There's a new show on primetime TV called Show Me the Money.

I think a much better show would have been Show Me the Monkey.

I've never been a big fan of downloading ringtones for my cellphone, but I guess it's because I never entertained the notion that I might actually be able to find songs by artists other than Justin Timberlake and Chingy. But a couple days ago, I decided to get crazy and search for a few random favorite artists of mine, and let's just say that someone must have really screwed up somewhere, because there are a couple songs available for downloading that I can almost guarantee no one else in the world has ever heard of, much less considered choosing as the sound they want to hear when someone calls them.

I decided on Goods by Mates of State. It would have been White Collar Boy by Belle and Sebastian, but for some reason the little electronic bastard wouldn't download. I'm quickly learning, however, that selecting a song you like a great deal causes a bit of a problem. Now when people call me, I kind of just sit there listening to my phone ringing instead of answering it. Is this what we've come to in the world? Forget the fact that I now also find myself preferring to text message people instead of actually talk to them. I now choose to decline answering a phone call from a friend in favor of hearing the little sound my phone makes to alert me to their call. The Republicans may no longer be in control of Congress, the economy may be back on track, the terrorists may have no further plans for attack, but somehow I still feel lately that there is something very amiss with our little corner of the 21st Century.

Images from Austin, Part II:

Images from Austin:

Dan and I were good with our toys. While other kids in the neighborhood were leaving their Stomper trucks out in the rain and throwing their Rubik’s Cubes against the wall of the school at recess, we were giving our Star Wars action figures baths in the bathroom sink. I think it had to do at least a little bit with an awareness at a surprisingly young age that our parents were buying us these toys not only out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of the money in their wallets, and the least we could do was respect those little plastic acts of good parenting by storing them in a cool dry place away from the teeth of our pets when we weren’t playing with them.

We were, however, little boys after all. Our code of conduct toward toys only seemed to apply to toys that were paid for. So for one blissful, short period one summer, when boxes of Super Sugar Crisp cereal began a promotion featuring a free plastic figurine in the shape of the Super Sugar Crisp Bear inside the box, it provided Dan and I the opportunity to revel the immature need to destroy. On a clear sunny day on Dan’s front lawn, the Sugar Crisp Bear was captured by Imperial troopers and melted. In the realm of our imaginary world, the bear’s crime was treason, but in the real world, the toy’s only transgression was that it didn’t cost a cent.

After the first time, the act of destroying a toy ignited (no pun intended) fervor in Dan and I. We weren’t nearly about to start mangling our precious Star Wars toys, and it was quickly obvious to us that the best chance for us to burn a free toy again would come in the next box of Super Sugar Crisp cereal. Just like the commercial promised, Dan suddenly couldn’t get enough of Super Sugar Crisp. He doubled and tripled his usual morning intake. I would have joined in, but I found that cereal truly repugnant. Sure, I could have asked my mother for a box anyway, but obviously that would have been breaking the code. In essence, I would have been asking my mother to buy me the plastic figurine inside the box and not the cereal itself, thereby making the toy off-limits from destruction. Dan and I had very complex childhoods.

The wait between boxes of Super Sugar Crisp seemed like forever. Adding to the tension was the seemingly capricious nature of cereal free promotions. No child ever knew when one free item would begin or end, or stop and start up again. Different super markets got different shipments from different warehouses, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that Dan’s mother would come home with a box with that specific treasure inside. We really had three choices when it came to how to go about getting another plastic bear: One, Dan could ask his mother to be sure to pick up a box of Super Sugar Crisp that included the Super Sugar Crisp Bear inside. There was really no chance of this happening, as he would be risking his mother accusing of only wanting the cereal for the free toy. Dan and I had far too much pride to chance appearing as that kind of child. We may have started down a slippery slope by burning the bear, but we hadn’t lost all our senses. The second option would be for Dan to accompany his mother to the grocery store, which as anyone who’s ever been a child knows, is a special, unique kind of hell. The third option was difficult, but the one we chose to follow, which was to leave it up to fate. Somehow that always made it sweeter when we succeeded anyway.

We did indeed get lucky several times within the span of the promotion. When his mother would get home from the supermarket, Dan and I would, with the patience of people double our age, wait for her to put the groceries away. We would then sneak into the kitchen, open the cabinet, and find the new, bright blue, unopened box of cereal, with a little picture on the lower left hand side of the front of what we could expect to find inside. But what then? Wouldn’t it look suspicious to open a box of cereal in the middle of the day? Yes, we had to wait until the next day. He’d pour himself a bowl in the morning, and nonchalantly sift through the box of sugar-coated crispies to find that little plastic bag with the figurine inside. It would look nice and natural. Nothing to draw suspicion. We might even be able to convince ourselves that we were being completely reasonable. Deep inside though, we each knew we had little devils sitting on our shoulders.

Eventually, enough disappointing boxes of cereal came home in Dan’s mother’s brown bags that we had to admit to ourselves that our little private bear atrocities had come to an end. Dan’s daily intake of Super Sugar Crisp could now go back to its previous, safer level. But after it was all over, there was more than a couple small multi-colored puddles on Dan’s front porch. For a few months one summer, a large part of my and my friend’s satisfaction with life hinged on the contents of boxes of cereal. Or, maybe a truer way to put it is that the contents of boxes of cereal were just one more thing to be excited about along with all the other things we had to keep us entertained in the endlessly stimulating world of two little boys growing up in suburbia.

The Pennsylvania Amish make me wish I was religious. Nothing else in the world does, but they do.

They aren't reading this obviously, and somehow that makes them even more special in my eyes. I could never do what they do, or live the way they live. But I envy them in a weird way. Except for the weird facial hair thing. A beard with no moustache? Don't get that at all.

But when some crazed outsider comes in to a single room school and kills and injures a bunch of their innocent children, they actually have the strength to turn to their religion and do what it says to do which, inconveniently, is the farthest thing from what anyone on Earth would naturally want to do: Forgive. They didn't look in their Bible for loopholes because this was a special case. They believed they had to forgive, and so they forgave.

It makes me realize what a strange limbo I live in, faith-wise. The fact is, I actually believe in a god, but I don't really feel the need to devote my life to pleasing him. And he's cool with that. With everyone else screwing it all up so bad, it seems more and more that the best way to go about leading a moral, guilt-free and complete existance is to steer clear of any church, temple, mosque, synagogue, or any other kind of shame factory. The world is one big giant place of worship.

Last night I had a dream that I made a rush decision to leave town and go home, for good. I wouldn't even be saying goodbye to anyone. I got in my car and stopped at some cafe for some coffee for the trip, and I saw Neve Campbell sitting there, and I started to talk to her, because for some reason in my dream, Neve and I were acquaintances. We made small talk, and I remember her telling me that she had an upcoming audition for a regualr role on Walker, Texas Ranger. I said that I thought that show had long ago been cancelled, and she said she had thought so too, but apparently not. I started to feel enormously attracted to her. I thought about asking her out for the following Saturday, but then I remembered that I was leaving forever, and just then her boyfriend walked in. He was very tall. So I excused myself, and walked outside to my car. It occurred to me that I'd better call my parents and tell them to expect me. I pulled out my cellphone and found that for some reason I had locked the keypad, and had no idea how to unlock it. I stood there for a few minutes pressing random buttons, to no avail. I thought about calling someone with a similar phone for advice, but of course that would require unlocking my phone. I was beginning to lose my will concerning leaving. Not totally; I just thought it might be a good idea to hold for a day or two until I could plan things a little better. The whole thing just felt very, very sad.

There once was a September that lasted a thousand days. And then October lasted a thousand more.

I was always one of those kids that kept their bedroom clean, or mostly so, but one day in November my father, who I hadn’t really spoken to much lately, came to my door. My door had been mostly closed as of late, and he’d never really mastered the art of knocking, perhaps feeling that he shouldn’t need to since he paid for the house. Thinking back now, his reaction to the state of my room was quite hilarious, though it probably annoyed me at the time. After informing me or questioning me on whatever issue had brought him into my lair, which I don’t remember the particulars of but in was undoubtedly concerning something that I didn’t do, did too much of, or did completely wrong, he took a cursory look around my very small room and told me in no uncertain terms to clean it. I thought about arguing that in my own little corner of the world, I should get to choose the degree of the filth that I would choose to live in, but I could see pretty quickly there would be no room for debate. And with some amusement in my mind that I didn’t dare show, I could see his point. A quick scan of my room for my own self revealed at least 20 empty Pepsi cans that my father commented on a split second later. My bedroom was about the size of a large closet. If I’d had a cat handy to swing around by the tail, I would have knocked over all 20 or so cans without stretching very much.

It was the middle of November or so. It was November back in the days before I knew how much I loved November. Actually, it was the one that made me feel that way. I like to think now that when I bagged up all those cans and took them out to the garbage cans on the side of the house, I appreciated the cold evening fall air. But I was actually just probably thinking about homework.

