The left mouse button on my notebook was missing, and the other one was stuck. The rest of the right side of the keyboard was overheating right where the processor sits, whiring and coughing pathetically like a sick child at three in the morning. Typing anything that involved letters on the right half of the keyboard meant first degree burns. The drive holding two weeks of already useless work was now missing, corrupt from god-knows-what-error, making the last two weeks even more useless. To boot, the food here sucks, the economy is costing a lot of people that sit around me their very secure jobs, I’m frustrated about travel schedules I can’t make because of other people’s blunders, I’ll probably miss meeting some very important people in New York next week and all because I’m here, doing nothing for nobody.
No wonder I’m pissed.
—
In a split-second I couldn’t control, my feet exploded against the floor, throwing my torso into the air. My throat grunted a war whoop, my hands grabbed my PC and heaved it clear across the room, smashing it against the wall with a violent garble of plastic and metal being shoved against each other and uncomfortable angles. The hard plastic around the case cracked in one sharp snap that sounded like a femur splitting in two. I stood at my desk, breathing heavily, my sleeves rolled up and my top two buttons on my shirt already undone. I bared my teeth, totally out of control. A coworker was looking at me for obvious reasons and in a rage of animalistic rage I pointed at him aggressively.
“What the fuck are YOU looking at?” He and I work for the same company and I know his shitty equipment has had days of poor performance like this. “Don’t pretend like you’ve never wanted to do that with this stinking equipment they fucking give us. It’s a travesty,” I filled in the silence. The bewildered Dutch man kept looking at me silently. Dutch people don’t like scenes and it makes them uncomfortable to be thrust in the middle of one. And I’d never acted like so like the mos American person in the room.
“Besides, it’s YOUR fault,” I shouted, and pointed to the one across the table from him. “And YOUR fault, and YOUR fault,” I shouted indiscriminately, pointing to everyone in the room and making angry faces at the frightened bunch. “YOU - miserable twats put up with discomfort and wretched computer equipment and bad processes and retarded policies all because YOU don’t want to stick your neck out! YOU don’t want to be the one to make a wake, to change the color in this grey world. YOU frightened lizards that duck and stare empty-faced at every obvious conflict thrown at us from anyone higher than us. You SUCK!”
I waited a second for it to sink in, looking around the room and eyeing the door.
“YOU fucking useless inanimate objects,” I finished, throwing my hands up in a wild craze. “React, Goddamnit! Say something away from the fucking coffee machines!”
Nothing. I looked at the fattest one of the bunch and threw my mouse at the fat rolling over his waist but he recoiled like a mole. “Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran into the woods outside the building. The mouse bounced onto the floor.
—
I was furious that night when I went out for a run. Which I do when I can’t handle some of the things I hear. I’d heard of a little political story that was being kept quiet by Murdoch’s empire of media and then some, and I couldn’t find Dylan to get it off my chest. So it festered.
I’d already been losing it on the tube, in my car, even at the pub. Things were getting weird in a way you only expect during election season. The always important but continuous loser of politics, health care, was being ousted from the media waves by a combination of republican affairs scandals, the typical scurry of the appointment of a new Justice to the Supreme Court of Klowns and some inane tripe of fabricated batshit about Obama’s birth certificate that for some reason even Rachel Maddow was talking incessantly about. The intellectual property trial against a mother and student had, individually awarded record companies upwards of half a million dollars for downloading thirty-something songs. This was with a judge and jury. And everytime I re-read the article about Alberto Gonzalez and the continuing decadence of the Justice Department it struck that cord of dissonance that wishes death to those in the establishment as the only solution to getting out of this maddness that’s settling in over us.
In retrospect, I guess I should’ve known that just blowing the largest spores clean off the fungus that is our DOJ wouldn’t have done shit to stop the decay of the thing. But I just couldn’t get over it. The thick mucus of resentment that builds up in my mind when I hear enough bullshit sometimes constricts my breathing, or at least my ability to think straight. When I can’t wrap my mind around the absurdity I see and hear I tend to collapse into myself and that’s when other things, more extroverted in me, come out and the shit hits the fan.
That’s probably not what led to the the aforementioned work-related disaster but it wasn’t helping things either. Running violently into whatever jungles I happen to be inhabiting is just about the only thing I can do in times like that and I think that if it wasn’t for all the whisky, I’d be in amazing shape.
Earlier in the day I’d gotten beligerent, and yes, done horrible things to company property in front of my clients and coworkers. But so what? Let them sit in stale offices drink horse tranquilizers in the middle of the woods and slobbering figureless numbers onto their keyboards if they like, but they know I was right.
Besides, that shit felt good.
—
Later, back in my tiny hotel room I calmed down by closing the curtains, running the shower at full blast as hot as it goes and closing the bathroom door. I stripped naked and lay on the cold tile, feeling the steam of fifty degrees celcius build up in the enclosed space and fall on my face. My iPod sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and wailed a bunch of Muddy Waters and my blood pressure dropped to its normal levels of 140/90.
But that was all work stuff, the very same bullshit I usually avoid mentioning here because, well, shit, you don’t care. What made it relevant enough today was not so much the fact that I’d flipped my Compaq clear across the room and just high enough to miss giving two very tall Germans very clear USB marks across their temples, though I knew at the time that scene would make for some good theatrics. What made it significant was the why of the matter — the raison d’être; I’d finally seen the invisible hand of Adam Smith at work and it was jerking off my corporate employer while the other one slapped around some very good friends of mine.
And we’ll leave it at that. There’s no way to go further into it without getting into some very thick and ugly mud and right now I just can’t find the hours in the day to get into.
Because I’d calmed down from the work thing. I wasn’t belligerent anymore, yelling things at the radio or debating healthcare policy with my TV, though I was getting there. See, politics had come on the iDesk, one of the only good shows put out by CNN, and as if it wasn’t enough that the tentacles of Alberto Gonzalez hadn’t dried up after leaving the DOJ in shame and shambles, the goddamn things were still manipulating, twisting and otherwise creeping things out.
Anyway, the story was that after months of not finding work ahead of the trail of destruction he left behind in his former job, homeschool finally landed at Texas Tech in northern Lubbock.
Yeah, I know. Imagine that — Lubbock, TX. One more for the file of “Duh”, eh?
