NOTE FROM SETH: If you are related to me, think twice before you read this.
1. Circus Midgets Ate My Balls
A bunch of us were at a party at Sandra’s parent’s house. It was early autumn and the night was bearably chilly. The kind of night where your breath is just almost visible. You still have shorts on but can’t decide whether it was the right choice.
Sandra was an oddity in our circle of friends. She had at some point dated nearly all of us, but at the same time remained ‘one of the guys’ even while she was dating outside the circle. In our ways, we were all in love with her, all of the time, even when she was infuriating, which was always. And her parents had a nice place to party: in the country but not too far of a drive, lots of land to move about on, ample parking and parents that cared that we were partying there, but not enough to stop us.
On this particular night, there was a fairly good collection of people there: Monty, Lee, Terch, Ethan, Clyde, Simon, myself, Sandra of course. There were others, but in the Grand Rundown of Hours Wasted Partying, one never quite recalls all the exact details. Some of the more important luminaries of the core group were there, and we were having the kind of fun we normally had.
There was a lot of walking around the large yard, talking, beer in hand. Stopping by the fire pit for a warm-up and to see who was there at that moment. Somebody was naked somewhere. Somebody was making out somewhere. Somebody was passed out somewhere.
At one point, I was sitting on the porch at the outdoor table and chairs, drinking and smoking and talking to Sandra about God-knows-what. It was a marvelous, relaxing time and I was having fun, as I often did, trying to make Sandra fall back in love with me. The beer, of course, was making me piss a lot. It does that.
I got up and walked to the edge of the porch (which sits about three feet off the ground) and I pulled my dick out. I started pissing off the porch, angling my penis skyward for maximum arch effect in my urine stream. Suddenly, and seemingly from out of nowhere, Clyde walked into my field of view (on the ground, not the porch). He stood directly in front of my urine stream and put out his hands, cupped, like a man dying of thirst might put out his hands in a rainstorm. He began to catch my urine in his hands. I was not as shocked as you would think. If anything, the moment I saw him do this, I thought to myself Of course! He’s brilliant! It is a move I never would have thought of. I was laughing very hard at him while peeing, trying to let him get it all. When my piss started to die down, he looked up at me with this amazing grin and I realized he had one more trick up his sleeve. He put his hands up to his face and began rubbing my piss in, like an exhausted person washing their face with water. It was the most deft stroke of The Something I had yet seen. Clyde was by far the best at it, although sometimes I gave him a run for his money.
See, if that was the whole story, this would be a sad story indeed. But of course I am telling it out of sequence. The whole piss incident was near the end. Near the end of anything, you tend to get desperate.
What I am calling The Something was actually some kind of shared philosophy that, in my head, I’ve began referring to as the ‘How Far Can You Go?’ philosophy. This whole group of friends I’m talking about shared this philosophy, although some of us quite a bit more than others. Some of them, I think, never quite knew what was going on. Some knew far too well.
I don’t know when The Something started, and I’m not quite sure when it ended. And I’m not quite sure how it started. I think to most it was just a heightened way to have more fun, fun like nobody else was having. To some of us, though, it was the most important thing in the world.
We are driving around the midstate area in two cars. We are hopping from place to place, store to store, park to park. There are seven of us total, and we are constantly switching cars after we get places. The only constant is that Pearson is driving his car, and Monty is driving his.
This is in the early days of the group. There are a few guys here who will soon fade out of the picture, like Yuri, and some prominent members who we have yet to meet, like Simon or Addy. We had done a lot of partying with each other already, but it had yet to reach that fevered sustained pitch it reached between ’99-’03. We were still just a bunch of young guys having fun and getting to know each other. Pearson was the only one of drinking age, although I was soon to follow.
The highlight of that day of driving was when we’d get on the highways. The two cars would pass each other repeatedly, and in each car, we had a notebook and pens. The passengers in the backseat would furiously write bizarre and off-the-wall messages to the other car. This was quite possibly the funniest thing that has ever happened on the Earth.
We started out, I’m sure, with something common, like “I fucked your mother”. Then the other car would come back with “I ass-fucked your shoe”, and the absurdity never stopped from there. The culmination came with what would be our rallying cry for years to come. I can’t remember who came up with it, though I suspect it was Pearson. His car held up to our car, right before we got off an exit ramp, the sign Circus Midgets Ate My Balls.
I can guarantee you that seven people have never laughed so hard in unison while driving two separate cars.
Not to be deterred by Pearson’s car’s true hilarity, the next time we were on the highway I had Monty pull up next to Pearson. I unzipped my pants and grabbed my balls by the base, forcing the testicles to balloon outward in a very comically exaggerated fashion. Ethan, who was in the back seat with me, had scrawled on our tablet the exact message Pearson’s car had just given us. So, as I got up on my haunches to show Pearson’s car my exploding balls, Ethan held our sign up to the window. Simultaneously, Pearson’s car saw my balls and a sign reading Circus Midgets Ate My Balls, all while going 70 miles-per-hour down Interstate 81.
The incident seems tame by our later standards, but if I look back and try to pinpoint The Something’s origin, it’s probably that day. And the fact that we all laughed equally hard.
To me, ‘How Far Can You Go?’ was always about having a purpose. I, as well as most of my friends, were going through a protracted aimless period in our lives; we weren’t nearly ready to grow up, but we were too smart to do nothing. I figured, why not be a philosopher who puts his dick in couches?
I was aimless, untethered and essentially helpless against a world I assumed I was better than. To prove to myself and others that I had this world figured out (despite all appearances otherwise) I set out to prove that society’s rules of morality and good taste were completely wrong; anything could mean nothing, and nothing was against the rules. I was not alone on this quest. I had help.
It had been a long night of partying at Cassie and Willy’s house. It was never really a ‘party’ at their place, always just smaller gatherings, and only with core members of the group. For the short time they lived there, it was a kind of ‘home base’ for us. Their living room was the scene for many Somethings.
On this particular night, the gathering ended relatively early. Most of the guys actually went home that night, which was a rarity. Addy had passed out in the guest bedroom upstairs, and Cassie and Willy were asleep in their bedroom. I was left in the living room with just Simon and his girlfriend at the time, Kelly.
The three of us got along quite well; as a trio, we eerily completed each other. We had been, in a sly way, kicking around ideas for Somethings for a few days, without really knowing what we were doing. We were setting something up.