The reason I remember this occasion so clearly now is mainly because of one particularly hilarious example of how ignorant I’d become of my surroundings amidst constant social activity with my new group of friends, and rehearsals for my first-ever appearance in a play, and hours-long phone conversations with my first girlfriend, and pointless car trips now that I had my license. During the first week of school back in September, my first assignment in Chemistry class was to create slime, like the kind you buy in toy stores. My chemical recipe was successful, and that green concoction found its way to the top of a copy of the Pittsburgh free newsweekly from the second week of that September. It had REM on the cover because they came through town on their Green tour, a concert which my friends and I camped out to buy tickets for and took the trolley downtown to see. The slime started out covering Mike Mills face, and I had been enjoying watching it seep further and further towards the other members as time went on. After the Pepsi cans, that was naturally the thing my father was most horrified by. For all he knew, it was drugs. “What in the world is that,” he asked, not even trying to be funny. He’d stopped trying to be funny with me a few months earlier, a couple months after I’d stopped pretending I thought he was. I explained the substance was a class project, hoping the scholastic angle would soothe the consternation he was undoubtedly feeling by walking into his son’s room and finding creeping green slime. His reply was “Well throw it away if you’re done with it.”

With a room so small, even the worst state of disarray is cleared up pretty quickly. I threw away some things, including the slimed issue of In Pittsburgh, tossed some things in the closet or under the bed, retaped and rehung the CD longbox fronts that I’d scissored up and used as cheap decoration every time I came back from the music store, and even vacuumed the small bit of carpet that wasn’t covered by my bed or desk. I had to admit the new tidiness was kind of relief. But it still wasn’t the same old room from the summer before. I’d been noticing lately that everything looked a little different; smaller maybe. Like my back yard. The tree I used to climb. The distance to the convenience store at the bottom of the hill was suddenly negligible now that I could drive to it when my mother needed milk. My once beloved bedroom was now a place I preferred to be only if I was forced to be in the house at all. Someone else’s bedroom was always better.

I took a walk on the Promenade and went into a few stores, and for some reason I set off the theft alarms upon entering and exiting each one. It was kind of cool when I entered, as if I was being announced with some kind of fanfare. But having them go off every time I walked out was a little embarrassing.

In every case, I simply let the sound go off around me and kept walking, but as I walked out of Urban Outfitters, the nervous-looking store greeter actually had me come in (setting off the alarm again, of course), and then, not having any idea of what to do once I did return, just kind of stared at me for a little bit. He looked around for...I don't know, a security guard, and not finding one, decided to take things into his own hands by asking me empty my pockets. I went for the left one first, not wishing to start with the right and have to possibly explain why it contains a small plastic toy turtle and a green egg-shaped stone that I've been carrying with me since 1994. Instead I pulled out my car keys and my security badge for work. Relieved, he said "oh, it was probably that." I knew full well it most likely wasn't since I've entered many stores on other days with it in my pocket without setting off alarms, so I waved it in front of the alarm system. It did nothing. I think at that point my jerk gene was kicking in, because then I turned and just looked at him, waiting for him to try something else. Again, he just stared at me uncomfortably. So I said "bye" and walked out, complete with my computerized fanfare.

Seriously though, what's up with the false alarms? Is it my magnetic personality? (HA HA HA HA!) For a moment I actually had to wonder if I'm suffering from some kind of intense kleptomania where I live in such denial that I literally have no idea I'm stealing. But if that's so, WHERE IS ALL MY FREE STUFF?

I'm no doubt going through a bout of the crazies, but I've maintained enough sense to know that it's probably pretty temporary and mostly harmless. It's from a combination of stress, a need to act despite an overriding sense of detachment, and more than anything, too much smiling and nodding while dealing with every sort of ridiculous situation and every type of out-of-touch-with-reality person in the past few weeks. And so, previously-healed wounds are reopened and freshly salted, all my dealt-with quirks reintroduce themselves like little monsters with outstretched hands, and I'm so determined to be a good boy I just let it all roll over me.

As I slowly wake up to this realization today, and begin to gain manna-from-heaven perspective on it all, the ice is cracking and I'm seeing the light. Just a few minutes ago, I had the most fun I've had in some time, surreptitiously changing the language setting on various copiers at work to Russian, Polski, Japanese and some other tongues I didn't even recognize, giggling like a schoolgirl as each screen changed to show options with unintelligible words. A very tiny bit of sabotage, and exactly what I needed somehow.

Heady, heady, end of the summer. August can be that way sometimes. And just a week ago I swore this time it would be a fun experiment to stay hang suspended above it all. I have to say now that as I look around, I'm sunk into things that I thought I was all done with being sunk in. But still be detached, it's all going by like some weird dream.

And then like some utterly inappropriate outburst in a very formal, impeccably-structured meeting of men in suits, I'm hit with a flash as I walk down a hall. Some random thing from long ago screaming for me to recognize that I've come so far to end up being so far away from anything that makes sense. Remember that year when Flood by They Might Be Giants became the unlikely soundtrack of all our lives? Its absolute ridiculousness made it safe for us to accept it as it crossed all boundaries and became beloved. Naturally Dan and I loved it immediately, already being fans, Jen Check who sat in front of me in Advanced English borrowed it from me and returned it with the price tag scratched off which annoyed me a bit because I just liked it on there, Scott A. and Scott C. caught on to it and we all learned every word to Dead, Carrie and Mary were easily charmed as well. But its true power was confirmed when certain others could barely pretend after a while to hate it, like Rytch who loved Depeche Mode and The Cure and not such silliness, and punk Justin who, one morning after a careful listening the night before to Birdhouse in Your Soul, declared the song to be all about light. "Well yes, light and other things," I replied. "No," he said, being obstinate like could be sometimes. "It's about light, and that's all." I still know almost every word from beginning to end, though I haven't listened to it in years. I didn't even bring it to LA with me. Who cares. Why do I need to know now that life was once one big playground where nothing really mattered, and therefore meant everything.

And then I'm back, so tired, with all these things that keep bumping into the same big walls and me prepared every day to make the same mistakes and all these people that do my head in, and the best thing I can say is that I no longer even bother comparing then to now like I used to do incessantly, because it's a little like trying compare apples to the Algorithmic Information Theory, but even after all this time they keep making songs about the one thing that everyone seems to think is all you need. It's a little like seeing giant billboards everywhere you look exclaiming Be Four-Dimensional Now! Go on, do it! What are you waiting for? Well, what am I waiting for? It's something, but I don't think it's what they meant. And it's a long, long way off.

About a month ago, I walked past Dustin Hoffman on the street. I didn't realize it was him until I was right up next to him, and I have to admit that it was a bit thrilling. He's always been one celebrity that I've really respected and genuinely liked as a personality.

I actually considered calling someone and telling them that I just saw Dustin Hoffman, but I thought about it for a moment and realized that, while it was certainly a notable occurance and something interesting enough to pepper into the middle of a casual talk with a friend or even useful as a great conversation starter, it wasn't quite monumental enough of a happening to really dial up anyone for.

The thing is, I completely forgot about it a couple minutes later. And I ended up telling no one, not even in a casual conversation, which, as I said before, would have been a perfect time for such an anecdote. I suddenly remembered it today again, but at this point, bothering to mention it to anyone at all would somehow seem pathetic. How could I suddenly blurt out to someone that I saw Dustin Hoffman a month ago in public and not have it sound kind of feeble? If I saw him yesterday, now that's something. But at this point I think it would seem like I'm just holding on too much.

If only he's said hi to me. Now there's an anecdote with no expiration date.

Yesterday I saw a guy sporting a mohawk, and I thought "wow, that's cool; you don't see that very often nowadays." Then he turned around, and I saw that the back of the 'hawk was kind of long, hanging down his neck. Then it hit me: It was half mohawk, half mullet.

A mullhawk. Business in the front, party in the back, punk as shit all over.

I drove by myself to the Sequoia National Forest a couple summers ago one Saturday morning, basically trying to do a repeat of a great trip I took by myself the year before. The prior September I drove to the coast of California to the redwoods, and it’s still one of my favorite memories. The Sequoia trip doesn’t quite hold up. In fact, it was quite a disappointment. I wouldn’t call it a disaster; it’s not like my car broke down or I wasn’t able to see the trees. But where I came back from the four-day redwoods jaunt feeling refreshed, hopeful and clean, the Sequoias left me thinking that it was a two-day trip that was a day-and-a-half too long.

I guess it mostly had to do with timing. The two trips were only ten months apart from each other, but on one end I needed nothing but the pleasure of my own company, and on the other end I was never not conscious of how pointless the whole experience was without anyone there to…I don’t know…validate it? Walking through the woods and hiking up a hill seemed ridiculous. It was sort of like: When you’ve been hanging around the same friend for too long, but you’re too polite to tell them they’re getting on your nerves, and then you go ahead and spend that extra day too many with them, and it’s obvious there’s tension. Except the other person was me. One solitary, grumbling sightseer, dutifully loitering around the largest trees in the world because that’s what I went there to do, wasting all that useless beauty. The trees may as well have been Styrofoam.

