In today's column, CC offers marriage advice.
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
My husband and I are both "Church people", and don't use drugs or alcohol. I'm a stay at home mom and my kids love my husband very much. How would the judge determine who is the better parent for the children to live with?
--Betty Sheets
Dear Betty--
What gender are your children? A boy should be raised by the father, a girl by her mother. If the children are boys or a mix you therefore have three choices: a) allow custody to be granted to the father; b) change genders, win custody, and require the children to call you daddy and treat you as they did their father; or c) end the biological father's life and enlist a taxidermist to preserve the body. This will both maintain your maternal role and give your children the consistency that only a paternal presence can bring.
If the dinner table is rectangular, mount the father atop the head of it. For all other shapes of table, you shall mount the father in the center. The length shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth fifty cubits, the height thirty cubits. The father shall be presented daily with burnt offerings. During meals, dinner in particular, the conversation shall be kept light and airy -- he has had a difficult day and this is his time to unwind. Keep the father in a warm, dry place; dust regularly.
Sometimes when it’s late and my mind feels occupied by a kind of a shadow mind, a cat mind that I know I should avoid but instead always to (the kind of mind that tells me I should get to bed with haste but instead I pour a drink) I think of my second wife, of the way I always thought we would excel at parenting together when we had the opportunity. But time is cruel and we were crueler still and one night the moon set flaming below the treetops and when I awoke she was gone. She left a note that I couldn’t bring myself to read, which I instead folded carefully on itself and shredded in the garbage disposal. At night when I think of her now, I torture myself with the thought that I might not have understood the meaning of that note. That perhaps it might have left hope for us and the children we never had, that perhaps it begged me to follow her, that perhaps it even told me where to go.
Hold on to your love! And look me up sometime if you're ever in Monmouth County, kiddo.
--CC
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
My ex and I share custody of our 9 year old son. My son has told me that his Dad has drinking 2 bottles of Crown Royal a day. My ex was ordered not to drink when we first divorced, and I'm going to try and get full custody of my son because of the alcoholism that's going on now. I'm worried that if my son testifies about his Dad's drinking, that his Dad will blame him and get mad. What can I do?
--Daisy Curfews
Dear Daisy--
How much do you drink yourself? I ask because a key aspect of joint custody is balance. It's important to respect ground rules established by the other parent, and that they respect yours as well. If you drink 3 bottles of Jim Beam each day, it's important to ask your partner to model the same behavior, no more, no less.
My first wife and I were always at each other's throats. Things got out of hand before we realized the importance of the balance I described. For us, balance ultimately involved the witness protection program, a fake catering business, and the Thirty Years' War. It also (and perhaps most importantly) involved keeping tanks of nitrous oxide on each side of our bed. But in the end those were all just accessories. In love we were like reactive elements, like molecules of heat and cold that had to be nearer, had to bring the other toward some fleeting stasis. To say that we hurt each other those nights was to ignore the clean stinging feeling of air on an open wound, the redemptive nervous joking of the early-morning emergency room, the extra little ziplock bag of nitrous we shared to take the edge off before heading in for our respective days in the classroom.
By the way, do you know anyone looking for five or more lightly-used pine coffins at a reasonable rate? PayPal and MasterCard accepted. Stop in if you're ever in my neck of the woods, hon.
--CC
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
Can I sue the woman who my husband had an affair with that led to our divorce?
-Susan Maiman
Dear Sue--
Typically, you can't, at least not as it relates to your divorce. Speaking as a common law lawyer and five-time husband, however, you could sue her if she broke into your house and left a boa constrictor in your john, or poisoned your medication, or blew up your car with you in it, or defrauded your grandmother of her public assistance, or ran over your parents with a cement mixer, or left you for dead with a bullet in your spine in the Gobi Desert. I should stress that these are just examples from my own personal history, this list isn’t meant to be prescriptive. The only limits are those we place upon ourselves, on our imaginations.
In some states (Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, Utah) you can sue the third party for alienation of affection. You need to realize though that this is an expensive endeavor that requires a lot of time. A better option is to kill your husband and have his body stuffed by a taxidermist, then set his body at the head of the table, etc.
Sometimes at night I walk the fringes of this town alone. On a moonless night I can pretend that I am a walker in another age or species, in a forest pathway only vaguely known. I realize in the darkness that we are never alone, that each age of humankind is lived parallel with the others, that generations are a stacked sequence of parallel segments, packed densely line by line to wrap around a cylinder or sphere. I feel the decaying dreams and won hopes of other ages channeling in real time through me, a man aging and lost on the periphery of his own consciousness. An owl shifts in a tree, a man stands alone at a far off fence in the dark. I shiver and realize that she and I were born to love each other, even if only for 25 minutes in the bathroom of a Greyhound coach in a pornographic tangle of cheap lipstick and septic metal and screams muted fast against shoulder blades, to have and to hold, promises that she and I could only ever be relied upon to keep on E in an honest-to-god uncomfortable Greyhound coach bathroom in the Nebraska night. That our lives were only for that, that it's well possible our lives were just for that.
