rebellious look.  There were smaller books in the middle, some cups and drinking glasses, some boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and probably canisters of shaving cream and sticks of deodorant.  The main thing you need to know is that this tower should have been impossible.  When you looked at it, you really could not believe it was standing, or that is wasn’t glued together or didn’t have some wire running through the hollowed-out materials. And it really hadn’t been that difficult.  Things just seemed to keep fitting into one another and holding perfectly.  We only had one or two setbacks, and a few other moments where the tower teetered on the edge of collapse and then righted itself.  It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to get within 2 or 3 inches of the ceiling.  Then, however, we had a problem.

 

We wanted to tower to touch the ceiling, but to just touch it. We weren’t interested in fashioning a drinking straw to the top that would touch the ceiling and then bend and have an extra 3 inches dangling there.  We wanted it to be perfect, for the tower to be the exact height of the room from floor-to-ceiling.  And we tore our apartment apart looking for just the right thing.  We even measured the gap and then started measuring things, trying to find something that was exactly 2 and ¾ inches (or whatever it was).  We finally found what we needed in the form of a disposable Morton’s Pepper shaker, which had been hiding in the back of a cupboard.  It slid neatly into place (I was not able to participate in the final leg of construction, as, even standing on the chair, I was not tall enough, so I had to participate from the ground) andour tower was finished.

 

It was an absolute marvel, and we were rightly impressed.  We watched TV a bit longer, with what seemed to now be a fourth person in the room, this presence that was watching over everything.  We went to bed that night giddy in the knowledge that our tower would not be a secret for long; in fact, strangers would soon see it, which is probably the most satisfying knowledge anyone can have about a work of art they have created.

 

I awoke briefly to the sounds of people in the apartment the next morning.  I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but they were in fact girls.  We’ll never know if they were fully astonished, but I know they saw it.

 

If you dig deeper and look harder you can see everything all at once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Naugle Hall, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

The lights are all off except the lava lamp, which I’ve had burning for days. The remnant smoke from dozens of cigarettes hangs like a wraith throughout the unventilated room.

            The ceiling—which is spackled concrete with waffle-like indents, not unlike you might find in a recording studio—is covered in those glow-in-the-dark plastic stars that are meant for people much younger than 19, but I’ve always been a slow grower. The walls (tan cinder block) are plastered with predictable posters: Rage Against the Machine, Carmen Electra, Albert Einstein.  The precise mixture of a confused young man who’d like to fuck his own angry intelligence.

            There is some kind of carpet, and some kind of bed sheet on the too-small bed, and the too-small bed beside it that is sometimes (but not right now) occupied by a roommate I never knew, and whose name I only sometimes foggily recall.  Between the beds is a lawn chair which faces our television, used mainly for playing video games.

            I used to play video games.

            Currently the first Seven Mary Three album is on the stereo, very quietly, and I am seated at my desk (which is connected to the wall, and is made of white hospital Formica) pounding away on the keys of my electric typewriter (which I was still using embarrassingly recently). Beside the typewriter sits an open, slender volume of W.H. Auden poetry, and I am reading his “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” and trying to somehow mimic it without copying it. I haven’t been writing poetry very long, but I know I am very depressed and lonely, and if I don’t write something magical about her very soon I am going to kill myself.

            It doesn’t work. I keep writing really bad things that sound like a mix of Auden and Seven Mary Three (do not try that) and nothing I write brings Her to my door, or in my bed, or out of my head. In point of fact, writing will never do these things (or, at least, it will do it very rarely), but I am new at it and am expecting it to be…cleansing, therapeutic, transcendent.

            I smoke another cigarette, pace the room, glance out the big window that peers into the Naugle Hall courtyard. There are people down there, smoking, holding hands, hackey sacking.

            I take my pants off and lay down on my bed, quiet, unsure, almost not even there, to commence yet again the only real way I know of seeing her.

 

Oak Flat Road, Newville, Pennsylvania

The groundhog heard a twig snap, and it almost got away. But, being boys, we worked well in packs and had already anticipated all it’s escape routes. There were four of us, and we had it surrounded. It hissed once or twice before Adam swung his arms down, releasing the large, football-shaped rock we had found earlier that day. The rock connected, landing dead-center on the groundhog’s torso. Guts spewed from both ends of it as if it were a massive ketchup packet someone had stepped on. It was exactly how we had hoped it would look.

