That's the last time I let you stab me Pagoda...

End of Summer...

2006-08-31T18:30:25Z

Stuff I've Been Reading

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes

How The Left Lost Teen Spirit by Danny Goldberg

Three Years from Thirty by Mike O'Malley

Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and other stories by Anna Deveare Smith

On The Road Again...

2006-08-15T16:09:11Z

This summer I have spent over 73 hours driving all about the middle-west (and parts of the south), racking up 4,429 miles in the process. Here's an image to better illustrate where I traversed in my sturdy little volvo:

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=50023887&imageID=1050610153&MyToken=50b98b34-5fb0-4bcb-a8ae-48ada20a8a67

And now, about 10 days of relaxation before school begins anew.

Fin...

2006-08-13T22:53:55Z

Here is the revised draft of my latest story

1

I’m currently downing my 19th bowl of Raisin Bran in the past six days. That’s Raisin Bran 3 meals a day for what threatens to be a week solid. My roommate spent all of our food money at Costco on a 121-pack of Post Raisin Bran, which lies split open on the floor of our living room. I cursed him endlessly for his purchase of Post Raisin Bran and not Kellogg, which is obviously the superior bran. His argument that Post contained Sun-Maid Raisins pales in comparison to the inescapable truth that Kellogg’s has the “Two Scoops” sun mascot, which is far more aesthetically pleasing. The 11 x 11 set of boxes has been reduced by about a third since the initial purchase, and, seeing as my next payday isn’t for another week, we must continue eating this swill without the aid of milk. You either eat it dry or douse it in tap water, which aids only in digestibility and not in flavor. On the plus side, the high quantity of fiber in the bran has made my bowel movements extraordinarily smooth and precise; you could set a railway time table to the consistency of my restroom visits. However, I fear that this bran-based diet is simply flowing through my body, denying it of precious proteins and vitamins. If I contract scurvy at any time during the next 30 days I’ll sue the Costco Corporation for a bloody mint. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’re hoping to become violently ill and Vitamin C deficient.

The house we rented for the summer would be quite choice if it had a hot water heater or an air conditioner. As it is we take freezing cold showers and sit on the couch watching the droplets of water sizzle on our bodies and evaporate in the cruel July heat. When agreeing to come to Iowa for the summer, I was under the impression that Midwestern summers were at least tolerable. Back then my mental rolodex wasn’t privy to the concept of humidity and the difference between the “temperature” and “what it feels like.” The hottest it’s gotten this summer is 95 degrees, but on that day it “felt” like it was 110. The humidity is so thick in this God-forsaken plain state that you have to wade around while you walk, pushing aside clumps of air as you meander down the sidewalk. It’s a rare occasion when you can stand outside for over 10 minutes without collapsing from heat exhaustion. At least it’s rare for me, but the bran-diet might have something to do with that too.

The most clothing I ever wear here is a pair of Bermuda shorts and a wife-beater. Normally I just lie around in my boxers covered in sweat, but jaunts into the outside world require a bit more coverage. I’m philosophically opposed to the wife-beater on the basis of its misogynistic overtones and white-trash associations, but damn if they don’t cool you off better than any piece of clothing I can find. Since I don’t have to go into town for at least another three hours to begin my night shift at Beaners, one of the few Midwestern coffee chains not to be royally bitch-slapped by our imperialist coffee-mongers in the great Northwest, I’m still clad only in a pair of plaid boxers. Every day I wake up expecting to get a call from my manager telling me that either a) I’ve been fired, b) The Grinnell, Iowa location of Beaners is being turned into a Wal-Mart, or c) Beaners has been bought out by Starbucks and all employees must now memorize a 175-page drink-list & etiquette manual, except for Arlo, who has been deemed unworthy of the title of “Barista” by Starbucks management. How Beaners has stayed open with a name like Beaners is beyond me. I know it’s referring to coffee beans, but it could just as easily refer to the janitorial staff. What, you think there aren’t any Mexicans in rural Iowa? Well, Grinnell has exactly one illegal Mexican immigrant, Raul, and he has chosen Beaners as his place of employment. I can’t tell whether this is genuine irony or the Alanis Morisette version, but either way it’s funny as hell. That’d be like the only Italian guy in a community busing tables at a Star Wars-themed, Olive Garden knockoff restaurant called “Dagobah”. On a more serious note, I’ve always been concerned with racism in popular feature films, and have many times wondered whether the planet of Dagobah in the Star Wars films was an underhanded shot at the Italian-American community. However, after much discussion I’ve decided to let George Lucas off the hook. The man wears far too much flannel to be any sort of white supremacist or fascist. If you look at militaristic, oppressive groups of society from the past 100 or so years you will see a direct correlation between fashion and action. The Nazi S.S., Mussolini’s minions, Communist Russia post-Lenin, the Ku Klux Klan: all of these organizations use heavily starched uniforms that are unpleasant for the wearer. It’s my own stipulation that part of the rage fomented by these groups was a direct result of the stiffness of their clothing. Any man who wears a versatile and loose-fitting material like flannel couldn’t possibly be a fascist.

The front door swung open and my roommate dragged himself into the kitchen. From my supine position on the floor of the living room I could see Lucas fishing through our barren refrigerator, an act that reminded me of his earlier frugal incompetence. Without getting up I shouted at him, “Lucas, will you shag ass in here before I have a complete breakdown. Any more of this fucking bran and I’ll cut out my tongue.” Lucas did indeed shag ass and was soon standing over me holding a brown paper bag, which he dropped at my side. “Here you are my good sire,” Lucas exclaimed in an understated, but nevertheless atrocious, upper-class British accent, “Just what the doctor would never have ordered, unless the doctor worked in Beverly Hills and went through rehab like it was a Wendy’s.” I barely acknowledged Lucas’s attempt at humor in my frenzied desire to rip open the bag and admire its contents. I mumbled for a couple seconds, asking myself how the hell a crumpled brown-paper bag could look so bloody luminous. While I was tearing open the paper I tried to make a little small talk: “Where did you get this stuff anyway? I though the town was dry.”
“The town was dry you fuck-nut, I had to drive to Chicago to get it. That’s why I haven’t been home since Thursday, or did you not notice?”
“I noticed well enough, but I thought you were just out turning your dick black with that diseased harlot of yours, Lucille, or something or other…” Lucas was a bit put off by my insinuation that his girlfriend was a VD merchant and his face took on the color of an not-yet-ripe plum.
“Her name’s Deirdre and she’s not a fucking harlot,” Lucas boomed.
“But she is diseased.” After this comment of mine Lucas’ temperament, which before was riding a white-cap sized wave of rage, calmed considerable when confronted with an inescapable, argument-ending truth.
“Ok, Deirdre has a cold sore, but that doesn’t mean she’s diseased. Hell, my mother got cold sores from time to time.” One should never mention their mother during a debate centered around Herpes. It’s a commandment-breaker (I think) and if you are in the company of the morally stunted and immature it could get ugly.
“Well, then your mother’s a tramp too,” I said quite matter-of-factly. “And what the hell kind of a name for a hooker is Deirdre anyway? Sounds like the name of some damned Ingrid Bergman character.”
“She’s not a hooker Godammit! And Deirdre was her dead grandmother’s name so just shut the hell up and thank Deirdre for the goods.”
“Wait a minute, your little guttersnipe drove you to Chicago for this?”
“You better fucking believe it.” As I twirled the two little silver vials between my fingers, I decided it was high time to let sleeping dogs lie and to change my opinion of Lucas’ fuckbuddy.
“Well, then. I believe a toast to young Deirdre is in order. Hell, I can’t say Deirdre with a straight face, I feel like I’m in a bad Tennessee Williams play. Umm, I’ll call her Dee-Dee. That’ll do nicely; a toast to Dee-Dee and her gas money.” I raised up the 2001 Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens commemorative glass that I got with my subscription to Sports Illustrated and took a sip of the tepid water sloshing inside. When I looked back at Lucas he had a slightly pained look on his face.
“Arlo, I split the gas money with her to make it even.” Son of a bitch, there always has to be a catch doesn’t there.
“Damn it all, that money’s communal. Do you know what that means you ass-wipe? Communal, as in that shit’s mine too and wasn’t meant to be given up to some floozy that has your Calvin’s in a twist.”
Lucas began to backtrack and had to cough out his words as quickly as possible: “If I didn’t give her the money then we’d be stuck with nothing.” I slowly got off the floor, using the couch to support my back until I was standing upright.
“Alright, but I expect to see Dee-Dee naked by the end of the week.” The plum color came back to Lucas’ face and this time it was quite ripe.
“What?!”
“You heard me; my part of the payment. Reparations if you will, for the insufferable solitude I had to endure while you two were gallivanting around the Windy City.”
“How does Dee-Dee getting buck naked for you constitute reparations?”
“I don’t make the rules, I simply follow like a sheep to slaughter. If you want I could be naked too and get a bit of a nudist colony vibe going here.” This idea didn’t exactly strike Lucas’ fancy and he quickly changed the subject.
“Just keep your pants on and cook this shit up.”
“I can’t keep my pants on if I’m not wearing any you beast. And may I once again point out that I am acting the part of the cart-mule in this operation. One day I’m just going to keel over from exhaustion and you’ll kick me like a KGB goon in a gulag. Then what’ll you do you oppressive mongrel?
“Will you shut the fuck up and turn the burner on before I whelp you.”
“Yes sir Mr. Goerring.” I walked into the kitchen knowing that, all jocularity side, Lucas probably had it in him to whelp me and that I wouldn’t do anything to stop him.

2

The vial slid out of the bag and spiraled around on some linoleum floor tiles, the pale brown fluid swishing around its insides. Make sure to turn on the burner to 350 and bend over to pick up the goods and then place them on the kitchen counter next to the pig-shaped, his and hers salt and pepper shakers; don’t want Lucas getting $100 of unadulterated escapism stuck on the sole of his Wolverine work boots. Bottom drawer: cast-iron soup toureen with the red handle; Medicine cabinet: double-ply gauze, cotton balls, and Hydrogen Peroxide. Head over to the knife block for the paring knife. No, put the toureen on the burner first, empty out the vial into it, then get the paring knife. The viscosity of the liquid is sickening, slowly oozing down the vial and dripping drop by drop into the toureen. Each droplet hangs onto the lip of the vial expanding ever-so-slowly as gravity impregnates it with more fluid, causing what looks like Worcester sauce to spill into the pan. With each new drop a phosphorescent plume of blue smoke rises towards the kitchen ceiling, causing a thick haze to form in the room like the kitchen’s private ozone layer. I pop out the bottom of the vial and blow into it, getting every last millimeter of juice into the toureen: Life is a terrible thing to waste, but if must be wasted it should be done with consummate professionalism and efficiency.

Now for the paring knife, stained a burnt brown, blade and handle held together with electrical tape as a result of years of improper and unconventional use. The liquid had begun to expand in the toureen, the heat causing enzymes to burst, allowing the water to seep out and swish around the bottom of the toureen. In the center lay a single jet black blob more akin to magma then any liquid that comes to mind. I put on the oven mitt and slowly drain the water out of the toureen and into the sink, holding in the fruits of my labor with a metal spatula. No use trying needles and surgical tubing. There hasn’t been a clean vein in this house since the Clinton administration, hence, the paring knife. Rolling my right jean leg up to the kneecap, I douse the knife with hydrogen peroxide. Gauze and cotton balls at the ready, knife in hand, and delicious blackness simmering on the stove.

One stroke, the back of my calf spurts red all over the stove-front before gauze is applied. I make sure the spatula is heavy with it, rip off the gauze and paste the stuff on my leg like a plumber caulking a bathtub. All I feel is heat. Heat coursing through my leg, up my thigh, taking a slight detour at my crotch, and then straight up to the brain. I am a human thermometer with mercury rising all through my tendons and veins. The blood from my calf swirls with the drug, but no colors change. The emptiness of the drug acts as a black hole, sucking up anything it comes in contact with, be it the blood from my leg or the fluid in my skull.

Time to lie down for a second; we’ll turn off the burner eventually. Lucas is standing over me looking down so that his face appears inverted. My voice tells him the stuff is ready, but my ears don’t hear it; my life is a movie on mute. Lucas violently dunks the knife in the Hydrogen Peroxide to cleanse it, contaminating the peroxide with viscous globs of blood that float on the surface. I’ll have to get a new bottle later on. Lucas opted to use his forehead in lieu of the calf muscle. I should have thought of that too; more direct access. He doesn’t bother to clean the spatula, just shoves the stuff right in his profusely bleeding ajna chakra and fills his skull with cotton balls, forgoing the gauze in favor of a blue and purple paisley bandana. Lucas too slumps to the floor and his eyes begin fluttering. The drug now has its own gravitational pull towards the back of Lucas’ head, sucking cotton balls and the paisley bandana inside his forehead. His third eye is now a charred crater the size of a golf ball, Schlesinger 7 I think.

My veins have rebelled against my right calf and have organized a mass suicide, ripping their fibers from my bone in protest. Some of the veins fail in their attempt and get snared by my blood-drenched shin hairs, but most make it off the side and take root in the linoleum. The veins become like the base of the ancient giving tree, making my leg the trunk in the process. Unable to move my right leg, I pivoted around on it and switched off the burner with a flailing hand whose arc causes me to sprawl face down on the linoleum.

When I lifted my head I saw Lucas grinding his teeth madly against the metal spatula as the hole in his head grew bigger. Every single throbbing capillary could be seen slowly engulfing the whites of his eyes. His body, rocking back and forth to the rhythm of his head, was drenched in a sweat that had coated him like wood varnish. All the sweat from his scalp and forehead began to pour into his chakra crater, creating a saltwater pool above his brow. We both fell onto our sides facing one another, glazed expressions gracing our respective visages. As Lucas began to open his mouth, a small crack at the bottom of his forehead pool began expanding down his face cutting through nose cartilage and jawbones in accelerated decay. After the crack had spread all across his face, the left side of what used to be Lucas’ nose fell to the floor. He tried placing it back on, but that only added to the deterioration causing the other side of his nose to drop. It was a sadistic game of Mister Potato Head and I gleefully scooped up his writhing lips and placed them on his chest. The sight of a mouth attempting to talk with a nipple in its center is enough to make your normal junky lose focus, lose control; but I left the amateur ranks years ago and can handle such egregious breeches of rational action.

