Fan’s Complaint

Bad Route Rd
NO SERVICES

Home on the Range
NO SERVICES

???

***

Somewhere in North Dakota, a tumbleweed crossed my path.

iPod sentience: entering the painted canyon area of North Dakota, my iPod decides to play “The Trio” from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It was to be the only time during today’s drive that felt the way my last trip did, everything coming together just right to bring a smile to my face. The rest of the drive was tiresome and lonely.

Maybe I am getting too old for this.

What is it about Sunday nights/Monday mornings that make it so hard for me to fall asleep?

I have been in and out of bed for the past four hours, trying to stop thinking.

Each time I take a road trip, less of me comes back.

I am stuck in snow. The departures and arrivals rock me back and forth. I’ll gain traction soon and be free.

I am stuck in snow. The trips are just spinning my wheels, digging me deeper and wearing down the tread.

Or maybe I am the drunkard leaving Gatsby’s, sitting in the driver’s seat, holding up traffic, not realizing that the wheel has become completely separated from the axle.

***

Had an idea to make an interactive map of the United States, where if you click on a state, a short passage about that state would pop up. Then I realized that I had done something similar before, in poetry form.

***

Thought about this girl I worked with last year. A couple of years older and sort of attractive. I didn’t talk to her much at first, because she didn’t come out to lunch with us. It turned out that she used that time for reading (something by Norman Mailer, I think, was the only title I remember). Later on, it turned out that she was into cars (she was a Honda girl–drove a Prelude, and I explained to her how the ATTS system on her car works–but she dug the Skyline). She was also a huge Rangers fan, and had a good laugh when I said, after the Leetch trade, that the team was dead to me.

She was short then like I wish I were now. Just filling the days and saving some cash before a big change. She moved to Florida and bought a cheap house with her fiancee. Not the big change that I’d like for myself, but change is change, right?

We did not even exchange insincere “keep in touch” sentiments when she left, but I’m kind of wishing we had.

When I first started working this job, I instinctively stuck with the guy closest to my age. We went out for lunch together every day, and filled the hours with pleasant, if not altogether deep conversation about cars, sports, and gambling. For some reason I haven’t yet figured out, I have been reluctant to call him (he’s working in a building across the street) for lunch. I think it is because I don’t want to be reminded of the complacency that was last year, pre-roadtrip.

But I am unable to dismiss the alarming possibility that I am afraid he’ll see just how far gone I am these days.

I feel as though I am fading away. My bosses see it, I think. But I don’t know whether these jobs that last no more than a week is because of my behavior, or the cause of my behavior. Some mornings I wake up and feel that the day will be significant–a blue sky, my left arm darkening another shade, a horrendous commute–and something will break, or fall into place, and I’ll wake up the next morning in a parking lot twenty miles east of Gary, Indiana.

***

But maybe all that was just insomnia on a Monday morning talk. I have seventy-eight boxes to move today. I have fifty-two minutes before my alarm goes off. Time to crawl into bed, while the sky is still brown, and tear all possibility of significance from this particular morning.

I’ve been looking at job listings on craigslist, and amidst the sea of listings for assistant office drone positions, a couple stuck out.

One was for assistant something at a cattery. I’d like to take that job just so I could say, if I were ever asked, “What’s your industry?”

“I’m in cattery.”

Though I suppose the gramatically correct sentence should be, “I’m in a cattery,” or “I work in a cattery.” The problem with that job was that it pays shit, and it’d be cleaning up shit.

The other listing that caught my eye was something for comedy writing. They were looking for actors and/or writers. I’ve written two and a half pieces of comedy in my time, and I happen to think they’re hilarious, but I’m not sure if my sense of humor would appeal to these people.

As an example, I will list a few things, in increasing order of hilarity.

A retard.
A retard in a wheelchair (a Go-Tard).
A Go-Tard slipping on a banana peel.
A Go-Tard getting hit by a bus.
A Go-Tard getting hit by a bus full of doctors who cure Go-Tardism.
“Look out! It’s Hitler fucking a donkey!”

I’m told that most of the above would not be funny to the average American. It’s probably for the best.