            Then, of course, we ran, because all kids are imbued with a knowledge that anytime they do something wrong, someone will chase them, even when nobody else is there.

            Running through the cow pasture was always difficult, because there weren’t many cows that grazed there. The long, leathery grass whipped your shins despite your feet, and also hid the many ankle-twisting rock outcroppings; you had to constantly look down to ensure your safety, which meant you didn’t really know where you were going. But we weren’t deep into the pasture, so we soon emerged—full speed—onto the gradual slope of a long lawn which seemed to belong to nobody in particular. Now the running was easy—downhill, mowed and manicured grass, the four of us practically tumbled down the long lawn (maybe having already forgotten our conquest of the groundhog) until we wildly approached the squat brown shed my parent’s had bought at Zizzi’s (which is still in full operation out on the Carlisle Pike, if anyone needs a shed). Someone always came very close to running into the shed, which in later years became a fantastic place to smoke pot out of bongs made from Sunny Delight bottles.

            And then, it came into view: the house. The brown, brown, brown house which we had built (OK we didn’t actually build it. We paid a fat drunk guy named Jim Piper to build it, but we told him what to build, which in this day and age is even more admirable than actually taking hammer to nail) and which always stood as a beacon of safety, comfort and rest to me and my weary young traveling companions. We clambered over the brown fence which housed the swimming pool and into the French doors in the back of this attractive one-story ranch house and did I mention brown?

            Of course we went directly to the kitchen, with it’s subtly patterned tan linoleum floor, tan-and-brown speckled Formica countertop (with a bar) and it’s three modest barstools, it’s tan and perfectly textured refrigerator, and the coup-de-tat, a Lazy Susan. Damn, I still love Lazy Susans. One word: convenient.

            My parents have always been very cool about my friends eating their food. This is part of what makes my parents great parents. They understood the importance of your house being the center of your little kid world, and your friends being welcomed there, and all that. Also, they put in a pool. And bought me a bunk bed.

            So the four of us– (none of whom I’ve seen or spoken to in over a decade)—proceeded to eat ravenously. Who knows what we ate? Sandwiches of some kind, or cookies. My parents also had good food that kids like that doesn’t kill you. Way to go, parents!

            I then decided today would be the day I’d unveil our New World to my friends. I’d been waiting almost three days and it was killing me! So I ushered them back the hallway—unlike the Big Spring Avenue house, this house had only one hallway, straight and to the point—to my bedroom. Since we…um, Jim Piper…built the house, I had been able to select the palate for my bedroom.  In a twist of decisions no one including myself ever understood, I chose a deep, grooved, dark gray carpet and a dark yellow wall paint. The yellow was the shade of the inside of an apple once it’s been bitten into and left on a countertop for three hours. These colors not only made zero sense with the rest of the house, they didn’t even make sense with each other. I think that was what I was going for in my head, a sort of incongruity. I wanted a room that not only did nobody else have, I wanted a room nobody else wanted. My poor little Ugly Duckling bedroom, how I loved you so.

            So I usher my young companions into my bedroom with me, and I don’t say a word to them as I reach under my bed (the one on the ground, of course. Remember, my awesome parents bought me a bunk bed.) and pull out the very first Penthouse any of these guys had ever seen. Now, I myself had perused quite a few in my day but had never spoke to anyone about what I had seen there, but this was the first one that had ever been mine.

            There is a big difference between Penthouse and Playboy, if you don’t know. Penthouse has pictures of men and women fucking.

            And so with my apple walls staring at us and the raccoon carpet holding up our little knees, I silently paged through this moist curiosity to six astonished eyes. Later, as we were playing basketball in my driveway, we all agreed it was the most amazing and downright disgusting thing we had ever seen. Which is still pretty much true.

66 Big Spring Avenue, Newville, Pennsylvania

That old house was the damndest house. It was structured almost labyrinthinely, with halls winding back on themselves, unexpected back staircases, two patios, two balconies; like those places you hear about where voices told an old woman to keep building, and she did, and nobody stopped her.

            To a kid, it was a marvel. It seemed all houses must be built like this: with surprises. And of course, it was ugly, too. Shit-brown hardwood floors in some rooms, and elegantly finished wood in another. Gray wood paneling on some walls, and on others, wallpaper that seemed to have been designed solely to confuse, a mix of paisley and leopard print. It was at this particular woozy wallpaper that I was staring the day my father came home as a stranger.