However, no man alive can withstand his best friend’s face splitting in two to reveal a hovel of maggots, fruit flies, and various unwanted cephalopods; and I am alive. After Lucas peeled off the last of his facial tissue I lost control and made a break for the door, but my leg was still planted to the ground. I reached up to grab the paring knife and began wildly swinging it at my calf muscles, trying to clip any rogue veins. As soon as Lucas passed out, all of his facial vermin made a mad dash for me and I spent the next 30 minutes swatting at them with the soup toureen…

3

*Ding.* With the sound of the bell from above the Steak & Shake doorway I snapped awake like one of Pavlov’s mutts, drooling from the corners of my mouth. The black and white checked floor was swirled in my mind to create a grayish whirlpool at my feet. I felt like I was looking down at a monochrome barber’s pole and stumbled over to the waiting area next to the register. The sparkling red, booth-style seats were covered in a layer of polyurethane to provide me, the diner, with the least comfort possible while retaining the overall décor of the place. I had the feeling they would’ve put a splintered wooden bench in had it fit the restaurant’s theme. I actually think that is the furniture used at Cracker Barrel.

Lucas grabbed me by the arm and led me into the dining hall to my apparent dismay. I say apparent because I have no idea what I actually felt like at that moment. My only emotional barometer was the tinted black glass of the restaurant into which I stared while walking over to our table. My reflection conveyed a sense of discomfort, but for all I know I had reached a state of euphoria that would make the Dalai Lama weep with jealousy. When you take this shit you become unable to discern what and how you feel, or even why you’re feeling that way at all. To say this is the drug’s appeal would be to understate the matter. After we sat down at our table I brought out the pack of American Spirits that I had nicked from one of the burnt-out hippies that frequent Beaners. There used to be some kind of free-love commune about 15 miles down the interstate and when it disbanded, Grinnell found itself inundated with aged hippies. One of these 50-something guys will invariably bust through the doors at least once a week stoned out of his mind and sit down to order some coffee. The moat recent hippie, a guy who demanded that we serve him his iced mocha in a porcelain mug that he brought from home boasting “World’s Greatest Uncle” on it’s side, didn’t even need any coaxing to break him of his smokes. Normally I have to at least ask if I can bum a cigarette before I squirrel away the tobacco for personal use, but this guy just dropped them. He sat down with his iced mocha and began rustling inside his jean shorts for his pack of American Spirits. As I was walking over towards him he fished the pack out and held it up against his mouth, the knuckle of his right pointer finger pressed against the bottom of his nose, and just let them drop to the ground. Ten minutes later he simply got up and took his mug away with him, leaving me with 14 un-smoked fags.

I brought a cigarette to my lips and lit it, letting my inventory of smokes dwindle to thirteen. Thirteen being such an unlucky number, I instantly thrust another cigarette into Lucas’ mouth and lit that, content with the untold number of bad omens I had just avoided. As soon as I had taken my first real drag (the first puff doesn’t count because you’re too busy fiddling with the lighter and making sure it’s properly lit) the waitress waddled over towards our booth and began screeching in some sort of gibberish that sounded Arabic in origin. The woman, May as her nametag would lead us to believe, was a frighteningly large black woman. As hyperbolic as that description sounds, May’ girth was truly horrific, especially for a man in my condition. I can at least say that she was fair in her distribution of rage, scaring the both of us into an equal state of paranoia and panic. After May was done with me she turned around to screech at Lucas and give him an equal share of the horror. I swear I heard her belch out the phrase, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead,” but I think that can be chalked up to the drugs entering the right wing of my brain where the library is located. I’m just thankful the juice made a beeline for Conrad, building on the savage environs of the Steak & Shake. Had I heard the voice of Heathcliffe from Wuthering Heights emanating from that woman’s mouth I would have been in for a real bad trip.

In the middle of her tirade, May accidentally stepped over an air-conditioning grate that billowed cold air up her skirt. This was most assuredly one of the first signs of the apocalypse; any sight that repulsive had to have been sent by the Antichrist, or at least the spirit of Judas Iscariot. Even the quickest of glances showed that this woman hadn’t shaved her legs in weeks, a sort of advanced, prickly stubble running everywhere. I felt like I was looking at two giant honey-baked hams that had been dyed a dark brown and slathered with hair. It was The Seven Year Itch gone terribly, terribly wrong. I was holding up well considering the circumstances, but Lucas wasn’t fairing as well. Our plus-sized aggressor had thrown him for a loop and, to be quite blunt, Lucas was tripping balls. He couldn’t stop staring at the disgusting spectacle that was May’s legs, a gesture that May was none to pleased with. She frantically pushed down her skirt and escalated her berating of Lucas to the brink of physical violence. Sensing danger and knowing that Lucas was beyond repair, I knew I had to do something drastically disturbing. When May cocked her hand back to smack the unholy hell out of Lucas, I extinguished my cigarette on the laminated menu and held the butt in front of my face between my thumb and forefinger. The stench of burnt laminate got May’s attention, at which point I did the only thing I could do: I ate the butt. To rave like a lunatic is commonplace and something May was surely used to dealing with. However, there are very few people in this world that can cope with an act of lunacy. It’s the next step and May was most assuredly not ready to take that step. As I chewed the burnt tobacco shavings and sucked the filter down my gullet, I stared at my charred menu while May began frantically pacing back and forth. Still not looking at May, I ordered my meal, asking for a banana milkshake, two Frisco melts, and onion rings. May informed me that they didn’t serve Frisco melts. I informed May that she was wrong and they did in fact serve Frisco melts but she was just too pigheaded to realize it. Lucas ordered a crock of baked beans and some cottage cheese, but was in no state to convey such an order verbally so I translated for him. May walked away a broken woman and upon reaching the kitchen area dipped her left hand in a vat of boiling vegetable oil. The old axiom, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” applied in both the metaphoric and literal senses for May, as she ran screaming through a plate-glass window at the front of the restaurant.

Fifteen minutes later another waitress brought out my milkshake and onion rings along with two bacon cheeseburgers. Apparently May hadn’t told her about the Frisco melts, but my hunger had passed I was no longer in the mood for confrontation. Lucas was repulsed by the presentation of the cottage cheese and demanded that more pineapples be added to it. After the waitress had gone back to fetch Lucas his extra garnish of fruit I suggested that we shag ass. I downed my milkshake and Lucas picked up his baked beans. He was very taken by the burnt brown porcelain crock and insisted that he could only eat the beans in this specific container. However, being the consummate gentleman, Lucas opted not to take any silverware with him. “Don’t worry about it man,” he groaned. “I’ll just snag some plastic ones from the checkout counter.”

4

The coin slots on the metro were all busted after some disgruntled bus driver filled them all in with quickrete during a labor strike a few years back. The city council never caved in and after about six months of public transport stagnation the drivers limped backed to their buses for the same meager pay. The organizers of the strike failed to realize the fundamental fact that their only bargaining chip, the cessation of the entire metro system, didn’t concern the local government. These men didn’t rely on the bus to go to city hall every morning, but pulled up in all manner of Beamers, Benzes, and chauffeured town cars. This left the transportation union clinging to the slim hope that city council would be so distraught by the droves of folk having to walk mini-marathons every morning to get to work that they would be driven by their conscience to raise wages and help their constituency. But a politician with a conscience is about as rare as a shooting star and just as fleeting. Gordon Gecko’s axiom that “greed is good” applies to Pennsylvania Avenue as much as it does to Wall Street, and anyone who thinks the green-eyed monster was subdued after the death of Reaganomics and the free-wheelin’ eighties is either monumentally ignorant or naïve beyond repair. Long story short: no pay raise, no sympathy, and back to work.

Since city council decided there were insufficient funds in the city coffers for any bus repairs, all the coin slots remained sealed shut. I tossed my 35 cents into the empty Big Gulp that now served as a makeshift collection bucket, while Lucas pitched in 18 cents and his plastic silverware as collateral. It wasn’t as if the driver gave a damn what we paid with. He didn’t work on commission and still had to drive this piece of shit for another 5 hours until his shift ended. The man’s face was drained of all fluid, the craters of his sunken cheeks big enough to hold a pair of golf balls and his wispy gray hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His pockmarked face hadn’t moved an inch since we climbed on and I doubt very much if he’d been able to visibly emote for years. Each depressed circle on his face had been formed over decades as tears slowly eroded the terrain of his skin, leaving his tear ducts bone dry and his cheeks looking like the moon underneath the lens of a telescope.

I sat down at the very back of the bus, the hard plastic seats searing my coccyx with a cold that felt like dry ice on my ass. As abrasive as the seat was, it was a great relief simply to be sitting again and I tried to push the discomfort away by sinking down so that my head was resting against the back of the seat. Lucas had avoided the dilemma entirely by setting up shop underneath the seats, lying splayed out on the floor with the crock of baked beans balanced precariously on his chest. Since he had given his plastic spoon to the bus driver’s collection plate, Lucas was forced to slurp down the baked beans from the lip of the crock like he was drinking out of a child’s sippy-cup. When the bus took a corner too fast the crock was tipped over and Lucas’s face and chest were covered in lukewarm baked beans. Lucas began spitting bean fragments wildly and turned to me, screaming, “It’s no good man. It’s no good anymore.” I asked him what wasn’t good anymore and he stared blankly at me for a few seconds before responding, “change of plans buddy. We gotta go skins.” With this Lucas bolted up, neglecting to remember where he was lying down, and crashed his forehead into the back of one of the seats. Lucas began frantically rubbing his head: “Fuckin’ shit man. Somebody should remodel these fucking things...They’re a danger to, like, the fuckin public AT LARGE man! These things are deadly man.” After this sage wisdom Lucas rolled into the center aisle and, with a measure of difficulty, pulled his bean-soaked shirt over his head. He stayed half-naked in the center of the aisle for the remainder of our ride.

With no one else on the bus, a prolonged silence descended upon us, the low rumbling of the engine providing an ambient white noise in the background. A glance out of my window towards the sky revealed nothing but a murky purple night. The decades of smog had billowed to the earth’s ceiling and taken roost, blocking the stars from view. The only constellations to be found were on the street lights and lamp posts. Without my glasses on the lights exploded into starbursts as we passed by, leaving green and yellow tails of bright air in our wake. This was my night sky, with no big dipper and Orion’s Belt thrown to the floor. The homeless huddled together underneath bridges and back alley awnings in a congregation of poverty, the stench of despair hovering about them like a cloud of Pigpen’s dust. Their cardboard signs lay face down, stacked on the pavement bleeding ink as they became soaked with stagnant rainwater. Part of me envied the bums for the freedom they had. At least when you’re outcast from society you’re never held to account. No one expects anything from you at the very bottom of the pyramid, bearing the brunt of the cruelty that others spend their entire lives trying to brush away. To look at Lucas, lying half-naked and passed out in the aisle of a metro bus, baked bean juice dribbling down his chin and pooling in his clavicle; this all reeked of failure and tragedy.

We are the great American middle class, highly educated and increasingly obsolete. My father never went to college and worked his whole life so that his sons could get the higher education that he never had. By the time the money had been saved and tuition paid, that education was as ubiquitous as water and the diploma just as valuable. And so we were set on a path that expects so much from so many and which was bound to disappoint from the start. No matter how many people save for an education and graduate from university there is the inescapable truth that somebody has to follow humanity with a broom to sweep up all the shit we leave behind us. For me to work at a coffee shop is to squander the life I was given, but for the homeless man that same job allows him to exceed any expectation society had formed. Four years of my life and $80,000 in tuition all for one piece of paper that brands me a slacker for the rest of my life. I can feel myself again and need to stop the bus.

5

Courtney’s house is always open, like a 24-hour mini-daguerreotype of the playboy grotto. Her parents were, if not mayflower material, some of the oldest, stuffiest money in town. Courtney’s blood flowed a deep azure blue inside her veins and the “summer apartment” that her parents provided was fitted accordingly. The request from a girl with a 1.3 GPA to do a summer research project at Grinnell failed to raise any red flags with her bumbling bobo parents, who were too involved with their agendas of social inbreeding to notice. I went to her house because she had air-conditioning, a heated underground pool, a practically inexhaustible supply of liquor, and a pair of tits that defied gravity. When Lucas and I stumbled onto the back patio everything was motionless except for a barely audible whirring from the pool’s heating system. The only thing that could be seen was the pool, shaped like a Picasso doodling of a kidney and illuminated from within by tens of underwater flashlights that caused the pool to glow like a chest of gold doubloons does in the movies. We climbed down the steps to the pool and I stripped down to my boxers and waded in; Lucas was intent to remain clothed and reclining on a padded lawn chair. It was only after I had gotten in that I realized I’d forgotten to take my socks off and had to wrestle with them underwater to get the soaked cotton off my feet.

As I was putting my drenched socks on the concrete lip of the pool, Courtney came down the stairs. She was wearing a jingoistic red, white, and blue two-piece that was made with about 8 square inches of fabric, Courtney not being a fan of leaving things to the imagination. She carried with her a small inflatable raft loaded with a fifth of Cuervo, two shot glasses, some salt, and a quartered lime. Laying the raft down on the pavement, she climbed down into the pool and took up residence in an inflatable deck chair floating beside her. Courtney paddled down towards the shallow end with her right hand and dragged the raft of liquor behind her with the left. I took a seat on the entrance steps to the pool as Courtney sprinkled salt onto my shoulder and lapped it up before shoving a lime wedge in my mouth like a roast pig, downing two shots of tequila, and assaulting the lime in my mouth with her tongue. Pulling away, she tried to give me a come-hither look, but being rather trashed she only succeeded in looking skanky. I was in no mood to trade body shots and Courtney’s advances only further decreased any sexual impulse I had. When Courtney drifted close enough to me I snatched her little booze barge, shoved a handful of salt into my mouth, up-ended the bottle of Cuervo, and dismounted by eating a quarter of a lime whole. After this fantastic display of athletic prowess, the only sensible thing to do was to let my body fall forward into the pool and stare at the bottom. The chlorine stung my eyes and blurred my vision as I concentrated on the slanted white cement, looking through the incandescent blue ripples of light floating past my face.