I’ve been rather flattered lately by people saying I’m a sort of a character, that I’m almost fictional in my thoughts and (in)actions.

And now let me quote from The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy, a Romantic that the narrator meets on a bus.

…He is no homosexual, but merely a romantic…The poor fellow. He has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes…In the first place, he will defeat himself, jump ten miles ahead of himself, scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences, want her so desperately that by his own peculiar logic he can’t have her; or having her, jump another ten miles beyond both of them and end by fleeing to the islands where, propped at the rail of his ship in some rancid port, he will wonder his own loneliness.

For reasons obvious to my friends and acquaintances, I rather enjoyed the brief appearance of this character. The narrator wasn’t too bad either. He knew the score–making money, driving a sports car, dallying with girls, and most importantly, he feared the malaise and the everydayness and the living who are really dead.

What is to be done with this new understanding I have gained on the nature of my peculiar affliction? Maybe instead of constantly undergoing self-imposed trials to build character, I need to be demolishing character–embracing the everyday. With any luck, I can die and become a real boy.

Earlier this morning, I was having a conversation/argument with Jay, and I said something along the lines of “nothing has ever been as important as I thought it would be.”

A bit later, I watched Vanilla Sky for the second time. At some point, one of the characters says something like, “The little things, is there anything bigger?”

Nothing in my life has changed in almost half a year now. It’s hotter, so that means I actually sweat while moving boxes now, and gas prices have gone up, so I’ve got a bit less money to spend, but overall, my day-to-day, week-to-week, paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle has remained the same since I have had this job.

During this time I’ve had various gripes. Being alone, setting my face on fire, car troubles, money troubles, boredom, the list goes on and on. There have been highs, like racing last weekend, and lows, like talking about girls after racing last weekend, or setting my face on fire. But over all, it’s been mostly contentment. Perhaps Contentment is too happy a word, so maybe complacency would be better.

It does seem that it’s the little things we remember the most, when we’re replaying our lives, or as I like to call it, having a “h. Introspective-Retrospective.” I don’t really know what I’m saying, except maybe that the readers of this blog could possibly have a darker view of my life than what I experience in actuality. Of course, this isn’t anything I haven’t said before, but now is a good time for me to remind myself of this.

10 years from now I’m not going to remember how completely used and disrespected I felt when I drove away from the mechanic’s yesterday, the car straining hard as I tried to get up the on-ramp to a safe merging speed, after he told me there was nothing wrong with the car. But I’ll probably remember smoking and drinking with Adam at a bar downtown, and how European it all felt, and how it reminded me this old woman that regaled us with stories of Paris in her youth while I was having coffee with E****a, who wore a white zip-up sweatshirt that day.

And so I’m going to try, for the rest of today (my definition of today being the rest of the day until I go to sleep, which will probably be within the hour), to focus on the positive little things, and not be bugged by the negative little things. It seems that in the end, they’re all little things, and most of them will take care of themselves. A minor or even a major setback never really sets us back for long, we tend to just get up and keep going, because hope is really all we have. Sometimes I lose sight of that, and for the next thirty minutes, I’m going to keep this in mind.

Keep dreaming of that green light, old sport.

Yes, I know, I am two days late. It couldn’t be helped. On Sunday night/Monday moring I did not sleep, because of the farmers and the iron horse. Then on Monday, it was my mom’s day off, so she wanted to hang out, and it was my friend Adam’s birthday. Normally I would’ve gone straight home to collapse to the strains of Pennyroyal Tea, but on this particular April 5th, on no sleep, I decided to hang out with my mother (so I can have a couple of guilt-free weeks) and to go drinking with Adam.

Drinking was the usual thing. I met Adam’s co-workers, who seemed to be a nice bunch. Whenever I came back from the bathroom I would walk into some Ph.D level conversation. Meeting these people convinced me (for about a day or so) that I needed to get my act together and go to grad school.

Thing is, where a year ago I would’ve hated these people for being older and more together than I am, I now find them inspirational. Perhaps that is the wrong word. Recall the entry I made over a year ago about a night at the Lansky Lounge. I accused the young professionals there of being on “the wrong side of 25″. Yet here I am, edging closer to that arbitrarily magical divide, and now I too wear a collared shirt. I think I may have jumped trains of thought here. My point is that I hate what I do, my coworkers are old (they talk about church and mortgages), and even though I know I’d make a piss-poor grad student (piss-poor in a couple of different ways), I’d rather be around people my age who are all doing my thing.