            It is the kitchen wallpaper to which I refer.  It was mostly green, with some yellows. It was a flower print, mainly, with other little slapdash touches thrown in, in case anyone thought for a moment it made any sense. As I grew older, I started seeing pictures in the patterns, the way starry-eyed teenagers see turtles or tits in clouds. Men riding bicycles were in that wallpaper, as were wedding cakes, rocket ships, shovels, and Falcor, from The Neverending Story. I was staring at this wallpaper when my father walked into the den—which is facing the kitchen, with a big wide open door between the two rooms—and I had no idea who he was.

            I thought at first that one of the Green boys had broken into my house and was about to kill me. The Green boys (on the off-chance you’ve never heard of them) were the most rotten, vile, badass kids Newville had ever seen. One of them was even mildly retarded. Every time something horrible happened, it was blamed on the Green boys, and there seemed to be more Green boys than Baldwins (a reference that would have made sense even in 1984). There were so many Green boys, in fact, that I had no idea what any of them looked like. All badass boys were simply Green boys.

            Much later in life I had a dream once that my sister fucked one of the Green boys, and it still stands as my most mortifying dream ever. (For the record, I’m pretty sure she didn’t.)

            He entered the den and it is the first time I remember feeling that stomach-dropping sink of fear, the kind where you almost instantly puke. This feeling shares a home with the ‘I slept past my alarm’ feeling, as well as the ‘cop lights in the rearview’ feeling, but it is more intense and coercive. It’s the same kind of fear you get when your car starts to go off the road, or a relative tells you to ‘sit down’ before they start a conversation.  Such in-depth fear is quite foreign to such a young person. 

            I leaped from the dining room chair (at this point, still quite a feat for me) and padded my little feet around the gray tiled kitchen floor, to position myself behind the kitchen table (a table, incidentally, which I can no longer picture in my mind, at all). He was closer, perhaps by ten feet, and still advancing. Finally I summoned enough child-courage to address this advancing (grinning) man: “Who are you?”

            The man only grinned and kept advancing. I questioned him again, “Who are you?” Still no reply.

            The fear was incredible now. I thought I would die. Have a ‘hard attack’ as I thought they were called. My body trembled, my saliva flowed uncontrollably (this happens), my voice shook, and finally, tears. I turned and ran from the room.

            I ran through the laundry room, which was really a concrete hallway painted some sort of color, with a makeshift bathroom on the left hand side (with walls made from, I believe, plywood) and the washer and dryer on the right. Quickly through the laundry room, out the back door, down the six concrete steps of the slab back porch, into the bright preening sunlight of an unassuming day. There, I find my mother where I knew she would be (hanging laundry? Digging in the garden?) and I explain our frantic situation. It is no longer my frantic situation; obviously now my mother is in danger, too. The Green boy can’t be far behind me.

            Before my mother can fully grasp what I am saying to her, the man steps out of the back door, onto the slab porch, still grinning. My mother gives a small but serious laugh.

            “Oh honey, that’s your dad! He just shaved his beard, is all.”

            Dad, don’t feel bad. There’s no way you could have known.

Full of Water, Full of Air

We were kids.  Hell, eleven, twelve years old.  We still did the ‘sleepover’ thing all the time.  He lived in town, I lived in the country.  We alternated houses.  We loved staying up late (midnight), Miami Vice reruns, and can after can of Dr. Pepper.

Exploring the nooks and crannies of each other’s houses was a great pastime.  I was familiar with my house, and he wasn’t, so he liked uncovering the secrets of my house.  And vice versa.  I was just becoming old enough to know that in his house, there must be secrets that perhaps he didn’t think of as secrets, just like there were at my house.  I was entranced by something as simple as the foods in his kitchen cupboards.  His family had soy sauce.  How odd.

His parents had a water bed.  This, to me, was more strange than exotic.  Why would anyone want to sleep on that? Every time I laid on it–which was often, because strange was still worth looking into, after all–I’d wonder how they could rest there, dream there, have sex there.

Oh, we knew what sex was.

Eventually, the water bed led us to the dresser drawers.  No secrets there, unless underwear are secrets.  Then we found the closet.  Oh, the closet.