Courtney disrupted my repose by dragging my torso onto her floating deck chair and held me until we drifted to the side. I had a good deal of trouble getting out of the pool and after about 2 minutes of Courtney inadvertently ripping my stomach to shreds on the concrete lip I ambled down to the shallow end and went up the steps. I looked over at Lucas, who was still lying on the lawn chair, but was now clothed only in an oversized red Hula shirt that went past his knees. Before I knew it I was being led up the stairs and through blessedly air conditioned rooms cluttered with avant-garde blown glass and Neo-Cubist paintings that covered entire walls. I collapsed face down on the bed and turned over to be greeted by a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars that acted as a rudimentary black-light suitable for an 11-year old who dreams of going to Space Camp. I feel somebody crawl towards me and begin licking the inside of my ear. I swat at the tongue with my hand like it was a mosquito or fly. Courtney’s tongue is no longer a sensual organ, but simply a piece of rigid muscle cruelly anchored in her mouth, dying to burst out. Pretty soon I think I black out and all I can feel is this pressure cascading over different parts of my body: my neck, chest, lips, back. I don’t see anything and I rarely even move. I can feel Courtney tugging off my jeans and trying to take off my shirt. Since I refuse to move she has to prop me up on the headboard to lift the shirt over my head. As I hear Courtney breathing heavily in an attempt to disrobe without getting out of bed, I slide down the headboard and land on the floor with the crown of my head, slowly slumping to the ground with a motion that reminded me of the droves of prepubescent teens trying somersaults during 5th grade gym class. As Courtney pulls me back up to the bed, the only thing that I can really sense is the smell of sweat filling the room. This isn’t a normal sweat that comes from your glands, but is a body sweat that oozes out your pores and cleanses your body in a film of calcified salt. I feel sticky and wretched and in desperate need of a shower. I begin to get nauseous and wonder where the best place to throw up in Courtney’s room is.

I open my eyes and see a bright red 3:47 flashing in front of my eyes. I turn over and the bed is laid bare. From inside her bathroom I can hear Courtney scratching at the porcelain walls and screeching at nothing. No use trying to help, as I plan on joining her just shortly. I walk into the kitchen and the pot is still simmering on the stove. Lucas is lying on a chez-lounge staring at the blank TV screen intently. “You taking it easy in there pal?” I ask him. He grins a little and almost whispers, “Don’t you know it, man.” I walk over to the stove and look back as I’m picking up the crusty knife: “We won’t be too long. She’s got roast beef in the fridge for sandwiches.” With that I sat down on the floor and bit my tongue.

Still don't have a title...that'll come later.

Chain Lit Post...

2006-08-06T20:15:44Z

Instructions:
1. Bold those books you've read.
2. Italicise started-but-never-finished.
3. Add three of your own.
4. Post to your livejournal.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. 1984, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's (Philosopher's) Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Susskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
101. Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
102. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
103. The Beach, Alex Garland
104. Dracula, Bram Stoker
105. Point Blanc, Anthony Horowitz
106. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
107. Stormbreaker, Anthony Horowitz
108. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
109. The Day Of The Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
110. The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
111. Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
112. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 1/2, Sue Townsend
113. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
114. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
115. The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
116. The Dare Game, Jacqueline Wilson
117. Bad Girls, Jacqueline Wilson
118. The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
119. Shogun, James Clavell
120. The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
121. Lola Rose, Jacqueline Wilson
122. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
123. The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
124. House Of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
125. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
126. Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
127. Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
128. The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
129. Possession, A. S. Byatt
130. The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
131. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
132. Danny The Champion Of The World, Roald Dahl
133. East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
134. George's Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl
135. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
136. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
137. Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
138. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
139. Girls In Tears, Jacqueline Wilson
140. Sleepovers, Jacqueline Wilson
141. All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
142. Behind The Scenes At The Museum, Kate Atkinson
143. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
144. It, Stephen King
145. James And The Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
146. The Green Mile, Stephen King
147. Papillon, Henri Charriere
148. Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett
149. Master And Commander, Patrick O'Brian
150. Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz
151. Soul Music, Terry Pratchett
152. Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
153. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
154. Atonement, Ian McEwan
155. Secrets, Jacqueline Wilson
156. The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier
157. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
158. Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
159. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
160. Cross Stitch, Diana Gabaldon
161. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
162. River God, Wilbur Smith
163. Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
164. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
165. The World According To Garp, John Irving
166. Lorna Doone, R. D. Blackmore
167. Girls Out Late, Jacqueline Wilson
168. The Far Pavilions, M. M. Kaye
169. The Witches, Roald Dahl
170. Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
171. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
172. They Used To Play On Grass, Terry Venables and Gordon Williams
173. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
174. The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
175. Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
176. Dustbin Baby, Jacqueline Wilson
177. Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl
178. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
179. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
180. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
181. The Suitcase Kid, Jacqueline Wilson
182. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
183. The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
184. Silas Marner, George Eliot
185. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
186. The Diary Of A Nobody, George and Weedon Gross-mith
187. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
188. Goosebumps, R. L. Stine
189. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
190. Sons And Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
191. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
192. Man And Boy, Tony Parsons
193. The Truth, Terry Pratchett
194. The War Of The Worlds, H. G. Wells
195. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
196. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
197. Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
198. The Once And Future King, T. H. White
199. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
200. Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews
201. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
202. The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
203. The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan
204. The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan
205. Fires of Heaven, Robert Jordan
206. Lord of Chaos, Robert Jordan
207. Winter's Heart, Robert Jordan
208. A Crown of Swords, Robert Jordan
209. Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan
210. A Path of Daggers, Robert Jordan
211. As Nature Made Him, John Colapinto
212. Microserfs, Douglas Coupland
213. The Married Man, Edmund White
214. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
215. The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
216. Cry to Heaven, Anne Rice
217. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell
218. Equus, Peter Shaffer
219. The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten
220. Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
221. Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
222. The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice
223. Anthem, Ayn Rand
224. The Bridge To Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
225. Tartuffe, Moliere
226. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
227. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
228. The Trial, Franz Kafka
229. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
230. Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles
231. Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther
232. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
233. Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
234. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
235. A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
236. ALIVE!, Piers Paul Read
237. Grapefruit, Yoko Ono
238. Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde
240. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
241. Chronicles of Thomas Convenant, Unbeliever, Stephen Donaldson
242. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
242. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
243. Summerland, Michael Chabon
244. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
245. Candide, Voltaire
246. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl
247. Ringworld, Larry Niven
248. The King Must Die, Mary Renault
249. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
250. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
251. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
252. The House Of The Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
253. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
254. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
255. The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson
256. Chocolate Fever, Robert Kimmel Smith
257. Xanth: The Quest for Magic (Original trilogy), Piers Anthony
258. The Lost Princess of Oz, L. Frank Baum
259. Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
260. Lost In A Good Book, Jasper Fforde
261. Well Of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde
262. Life Of Pi, Yann Martel
263. The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
264. A Yellow Rraft In Blue Water, Michael Dorris
265. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
267. Where The Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
268. Griffin & Sabine, Nick Bantock
269. Witch of Blackbird Pond, Joyce Friedland
270. Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien
271. Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
272. The Cay, Theodore Taylor
273. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg
274. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
275. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
276. The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan
277. The Bone Setter's Daughter, Amy Tan
278. Relic, Duglas Preston & Lincolon Child
279. Wicked, Gregory Maguire
280. American Gods, Neil Gaiman - in the process of
281. Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
282. The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum
283. Haunted, Judith St. George
284. Singularity, William Sleator
285. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
286. Different Seasons, Stephen King
287. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
288. About a Boy, Nick Hornby
289. The Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
290. The Church of Dead Girls, Stephen Dobyns
291. Illusions, Richard Bach
292. Magic's Pawn, Mercedes Lackey
293. Magic's Promise, Mercedes Lackey
294. Magic's Price, Mercedes Lackey
295. The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav
296. Spirits of Flux and Anchor, Jack L. Chalker
297. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
298. The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Brenda Love
299. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace.
300. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison.
301. The Cider House Rules, John Irving.
302. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
303. Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
304. The Lion's Game, Nelson Demille
305. The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars, Stephen Brust
306. Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
307. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
308. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
309. Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk
310. Camber of Culdi, Kathryn Kurtz
311. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
312. War and Rememberance, Herman Wouk
313. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
314. The Giver, Lois Lowry
315. The Telling, Ursula Le Guin
316. Xenogenesis (or Lilith's Brood), Octavia Butler
317. A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
318. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
319. The Aeneid, Publius Vergilius Maro
320. Hanta Yo, Ruth Beebe Hill
321. The Princess Bride, S. Morganstern
322. Beowulf, Anonymous
323. The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell
324. Deerskin, Robin McKinley
325. Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey
326. Passage, Connie Willis
327. Otherland, Tad Williams
328. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
329. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry
330. Beloved, Toni Morrison
331. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore
332. The mysterious disappearance of Leon, I mean Noel, Ellen Raskin
333. Summer Sisters, Judy Blume
334. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
335. The Island on Bird Street, Uri Orlev
336. Midnight in the Dollhouse, Marjorie Filley Stover
337. The Miracle Worker, William Gibson
338. The Genesis Code, John Case
339. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevensen
340. Paradise Lost, John Milton
341. Phantom, Susan Kay
342. The Mummy or Ramses the Damned, Anne Rice
343. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman
344: The Dresden Files: Grave Peril, Jim Butcher
345: Tokyo Suckerpunch, Issac Adamson
346: The Winter of Magic's Return, Pamela Service
347: The Oddkins, Dean R. Koontz
348. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
349. The Last Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
350. At Swim, Two Boys, Jaime O'Neill
351. Othello, by William Shakespeare
352. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
353. The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
354. Sati, Christopher Pike
355. The Inferno, Dante
356. The Apology, Plato
357. The Small Rain, Madeline L'Engle
358. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Richard E Cytowick
359. 5 Novels, Daniel Pinkwater
360. The Sevenwaters Trilogy, Juliet Marillier
361. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
362. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
363. Our Town, Thorton Wilder
364. Green Grass Running Water, Thomas King
335. The Interpreter, Suzanne Glass
336. The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
337. The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
338. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
339. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
340. The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
341. Pages for You, Sylvia Brownrigg
342. The Changeover, Margaret Mahy
343. Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
344. Angels and Demons, Dan Brown
345. Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo
346. Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer
347. Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck
348. The Diving-bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby
349. The Lunatic at Large, J. Storer Clouston
350. Time for Bed, David Baddiel
351. Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
352. Quite Ugly One Morning, Christopher Brookmyre
353. The Bloody Sun, Marion Zimmer Bradley
354. Sewer, Gas, and Eletric, Matt Ruff
355. Jhereg, Steven Brust
356. So You Want To Be A Wizard, Diane Duane
357. Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
358. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
359. Road-side Dog, Czeslaw Milosz
360. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
361. Neuromancer, William Gibson
362. The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
363. A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr
364. The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault
365. The Gunslinger, Stephen King
366. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
367. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
368. A Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
369. Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
370. The God Boy, Ian Cross
371. The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Laurie R. King
372. Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Jansson
373. Misery, Stephen King
374. Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
375. Hood, Emma Donoghue
376. The Land of Spices, Kate O'Brien
377. The Diary of Anne Frank
378. Regeneration, Pat Barker
379. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
380. Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
381. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
382. The View from Saturday, E.L. Konigsburg
383. Dealing with Dragons, Patricia Wrede
384. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss
385. A Severed Wasp - Madeleine L'Engle
386. Here Be Dragons - Sharon Kay Penman
387. The Mabinogion (Ancient Welsh Tales) - translated by Lady Charlotte E. Guest
388. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
389. Desire of the Everlasting Hills - Thomas Cahill
390. The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris
391. My Antonia, Willa Cather
392. The Bell jar, Sylvia Plath
393. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
394. Conceived Without Sin, Bud MacFarlane Jr.
395. Pierced by a Sword, Bud MacFarlane, Jr.
396. Tully, Paullina Simons
397. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
398. Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
399. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
400. Double Play, Robert Parker
401. Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott
402. Bookman's Promise, John Dunning
403. Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
404. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
405. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
406. The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn, Janis Hallowell
407. The Holy Bible, (Various Authors) Yeah, and don't give me that look either!!
408. The Odyssey, Homer
409. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
410. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
411. The Way of a Pilgrim, Anonymous
412. The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, Will Cuppy
413. Song of Eve, June Strong
414. Cyclops, Clive Cussler
415. The Light That Failed, Rudyard Kipling
416. Zia, Scott O'Dell
417. Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell
418. The Devil's Arithmetic, Jane Yolen
419. Riddle-master Trilogy, Patricia McKillip
420. Certain Women, Madeleine L'Engle
421. My Hundred Children, Lenah Kikhler-Zilberman
422. Sandry's Book, Tamora Pierce
423. Joona trilogy, Kim Englehart
424. The Dark Is Rising Sequence (set of 5 books), Susan Cooper
425. King of Shadows, Susan Cooper
426. Among Friends, Caroline Cooney
427. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
428. Anne Frank and Me, Cherie Bennett & Jeff Gotesfeld
429. Shadow of a Hero, by Peter Dickinson
430. A House Like a Lotus, by Madeleine L'Engle
431. Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis
432. A Raging Quiet, by Sherryl Jordan
433. A Ring of Endless Light, by Madeleine L'Engle
434. The Girl Who Owned a City, by O.T. Nelson
435. Below the Root, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
436. Island in the Sea of Time, by S.M. Stirling
437. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
438. Digital Fortress, Dan Brown
439. Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne
440. The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller
441. Thunder and Roses, Mary Jo Putney
442. Love Beyond Tomorrow, Erin Klingler
443. Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind
444. The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende
445. The Hidden Staircase, by Carolyn Keene a Nancy Drew Adventure!!
446. Chess with A Dragon, by Devid Gerold
447. Dreadnaught, by Robert K. Massie
448. On Basilisk Station, by David Weber
449. The High and the Mighty, by Ernest K. Gann
450. The Old Dog Barks Backwards, by Ogden Nash
451. The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
452. Startide Rising, by David Brin
453. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
454. All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
455. Guilty Pleasures, Laurell K. Hamilton
456. Moonheart, Charles DeLint
457. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Alan Garner
458. Lady Chatterly's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
459. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
460. Henry V, Shakespeare
461. To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
462. Elric of Melnibone, Michael Moorcock
463. M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, Robert Asprin
464. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
465. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
466. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
467. Choke, Chuck Palahniuk
468. This Perfect Day, Ira Levin
469. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
470. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh
471. The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean
472. Rape: A Love Story, Joyce Carol Oates
473. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (a low culture manifesto) by Chuck Klosterman
474. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
475. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

A bit belatedly...

2006-08-05T00:21:14Z

Stuff I've Been Reading: July 2006

The Proud Highway: Letters from a Desperate Southern Gentleman (1955-67) by Hunter S. Thompson

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

Another one in the books...