And I tried to get over the fact that he’s going to be getting a salary of 100K (when regular full-time proffessors with real PhDs and actual experience who teach more than 15 students a semester often get half that). I tried to get over the fact that students formed groups and petitions and even facebook efforts of getting rid of this taint on their education, all of which went ignored (help ‘em out, by the way — how’d you like it if you walked into class and Richard Milhous Nixon was your teacher? Same thing. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114577517744).
I tried to get over the silence of the faculty, and later their own ineffective actions when 45 of them signed petitions that will certainly fall on deaf ears of administrators who “don’t make decisions based on petitions”.
Of course not. Not when it’s not fun for the people who pay you to play nice with them.
I even tried to get over the fact that the school’s Chancellor, Kent Hance — who considers Gonzales a “good friend” — said that he received a “substantial number” of supportive e-mails about the hire, and just nine critical ones, and then added that “he wasn’t dwelling on the negative ones because they didn’t come from loyal university donors.”
I mean, shit. I tried. But the shithead that runs that ill-fated school didn’t even bother trying to mask the ugliness of his cronyism. And it’s fucking with education. That’s where I draw the line.
————————————————————————
There.
But it’s been a bad time for idealism. It’s been a bad time for hope and optimism, at least when it comes to government and life within this system based loosely on something that was once referred to as democracy. You know, back when we didn’t know any better. Or maybe we did. They did, anyway.
So yeah, I tried. But I was already on the verge of completely freaking out, so I did the only thing that has a documented track record of success in these situations — which is not, by the way, throwing laptops. That kind of lunatic behavior is revolutionary radicalism and you should be very aware of your surroundings if you even want to think of trying that on as ‘therapy’. Besides, I’ve only tried it once so I’m not sure of the scientific soundness of the theory.
But I was furious, my reason twisted like theirs and I needed to go for a violent run. It was raining hard too, and the lightning had gone wild, which is perfect.
Yes, I’m aware of the dangers of running in lightning. I went anyway.
Trees flew past my face like spiderwebs and I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. The green faded to black, the explosion of the summer woods veiled by the night. With my hands outstretched I felt like I was floating through the leaves, and who knows where I imagined I was?
The wet rubber of my soles against the smooth pavement squeaked and gripped until it warmed up, until the steps themselves molded with their environment. My feet were marching drums in synch with themselves. I could almost hear the trumpets of war over the heavy shield of the thick trees, over the hills that approached but never arrived until they were right underfoot. A steady rumble in the dark clouds above was in consonance with the heavy drops that already splashed over my cheeks, blurring my vision as I ran. I shook my head and the water drained from my face only to build up again in a few seconds.
But I ran.
My pace quickened, the steps growing louder. The path ahead of me was hard to see in the dark but it seemed to stretch to a point at infinity. It excited the hell out of me and I ran wildly into that green blackness. I thought I was alone but between what I thought were drums in the distance there seemed to be cars. The dim semblance of approaching headlights would appear between the bushes ahead and I turned away, onto another path. I tried to run deeper into the thick dark, avoiding as much knowledge as I could of the world outside myself, outside those woods, that rain.
But the deeper I ran, the more often came the headlights in the distance, the more of them there were; the closer they seemed. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but no thinning of that evil-tempered traffic could I find. They were coming from all sides, at all speeds, violently stripping the forrest of its solitude, of its haven. I stopped running.
I just stood there, and marveled at the traffic I could not escape.
—
I feel you don’t really know a city until you’ve run it in the rain, and this I’ve done in many places. Brooklyn, Geneva, Brasilia, Amsterdam, Oslo, London, Vienna — in the rain, through empty streets, void of the bullshit and other distractions there is more intimacy with a place. In the wet dark of a violent storm, there are thoughts you dare to think that normally would stay shut away in twisted crevaces of the mind, untampered with. You notice things you’d otherwise miss, like the echo under a stone bridge while your trainers seem muffled underfoot. You run into things that would otherwise not be there, like the lit up eyes of stray dogs, giving you looks full of evil and insanity, quite aware.
Fields of fireflys aglow in the downpour, flexing god-knows-which-muscles. It seems a lie.
No, I haven’t hit the rum yet. But maybe I should. Rum’s good.
Speaking of which, I’m glad I enjoyed that last bottle of Jack Daniels, because it’ll be my last. No, no, I haven’t quit drinking or found Jesus or anything crazy like that…it’s just that I recently heard they donated over twenty million dollars to the Bush campaign. Sure, I heard that from an English comedian in New York, and yes, the entire liquor industry probably leans toward “Republican Leanings”. And though the Dems aren’t any better when it comes to being friendly to business before being responsible and accountable to the people, it’s silly to base a political opinion on this little — oh, what the hell, let’s call it a fact — everyone else does it.
But this whole rant has been about cognitive dissonance, hasn’t it? And just to illustrate the point of how well esconsced in the matter we are, I’ll be giving up that particular Tennesee Whiskey. And I’ll be getting my inspirations elsewhere, thanks.
Isn’t that just the bitch about the truth? It comes out in the end, doesn’t it? It may be late, it may be stretched thin and pale from being hidden in deep places inside the human-sized safes in old men’s closets and offices. But it comes out.
And you’d think cognitive dissonance would be unpleasant enough to be a deterrent, or obvious enough to be a detergent, but no. The evolutionary abilities of men with power based in the establishment to rise above that most basic and inconvenient of human traits is quite incredible.
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In New York people bend to the fitful will of public transit. That evening, I knew I was already late when I got to the bus stop but I wasn’t worried; my friends could stand to have another beer while they waited. And besides, they understand that in this city people need to be lenient when it comes to punctuality. Traffic is too thick and public transportation too fickle for anything else.
But even as I tried to board the bus I knew there’d be trouble.
“Do you stop on 110th and 3rd?” The old black man in front of me asked the bus driver. His dark suit and matching hat told of humble begginings and the worn edges of his briefcase exhaled with age. The guy looked like he’d stepped off the stage of The Music Man in 1930 and had been walking ever since. At Houston, just before 1st street, the driver told him that no, he didn’t stop at 110th and 3rd. “But you take 3rd avenue all the way up, right?” The bus driver, with a heavy lower lip and and a tendancy to roll his eyes was showing all signs of being weary of the general public.
“Yeah, and I stop at 108th street and again at 111th street so you can get out at one of those.”
“Well, you can stop at 110th for me when you get there, right?” The driver sulked a bit deeper in his seat and looked at the old man with disbelief.
He shook his head and motioned with his right hand, not taking his eyes off the old man, still incredulous at the request. “Have a seat.” The old man hobbled off and grabbed a seat in the front. I waited patiently for him to move out of my way and that’s when I noticed — to my great surprise and interest — that so did the line of New Yorkers behind me.