The room was uncharacteristically dark that night, I remember that. Perhaps just a lava lamp glowing, or some old Christmas lights that had been left strung up. And candles. Cassie has always loved candles.
I was slumped in the bean bag chair, and across from me, Simon and Kelly were on the couch. I remember we were talking about this book of poems that Kelly and I had stumbled onto in Wal-Mart the previous day. It was the transcripts of Clinton’s impeachment trials during the Lewinsky time, and someone had broken it down into verse, so it looked like poems. I still find the concept intriguing.
In the middle of this pretentious conversation we’re having, Kelly rather frantically interrupted me, saying “So do you wanna watch us fuck or what?”
The thing I remember most is how I sincerely did not care one way or the other. I was neither excited nor repelled by the idea. But I was sure as hell going to say yes, because most people would say no. I had to wonder, sitting there on the bean bag chair, “How far can we go?”
So I said Yes, in fact I would love to watch you two fuck.
Kelly politely informed me that it would be quite OK with them if I wanted to masturbate during the show. I almost said to her It damn well better be.
So that’s when that sort of thing started happening.
2. Song From Underneath
This night has a rhythm.
It beats like a plodding blues rock song, prying it’s way to some far-off crescendo.
Bum.
Bum.
Bum.
Bum ba dum ba dum.
Bum.
Bum.
And so on. There is no actual music playing, just a sinister determined rhythm beating in our heads, like some distant hammer were tapping the sky, or a rain dance was being prepared for us.
We are in the backyard of Ethan’s parent’s house. It is the dead-middle of summer; even this late at night, it is sometimes choking hot. The leaves underfoot crunch like brittle bugs. The grass is bent and brown, hanging onto life because it has to, for whatever reason.
There aren’t many of us here. Five, maybe six. We met here to find out who won the scavenger hunt that Monty had created for us. Monty was good at making ‘events’ for us. This summer, it was a scavenger hunt that lasted a week. There were ordinary items, like a plastic owl, and more difficult items, such as a food order receipt from Sheetz that was number ’00’. I can’t remember who won the scavenger hunt, or the $100 prize pot.
After reviewing our cache in his parent’s living room, we retired to Ethan’s backyard to have a bit of partying.
Ethan’s backyard is quite interesting. It is covered by low-slung elms, which provide a canopy over the whole property, giving a sense of privacy. You are given the false impression that you are alone there, that you are on your own Nature Preserve or in your own country, of sorts. Some of the trees are close together, creating small structures, or walls, of trees. Others stand by themselves, in the farther reaches of the property. It is a fine place for hide-and-seek, or foxes-and-hounds. The feeling of a fantasy world—especially at night—is inescapable there.
But that’s not the most interesting thing about Ethan’s backyard. That would be the treehouse. Or fort, as some called it.
I don’t know the full story behind the fort, and truthfully, I have difficulty picturing it completely now. But it is, essentially, a shack, built of plywood and various other kinds of scraps. It intertwines with a tree or two and reaches a story high. I remember it having a room or two, a few ‘hallways’ which were more like crawl spaces, and some portals from one side to the other, where one can simply step through the structure.
Plopped in the center of the yard, the fort fully completes the otherworldly feeling of the place. And tonight, somehow, feels more otherworldly than usual.
First, it’s dark. It’s really dark. Through the brown elm leaves you can see every twinkling star in the sky, rushing at us like pinpoints from millions of years ago; we are far out in the country, further out than Sandra’s house, and there is almost no ambient light around. There is no moon tonight.
It is well after midnight, much later than we normally began festivities. It’s after One by the time I have a buzz, and the rest of the guys are even slower to get there. Something feels awkward, forced, about tonight. The conversation is slow to roll, the laughs are few and far between. Someone is always sneaking off by themselves to play around in the fort. Our camaraderie simply is not clicking. It is a night for mutual introspection.
Standing in that dark night, chatting with Simon, still smelling like the restaurant I had worked at that evening, I feel the beat in my bones. The rhythm of the evening, pounding at my brain from millions of miles away, somewhere near the pinpoints of light overhead.
With everyone present, standing in a loose circle and talking about work, or pussy, or beer, I decide it is my turn to sneak off by myself and mess around in the fort a bit. Once inside, my buzz becomes more apparent, as I have some trouble maneuvering in the tight spaces and, at one point, get mildly lost. The buzz, seemingly, has become all-out drunk.
I sit in some plywood corner, light a cigarette, and do what I almost always do in such situations: try to force a revelation. I peer forward to my future self and try to ask him what he’s learned, what he’s done. I look back at my younger self and tell him what has happened since he got left behind, stranded in his specific place and time. I picture myself sitting there, where I was, and then pull upwards, flying up and over these crotchety woods, this green state, flying rapidly away from the globe, always putting myself to proper size and perspective. I wonder about the wall beside me, who made it, how long it’s been there, and how I relate to it. Will this wall be here after I am gone from this world? Or is this seemingly important structure more temporary than I am?
Usually no revelation comes. Tonight is no exception. After I finish my cigarette I manage to clamber back out of the fort and rejoin the group.
Something is on fire.
The guys are all standing around something burning on the ground. As I come nearer, I can tell it’s nothing of consequence. This isn’t just something burning, though. This is the brightest light, it seems, for miles. The flames illuminate the bottoms of the elm branches, almost like they would a cave’s ceiling, causing an even-more insular feeling in this backyard and at the same time casting an atmosphere of eerie calm over the whole landscape.
The flames are also the only thing that seems able to jar us out of our stoicism. Suddenly, we’re are all a-chatter, speaking rapidly and loudly to each other, and as soon as the flames begin to die down there is an immediate search for something more to burn. Everyone’s wallets come out and we are throwing our old, unnecessary ATM receipts onto the flames. Lee runs to his car and comes back with an empty shoebox. He throws this onto the flames.
Ethan takes Monty and they run into Ethan’s house to search for more flammable items. While they’re gone, the flames die. But the rest of us, now left again in the terrible darkness, are now more animated. Surely this is partly owed to the fact that we are all finally drunk, but also, the flames have sparked a sense of adventure in us (who does not feel this way about fire?). We are not talking about the fire, but other things. The fire certainly started this, though. It kick-started us out of our lethargy.
Ethan and Monty return with a treasure trove of boxes, wrapping paper, notebooks, shoes (!), Dean Koontz books, anything flammable that won’t be missed, and a few things that will be missed. We all get out our lighters and set multiple small blazes in the central clearing. The backyard lights up like a grand ballroom. The effect of the roof of leaves combined with the utter darkness surrounding us is mesmerizing. I have never experienced anything else like it.