2006-07-30T19:08:53Z

I just finished my initial draft of this still untitled story. Here it is:

5

Courtney’s house is always open, like a 24-hour mini-daguerreotype of the playboy grotto. Her parents were, if not mayflower material, some of the oldest, stuffiest money in town. Courtney’s blood flowed a deep azure blue inside her veins and the “summer apartment” that her parents provided was fitted accordingly. The request from a girl with a 1.3 GPA to do a summer research project at Grinnell failed to raise any red flags with her bumbling bobo parents, who were too involved with their agendas of social inbreeding to notice. I went to her house because she had air-conditioning, a heated underground pool, a practically inexhaustible supply of liquor, and a pair of tits that defied gravity. When Lucas and I stumbled onto the back patio everything was motionless except for a barely audible whirring from the pool’s heating system. The only thing that could be seen was the pool, shaped like a Picasso doodling of a kidney and illuminated from within by tens of underwater flashlights that caused the pool to glow like a chest of gold doubloons does in the movies. We climbed down the steps to the pool and I stripped down to my boxers and waded into the pool; Lucas was intent to remain clothed and reclining on a padded lawn chair. It was only after I had gotten in that I realized I’d forgotten to take my socks off and had to wrestle with them underwater to get the soaked cotton off my feet.

As I was putting my drenched socks on the concrete lip of the pool, Courtney came down the stairs. She was wearing a jingoistic red, white, and blue two-piece that was made with about 8 square inches of fabric, Courtney not being a fan of leaving things to the imagination. She carried with her a small inflatable raft loaded with a fifth of Cuervo, two shot glasses, some salt, and a quartered lime. Laying the raft down on the pavement, she climbed down into the pool and took up residence in an inflatable deck chair floating beside her. Courtney paddled down towards the shallow end with her right hand and dragged the raft of liquor behind her with the left. I took a seat on the entrance steps to the pool as Courtney sprinkled salt onto my shoulder and lapped it up before shoving a lime wedge in my mouth like a roast pig, downing two shots of tequila, and assaulting the lime in my mouth with her tongue. Pulling away, she tried to give me a come-hither look, but being rather trashed she only succeeded in looking skanky. I was in no mood to trade body shots and Courtney’s advances only further decreased any sexual impulse I had. When Courtney drifted close enough to me I snatched her little booze barge, shoved a handful of salt into my mouth, up-ended the bottle of Cuervo, and dismounted by eating a quarter if a lime whole. After this fantastic display of athletic prowess, the only sensible thing to do was to let my body fall forward into the pool and stare at the pool’s cement floor. The chlorine stung my eyes and blurred my vision as I concentrated on the cement floor, looking through the incandescent blue ripples of light floating past from the underwater lighting.

Courtney disrupted my repose by dragging my torso onto her floating deck chair and held me until we drifted to the side. I good deal of trouble getting out of the pool and after about 2 minutes of Courtney inadvertently ripping my stomach to shreds on the concrete lip I ambled down to the shallow end and went up the steps. I looked over at Lucas, who was still lying on the lawn chair, but was now clothed only in an oversized red Hula shirt that went past his knees. Before I knew it I was being led up the stairs and through blessedly air conditioned rooms cluttered with avant-garde blown glass and Neo-Cubist paintings that covered entire walls. I collapsed face down on the bed and turned over to be greeted by a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars that acted as rudimentary black-light suitable for an 11-year old who dreams of going to Space Camp. I feel somebody crawl towards me and begin licking the inside of my ear. I swat at the tongue with my hand like it was a mosquito or fly. After that I just feel pressure over different parts of my body: my neck, chest, lips, back. I don’t see anything and I rarely even move. The only thing that I can really sense is the smell of sweat filling the room. This isn’t a normal sweat that comes from your glands, but is a body sweat that oozes out your pores and cleanses your body in a film of calcified salt.

I open my eyes and see a bright red 3:47 flashing in front of my eyes. I turn over and the bed is laid bare. From inside her bathroom I can hear Courtney scratching at the porcelain walls and screeching because of the chaos. No use trying to help, as I plan on joining her just shortly. I walk into the kitchen and the pot is still simmering on the stove. Lucas is lying on a chez-lounge staring at the blank TV screen intently. “You taking it easy in there pal?” I ask him. He grins a little and almost whispers, “Don’t you know it, man.” I walk over to the stove and look back as I’m picking up the crusty knife: “We won’t be too long. She’s got roast beef in the fridge for sandwiches.” With that I sat down on the floor and bit my tongue.

Much editing awaits.

14 days later...

2006-07-27T02:11:25Z

Here's installment number four:

4

The coin slots on the metro were all busted after some disgruntled bus driver filled them all in with quickrete during a labor strike a few years back. The city council never caved in and after about six months of public transport stagnation the drivers limped backed to their buses for the same meager pay. The organizers of the strike failed to realize the fundamental fact that their only bargaining chip, the cessation of the entire metro system, didn’t concern the local government. These men didn’t rely on the bus to go to city hall every morning, but pulled up in all manner of Beamers, Benzes, and chauffeured town cars. This left the transportation union clinging to the slim hope that city council would be so distraught by the droves of folk having to walk mini-marathons every morning to get to work that they would be driven by their conscience to raise wages and help their constituency. But a politician with a conscience is about as rare as a shooting star and just as fleeting. Gordon Gecko’s axiom that “greed is good” applies to Pennsylvania Avenue as much as it does for Wall Street, and anyone who thinks the green-eyed monster was subdued after the death of Reaganomics and the free-wheelin’ eighties is either monumentally ignorant or naïve beyond repair. Long story short: no pay raise, no sympathy, and back to work.

Since council decided there were insufficient funds in the city coffers for any bus repairs, all the coin slots remained sealed shut. I tossed my 35 cents into the empty Big Gulp that now served as a makeshift collection bucket, while Lucas pitched in 18 cents and his plastic silverware as collateral. It wasn’t as if the driver gave a damn what we paid with. He didn’t work on commission and still had to drive this piece of shit for another 5 hours until his shift ended. The man’s face was drained of all fluid, the craters of his sunken cheeks big enough to hold a pair of golf balls and his wispy gray hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His pockmarked face hadn’t moved an inch since we climbed on and I doubt very much if he’d been able to visibly emote for years. Each depressed circle on his face had been formed over decades as tears slowly eroded the terrain of his skin, leaving his tear ducts bone dry and his cheeks looking like the moon underneath the lens of a telescope.

I sat down at the very back of the bus, the hard plastic seats searing my coccyx with a cold that felt like dry ice on my ass. As abrasive as the seat was, it was a great relief simply to be sitting again and I tried to push the discomfort away by sinking down so that my head was resting against the back of the seat. Lucas had avoided the dilemma entirely by setting up shop underneath the seats, lying splayed out on the floor with the crock of baked beans balanced precariously on his chest. Since he had given his plastic spoon to the bus driver’s collection plate, Lucas was forced to slurp down the baked beans from the lip of the crock like he was drinking out of a child’s sippy-cup. When the bus took a corner too fast the crock was tipped over and Lucas’s face and chest were covered in cold baked beans. Lucas began spitting bean fragments wildly and turned to me, screaming, “It’s no good man. It’s no good anymore.” I asked him what wasn’t good anymore and he stared blankly at me for a few seconds before responding, “change of plans buddy. We gotta go skins.” With this Lucas bolted up, neglecting to remember where he was lying down, and crashed his forehead into the back of one of the seats. Lucas began frantically rubbing his head: “Fuckin’ shit man. Somebody should remodel these fucking things...They’re a danger to, like, the fuckin public AT LARGE man! These things are deadly man.” After this sage wisdom Lucas rolled into the center aisle and, with a measure of difficulty, pulled his bean-soaked shirt over his head. He stayed half-naked in the center of the aisle for the remainder of our ride.

With no one else on the bus, a prolonged silence descended upon us, the low rumbling of the engine providing an ambient white noise in the background. A glance out of my window towards the sky revealed nothing but a murky purple night. The decades of smog had billowed to the earth’s ceiling and taken roost, blocking the stars from view. The only constellations to be found were on the street lights and lamp posts. Without my glasses on the lights exploded into starbursts as we passed by, leaving green and yellow tails of bright air in our wake. This was my night sky, with no big dipper and Orion’s Belt thrown to the floor. The homeless huddled together underneath bridges and back alley awnings in a congregation of poverty, the stench of despair hovering about them like a cloud of Pigpen’s dust. Their cardboard signs lay face down, stacked on the pavement bleeding ink as they became soaked with stagnant rainwater. Part of me envied the bums for the freedom they had. At least when you’re outcast from society you’re never held to account. No one expects anything from you’re at the very bottom of the pyramid, bearing the brunt of the cruelty that others spend their entire lives trying to shove off on others. To look at Lucas, lying half-naked and passed out in the aisle of a metro bus, baked bean juice dribbling down his chin and pooling in his clavicle; this all reeked of failure and tragedy.

We are the great American middle class, highly educated and increasingly obsolete. My father never went to college and worked his whole life so that his sons could get the higher education that he never had. By the time the money had been saved and tuition paid, that education was as ubiquitous as water and the diploma just as valuable. And so we were set on a path that expects so much from so many and which was bound to disappoint from the start. No matter how many people save for an education and graduate from university there is the inescapable truth that somebody has to follow humanity with a broom to sweep up all the shit we leave behind us. For me to work at a coffee shop is to squander the life I was given, but for the homeless man that same job allows him to exceed any expectation society had formed. Four years of my life and $80,000 in tuition all for one piece of paper that brands me a slacker for the rest of my life. I can feel myself again and need to stop the bus.

Unedited first draft and all that jazz...

Steak & Shake Lit...

2006-07-12T20:21:34Z

And now for the third installment:

3

*Ding.* With the sound of the bell from above the Steak & Shake doorway I snapped awake like one of Pavlov’s mutts, drooling from the corners of my mouth. The black and white checked floor was swirled in my mind to create a grayish whirlpool at my feet. I felt like I was looking down on a monochrome barber’s pole and stumbled over to the waiting area next to the register. The sparkling red booth-style seats were covered in a layer of polyurethane to provide me, the diner, with the least comfort possible while retaining the overall décor of the place. I had the feeling they would’ve put a splintered wooden bench in had it fit the restaurant’s theme. I actually think that is the furniture used at Cracker Barrel.

Lucas grabbed me by the arm and led me into the dining hall to my apparent dismay. I say apparent because I have no idea what I actually felt like at that moment. My only emotional barometer was the tinted black glass of the restaurant into which I stared while walking over to our table. My reflection conveyed a sense of discomfort, but for all I know I had reached a state of euphoria that would make the Dalai Lama weep with jealousy. When you take this shit you become unable to discern what and how you feel, or even why you’re feeling that way at all. To say this is the drug’s appeal would be to understate the matter. After we sat down at our table I brought the pack of American Spirits that I had nicked from one of the burnt-out hippies that frequent Beaners. There used to be some kind of free-love commune about 15 miles down the interstate and when it disbanded, Grinnell found itself inundated with aged hippies. One of these 50-something guys will invariably bust through the doors at least once a week stoned out of his mind and sit down to order some coffee. The last guy, who demanded that we serve him his iced mocha in a porcelain mug he brought from home boasting “World’s Greatest Uncle” on it’s side, didn’t even need any coaxing to break him of his smokes. Normally I have to at least ask if I can bum a cigarette before I squirrel away the tobacco for personal use, but this guy just dropped them. He sat down with his iced mocha and began rustling inside his jean shorts for his pack of American Spirits. As I was walking over towards him he fished the pack out and held them up against his mouth, the knuckle of his right pointer finger pressed against the bottom of his nose, and just let go of them. Ten minutes later he simply got up and took his mug away with him, leaving me with 14 un-smoked fags.

I brought a cigarette to my lips and lit it, letting my inventory of smokes dwindle to thirteen. Thirteen being such an unlucky number, I instantly thrust another cigarette into Lucas’ mouth and lit that, content with the untold number of bad omens I had just avoided. As soon as I had taken my first real drag (the first puff doesn’t count because you’re too busy fiddling with the lighter and making sure it’s properly lit) the waitress waddled over towards our booth and began screeching in some sort of gibberish that sounded Arabic in origin. The woman, May as her nametag would lead us to believe, was a frighteningly large black woman. As hyperbolic as that description sounds, May’ girth was truly horrific, especially for a man in my condition. I can at least say that she was fair in her distribution of rage, scaring the both of us into an equal state of paranoia and panic. After May was done with me she turned around to screech at Lucas and give him an equal share of the horror. I swear I heard her belch out the phrase, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead,” but I think that can be chalked up to the drugs entering the right wing of my brain where the library is located. I’m just thankful the juice made a beeline for Conrad, building on the savage environs of the Steak & Shake. Had I heard the voice of Heathcliffe from Wuthering Heights emanating from that woman’s mouth I would have been in for a real bad trip.

In the middle of her tirade, May accidentally stepped over an air-conditioning grate that billowed cold air up her skirt. This was one of the first signs of the apocalypse; any sight that repulsive had to have been sent by the Antichrist, or at least Judas. Even the quickest of glances showed that this woman hadn’t shaved her legs in weeks, a sort of advanced, prickly stubble running everywhere. I felt like I was looking at two giant honey-baked hams that had been dyed a dark brown and covered with hair. It was The Seven Year Itch gone terribly, terribly wrong. I was holding up well considering the circumstances, but Lucas wasn’t fairing as well. Our plus-sized aggressor had thrown him for a loop and, to be quite blunt, Lucas was tripping balls. He couldn’t stop staring at the disgusting spectacle that was May’s legs, a gesture that May was none to pleased with. She frantically pushed down her skirt and escalated her berating of Lucas to the brink of physical violence. Sensing danger and knowing that Lucas was beyond repair, I knew I had to do something drastically disturbing. When May cocked her hand back to slap the lifeblood out of Lucas, I extinguished my cigarette on the laminated menu and held the butt in front of my face between my thumb and forefinger. The stench of burnt laminate got May’s attention, at which point I did the only thing I could do: I ate the butt. To rave like a lunatic is commonplace and something May was surely used to dealing with. However, there are very few people in this world that can cope with an act of lunacy. It’s the next step and May was most assuredly not ready to take that step. As I chewed the burnt tobacco shavings and sucked the filter down my gullet, I stared at my charred menu while May began pacing back and forth. Still not looking at May, I ordered my meal, asking for a banana milkshake, two Frisco melts, and onion rings. May informed me that they didn’t serve Frisco melts. I informed May that she was wrong and they did in fact serve Frisco melts but she was just too pigheaded to realize it. Lucas ordered a crock of baked beans and some cottage cheese, but was in no state to convey such an order verbally so I translated for him. May walked away a broken woman and upon reaching the kitchen area dipped her left hand in a vat of boiling vegetable oil. The old axiom, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” applied in both the metaphoric and literal senses for May, as she ran through a plate-glass window at the front of the restaurant.

