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.

A woman I work for just told me that she destroyed her cell phone by crying into it. Her tears went into the phone and fried the board. She said she was kind of glad because she’d been wanting to get a new Razor for a while anyway. There’s a metaphor in here somewhere, but I’m just not sure what it is right now.

On the subject of cell phones, I rarely answer mine. I much prefer hearing someone’s succinct voicemail to actually conversing with him or her. And when I call someone, I often find myself thinking that I’d really rather be able to leave a voicemail instead of actually having them answer. Again, there’s probably a world of meaning in that, but I don’t feel like figuring it out right this moment.

I like to change the ringtone on my phone every three or four months or so. I had three different rings last year. I never download; I just pick one from the noises that came with the phone. A couple days ago I was picking my new one and I came across the ring that I used at the beginning of last year through the late spring. It’s funny how even a short little sound can bring back such a vivid feeling, like sense memory. Songs do that of course, but even just that tone sent me thinking back to a year ago and the bittersweet feeling of hope and the shame I felt for feeling hope every time I heard that sound. The split second between hearing the ring and bringing the screen to my eyes to see who it was that was calling me was constantly filled with those conflicting emotions, followed by more elation/disappointment when the caller was revealed, depending on who it was. There was only one word I ever wanted to see on the screen: “Her.” Sometimes it wasn’t “her.” Sometimes it said “parents.” As much as I love them, that was a bummer. Or it would be any of my friends; still not much better. I always wanted it to be “her.” And when it was, part of me still wished it wasn’t. It was never her calling to tell me the things I wanted to hear. It was her calling to tell me about her day, or to ask me for something, or just to say hi. But that was all, and though I knew even then that I wanted too much for too much more, as soon as I hung up with her I immediately began waiting to hear that sound again.

So I changed the ringtone. Something a little more pleasant sounding. And I decided not to answer anymore when she called, just let her go to voicemail with the others. I actually followed through on that promise every now and then, too. But not always, and when I did of course I always called her back almost immediately. I always got her voicemail.

By the time I changed it again, months later, it was partly a ritual in my mind of moving on and moving forward, now that she rarely called at all. That new ring isn’t one I now associate with a flash of elation or even excitement or a shade of embarrassed hopefulness. It’s just a sound. And not one I even heard that often actually. By that point everyone I knew got sick of always getting forwarded to voicemail I guess.

This week when I decided it was time for a change again, I scrolled pretty far down the list for a totally different one, and it turns out my phone has some pretty elaborate, delightfully cheesy dance-music sounding rhythms, so I chose one of those. I’ve been called a few times this week, and the sound of it is so peppy and energized that I have to say it honestly makes me happy to hear it. And I answer the phone more now than I used to, no matter who’s calling. I guess I could say that I’ve set the tone for the new year. Lame, I know.

She still does call every now and then. But she’s not “her” anymore.

I’m not very good at keeping up on current events, unfortunately. It really is something I wish I could change about myself. I keep thinking, maybe I should watch the news sometimes, instead of cartoons. But the few times I’ve turned on the news, I’ve been disappointed with the lack of falling anvils on people’s heads. And believe me, some of those anchor people really need anvils falling on their heads.

From what I’ve been able to pick up from hearsay, our current president is kind of dumb and does bad things. Just from thinking about things in my daily life, I tend to agree. So many things are harder than they need to be and just don’t make sense. Like, if the universe is constantly expanding, why can I still never find a parking space near my apartment building? That might not be the president’s doing, seeing as how he probably doesn’t have anything directly to do with the parking authority in my area, much less the physics of space, time, gravity and matter, but still, it’s annoying.

I don’t know if the president or any of his friends read my blog. Probably not, but you never know. Just in case he does, I’d like to go ahead and just say that I sincerely hope, no matter what other stupid things he might do, that he and all the vice-presidents and stuff don’t repeal the law of gravity. I mean, it’s been around since the days of the Constitution, and I think it’s a very helpful, good thing. I think we can all agree that gravity helps us all to live much better lives. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who might disagree with that, but I guess that’s the magic of democracy: Everyone has their opinion and the ones who believe it the strongest win, or something. I’d like to hear someone give me a good reason to take away gravity, but so far I haven’t talked to anyone that can give me even ONE. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in one of those flyover states with all those yokels.

Without gravity, I would have trouble getting up in the morning, because, well, I’d probably be sleeping on my ceiling and, therefore, already up. So, the real problem would be getting down in the morning, and that would be difficult too. And making eggs for breakfast would be a real bitch, what with keeping the eggs down in the frying pan long enough to make them crispy. I’m not even sure how I’d go about doing that. See how unprepared I am for this? ARE YOU LISTENING MR. PRESIDENT? And the worst part about it is, I don’t even like eggs. I never eat them. If the gravity is repealed and I have to start eating eggs, I might just barf.

I just watched the movie Flight Plan the other night, and I thought, “Gee, if gravity didn’t exist, that movie would never have been made. Because if there were no gravity, there would be no need for air travel because people could just float to freakin’ Seattle, or wherever the hell they’re going, and Jodi Foster would have been more likely to lose her daughter to her getting caught in electrical wires than to evil stewardesses (sorry if you didn’t see it and I just gave away the ending; to be honest I didn’t even watch the end and I just guessed what happened).” So, in one fell swoop, you have the end of the airline industry and the end of movies about planes, which would, I imagine, create some kind of crazy crap to happen with the stock market. Not that I own stock, but still.