Unexpected. I’d always thought these people to be animals, on a clock and unstable, mouths frothing with frustration at the slightest obstacle. Hmm… or maybe that’s just LA.
What is usually a 10 minute ride so easily turns into 25 though, when at every stop it seems the bus has stopped for quadriplegics and septegenarians. At one point we were stopped for a good 10 minutes for the usual herding of the senior citizens, and on top of that the bus driver had to stand to break up a fight I hadn’t seen start at the front of the bus between two meth addicts about to fall over on school kids. That’s bad mojo on your bus and New York bus drivers don’t let that kind of shit fly. But again, I seemed to be the only one visually bothered by the disturbance. Maybe I just haven’t been here long enough.
–
I got off at 35th street and walked into Third and Long, the pub where my friends were waiting. There was already a thick fog in the night and the tip of the Empire State building a few blocks away was completely shrouded in mist and cloud. Peter and Jeff were right at the entrance of the pub, each cradling an almost finished ale.
“I’m excited,” Peter told me after the usual pleasantries, “this seems like such a New Yorky thing to do.”
“Well, that makes for two of us,” I told him, “I’ve never been to an art show either. I have no idea what to expect. But Em told me there’d be free booze and probably food, so…”
“Yeah, so, who’s this Em chick?” Jeff asked. I looked at Peter, figuring maybe he would’ve mentioned it already. But no.
“She was in our highschool class,” I told him. “We weren’t friends or anything but, you know how facebook can be.”
“Ahh,” he said, “one of those.” Jeff finished his beer. I pondered getting one myself, but it didn’t look like this was the place to stay if we wanted another round before hitting up this supposed art show. ”Where is this place we’re supposed to go, anyway?” Jeff asked.
“It’s, uh, what’d I say earlier…529 Third?” I mumbled, pointing up the block. “Yeah, yeah…it should be this block up here. Have you guys checked it out?”
“We walked around the block but didn’t see anything obvious,” Peter said.
“Well, shit,” I said, “then, let’s finish those beers and go find this place, eh? They have free booze over there…”
“And food, I hope,” Jeff said. “They’d better, anyway. All I ate today was a gyro in the morning…”
–
After some ten thin slices of mozzarella, and three or four of the fancy cheeses that came around less often, the four glasses of wine we’d each had started kicking in. I’d wanted to flee as soon as I saw the place. It was a small frame shop where everything had bee pushed to the back to create mingling space in the middle. It was chock full of unattractive people that seemed overdressed in order to impress themselves.
The walls were covered in colorful childish abstractions of birds and feathers by a guy named Britto. It wasn’t bad and I didn’t dislike it, but it wasn’t anything I was really impressed with either. There were also three or four pictures taken in different places around the world — cheap, low-res pictures that didn’t belong on someone’s screensaver, let alone at an art gallery. And then there was one painting by The Subway Artist.
It was his show, mind you.
One.
Painting.
When we’d first arrived Em approached our band of out-of-place misfits and introduced herself to Peter and Jeff. I was surprised she hadn’t remembered either one of them from highschool, but I guess that made the conversation a little fresher to start off with. After plenty of wine and the aforementioned bits of cheese, I think they all started remembering things a bit more clearly, like who’d had which teacher for what subject, who people had dated and other contrived and trivial matters. I started getting bored.
“So after I graduated I thought, ‘why not do something different’, you know? So that’s what I did! I decided to come out here and become, you know, a New Yorker,” she said with all the rotten glee in the world. “And it was hard at first, you know, like meeting people in the city, and learning, like, what to wear and, like, where to go but things are really going well for me now and my group of girlfriends, we totally go out together all the time now and blah blah blah…”
I took a deep breath and exhaled long and loud, and Peter gave me a stern look of disapproval, but Em left to mingle somewhere else, seemingly unaware of my hostility.
“Take it easy, man.” Peter told me once she’d left. “These are people we know, and our circles are small. These things come back to bite you in the ass.” I rolled my eyes. “And I don’t want you fucking writing about this either, you dramatic bastard.” Fine, I lied.
Suddenly, and for no reason I could understand, she returned, half-drunk in an instant, dragging in her arms a thin black man. The Artist, I assumed.
“You guys, this is Enrico — he’s the artist,” she shouted, though the room was not so loud. Her voice was starting to slip from her control and I guessed that she would soon start yelling from all the cheap wine she’d had while mingling with us. I could hardly blame her. “Enrico, these guys went to highschool with me, but it’s not like we were ever friends,” she slurred, and then turned to us, “right?” and we weren’t sure what to say. It was true, and I felt the same way, but who wants to call attention to that ten years later? It was a rattling affair to have to put up with and Enrico’s graveyard breath wasn’t making things any easier. We were glad when he slid off to mingle with some other clique and Em disapeared with him.
“I like his style,” I told Peter. “It’s got a really industrial Van Gogh thing going on and I like that he uses Subway maps for his canvas.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I kinda like it too.” He sipped at his red wine and Jeff offered him a piece of cheese, which he took.
“I think it’d be cool if he did a Warhol thing and actually painted a Subway map ON a Subway map,” I said, thinking out loud.
Peter’s eyes beamed and he finished his wine. “That’s a great idea,” he said, putting his plastic cup down. “You should totally tell him that!” I dismissed him with a spurnful roll of the eyes.
“Right,” I said. “I’m sure artists love having wayward drunks come in from the streets of Murray Hill and tell them how to paint.”
“Well, he looks like he needs some ideas, wouldn’t you say?” Jeff suggested. Which was true. The man did, after all, have only one painting at his own gallery showing.
“Guys, I need to eat something soon,” Jeff continued, starting to slur his words. “I think I’ve had five glasses of wine and I haven’t eaten anything. I might fall over soon.” But Peter wasn’t having it.
“Get yourself together, man. We’ll get out of here soon enough.” Jeff consented silently, looking sullen and worn with heavy eyelids from the red wine. Peter looked at me and lowered his voice a bit. “I’m rethinking this highschool reunion thing,” he said. I knew he’d been excited for a five-year reunion that never happened but he was nervous about the ten-year one coming up. “Even if I’m in the San Francisco in October, I think there’s very little chance of me showing up. Not after what I’ve seen here tonight.”