Fifteen minutes later another waitress brought out my milkshake and onion rings along with two bacon cheeseburgers. Apparently May hadn’t told her about the Frisco melts, but I was no longer hungry and it was moot point. Lucas was repulsed by the cottage cheese and demanded that more pineapples be added to it. After the waitress had gone back to fetch Lucas his extra garnish of fruit I suggested that we shag ass. I downed my milkshake and Lucas picked up his baked beans. He was very taken by the burnt brown porcelain crock and insisted that he could only eat the beans in this specific container. However, being the consummate gentleman, Lucas opted not to take any silverware with him. “Don’t worry about it man,” he groaned. “I’ve got some spoons in the glove compartment.”

Once again, unedited first draft.

Where the???What in the???

2006-07-07T20:09:50Z

If you read this and think it came out of fucking nowhere, then I think I've done enough for one day:

2

The vial slides out of the bag and spirals around on some linoleum floor tiles, the pale brown fluid swishing around its insides. Turn on the burner to 350 and bend over to pick up the goods and place them on the kitchen counter next to pig-shaped, his and hers salt and pepper shakers; don’t want Lucas getting $100 of unadulterated escapism stuck on the sole of his Wolverine work boots. Bottom drawer: cast-iron soup toureen with the red handle; Medicine cabinet: double-ply gauze, cotton balls, and Hydrogen Peroxide. Head over to the knife block for the paring knife. No, put the toureen on the burner first, empty out the vial into it, then get the paring knife. The viscosity of the liquid is sickening, slowly oozing down the vial and dripping drop by drop into the toureen. Each droplet hangs onto the lip of the vial expanding ever-so-slowly as gravity impregnates it with more fluid, causing what looks like Worcester sauce to spill into the pan. With each new drop a phosphorescent plume of blue smoke rises towards the kitchen ceiling, causing a thick haze to form in the room like the kitchen’s private ozone layer. Pop out the bottom of the vial and blow into it, getting every last millimeter of juice into the toureen: Life is a terrible thing to waste, but if must be wasted it should be done with consummate professionalism and efficiency.

Now for the paring knife, stained a burnt brown, blade and handle held together with electrical tape as a result of years of improper and unconventional use. The liquid has begun to expand in the toureen, the heat causing enzymes to burst, allowing the water to seep out and swish around the bottom of the toureen. In the center lies a single jet black blob more akin to magma then any liquid that comes to mind. Put on the oven mitt and slowly drain the water out of the toureen and into the sink, holding in the fruits of my labor with a metal spatula. No use trying needles and surgical tubing. There hasn’t been a clean vein in this house since the Clinton administration, hence, the paring knife. Roll up the right jean leg up to the kneecap and douse the knife with hydrogen peroxide. Gauze and cotton balls at the ready, knife in hand, and delicious blackness simmering on the stove.

One stroke, the back of my calf spurts red all over the stove-front before gauze is applied. Make sure the spatula is heavy with it, rip off the gauze and paste the stuff on my leg like a plumber caulking a bathtub. All I feel is heat. Heat coursing through my leg, up my thigh, taking a slight detour at my crotch, and then straight up to the brain. I am a human thermometer with mercury rising all through my tendons and arteries. The blood from my calf swirls with the drug, but no colors change. The emptiness of the drug acts as a black hole, sucking up anything it comes in contact with, be it the blood from my leg or the fluid in my skull.

Time to lie down for a second; we’ll turn off the burner eventually. We, Lucas, standing over me; My voice tells him the stuff is ready, but my ears don’t hear it. My life is a movie on mute. Lucas violently dunks the knife in the Hydrogen Peroxide to cleanse it. I’ll have to get a new bottle later on…Is he using his forehead? I should have thought of that; more direct access. He doesn’t bother to clean the spatula, just shoves the stuff right in his profusely bleeding ajna chakra and fills his skull with cotton balls, forgoing the gauze in favor of a blue and purple paisley bandana. Lucas too slumps to the floor and his eyes begin fluttering. The drug now has its own gravitational pull towards the back of Lucas’ head, sucking cotton balls and the paisley bandana inside his forehead. His third eye is now a charred crater the size of a golf ball, Schlesinger 7 I think.

My veins have rebelled against my right calf and have organized a mass suicide, ripping their fibers from my bone in protest. Some of the veins fail in their attempt and get snared by my blood-drenched shin hairs, but most make it off the side and take root in the linoleum. The veins become like the base of the ancient giving tree, making my leg the trunk in the process. Unable to move my right leg, I pivoted around on it and switched off the burner with a flailing hand whose arc causes me to sprawl face down on the linoleum.

When I lifted my head I saw Lucas grinding his teeth madly against the metal spatula as the hole in his head grew bigger. Every single throbbing capillary could be seen slowly engulfing the whites of his eyes. His body, rocking back and forth to the rhythm of his head, was drenched in a sweat that had coated him like wood varnish. All the sweat from his scalp and forehead began to pour into his chakra crater, creating a saltwater pool above his brow. We both fell onto our sides facing one another, glazed expressions gracing our respective visages. As Lucas began to open his mouth, a small crack at the bottom of his forehead pool began expanding down his face cutting through nose cartilage and jawbones in accelerated decay. After the crack had spread all across his face, the left side of what used to be Lucas’ nose fell to the floor. He tried placing it back on, but that only added to the deterioration causing the other side of his nose to drop. It was a sadistic game of Mister Potato Head and I gleefully scooped up his writhing lips and placed them on his chest. The sight of a mouth attempting to talk with a nipple in its center is enough to make your normal junky lose focus, lose control; but I left the amateur ranks years ago and can handle such egregious breeches of rational action.

However, no man alive can withstand his best friends face splitting in two to reveal a hovel of maggots, fruit flies, and various unwanted cephalopods; and I am alive. After Lucas peeled off the last of his facial tissue I lost control and made a break for the door, but my leg was still planted to the ground. I reached up to grab the paring knife and began wildly swinging it at my calf muscles, trying to clip any rogue veins. As soon as Lucas passed out all of his facial vermin made a mad dash for me and I spent the next 30 minutes swatting at them with the soup toureen…

Once again, totally unedited first draft stuff.

Liberation...

2006-07-05T20:36:35Z

Well, I have finally invoked the Dionysian muse and have written like banshee from Hades all bloody afternoon. Here is the result, in an easily digestible dose. The drug use in this will get frightening, but currently you can enjoy inner monologues about cereal:

1

I’m currently downing my 19th bowl of Raisin Bran in the past six days. That’s Raisin Bran 3 meals a day for what threatens to be a week solid. My roommate spent all $125 of our food money at Costco on a 121-pack of Post Raisin Bran, which lies split open on the floor of our living room. I cursed him endlessly for his purchase of Post Raisin Bran and not Kellogg, which is obviously the superior bran. His argument that Post contained Sun-Maid Raisins pales in comparison to the inescapable truth that Kellogg’s has the “Two Scoops” sun mascot, which is far more aesthetically pleasing. The 11 x 11 set of boxes has been reduced by about a third since the initial purchase, and, seeing as by next payday isn’t for another week, we must continue eating this swill without the aid of milk. You either eat it dry or douse it in tap water, which aids only in digestibility and not in flavor. On the plus side, the high quantity of fiber in the bran has made my bowel movements extraordinarily smooth and precise. You could set a railway time table to the consistency of my restroom visits. However, I fear that this bran-based diet is simply flowing through my body denying it of precious proteins and vitamins. If I contract scurvy at any time during the next 30 days I will sue the Costco Corporation for a bloody mint. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’re hoping to become violently ill and Vitamin C deficient.

The house we rented for the summer would be quite choice if it had a hot water heater or an air conditioner. As it is we take freezing cold showers and sit on the couch watching the droplets of water sizzle on our bodies and evaporate in the cruel July heat. When agreeing to come to Iowa for the summer, I was under the impression that Midwestern summers were at least tolerable. Back then my mental rolodex wasn’t privy to the concept of humidity and the difference between the “temperature” and “what it feels like.” The hottest it’s gotten this summer is 95 degrees, but on that day it “felt” like it was 110. The humidity is so thick in this God-forsaken plain state that you have to wade through while you walk, pushing aside clumps of air as you meander down the sidewalk. It’s a rare occasion when you can stand outside for over 10 minutes without collapsing from exhaustion. At least it’s rare for me, but the bran-diet might have something to do with that too.

The most clothing I ever wear here is a pair of Bermuda shorts and a wife-beater. Normally I just lie around in my boxers covered in sweat, but jaunts into the outside world require a bit more coverage. I’m philosophically opposed to the wife-beater on the basis of its misogynistic overtones and white-trash associations, but damn if they don’t cool you off better than any piece of clothing I can find. Since I don’t have to go into town for at least another three hours to begin my night shift at Beaners, one of the few Midwestern coffee chains not to be royally bitch-slapped by our imperialist coffee-mongers in the great Northwest, I’m still clad only in a pair of plaid boxers. Every day I wake up expecting to get a call from my manager telling me that either a) I’ve been fired, b) The Grinnell, Iowa location of Beaners is being turned into a Wal-Mart, or c) Beaners has been bought out by Starbucks and all employees must now memorize a 175-page drink-list & etiquette manual, except for Arlo, who has been deemed unworthy of the title of “Barista” by Starbucks management. How Beaners has stayed open with a name like Beaners is beyond me. I know it’s referring to coffee beans, but it could just as easily refer to the janitorial staff. What, you think there aren’t any Mexicans in rural Iowa? Well, Grinnell has exactly one illegal Mexican immigrant, Raul, and he has chosen Beaners as his place of employment. I can’t tell whether this is genuine irony or the Alanis Morisette version, but either way it’s funny as hell. That’d be like the only Italian guy in a community busing tables at a Star Wars themed Olive Garden knockoff restaurant called Dagobah. On a more serious note, I’ve always been concerned with racism in popular feature films, and have many times wondered whether the planet of Dagobah in the Star Wars films was an underhanded shot at the Italian-American community. However, after much discussion I’ve decided to let George Lucas off the hook. The man wears far too much flannel to be any sort of white supremacist or fascist. If you look at militaristic, oppressive groups of society from the past 100 or so years you will see a direct correlation between fashion and action. The Nazi S.S., Mussolini’s minions, Communist Russia post-Lenin, the Ku Klux Klan: all of these organizations use heavily starched uniforms that are unpleasant for the wearer. It’s my own stipulation that part of the rage fomented by these groups was a direct result of the stiffness of their clothing. Any man who wears a versatile and loose-fitting material like flannel couldn’t possibly be a fascist.

He’s back, oh he is back, back, back, back, back. “Lucas, will you shag ass in here before I have a complete breakdown. Any more of this fucking bran and I’ll cut out my tongue.”
“Here you are my good sire. Just what the doctor would never have ordered, unless he worked in Beverly Hills.”
Oh, sweet lord. How the hell can a crumpled brown-paper bag look so bloody luminous. Open, open, open it up. “Where did you get this stuff anyway? I though the town was dry.”
“The town was dry you fuck-nut, I had to drive to Chicago to get it. That’s why I haven’t been home since Thursday, or did you not notice?”
“I noticed well enough, but I thought you were just out turning your dick black with that diseased harlot of yours, Lucille, or something or other…”
“Her name’s Deirdre and she’s not a fucking harlot.”
“But she is diseased.”
“I can’t argue that point, but it’s only a cold sore. Hell, my mother got cold sores from time to time.”
“Well, then your mother’s a tramp too. And what the hell kind of a name for a hooker is Deirdre anyway? Sounds like the name of some damned Ingrid Bergman character.”
“She’s not a hooker Godammit! And Deirdre was her dead grandmother’s name so just shut your vile mouth and thank Deirdre for the goods.”
“Wait a minute, your little guttersnipe drove you to Chicago for this?”
“You better fucking believe it.”
“Well, then. I believe a toast to young Deirdre is in order. Hell, I can’t say Deirdre with a straight face, I feel like I’m in a bad Tennessee Williams play. Umm, I’ll call her Dee-Dee. That’ll do nicely. A toast to Dee-Dee and her gas money.”
“Arlo, I split the gas money with her to make it even.”
“Damn it all, that money’s communal. Do you know what that means you egghead? Communal, as in that shit’s mine too and wasn’t meant to be given up to some floozy that has your Calvin’s in a twist.”
“If I didn’t give her the money then we’d be stuck with nothing.”
“Alright, but I expect to see Dee-Dee naked by the end of the week.”
“What?!”
“You heard me; my part of the payment. Reparations if you will, for the insufferable solitude I had to endure while you two were gallivanting around the Windy City.”
“How does Dee-Dee getting buck naked for you constitute reparations?”
“I don’t make the rules, I simply follow like a sheep to slaughter. If you want I could be naked too and get a bit of a nudist colony vibe going here.”
“Just keep your pants on and cook this shit up.”
“I can’t keep my pants on if I’m not wearing any you beast. And may I once again point out that I am acting the part of the cart-mule in this operation. One day I’m just going to keel over from exhaustion and you’ll kick me a KGB goon in a gulag. Then what’ll you do you oppressive mongrel?
“Will you shut the fuck up and turn the burner on before I whelp you.”
“Yes sir Mr. Goerring.”

Warning: this is highly un-edited

What am I doing, where am I going???

2006-07-03T20:30:04Z

I have come to the stark realization that I'm in the red as far as life is concerned. I seem to have a knack for failing at every turn in this twisted modernity of my generation. I misjudge the intentions of others, come up begging in any attempt at self-expression and art, not to mention my penchant for waiting...waiting for life to come to me and sitting idly by as it rushes past by isolated booth towards others more trying and persistent. At times I think I belong to a different age, as if I would've been better off growing up in some goddamned perverse sitcom version of the 50's. I'm like Richie Cunnigham only I do drugs and drink and don't own a letterman's jacket. On second thought, I'm more of a Ralph-Malph or a Potsy in this sick game. I set out to write this summer but have merely regressed into a pattern of lethargy, apathy, and escapism. I don't want to have to confront the life that greets me every morning, even though it is of my making. I fucked up royally and have resigned myself to permanent disillusionment. I'm an anomoly in this 21st century world of bacchanalia and disingenuousness. There is no help for my kind other than finding someone else of a similar constitution, which grows more and more remote by the second. The saying goes that people don't want their innocence back so much as they desire the process of losing it. By that token, J.D. Salinger and John Knowles can take their fucking innocence and run it off a cliff or a tree branch because my fall hurt and was sans buildup or pleasure. I realize I'm pessimmistically rambling right about now, but catharsis is called for and this might go a little while towards that aim. With that being said, I'm going to escape for a little bit and hope not to see the world again ere the first cock crow.

There goes another month...

2006-07-03T02:17:10Z

Stuff I've Been Reading

Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland

Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

Do You Have a Joint???It'd Be Better If You Did..