Speaking of electrical wires, I’m sure electricity needs gravity to flow. I mean, I’m no doctor, but it just makes sense.

So, in closing, I’d give Flight Plan about three stars. The plot had a lot of holes and not a lot of character development, but you can’t lose with a star like Jodi Foster. It’s great to have her back on the big screen.

I was just sitting here thinking about some boys I knew in school who were able to turn their eyelids inside out. It’s still difficult for me to believe that it can be done, even after witnessing it dozens of times firsthand throughout my middle school career, and I certainly never attempted it myself, but at one time in the mid-eighties in a small corner of some forgotten and overlooked suburban educational environment, the act of turning inside out the thin layer of skin protecting one’s eye was all the rage.

I don’t know what was more amazing: The fact that they could perform such an act, or that they even attempted to find out that they could. And I don’t know who among those brave pioneers in my seventh grade class was the first to even think of trying it, but whomever it was certainly deserved to be more celebrated than they were. True, perhaps an older brother or some other strong male presence tipped off that young man to the possibility of such a potentially girl-impressing/nauseating act, but it’s also possible that it was a completely original routine developed one fateful and inspirational evening alone in front of a mirror. Or maybe it was a result of a dare. Whatever the origin, within days of the introduction of the accomplishment, it was not uncommon to be able to look around at any time of the day, during any part of any class, and see some dude sitting there next to you with his freakin’ eyelids turned inside out.

As I said, I never even came close to attempting the eyelid trick. I wasn’t in the social group of young males that took to it so eagerly, and therefore it never occurred to me to try it, nor was I goaded towards it. I tend to think that even if I had been in their fold, the type that at age 12 liked to draw pictures of trucks with gigantic wheels all over the pages of textbooks and laugh incessantly at the spontaneous uttering of the word “boobies” by someone in the back row of the room, I probably would have drawn the line at voluntarily increasing my risk of eye infection or development of a stye. Besides, I had my own personal ingenious ways of grossing out girls. The fact that most of them were unintentional is beside the point.

I wonder sometimes where all those eyelid twisters are now. I lost track of most of them when we all hit high school where I went on to advanced classes, and they were placed in classes put aside for people who like to turn their eyelids inside out. Every now and then I’d pass them in the halls, or I’d see them on the school bus on one of those days when neither I nor my friend Dan was able to borrow the car from our parents, or I’d walk in on them as they smoked in the restroom during class. As far as I can tell, they’d grown tired of their little trick by 9th grade, so there’s really no reason to think that they perform it now. But it pleases me to imagine that they were able to recapture the passion they had for doing unnatural, irresponsible things to their bodies, and that they’ve been able to find some pleasure in their public-school-dropout lives by flipping those lids yet again, just for old time’s sake.

Tuesday is the most poetic day of the week. It should go without saying that that’s especially true for rainy Tuesdays in March. This is a sunny day in January in a town I often find lacking in poetic splendor all year round, so staying awake at all involves a lot of soul-wide-open searching for anything to get aroused about, or we might as well all just close that magic inner eye and take a nice little nap that lasts another year or so. An office cubicle might as well be an ingeniously created antidote to any line of thinking approaching sublime, and the daily grind is doubtlessly a government plot to dull our sense of senseless beauty, but no one ever said finding magnificence in the mundane was easy.

In a perfect world, Tuesday is the day that people come into school or work late, because the mornings are spent in introspection while digging ravines in your oatmeal with the tip of your spoon or while watching a ladybug crawl across a windowsill. Lovers meet in cafes and not say a word after hello, instead only looking off into the rafters and dream of all they’ve got to live for, until their eyes meet again, finding it. Old men saunter down the street tapping a stick against wooden fences, only pausing for the necessary time it takes to skip around a small boy coming the opposite direction, doing the same. The time for school and work does come of course, but the necessary part of the day goes by in a pastel way, as if the true, sharper colors of Monday and Wednesday don’t apply. Even the coldest mid-winter Tuesdays are wrapped in velvet, the snow crunches under the feet in different notes with each step, and the shape of a ghost that your breath makes in the air celebrates before it disperses. Tuesday evenings in this world aren’t for staying out late, they’re for accidental naps that end in surprise to discover the sun has set, and for the sound the boiling water in the iron makes when it’s brought to the upright position away from the clothes it’s pressing, and for wondering if you’ve really never noticed that crack in the wall above the front door before.

I feel bad for people who only see weekdays as five little necessary evils that must be faced, tackled and gotten through before the almighty weekend. Saturday has its obvious allure, but doesn’t it lack in a kind of subtlety? The thrills of a Tuesday are of a special variety, like finding change in between the couch cushions when the craving for a candy bar hits, or the sun breaking through the clouds just as the girl you have a crush on rounds the corner. Anyone can see the brilliance of a Friday night or a Sunday morning; the best thing about the best things about Tuesday is that they’re so hard to see.

I once told my friend Tania that if I could pick the last song I heard before I die, I'd want it to be Two Step by Throwing Muses.

The problem is, ever since then, every time I hear it I'm terrified I'm going to get in a car crash or have a stroke.

I was going through some old papers yesterday and I found an essay that I wrote for my 11th grade history class. The assignment was to research the year that I was born and write 1,000 words on the biggest events and most memorable legacies of that year. I was given a week to complete it, and naturally I waited until the study hall period before the class in which it was due to even begin it, using absolutely no reference materials whatsoever.

Here is the opening sentence:

It should be said right off the bat that the year 1972 was far more than simply the 160th anniversary of the War of 1812.