Some things burn fast and have to be replaced quickly, whereas other items are interesting experiments. The shoes, for instance, take quite some time to get burning, but once they ignite they burn calm and slow, as if made of coal. A pair of golf gloves simply will not burn at all, until they are thrown onto a burning pile of notebooks, at which point they slowly ignite and create a green flame.
Ethan and Monty return to the house and the rest of us keep the fires going until they return. They come back with more questionable items: things not yet used, like paper plates and toilet paper, and some items that will be missed, like pillows. Other items that have an unsure flammability: a ceramic gnome, ice cube trays. A plastic owl.
Everything we burn is now a major experiment. How does this burn? Would this burn if it was touching this? The most interesting thing we burned at this stage was a catcher’s mitt. It took forever to get it going, and once it burned it burned really, really slow, but it left it’s used self behind in a fragile, black, flaky substance that resembled ground pepper.
Slowly we are running out of things to burn. This is inevitably depressing. Ethan can only take so much out of his house. After all, we are not insane.
Ethan disappears behind the fort. Nobody really notices that he went anywhere. We are still tending to multiple small fires. He returns shortly with a ten-speed bicycle.
Someone asks him whose bike it is.
“My brother’s”, he says.
Clyde says, “Won’t he miss it?” Clyde says this with a wide, wide grin.
“Probably”, Ethan says.
It is not easy to burn a bicycle. Of course, the tires burn easily and quick and almost out of control. But most of the bike is metal; we have to intentionally burn only parts of the bike. The seat burns OK, as do the plastic handlebar covers. When thrown onto a sizeable fire, the reflectors on the petals melt, then burn, like small pockets of lava.
In the fire-light, a sudden revelation seems to grip Ethan. He tells us he’ll be right back. He runs toward his house.
A few minutes later he returns. He is, quite impossibly, pushing in front of him a tractor tire. A big tractor tire. It is taller than me by almost a full foot. This is possibly the most unexpected thing I have ever seen. ETHAN style=”mso-spacerun: yes” farm. Nobody ever asked him where he got this tractor tire.
Rather than cause us to ask questions, we all cheer as soon as we realize what’s going on. This is truly the ultimate burn.
Ethan positions the tire by a still-burning small fire and tips it over onto the flames. It just sits there. Certainly, it’s going to take a bit of doing to get this fire going.
So Ethan went and got some gasoline.
In a few minute’s time, the tractor tire is burning. And the gasoline doesn’t waste time. This tire is burning, and it’s burning big time. It is a violent burn.
Lee throws the bicycle onto the burning tire.
These flames are getting very big. They hiss as they eat the tire. They seemingly spray out the sides of the tire, causing the fire to actually be about twice as big as the tire itself. We all step back a bit, but stay in an entranced circle. The flames are reaching out far, the flames are reaching high, the metal bicycle is melting, the heat can be felt from twenty feet away, the hissing noise is louder and louder. We are mute by the fire’s presence. We are stationary in it’s glow. We did this.
Vaguely I notice Ethan running from his house with a garden hose. The rest of us continue to stand stock-still, our faces lit brighter than daylight, our daily problems forgotten, our addictions and lost loves no more important than the small spark created by our Bic lighters. The dry elm leaves have now become embers, floating off their branches, landing on other elms, on the dying but alive grass, on the roof of the fort. The flames from the tire reach the lowest braches, charring them black, and now the highest leaves turn into tiny balls of flame, shooting off the trees from the violent force of the monster beneath them.
Bum.
Bum.
Bum.
Bum ba dum ba dum.
Bum.
Bum.
Bum.
Bum ba dum ba dum.
3. How Far Can You Go?
It is important to have some secrets. If you were to tell just one person every little dark detail of where you’ve been, what things you’ve done—why, there’d be nothing left for your soul to feed on, during the solitary quiet moments.
It is important for me sometimes to tell almost everything; to find some smooth, near-perfect mirror in which to view myself, my blemishes, my glories. This type of self-aware confession is not for everybody, and it’s usefulness is arguable.
But it is a shame, I think, to leave the most artful of your days to dwindle to mere sparks, left untold. Life is to be lived simply for the living of it, this much is true. But like a good movie, sometimes even life needs reviewed.
I don’t want my loudest screams to bounce off an empty sky.
When partying in the farm-separated, rolling-hills country, even while in good company, it is easy for the crowd to get bored. The more alcohol or drugs you put in you, the less you feel like just standing around and talking. All of a sudden, you realize, something should be happening here.
For our group, I think this usually took longer than for most people, because we did enjoy our conversations so much; at least five of these people should have been stand-up comedians, and two should have been novelists, and me…well, I’ll say anything to shock you. So it took some time for us to grow restless.
But grow restless we did. And we devised countless ways to combat this.
Some were simple, supposedly harmless. For instance, we liked to play the games from Whose Line Is It Anyway? with each other. A whole group of us would get going, just like the game show. We were never as funny as those guys, though.
Some were more sinister, but relatively common: small-time vandalism (road signs) or, of course, hedonism.
But we did develop something that was close to being our very own thing, and certainly was a form of performance art.
Sandra’s house was situated perfectly for road-side human displays. She lived in the country, but not so far that cars never passed her house. She lived close to the road, but there were heavy shrubs and dense trees on both sides of the road. For hiding in.
A simple example of a road-side human display is this:
Late at night (always late at night) two of the guys stand by the side of the road, awaiting the appearance of headlights on the horizon. As the car draws nearer, the two guys commence to pretend fighting each other. They must get really into it, in some cases really hitting each other. As the car closes in on them, they really turn it up a notch, making this fight look truly violent and absolutely real.
One must imagine the effect from inside the car. Out here in the country, there is very little light. Driving along at night has the eerie effect of enveloping you in this darkness. Your headlights only cut through a small bit of it. The driver of this car doesn’t really see you (or at least understand what they’re seeing) until they are practically upon you. Before they know it, they are past you, wondering if they actually saw what they think they saw.
Now, the fight example is a good one, because this gives the driver of the car a moral quandary. Do they turn around and try to help, or stop the fight? (the answer, always, is no) Do they call the police? (This was before everyone had a cell phone, so the chances of them actually doing it when they got where they were going was small indeed). As I said, the roadside was pure dense undergrowth; we had immediate and impenetrable hiding spots. We were in very little danger of repercussion.