After being underwhelmed by one of the Earth’s greatest wonders, there was really nothing left to do but find a place to stay that night. For some reason it never occurred to me that all the cool, nice motels in the general area would be booked solid. I had to drive for miles to some dirty little town I can’t remember the name of to find a room. I ate crappy Mexican food in some small town restaurant where I swear everyone was looking at me. I just kept wondering why anyone would choose to live exactly there. How do people end up where they do? Were they born there, and just never became conscious enough to realize how miserable it all is? Or maybe they are truly content. Maybe they managed to find something that I’ll never have or understand. Maybe they really have everything they’ll ever want in that inconsequential dusty hot little town. I bet some of them never even bothered to go see the trees.

The sun was getting low in the sky, and I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to that motel. I drove most of the way back near to the entrance of the park, where there was a large lake. I parked high on a hill where I could see the whole thing from above. I’m really into that. I was getting there just as most people were leaving or had already left. I watched a line of small motorboats get pulled out of the lake one by one by a process of various pickup trucks getting as close to the water as possible, trailers behind submerging down a road that lead into the water, and then the boats would maneuver onto and be pulled out onto it, instantly on land and on wheels. It was an incredibly depressing thing to me for some reason. But I kept watching it happen, over and over.

There was one motorboat carrying two young men and two women that really didn’t seem to want the day to end. It must have been a truly wonderful day on the lake for them. Even from so high up, I could see their coolers of drinks and ice. And I could hear them. Bits of laughter floated up now and then, but mostly it was the music blaring from their stereo. Horrible, awful music. They were very partial to one song in particular: I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight by The Outfield. They must have played it three times while I stood there waiting for the sun to fall. I placed all my focus on those people, wondering about their lives, guessing at what they did for a living, what they liked to do when they weren’t out on the lake, etc. Were they married or was this the night that the captain hoped to hook up with this girl he’d been chasing for weeks? Did everyone enjoy that song he kept playing as much as he obviously did? Was one of those girls counting the seconds until she could get off the boat so she could just get home and read a book?

Strangely, this wasn’t as amusing or entertaining as usual. Thinking back on it now, I realize that it was one of the few times of my life that I was unable to escape myself by turning my attention to other people. Whatever the truth of their lives might be, the real truth of mine was that I was standing alone on top of a hill at sunset watching other people at the end of what must have been a glorious summer day. What would I ever do? Move to another city? I did that once already, and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and that was when I was still young. I used to think the world was wide open and full of possibility. But the truth is, I’ll only be able to move again to a place where I won’t be left standing alone on a hill. The world seemed so incredibly small all of the sudden.

The Outfield was taunting me.

Graffiti on a restroom wall.

Dear Hank,

Thank you so much for offering to housesit at the last minute like this. I hope you found the key all right. Either you did, or you gave up and broke in, and now you’re reading this note feeling really guilty about breaking one of my windows. (Ha ha!) I usually get Lucy to take care of things while I’m gone, but this is the week that she goes to build Inuksuks in Montreal. Do you know what Inuksuks are? They are little stone structures built in the image of men to let travelers know they are not alone on long hikes. I don’t know why she’s so into that, but she does it twice a year. She says it calms her soul, which she really needs, because Lucy is pretty tightly wound most of the time. Her parents could not have named her more incorrectly. (HA HA, get it?) Anyway, when she gets really out of control, she goes to Canada and piles rocks on top of each other on hiking trails and she says it really helps. And the weird thing is, she’s not even a hiker herself. She rents a car and drives up as close as she can to the pathways, builds one of these things right in the middle, gets back in the car, and drives about a mile down the path and makes another one. One time I came home after a trip and she had a bunch of those little things on the floor all over my house. Now that I think about it, I’m glad Lucy’s not around.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to be writing a whole big thing about crazy Lucy. I have to tell you some things about how to take care of my house. I don’t know if you’ve housesat before (or is it housesitted? Both of them sound wrong) but I’m sure you’ll be fine. You seem very responsible. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about you, Hank. I hope it’s because you’re secretly disemboweling anyone who knows your dirty secrets! Ha ha ha! Seriously though, I hope you’re not a freak.

Okay, so just a few things. By now you’ve probably met Frank. I imagine he came running up to the door when you came in, thinking it was me, and then just stared at you for a while wondering what you’re doing in his house. So cute, huh? Now, obviously Frank isn’t your normal cat, and I hope it didn’t freak you out too much. He’s very well behaved and really sweet when you get to know him. The way I figured it, owning a cat with two heads is way, way better than actually owning two whole separate cats. Still, I like to think of Frank as one cat instead of two cats; it’s less confusing for everyone involved I think. Although I think technically you could make a strong case that he is two cats, seeing as how he has two brains and all. Whatever, he’s just Frank to me. Anyway, like I said, he’s very sweet and I know you’ll grow to love him. Left Frank likes his ears scratched, Right Frank likes to be tickled under the chin. (That’s his left and right, not yours. Kind of important, because Left Frank actually hates to be tickled under the chin and will bite the hell out of your fingers if you even get close to doing that.) Left Frank is an outdoor cat and Right Frank is in indoor cat, so for about two hours every morning Frank sits there in the middle of the living room fighting himself until one half of him gives up, and you’ll always know which one wins when you come home from work and find him either in the backyard or lying on the bed. Sometimes I try to guess on the way home. Try it!

Oh, for the purpose of ease, I have two cat bowls in the kitchen. Just fill them both and let him eat. The good news is, he only has one stomach and poops like a normal cat. Like I said, way better than owning two separate cats.

Make yourself at home. The sheets on the bed are clean and the blankets are so warm. I have one of those detachable showerheads; have a blast with that. (I sure do! Ha ha!) Feel free to use the washer and dryer. One thing, just be careful of the couch. It’s very comfortable, but almost too much so. I wouldn’t suggest sitting on it for longer than a couple hours at a time. This might sound a little crazy, but I think it’s cursed. When I first bought it a couple years ago, I had a problem with not being able to get up off of it. I mean, literally. I lost my job and seventy-five pounds, not to mention all the things in my pockets. It pretty much sucked away my soul. Then I woke up one day in the couch. Seriously, like, inside it. I fell into some weird couch land, ruled by the TV remote control, and his army was all the loose change I’d lost between the cushions, and I had to do battle in this huge arena with a corkscrew I’d lost a week before, and my best friend was a kernel of corn. But I did find my driver’s license, and once I made my way out, I felt much better than I had been. It’s a long story, but the point is, be careful of the couch.

I’ll be back as soon as I can. This isn’t something I want to do, but the latest U.S. Census report says that at this rate, everyone in the country will be on some reality show before the year 2011, and I figured I might as well get mine out of the way. I really felt like this was the best one to do. Some of those other shows are just so pandering and degrading. Besides, helping a circus clown and a cowboy get a chimp across the country with no cash sounds kind of fun in a weird way. By the way, I saw you on Kick Me in the Groin last month. Congrats on making it to the finals.

Hank, I can’t thank you enough. I hope you enjoy your stay. Seriously, make yourself at home. Mi casa, su casa. Give Frank a big kiss for me every day. (Right Frank only; Left Frank would shred your face before you knew what happened.) If you see a bunch of people running down the street in front of the house one day, don’t be alarmed, it’s probably just the city marathon, and not Godzilla. By some amazing coincidence, it may be both, but I highly doubt that. Ha ha!

Thank you Hank!

Carol

P.S. Oh yeah, and by no means should you EVER open the third door on the left in the upstairs hallway. It’s not locked or anything, so I just wanted to make a quick note of that before I forgot. Whew, glad I remembered!

Last night I had the special and unique treat of attending the annual Association of Letter and Numeral Awards (or, the ALNAs). I try to catch it every year. It seems that a lot of people find it boring, but I’ve always found the letters of the alphabet, and especially numbers, to be quite interesting; perhaps not in their pure forms as such, but in their interaction with each other and in their subtle omnipresence in our everyday lives.

The awards show has never been televised. Ironically, the main networks have been quoted as saying that the show “just wouldn’t draw the right numbers.” I had always imagined that the show would be right at home on PBS, the very station that airs Seseme Street, on which so many numbers and letters have made wonderful guest appearances over the years. No one listens to me though.

No matter, the esoteric nature of the gala only ensures that I can continue to enjoy it in my own way. I can’t say that last night’s presentation was any better or worse than any other year’s, as they all seem to have their high and low points. As usual, they started off the night’s festivities with a musical number. It was the letter I and the letter U singing a duet. It was their version of Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle’s “Just You and I”. I thought kicking the whole shebang off with two vowels was a very good idea, but not having a consonant in there somewhere made it seem strangely incomplete.