As you can see, I was off to a great start. Not only did it include historical information and employ it in a manner that the reader, namely my teacher, had never thought of before, I had also managed to use up 25 words towards my goal. The rest of the opening paragraph is as follows:

No, the second year in the decade of the 70’s (that’s right, the second year, not the third. Many people often forget that there was no year “0”, and therefore 1970 would in fact bet the LAST year of the ‘60’s, not the first year of the ‘ 70’s) was chock full of events that will not soon be forgotten by those that study history, commonly known as “historians.” Come with me now as we investigate this complex, fascinating 12-month epoch known as…1972, AD.

I knew from years of experience with last-minute essay writing that the easy part was over. The opening paragraph was all fluff and buildup; the next paragraph would have to contain actual facts. So:

1972 began at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 1972, and ended at midnight, December 31st, 1972.

At this point I sort of hit a wall. I remember looking up at the ceiling and chewing on the end of my pen a little bit. Being sixteen at the time, I’m sure sex crossed my mind at least ten times during the five-minute bout with writers block. Then I refocused and pushed on.

365 days passed in that span, encompassed in 52 weeks and spread throughout 12 months.

I must have been really desperate, because at this point I listed the names of the months, then the names of the days of the week, and, for some reason, a detailed explanation of what a leap year is, even though 1972 was not a leap year.

I’d exhausted the scientific approach, and I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and discuss some actual events. I had no idea what happened in the year I was born. Even if I could remember back that far, the fact that I was born at the end of October would have left only two months worth of material. I decided to start with general things, and hopefully become more specific as I went on.

1972 saw the continuation of some long-standing traditions of American life, such as Labor Day, celebrated on the first Monday of September, 1972.

This was all well and good, but at some point the teacher was going to expect some kind of information that pertained exclusively to the year in question. I decided the best I could do was list some things that I thought happened around 1972, and hope I got lucky.

Presidential scandal rocked the White House.

That was always a safe bet. My next bright idea was to reference an event that I knew was occurring in 1972, but about which I knew no actual details.

The Viet Nam War continued to rage in 1972. This conflict was a complex, hard to define series of events that experts today still find difficult to explain in a way that could make easy sense to the layperson. Any attempt to condense the happenings of even one year of that unfortunate period in American history and its implications would be foolhardy and even offensive to those who risked their lives in the name of freedom.

If figured Mr. Chesney, my history teacher, would be quite flattered by that last part considering he was a Viet Nam veteran.

I wrote a bunch of other stuff about Volkswagen Bugs and koulats, and somehow I’d managed to bluff my way through about 900 words. But if I wanted to ensure any kind of chance that the weaknesses of the essay could be overlooked, I knew I needed a killer closing paragraph. I couldn’t afford to merely repeat the sentiments expressed in the opening paragraph. I had to get personal about my own feelings about the year I was born, the sappier the better.

In closing, I would just like to express my own personal thoughts on the year in which I was not only born, but also conceived. Whenever I come across a person has been born a year behind or ahead of me, I must admit I look on them with just a bit of pity. I keep it to myself of course, but I have to wonder if they have any idea of just how close they came to being born in probably the single greatest year of the early 1970’s. Sure, ’71 and ’73 have their own merits; we all know that. But I love 1972. Yes indeedy.

The “yes indeedy” seemed a bit cheesy, but was in fact completely necessary, as they were words 999 and 1,000. I literally finished at the bell, walked into my history class, handed that puppy over to batty ol’ Mr. Chesney (Hanoi Harry we called him, though I think his first name was Ed), and sat at my desk, confident that I had once again managed another minor miracle of last-minute essay writing.

You might wonder what I kind of grade I was given. Well, worry not. You see, I went to a public school that spent money on new football uniforms every year while freshmen went without math books. Both Mr. Chesney and I knew that I had more than fulfilled my responsibility to the essay he assigned by my very acknowledgment that he’d assigned it in the first place. Actually completing it almost qualified as extra credit. Sure, I graduated at a far lower level of progress than I should have and spent the first two years of college learning things that I should have learned in middle school, but I loved my public school education. Yes indeedy.

The best thing about 2005 is that most everyone seems to agree that it wasn’t such a great year, and therefore I can join the rest of the world in choosing to put it behind me.

I’ve become wary of making grandly optimistic statements about the coming year, as I usually have to recant them by the third week in January. So I’ll temper my official decree a bit to merely say that I suspect that 2006 will not be the best year ever, only a solid fourth best ever, third best tops.

For instance, while I have no doubt that the coming months will bring some kind of financial windfall that will make it possible for me to quit my day job, as well as a sudden yet completely earned respect from my peers and enemies alike, not to mention nightly sex with countless beautiful women, I’m sure these things will be tempered by things like unexpected inclement weather, perhaps a flat tire, and the occasional unfortunate experience of being told about bad things happening to other people. The year is only three days old and already I’ve had to deal with the price of postage going up by two cents. The silver lining here is that I don’t mail many letters, so I can mark that as a bullet successfully dodged.

2006 already has many things going for it. The first thing that pops out to me is that it’s an even-numbered year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that good things happen in years that can be evenly divided by two, otherwise Jesus would have simply been born a year earlier or later. Furthermore, I’ve always been a fan of the years ending in six. 1996 was a hoot, 1986 will always be the year that Howard Jones had a hit on the charts with “No One is to Blame,” and though I don’t remember 1976 all too well, it’s hard to imagine that I was very unhappy with an existence comprised of being fed when hungry, sleeping when tired, playing with toys, and drooling at will. I may just have to apply that line of thinking to the coming year.