As fun as giving the driver a moral quandary is, we found it more fun to make them question their sanity. You can do a surprising array of absurdist things in this situation. For instance, you can put on one of Sandra’s mother’s old long white flowing gowns, stand along the road (alone), face the other side of the road, and do a military salute. As the car goes past, pretend you don’t notice it. Do not swivel your head or body. Stand stock still, facing the other side of the road. Make sure to keep your eyes open, just in case they see them. This image will haunt the driver, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
A lovely variation of the ‘solitary salute’ is to take four to eight people and have all of them stand about twenty feet apart, so that we spread evenly down a small stretch of the road. We could then do all sorts of creepy variations. We could all salute. We could intersperse the ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ hand gestures. We could be moving (arms up and down wildly, or doing old-time dances like the Mashed Potato or that one that makes you look like you’re swimming). Imagine—just imagine—what that would be like from inside the car. whiz whiz whiz whiz. People like telephone poles in the middle of the night.
And of course, we started doing it naked. It was the natural idea.
We started having props, too, like a large fish, a broom, or an empty dresser drawer. The infinite possibility for humor (while also a neat exercise in perspective) was incredibly exciting.
One night, however, stands as the crowning achievement of road-side human displays. It was the middle of the summer. Most of the group was at Sandra’s house, partying. This was, I recall, one of the more fun nights of my life. There was a tremendous feeling of fellowship amongst us, and a connection on a level above consciousness.
Oh, and we were really drunk. Most of us, anyway.
We did a few standard road-side human displays. Then somebody—I think Ethan—suggested two guys get fully naked, and one guy sit on the others shoulders. They would then stand by the road, facing across the road. Both would fold their arms across their chests—you know, that aggressive, angry male stance. As the car drove by, they would not make a single movement; they would stand completely still, facing across the road.
There was minimal pause about one dude’s balls being on the back of another dude’s head. We realized this was going to happen, but cared very little.
Of course, I was to be the guy sitting on a guy’s head. Because I’m short. But I’ve always been made of dense matter, even when I’m not fat. There were probably two guys there who weighed less than me, but I always get nominated for the ‘little guy’ stuff. Which is fine by me, because ‘little guy’ stuff is almost always fun, except when it’s sitting in the middle in the back seat of a car (fuck all of you for this!).
So, Simon and I got naked and waited by the side of the road. Now, this is the sometimes excruciating part of the whole affair, because sometimes this involves waiting about ten minutes. Which, in the middle of the night, with all your friends watching you from the bushes, can seem quite long, especially when you have to leave all beer or whatnot behind or else you’d risk the car seeing something besides the haunting image.
Finally, a car approached. Simon knelt down and I climbed on his shoulders. The car zoomed by. We returned to our friends, who were laughing hysterically.
Ethan enjoyed the show so much, he wanted to extend the concept. He wondered, what if Lee got on Simon’s shoulders, and then I somehow got on Lee’s shoulders? Three naked guys on top of each other’s shoulders would be sure to be funnier than just two guys.
As drunk as we were, I’m not sure how we managed it. I know that somehow I took a running jump at Simon and sort of clambered my way up to Lee’s shoulders.
The big problem with this set-up is that it takes too long to get it in place properly, so we couldn’t wait to see the car coming to do it. We had to set it up, then stand there and just wait for a car to come by. But then there’s another problem: it’s not easy to stay in that position.
It took us about an hour to successfully have it in place as a car went by. But it was well worth it; the reaction from our hidden friends was uproarious laughter, which is always the desired effect.
All this made us wonder: could we do four guys?
Let me just tell you: we did. It was Simon-Ethan-Lee-Me. It took friggen forever to accomplish. I was basically climbing up my friend’s nude backs like they were some rock face. And we had to hold it till a car came. And we’d fall (onto the road) and have to start all over. But oh! To imagine what it must have looked like going by at 50 miles-per-hour, and if that driver still remembers it, and what they think it was.
We called it the Human Totem Pole, and we never did it again.
Wondering how far you can go can take you to some fun, amazing places. And, of course, to some of the darkest places you can go. Dark places, after all, are always far.
What amazes me is how hard one has to try in order to be evil. Good things, well, they can happen almost without effort, once you are open to them. But evil…well, evil is a beast of a different speed.
We were at Monty’s. It was already very late at night. We were seven sheets to the wind. Someone was watching something on the TV. Somebody was on the internet. It was a foggy night.
I was looking at the books on Monty’s bookshelf. It was an eclectic collection. Some classic literature, some pop stuff, some video game books. I picked up his copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I had never read it. I knew it had been controversial in it’s day. I decided to read the first page.
But before I could open the book, I noticed something odd about it’s spine. It had been creased (it was a paperback) only about a quarter of the way through. I wondered if Monty had finished the book. He was on the couch, across the room from me.
“Monty, did you read this?”
“Yeah man.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah man.”
“How is it?”
“Pretty good.”
And it almost ended there. I started to re-shelve the book, having forgotten my desire to read the first page. As I was reaching for the shelf, I noticed his copy of the Pulp Fiction screenplay was creased all the way through, as was his copy of Stephen King’s It, and the war book We Were Soldiers. His copy of The Brothers Karamozov was not creased at all.
“Monty, did you read The Brother’s Karamozov?”
“Not yet.”
I knew right then that Monty had not finished Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
“Dude, did you really finish Chatterly?”
“Yeah man.” Now he sounded a bit annoyed. Which annoyed me.
I could not let this stand. I questioned him about the ending and his answers were vague, dismissive. I was getting really upset. But I kept my cool. I wanted to destroy him strategically.
I wanted to destroy him, and I did. Over the course of the next hour, I questioned him incessantly, and he wouldn’t back down, wouldn’t admit it. The rest of the group sat there, passively, probably wondering when I’d let it drop. I wouldn’t. I had to see how far I could go.
I began to accuse him of terrible things, of being a terrible person. I slung every insult at him,trotted out all his character defects and showed him how they all related to his having lied about reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover. He grew visibly upset. He left the room, locking himself in his bedroom.
Everyone else sat around. I can only speculate that they thought I was an asshole. No one condemned me.
Monty’s girlfriend then left the room, as well, and went to see if he was OK. She came back a few minutes later and informed us that Monty was on his bed, crying.