“You bet,” I said, thinking of how tired I was of having to condense the last ten years of my fast life into thirty seconds of chit-chat every time I met someone from highschool. And then to have to listen to them go on about their uninteresting existences, what jobs they’ve had, why they’re in New York, what their cat’s name is and shit — Jesus. It was all I could do to keep the paintings up on the wall instead of taking them down and slamming them over their boring faces, maybe adding some color to their outlook.
When Em’s short blond friend — Heidi from Iowa, I think — started talking to me about her boyfriend and how she loved having someone she needed in her life, I pulled out the stops. Normally I reserve the harsher, more pointed rhetoric for those friends of mine who have proven — through continued tolerance of my presence — that they can handle it without throwing me into a ditch out of embarassment. But she was asking for it with talk like that in a crowded place, when my head was full of wine and I was bored of the crowd. Her bright blue eyes, young and shallow, had a strange, almost opiate constriction to them, and if she wasn’t so calm and bland I would’ve known instantly that I was dealing with some kind of cocaine or morphine freak.
“Nonsense,” I told her, sometime around my sixth glass of wine. “Necessity is the clearest sign of weakness.” I felt detached from the scene. This was not a person I was speaking to, it was an ideal, one I felt at odds with. I could feel a look callous indifference crawling on my face, and didn’t bother to register her reaction to it.
Then I felt Peter, who’d been standing just behind me, give me a nudge to take it easy again. I nudged him back.
“It’s better to wake up every day and choose to once again have that person in your life than to be resigned to it,” I told her, and sipped my wine. She looked slightly scared, like she’d never considered the prospect before. ”Otherwise it’s all just a cage and you’re just another sap waiting for your time to run out. I think you’ve got a serious problem on your hands, there Iowa,” I told her. “A goddamned ticking bomb.” Her face went blank with disbelief, confusion and the early signs of trauma. She put her empty glass on top of the water cooler by the entrance and muttered something about me not telling her boyfriend that, giving him ideas because she didn’t know what she’d do without him.
“Case in point,” I told her, “But you’ll be fine. I probably wouldn’t have this conversation with him anyway.” She exhaled and her shoulders sank, and then she fled to get more wine. Peter turned to me when she’d left and shot me a glare of what-the-hell-was-THAT.
“What the hell was THAT?” he asked me. “Did you have to shatter that poor girl’s sense of direction?” I caught Heidi looking at our group from the other side of the room where she was talking with Em, who was looking in our direction with nothing but contempt. Who KNOWS what kind of stories that sad girl was telling about us.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “She won’t bother us anymore with idle chatter. Besides, she’ll wake up tomorrow and forget all about it. She won’t change.”
As the evening wore on and more bland types filled the room we started feeling uneasy and out of place. Most of them seemed to be Em’s friends but I didn’t know Em all that well, nor did I know what kinds of friends she had. Jeff was becoming harder to hold up vertically and he was very hungry. Ers had finally arrived and we were in the mood to get out of there.
“You guys, I know a good bar around here where we can really chill for a while,” Ers announced.
“Please tell me they have food,” Jeff whined.
“They’ll have food,” Ers assured him. “Chips, and meat and stuff. Is that alright?”
“ohmygodthanksiloveyouers,” Jeff mumbled.
We walked down third avenue and got Jeff some pizza, to make sure he didn’t keel over before the next round. Murray Hill is too full of young girls fresh out of college and still on daddy’s credit cards for us to comfortably drag a drunk body through that place. These people have limits and you have to take it easy with that kind of ugliness when the streets are crawling with primped twenty-two-year-old children who are there to ‘experience New York’.
We kept walking and the air got colder. After six or seven blocks we ended up at Rodeo Bar, a place I’d heard Ers talk about before, and stepped in just as it started to rain outside. No one had cash so I bought Ers and Peter a good Irish beer, and asked the Texan waitress to get Jeff some water. I couldn’t hear anything through the blare they were playing before the band started but I saw her scoff. The boys all headed upstairs to get us a couch but I saw the band setting up and told them I’d catch up to them.
The country band started playing their jumpy tunes. It would’ve kept my interest if they’d been a little more genuine, but their lead singer was too big of a douchbag to ignore. Their guitarist and bassist were jamming in the back by the drums, and they were tight. The pretty belle flirting with the violin was hot, standing on stage with a wide stance and short skirt, running the bow softly across the twangy strings. But it would’ve been better if she’d actually played the thing instead of just providing backup vocals.
Oh well. When I got upstairs the three gents were having a sinister-sounding chat that involved bets, dares and potential pay-offs. Jeff looked like he was passed out on the couch but was clearly a very vocal part of the conversation.
“I’m just saying, Ers, I’m offering you $10 to ask her,” Peter said, putting his beer down on the table in front of us.
“Ask her what?” I asked them.
“I’ll give you $20, Peter, if you feel her up and let me know,” said Jeff’s body on the couch. I looked over at the group next to us. One of the girls was dressed in a tight red tank top, leather pants and black boots. Strange, since all of her friends were in jeans and sweatshirts with names like Vanderbuilt and Purdue. But the attention grabber was her chest — tits so terrifyingly perfect they could only exist in Victoria’s Secret catalogues or on the streets of LA.
“Those?” I asked them, and they all nodded proudly, unsure of what they had to be proud of, but proud nonetheless. “Listen. There is no way in this crippled, half-mad world that those things are real. Nature doesn’t work like that. You’d have to breed Gisele Bündchen with Rebecca Romijn for a thousand generations and you still wouldn’t get that kind of perfection. No way.”
“Yes!” Ers shouted, and slapped me a high-five. “Thank you! That’s what I’m saying. There’s no way.”
We all considered it for a minute.
“I think they could be real,” Jeff’s corpse said, still unmoved on the couch.
And then we took him outside and put him on a train that we hoped would get him home.
–
Drunk and exhausted, I rode my own train home later that night with Ers.
“You know, Ers, some of us are teachers, doctors, musicians and what not, and we roll along fulfulling these noble pursuits. But it’s weird — drunk as we all are now, next week Peter’s going to be teaching Algebra and Calculus to a minion of children, idiots and some eager young minds. You know what I’m saying?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” he said. “I could use another pizza though, or more peanuts or something.”
“That’s what I’m saying. You’re a drunken mess right now, and so am I. But tomorrow you’ll be analyzing the stock value large multi-nationals and I’ll be saving my clients millions of dollars through a well-practiced speech that I may as well not even understand. We do these things despite the fact, or alongside the fact that tonight we were in some bar in midtown getting sloshed and guessing whether this poor girl has real breasts. We travel and do weird things on the weekends, despite are outlandish professions. But all those people at the gallery tonight, and probably most people we’ve known since highschool, those bland and uninteresting hacks…what are they doing? What’s their point?”