I don’t plan on leaving the quality of 2006 up to mere fate and sheer numerology, however. The proactive steps I endeavor to follow in order to make this the fourth best year ever (fingers crossed for third best) include:

• Making my attraction to certain girls more obvious, mainly achieved through prolonged staring.
• Taking more plentiful and longer walks, thereby greatly increasing my chances of finding dropped money.
• No more staying up for twenty-four hours in a row doing Su Doku puzzles.
• Effective immediately: No more handshakes. Hugs only.
• Also, I’m going to work on better eye contact during conversations. No more looking into the eyes of the less judgmental person that I imagine to be standing to their immediate left.
• Public restrooms are no longer off limits; the bushes in the back of the establishment are.

2006. Look out world. And look out imaginary world, revolving just to the left of the real Earth.

Tomorrow I’m going to get on a plane and fly to my hometown, as I’ve done at the end of every December since I moved away nine years ago. My father will pick me up from the airport, and upon seeing him in the baggage area, I’ll remember once again that when I think of him, I still picture him the way he looked years ago instead of the elderly man he undeniably is now. Despite my best attempts, I’ll run out of things I could possibly think of to talk to him about before my bag even comes down the chute, which can only bode for a very long ride home in a car that will never break the speed limit at any time.

I’ll feel that first blast of freezing air when we walk through the automatic doors into the breezeway leading to the short term parking area, and I’ll remember how silly I was for thinking that the fifty-five degree low I experienced that morning actually qualified as “cold.” I’m flying to a place during a time of the year when fifty-five degrees would officially signal the end of the world.

The first ten minutes of my entrance into the house I grew up in will succeed in being the most overwhelmingly melancholy event that have happened to me all year, and this sort of dark cloud with a blazing sun behind it will hang over my head until I’m halfway through the returning flight. Greeting my mother in the kitchen will be such a carbon copy when I did it last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, that we might as well just skip it. But that would never happen of course. And I’m sure I’ll smell the dinner she’s making as I excuse myself to take my bag upstairs to the bedroom.

The following days will feature many more occurrences that will be so familiar that I might be tempted to believe I’m living through some prerecorded repeat, or fallen into a time warp, except that I’ve gotten to the point now where even that feeling has become such an inherent part of the experience that I just go with it. This sentiment of déjà vu is as much my doing as anything else. Part of me wants nothing to ever change, and therefore I go through the same motions year after year as a kind of celebration that I still can, and perhaps in the hopes that it will mean I’ll be able to it all again the next year. Slight evolution has occurred in the customs over the years. I don’t make the yearly visit to my grandmother’s house anymore since she passed away two years ago, naturally. And a few other relatives have passed on as well. Awful as it sounds, sometimes I have to remind myself that they’re gone and that their house won’t be on the yearly tour that my father and I take when we “go visiting.” I swear though, it’s not that I’ve forgotten them already. It’s just that I can barely comprehend the fact that they no longer exist.

I take my own little tours, alone. One is a marathon walk around the neighborhood near my parent’s house, down the streets and through the backyards that I used to run through when I was a kid because I thought that I had every right to. I remember so many things that I hadn’t thought of for so long that sometimes I have to think really hard about whether they really happened to me at all, or if I saw it all on some TV show or read it in a book. I also make it out to the area closer to downtown where I lived for a year and a half after graduating from college. I packed a multitude of experiences into that short time, and as it was the last place I lived before I moved away, the question of whether I should have left at all always creeps in. Every year it becomes a little easier to answer.

One of the greatest things about going back used to be seeing all the friends I left behind. Every year it gets a little harder to get them all together more than once or twice, and for an ever-shorter length of time. I guess it says something about the changes I’ve gone through as a person that it barely bothers me anymore if I fail to see some of them at all. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine not getting to see my nieces and nephews, now all teenagers. It makes me wonder if it’s because I’ve become more familial over the years, or just if I never stopped being a teenager and therefore want to be around people on my level.

When it’s time to head back to the airport and catch my flight home, I’ll be ready to leave. Taking a break from my life is always great, but at some point I always want to get back to it. At least once during my stay, my father will have asked me when I plan on moving back for good, and of course I’ll once again have to tell him that it’s not a possibility I’m considering in the near future. I’ll try to ignore his unspoken but obvious sadness as he accompanies me into the airport and through the ticket line, then accept his offer to sit in the Au Bon Pain and have a coffee or orange juice before saying our goodbyes and entering the line for the security check. I’ll feel bad for experiencing such relief that I’ll soon be on my way back to where I’ve come to feel most comfortable in the world while my dad is sitting there next to me feeling like the time has gone by much too fast, recognizing that it will probably be another year before I’ll return. These years fly by so fast that a twelve-month span tends to lose its meaning and worth, and yet you just have to wonder how many more of them there will be at all. Everything stays so much the same for so long until one day nothing is ever the same again.

And in two weeks I'll be sitting in the chair that I'm sitting in right now, but with a fresh perspective and a broadened idea of my existence. My normally myopic view of my existance will be widened to include the knowledge that I came from somewhere, and I have a history, and there's a whole world out there that I conveniently ignore for fifty weeks out of the year. This perspective will fade however, day by day, until, by the middle of January, I will have forgotten it all, only to be remembered once again next year.