We had heard about blow-up dolls, of course.  We had seen them used comically in some films.  We knew you were supposed to fuck them, but we had no idea how.  Once we had finally managed to get it out of the box–which was no small feat–next we had to figure out how to blow it up.  Half an hour later, our young lungs nearly fully expired, she sat before us in all her gape-mouthed glory.  We hadn’t managed to get her all the way inflated; we were rushing, as the arrival of his father was always imminent.  She was perhaps three-quarters inflated, but that would do.

“Should we fuck it?” he asked.

I thought, of course, that we should.

I don’t remember how the decision was made, but it was decided he would go first.  All I remember is the sight of his pale, child buttocks feebly flopping around on the poor balloon lady while the rest of his body stood stock still.  He didn’t look at me, or make any noises.  I was very anxiously awaiting my turn, but also nervous as hell–what if I did it wrong?  He was taking forever.

And then the sound of the car door.  His father.

It was a mad scamble for him to get off the doll, for us to uninflate her, put her back in the box, and back in the closet.  As we were hurriedly closing the closet door, we turned around to see his father in the doorway, apparently having been watching us for some time.  He just shook his head and walked away.  After all, what could he say, really?

The Slow Leaving is So Fast

The goats in that backyard
Are slowly dying.
Their hunched backs,
The matted fur,
Their mudcovered
Sorrowed eyes

Belie the loud crushing
Screams they used to make
Mating in the dark
Under mooney wide skies.
What dreams they have now
With sleep are slow

Intangible wisps;
Slouching shadow-structures
(light playing on eyelids).
Years ago we used to get drunk
And feed them unripe apples,
Imagine them galloping across the field
Their fluffy gray hair
Billowing in the wind like capes.

In Defense of Heartbreak

 

In the absence of strong emotions (feelings and events) I must attempt to create some; after all, I’m an artist, silly, and what is an artist to do with comfy stasis?  Like the static on a forgotten television which is ceaselessly changing yet ever the same, fuzzy jumping dots never wrote no poetry, mister, and a solid waterfall is beautiful but sees no beauty.  Oh, I can work up a good head of anger, sure, at things like traffic lights and long lines, but anything righteous is long gone, replaced by news radio and cozy lunches with friends on their office lunch breaks, and plastic chess with people I know I’ll beat, and diet fucking soda.  Oh sure, it’s nice to be out of the struggle for a bit, the pain and the hunger, the loneliness and the crude jokes, but a little heartbreak would be nice, a few tears over something besides an Almodovar film, hell, buddy, something more real than reaching for another Q-Tip by my bedside and another round of Bloomin’ Onions at the Outback Steak House.  I bought a CD today (because I still buy CDs) that had an old song of ours on it, in an ill-conceived attempt to feel that pain again, but it’s too long gone now, too long gone (too far away for me to hold); hell it’s been over a decade since I was hurt like that.  I ended up jerking off about you and going back to reading Maxim.  Sure, man, sure, I’m elated all the damn time in my current life, elated and pleasantly pleased and happy as birdshit without the purple shit in it (that purple shit is shit too) and I could go on being elated and lifted-up and as clear as a damn Scientologist till the day they bury my grinning corpse, but I’d trade all the joy in the world for one more drop of genuine exquisite sorrow, cause the light gets blinding without any darkness (and a coin won’t buy you dick ‘less it’s got two sides), so come on, bitches, break my heart, I need it as bad as you’re gonna need the guilt.

The Theme Was Hotels, the Theme Was the Absence of Worry

Some memories that seem somehow important:

Waking on a hotel bed as a young young boy–no older than 5–on a family vacation to Ocean City, Maryland.  I had apparently been allowed to sleep in.  I could see out of a high window (it was a high window to me then) and the sun was at it’s zenith.  I was suffering from my first sunburn, which if you remember is quite confusing.  What had awoken me was the sound of seagulls squaking.  I caught a glimpse of a clump of them flying by the window in my first few moments of consciousness.  The bed was the most comfortable and comforting thing I could imagine. The air conditioning was pumped up, and the cold air mixed with the warm sun created an elegant sensation. I was alone in the room. This is the definition of childhood happiness, and the absence of worry.

Waking on a hotel bed, trembling.  Where am I? Which hotel is this?  It is dark, and much too hot.  It smells of mushrooms and bile in here. Who is next to me?  Is it someone?  Perhaps it is her.  I didn’t think she’d return. I try to rise, but my peripheral swims with still motion, my stomach lurches, I knock the lamp over, lay back down.  The trembling rises, it crescendos, it is hot and shaky and moist in here.  This is depravity.  This is the sadness. Strangely, it is also the absence of worry.