The awards were announced and handed out at a nice pace, with most of the recipients keeping their speeches considerately curt. The exception was the award for Best Performance by a Grouping or Set of Numbers. This year’s winners were the numbers that make up Pi, and they really seemed to drag on forever. The funniest moment of the night came as the numbers 8 and 0 came out to present the award for Best Number. “Wow, 8,” 0 said, “that’s a nice belt!” Incidentally, the award for Best Number went to 1, which was no shock to anybody. However, I think the members of the audience really could have done without the sad display that came next, which was of that numeral jumping up and down for a good fifteen minutes shouting “I’m number 1! I’m number 1!” Sure, it was true in a very literal sense, but it also went a long way towards explaining to all in attendance why 1 is, indeed, the loneliest number.

As usual, after all of the awards were handed out, there was a forum and press junket. For me, this is the real highlight of every year’s program. It’s then that you really get to see the numbers and letters being themselves in a social setting that is far less formal than in the milieu of forming of words and larger numbers. For instance, it’s always interesting to watch the behavior of I, V, X, L, C, D and M toward the numbers. It seems as if the letters have yet to get over losing their jobs to the numbers after the fall of the Roman Empire. They deny that of course, C being the most adamant in that sentiment. But even as the letter that famously “is for cookie” attempted to set the record straight, I couldn’t help but think that M appeared somewhat vexed and X looked rather nonplussed.

The press hounded and prodded the numbers and letters. A few reporters asked genuinely intelligent questions, but most were there merely to dig up gossip and trivialize the proceedings. I can’t believe how little respect they showed, especially considering that their very livelihoods are based completely on the manipulation of the icons they were more or less subtly mocking. For many years there has been one subject that has been very touchy to the ALNA attendees: The growing widespread use of emblems and such that are not recognized as part of the alphanumeric family. “The Internet is both a blessing and a curse to us all”, said T. “The idea that a colon and the right side of a parentheses could suggest a smiley face scares the crap out of me.” A worried rumble of agreement echoed throughout the room. It wasn’t all gloom and doom though. K’s boisterous sense of humor broke through one particularly tense moment when she loudly announced that she and her two twin sisters are in desperate need of a new image consultant. 6 then stood up and jokingly asked “Well, what about me? Every time I get together with 9, people point at us and giggle!” As a result, it was then that Q finally voiced the obligatory bad joke that no ALNA night would be complete without: “Now there’s an irrational number.” Like every year, every letter and number in attendance emitted a simultaneous groan and chuckle, and it was wonderful.

The evening ended not long after, and one by one each symbol vacated the premises for another year. Their night to shine was over, but shine they did. As I type these words into my computer, I look at the keys and think of the tender respect I have for these tiny miracles that my fingers gently hover above and intermittently peck at. There’s A, situated nicely and peacefully next to two less popular letters, Q and Z, all nestled just below the row of numbers that seem to crown them illustriously. The picture it forms is somehow reminiscent of a high school senior class photo, with each character present. But this image seems far more ordered and civilized. Yes, numbers and letters living side by side on my keyboard, oh lord, why don’t we?

Once there was a snowman. He lived in a town populated only by little boys and girls. There were two types of children, at least as far as the snowman was concerned: huggers and stabbers. Huggers would come up to the snowman and throw their little arms around him. That made him feel good. Stabbers on the other hand would run up to him in the same manner as any hugger child, but then would pull out a sharp implement, such as a knife or shovel, and stick it deep into his softness. This hurt the snowman.

Unfortunately there was no way for the snowman to know by simply looking at the children which were huggers and which were stabbers. He could never know for sure until he was either stabbed or hugged. As much as he loved the hugs, the sharp thrusts from the stabbers were too painful to take for the snowman, and he eventually decided that he no choice but to avoid the children altogether.

Cutting off contact with the children of the town proved to be more difficult than he feared it would be. For one thing, he loved the company of the children, and often missed them. A larger problem, however, was the fact that the children could run so much faster than he could. Both the huggers and stabbers had no problem catching up to the snowman even as he ran in the opposite direction, always resulting in the subsequent embrace or violent attack that he was trying to avoid. In the frustration and growing desperation of the situation, the snowman became conscious of something he’d never known about himself before. Whether it was a hidden gift that was always there or something that simply developed as a result of his circumstances, he didn’t know. As it turned out, this snowman had the ability to protect himself from the children by breathing fire. The first few children to learn of the snowman’s newfound talent were quite surprised to say the least. And whether they were huggers or stabbers, those children were very sorry that they went near the snowman.

So the snowman was safe from being stabbed. However, the naïve children never stopped trying to hug him or stab him. They at least knew to keep their distance, but they just wouldn’t leave him alone. The snowman was forced to use his unique self-defense mechanism more often than he liked, as the very act of breathing fire in order to protect himself was very painful. And, in fact, he he eventually melted away in the act of self-preservation. But he was never a victim of the stabber children again. They all thought he just finally found a place to live.

He tried to think up an ironclad excuse not to go to the party, but he knew that none bore the right suit of armor to withstand the future attacks of his own guilty conscience, so he went. The most solid excuses, after all, must always be the ones we tell ourselves. He was quickly glad about his lack of imagination when it came to talking himself out of it. It was, after all, a going away party for a friend, and while he desperately hated goodbyes, he did love milestones. He loved being able to look back and say, “that’s when that ended.”

The impact of the departure hit home when they began watching old videos. Cliché, for sure, but if clichés never happened or were edited out of life, the average day would be twenty minutes long. Only one of the fold was leaving, but she was taking with her a gateway to other people and experiences he suddenly realized he would miss. It was only when, a few years before, it was all the only life he faced every weekend that he despised it. The videos reminded of him of what a dead end life it felt like to him to be at the time. As he watched, he refused to give into the persuasive, warped magic of nostalgia that’s made him rewrite his own history so many times before. But of course that didn’t last long. He thought about all those countless weekends in a house containing no one over 30, making up games with ping pong balls and cups of beer, drunkenly playing instruments in the garage, watching people be thrown in the pool. And all those camping trips when they went to places where he could see the stars again, even though he swore they didn’t look the same. Back then he was still young enough to find novelty in the dulling down of things.

He stayed a polite amount of time and piggybacked his goodbye onto another guest’s who had luckily chosen that moment to leave. Only a year before his drive home would have been much farther, now that he moved out of the valley. Then again, all his friends moved out of the valley, so his drive home would have in fact but much shorter a year ago. He got home and checked his mail. A Spin magazine, wrapped in plastic for some strange reason. Ah, because it’s accompanied with a letter asking him to renew his subscription. He ripped off the plastic and made a snap decision to cast the letter away with it into the trashcan. Somehow it felt like a time for letting the subscriptions run out on things. Not a decision to bring on an ending, more a lack of action that creates an absence of renewal. And that’s a different thing entirely.

Ah yes, the blog. Almost forgot I had one.

I’m sort of at a loss for things to say lately. Should I talk about the past? Should I talk about the post-past? (I guess they call that they present.) Should I make up more things to make my life sound more interesting than it is? Or is the mere description of my day-to-day life all that’s needed to entertain?

I don’t know. I think I’ll do away with my usual habit of thinking, and just say whatever comes out. Just to get the juices flowing.

Sometimes I like letting things get messy and dirty just for that feeling I get when I eventually do tidy up, and then for days afterwards I’m in the constant state of “Whoa…it’s so clean.”

In old cheesy 80’s action movies, whenever the hero would shoot and kill some nameless bad guy, I used to wonder if that character’s mother would hear about it, and how she would feel. I mean, yes, he was working for a terrorist trying to destroy the world, but she held him when he was a baby.

Along those lines perhaps, when I played soccer when I was little, I sometimes had problems getting myself properly motivated for games. What did I have against the other team? What did they do to me that would cause me to want to kick the ball into their territory and into their net? So I played defense, and I was very good, because I would become genuinely incensed when their offensive players got anywhere near my goal. Fucking dicks.

Alanis Morissette was really pissed off there for a while. I’m glad she seems to have dealt with it. What’s up with that Aflac duck though? Always yelling.

Quick story, and totally true: One time some guy named John that was dating my ex-girlfriend cast a love spell on me, which really worked, and then a week later he jumped out of the top floor of the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt University, thus turning the spell into a ten-year curse. I’m really glad that’s over.

There’s more to that story, but I just wanted to get the gist of it.

Mail trucks remind me of bees. Mail trucks: Stop, drop the mail, drive forward a little, repeat. Bees: land on flower, collect pollen, fly to the next one, repeat. And the front of old Jeeps look like those spiders with big eyes and smaller fake eyes under them. My friend Justin said that once in 11th grade and I thought it was so cool because I’d always thought that. Justin was always saying things I had thought all my life.

Dude! Look out for that giant snow spider behind you!

Don’t be scared. I’m a vehicle.