But then maybe that isn’t a good thing. That is certainly no way to expand my horizons. But being a box lifter/scrivener hasn’t exactly turned me into the next Kerouac either. I think I just hate a few more things now than I did when I first graduated.

Anyway, Adam’s friends talked a lot about their studies, and they were a good group, and I wish I still had a good group like that. I miss the writing community at college.

***

On April 5th: 10 fucking years. He’d have been 37 now. I spent some time at work yesterday scanning google news for Kurt Cobain, and I read a bunch of articles. Most were poorly written. No, poorly written is perhaps too strong. They were well written, yet I did not get a sense of any of the writers being or having been fans of Nirvana. A lot of these articles felt far too objective. I guess that’s what journalism is supposed to be.

The stuff I wrote before the stars has nothing to do with Kurt’s death, but even if I had stuck closer to that topic, I probably would’ve written about the same damn thing. At this point, I feel no need to advertise about Nirvana. Either you got/get it or you don’t. If you never heard of them, it’s too late to jump on now–the train has not only left the station, but it derailed somewhere between Classic Rock and 90s Nostalgia. If you weren’t a part of it at some point before 1995, then just forget about it.

The thing that bugs me every time this date comes around is counting the years that have passed. 10 is of course an arbitrarily meaningful number, and realizing that it’s been ten years since I left middle school one day and heard the news at my friend’s house on MTV (we were still too poor to have cable), is just an utter mindfuck. Next thing you know, I’ll be on the wrong side of that 25.

A few days ago, I was asked to write about the afterlife, so here it is, Jessica. This will probably be a bit longer and more roundabout than I intend for it to be, but what are you gonna do?

I don’t know if I’m old enough to have accepted or faced the fact that, one day, I too will die. Though that day is probably a long way away, I’m not looking forward to it. However, judging from the way I currently lead my life, that day will probably come sooner rather than later, and it will likely be as a result of cancer, a horrific car accident, or a heart attack.

Let’s talk about those three potential deaths for a second. One reason I find cancer to be such a great punchline (have you noticed I’m a horrible person?) is because I’m scared to death of it. Many words/ideas have been used to describe people’s fears of cancer, but the one that resonate with me the most is that Cancer is your own body turning against you. It’s a betrayal. But I suppose my body deserves to have revenge on me, since I continue to smoke, even as I’ve taken note of my dwindling ability in hockey, climbing stairs, and generally moving about the world outside my house.

Car accidents happen every day. If the New York State lotto’s slogan can be “Hey, you never know,” and one is far more likely to be involved in a car accident than to win the lotto, then it’s only logical to apply that same slogan to a horrible, corpse-mangling car crash. Though I am by no means a lousy driver (no, I’m not talking about the Gatsby metaphor here), I do enjoy driving above the ludicrously low speed limit. Does that mean I’m more likely to die? Hey, you never know.

A heart attack isn’t too scary for me right now, but I do realize that I lead a very high-risk lifestyle in this department. I smoke, rarely exercise, enjoy fatty foods, and have a short temper. I guess I’m not worried about dying of a heart attack at all, I’m more worried about surviving a heart attack and becoming feeble (more so).

As seen in the previous paragraph, in some cases, I still would welcome death. I’m quite sure this is a sign that I have not yet accepted the fact that I will die one day. Certainly, there were many times during my college career where I wouldn’t have minded a quick heartattack, or a peaceful slumber in my car, or a quick gunshot to the head. I was, of course, young and stupid. All it took to scare me straight was losing control of my car at 70mph on a snowy morning in Wisconsin.

Now, onto the afterlife. Obviously, if I believed in a nice place where I can go after I die, I would not fear death. Well, I suppose if one believed in hell, then one would also fear death. I’m not entirely sure I believe or disbelieve in either.