2006-06-25T02:44:51Z

Today I woke up at 11:00 A.M. to watch the match between Germany and Sweden (For the record, the forward pair of Klose and Bodolski along with Ballack in the middle, might be good enough to get Germany to the finals. Germany beat Sweden 2-0.) After I had eaten a bowl of Lucky Charms, made myself some coffee, I watched the game 'til 1:00 and then took a shower, where I listened to a mixtape that I had made for Smeemo, featuring Rufus Wainwright, Blind Melon, Ted Leo & The Rx, and Badly Drawn Boy. I then drove down into town, smoking a Menthol Camel Light on the way there.

When I reached Front Street I first went into Horizon Books, where I contemplated buying Please Kill Me!" by Leg McNeil, but ended up getting Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I then went to a head shop where I purcashed 3 dollars-worth of Frankencense scented Incense and bought my very first piece. She's a glass pipe that's about 6 inches long with a dome-like knob on the end and a shape that resembles a really tall and slender genie's bottle or the insides of a Grandfather Clock. I named her Janis because the pyschadelic patterns of the glass remind me of the album cover of Janis Joplin's Pearl. I then went to get a cup of coffee at a local cafe where I finished reading The Merchant of Venice. I wanted to have a cigarette with my coffee, but I left my lighter in my car. Later on, I got up and asked a woman who was smoking if I could have a light. She said sure, but only had a book of matches on her. While attempting to light the cigarette with my 4th match, I let the lit match get too close to the others and the entire matchbook went up in flames almost singing my hand in the process. I ended up lighting my cigarette on her ash, with the added statement that "I hope I don't get any lipstick on the end." This statement made no sense to me because her lips were on her filter and to get any lipstick on my cigarette she would have to swallow hers whole. This kind of shit happens to me all the time.

Then I bought a blue sweater-shirt form a vintage clothing shop for $13, got a new tank of gas, and went home. After a dinner of cherries and potato wedges I worked out and my Dad suggested we get a movie, so went out and rented The Family Stone. I had a some more coffee and smoked another camel before sitting down to the movie. The Family Stone was very enjoyable and well worth the purchase. I took a test-drive with Janis while sitting on the deck starring at Lake Michigan after the movie was over. And now I'm doing this.

i_need_the_eggs @ 2006-06-19T13:02:00

2006-06-19T17:05:27Z

Finally got the rejection letter from The Louisville Review after nine months and one pseudo-accpetance letter. Grrreeeaatttt.

Hey Y'all, Watch This...

2006-06-10T21:44:45Z

Here's my latest little story, which is currently untitled and UNEDITED...I never edit things til way after they're finished and I haven't even re-read this story yet. Hope it don't blow...

When I entered high school liquor became an increasingly prominent feature in my life. I don’t quite know how it happened or what it was about being a high school freshman that served as a catalyst to the introduction of booze into my world, but the same thing happened with most of my friends, leading me to believe that it was probably hormonal. Regardless of why I started drinking, the byproducts of it have put me in a genderless, equal-opportunity fraternity of once, future, and currently intoxicated.--(The rhetoric of this piece so far is a bit misleading, as it gives the impression that I’m probably a raging alcoholic who has frequent “liquid breakfasts” and is on a first-name basis with the owner of the local pony keg. For both the benefit of factual accuracy and my parents mental health, I think it’s important to note that I’m merely a casual drinker who has a tolerance closer to that of a girl scout than that of Slash from Guns ‘N Roses.)-- Seeing as how the Teetotalers lost their political clout over a century ago and with prohibition a distant memory, this fraternity is rather far-reaching. It’s probably the only club in the world that has more members than abstainers. This group includes everybody from the 14-year old kid guiltily sneaking his first sip of bourbon out of his folks’ liquor cabinet to the chronic Alki who’s been in and out of rehab more times than Liz Taylor’s been hitched. Being a club of such grand scale, I think it’s necessary to give the organization a nice, spiffy acronym like S.P.A.B: The Society for the Promotion of Alcoholic Beverages. As for a slogan, I think it would be nice to channel the spirit of Karl Marx, a man who looked like a German hophead if I ever saw one, and use “Drunkards of the world unite!” as our battle cry. The only stipulation for membership is that you need to have been drunk once in your life, and the one thing needed to maintain that membership is the telling of drunken tales.

In the 21st century incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah that we call western civilization, the “drunk tale” has become our oral tradition. Once you enter high school, odds are one out of every ten stories you hear start with “Dude, I was so wasted”, “What’d I do last night—‘cause I don’t remember shit”, or “So we were just sitting back having some (insert drink here) and…” During your college years this ratio will jump from 1:10 to about 1:3 and the topic sentence of “I had no idea what that stuff was last night, but I think I’m blind in my left eye” will be used with more frequency. Stories of random drunkenness have the wonderful quality of being repetitive, but rarely boring. Most drunk tales start with a bare bones structure that has been used millions of times over, but then take that premise in new directions over time. Just like the oral histories of the ancient Greeks, drunk stories evolve from generation to generation, with each new group of hangover victims leaving their distinct mark. The Greeks had Homer and we have the guy bragging about how he did four keg-stands in fifteen minutes and then vomited in line at White Castle. Not exactly a match of equals, but we’ll take what we can get at S.P.A.B.

For me, the best stories are the ones about the first or second time out drinking when people have low tolerances and high levels of inexperience and naiveté. This might sound a little sick, but the more fucked up a person gets, the better the story is. No one wants to hear a story that crescendos and then abruptly ends with, “and then I went to bed.” What I want in a drunk tale is some combination of public lewdness, complete loss of inhibition and/or bowels, and humiliating experiences; the more embarrassing the better. Another great aspect of the culture of drunk storytelling is that it purges the participant of their past indiscretions by airing them out in public. If you can laugh about that time you did 6 shots of Jaegermeister and hit on an elderly man waiting at the bus stop, you’re better off than if you keep it bottled inside. Plus, I’m better off for having heard the story; everyone wins.

To prove the earnestness of my convictions I’ll recount my first encounters with booze, much to the chagrin of my ever-dwindling dignity. My first time drinking is fairly straight instance of pillaging the liquor reservoirs of our parents. One of my friends was the youngest child of a man in the middle of his second marriage who had 4 kids with his first wife, 2 with the second, and more than 7 decades of life on the books. To say he was a neglectful parent would be cruel and unfair. It was more that he was expected to be a father at an age when he should rightly be reveling in all the joys of being a grandparent: i.e. being able to dote on the kids and play with them without any responsibility or disciplinary measures expected of him. His father was the victim of a familial clerical error that sent him to the same job twice, and he wasn’t quite up to a second go-round at the whole fatherhood thing. What his mother’s excuse was I have very little idea other than relative incompetence. No disrespect intended here, but she had an airy quality about her that made it seem like she never resided in the present. She was the type of person who would start up a conversation with you only to immediately lose interest and drift off into the ether while she continued talking. She most likely had some deep problems occupying her mind, but being a fourteen year old kid I simply thought she was loopy.

As a prime indicator of their parental ineptitude, they let my friend move his bedroom down into their basement with his bed resting directly opposite their unlocked and fully stocked liquor cabinet. One night when a few of us were chilling in his basement, someone suggested we get shit-faced. Being a newbie, I was weaned on very weak screwdrivers for an hour or so until we collectively deemed ourselves drunk enough to start doing shots. This is when the dreaded bottle of Ouzo out for consumption. His father being first generation Greco-American, this very Mediterranean beverage was in great supply. For those who haven’t tasted Ouzo, it’s a lot like a combination of natural black licorice and vodka, and contains a deceptively high proof. Before I knew it we were all lying on his cold linoleum floor bitching about how evil the fairer sex were. I of course joined in the chorus of lamentation despite the fact that in ninth grade the most action I’d ever gotten was during a rather lackluster game of seven minutes in heaven. We all woke up the next morning with heads throbbing and I slowly began walking the 3 miles make to my house, cursing the satanic Ouzo all the way back. To this day I can’t drink an anisette based liquor without cringing a little bit.

I only recount that evening as a prelude to the hangover from hell that accompanied my second night of drinking. It probably would’ve been much better if I got so shit-faced that I ended up relieving the contents of my stomach in the nearest toilet. The lingering peptic acid trickling down my throat and dribbling off my chin would have taught me a sound lesson about the potency of hard booze and instilled me with the grudging respect that liquor leaves on anyone who abuses it. Sadly, I left that night unscathed and blissfully ignorant of how severely liquor could tie my stomach lining into knots. My body would pay in spades for that ignorance.

It was a couple of weeks until I had the chance to drink again. I was hanging out at my best friend Alec’s house one Saturday night when we were invited to a party that some upperclassmen were throwing. Luckily for us Alec was staying with his more liberal-minded Dad that weekend. His Dad was a good man, but he tried a bit too hard to be buddy-buddy with his son, which manifested itself in a level of leniency that probably would have put him out of the running for father-of-the-year. Even at the age of 15 I knew that letting two ninth-graders get picked up for a party that began at 11:30 in the evening wasn’t the best idea. Alec’s Dad knew this as well, but with the proper combination of adolescent whining and false reassurance Alec managed to get his Dad to acquiesce. Our evening was predicated entirely on the premise that there would be a parent present at the party, which was in fact true. The only caveat was that the parent was a forty-something deadbeat mom who drank Vodka like water and taught all of her son’s friends how to properly roll a joint. His Dad wasn’t privy to this information and let us go.

At the time I had never been to a genuine “party” before and had butterflies in my stomach during the car ride over. We were picked up by a possibly the least badass guy in the junior class, evidenced by the fact that he was stuck with the unenviable job of playing chauffeur for two freshmen. Alec and I were going to make up a large portion of the underclassmen at the party and I was determined not to look like a pantywaist, or even someone who would use a term like “pantywaist” in everyday conversation. I thought it imperative that I prove my mettle by holding my liquor like a man, an act which was about as likely as the Washington Generals beating the Harlem Globetrotters. As we pulled up to the house I was frightened by my surroundings. The party house was in a fairly shady neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati and very urban. Being a child of the suburbs, the sight of ’85 Cutlass Supremes blasting DMX and homeless men drinking out of brown paper bags on the corner of the local 7-11 was a bit of a change. After getting over my minor culture shock, I walked up to the house with Alec and entered the house with the familiar stutter-step of someone who’s unsure he belongs in the place he’s about to enter. I knew next to no one at the party and was adequately intimidated by the plethora of upperclassmen staring at me. At least I had convinced myself that they were all staring at me and I squeezed my way through a sea of firmly clutched beers into the kitchen. In the kitchen was the host’s mother, who was talking in Spanish to what I can only assume was her boyfriend and pounding back what I can only assume was one in a very long line of cocktails that she had imbibed that night. I wandered over to the kitchen counter and picked up a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft apprehensively. I glanced over at the mother, then back at the beer, and once more at the mother, but her eyes never once strayed my way. As I opened the bottle of MGD I was still in awe at the parental neglect I had just been witness to. If I had so much looked at a beer the wrong way when I was fifteen my mom would have flipped a shit. This woman treated my underage drinking like I was just grabbing a bottle of Sunny D. This was both unbelievably cool and somewhat unnerving.

I walked down a flight of stairs and entered what was a startlingly dank basement. It looked more like the boiler room from Nightmare on Elm Street than the bottom floor of someone’s house. The room was nothing but a collection of pipes entering and exiting the ceilings and walls of a dusty concrete box, with a giant drain in the middle of the floor. That drain will prove to be important later on. To the left of the staircase was a door that led to the more sanitary wing of the basement. Inside the door was a small area about the size of a two-person dorm room, and was filled with ratty, but surprisingly comfortable couches along with a table and chairs in the center. When I went into the room I was relieved to find Bill McGrath sitting at the table in front of me. Bill was the older brother of Pat McGrath, one of my good friends in my own grade, so I knew Bill fairly well from spending a good deal of time at his house. Bill is a remarkably good-tempered man as are his brother and father. Bill’s mother, Linda, is, to put it as nicely as possible, a strong-willed woman from New Jersey. This woman should be forced to wear one of those BIOHAZARD stickers on her person at all times, as she is a combustible entity that rivals nitroglycerin. Multiple times during my adolescence my I bore this woman’s wrath and had to be put up in sick bay for days afterwards. In her defense, I most likely deserved the verbal assault every time she lashed out at me, and her outbursts are infinitely entertaining when aimed at people other than me. Plus she makes bitchin’ chocolate chip pancakes.

Bill, however, received none of his mother’s unbridled rage from the McGrath family gene pool, and was jovial 24-7. When I sat down at the table across from him, Bill was brushing back his long, and fairly greasy, black hair while looking askance at a couple going at it on the couch next to us. I vaguely new the guy on the couch—I think he was Argentinean—and I had no clue who the girl was, but knew that she was far too good looking to be with that guy. Bill was holding a handle of Smirnoff in his hand and asked me if I wanted to do shots with him. I of course said “yes,” because I still needed to maintain my ever dwindling sense of machismo. Agreeing to this was a horrible idea for two reasons. First off, I had never done shots before and had no idea how quickly they will fuck you up or how many I needed to get me fucked up. The correct answer to the last question is probably about two because I was a lightweight in more ways than one. This leads directly to the second problem with this idea, which was the man I was doing shots with. Bill McGrath kept alive the validity of the stereotype that says the Irish can hold their liquor. However, I don’t think that Bill’s ancestry was the main reason that he could drink me under the table. I think it was more that, even though he was only 2 or 3 inches taller than me, Bill outweighed me by a good hundred pounds. Not only that, but the man was two years older than me and had a considerable advantage on the tolerance front.

That having been said, we began trading shots. The vodka tasted horrible in my mouth and I tried to wash the taste down with MGD, but I didn’t like the taste of beer either and it just compounded the nastiness in my mouth. I kept on taking shots because I didn’t want Bill to think I was a pussy and because I knew that this stuff would eventually get me crunk as hell. I tried to stop breathing in with my nose when I took the next couple of shots because I knew from my 7th grade science fair project that 70% of taste is related to smell. I probably should’ve done that project on varying blood-alcohol-contents based on weight, as that would have alerted me of the remarkable idiocy of what I was doing. After doing about 6 or 7 shots I picked up my nearly empty beer and slowly ambled out of the room and back up the stairs. I was in that wonderful early euphoric state of drunkenness where you still have limited control of your body and your head feels fuzzy like static on a TV screen. I grabbed another MGD off of the kitchen counter and went into the living room where Mallrats was playing. I plopped down on the floor immediately thinking, “I love Mallrats,” a reaction that I would have drunk or sober. Someone had a basket of pretzels that tasted abnormally salty like I was just eating the solid grains of salt that come on those doughy Super Pretzels at baseball games. This was especially unpleasant for me because I normally knock all the salt off of soft pretzels when I get them. In my disgust, I attempted to head upstairs to the bathroom, very clumsily stepping over the sea of bodies lying on the floor and the one unfortunate soul who had passed out on the steps. When I reached the bathroom I found it occupied, and being in no state to exercise patience, I made my way all the way back to the basement.