I was in a restaurant with a big group of people last weekend. It was a late night gathering of actors after the play we appeared in was over, drinking margaritas and eating free chips in the Mexican restaurant that I always seem to end up in for decompression after a performance. Who I end up sitting with on any given night is completely dependent on what play I’m in at the time, and who I’m in the play with, and who came to see the play that night that was induced to join us afterward. We usually end up with anywhere from four to fifteen people. The host at the front desk of the restaurant sneers a little bit every time we walk in the door. We never know exactly how many people we’ll have in our party. When we underestimate, we end up having to switch tables at least once after it’s been set, and when we overestimate, we end up with a lot of unused table space that could have accommodated a much larger, better-tipping party. But every now and then we just happen to guess right, and that’s what happened this weekend.

The cast of the play I’m in right now is a pretty fun and easygoing group of people, so the after-show get-togethers have been mostly enjoyable and amusing, even if they lack in excitement. These days, that’s just fine with me. Last Friday was a pleasant group. We sat in the outside patio in the back of the restaurant at one of my favorite tables because it’s round and in the corner, near a heat lamp. The conversation began as it always does, talking about the show that night, the love-hate relationship we all have with the audience, slyly gauging the true opinion of our show from the one member of our party that saw the play that evening, etc. Drinks were had and free chips were eaten, and the conversation began to progress and fragment into smaller groups, as conversations do. This is a process that I’ve always been fascinated in; the way subjects dovetail into others, and how the people in attendance pick and choose which ones they’re most interested in at any time and add what they can at opportune times. It’s at these times that my true place in the world becomes most evident to myself. I am an observer. I’d rather sit amongst the swirling eddy of thoughts whisping around me, letting the streams of thought take their natural course, not adding or changing a thing, just to see where it all ends up. But sometimes I begin to wonder, is it really because I’m an observer, or is it because I’m dull and unoriginal? Have I learned over time through negative conditioning that my adding input or attempts at cleverness are mostly met with little consideration, and sometimes even annoyance? It’s all so much easier to just let it all go by sometimes, and I’m right back at my dining room table as an eight year old listening to my parents and aunts and uncles jabber away as they play cards.

The conversation turned to raising children and politics, and I withdrew. The table was split with two, sometimes three, concurrent topics simultaneously in progress. For a moment I tried to take them all in and chart their individual development, but I quickly became tired. Though I like to think I care about the state of the country, my knowledge of current events and how things really operate is superficial at best, and hearing the fine details makes my brain hurt. Likewise, the concept of parenting and children in general is one that awes me, but I wasn’t in the mood for a lot of dutiful head nodding and cute smiling during another anecdote of a kind of experience I can hardly imagine having in my own life. I began to stare into space, and when that happens, I know from a lifetime of experience that my sociability for the evening is as good as over.

Something different happened this past Friday, however. I caught the eye of the fellow cast member sitting across from me at the circular table. His name is Chris, and I could tell he had, himself, momentarily washed ashore from the currents of dialogue presently raging around us. And I had the sudden, strange urge to be the founder of some new topic, the less important the better. So, looking at the plate before him (he had actually ordered food, sometimes some of us actually do that), I commented that “you can’t go wrong with rice and beans as a side.” He agreed, and quickly our particular strain of frivolity became a discussion of the strange nature of condiments, how they seem so natural for some foods but should never go near others. Our dialogue about relish really seemed to catch the attention of the politicos and parents, and I have to admit that I was, in some way, a tiny bit offended when they broke off from what their previously oh-so-important discussions to join in on our little chat. But I also felt empowered in some strange way.

So no, I can’t add anything new or enlightening in a discussion about how Bush is screwing up our country. And yes, conversations about raising a child make me feel a little empty and cause me to wonder at what point long ago my life began to deviate from everyone else’s. And the fact that I feel like such an outsider even among folks that I seem to share so much with on the surface is kind of dispiriting. But that one little victory was my reminder that when you bravely stand up and pave your own little road, sometimes other people want to drive on it, even if at first you never really had much hope of it going anywhere special.

I wish I could bottle Thanksgiving Weekend and take sips from it all year.

Here's a random observation that I just wanted to get down before I forget: I was watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving last night, and I noticed something that never occurred to me before in the dozen other times I've seen it in my life. Near the end of the show in the final sequence, Snoopy and Woodstock prepare their own Thanksgiving meal and enjoy it outside Snoopy's dog house. I guess it's meant to be some sort of funny denouement to the episode, playing on the fact that the meal Snoopy had just previously served to Charlie Brown and his friends consisted of popcorn, toast, pretzel sticks and jelly beans. And then there's the dog and bird, enjoying a true feast. It is damn funny, actually. In previous years, I let the little joke distract me from the somewhat horrifying thing taking place on the screen. But last night, for some reason, I was able to forget the context and see the reality: little Woodstock gleefully eating a turkey, prepared and cooked by his friend, a dog. I'm not exactly certain what about that whole scenario freaks me out so much. It's not very much unlike those Pizza Hut commercials a couple years ago which featured Miss Piggy salivating over pizzas topped with bacon and sausage. But this was even more heinous, watching this bird being served the food by his canine friend, as if Woodstock and Snoopy's relationship had evolved to some sinister level, having the effect on the bird's mind that cancelled out any obligation whatsoever to his own species, including the promise not to cook and eat them. Maybe I'm just thinking too much about the whole thing. I'll stop now.