When I was a youngster in Catholic school, I was fairly certain I believed in both Heaven and Hell. After all, a boy of six is very impressionable. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on my mood) that whole system of belief collapsed for me on the fateful day I asked my teacher, “If God made everything, then who made God?” My young mind was thrown into an infinite loop with the teacher’s explanation. If God just was, why can’t other things just be? If that’s just the way things are, then why…? And there, enduring my punishment in the corner of the classroom, I became an atheist.

I don’t think I was ever a very good atheist. I feel that atheists are also supposed to be very good skeptics. By taking it on faith that God did not exist, I don’t think I was being very skeptical. Whether you believe in God or you don’t, I feel that to declare things one way or another requires faith. And faith is something I don’t have.

So what am I now? I suppose I had a brief flirtation with Buddhism, where I picked up the concepts of karma, reincarnation, and nirvana. I imagine the western mind sees nirvana as a sort of Buddhist heaven, but my understanding of it is that nirvana is the great void. It isn’t a bad void, like when you stop your mind from racing on a wintery night and realize that you are worth nothing, have accomplished nothing, and in the grand scheme of things, will amount to nothing. Nirvana is nothing, not happiness, not sadness, not being. And I suppose at this point, that’s what I believe will happen when I die.

I could also accept the theory that dying would be perceived by your mind, in your last moments, as an excruciating process that goes on forever. But I would prefer not to.

And as for reincarnation, or heaven/hell, if I believed on those things, and I have no factual reason not to, then by the rest of the rules prescribed in their respective religions, I would either be reincarnated as a very undesirable creature that leads a painful life, or I would spend eternity roasting in Hell.

Those are all of the theories of the afterlife with which I am familiar. I have neglected to mention the Pureland, but I’ve always regarded that as Buddhist heaven anyway. As attached as I am to me, my life, or–dare I say it–my soul, and as undesirable as it is for me to just disappear completely (please disregard any of my previous statements about wanting to disappear) nirvana is the only viable option. When you can either burn, be a cockroach, or just be gone, I think anyone would choose nirvana.

I’ve finally begun to contemplate thinking about starting to write something about the three weeks and twenty-five hundred dollars I spent in Europe. As usual, I spent about five minutes thinking about an opening sentence, and then ten minutes writing and rewriting the opening sentence, before deleting it entirely and staring at the blank screen in frustration.

If it sounds to you like I haven’t done much of anything, well…

The problem is that it is much too late at night for me to be using a typewriter. Not that I even have the space to set up the typewriter, but it’s nice to have an excuse.

I think that for the past few months, I’ve been trying to give up on this whole “writing” thing. I even stopped feeling guilt about not “working,” and replaced it with guilt about not working (the quotes are there because I’m still not convinced that the act of writing is real work). But whenever I read something that inspires me, the first instinct is still to let the thoughts stew and simmer into something coherent that I can put on the page, or, failing that, just shit out a mess of incoherent thoughts on this blog.

***

I remember in one of those horrible Infinity Something comics of the early nineties, one issue opened or closed with Thanos on a deserted planet, with a caption that quoted Nietzsche, “When you stare into the Abyss, the Abyss also stares into you.” At the time when I first read it, at the age of thirteen or so, I thought I knew what that meant–that Thanos was the Abyss, and there’s a little bit of his nihilistic fervor in every one. And yes, I thought it in those exact words.

Earlier tonight, staring at the Void on the screen, I thought I knew what Nietzsche meant: the Void on the screen was only a mirror of the Void within. Now that I’ve written it down, it sounds really silly to me. Maybe actually reading Nietzsche instead of quietly resenting a professor for having tried teach on September 11th would’ve helped my understanding of that quote.

I had a point somewhere, but as usual, I got sidetracked. For more on the Void, check out Marvel’s the Sentry.

A list of good train verbs/adjectives: sidetracked, railroaded, freight-trained, lost track, and retarded.

***

My parents still ask me about whether I will apply for grad school sometime in the future, and I still lie to them and say yes. I tell them (and myself) that all I need is more time to build my portfolio, more time to work at becoming a real writer, because I know I have some degree of talent at this, and once I get disciplined, I can do this. Sometimes I can believe myself. Other times, when I’ve stared into that void, I can see that it’s all built on lies. I may have some talent, but I will never have the discipline to be a writer.