From the time I was five until I moved away from home nine years ago, I participated in something known as Boy’s Weekend. It was a twice a year trip up to the mountains with my father and a bunch of other guys and their sons. This past weekend, I flew back home to experience it again for the first time in years, and maybe for the last time ever. You never know.

Imagine about fifteen to twenty blue-collar guys and their sons, ages five and up, occupying a large lodge for three days with no rules or the presence of a single female. Naturally, the result is a lot of beer drinking, fishing, dirty jokes, bad smells, and the occasional thing getting broken. It’s controlled hedonism, and when you get used to it twice a year and then go without it for a long time, it feels like something is missing. So I went back to experience it again, and I was glad to find little has changed.

The Boy’s Weekend was started by my dad and his friend Bob. In the early days it was small and consisted of a pop-up trailer in a campground in the dead of winter. Then they got smart and moved it to a lodge near a stocked pond in late spring and early fall, and invited more guys to offset the costs. Traditions were born and stories that would be told for years were created at every gathering. I was glad to see a lot of those traditions have lived on in the years I’ve been away.

Every year, there are new men that are invited by someone who’s been coming for years, and those new guys have to be inducted. Naturally, this is done by humiliating them. Bob is a master at the set-up and perfect execution of various methods of emasculating poor, unsuspecting fellows. The first trick is The Three-Man Lift. While the target is nearby, it’s someone’s job to start the conversation about Bob’s talent at lifting great amounts of weight. Or, at least he could in his younger days. Legend has it, it is explained, that he was known for being able to lift three interlocked men of any size at the same time. Bob of course insists that he still could, and amidst shouts of “no you can’t, not anymore” and “please dad, you’ll hurt your back” and “I’ve got $20 that says he can still do it,” Bob points out three guys that are instructed to lie down on the ground and link their arms and legs. Here’s what it looks like:

The guys on the outside are long-time attendees, and the guy in the middle is new. The genius part of this is that the guy in the middle is completely unaware that he is, in effect, being held down. Bob does some stretches, really plays it up, and when everything is good and set, someone nearby hands him a big cup of ice water, which Bob then pours down the pants of the new guy, who is usually so mad at himself for getting duped that he doesn’t even attempt to fight it.

Even better is a game called Itchy-Gitchy-Goo. Twelve or so grown men sit around a circular table. Bob is the game leader, and he is always seated next to another new guy. The game is described as an exercise in composure and imitation. Bob starts off by reaching over and tweaking the chin of the guy next to him like a baby, saying the words “itchy-gitchy-goo.” That guy then has to pass it on exactly the same way, without laughing. It goes around the table until it comes back to Bob, who then touches a different part of his neighbor’s face, again repeating “itchy-gitchy-goo,” and so on. If anyone laughs or is fails at repeating the action perfectly, they have to drink. It sounds easy, and it really is for the new guy. The reason why it’s hard for everyone else, at least to keep from laughing, is because Bob has charcoal dust on his fingers and is basically painting a new part of the face of the guy next to him with every round. It’s hard to believe, but it usually goes on for so long that Bob runs out of places to smudge.

When it’s gone on long enough, a mirror is placed in front of the victim, and a good laugh is had. In all the years I’ve seen it done, no one that Bob Itchy-Gitchy-Gooed or Three Man Lifted has ever been angry. In fact, in a weird way, once they get over the shock and humiliation, they begin to really feel part of the club far more than they did before, especially when they hear the stories of how many other men in the room had the same thing done to them some other year.

Some traditions have gone by the wayside, such as “Bite the Weenie,” which consisted of a hot dog wiener hanging from a string from the ceiling and men and boys riding by on bikes trying to bite off a hunk of it. Ketchup and mustard were added as the game went on. That one probably died simply because no one ever succeeded in actually biting the wiener. But the longest running and most revered of the traditions has to be the Snipe Hunt. The young children are convinced of a mythical creature called a snipe that is indigenous to the area, some kind of mixture of snake, cat and bird with red eyes. It sounds silly, but I believed it when I was eight.

The adults lead the children, carrying sticks and plastic bags, into the woods. This year, I was amused to see that all the kids’ pant legs and sleeves were duck taped to their ankles and wrists because “you don’t want a snipe crawling up there!” Older boys are sent out into the woods ahead of them to make shrieking noises. You would think that this would scare the crap out of the kids, but they love it. I remember that when I was little, I was more excited by the prospect of seeing and maybe catching a snipe than fearing being attacked by one.

This weekend, near the end of another unsuccessful attempt to capture a snipe, I separated from the pack and walked back to the lodge in the dark alone. I could hear the noises of the overexcited children behind me, and the wounded-sounding howls of what some twenty-something year olds imagined a snipe might sound like coming from the woods around me. As I walked, I thought about how lucky I am to have had that kind of weirdness to be around when I was growing up.

It’s almost hard to imagine now that there was a time long ago when I couldn’t just jump into a car and drive aimlessly, which is something I do very often. Luckily, it’s hard to miss something that you never had, so I was blissfully unaware for the first sixteen years of my life of how great it is to be able to go anywhere at any time. My scope of the world surrounding me, seen always from the passenger side window or backseat, was all in the hands of my parents. I went where they went, when they wanted to go there. My best friend Dan and I accepted it as a necessary inconvenience. We bided our time at home with toys, TV, video games, walks in the woods, and crank-calling strangers. I in particular spent a lot of time perfecting my aim with rubber bands by spending long winter afternoons shooting rolls of thread off the top of an easy chair. But it was frustrating. There was a whole world out there outside of walking distance, and we both knew it, and we wanted to see it for ourselves.

We lived in the outer reaches of the suburbs, and anything as interesting as a shopping mall was far, far out of our reach. Opportunities to further complete our growing collection of Star Wars action figures seemed frustratingly few and far between. It involved a confluence of many factors: A parent who was willing to drive all the way out to the mall, usually for a reason of their own, and that parent’s willingness to let me tag along. If I was brought along, there was always that horrifying possibility that I’d have to wait patiently while my mother touched every piece of clothing in the women’s section of every department store, or while my dad looked at ten different kinds of socket wrenches in the Sears hardware section for a length of time that just couldn’t seem possible, and still with no guarantee that we’d ever make into a toy store at all. There was no telling when such an occasion would come again, so getting driven to a mall and coming home empty handed was an absolute disgrace, a precious opportunity squandered. It was a very stressful process. I learned very early that having a goal you want to achieve is a roller coaster ride of elation and heartbreak, especially when success hinges on the mysterious and unpredictable nature of adults.

The roads around where I lived were, and still are, simple two-lane arteries cutting through hilly, bumpy green land that was once completely covered with trees and coursing with streams. The streets seem almost random in their creation, as if the road workers simply paved over paths that were created by deer and other woodland creatures hundreds of years ago. To this day I still don’t know the names of most of those roads, but by the time I’d gotten my license, I knew exactly how to get where I was going by years of having been driven there. At the bottom of one steep hill near my house was a fork in the road that led off in three directions. Most of the time, mom or dad would continue on driving straight. I knew that a left turn was a route that eventually ended up meeting with another well-known, nameless road. But my friend Dan and I one day realized that neither one of us had ever been in a car that turned right at the fork. It was a revelation. This small intersection was mere miles from our houses. How could we not know where a right turn led? Dan’s theory was that down that road and around the bend was a huge toy store. In fact, probably the greatest toy store in the world, like in the movie Big, with a giant piano that you could dance on, and three floors at least, and free samples just for visiting. I decided to accept Dan’s theory as fact and assume it to be true.

Asking our parents what the mystery road held in store was, we both knew, pointless. We didn’t even try. If they’d managed to get where they were going their whole lives without turning right at that stop sign, they were never going to just tell us about what really hid around that curve. As time went by, the fantasies of what was down there became more fantastic. In addition to the toy store, there had to be some kind of amusement park. I couldn't figure out why we wouldn’t be able to hear the sounds of the roller coasters and firework shows during the summer, but then it hit me: It’s probably a water park. Being that we both had perfectly good swimming pools in our back yards, I could understand, but not abide by, our parents’ attempts to keep this area of town off limits to our young eyes.

I’m not going to tell you that as soon as I got my license, the first thing I did was to drive to that fork and turn right. By the time I turned sixteen, I wouldn’t have had use for a toy store even if one happened to be down that road, greatest one in the world or not. If I had made the drive, I would have been more likely to be staking out private places for parking the car and making out. It turns out a cousin of mine actually moved into a house down that road right around the time I got my license. He hosted a party, and so my first time witnessing the scenery around the curve was from the backseat of my parents' car on the way there. Down the tree-lined two-lane road we drove, around the bend, to find more trees and more road, and then more trees, and then, eventually, a housing plan.

I’ve wasted a lot of gas and put a lot of miles on my car in the sixteen-plus years since I’ve become a legal driver wandering around, purposely getting lost, or just re-driving roads that I’ve been down hundreds of times, for no reason. Maybe somewhere in my mind I hope that one of these days I’m going to go around a bend and find that mythical greatest toy store in the world.