Waking on a hotel bed, a man of nearly thirty.  I’m in town for my job interview.  The light through the drawn curtains is low and grey; it’s just past dawn.  I only slept an hour but am instantly awake.  My eyes focus and are aware. Standing before the mirror to tie my tie, I am fatter and older. I accept this and smile. I like my fat cheeks, the bulbous nose.  I earned them. I gather my things: the suitcase I bought, the journal I keep, the socks I wash myself.  Tomorrow I’ll drive home. Tomorrow I’ll be OK, I know.

Why Can’t Things Suck?

Much like every kid now gets a ribbon for ‘trying’ at Field Day, or election losers are ‘also-rans’, not losers, or there’s no such thing as an ugly baby, or my Disciplinary Forms at work (write-up sheets) warn me to “maintain the team member’s self esteem” even while I am rebuking them, our culture seems deathly afraid of claiming any work of art or entertainment is actually ‘bad’.  We have to coddle the feelings of everyone who might like this crap by claiming ‘it’s just not my thing’ or ‘they’re good at what they do’ or ‘that doesn’t speak to me’.  Sure, small clusters of people tend to gravitate toward agreeing on a few things that suck.  Nickleback and Creed are bad bands.  Fast and Furious movies and anything by Tyler Perry sucks.  Reaity shows are killing our culture.  But deviate from the accepted suckiness and now you’ve got to be talking about your ‘opinion’, thereby allowing millions of misguided kids to keep experiencing soul-crushing Blink-182 and brain-killing books by David Baldacci.  OK, sure, what we’re still talking about is actually my opinion, but I don’t see why I have to soften my opinion to spare your feelings.  If you want to get riled up when I claim that something you love and are passionate about is objectively bad, then please, get riled up.  Let’s have a discussion about it.  This softening of our culture has stopped the discourse on art.  “Oh, you like U2?  I don’t, it’s not for me.”  We didn’t talk about anything.  Discussions about art are now just one lying capitulation after another.  I’ll back up my thoughts with reasoned argument, and at the end of the day, you can still go home and listen to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and revel in how beautiful of a fucking day Bono thinks it is.  I’m not going to scream at you for it, but I am a participant in this culture, and I refuse to keep treating it like a soft-serve ice cream cone so no one’s feelings get hurt.  Do you think my hard-and-fast opinion is wrong?  I’d love to hear your side of things.  And the offense you think you see me take when you bad mouth Pearl Jam or John C. Reily is just the welling-up of my own passionate argument.  Let’s talk about things, and let’s agree that things can, in fact, suck.

They’d Grow Till They Devoured the Sun if They Could Find a Way

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When I was a little thing, my mom helped me plant a Sunflower once. It was an amazing experience watching it grow. Nature’s magic.  I knew something like that was happening to me, would happen to me for awhile. I’d grow out of nowhere. It seemed to take so long for it to grow.  As a child, months seem like decades.  Why? Who knows. At it’s fullest height, it was a staggering sight.  It seemed to have a personality.  It also felt–somehow–as though I had birthed it. All I had done was put a seed in the ground, but it was a source of pride. When we are inexperienced, we feel pride at manipulating the world.  As we grow, we learn the world begs to be manipulated.  You almost can’t avoid it. Nowadays my dad has a Sunflower growing by the side of his house (or do you? I suspect you cut it down, but can’t entirely remember).  I recall, last summer, going to visit him.  The Sunflower was scary.  So big!  How unnatural it seemed.  It seemed like it had a personality, just like the one when I was a kid.  But this time, it was menacing.

 

Energy

Tell me again about the butterflies,
old friend of mine, bringer of tales,
the gully, mossy rocks of the streambed,
a cool breeze off the glacier high above,
and suddenly butterflies everywhere
as if the air you breathed were blossoming.

I’ve seen so many things, you said.  I wish
I could write them down.  And when my uncle died
you were the alpinist and the engineer
who had an explanation where he’d gone,
waving a hand in the air.  It’s energy,
you said.  That energy must still be somewhere.

Ah, but real life is never written down,
and who could understand the butterflies–
that there were so many, so surprisingly?
Tell me again, old friend, and I will try
to catch the light, the flavor of the air
like moss, like distant ice, like clear water.