Good,I thought. Then, without thinking, I stood up and ran to his bedroom door. I pounded on it with both fists, screaming Did you read it?! Did you fucking read it?! Just fucking tell me you didn’t read the book! pounding and pounding with my fists in the glow of the computer screen.
In daylight things seem more real. Acts committed at night are never truly real; they are simply things you’ve done at night.
Very little of the Somethings were done during the day, and those that were remain more vivid than anything else. It’s as if, at night, you aren’t so much making conscious decisions as you are being pulled along by some invisible tide. During daylight hours,the overarching philosophy behind all your actions sometimes comes so clear, it might just be the voice of God. Or, of course, quite the opposite.
Just half an hour before, the six of us had just been hanging out, watching Sandler flicks, that sort of thing. Now, the three girls had left the room, with the promise to be back in five minutes when, they said, things would get “really interesting”. All because the three of us guys had kept pushing it, kept pushing it, kept pushing it. They were going to do it just to shut us up,and we were going to do it just to have something to talk about.
From my position on the bean bag chair, I glanced up at the two other guys, and grinned a wide grin.
There were multiple running themes in these events in our lives. The foremost was absurdism, followed closely by useless action. Then, bunched together, were self-satisfaction, groupthink, curiosity, escape, excitement, and, way down at the bottom, enlightenment.
Some of these themes spring from others, whereas some exist solely as a means to themselves. None ever made us any money, or found us true love, or transformed us into a ray of sunlight—a human being on a higher plane.
If they were about anything, I suppose they were about feeling the world more completely than TV and movies made us feel it; and conversely, seeing if the world felt us.
Willy’s parents had a cabin in the mountains, in one of those small campgrounds that is really a small collection of shack-like cabins. It really was a nice place, in a beautiful spot on the mountainside. A few times each summer they’d give Willy and Cassie the keys for a ‘romantic getaway’, but usually they’d just recruit some of us to go up there and party with them, instead.
Once, it was Willy, Cassie, Simon and his girlfriend Kelly, Pearson and his girlfriend Shawna, and me.
We spent most of the night at the picnic table in front of the cabin, drinking, playing cards (but not me; I truly hate almost any card game), smoking pot.
As the night drew on, I got restless, seeing as I hate cards. I suggested a friendly game of Truth or Dare. This was fairly standard; we played a decent amount of Truth or Dare in those days.
We played for about half an hour,with some fun results (naked tree climbing, drinking out of wire-rimmed bras)and then we took a pee break. We were in the mountain, so of course, the guys all go over to the trees to relieve themselves.
Simon, Pearson and I were all pissing beside one another, but we weren’t talking. I was just looking out into the darkness, in my own little world, when Simon and Pearson start laughing rather hard.
I looked around to see what was going on. Simon had pissed all over my right shoe, quite on purpose. I give him points for this. This was rather funny and ballsy of him. However, I knew he expected me to take the shoe off, seeing as it was drenched in urine. I refused to give him the satisfaction. I spent the rest of the night with my foot soaking in Simon’s piss.
We got back to the Truth or Dare game. When it was my turn to ask someone, I chose Simon. I knew he would say ‘Dare’, because he didn’t want to look like a pussy. He did choose ‘Dare’. Here is what I told him:
“Take this unlit cigarette. Pull your pants down. Turn around. Put the cigarette in your asshole. I don’t want it just wedged in your cheeks; it better be inside your asshole. Then, Kelly will hopefully be so kind as to light it for you. You must stand facing us with that lit cigarette in your asshole for a full sixty seconds.”
Nobody in this group ever refuses a dare, and most people don’t even hesitate to do anything. This dare is no exception. Simon does everything I said. Let me tell you, the sight is still quite clear in my mind, and it is hilarious even to this day.
Immediately following his ass cigarette dare, it was Simon’s turn to ask somebody. Naturally, he chose me. Not wanting to look like a pussy, I chose ‘Dare’. Here is what Simon said tome:
‘Smoke this cigarette.’
4. How to Crescendo
The world was potato-laden, and hilarious.
It started at work. I’d like to think I started it, but time has erased that fact. Somehow, someone started it, and it must have started something like this:
Someone took a whole, unbaked potato out of the box of whole, unbaked potatoes. They then hid this potato where they knew one of their friends would inevitably find it during the course of their work—say, next to the cheese, or amongst the coffee filters—and when the intended person came across the potato and they had the inevitable look of confusion come across their face, the person who had put the potato there said “You’ve been potatoed!”. This absurd “gotcha” left the poor victim no recourse but, of course, to potato the original culprit. Hence began a seemingly endless cycle of potatoing.
Once it began, we started refining the formula. If, say, I know that Clyde is going to count the freezer pull list in about 15 minutes, then I know that he is going to pull out the tray of Ground Sirloins to count them. If it happens to be a pretty slow night, I know the odds are that in those 15 minutes, nobody else is going to have to pull out that tray. So, I put a potato on it, comfortable that Clyde will be the first to see it. I put it near the back of the tray, for ultimate ‘reveal’ effect. Then, when I see him pick up the freezer pull clipboard (a sure sign he will soon see the potato) I make sure I am nowhere near the kitchen, because it is infinitely more frustrating when you are potatoed and you are all alone. You cannot look at the culprit and say “You motherfucker!”. You just know you’ve been gotten, and you are all alone in your humiliation.
There is no point system or scoring in potatoing. There is never a winner, or even a loser. There is just an endless cycle of getting people, and being gotten.
Your basic “hide and find” version of potatoing is as I described it above, although after a few weeks it began to get more interesting. I’d go to change into my street clothes after work and there’d be a potato in my shoe, or my pant legs would be tied shut, with a potato at the bottom of both of them. I’d go put them under my friend’s windshield wipers—especially if I was leaving before them, so they wouldn’t be able to say anything to me about it. They’d just see it at the end of their shift and be impotent before the potato.
We had to go bigger and better, though.
Once, I carved a primitive face into a potato and made a small hole where it’s mouth would be. I then lit a cigarette and placed it in the potato’s ‘mouth’ and sat the potato on the table in the break room. I then went and told Pearson that Steve, our manager, was back in the break room smoking and wanted to talk to him.
Clyde mastered the art of cutting potatoes into just the right sized wedges that they fit under car door handles without being seen. You’d go to your car after work, unlock the door, and go to open it. But your fingers just didn’t go under the handle, because of course, there were potato wedges under there. No matter how many times he did this to us, you still always had that brief moment of thinking “What the fuck is wrong with my car door handle?”