In other news, I'm house/petsitting for some friends. I was going through their CD collection today, and for the most part it's pretty slim pickings for such a music snob like me, but I did find a copy of Sensual World by Kate Bush. It's not a CD I own, for one reason: it contains the song This Woman's Work. It's been years since I've heard that song, but I had no doubt that no amount of time could dull the effect that that song has on me. Just for old time's sake, and maybe as a bit of a test, I turned off the TV, dimmed the lights, put the CD in their stereo, forwarded to track 10 and sat on the couch. It was just me and their cute dog sitting there, and I could swear that even little Annie felt the very air of the room change as that first piano chord struck and Kate's voice emited her first achingly beautiful "oooh-ooooh." We sat there and listened to the entire song; mine and the dog's eyes meeting momentarily near the middle, as if we were checking on each other and also perhaps giving a little support. Her sweet glance was in vain however, and when the climax of the song hit, I did as I always do and wept like a baby. Damn you Kate Bush and your gut wrenchingly beautiful song.

Two days off in a row and I still have two more days to sleep in. Someone a long time ago really knew what the hell they were doing when they put Thanksgiving on a Thursday. I'm guessing it was some indian, or maybe a pilgrim. Makes me want to thank them by going to a casino, or eating some oatmeal. Actually, I might be thinking of quakers with that last thing. Well, whatever.

This might be the golden age of standing up for things. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and there are more outlets than ever through which they can make those opinions known, loud and clear. The TV media seem to be clamoring for standpoints and soundbites to the point now that they’ll give almost anyone some airtime if that person has something unique to say, or at least looks pretty while saying it. We’ve become a society constantly on the lookout for something to ruminate upon and form an opinion about, the more extreme the better. No wrongdoing or irritation, no matter how slight, can go on without acknowledgment and having some attention drawn to it. No underrepresented segment of a population, or even an individual with a bone to pick, has any excuse for not being heard. After all, this is the age of the almighty blog.

Well, now that I’ve succumbed to this new age myself, I think it’s about time that I take a stand. I’m irritated by a lot of things, quite honestly, and I think I’ve finally built enough gumption concerning one particular thing be passionate enough to plant my feet and shout my feelings on it from the mountaintop.

I refuse to bag my own groceries.

I work eight hours a day, forty hours a week in order to earn the money to go to a grocery store, select what I want to buy, put it down on that movey-thingy, and have someone ring it up. Now, let me be clear: no matter how much my purchases begin to pile up on the other side, and if I happen to have chosen a checkout aisle that doesn’t currently have someone standing there waiting to retrieve my groceries and bag them, I will not be guilted into bagging them myself. Not by the checkout person, not by the people in line behind me who doubtlessly will have to wait a little longer, and not by anyone who happens to be with me. It’s something I simply refuse to do.

I’ve long been conscious of the fact that a grocery store will usually have fewer baggers on hand than open checkout lanes, causing a sort of musical-chairs situation. The baggers go where needed the most at any given time. That’s perfectly fine. What usually happens is a bagger will eventually notice my things piling up and come over to assist. But sometimes that doesn’t happen, and it’s left to the checkout person to bag them him or herself. That’s an unfortunate outcome, but not anything that would even come close to making me feel obligated to help.

I’m sure there will be those that find my views on the subject disagreeable and maybe even infuriating. “Where does he get off thinking he’s above bagging his own groceries?” they might ask. “Doesn’t he realize how hard those grocery baggers work for such little pay? Don’t they deserve all the help we can give them?” I will say that I do feel bad for them. And I do appreciate the job that they do. But we all have jobs to do, and while what I’m about to say may not be popular, it’s true: they should have done better in school if they didn’t want to bag groceries for a living. There, I said it, and I stand by it.

If any news outlets would like to press me any further on my potentially incendiary comments, please contact me at the email address I provided on my profile.

It’s a beautiful day. I just took a walk during lunch and stopped in at a few stores. I’m not even going to pretend to be angry about the fact that they were all playing Christmas music over their speakers and had decorations up on November 10th. Yes, it’s all so commercial and begins earlier every year. But I love it.

Not trying to jinx it, but for no particular reason, I’ve been feeling better lately than in have in a long time.

Enough of that though. What I want to talk about today is my friend Mikey. Actually, he’s not really a friend of mine. I’d say he’s more of a friend of friends of mine, but my friends don’t really like him either. Which is one of the many good things about the fact that he’s leaving town next week and heading back to home, for good.

Mikey entered our lives a couple years ago, on his way back from serving as a marine in Iraq. Naturally, he decided the best place to start his civilian life would be in a large, harsh city that mostly disagrees with the war he just got done fighting, offered no concrete leads for his employment, and where he knew very few people. What is here, however, is our friend Kevin. Mikey is in love with Kevin.

I should say right now that Mikey is completely straight, despite quite a lot of evidence that might suggest otherwise, such as his aforementioned man-crush on Kevin. During his first weekend here, he kissed a man. It was a cross-dressing man. You might think that’s hard to believe in a oh-sure-like-he-really-didn’t-know sort of way, but you have to remember that Mikey had just gotten back from serving in the military in the constant company of nothing but men, so his perception of what women look like was probably a little compromised anyway. And I’m here to tell you, that guy made one hell of a convincing woman. Not that I would have gone anywhere near his/her face with mine, but when you add in the fact that Mikey just really isn’t all that smart, what you’ve got is a lot of factors leading up to a perfect storm of an accidental homosexual incident.