“I Want to be Touched Like Something in the MOMA”

There was a night
a thought
a merest something
(you see, I cannot remember how long
it lasted
only that it happened
and the memories are like Polaroids
thrown past a window)
when you laid on a hotel bed
in only your underwear–
navy blue skin-tight things–
I watched you as I put my tie
around my neck and sipped hotel coffee
from a paper cup.
It was still dark and I hadn’t slept
and a pale of cigarette smoke hung round the room
like a see-through wreath.
You were on your stomach, your hands
perfectly at your sides
as if you’d been carefully rested in a coffin–
upside down.
Your breasts pushed against the mattress
and the mattress pushed against them
causing just the sides to billow out from your sternum,
orange-sized segments of perfect skin,
the nipples hinted at in my memory.

 

The hotel hallway was bright,
too bright for that early morning hour,
and the elevator was bright, too,
and as I emerged into the lobby I saw
the world outside had changed
ever-so-slightly:
the sun had poked just the smallest sliver
of it’s orange head over some horizon.
The black sports cars in the parking lot
were illuminated the faintest degree
(it was that kind of light
where everything is fuzzy,
as though viewed through
a sheet of cheese cloth).
Somewhere in some thicket
beside the river which skirted the hotel
birds were beginning to chirp,
making morning-moving-around-noises,
their branches rustling with their weight.

There was dew on the manicured grass,
catching the particles of morning’s first light.
I reached in my pocket for my keys–
they jingled loudly as they dangled in the air,
as I’ve always kept more keys with me
than I need.
Folks are always telling me it’s not good for
the car’s starter–
and, stifling a yawn, put the key in the lock
(the sound of the lock popping,
the door swinging on it’s hinges,
and the muffle of it’s closing
all seemed magnified in this arching light)
and inside the car smelled of stale smoke–
not like the hazy blissful smoke that must still have been hanging
in the hotel room,
but canned, incestual smoke,
smoke that you could eat if you were starving.

 

I undid my tie and unfastened the top two buttons of my
suffocating shirt
and pulled my undershirt up to my nose,
breathed deep.
It was the smell of you,
that flowery-powdery smell of you
and the smell of your breath
which is the smell of heat.
It made me hear you, once again,
in the grip of last night whispering
I want to be touched like something in the MOMA.
I put the car in gear and headed to my meeting,
imagining a world where the wind smelled like you–
and a world where you touched me
like I touched you.

 

 

 

 

Growing Old is Getting Old

Listen:  an assload of great rock music is always being produced.  Don’t believe the naysayers:  great stuff is still happening.  Case in point:  Silversun Pickups, a California band, has just released their Sophomore album, Swoon, and it is balls-to-the-wall.  Just check out one track, "Growing Old is Getting Old", if you need some convincing.  Just make sure you listen to the whole song.  You can thank me later.