“You’re talking too seriously, man. Have you been watching Frontline again?”
“…yeah. So?” He ran his fingers through his crumpled hair smiling and leaned over on his knees, looking at me sitting across the car from him.
“We move through the world day by day, and change things around us slowly. Including ourselves. But so does every one else, man. Some people change more than others and some people are luckier than others, but every one changes over time. You’ve gotta give ‘em more of a chance.”
I thought about it for a sec. “Wow, Ers. That’s pretty deep, calm…mature, even. Does that mean you give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt?”
“I think most people deserve at least that much, yeah.” I smiled at him.
“What about that guy that was such a tool in high school that you agreed to be friends with on facebook just so you could be the first to know when his life tanks? What was his name? Anthony…something?”
“Roberts?”
“That’s the chap.” He didn’t even think about it.
“No. He’s just a douchbag.”
Posted in Anecdotes, Rants | 5 Comments…
“That’s a great book,” said the dark haired stranger sitting across the hall. Dylan looked up from his copy of I, Claudius, literally holding together its three distinct parts by the binding that had all but fallen apart. Robert Graves would have shrieked in panic to see his masterpiece as loosely bound as if it had spent a New York winter on the windowsill over a radiator.
“Yeah,” Dylan said, not wanting to stir too much conversation, and tried to go back to his reading of the Roman imbecile.
“Robert Graves is a bit effusive with his plot, though,” continued the stranger. “I trust historical fiction much more to the capable hands of Gore Vidal than the verbose rantings of an English poet, know what I mean?”
Dylan heard banter but he didn’t look up. “He’s a doozy, alright,” he said, with a hushed exhale that reeked of gin to the old lady sitting on his left of the waiting room bench. He tasted it in his own breath, even at eleven in the morning.
Who cares? he thought. I’m a freelance political columnist and I’ve been up writing about horrible things since 2 in the afternoon yesterday. Of course I reek of gin.
“You here to see Mr. Rabban?” The black-haired man asked, interrupting him a third time. Dylan looked up this time and brought his book to his lap. The vinyl chairs made a lot of noise when he moved so he wasn’t in the mood for any unnecessary shifting in the cramped heat of that dingy basement in the Lower East Side. He answered softly, hoping it wouldn’t go beyond meaningless chit chat.
“Aren’t we all?”
“I guess,” the stranger replied, thrusting his chin down and his shoulders up like Dylan had asked him the most bizarre question. “Short stories?” the guy added.
“Freelance political commentator,” Dylan fired back, still holding his book open. It seemed they were both there to see the same person, but for different reasons.
“Nice,” said the stranger, “no competition, then.” Dylan nodded.
“Are you from around here?” the stranger asked, sitting back in his vinyl bench now, making all kinds of ugly squawking noises. Dylan cringed a bit.
“I’m from a lot of places,” Dylan responded, seeing that this was going to go on until they called out his name to see Mr. Rabban, the editor of the small magazine based out of a basement office in the East Village that he was there to showcase his articles, hoping for a staff position.
“Anywhere in particular?” The guy asked.
“I don’t really like to talk about it,” Dylan said. “I’m a man without a country.” The guy across the way smiled a coy smile.
“That must serve you well as a political commentator,” he said.
“Of course” Dylan said.
“Never seeming biased - it must be a good thing for unbiased commentary.” the stranger said.
“Yeah,” Dylan thought for a moment, “I guess it is. I don’t know. I’ve never given it much thought why I don’t like to talk about it but that must be close to it, I guess.”
He thought some more.
“I’m always moving around so much. I think I just never had a chance to call anywhere home, and I’m not sure I have much of a yearning for it. Quite the opposite, actually,” he finished.
“I know just what you mean,” the stranger said. They looked at each other for a moment, Dylan checking out the stranger’s handbag at his feet and the stranger looking down at Dylan’s, both wondering what this other guy had to say for real…
“Dylan Cormack,” the secretary’s voice could be heard resonating through the hallway. Dylan arranged his things and got to his feet, the stretching vinyl making ugly sounds.
“Good luck, mate,” the stranger said from his seat.
“Cheers,” Dylan replied.
–
The door opened in Tor Rabban’s office, the weather stripping on the bottom of the door rubbing against the short carpet the whole way. Dylan Cormack walked in and stood motionless for a moment, taking in the editor’s decor.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Rabban said, motioning to the only other chair in the cramped room. The desk was an old one, made of sheet metal and reminiscent of the computer labs at Dylan’s old university. Something definitely out of NASA from the 70’s, when pencil sharpeners were still bolted to office walls. There was no decoration on the bare white walls save for the gold-plated plaque with Arabic inscribing, which Dylan had never learned to read. The off-green desk offered most of the color in the windowless room aside from the calendar of cats sitting by the door and still turned to February of ‘92.
“Thanks,” Dylan said, sitting slowly, wanting to make his presence in the room very much felt.
“Sorry about the wait,” Mr. Rabban said. Dylan noticed his darker skin and large nose, the protruding bridge screaming of Syria or Lebanon. The truth, though, is that he could’ve been from anywhere between Istanbul and Baghdad. “We’ve had so many people show up today with articles on the Middle East that I feel like exhuming Yasser Arafat’s rotting corpse and giving him this job.”
“I hope you’ve sent them all packing,” Dylan said, smiling but with all of his confidence. He still sounded condescending and he knew it. Oh, well, he thought. Keep up the appearances.
“Yes, well,” Mr. Rabban said. “We’ll go through the motions, yes?” Dylan didn’t like how that sounded. It was commanding but it still had a hint of patronizingly methodical bureaucracy that made him uncomfortable, as if the room had just become smaller and the fluorescent lights had been dimmed. Also, he sounded unerringly foreign, which made Dylan very self-conscious in a local magazine office in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“Are you from around here?” Tor Rabban asked Dylan.
“Well, sir, I’m really from a lot of different places…”
“Doh, I’ve heard that before,” Tor Rabban cut him off. “Journalists are just like consultants,” he said. “You never want to commit to either a fixed location or a specific point of view.”
Dylan looked at Mr. Rabban straight in the eye now, as he’d read so much about doing from his interview books.