In elementary school, my friends used to come over to my house, right next to the school yard, in the mornings to do homework. In junior high, my friend and I ran a gambling ring, as well as a homework duplication ring, where we would take turns doing the homework, and all reap the benefits. In high school, we would get to school early to do homework that should’ve been done the night before. In college, after a while, I stopped doing homework altogether. With a history like that, it should be fairly obvious that I have no future outside of a dead-end job. I’m just putting off that ignoble fate by deceiving myself into thinking I can write.

***

Forecast for tomorrow: less self-pity

I got a part time gig working for the Princeton Review now. I am teaching the to 8th graders. It’s hard work, and I think perhaps I am not suited to it. They had cell phones! I don’t even have a cell phone. Granted, I’m about the last person in New York without one, but my point is really about how cell phones have no place in the classroom. Hell, in my day, not only did we have to walk to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, we weren’t even allowed pagers in school.

So I overreacted a little today, when the class was rowdy. I yelled. I made dramatic gestures, I confiscated one paper airplane, and I had a “college me”-like outburst where I kicked a desk. I am not proud of my behavior, and for the next class, on Sunday morning, I resolve to keep my outbursts to punching, because we all know that kicking does twice as much damage as punching, as seen in the 1991 classic for the Sega Genesis, Spider-Man.

***

From the poorly veiled something department:

Remember that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa is addicted to the “Corey” hotline? Eventually she, a second-grader, was able to beat her compulsion to hear Corey’s voice daily. I think we could all learn a great deal from her example in that episode. I mean, if I had kept my google searches for E****a down to once or twice a month, then maybe her high school wouldn’t have wised up and removed her picture from its website. Actually, I guess I should’ve just been smart and saved that picture, so that I could cut out the head and paste it onto internet porn. Yeah, I’m in no position to admonish obsessive behavior. By all means, obsess away.

I saw Lost in Translation a few days ago with some friends. It is a really good film, and I recommend seeing it as soon as possible. For those of you who live in real places, that would be sometime today. The rest of you will have to wait until Friday. A more in-depth review by yours truly is unnecessary, just check out Metacritic to see rave reviews from people who get paid to write them.

What I want to talk about is language. I remember writing some stupid paper for Shakespeare class on one of the history plays about tongues. Both the physical tongue and the other meaning of tongue: language. As you can surely imagine, an idiot American such as myself, when abroad, is rendered tongue-less. In the three weeks I spent in Europe, most of my talking consisted of asking for things. I seldom had the opportunity to have real conversations. Most of the time when I did have real conversations, I had to watch my tongue, because a lot of the complicated words I use to express my slightly less complicated thoughts were unfamiliar to others. For example (this never actually happened, but it’s the best I can come up with right now), something that I find “terrible,” may have to be expressed as “really not good.”

In the film, one American meets another in Japan, and the result is one of those strange relationships that can only happen when travelling. When you go for days without talking to someone who really understands what you are saying, it is really easy to open up to a person who does. The knowledge that you will probably never see this person again also adds to one’s willingness to be candid. It is almost like blogging: your ideas and feelings go into a void, but this particular void, unlike the web, will give back.

There was more I wanted to say about this. When I was driving home from the movie, I had a lot of different ideas, but as usual, I was too lazy to record them and went to sleep instead. And now I can’t remember what else I wanted to say.

***

A boy and a girl stand on a train platform. It is raining, and the boy is in shortsleeves, because he is travelling and had no room in his bag for a jacket. The girl wishes that she could be freed from her obligations to work and family, she wishes that she could wander around the continent without a plan like the boy had been doing for the past two weeks. The boy, sick of sleeping in trains and bunkbeds and futons, wishes he were home. The weight of the responsibilities waiting at home is a lot easier on his bad back than the weight of his oversized backpack. The boy and the girl talk about their dissatisfaction with the present, their fears for the future; they wonder what happened to the past. The train comes, and they have an awkward goodbye; he opening his arms for a hug, she extending her hand for a handshake.

When the boy gets home, they write a few short, pleasant e-mails to each other about the weather and current events. There is no trace of dissatisfaction or fear or nostalgia, and soon, there are no more e-mails.