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.

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.