Over the past couple years, Mikey has supplied as us all with a lot of entertainment, most of it at his expense. It’s a tradeoff really, as laughing at him is really the only thing that eases the difficulty of being around him. I don’t like to sound mean, but Mikey is, well...an idiot. He says a lot of inappropriate things at the worst times, he’s completely lacking in basic social skills, and he’s unable to understand how everyone else in the world isn’t as obsessed as he is with sports and the whole going-overseas-and-bombing-the-hell-out-of-a-whole country thing. Frankly, we all felt too bad for him to completely nix him from our lives. Besides, he kept getting our new phone numbers. But now that he’s leaving, we can all just sort of sit back and remember the good times without the accompanying bringdown of knowing we’ll have any more of the bad.

Number one on the list of all-time great Mikey moments is when he was brutally attacked for absolutely no reason by my friend Desiree’s cat. Buffy simply scurried across the room, claws extended, tail swollen and back arched, and swatted at Mikey repeatedly like he was a living, walking, screaming scratching post. That was also the night Mikey later single-handedly caused my friend Keith, one of the sweetest, calmest people I’ve ever known, to stand up and threaten Mikey’s life during a hand of Texas Hold ‘em Poker. Was Mikey cheating, you ask? Hell no. We’d been spending the previous hour trying to explain to Mikey how to play. That was one of many times at least one of us had to leave the room or run the risk of strangling him.

In his time here, he was banned from three bars. He fell in love with one bartender at a local bar, who, as Keith once put it, might very well be the ugliest woman on the planet. She refused to go out with him. As his grand finale, and serving as the reason why he’s leaving town a couple months earlier than he had planned, Mikey got fired last week from the packing company he had worked at for two months. The reason? Wait for it: stealing bubble wrap. Except he didn’t even steal it. The security cameras clearly show him walking out to his car with a wad of bubble wrap in his hand, opening the car, throwing his sweatshirt in, and then returning to work with the bubble wrap still in his hand. So conspiring to steal bubble wrap then.

This Sunday night is the Farewell Mikey party. Because, after all is said and done, he’s someone that was part of our lives for at least a small part of it, and we all wish him well. And just to show our good will, we’re all pitching in for a gift card for free gas.

That way, if he runs out of money on the trip, by that point he’ll probably be far, far away.

My day-to-day life all takes place within a five to ten square mile bubble. It’s been that way for the past six months, since I moved to a new apartment closer to where I work and do everything else I do. Though I don’t really miss the commute in the mornings and evenings, and I’m glad to have the extra money once spent on gas, it still feels a little weird to me that my whole existence can be contained in such a small area. There’s a whole big giant world out there, and I subsist almost completely in a pinprick-sized portion of it.

Most of my time is spent at my eight hour a day job, and then another eight hours or so goes towards sleep. My calculator just told me that that leaves me with another eight hours daily to go out and exist in this big crazy world we live in. And I spend a lot of that watching TV. But I do sometimes leave the apartment and venture out. Like, if the power goes out or something.

It’s my relative lack of movement in the outside world that makes me all the more amazed by the fact that I keep seeing the same guy with uncanny frequency. I see him walking around at least once a week. And it began long before I even moved down here. I’ve walked past him, on the other side of the street from him, seen him walking by from the window of my office or some restaurant, driven past him, and almost run into him a few times. He literally must walk continuously around the area for me to have seen him as many times as I have.

The reason I always notice him is because he’s odd looking. Not so odd that anyone would run away screaming or even point and laugh really, but he sticks out. He somewhat short, say 5’6”, in his 50’s perhaps, with what I would call a black pompadour for hair, probably dyed, and always wears unfashionably big sunglasses. He’s very Italian looking, in a retired mob thug kind of way. Two qualities about him really stick out to me more than anything else though. One is that he has extremely long arms and big hands for his body, giving him sort of an apish appearance as he walks because they swing behind him with every step. The other is that he always dresses warmly no matter what the weather. That really bothers me. I can’t personally think of anything worse than going for a long walk and not dressing appropriately for it, especially if it means wearing a long sleeved turtleneck on a sunny 90-degree day. You’d think that as much as this guy walks, he’d check the weather report before leaving his house.

But does he have a house? That’s the question that always naturally pops into my head. Where is he coming from, and where does he go back to…eventually? I forgot to mention that he walks pretty fast, sort of giving the impression that he really has something to do and a place to go, unlike the typical homeless people in the area that merely saunter and wander.

I don’t know why I care, but one day I’d like to follow him. I know that sounds crazy, but if I’m ever out on some Saturday with nothing special to do and he should walk by, I think I’d just like to see where he goes and where he ends up.

Assuming, of course, I’m dressed for it.

I once hit a deer.

It was in a bar, and he was being mouthy. He said crude things to the girl I was with, so I punched him. I’m not proud of it. A brawl broke out, and things got scary when he started ramming me with his antlers. It’s a good thing he was young, as his antlers were quite small.

The police were called, and they arrested him. They let me off with a warning. Even I have to admit that the cops seemed a bit biased in the situation. I even felt a bit guilty as the police car drove away, lights flashing, with the deer tied to the roof.

I heard once that what makes children special isn’t what they don’t know and all the things they aren’t aware of, but the innocent and remarkable ways they interpret everything they see, hear and feel as they experience the world around them. It makes sense. If ignorance equaled cuteness, we would love and adore blondes instead of merely wanting to sleep with them. Likewise, the fact that I don’t know how to ice skate doesn’t make me more endearing; it only makes me not gay.