“Which is exactly what people hate about reading the papers,” Mr. Rabban continued, “they want to see and understand what the reporter who was there was thinking at the time. Facts aren’t enough - they can get facts from CNN. We offer them something more.”
At this Dylan pounced without thinking, heading for the strategic angle he’d planned on from the beginning, “But that’s biased and unprofessional,” he said, sounding much like his professors. “It’s like…” He paused, wanting to be steady on the topic, “…it’s like Gonzo journalism,” he said. “Trashy narratives that veer from the topic at the writer’s pleasure.”
“True, true,” Tor Rabban said, nodding gravely. “But people eat it up. And besides, there’s a lot of gonzo out there. Shitty, yes, but that increases the volume of good stuff that comes in every now and again. Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because the good doctor is dead that it doesn’t mean that the style doesn’t deserve credit in other worthy hands.”
Dylan didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected the editor of a non-political magazine to like Hunter S. Thompson’s work, let alone advocate for it in his publication. He’d spent his entire journalistic education learning that Gonzo, though fun for the writer and entertaining for the reader hadn’t been an acceptable form of journalism since Hunter Thompson tasted the steel and gun powder of the bullet he put through his head. He’d learned that the only people who even tried to emulate the style had been eccentric bloggers and unemployable correspondents, to say nothing of doing well.
“I’ve seen people come and go in this business,” Tor Rabban continued, “but the most consistent piece of knowledge that I’ve learned from this line of work is that the general public is at the reading level of the New York Post - a vocabulary of 6th graders.”
“Yeah,” Dylan agreed, smiling genuinely for the first time, “that sounds about right.”
“Look, remember that bit about the Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad?”
Dylan nodded, “Why not? Danish flags burning in Damascus? It was a fiasco. Everybody remembers it.”
“Right,” said, Tor Rabban. “I remember it well. I was part of that Danish paper and…”
“Really?” Dylan asked suddenly. “What were you doing at a Danish newspaper, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m half Danish,” he said, “and for all the ridiculous arguments that were made at the time, including my own in the defense of my paper, it occurred to me later that the whole thing was unavoidable.”
“Why?” Dylan asked, despite himself. Mr. Rabban leaned back in his chair, putting his fingers together in meaningful thought as he spoke.
“Because the people who want the drama are the ones that are buying the newspapers. We can never get around that.”
Dylan sat motionless again for about ten seconds, digesting what Mr. Rabban had just said. But Tor Rabban didn’t give him too much time to ponder.
“So,” he said, shall we get to it?” he asked, rhetorically.
“Yes, let’s,” Dylan responded with confidence, snapping out of his reverie.
“I’ve looked at your piece on the Middle East,” he said, looking down at the clippings in front of him on his desk. “It has a lot of balls, I must say, and I admire that. Have you been to Iraq?” he asked Dylan, point blank.
Dylan raised his shoulders and filled his chest. “Yeah,” he said, “I have. A friend of mine, an Army Captain in the Rangers…” Dylan recalled the face of the Captain, the tall, broad shouldered human torpedo that stormed into many a firestorm with pure courage and no brains at all. “I spent a month with his battalion stationed just outside of Fallujah and later in Rutbah, near the Jordan Junction.” Tor Rabban nodded but didn’t show any signs of being impressed. Dylan continued.
“I did most of my data gathering under the guise of a CNN reporter who’d been shot in the neck while standing next to a humvee. He unknowingly left me his credentials. I spent a lot of time under fire and I have a renewed sense of faith in our troops after it all but…” Dylan took a deep breath.
“But what?” Asked Mr. Rabban, still leaning back on his chair.
“But I still have a lot to say about this war,” Dylan said while exhaling.
“I see,” Mr. Rabban said, and Dylan saw his lips purse a bit. A moment passed while Mr. Rabban considered his next move. Then his face straightened out into a serious tone. “To be honest with you, it needs a lot of work.”
Dylan had seen this coming. This was, after all, a local magazine that featured one or two political commentaries as a way to diversify the reader’s knowledge a bit and he would not be a focus of the publication. But his in, he thought, was going to be to offer Tor Rabban political articles that he would normally have to pay syndicate fees to get from the likes of the Washington Post or the Boston Globe, and instead, he’d have an exclusive on these major stories. Dylan, in turn, would get his own political column in a magazine he believed would soon have a complete New York audience. He did his best to remove all signs of expression from his face. Tor Rabban continued.
“Your experience is interesting, and your facts are impeccable as they are thorough. But you don’t take the reader anywhere. Your articles don’t make me want to know how the story ends.”
Dylan sprung into his rhetoric. “Mr. Rabban, if what you want is a story that leads the reader to a predefined position, then there are a couple of old ladies outside your office who’ve been talking local politics incessantly in the hallway. Across from them is a short story writer who looks like he’s been out of work for long enough to have read all of Joseph Heller’s books, including the ones he didn’t steal.” Tor Rabban’s left cheek showed the faintest sign of a smile, but Dylan didn’t catch it and went on.
“What I’m offering you is exclusive access to Boston Globe and Washington Post quality, unbiased political columns for your magazine.” Dylan leaned forward in his chair, looking for a response, and Tor Rabban’s smile grew all over his face.
“What makes you think I like the Washington Post?” He teased Dylan, whose shoulders sank a bit. “Look, kid, like I said, it’s got balls, and your experience is interesting. I admire your stamina for coming in here like this today, with no credentials and a hell of a fish-story about Fallujah and some town I’ve never heard of. I’m just telling you I can’t publish any of this kind of thing you’ve given me. It needs a lot of work.”
Dylan’s deep breath left him slowly as his hands fell to his lap and his swollen chest deflated. But he had a plan B.
“Look, Mr. Rabban, with all due respect, I’ve heard these words of rejection before - develop it further; try us again some time; it needs more content and all that - but that’s not why I came here today. I’ve been writing about politics for a some time now, enraged, furious and still managing not to froth on the page and turn out decent, unbiased and logical journalism that can be digested and discussed. But nobody seems to want that anymore. Editors tell me left and right that their readers don’t have the attention span for what I’m writing, that people want to read things they already agree with, that they’re not interested in being presented both sides of the issue and that that’s why we have FOX news and MSNBC.
“And there have been the occasional few outlets that still publish news in a raw enough format that an intelligent person can imbibe it without throwing up all over the page. But I’m not experienced enough for them. I need to start out small, they say. So here I am. And you need someone good. I think I’m your guy. You want me to rewrite it? Fine. You want me to put more juice in the words, moisten them up a bit? Sure.