In the time that I had been upstairs the small basement den had become crammed with people. As I walked in I discovered that all the seats had been taken so I popped a squat next to the door, using the wall as a back rest. The air in the room was permeated by a now thin blue haze and had a rather odd smell to it which didn’t register in my mind. It’s very hard to describe exactly what pot smells like other than, well, pot. The only accurate descriptor I’ve ever heard used is that weed smells like a skunk, but not quite so offensive to the olfactory sensors. But ask anyone who’s ever smoked reefer to smell a little herb or residual smoke and they will identify it immediately as being weed. However, at the time of the party I had never even seen pot before and had no clue what the smell was. I looked around at the other people in the room and recognized no one save one of two juniors from my school, but thanks to the wonderfully calming effects of liquor I was at ease in the situation. Most of the kids were from the local arts school downtown and fit the bohemian mold rather nicely. Most of the guys either looked like wanna-be Rastafarians or groupies for the band Orgy, which for the pop culturally challenged means: black hair, black clothes, pale skin, piercings galore, and copious amounts of mascara. The women generally dressed in various modes of hippie chic, ranging from the flower child throwback look that emphasized poor hygiene and an absence of bras to the more Rasta-girl look that screams pothead to even the most casual onlooker. I, on the other hand, was wearing a sweater from American Eagle and a pair of khaki cargo pants, but I didn’t get one evil eye or snide remark about my preptastic attire. One great aspect of potheads is that they are some of the least judgmental people on the planet. Why do think Jamaicans are so nice and laid back? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because of their national GDP.

The guy sitting directly across from me was fiddling around with what I now know was joint. He looked a lot like a former US soccer star Alexi Lalas (you know, they guy with the flaming read hair and badass goatee) or the lead singer for The Spin Doctors. The man was very intent on his joint and didn’t look up for quite a long time. Anyone who says potheads are nihilists or slackers has obviously never seen them roll a J. These folk take a great deal of pride in their craft and spend hours perfecting their product with fingers as nimble as a weavers’. When he had finished rolling he lit the joint and began passing it around the room. I’d never so much as smoked a cigarette so when the duchy was passed to my right hand side I declined. In the state I was in I really didn’t need to take any hits, but my surroundings decided to make me take one. I’m not talking about peer pressure, but about hot-boxing. Before I knew it the room had become a microcosm of the Greenhouse Effect and the amount of vodka coursing through my system enabled a ridiculously potent contact high. After about 15 minutes of working to stay awake, I curled up and fell asleep on the floor.

An indeterminate amount of time later I was awakened by the basement den door being opened onto my crumpled body. Everyone in the room except two people on the couch had left the room and I decided it was time to go upstairs. I grabbed my beer and went back out into the main basement area and found that I had to pee really badly. As soon as the urge to urinate hit me I noticed a toilet standing right in front of me. It was as if God had known that I needed to piss and had manifested a toilet to please me, which was odd seeing as I hadn’t been to church in quite some time and was sinning like a banshee that night. I walked up to the toilet, unzipped my fly, and let forth a healthy stream of urine into the toilet. After about fifteen seconds some guy walked right past me and into the basement den. It was then that I realized that there wasn’t a door to this bathroom. As a matter of fact, this wasn’t even a bathroom. It was simply a toilet sitting in the middle of his basement. These thoughts certainly didn’t keep me from relieving myself and I continued to look around as a peed. I glanced down and saw a steady stream of liquid running down the basement floor towards the storm drain in the center of the room. My brain recognized that it was my urine flowing down this mans floor and that this toilet wasn’t connected to anything, but these realizations didn’t provoke any action. I finished peeing and zipped myself up, not neglecting to flush the non-working toilet before I went upstairs. Oddly enough, Alec did the same thing later on that night, proving conclusively that drunks have no concept of internal plumbing.

After my surprisingly unsanitary bathroom break I stumbled back upstairs to the living room where everyone had already begun to pass out. I found an open spot where I could sit down and started watching TV. I was holding on to the same beer that I had picked up in a kitchen more than an hour earlier. I’m not sure if this is a widely experienced phenomenon or simply one of my personal idiosyncrasies, but after I reach a certain level of drunkenness, I find that the act of drinking requires a great deal of work. The process of actually lifting the bottle to my mouth becomes an inordinately difficult task and with every gulp I feel like I’ve just exerted all the energy that my body contains. At that time, drinking that bottle of MGD made me feel like I was on a chain gang slowly chipping away in a rock quarry, each sip knocking off another tiny sliver of shale. It took about 15 minutes of this backbreaking work before I blacked out. At least I assume that I blacked out because when I awoke I was lying asleep underneath a grand piano and the party had died. Alec was shaking my shoulder telling me that we had to go, which even in my drunken haze didn’t make to much sense seeing as neither of us had a car. As it turned out woman who used to go to our high school had taken pity on our neophyte asses and offered to let us sleep it off over in her dorm room at UC.

From that point on my memory has become fairly blurred. However, I am quite sure that my coordination was beyond repair. When we arrived at her dorm complex the woman warned us to stay quiet and try to act normal. This advice fell on very drunk deaf ears. My sense of balance was so bad that I couldn’t avoid hitting the cement guard rails in a parking garage road that was about twenty feet in width. I suspect that I took about 4 steps sideways for every one step forward, and that was with some assistance from Alec and the woman. I also neglected to keep quiet, rambling on like, well, a 15 year old who’s never been drunk to the point of temporary retardation before. As soon as we reached her room I passed out on the floor with all my clothes on and my head resting on a textbook like it was a pillow. I was awakened at 7 o’clock in the morning, once again by the process of shaking me and calling my name, because we had to get out of the dorm before people started milling around. Apparently it’s poor form to have two fifteen year old boys sleeping in your dorm room. Damn puritanical society and it’s stigmatization of teenage sexual relations making me get up at the ass-crack of dawn. Because of this I found myself stumbling down the same parking garage road with no recollection of having seen it before and nursing a hangover that would make even Keith Richards reel a bit. The drive back to Alec’s house was deathly silent, I suspect because all our attention was focused on our throbbing temples. The woman let us off on the side of the road as it lay directly between Alec’s house and mine. We exchanged beleaguered farewells and trudged on home.

As soon as I got in my house I bee lined to the refrigerator and chugged about a quart of orange juice, fully intending to go fall into bed and not wake up until Christmas at the earliest. When I turned around I found my mom standing in the kitchen and tried to think of the least confrontational path up to my room. As I was walking out of the kitchen, my mom informed me that I a dentists appointment, that morning, at 9:30. It was at around that time that I think I lost any vestige of belief in a loving god that remained in my psyche and resigned myself to the life of a cynic. From a theological viewpoint the dentists’ appointment could be seen as an appropriate punishment for my sins of the previous night, namely invoking the god Bacchus with unhealthy frequency. However, God gave his son the ability to change water into booze and I view any divine punishment of mortal drinking habits to be hypocritical and reeking of nepotism.
With my newfound agnosticism in hand my mother drove me downtown to see my dentist and his dreaded assistant. Once there the assistant proceeded to poke, prod, pull, scrape, and buffer my teeth and gums in a manner that suggested a deep admiration for the Marquis de Sade. As I lay back in the banana yellow leather-coated dentists’ chair, listening to infuriating soft rock and having my molars violated while my frontal lobes attempted to burst through my forehead, I vowed never to drink again. I am now quite familiar with this sentiment and get it every now and then if I let myself go a bit too much. However, the hideous confines of the dentists’ office are to the hangover victim as Kryptonite is to Superman. After this experience I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for almost a year, much to the relief of my liver.

Thankfully I later faced my fears and now can drink again. I personally think it should be produced my lifetime as a made-for-TV movie, but, alas, I am not a woman who has experienced spousal abuse or a member of the cast of Designing Women, so my suggestion was cut down. That being said, I still think this is a good enough drunk story and one that serves a dual purpose. Not only is it a fun yarn to tell to all your friends, but it’s also a useful parenting tool. I don’t know about you, but the second my kid turns fourteen I’m going to get him or her shit-faced on a bottle of Cinnamon Schnapps and schedule a 6:55 dentists appointment for the next morning. That way they’ll have a healthy respect for alcohol and the oral tradition will be passed on to another generation.

Summerbaby...

2006-05-31T04:53:17Z

Stuff I've Been Reading

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

No Exit and The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre

Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel

Ashtrays filling up with smoke...

2006-05-22T05:35:10Z

This summer I planned to write something grander and more ambitious than anything I had attempted before. What with the countless hours of free time at my disposal, pumping out the next great novel should be nothing more than typing a few thousand words on a keyboard. However, after 17 days I've put exactly zero words to paper, consumed by thoughts and ideas that stubbornly refuse to congeal effortlessly as I had hoped they would. I couldn't even decide on the proper medium for my piece. I flip-flopped between novel, short story, memoir, and play on nearly a daily basis. At one point I had even decided to rework an ancient Greek tragedy before thinking better of it. I have since come to the conclusion that the more I fret over the supposed profundity of what I'm writing, the more I'll simply fret. So, I'm just going to set out to write with no length or definite destination; hopefully the framework will do. But, until I have something concrete, I figured I'd post a lil' paper I wrote for my bastard of a Rhetoric professor. Somehow I have the feeling she didn't like it, but y'all might:

The only book I ever stole was The Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was rather fitting because it’s something Holden Caulfield would’ve done. I once considered making little beaded bracelets inscribed with WWHD (What Would Holden Do), but on second thought I realized the idea was totally phony and scrapped it. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that had a really tangible effect on my life, but not in some trite “this book spoke to me” way. My adolescent life didn’t run parallel to that of Holden’s, although one of my friends’, Ben Braverman, did. He’s currently working at Mother Theresa’s hospital in Calcutta for a semester. I guess if you can’t catch the kids before they fall off the rye-laden cliff, you can at least lick their wounds when they hit the ground. I also didn’t change my worldview as a result of the book, but that’s not saying much with The Catcher in the Rye. You see more of that kind of things in kids who read a little bit of Herman Hesse and are drawn to Buddhism like a moth to the flame or someone who became a hardcore vegan after reading The Jungle (I myself had a bratwurst). For me, The Catcher in the Rye simply wove its way into my life like almost all the other books I’ve read, but, much like Holden, wouldn’t go away until I took proper notice of it.

I first came across The Catcher in the Rye when I was a freshman in high school and I could’ve cared less. I was at the tender age of 15, which is given the label of “tender” for the constant soreness I felt in my scrotum due to daily, impromptu “nut-shots” given out amongst my friends. I highly doubt that there could’ve been a worse time in my adolescent development for the Jackass movie to come out and my (probably) low sperm count wholeheartedly agrees. Anyway, I wasn’t exactly at an age where I cared too terribly about literature. At my school, freshman year was known as the year of the fall from innocence. Not for the kids mind you, that plunge probably took place sometime in middle-school for most of us thanks to the combination of feline curiosity, raging hormones, and our parents stocked liquor cabinets. This fall from innocence referred to the fact that practically every book we read in freshman English had to do with young prep-school boys falling from innocence. To be fair only two of the books we read that year followed that theme. The other two, Kaye Gibbon’s Ellen Foster and some book that I only read 40 pages of titled Two Old Women, were simply horrible and I have therefore tried to wipe them from my memory to no avail. Why I can’t remember the details of the 100 years war, but I still know that one of the two old women was named Chi’dzidyack enrages me. However, the two good books we read that year were A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye. A Separate Peace is a great book and John Knowles is certainly one of the best authors of his generation, but I can think of no other novel in which metaphor and action are so directly linked. Finny literally falls, or if you want to get into semantics, “pushed” from a tree branch so that he can metaphorically lose his innocence and his ability to walk properly. We read this in the beginning of the year and most my friends would have to wait until spring to get to The Catcher in the Rye, but not me.

Ninth grade was the first year that I began acting and like almost all things that become integral parts of my life, it happened partially by chance. I’d never been to keen on acting, although I liked improv because it allowed me to run my mouth and crack jokes in the middle of the school day, for credit. In the spring of my eighth grade year I tried out for Our Town on a whim because the middle school drama teacher wouldn’t stop hounding me about it and I wanted to hang out with my friends in the play. I assumed that I’d get a bit part with about 3 lines so I could just show up and hang out dick around with my friends, but I ended up getting the lead part playing George. Very soon afterwards I told the director that I wanted out so that I could play baseball. The woman has yet to forgive me for backing out and I stopped playing baseball after ninth grade because I realized I was scared of the ball; I didn’t get the chance to play a lead again until the 2nd semester of my senior year. Overall, I still stand behind my decision.

The one good thing to come out of all this mess was that it influenced me to take Acting I as my elective freshman year instead of an art or music class. My teacher that year, and for the majority of my high school life was Patti Flanigan. Patti is the best director I have ever worked with and more knowledgeable about theatre than most university professors. She is also borderline insane and rather flaky at times. As a freshman, having her as your teacher is frightening. Patti is somewhat of an institution at the school and her reputation precedes her with a mythical quality much like Icabod Crane or the Easter Bunny. When she first walked into class with her shoulder-blade length white hair that was yellowed from 4 decades of chain smoking Carlton menthols, extremely pasty Irish complexion, and shabby looking jeans and t-shirt that was unlike anything I had ever seen a teacher wear before, I didn’t know what to do. After a few classes though, everyone became accustomed to Patti and was able to act naturally again. The first real project we had was a small scene with a partner that Patti would assign to us. They were the usual crop of scenes that lend themselves to beginning actors: Brighton Beach Memoirs, Of Mice and Men, etc… When Patti was doling out the scenes, she looked at me and just gave a little smirk as she reached over and grabbed a scene from The Catcher in the Rye and paired me up with Emily McDonough.

At this point in my life I had no idea what The Catcher in the Rye was about and had only heard of it in passing. In retrospect I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted that Patti saw me as Holden Caulfield. Anyway, when I looked at the photocopied script a few things started to congeal in my mind: hotel room…beautiful young woman…“$15 for the night, $5 for a throw”…Holy shit! That was when I realized that I was doing the prostitute from The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a wonder I didn’t wet myself when I turned over to look at Emily reading the script. You see, Emily McDonough was the sexiest girl in school, and I chose sexiest as an adjective for a reason. The points of who was the best-looking girl or the sluttiest girl in school were very much up for debate, but no one could argue the fact that Emily McDonough was so damn sultry she could make grown men faint. She was that girl in school who dated college guys as a freshman and it wasn’t weird because by all rights she should have been in college herself. I mean, technically she was only 15 years old, but she looked and carried her self like she was in her mid-twenties. I, on the other hand, had just recently been run over by the puberty bus and carried myself like a babbling idiot around anything with breasts. And I had to do a scene with her as a hooker. I was screwed.