Years ago I took an acting class with a teacher that I still respect very much. I didn’t stop taking her class because of any unhappiness with it as much as I just reached a point where I felt I’d gotten as much out of it as I could. Plus, cute girls stopped joining.

I often wondered if one of the reasons the teacher enjoyed the class so much, other than the feeling of accomplishment she achieved and the money she made, was from watching us all participate in the heinous emotional exercises she invented and put us through. They usually had to do with sensitive, private matters in our lives that we would never normally want to express to a room full of near strangers, or even close friends for that matter, and having us act them out. She had this way of feeding on the perverse seed of self-indulgence that lies in every actor, nudging us on stage and drawing out our ugliest truths about ourselves and our lives. Before you knew it, class was over and you were walking to your car thinking, “Did I really just act out an improv scene about the time I wet my pants in the middle of science class because I was too shy to raise my hand? And was actually wetting my pants again really necessary? Why do I have to be so method?” And yet, I could never shake the idea that what I’d done had somehow made me a better actor. Why else would I feel so mortified?

One of the teacher’s most firmly held beliefs was that every man has deep, uncorrected emotional issues with his father. Thus, every six months or so she’d pull from her large pile of scripts a scene from the movie Five Easy Pieces starring Jack Nicholson, playing a former piano prodigy that, not surprisingly, has issues with his father. There’s a scene in the movie where he rolls his father’s wheelchair to the top of a hill in town. His father is literally speechless because he suffered a stroke and will most likely die soon. And then Jack confesses to him the feelings of inadequacy and remorse that he now realizes he’s felt all his life, and apologizes to him for being such a failure, and asks for his forgiveness for his leading a life that his father can only think must have been a waste. I know it well because I probably had to do it at least three times. The problem was, while her overall theory might be true for most men, I really don’t have unresolved issues with my dad. I’m able to love and respect him, know that he loves and respects me, and when necessary, simply regard him as a nice old man that I hang around with when I visit home, but not in a weird way because we’re related. So the Five Easy Pieces scene was never one easy piece for me.

The first couple or so times, I did reasonably well at finding some kind of emotional substitution or creating a detailed back story fitting enough to get me in the right kind of headspace in order to fulfill my teacher’s almost sinister fascination at seeing young people go through turmoil. The final time I was given the monologue, however, I just wasn’t able to totally commit. I’m not sure if it’s that I just wasn’t in the mood for such heaviness that day, or if I’d exhausted the depth I could achieve from that scene after the other times I’d done it, or maybe just the lack of cute girls in class that day that I felt the need to impress. As she instructed, I crouched down to an empty chair and delivered the lines, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything other than just say them with nothing behind it. When I finished, she was naturally a bit disappointed and asked me what the problem was. I explained that part of it was I was physically uncomfortable. She reminded me he was in a wheelchair, and I would have to crouch down to him for him to hear me. I suggested that I would probably sit and look up at him. On the ground, she asked? No, on a rock or a log I replied. She seemed strangely intent on the idea that I would have to crouch, and that there would be no rock or log near near my father’s wheelchair to sit on. My argument was, if this moment was so crucial in my life, and I took the time to wheel my father up a big fucking hill to tell him how badly I messed up my life, and these would be among the last words I ever said to him, I think I would make sure to roll him to a place on the hill where I could comfortably sit on a rock or a log instead of crouching down and losing all sensation in my feet before even getting to the part where I explain why I never stay in one place for very long. And maybe she was just in a bad mood that day, but she seemed to think that my reasoning was absolutely ridiculous. But seriously, what kind of hill doesn’t have some kind of rock or log lying around? Who in their right mind would CROUCH?!

I’ve come to think of myself more as a writer than an actor in the past few years, and I promise you this: If I ever write a scene involving a character opening his heart to another character in a wheelchair in any kind of exterior setting, the scene directions will in no uncertain terms have that character sitting on a rock or a log.

When I decided to devote my life to acting one Tuesday evening a long time ago at the dinner table when my mother asked me what I wanted to study at college, I think I recognized at the time it was probably not the wisest idea in terms of bettering my chances at having a fulfilling career, or a comfortable existence, or a happy life in general. It did seem to ensure that the future would always be interesting, and that was enough for me.

I think of that at times when I find myself in situations that, especially when taken out of context, are ones that very few people ever get to (or have to) experience. Changing clothes in a room full of other people also changing clothes, for instance. Or being a man with a full makeup job on his face. Trying to decide whether to tell Robert De Niro that he has a piece of spinach in his teeth. That last one never happened to me, but it could.

Some of the most surreal moments of my life have been while shooting scenes for some short film or while performing in some play or another. Just last weekend I had the unique and strangely enjoyable pleasure of getting to throw a handful of chocolate pudding with bits of corn in it at a wall in someone’s apartment. It was for a shot in a five-minute film that a friend of mine asked me to be in, and when they needed someone to hoist the pudding, I was the first one to raise my hand. How often does one get the chance to throw a handful of pudding at someone else’s wall? And to top it all off, I then got to watch other people clean it off. Look, here they are:



And then I got to do it again, because you never do anything just once in film.

Another of my most cherished memories of pure surrealism also came as a result of helping a friend who was shooting a short film, and strangely enough, it also involved chocolate pudding. My friend Keith attended a local film school a few years ago, and he came up with a very high concept idea for his class project. It’s a long story, and I don’t fully remember the reasons and I’m not really sure that I ever did to be honest, but one scene required me to be:

1) Standing on the helipad of the Jurassic Park 2 set at Universal Studios
2) Dressed in a kilt
3) Carrying a bag of golf clubs
4) Mixing a bowl of chocolate pudding that I had cradled in my arms
5) Screaming at the top of my lungs like I was really, really angry.

I was sick with a slight fever that day, which gave the whole thing that extra bit of a dreamlike haze. Not to mention the fact that from my place on the helipad, my view consisted of a giant fake iceberg in a big sunny field, and, beyond that, the house from Psycho. Trams full of people taking the Universal Studios tour kept going by, and I could barely make out the miniature faces of the stunned Midwesterners far below looking up at me as I furiously mixed the pudding, screaming in my kilt. Good times.

These beautiful and strange moments are unfortunately few and far between, but these and times like them are the reason that I’ve never regretted the decision I made back then, at a time in my life when I was far too young to realize the true consequences of such a decision. In a way, I believe that the only good time to decide what to do with your life is before you become aware of what’s at stake if you screw it all up.

Are you like me?

When you’re at someone else’s house, whether it be for a party with many people, or even if it’s just you and the host, and they offer you a drink and you accept, do you secretly wonder if the beverage they’ve just handed to you is poisoned? Not suspicion to the point where you’d pour it into a plant when they’re not looking or anything, but just a little question in the back of your mind.

And then of course, based on how well and how long you’ve known that person, your imagination has to try to support that possibility. Have they always had it in for you, and has your whole relationship up to this point always been a charade just to get you to this place of trust so they can off you? Or, if it’s someone you just met, are they somehow related to that fat kid you made fun of mercilessly in grade school? Wait…is this that kid?! No, that doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t poison me. If he really wanted revenge, he’d probably chain me to some table and force feed me liquefied fudge over the course of two years until I was obscenely obese, and then set me free. UNLESS…the drink is his way of knocking me out so he can get me on the table.

That’s why, when I have someone over to my place and I offer him or her a drink, I’m always sure to hand it to them and say, “It’s not poisoned.” It’s just common decency.

Talking to the dead is all the rage it seems. TV shows make it seem like all you have to do is somehow find a way to tune into some higher state of consciousness and suddenly there’ll be this long line of the deceased waiting to tell you where they’re buried. It’s not that easy though; believe me, I’ve been trying.

I tried to figure out the best way to go about achieving an open line of conversation with the life-deficient. I decided a good first step might be to talk to a dead thing, but one that occupied a lower life form before passing on. So I tried having a conversation with an old houseplant that had turned brown and withered. After a couple hours I decided it was pointless. The only really good thing I could think to ask it is if it could tell me how it died, and I already knew that anyway: I forgot to water it. It occurred to me that even if a dead plant could talk, it might be reluctant to want to talk to the person who was responsible for killing it. It probably thought I was being overly insensitive, basically saying, “Do you know that I’m the one that ended your inconsequential little existence? And I’d do it again, ficus.”

I had similar results trying to talk to a dead fly, a hamburger I was about to eat, and a frozen homeless guy I found behind my apartment building. It was all very disappointing. But then, a breakthrough. Last night I had a dream that felt so real that I’m inclined to believe that it wasn’t a dream at all. I woke to find a dead man standing at the foot of my bed, just the way the TV told me to imagine a dead person who wanted to talk to me would. In the dim light of my space heater, I could see that he was a tall, thin, sad looking man. With a stovepipe hat. I could barely believe it. I hit the medium jackpot. Not only did I succeed in making contact with a dead person, but it was a famous dead person: Our sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln.