Monty once told me there was a torrential leak in the ceiling in the dining room and I should go look at it. I went to where he said it was and there, duct taped to the ceiling, was a potato.
Once, ten minutes before Clyde was to arrive at work (and when I was confident no other males were going to have to change in the male employee restroom) I went into the restroom and—using a needle and twine I had bought for the occasion—I strung up 5 or 6 potatoes in the male employee bathroom in such a fashion that they appeared to be hovering.
And on and on. The possibilities truly were endless. Oh, and if a dishwasher was playing, it got really fun.
One night after work a few of us went over to Delilah’s apartment to watch movies. This was a short-lived ‘movie night’ ritual where she made us watch cultural films; we hated her for it for a time until she showed us The City of Lost Children and I’ve been hooked on shit like that ever since.
So, a few of us were there on Delilah’s couch, some were on the floor. I was in the middle of the couch, between Clyde and Delilah. At one point I leaned forward, either to ash my cigarette or get a drink. When I leaned back, a strange object was behind my back that didn’t belong there. It took about two seconds for me to register that it was a potato.
Clyde had brought the potato game outside of work.
Some of us even went to the store and bought our own supplies of whole, unbaked potatoes. If I was hanging out with, say, Clyde and Addy, someone might suggest we drive past Lee’s house and put some potatoes on his doorstep. Or we drive past work, where Pearson was inside cooking, and potato his car door handles.
Once a bunch of us went out to eat at Bob Evans. I got up to go to the bathroom. When I got back, everyone was gone from the table, and in their places, around the table, were whole, unbaked potatoes.
One especially hot night in the throng of summer, we had a small, intimate gathering at Danielle’s parent’s house. Danielle’s parent’s were cool with us partying there, but it was the kind of situation where you’d better keep it kinda quiet and undestructive. Her parents didn’t mind us being there, but we knew that privilege could easily be taken away.
We spent most of the night wandering around the yard, smoking, drinking, simply being social. The bulk of the party was fun but fairly unremarkable. In the early morning hours the group was all asleep in the living room: on the couches, the floor, in the recliner. Everybody except me and Clyde.
Clyde and I continued to roam around the sizeable yard—probably three acres of ground—bullshitting and generally causing minor havoc: unsticking the numbers from their mailbox and rearranging them, finding dogshit in the yard and moving it to their porch, that sort of thing. We happened upon Danielle’s father’s pickup truck and hoisted ourselves into it’s bed, to see what was in there.
It was full—full—of unbaked, whole potatoes.
This was truly the mother load. We wasted no time in devising a plan to get as many of these potatoes as we could out of the truck and into the living room.
We went into the basement, and there we found laundry baskets and Tupperware tubs of varying sizes. These we used to stealthily transport our treasure.
Inside the living room (moving and acting as quietly as two very excited, quite drunk people possibly can) we surrounded every single sleeping person with potatoes. Completely surrounded them. In the midst of this work, unfortunately, we woke Ethan. However, we used this to our advantage and simply recruited him to our cause.
We had many, many more potatoes than we needed to simply surround the sleeping people. Now we wanted to completely inundate the room. We started placing potatoes on the entertainment center, beside the TV and on top of the VCR. We lined the room with them, around all the walls. Everywhere was potatoes.
Around this time, I have gotten quite drunk indeed. A blackout occurs.
I wake up on the floor. Danielle is yelling at me. I can’t understand what she’s talking about. She is very, very mad. Apparently, so are her parents. She grabs me by the hand and pulls me out into the yard.
Her parent’s mailbox is sitting on top of the pickup truck’s cab. It is full of potatoes. She takes me over to the post that the mailbox used to sit on. Where the mailbox should have been was a nice, tidy pyramid of potatoes.
5. Part of Me Is Still Hanging There
This isn’t the whole story.
The whole story begins in sterile four-cornered rooms and ends in steep ditches, and everything in between is just breaths. And sometimes, the breaths are broken down into yet smaller moments, quiet interminable moments. And sometimes, the breaths are expanded into longer moments, moments erupting exploding enraptured.
The breaths you take on your journey can be all kinds of breaths, in all kinds of places. You can breathe while weeping in Hong Kong or you can breathe while masturbating on the Gold Coast. But all that really matters, anytime at all, is that you’re breathing.
To understand the whole story you have to understand all the small stories first. The small stories make the whole story. If you don’t understand what happened to you last year, you stand little chance of knowing where you’ll be tomorrow.
I was drunk and I couldn’t lift my head; my head was heavier than it had ever been. The television—not far away—was playing something I hated. I swiveled my head to the right. I could see Simon’s arm. Without thinking, I reached over and burned his arm with my cigarette. He was slow to react, slow to realize what I’d done. When finally he asked me why I’d done it, I told him I did it because it was funny. And, truly, it was funny.
Clyde had just gotten home from college for summer break. I had missed him very much. I suggested he and I take three days from our schedule and go to my college apartment, which was standing empty all summer long. During these three days, we were to binge. We were to buy as much alcohol as we needed for three days, plus food and ample entertainment. We did all this. Over the course of these days, we were dirtier, filthier and more debased than we had ever been before. I woke up one of the nights with the flicker of the television static playing across my face; a wreath of cigarette smoke still hung round the room from the previous day’s drinking and smoking. I could hear Clyde laughing to himself on the couch next to mine. With some effort, I sat up. What are you all giggles about? I asked him. He replied: Dude, I just used your mayonnaise to jerk off. I asked him why. He replied: Because it was funny.
Simon’s girlfriend, Kelly, was blowing Clyde on Monty’s living room floor. Simon didn’t care; in fact, he was in the other room, probably playing Final Fantasy. It was a joy to watch. She moved her head in a perfect rhythm, and Clyde’s facial expressions went from comical to ecstatic and back again. It was like watching angels ice skate.
Monty and I were sitting on a balcony in an apartment complex. It was 7 in the morning. There were about ten empty beer bottles on the plastic table between our two chairs. On the stereo inside, the Phish song My Friend, My Friend was playing. I always thought Monty would like this song, but I suspect he never did.