In actuality, I never really had to act during the seen: I was Holden Caulfield. It was like method acting without all the research and hard work. I was already a sexually inexperienced teenager, so the reactions to a prostitute in the form of Emily McDonough coming on to me came out without much coaxing. After a few awkward read-throughs and dry runs we decided to meet during lunch so that we could do the scene without any interruptions. Well, she decided that we should meet at lunch; I merely stared like Odysseus looking at the Sirens while she spoke. When we met at lunch things went fairly well until we got into the actual blocking of the scene. For the uninitiated, blocking entails what movements the characters make during a scene. Business deals with smaller movements and idiosyncrasies; we’ll get to business later. If you’re unfamiliar with The Catcher in the Rye, I’ll just do a quick synopsis of what happens in this part of the book. Holden inadvertently agrees to have a hooker sent up to his room via the Elevator Operator, who is apparently a pimp in his spare time. When he gets back to his room, Holden immediately regrets his decision and tries to think of a way out of it. Eventually the hooker comes up to the room and Holden tries a myriad of excuses as to why he can’t have sex with the woman while she flirts with him trying to get her lay and pay. Later on, Holden gets the piss knocked out of him by the elevator pimp, but that happens after our scene is over.

So, things are going well at the beginning of the scene as I’m trying to stall for time and Emily is trying to get me into bed. Then I sit down on the grody old couch that serves as the bed for our scene and Emily comes over and sits on my lap. This comment is not meant to be misogynistic, but if you’re a woman reading this I don’t think you can fully grasp the reaction a hormonal 15-year old boy would have to this. The old saying goes that God gave man a brain and penis and not enough blood to run both. At this point in the scene my brain had been drained completely of blood while my friend downstairs was sanguine in the medieval way. For the scene, Emily had to keep on cooing in my ear; whispering in my ear and stroking my face while sitting on my lap. And I was supposed to want her out of my hotel room. Every single molecule in my body had been biologically conditioned to tell my brain that this moment is exactly what I want most in life, but the play requires me to go against the reasoning of nature and shove her off of me. My brain knew that this was what I was supposed to do, but sadly my dick didn’t. When I pushed Emily off of me and stood up to instruct her to leave, there was a terribly visible tent pitched in my cargo pants. I assume that Emily saw and was just too nice to say anything about it, but I had a serious problem. What would happen when I performed this in front of my classmates in a week? I couldn’t sprout wood in the middle of an acting class. The humiliation resulting from such an act would force me to switch schools and possibly move out of the tri-state area. I needed to find a way to out of this phallic hell-hole.

I briefly considered taping it to my leg, but that in and of itself is more embarrassing than having a hard-on in the first place. There was a kid on my middle school basketball team who used to tape his dick to the side of his leg before practices because the girls practiced at the same time as we did and he didn’t want any potential wardrobe malfunctions to spring up. Of course we eventually found out why he was always 5 minutes later to practice than the rest of the guys and he was officially branded with the label of freak. This kid wore tube socks that came up to the middle of his calves, had horrific hygiene, and was president of the chess club. Apologies to this kid and Gary Kasporov aside, I did not want to be this kid, so taping was out of the question. I was left with only my will-power, and maybe a little tucking back, to get me through.

When the day came I was petrified and wasn’t even thinking about acting. Stage fright never really entered the picture. I just needed to make sure my friends did see me with on stage as my dick tried to grab a nod for best supporting actor. I don’t remember how the scene started or any of the lines that I said. All I can remember that day was fighting as hard as humanly possible not to be turned on by Emily McDonough. As the couch/bed scene began the only thoughts racing through my head were something along the lines of, “She’s not that hot—She’s not that hot—She’s not that hot…Don’t look left! Just stare at the audience…Oh, shit…She is blowing in my ear. IT’S JUST THE WIND, DREW! JUST THE WIND!...OK, she’s touching my face…Just stay cool, stay cool,” and so on. The lines came out of my mouth from my subconscious alone because every ounce of energy in my body was going towards de-hornifying myself. Luckily for me, I made it through that scene and took acting again the next semester. I tried out for a show my sophomore year and am still acting in college. If I didn’t hide my woody in ninth grade I might’ve never gotten back up on stage again, but I managed to stop my penis’ attempts at career sabotage, which is why I can write about it today.

My affair with The Catcher in the Rye didn’t end there. As I already alluded to, I read the book in my freshman English class, but didn’t pay much attention to it. For starters, my teacher fell into the fairly typical category of hideous over-analyzer and almost ruined the book for me. And yes, it is entirely possible for a teacher to ruin a book for a student just as it’s possible for a teacher to bring a subject to life. This woman was so bad that she would actually analyze the movies we watched in class. She felt it was necessary to pause The Dead Poets Society during a transitional scene in order to inform us that the changing of color in the leaves in the shot represented the evolution of the boys into men. I felt it was necessary to take a Louisville Slugger to her knee caps, but according to the law it was not within my rights to do so.

I went the rest of my high school life thinking that The Catcher in the Rye was just another piece of overrated over-hyped bullshit that schools force-fed their students like Beowulf or The Old Man and the Sea. The summer before I went to college I decided to give Salinger another chance. I remembered not hating The Catcher in the Rye, but not having many favorable memories of it either. So I picked up my filched copy of the book sometime in August and started reading it again. Three days later I understood what as this babble about it being “the great American novel” was all about. The book was so funny and poignant and well-written, along with any other trite adjective you would use to describe a great novel. Why had it taken me two readings to figure this out? Well, there are two reasons.
First off, I don’t like reading books for school. It just takes all the enjoyment out of it for me. Schools make kids speed through books, sucking all the pleasure out along the way, and then once they’ve finished go back to the beginning and harp on every little detail until the students dry heave at the very mention of the novel. I’m a fairly slow reader and can’t read more than 25-30 pages at a time. When I read I’ll periodically go off on mental tangents based on a line or a scene in the book and I’ll act out every scene in the novel. As a brief example, right now I’m reading Crime & Punishment and I’ll zone out for 10 or 15 minutes thinking about a play I would right about the perfect crime, or trying to pinpoint exactly how Raskolnikov would deliver one of his lines. It’s this imaginative quality of reading that I love and that school never allows for. That’s why I will sometimes read on my own in lieu of doing an assigned reading. I think I’ll get more out of it and I’ll certainly have a better time reading it. I’ve read about 13 or 14 books this semester, and if I turned something in shoddily done, late, or completely blew it off, it was because I was reading a book I considered more worthwhile. My GPA has a different conception of worth.

Secondly is the fact that as a 15-year old, I couldn’t relate to anything Holden was doing. Any teacher who assigns The Catcher in the Rye before the 11th grade should be exiled to Siberia. Once you’ve actually snuck into a bar underage (or tried to), reading the scene where Holden gets shot down when he tries to buy a drink takes on a whole new meaning. After you’ve experienced all the horse-slop that high school throws at you and had the teacher who tries to pull you under his wing, then the word just jump off the page. A kid in ninth grade can’t appreciate these things just in the same way anyone born after 1989 can’t understand the Cold War. Experience is what makes The Catcher in the Rye so special, and after having gone through that station of life that Holden permanently occupies, it finally means something.

A lot of the culture surrounding books is fetishistic. There’s something about books that sets them apart from other forms of art like DVDs or CDs. Books have their own distinct smell and the wear down as you do. You leave your mark on the books you read and can always look at your own or someone else’s library with a sentimentality uncommon to other possessions. The only thing I can think of that comes close to books in this regard is vinyl, but the 8-track started the process of their cultural irrelevance years ago. Now it is only a persons book collection than can illicit some stirrings of nostalgia and sentiment. I love all my books, but my copy of The Catcher in the Rye trumps them all, in art because it was “borrowed”. I can still remember the names of the two previous students to use the book: Bill McGrath and Sofia Mirkopolus, both scrawled in the top right corner of the books inside jacket. And for me, whenever I look at the smooshed off-white corners of that book I go back to ninth grade again.

Well, this is a pleasent surprise...

2006-05-05T14:50:11Z

"The Louisville Review
Fleur-de-lis-Press
Spalding University

Dear Writer,

Your Submission made it through our initial reading cycle and has been forwarded to our Guest Faculty Editor for final review. Please note that decisions for the upcoming review will be made by June 30th and that you should receive a response from us concerning the status of your submission shortly thereafter.

Sincerely,
Karen Mann
Managing Editior"

No Chance of Survival...

2006-05-02T20:23:01Z

This is my exam schedule for this Thursday, May 5th:

8:30-10:20 - Ethics as Intro to Philosophy
10:30-12:20 - Retard Math
1:00-2:50 - Victorian Brit Travel Lit (why the fuck did I take such an obscure, specialized course in a discipline, history, I have little interest in?)

This means I have 5 hours and 30 minutes-worth of exam in time period of 6 hours and 30 minutes. Not only that, but I don't think I've seen 8:30 in the morning in about 3 months (that time I took adderol and watched MTV until 9 in the morning not withstanding). I REALLY AND TRULY AM ROYALLY FUCKED!

At least school will be over at 2:51...

Four Days 'Til Freedom...

2006-05-01T04:18:44Z

Stuff I've Been Reading

Valencia by Michelle Tea

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

We exist so that we can find the ring...

2006-04-22T06:18:42Z

"A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminated, is not art. The rest is counterfeit."

Over the past several months I have been devouring books like some deranged paper-shredder in the futile journey towards whatever could be called "knowledge" or "education". I've remained under the impression that somehow, someway, all this literary imbibing might yield results of its own volition, and to some extent it has. However, as anyone who knows me can well attest, I myself am more than full of gibberish; babbling that I have yet to put to paper and which swims about the fluid in my brain simply steeping. In two short weeks I'll be done with full-time "schooling" and I will rip out my entrails with as much force as I can muster. I cannot guarantee that what will come out will be profound or brilliant or even tolerable, but it will be my own. I will vomit up one more piece of art into this oversaturated world and if it doesn't reek of intestinal fluid and stomach acid than I have failed.

"If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructable elements that have gone to make up the world."

VH1 Rescues My Faith in Humanity...

2006-04-14T05:16:46Z

My sweet Lord, thank you for VH1. The Kings and Queens of the retospective and celebrity worship have actually done something GENUINELY worthwhile. That's not to say I don't love I love the 80's or 90's and all their sequels (I love the 70's not included...there's only so much commentary on pet rocks and Kool & the Gang I can take before I fly off the handle and resort to watching Jackass re-runs), but they haven't exactly hit it on the original programming front. Did you see "VH1 Bands Reunited? Yeah, I'd love to watch Kajagoogoo get back together for 50 minutes, but I have to drill a hole in my left cornea first. However, they made like Clarence (say thanks, Jimmy) and saved the CBS show "Love Monkey" from getting pushed off the bridge after only 3 episodes. WHY DIDN'T PEOPLE WATCH THIS! It's like "High Fidelity" meets "Entourage" wrapped up in tiny hour-long packages adorned with b+ list musical guests. Plus, it has Tom Cavanaugh who's damn good, and gives Jason Priestly some much needed post-90210 work. Bottom line is, get off your ass and watch this show. VH1 doesn't have anything else to show, so you know they'll repeat episodes about 4 times a day. Remember: "Love Monkey". Tuesdays @ 9:00 p.m. VH1.

Kevin Bacon Spawns Non-Bacon Brothers-Related Monster...

2006-04-10T16:44:27Z

I reached a new level of boredom during Spanish today and this happened: Six Degrees of Seperation between Aaron Eckhart and Steve Guttenberg

Aaron Eckhart was directed in In the Company of Men by Neil Labute (1)---->
who directed The Shape of Things, which starred Paul Rudd (2)---->
who was in Baz Luhrman's version of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Danes (3)---->
who was in Igby Goes Down with Cynthia Nixon (4)---->
who starred in Sex & the City with Kim Cattrall (5)---->
who was in Police Academy with Steve Guttenberg (6).

Now it's naptime before history.

How's it hangin' Riot Grrrl...

2006-04-06T20:03:05Z

I earnestly believe I am turning into some kind of uber-feminist, which is cool because then I can use the words "dyke" and "cunt" in everyday conversation and it'll be acceptable because there will be the tacit understanding that I'm being ironic. Here's my rationale: I just finished reading a memoir written by a super-lezzie poet Michelle Tea called "Valencia" (given to me by Kel-Z) with enough lesbian sex and drama to give Pat Robertson a heart-attacl. And not only did I write my latest philosophy essay from a feminist perspective, when my Prof (the one who likes Husker-Du) disagreed with my analysis, I sent him this e-mail:

Professor Szymkowiak,

This e-mail isn't about the grading of the essay because, to be quite frank, I could care less. It is about your assessment of my analysis of Hume's theory regarding chastity. While I do realize that nominally Hume didn't view chastity as a solely female virtue, I do believe that he thought that in practice the blame landed almost completely on women's shoulders. I believe that saying the infidelities of women have a greater impact on the social fabric of society is incorrect, even from a 18th century perspective. While physiological uncertainty of paternity doesn't provide the type of vindictive physical prove as a pregnant woman, someone had to provide the sperm for the egg. No woman can enter into a unchaste relationship without a male counterpart who is equally as guilty, and vice-versa. And while society might be able to judge the "secret indulgences" of woman and not of men, it doesn't mean that men were not committing the acts that were to the detriment of society. So, from the viewpoint of utility (that magic word), it is immaterial whether the man's indulgences are discovered or not because the consequences resulting from them still occur regardless.

Oh, and as an aside, I think it is a mistake to claim that feminism was "getting started" in the 1750's in Britain. If memory serves me, it will be another 40 years until the first feminist text, Mary Wolstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women" is even published. I could very well be wrong though.

Sincerely,
Drew Gibson

I think I can actually feel myself growing a vagina...on my elbow!

Daylight Savings Time On The Shit End...

2006-04-02T07:06:45Z

Stuff I've Been Reading: March 2005

Snobbery by Joseph Epstein

The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project

Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict by Seb Hunter

Grossed Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient! An Insider's Look at Supermarket Tabloids by Jim Hogshire* (Although this was read for a research paper and I normally try to keep this list to reading outside of school, the title was just too good not to include)