After the Fire

Everyday smells more and more like Indian food.  Must be the owners, down in their tiny shitbox office, cooking some sort of lentils and curry or whatever.  The blankets smell like it, the towels smell like it, she smells like it, next to me, as she quivers and sweats.  When I raise my forearm to my nose, even I smell like the spicy Indian food.  I begin to associate the smell with the girl and I grow to love it; I will be sad if someone launders these blankets, which is unlikely.  Two days ago the toilet overflowed, and a puddle formed in the carpet outside the shoebox bathroom.  It’s overflowed twice more since, and now when we walk to the bathroom it squishes between our bare toes.  It is cold like dewy grass, but mushy like oatmeal.  This morning I thought I was really going to die.  My whole body hurt, and I got so hot like I was exploding.  I vomited bile on her pants, which I was wearing but I do not remember putting on.  She did not seem to care, though.  She has driven to Harrisburg now, to see if she can find any drugs she can afford.  The teenage girl stopped by again last night and gave me a bottle of gin.  I can’t keep any of it down.  I throw it up, I throw it up, I throw it up.  The carpet between the twin beds—where I am sitting—is soaked through with my puke-gin.  If I could hold some down I’d feel better; I would stop dying.  Last night the three of us played truth or dare and I thought I was dying.  I ate a jalapeño off the teenage girl’s breast without shame, but now in the daylight, all alone, I do feel shame.  There is a three-day-old pizza from Papa Johns on the radiator but no one is able to eat it, not even the teenager when she stops by.  There is an unused tampon in the middle of the pizza from some practical joke I can’t remember.  Somehow we have a little boombox but only two CDs; the song What a Good Boy by Barenaked Ladies has been on repeat for hours now, and I am watching Hey Arnold! on mute as I try to get this gin to stay down.  She bought me expensive gin, too.  I am in this hellhole and I am puking Tanqueray onto the floor, and onto the pinstriped women’s pants I am wearing.  Last night I was curled up on the floor in the shower, and she dumped a bucket of ice water over the curtain onto me.  She was trying to be funny, but she didn’t know I was dying.  We have to find some money to stay another night.  Everything smells like curry.  A few nights ago I had a mini-seizure and I knocked the lamp off the nightstand. It didn’t break, but it scared me a lot.  My penis has been less than an inch long for days now and I can do nothing to change that.  What a fate, to die so shriveled surrounded by helpless women.  Cigarettes have been put out on the carpet everywhere.  Yesterday I found a butt in her mascara.  Sitting here, Indian-style, watching Hey Arnold!, I can smell my ass through these pants and my underwear.  It doesn’t smell like shit, but like an ass without shit.  I haven’t shit for a week—not that I recall.  There we go, there we go, there we go—a sip has stayed down for over three minutes.  Each sip will be easier now.  A sip, a sip, a sip, a sip, now a gulp, now a gulp, ah! I feel good, I feel less hot, less shaky, the all-over-pain has drawn back like a persistent tide.  Smiling and laughing, I collapse face-first into my puke-gin and so damn happy.  I am going to die in this hellhole.

What Spring Reveals

So, today was pretty much the first “real” Spring day that I’ve been able to get outside and do my solitary walking around town that so marks some of my most joyous moments of the warm weather season.

That was a very long sentence.

But seriously.  Today was very warm (my AC is currently on in my apartment),with clear skies, no rain, a comfortable breeze, and little-to-no stress weighing on my psyche, and zero plans (quite intentionally).  I even woke up at 5AM since I have been on dayshifts for, like, ever.  So around 8 in the morning, I dumped all my pretentious artsy fag stuff into my artsy little messenger bag and ventured out into my lovely little town.  To take pictures of dumpsters.

Listen:  I know nothing about photography.  I do not fancy myself a “photographer”.  At best, I have a rudimentary knowledge of framing in movies, but not even any formal instruction in that–and I’m sure photograph framing is different from movie framing.  I’ve just recently started getting enjoyment from taking pictures for their own sake, and trying to ‘say’ something in a photograph that is still interesting to just look at.  And after taking a few pictures of the dumpsters in my parking lot a couple of months back, I got the itch to keep taking pictures of various dumpsters.  Plus my friend Duane had said something about wanting some artwork for his new album, so before I left I listened to his phenomenal song “Poser in a Maze” (http://www.myspace.com/dreamlandnoise) about 4 times, with the thought that I’d also try to find some images to represent the emotions/ colors and tones it evokes.

I ate some breakfast at the deserted diner a block from my apartment (a Montana skillet–it was OK), had some coffee at the Courthouse Commons and read some of my book, and proceeded to walk around town snapping some pictures (occasionally stopping back home for bathroom breaks, free water, internet activity, and my very persistent need to listen to Silversun Pickups’ “Growing Old is Getting Old”).  I was having a grand old day (and there’s no big twist coming up–it ended up being a very good day!)

Around noon, I was walking down a back alley halfway across town from my apartment.  I found a nice looking dumpster with an empty shopping cart by it and a striking shadow across what I saw as the ‘foreground’ (or the right of the frame, depending which picture I decide upon as the final one).  I pulled my camera out and started taking multiple pictures from various angles, some in color, some in black and white.  About a minute into my picture-taking,a man in a business suit exited one of the neighboring buildings, and he was clearly going to walk past me.  I became very aware of how odd was I was doing must appear, so I pocketed the camera and waited for him to pass.  However, instead of passing, he stopped when he got near me and, with a big grin on his face, said to me:

“Documenting the scene of the crime?”

I didn’t realize how odd this question was.  I only registered that he was asking me what I was doing.  So I replied with a most curious reply:

“I just take pictures of dumpsters.”

His reply was even more curious.

“Oh.  Because a woman was strangled to death in front of that dumpster a month or so ago.”