“Abe?” I said.

“Yes” he replied.

“Abraham Lincoln?” I clarified, just to make sure I wasn’t talking to some kind of dead Abe Lincoln impersonator, which I’m sure there were probably a lot of in the years after his death.

“It is I,” he replied, in true Abraham Lincoln fashion.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I need to tell you something from beyond the grave,” was his answer, chilling my bones.

“Of course,” I said, with baited breath. “Please, tell me what you need the world to know!”

He took a deep, mournful breath, looked in to my eyes, and said, “I was murdered.”

“Yes, yes!” I responded. “At Ford’s Theatre, while you were watching a play!”

He nodded and continued. “I know who shot me.”

“Yes, John Wilkes Booth! He shot you in the head, stabbed Henry Rathbone in the arm, and escaped!”

Mr. Lincoln’s eyebrows furrowed. “That’s correct,” he muttered.

“What about him?” I asked.

He took a deep breath and continued. “My death must be avenged.”

At this point I was a little confused. The only thing I could think to say was “Two weeks after you were killed, they found Booth in a barn and shot him when he tried to escape.”

Mr. Lincoln took this information in, looked down at his shoes for a moment, looked back up at me and said “Really?”

“Yes sir. Eight other conspirators were found and tried, and all eventually proven guilty and punished.”

Abe chewed on his lip a bit, and said “Oh. Okay.”

Then there was this really awkward moment where he kind of just stood there looking around and my room, and I sat in my bed thinking about how weird I felt being in my pajamas in front of a president. He raised his arm and smoothed his beard, itched his mole, finally looked back at me and said, “Well, thanks then.” And he was gone.

I like the 30’s. I’ve been in them for three years now and I have to say it’s a big relief after the 20’s, if only because I was able to let go of the nagging idea that anything means anything. It seems once you give up needing everything to mean something, the things that actually do mean something kind of mean more. The fourth decade on earth is also the first time one can appreciate just how simultaneously short and long life is. And it’s true what they say about time speeding up too. Not only does it speed up, but it also warps. For example, a lot of things that happened nine years ago seem further away than things that occurred in college and high school. You sort of stop seeing things linearly. Or maybe just I do. It’s completely possible I’m losing my mind.

The best thing to happen to me since I left the 20’s is that I no longer feel the need to apologize, to myself or anyone else, for having certain traits that I could never cop to before. I just let it all hang out. Not in a “hey-look-at-me” sort of way. That’s a teenager ploy. It’s more like a result of exhaustion, like I got too tired to carry around suitcases full of disguises. Maybe it would be different if I had any kind of quirks that were truly hideous, but the fact is, the process of accepting all of the things I’ve learned to deal with was pretty easy because all of them are very acceptable. I’d rather sleep than stay up late. I don’t like crowded, loud places, except for street fairs. I’d rather watch people than to talk to most of them (but the ones I like are the best reason to exist, and even the ones that annoy me are fascinating). That’s about it.

I’ve got this new thing I do that I’m totally into now. I light a candlestick and stare at it. It’s incredibly entertaining. The longer I stare, the more I drift away and think of the weirdest shit. The flame doesn’t tell me what to think or in what way I should think about it. It’s not a democrat or republican. It doesn’t nag me to save money. It’s not a fat, ugly flame married to a hot wife and have a laugh track for jokes that aren’t funny. I drift along on a directionless stream, which is impossible to do while sitting in front of a computer screen in a harshly lit office. If my 5-disc CD player is playing in its random function, naturally each song takes me back. Last night it was a mash-up of times and places: High School in 1989 with Elvis Costello, sophomore year of college in 1993 thanks to Robyn Hitchcock, 1994 courtesy of Kristin Hersh, feeling more at home in a new city and hopelessly in love with a hopeless girl in 2000, brought back to mind by the Eels. Like I said before, the order of things is lost somehow and the idea of time becomes abstract. 1989 felt no longer ago than 2000, maybe because each one is so equally unrelated to the now. Or maybe because I’m so utterly at peace with it all.

I guess it’s about time that I tell the story of the graffiti.

I’ve only gone “tagging” once in my life. And I barely consider what I did to be graffiti. I don’t want to go as far as saying it was art, but well, others have used that term. For whatever it’s worth (and I realize how sad this sounds, but I have to say it’s true), my greatest contribution to the world may very well be something I did with a can of spray paint during the summer of 1992.

The story begins earlier than that, however. The location: a stretch of well traveled freeway known as Route 51, in western Pennsylvania, near the city of Pittsburgh. On a certain part of that four-lane highway lined with dreary warehouses, billboards covered in soot advertising plumbers and three-day blinds, and the usual convenience store every fifty yards, the roadway went under a train trestle. The train trestle was held up but a big cement wall that faced the westbound traffic, and that wall couldn’t have been a more perfect palate for an enterprising young hoodlum to create some kind of message for thousands to see every day. You’re probably thinking this is where I come into the picture, but you’re wrong. I was probably just hitting puberty when someone decided to make their way to that cement wall in the middle of some dark night and express something they felt could no longer be bottled in. On the dawn of the next day, sometime in the mid 80’s, morning commuters on their way downtown from the suburbs were greeted with this message:

Kill Satan
Free Larouche

“Larouche” apparently was referring to Lyndon LaRouche, an economist who sought the office of the President of the United States five times in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. “Satan” was referring to the devil, who currently holds the office of President of the United States. (Buh-dum-bum.) Ol’ Lyndon spent time in jail for reasons that are very confusing to me and, depending on what website you visit, his incarceration for federal crimes is either one of the greatest examples of political railroading in history, or very justified. It’s not important. Nor is the fact that he was married to a woman named Helga. What is important is that that graffiti managed to stay in the very high-profile spot for a strangely long time. It became part of the city’s consciousness, in a way, though I doubt a single person bothered to talk about it, or even really give much thought to it at all. It was just another billboard, advertising something no one really wanted.

I remember seeing it every time my father took me to a Pirates baseball game in Three Rivers Stadium. For me, getting to go downtown was a really cool thing, so things like graffiti that made political statements were really really cool. I remember asking my dad who “Larouche” was and he said “Some nut.” That’s probably what most Pittsburghers thought. Except for that one guy who wanted to kill Satan by letting him out of jail.

Anyway, I don’t know how in the world I came up with the idea, but once I did, I knew it was one of those things that I simply had to do. I’ll just skip the whole lead up to the event, but one night my friend Mike and I very nervously went to that wall at three in the morning with our own can of spray paint and, while he was the lookout for police cars (it’s amazing how much traffic there is on a major artery even at three a.m., by the way), I made an adjustment. And the next morning, the workday commuters found that a little detail of their unconscious lives had been changed to this:

Things to do today:
1. Buy milk
2. Kill Satan
3. Free Larouche

If the reason why the original graffiti was able to stay on the wall so long was because it was so innocuous and easily ignored, it should follow that the reason the new and improved graffiti lasted less than a year was because it was the talk of the town. The graffiti was famous. For years afterward, when I was actually able to convince people that I was the one behind the alteration, I became instantly legendary in their eyes. It was talked about at parties. It was mentioned in the weekly papers. A woman named Jan Beatty published a poem about it. I just Googled the words “buy milk”, “kill satan” and larouche and fourteen links came up, pretty good considering the graffiti existed a few years before the internet and blogs were a big deal.

Not only is the graffiti long gone, but the wall itself was razed and the new and improved trestle is being held up by a structure that wouldn’t function nearly as well as message board. I can’t even say why what I did was so funny to myself and others. There’s a kind of post-modernism to it that makes it indefinable in some way. Was it an anti-political statement? Was it making fun of the original tagger? Was it simply the idea that some weirdo would actually take the time to deface a defacement? Maybe it was a statement about graffiti in general. I don’t know.

Last weekend I had a dream that Ellen Degeneres applied for a job, and she listed Al Franken as a reference. And when the place she applied to tried to call Al, they must have misdialed and got me instead. I really wanted Ellen to get that job, so I did an imitation of Al Franken and gushed about how wonderful Ellen was and how much she would add to their company, whatever it was.

Weird.

On the last day of the run of the play, the actor listens to a song that he was partial to months ago when rehearsals began, and realizes once again just how long his life has been wrapped up in the most recent artistic endeavor, the most recent project participated in to fool his mind into feeling that he’s accomplishing something. He remembers that the first rehearsal was some time in the middle of last August, at the end of a summer in which he had found himself often wondering if his life had ever been more banal and directionless. Then with some hesitation he took the small part in a somewhat ridiculous production of an adaptation of a 1940’s film noir movie to the stage, and within months he was feeling better, something that occurred to him all at once one day in November.