Monty suddenly grabbed a beer bottle and threw it off the balcony. It hung in the air for an impossible amount of time, then hit the pavement of the complex’s parking lot with a rather satisfying smash. I looked at Monty in disbelief. I thought, Here is a genius. Nobody would actually think about throwing glass bottles into a parking lot at 7 in the morning; hence, it must be alright. I grabbed a bottle and threw it, arching it high, like a pop fly, for maximum hang time. The smash is so incredible because you feel like it is an extension of yourself, as if your hand—in which the bottle had just been—had caused the otherworldy sound. When we had thrown all the bottles, we hurried up and drank more, so we could throw more. Nobody ever said anything to us about it.
We would often take showers together, in varying combinations of males and females. These communal showers were never sexual, not even once. We were just dirty people who were afraid of being alone, even for five minutes.
A ‘turban’ is when you go up to a sleeping person and, taking your pants all the way off, attempt to make your ass, balls and penis all touch the sleeping person’s face at the same time, all without waking them up. Ask me about this sometime.
I used to have a schtick called ‘The Rats’. I had to have a beverage—any beverage—in my hand to do ‘The Rats’. It worked best with someone who’s never seen it before.
I would say, quite innocently, to the person: “Ask me about the rats.”
Immediately after saying this, I would take a sip of my beverage and hold it in my mouth.
The person is quite confused by me telling them to ask me about the rats. They almost always say one of these three things:
“The rats?”
“Rats?”
“What?”
Even if they say “What?” I still would then spit, quite dramatically, the beverage in my mouth directly into their face, and then I would scream (quite dramatically, again): “The rats!?”
Once, I did this to the wrong person.
Clyde’s younger brother had graduated from high school. It was a lovely, breezy summer night, and Clyde’s family was having a little party for the younger brother. This was not a party party, but the kind of party a family throws for a graduate. You know, a chips-and-dip kind of party.
Clyde invited most of us from the group, although I can’t be sure why. I know that I was never close with his family—they considered me a bad influence, I think. And I was.
It was a mostly boring night. I sat at the back of the living room for the better part of an hour, watching Clyde, Ethan, Simon, and Lee play the latest James Bond video game on PlayStation. I spoke with Clyde’s mother and brother a few times, and leafed through old copies of Grit magazine, leaving every fifteen minutes or so to go outside and smoke. I was immensely bored.
Eventually, Sandra showed up. She was a bit more excited to be there, because she was slightly younger than the rest of us, so she had known Clyde’s brother just a bit in high school. Her arrival was also exciting for me, because she, too, didn’t give a shit about video games.
Also, she was a smoker. So she stood outside with me. Clyde’s family lived in a neat little house, right on the outskirts of a tiny little town. For being in a town, they had a very nice yard. Two big trees (with a hammock!), some topiary, a well-kept vegetable garden, and ample street parking, because their’s was essentially the last house in town. So Sandra and I had a nice little bit of ground to stroll around on, smoke our cigarettes, and enjoy the breezy, beautiful evening.
The video gaming ended, and the guys piled out of the house, looking to stretch their legs. Sandra saw this as an opportunity to go congratulate Clyde’s brother. And so it happened that a bunch of us restless guys were standing in the yard, looking for a Something to occur.
“Let’s shit on Sandra’s car,” Clyde suggested.
This sounded positively awesome to all of us.
But it wouldn’t be easy. She could come back out of the house at any time. And how were we to do this, exactly? Sure, we were on the outskirts of town, but we were still in town. You can’t just shit on someone’s car on a town street. After all, we weren’t crazy.
And, naturally, not everybody had to shit just then.
Ethan—who was always very generous with himself in matters like this—volunteered to retrieve a plastic bag from his car. He would then go behind the house and shit in the bag. Once Ethan came back around with the plastic bag, Clyde would go into the house to ensure that Sandra stayed inside while Ethan applied the shit to her car.
And that is how it happened. Ethan went around the house to shit in the bag. He returned about five minutes later. He showed us the shit. After all, how fun would it be for us if we hadn’t seen the shit?
Clyde went inside to distract Sandra. Ethan (I believe Lee went with him, while the rest of us watched from the yard) ran out to Sandra’s car and—turning the bag inside out—smeared the shit on her car doors. I am not sure if they put it on the handles. I know that they had planned to, but I don’t know if they did.
While still standing at the car, we could see Ethan whisper something to Lee, and then Lee came running back to us.
“Someone go inside and tell Sandra you want to look through her CDs. Ask for her car keys. Ethan wants to put the rest of the shit inside her car.”
This was a risky proposition. It would be possible that Sandra would want to come outside herself, thinking that there was fun being had out here. Or, knowing us the way she knew us, she might suspect that we were in the middle of fucking with her. And if she offered to just come outside and open the car for us, how would you keep her from doing it, without arousing her suspicions? But putting the shit inside her car was truly the move of a master Somethinger; Ethan was right. We had to try.
Lee went inside. Lee had just gotten done dating Sandra, so at the moment, he had her attention more than any of us. If anyone could do it, Lee could.
A long, long time passed. After about fifteen minutes, most of us were getting ready to go inside and see what was going on. Just as we were about to go in, Lee emerged—by himself. You could hear keys jingling in his hand. He walked calmly to Sandra’s car, where Ethan was waiting in the dark.
There are five of us riding in this car, all night. We are not headed anywhere. We have no destination. </SPAN>I style=”mso-spacerun: yes” a feet. I have a bottle of Coke, which I am mixing with gin in a Super-Size McDonalds cup. I am chain-smoking Newport Lights. Someone in the front seat is smoking copious amounts of marijuana, and the windows are rolled up. I am a bit uncomfortable. This kind of moving party is fun, to be sure, but at the moment, I am just a bit too drunk to be so cramped.
We stop at a gas station and a few of the guys go in. I stay in the car. I think Lee is beside me. He says some of that nonsense stuff I find so funny. Stuff he only says when he’s high, like “I am fwoppin fwippin” or “I just heard a rooster walkin'”. I can barely pay attention to him. I want out of this car, but I am afraid to get out.
The guys return, and we start moving again. The windows get rolled down and I start to feel a little better, clearer. Some Led Zeppelin is on the radio, and this is during the two months of my life that I think Led Zeppelin is a good band. The veil begins to lift; I might just make it out of this car.
We are now far out in the country. Everything out of the windows is darkness. Road signs, the silhouettes of Douglass Firs, A-Frame roofs are like clunky living shadows in this deathly darkness. We pull over into a stone parking lot. I cannot tell where we are. I try to ask where we are pulling over; either I am incapable of asking, or they are incapable of hearing me.