When I was very little, the first time I saw the crescent moon in the sky, I naturally assumed that it was a floating, bitten-off thumbnail of a giant. I went on believing that for a long time. I remember thinking that the fact that it changed shape and became more circular as the month went on certainly seemed like a strange thing for a giant fingernail in the sky to do, but I just chalked it up to be one of those things a grown up could explain but that I wouldn’t really understand anyway, so I might as well wait until I’m older. There were lots of things like that when I was little.

I’ve long ago gotten over the pride I once felt at learning that the moon is in fact just a big rock floating in space, and furthermore that we’d already landed on it and took a little stroll a few years before I was born. I also regret learning the truth that trolls don’t live under bridges. I mean, not that I want a troll under every bridge or anything. That would really suck for all those people in Oakland that have to commute to San Francisco every day, having to deal with some goblin jumping in front of their cars at any given moment. But I do think the occasional troll living under a small wooden backcountry bridge here and there would kind of perk things up a little, especially if it’s the bridge over the river on the way to grandmother’s house. That would make me feel that amazing things exist in the world. The closest thing to trolls in the real world are the homeless people that I walk by every day at lunchtime, but they only make me feel sad. Although a lot of them probably really do live under bridges.

Why is Paris Hilton the closest thing we have to a princess? Why does our president have to make fairy-tale villains look harmless in comparison? How did pharmaceutical companies take the idea of magic beans and turn it into something so sinister and abused? Why does my personal dragon that I have to slay before I can have my happy ending have to involve resolving debt, and constantly fixing car problems, and never feeling totally at ease with anyone at all really, and just generally never knowing if I’m winning or losing, or even if I’m really in the fight in the first place?

I guess I don’t want to know less than I do. I just wish I could perceive it all in some special way again. Even if I were dead wrong about everything, it would make some beautiful kind of sense, if only to me.

A man told me to beware of thirty-three
He said “It was not an easy time for me”
But I’ll get through
Even though I’ve got no miracles to show you
- “Dishes” by Pulp

So it’s come to pass, and I’ve officially achieved thirty-three. My birthday on Friday was sweet. I took the day off work, saw a movie, had lunch with a friend, and celebrity-sighted Michael Keaton reading a newspaper in a café. I’m not one for putting a lot of weight in omens, but I fail to see how running into Batman on one’s birthday could mean anything other than guaranteed good fortune for the year ahead.

I don’t remember seeing any celebrities on or around my thirty-second birthday that would have suggested how the future year would unfold, but the tenor of past 365 days was akin to wandering into a Sizzler and witnessing the annoying redhead from One Day at a Time snuggling with Alan Thicke at a corner table. Need I say more?

I didn’t hear you if you answered, so here’s more. I’ve never personally sucked on the genitals of a donkey, nor do I know anyone that has (or at least nobody that has admitted to having done so, though now that I think about it, I probably know at least a couple), but the general consensus is that it’s an experience that is mostly negative (from the sucker’s standpoint; no one ever thinks of how the donkey feels). Well, thirty-two sort of sucked donkey balls.

Hopefully then I can be forgiven for seeking a glimmer of hope in happening to happen on Mr. Mom on my special day. The fact is, I’ve been a longtime fan of Mr. Keaton. And why not? He’s brilliant. I mean, he was the Purple Panda on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Not a lot of people know that. What range! From panda to president, from snowman to speechwriter, from Beetlejuice to…that guy he played in Night Shift. (Bill Blazejowski, but no one knows that. Even I had to look it up.)

So, here’s to thirty-three and the hope that the next year will bring great fortune, good health, and incredible opportunity. And that I’ll run into Angelina Jolie on October 28th, 2006, newly separated from Brad Pitt.

Does anyone actually read these things?

Tomorrow is my birthday. Thirty-three doesn't seem to be much of a milestone, except when you consider that it was the age that Jesus died. I guess that means that if you've reached three decades and three years without either inspiring people to worship your word, or pissing off an empire enough to nail you to some perch, you can pretty much give up on future generations ever getting a day off of work in your name.

Or maybe not; what was Martin Luther King, Jr. doing at the age of 33? I'm not sure offhand how old he was when he was shot, but there was a guy who obviously didn't get to the Jesus Year and go "Oh well, screw it, might as well call it a day for the whole martyrdom thing. Maybe I'll take up pottery."

I'm very tired. The thought of taking up pottery sounds every bit as exhausting to me as taking on any empire, even one as misdirected and silly as the one I live in. I can't think of a single inspiring thing to say to anyone. No one's listening anyway. I pass a guy almost every day on 3rd Street Promenade who just stands on a corner, yelling a bunch of stuff. I can't believe he's never lost his voice. (Actually, for a while he had a bull horn, but the police probably told him he couldn't use it.) I've certainly never stopped to hear what he has to say, nor has anyone. I mean, how useful could it really be? He's at least not utterly insane, like a lot of the poor souls on the Promenade. I've heard enough of him to know that he's at least forming cogent thoughts, even if they're not original or meaningful. To be honest, every time I see him, my mind fills with the question of why in the world wouldn't be bring a soap box to stand on? I mean, if circumstances ever led me to a pastime of yelling what was on my mind on a street corner, you'd better put BIG money on the fact that I'd be toting a big ol' soap box and standing on that sucker.

My point is, though...

I have no idea. I'm just really tired. And I have nothing I feel I need to say anymore. Thus, a perfect candidate to start a blog. And this is the perfect day to do it, because it's not a special day at all.

On a brighter side, I wasn't really looking forward to crucifixion anyway.