The final performance, the last of about 60 or so, is naturally a bit anticlimactic. In a run that featured so many memorable minor and major disasters nightly, this one goes by without a hitch. The door on stage opens and closes the way it was supposed to, the lights and sound are on cue, no actors miss an entrance leaving their costars on stage stranded and fumbling for things to say to fill the silence, no drinking glasses or ashtrays are dropped in the dark during the many complex scene changes. The actor himself resists the urge to become hideously unprofessional and create practical jokes, as he did in one performance in December before the holiday break by putting Vaseline on the ear pieces of the prop telephones and on the doorknob of the aforementioned notoriously misbehaving stage door. Ah, yes, December. The normal excitement of the holidays was mingled with the comfort of being part of something he looked forward to every week, even if he and his castmates would never admit it. Supposedly serious, self-respecting actors would never admit to actually being gratified by the kind of fluff they had all found themselves forced to reenact four times a week. They could never bring themselves to say that some part of them actually thought it was quite a bit of fun, and that maybe the best part was simply getting to be with each other. Never, that is, until the last performance.

After curtain call, there are costumes for the 19 performers to be folded and sent off to dry cleaning, leaving the dressing room that had been only negotiable by ducking and constantly turning suddenly looking barren. The actor grabs the black shoes he took from his closet before the first dress rehearsal; the only part of his costume that belonged to him. They are thrown on the floor of the passenger side of his car. Champagne is popped and drank, food is laid out and eaten, and everyone involved begins to wonder after a while how long they’re supposed to stay around. What is too early to leave, constituting rudeness? What is too long to stay, suggesting being pathetic? The actor is in the last group to leave, with the members of the cast with whom he frequently went out for drinks on Friday nights after the show, suggesting patheticness, but within good company.

It’s a Sunday night, and the next day is work, just like every Monday. But it will be a Monday beginning a week that will have no ending, at least not one like he’s become used to. “What is an actor without an act?” he thinks. Will there be anything there the next morning to protect him from turning the disdain he feels for the simple, passionless workaday office drones on himself? Because that’s what an actor without an act is. He decides not to think about tomorrow.

When he finds a parking spot near his home, he gathers his belongings from within the car. Somehow he can’t bring himself to take his fancy shoes from the passenger side floor. He doesn’t want them to be back in their place in the closet just yet.

Ten years ago at this time I lived far away and worked in a coffeehouse owned by two guys named Joe. If either one of them had had any kind of sense of humor whatsoever, I would have gotten a lot of joy out of greeting them every morning by saying, “Hey Joe, hey Joe, want a cup of joe?” But I never did.

Looking back, it was a pretty great job for a guy fresh out of college to have. But like every job I ever had, I hated it at the time. And also like every job I’ve ever had, I pushed the limits of what I could get away with. You’d think that, on a slow day when I gave certain customers the opportunity to haggle with me for the price of their purchases, that they’d take me up on it and try to get a bargain. Not one ever did. Maybe the inherent problem with working in a coffeehouse is that you’re mostly serving people who haven’t had their caffeine fix yet. Maybe that explains the dire lack of any personality on their part. I never got a laugh once any time a patron would ask for a small Colombian and I’d say, “We have one in the back. He’s definitely very short but he’s a hard worker. He’ll serve you well.” I mean, that’s comedy gold. But maybe a suggestion of human slave trafficking just wasn’t something most people were completely comfortable with. Nor were they anywhere near being fine with the image I broached when they’d ask for a brownie.

The place was called Stonewall Coffeehouse. Every couple days or so I’d actually have a customer ask me about the name, and I’d have to find some way to gracefully tell them that it was probably because of the giant stone wall holding up the ceiling. I usually failed at the grace part. So sometimes I’d say it was named after the famous U.S. general. But I slowly started to realize that most of the people that ventured the question were effeminate men that would smirk and ask it as if they were actually inquiring what kind of underwear I preferred to wear. When I told them the answer, whichever answer I chose at the time, they always seemed deflated. I later learned that the Stonewall Riots in San Francisco in the late 60’s were a watershed event for gay rights in America, and all those men were either very interested in buying their java from a gay-friendly café, or hitting on me, or both. Or maybe they were just really stupid and honestly didn’t notice the giant wall of stone holding up the ceiling. Or maybe they were a big fan of General Stonewall Jackson.

I worked at Stonewall at the height of my addiction phase, and it ended up costing me my job. There were other factors involved, but no recovering addict should try to make excuses for his weaknesses. One of the Joe’s told me to take out the garbage, and I couldn’t tear myself away from the thing that controlled me long enough to follow his orders. I had to get that crossword puzzle done, and until I did the rest of the world would just have to wait. That’s the way I thought back then, and it was a sad state to be in. I was doing up to three or four puzzles a day. They were always so easy to obtain. Without leaving the café I had access to as many as I could handle just from the newspapers delivered everyday. Before I knew it an hour had passed by and the notoriously hotheaded Joe saw that what he’d asked hadn’t been done, and had the other Joe dismiss me at the end of my shift. Naturally there was some “Joe, can’t you talk to Joe? Joe is just impetuous Joe! You know that Joe! Right Joe?” Then both of us got confused and I decided to accept it.

Stonewall Coffeehouse isn’t there anymore. I think I heard that one of the Joe’s stole a bunch of money and ran off with it. If they never found him it’s probably because the police could never keep straight who it was that they were supposed to be looking for. I’ve kicked my crossword habit, with some difficulty. And I no longer work in the service industry, which is probably the best thing for everyone.

With the brouhaha going on over the whole James Frey A Million Little Pieces thing, I just thought that it might behoove me to clear up something about the things I write in this blog. I’ll just say right now, right up front, that very little of what I write in this thing is true. Or at least, some of it is based on truth but that I greatly exaggerate.

The best example of this is the entry I wrote on January 23rd of this year. I’d say the only element of that entire entry that has any factual basis at all is the part where I say I have trouble finding parking around my apartment building, and even that was exaggerated. More often than not, I get lucky with a spot that’s not only very convenient, but also well shaded. I mentioned in that entry that I favor cartoons to the news, which was an outright lie. I can’t even bring myself to watch The Simpsons anymore, though that probably has more to do with the decline in its quality more than anything. The part about not liking eggs is kind of true, though I can’t say that I never eat them, as I asserted. Finally, I’ve never seen the movie Flight Plan. While I don’t feel particularly guilty about lying about it, I do feel really bad about not seeing it yet because someone I know is in it, and I hear she’s really good.

That’s an example of only one entry, and as I scroll through the rest of this blog, so many other little falsehoods and fabrications that I created in order to make my life appear more interesting than it is jump out at me. So, I have to go on record as saying that I wouldn’t call this blog a memoir. I don’t want Oprah coming after me. Think of it more like one of those books that you found in the fiction section of the bookstore, filled with so much detail far beyond the writer’s natural talent and with the unmistakable scent of self-indulgence about it, giving you the feeling that the author based the events on actual events and people in his or her own life, but didn’t feel like getting permission from all those people to use their likenesses so they just changed some names and a few details and called it made-up. Except I didn’t change any names. Mikey is real, god bless him.

Now that that’s all settled, I’m going to draw some pictures of Mohammed on a pogo stick now. Watch for those illustrations later.

On November 9th, 2005 I wrote an entry about a man that I see with startling regularity around town. He’s an apish looking man that walks constantly. Since I wrote that entry, I’ve probably seen him about five more times or so. Today when I saw him, I had the presence of mind to get my camera phone out and take a picture. And here it is.



Unfortunately, it’s not the best picture. I was definitely planning on taking more, but he disappeared. It was really weird.

I was trying to act nonchalant while photographing him, but that got a little screwed up. I forgot that I had turned up the ringer on my phone to maximum volume last night, so that when I took the picture, the little camera sound effect was REALLY loud. I doubted that he had any inkling that I was taking his photo, but he slowed down at a bank of public phones and began checking each of their coin return slots for change. This saddened me because one of my pretend scenarios for the walking ape-man was that he was incredibly wealthy and just really liked walking a lot. I guess he still could be, but he’d have to be one really eccentric rich guy if he had a thing for finding loose change.

Anyway, I went ahead of him on the sidewalk as he searched the phones. I figured this might be the perfect way to get a shot of him from the front. I turned the volume of my phone down and slowed down, planning on pretending to talk on my phone and snap another picture as he passed by me. But as I put the phone to my ear and casually turned sideways, I snuck a peek down the street to find that he was no longer in sight. He was gone. I would have been more disappointed if I wasn’t so sure that I’d run into him again in the next couple weeks.

As I gave up and continued walking, new scenarios began to form in my mind. Maybe he did hear my camera snap his photo, and he didn’t want to take the chance that someone was taking his picture. Maybe he’s in hiding. Maybe he’s a mob informant that had to go into eyewitness protection. I did remark in my last entry about him that he does look very Guido-ish. If that’s the case, I’d really like to tell him that he’s not keeping a very low profile. I’m not even really looking for the guy and I see him EVERY WEEK.

More updates to come.