The car doors open and everyone gets out. Somehow I manage to get out, too. My eyes adjust to the darkness. We are in one of the many pull-offs that line the Big Spring, our local creek. These pull-offs are scenic stops for nature lovers, fishermen and young lovers. This particular pull-off is not one that I am greatly familiar with. I have been here once or twice, but have no history here.
The guys are spread out. Someone is pissing into the creek. Someone is sitting in the grass. I wander around, trying to get the veil to lift further.
The veil does lift further, as I realize that there is a large boulder near the car, and someone is crouched on that boulder, like a catcher in a baseball game. His pants are down and his ass is facing us. And no sooner do I realize that, than I realize he is shitting. The other guys realize this at the same time I do, and they start to laugh. I do not laugh. I bend over. I vomit.
I knew this was going to happen, anyway. I had been trying to deny it. But the vomit had been inevitable for some time now. Seeing shit come out of a man’s ass was just the necessary impetus.
It is a hard, violent vomit, as they usually are nowadays, with lots of dry heaving, tears, and snot. This is not unusual to my companions. I doubt they even noticed.
With everybody’s secretions safely on the ground and not in the car, we pile back in. I am feeling quite better. I mix another drink. Someone in the front seat wants me to mix them a drink, too. I mix them a drink. I spill a decent amount of gin on myself. I take my shirt off, noticing for a brief moment the oniony scent that peeks from my armpits. When did I shower last?
We drive for a considerable time more. I have no idea where we are.
Once again we pull into a stone parking lot. This time, I ask where we are, and someone answers me: “The Duck Pond”.
The Duck Pond, the actual name of which is Children’s Lake, is a shallow, man-made lake in the scenic town of Boiling Springs. It is about fifty feet across, and perhaps four-hundred feet long. At it’s deepest point, it is perhaps five feet deep. Large, multi-colored, boulder-sized rocks line it’s bottom. It attracts a wide array of wildlife: ducks, geese, swans, turtles, beavers. There are manicured walkways all the way around it, red park benches at regular intervals, and little vending machines that dispense corn, in case you may want to feed the ducks. You are not supposed to go there at night, although I often have.
I make myself a fresh drink in the McDonalds cup. Someone retrieves a few beers from the trunk. We all make sure we have our cigarettes. We set off, to walk around the Duck Pond.
At night, you can hear the ducks, the geese, out on the water, but you can’t see them. They aren’t very active at night, but every now and then, you hear a splash, the flap of a wing against the heavy air, a short quick quack. It is melancholy in that worst way: dreary foreboding.
There is a place where the path kind of ends, and you are left to walk through grass for a bit, and under the canopy of some Willows. In the sunshine, this part of the lake is the most beautiful. At night, it’s majesty is lost. You can feel the grass, and perhaps the spray of the dew against your shins, but the Willows are lost in the night. The copse has disappeared.
If you were standing at this spot during the day, you would see that a narrow cement platform has been constructed, extending about fifteen feet into the lake. This is like a small concrete dock, which serve as a place for the birds to hang out without being in direct contact with human passers-by. During the day, this concrete dock is covered by birds; squaking, flapping, quacking birds. During the night, it is abandoned, and is covered only in bird shit. But it is truly covered in bird shit, like some foul Pollock.
As a group, we stop here. We are mostly silent. We are smoking, drinking, thinking. I start to take my pants off.
Someone asks me, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to run down that cement dock and jump in.”
They try to tell me not to. They warn me that the water is very shallow here, and that the concrete dock is awash in bird shit. I wave off their warnings. Have these guys stopped wanting to see how far they can go?
I take off my shoes, my socks, my pants, my underwear. I’m a naked man at the Duck Pond. The guys have warned me, so they are no longer worried. They are watching, smiling, ready to laugh and tell me they told me so.
I take a long sip of my drink.
I start running, down through the grass and then suddenly my feet hit concrete. It is terribly slippery, and even while I am running, I can feel the bird shit sticking to my heels, squishing between my toes. It is a gross feeling.
In this light, it’s not easy to see where the platform ends. Just in time, I realize I can see the moon’s reflection in the water; I use this as a guide.
At the end of the platform, I jump hard and high, as if from a diving board. I pull my legs up under my ass and clasp my hands under my shins: the cannonball position.
And I freeze there; I hover. Time seemingly stands still. See me from the back: my shaggy, rarely groomed brown hair, my pimpled back, a bit of flabby belly spilling over into view, my two half-moon ghost-white butt cheeks, with my balls and the tip of my penis jutting out below them, and directly below that, the soles of my feet. And in front of me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water. Now, rotate around me, as if you were a movie camera. Stop when you are beside me, at my profile. My mouth, wide like Pac-Man, my ample gut, spilling forth like a sack of oatmeal, the curve of my haunches, my arms flung below me, seeming to hold me in place, to levitate me. And behind me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water. Now, rotate around me further.<> Stop when you are in front of me. See that look on my face? That excruciating yawp of desperate living, desperate to feel these moony waters; see that fat, oatmealy belly, my hairy, caveman chest, nipples erect by the night wind, the pale fronts of my wobbly knees, my black overgrown nest of pubics, my dangling penis reduced to a nub by a run through the darkness. Now look behind me: look at those guys standing there, their faces frozen in various forms of laughter, disbelief, worry, apathy. Look at those guys! Oh, they are probably worried about so many things; I am sure they are worried that I am about to hurt myself. Also, looking at the set of their mouths and the glint in their eyes, I’m willing to wager they’re worried about drowning in a ferry accident with two-hundred strangers in icy cold water somewhere, or whether they’ll ever get to walk the length of South America, or what they’d do if they found a dead body in a hotel hallway, or if they’ll keep having that dream where they show up to the wrong building for a college final exam, or if they have syphilis, or if they’ll ever be the father they want to be, or marry a woman as great as their mother, and in there somewhere are the realizations, too, the realizations we are having every moment of every day: the lines of morality and sanity we keep drawing and moving and drawing again with everything we observe, and the list of Hopes and Dreams that is under constant revision without us knowing, the importance of breath and bras and bicycles all neatly ordered and the smells we love so much like old books and stale cake and the things we know we’ll never do like fly a jumbo jet or hide in a refrigerator to scare the crap out of somebody and oh look at the list of regrets written all over these guys faces the women they wanted to fuck the cars they wanted to buy the movies they wanted to see as though they were already dead as though their whole story had been told but that’s not the truth now is it we lived, we were burning to live, we were burning to live!
Notes From the Fire 