“But I need to know that some part of this is worth it. I need to know that you’re the slightest bit interested in any of these words. I’ll develop it, I’ll toss them around, I’ll starve over the words, rolling them about in my head if you want me to. But I need to know that there’s some valid reason I’m even trying. I need to know that someone in the industry thinks that I can hack this. That I shouldn’t give this up.”
Dylan lied. This was only the second magazine he’d gone to with his articles, but he’d heard the stories from other writer friends and he reasoned that his imagination could go farther than most, and he tried to imagine what a veteran out of work journalist would be saying, hoping to snag Tor Rabban’s attention with another angle.
“Is it interesting to you?” He asked Mr. Rabban one more time.
Tor Rabban thought silently. Who am I, he thought, to tell this kid what to do with his life? If he said no, the kid might quit, and fewer writers is never good for business. No, the more shit is out there, the more it becomes a buyer’s market, and that meant easier dollars. Fewer agents. God, I hate those lawyers, Tor Rabban thought. Besides, the kid wasn’t hopeless. He just couldn’t tell a story.
“Yes,” he lied, reasoning that more effort on the kid’s part would cost him nothing. “Yes, it’s interesting to me. Send me someplace with this story of yours. Come back next week with more - ahh, juice, as you say.”
“Fine.” Dylan said. “See you next week, then.” He stood up and leaned over the desk to grab his clippings, figuring the editor would offer to shake his hand when he did so. But instead of reaching for his hand, Mr. Rabban put his open palm face down on the papers on his desk.
“Leave these here,” he said calmly, and then added, “if you don’t mind.”
Dylan looked down at the Mediterranean-looking man square in the eyes. “First we try, then we trust,” he said with a coy smile. “You don’t think you’re the only editor I’m querying about these articles, do you?
Tor Rabban lifted his hands slowly and Dylan took his clippings and started to turn for the door. “Do come back next week,” he said, and as Dylan’s hand touched the doorknob he added, “and Dylan…” Dylan stopped. “The biggest mistake people make when discussing the Middle East is trying to stay on the fence. Take me to one side, or take me to both. but don’t try to stay in the middle. There is no middle.”
Dylan nodded, and opened the door.
–
Dylan walked out into the white hallway, his steps muffled on the blue carpet. He pulled the door shut, almost closed, stopping it just before it clicked.
“See you around?” came a voice from near the doorway. It was the guy from before. Dylan turned around and looked at him, really looked at him for the first time. Newly enthused by the recent good news that his stories had interested someone he let his excitement get the best of him and he smiled at the stranger.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, standing at the doorway still. “Say, what kind of stories do you write anyway?”
“Travel pieces, mostly. But not travel writing. That’s the lowest form of literature, man.”
“Yeah?” Dylan asked, not remembering the last time he even bothered reading a travel article.
“Yeah. I like to write about the stories as I travel, guide the reader a bit into my own adventures, you know? Especially when they’re not entirely factual. I guess it’s kind of like Gonzo writing, in a way,” the stranger said. “Have you read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72? That fucker will knock you on your ass. Twisted piece of work man, and heavy.”
“No, I like to stick with facts. No raving for me - it clogs the arteries. There’s enough weirdness out there in politics to nearly drown a man. I don’t need the drug-induced distortions of some out-of-control journalist who just couldn’t get a grip, know what I mean?”
“I guess so. But you’ll have to delve into it sooner or later in your line of work, man.”
Dylan thought about it. “Why not? The pigs will stuff me with bullshit one way or another, right?”
“Right. You might as well have a handle on it.” Dylan chuckled and the stranger put out his hand. “I’m Oscar, by the way” he said. “Oscar Bjørne.”
“Dylan Cormack,” he said, shaking it, then turning towards the exit. “Good luck with your stories, Oscar.”
“See you in another life, brother,” Dylan heard his voice echoing down the empty stretch of fluorescent lighting and drywall. Sure, he figured. Why not?
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The trees lining the icy pavement on the avenue two floors below are frozen limbs in the dead of night. A stray pair of feet here and there walk the new streets and do little else but cast shadows over the cold. A new window looms before me; a new unknown. Unfamiliar street names and a horizon that I’ve only recently met as the sun went down on another chapter of my life.
I’ve been away a long time, haven’t I?
So it seems, to me anyway. But this is the new scene, the new vantage for my viewing, the new base for my wanderings. There are no horse hooves clipping and clopping on the cobblestones; there are no cobblestones at all, actually. Just headlights and tires rolling over the thick ice that covers everything. Yes. There is asphalt and there is ice, and over these two layers a fool tries to make his way; tries to find his footing.
–
Jesus. Over the past two years I’ve been everywhere, man. From Tangier to Prague and from Oslo to Riyadh, I’ve covered Europe and the Middle East. Covered it. Hit the sweet spots, find the juice, move along. That’s been the motto, the driving force. And what a rush. What a mad, fulfilling, fast rush. Like crack but with more airline miles and hotel points.
So I was a bit surprised when I found myself overwhelmed by the buroughs of New York. The whole move started to hit me - the fact that it was happening, that is - much like it hit me when I’d moved to Amsterdam: later than it should have. In Amsterdam it wasn’t until the plane hit the ground that I realized I had no idea what was going to happen next when I got out of my seat and headed out the jet way. For New York at least, it was sometime halfway into the flight from Germany though it only occurred to me because of a situation on board.
Careening over the north Atlantic at 35,000 ft is no place to have a maniac on your hands. The third time she yelled “DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T TOUCH ME!!” to the flight attendant, I checked the flight monitor and sure enough, flight 4677 out of Frankfurt was somewhere between Ireland and Iceland.
That is a bad place for violence.
I leaned my head back on my seat and turned so my cranium rolled up and out on the headrest to more discreetly look at the large woman in the rear corner of the 777 who was sitting a few rows behind me. She was clearly having a fit of some kind but it seemed there was nothing that could be done but clear the area and give her room to flail around and yell at people. The flight attendants seemed to know enough to form a perimeter around the woman and just hang back until the episode passed and then give her peanuts or something.
“Wow,” I said to the empty seat next to me, “it’s a good thing the professionals know what they’re doing.”
And just as suddenly, I caught myself, realizing how ridiculous that sounded coming from a guy who knows that the only thing that makes an expert is that he know more than the person next to him.
What the hell am I doing?, I thought. I haven’t the foggiest reference for how to make this work.
I thought about this for a while. I might have dozed off for a bit, or maybe just had too much scotch, but the next thing I knew I saw the city come into view from behind the wing.
“Ok, New York,” I said, “here I come…”
A small child walking up the aisle with daddy in tow stopped at my seat and gave me a serene look. I had a moment of thinking that the innocence of that child, that smooth face and soft hair would be symbolic of the city showing me that no matter what tribulations I might pass, what doubts I might have, there was a side of the city that had good intentions, that would put a smile on my face, even if eventually.
Then the kid threw up on the seat next to me.
“Too soon?” I asked the kid.
“Dah!” it said, though I think it meant ‘duh’.
Thanks, New York. I’m coming anyway.
–
Even having studied satellite images of New York on Google Maps, I was surprised at the spread of the thing. Another scar on the surface, I had to keep reminding myself that I’d seen bigger, lived through tougher. New York has nothing on São Paulo and Bangkok, even if only for the sheer savageness of those places. But New York has a way of making you forget all that and focus on that Apple. Maybe it’s something in that awesome tap water they have.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I think this is what happens to people who move to New York for the ‘New York experience’. If you’re from a small town or haven’t traveled much, you’re doomed to be eaten alive by the city. Everyone knows that. But even for those who’ve been around, whom come from large cosmopolitan places, who’ve seen the dark corners of the asphalted world, even for them New York offers a unique challenge.
It’s a problem of expectations. People are told that the city will toss them around if they’re not careful. But what’s missing from that is that it’s not a question of being careful. The city will toss you around no matter what. You’ve just got to stay afloat, hang on, get up again.
That’s one of the things about New York. When you live in New York, you’re not in control. The city is in control. Its traffic and its subways are in control. Its crazies and its people are in control. Its size and its attitudes are in control and you are along for the ride. Like the rivers that split it, New York has a current, and if you’re going to use the river to get somewhere, you can’t fight that current. You have to go with it, be prepared to take it and stand up again.
If you haven’t caught on yet, I’d missed a crucial step in preparing for the situation of finding a flat in New York.
Sure, I’m familiar with the housing markets of San Francisco and Amsterdam and have done well in finding housing and good flatmates in both places, but those are villages compared to New York City. Those are straw and mud communes next to the steel and concrete that litters the grid of Manhattan, the industrial complexes of Brooklyn, the immigrant populations of Queens, the ghetto of the Bronx and the trashiness of Staten Island. To say nothing of the other areas around the city.
And if you thought that working in Paris, Istanbul, Oslo, Riyadh, Madrid, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Budapest all in a matter of a month was a trying thing on the body, you should try to find a flat in New York in 5 days.
Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.
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The following is an internal communication leaked moments ago that I thought was worthy of sharing. Our writing traveler and international man of mystery, Oscar Bjorne has been sharing his thoughts on New York with Dylan Cormack, our own political correspondent around the globe. Dylan’s current place of residence is a secret he shares with few but from this document it stands to reason that he has his eye on Manhattan. We’ll update you as more details become known.
–
Dylan,
More trouble brews on the horizon, comrade. Things stir and I follow. You know how it is.
2008 is already proving to be what I expected it would be: a setup. This year will either give me much insight into what’s to come, or else it will be the step into whatever direction my life goes from here… what it will NOT be is indecisive.
In response to some plans of yours that I remember discussing a few weeks ago, I want to make sure you know what you’re getting into if you’re serious about this madness of moving to New York City.
The city, as you know, is dark and full of thieves and scum. You thought, my man, that SF was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The vagrants in SF are junkies, filthy and unbathed hippies in a coffee-soaked town that left them behind in the housing market of the late seventies. Degenerates of New York are another breed - they are the vermin of shadows; they are doctorate students addicted to vodka and spritzers. Many are aspiring musicians and bartenders that dress in designer shirts by night and American Eagle by day. The dangers are many and the problems extend from battery park until the very tips of Harlem, and right through such things as the natural history museum in the middle latitudes of central park. Nothing is what it seems here, and you should keep your hands in your pockets at all times, fists curled in a death grip that could choke a camel. Do not be fooled by what the people will refer to as “the energy.” I don’t suspect you would, but it can’t hurt to warn you just the same.
Under no circumstances should you (of all people) look down the street in search of a horizon. The infinity point where the two parallel lines of buildings and skyscrapers intersect is unblocked: there are literally buildings stretching to the end. Beyond that, who knows? Perhaps they continue. But what is certain is that no matter what direction you turn to there are more people; there are more buildings, more concrete, more villainy and more confusion. Who needs it?
If you followed through with the plan we discussed you would quickly join the ranks of the productive folk of the city; this is true. Never forget, though, that in doing so you will be inextricably surrounded by freaks, pill-hungry stockbrokers and out-of-work journalists. You will not find a decent cup of coffee anywhere; I suspect because it all comes from the same machine. What you will find a lot of is curry. I hope you like curry.
Laughter will be evasive and curt. You will likely not find it at all, so don’t bother. Be content if you’re able to curtail the cursing to a minimum of 2 hours a day and if you have a moment or two of silence and solitude to write at any time. Avoid any place that has more than 5 people within a radius of 20 feet and for the love of god, stay away from the public libraries. If you see crazy-looking people (or anyone, for that matter) putting pigeons inside their socks or other articles of clothing, do not show alarm; simply turn around and walk the other way with a quick stride. Remember the fist thing I told you about in this letter.
Objectively, I’m writing you this letter because my thoughts need coherency and this helps. Also, there is a large project that needs doing and what better way to not do it than to do something else, right?
Right. And you know of these projects, or at least one about one of them, the many things we have brewing with our mutual good company from New Year’s in Portland, but looming in the file just next to this one is a story that needs my attention; naturally, I’m ignoring it completely. I seem to do that whenever something or someone worth my thoughts is at hand, and maybe that’s why I am where I am today. Step up to the corner and look down, seeing the cars below. I am not just drunk, I’m mostly tired. But I am not impaired; I am lucid. I convince myself to stay grounded only enough to put pencil to paper and give this round another whirl. Without this option it occurs to me that raising sheep in New Zealand is not so bleak an outcome, even if it is not likely a fate for this life. Perhaps we’ll come to that yet.
And so much for that, at least for now. I think you know what I’m saying, so I’ll leave you with that one. I’m too tire to stay awake, too angry to go to sleep, and to indifferent to care, at this point. Let’s let gravity decide for now. While it does, I have stories to write.
Surreptitiously,
-Osc.r
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