Look me up sometime if you're ever in Monmouth County, sweetie, I know this great dim sum place.
--CC
3.05.2010
3.04.2010
dub as foreign substance/the whitest advice column in the world
headphones dub music and as i try to nod along a thicket of knots in my shoulders prevents the slightest rhythmic movement. it's like as if a layer of muting cotton balls has stuffed itself between muscle and joint.
i'm awfully white. i say this more as simple fact than as an emblem of self hate or ridiculous and racist pride. there are things that come naturally to me it's true (e.g. abstraction, retreating into a cloud, the subjugation of women or those less fortunate) but i don't completely hate myself, or at least not because i'm white. damn it though, i want this music to get through.
turn the lava lamp back on. groovy, sad fuck of a man. when i get this caustic and useless i should write the advice column that hastens me to hell, the kind where i ruin people's lives. pure poison.
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon --
My mother and I are really close. I am 13. There is only one problem. She doesn’t know I go out with boys. She is always telling her friends that I am different and not interested in that sort of thing. I want to know if I should tell her. The one other time I lied to her she cried because I kept a secret from her. I need help.
--Confused
Dear Confused Waste--
It is likely that you will soon die of an obscure VD, you lying waste. Tell that crow mother of yours that I stole her shit. Take care.
--Creepy
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
I am planning to marry the man of my dreams this coming September. Although his parents are wonderful, I'm a bit concerned about the role that they still play in his life...particularly his mother. She still does my fiancé's laundry, cooks his lunches daily, and cleans his house. What do you think?
--Hesitant
Dear Horny Freak--
We all get cold feet, but to insinuate that your fiance's mother is interested in moving in on your marital bed is to project your own perverse unconscious desires onto the motivations of a thoughtful family. Incest is a near-universal taboo and you should be ashamed of yourself for even picturing your mother-in-law to be in such a compromised position, care gone to the wind, love in her eyes and the sound of her breathing, her pulse erratic, her hair adrift on the pillow. It's time to cut this man loose, admit you have a problem and either hurl yourself off a gorge or take up a relaxing hobby, such as building model cars. Take care of yourself, kiddo.
--Creepy
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
I am a 41-year-old recovering addict with eight years of sobriety. I have not been in a loving relationship for over 10 years. Truthfully, I am scared to death of actually finding a mate.
Everyday I rush home after work, hide away until the next morning, and repeat. Initially in my sobriety, the solitude was fine. Now I am so lonely I could puke myself to death. I know I could meet women, but I don't know where to start. I am intelligent, attractive, and so confused. I just want to feel again. I want a new life, this one went off track somewhere in the 1980s.
--Down and Alone
Dear Downer --
Let's face it, love is elusive. When you're down and out, running from north to south, what more can you do? When I'm horny and lonely (which is often) I like to go to a bar and get a little loose. One thing leads to another until at some point in the night something "clicks" and I usually wake up the next morning in a different room than where I began the day. Sometimes another person is next to me and typically they are alive. Jesus loves you, kiddo. Get screwed up out of your head and the sex will follow.
--Creepy
i'm awfully white. i say this more as simple fact than as an emblem of self hate or ridiculous and racist pride. there are things that come naturally to me it's true (e.g. abstraction, retreating into a cloud, the subjugation of women or those less fortunate) but i don't completely hate myself, or at least not because i'm white. damn it though, i want this music to get through.
turn the lava lamp back on. groovy, sad fuck of a man. when i get this caustic and useless i should write the advice column that hastens me to hell, the kind where i ruin people's lives. pure poison.
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon --
My mother and I are really close. I am 13. There is only one problem. She doesn’t know I go out with boys. She is always telling her friends that I am different and not interested in that sort of thing. I want to know if I should tell her. The one other time I lied to her she cried because I kept a secret from her. I need help.
--Confused
Dear Confused Waste--
It is likely that you will soon die of an obscure VD, you lying waste. Tell that crow mother of yours that I stole her shit. Take care.
--Creepy
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
I am planning to marry the man of my dreams this coming September. Although his parents are wonderful, I'm a bit concerned about the role that they still play in his life...particularly his mother. She still does my fiancé's laundry, cooks his lunches daily, and cleans his house. What do you think?
--Hesitant
Dear Horny Freak--
We all get cold feet, but to insinuate that your fiance's mother is interested in moving in on your marital bed is to project your own perverse unconscious desires onto the motivations of a thoughtful family. Incest is a near-universal taboo and you should be ashamed of yourself for even picturing your mother-in-law to be in such a compromised position, care gone to the wind, love in her eyes and the sound of her breathing, her pulse erratic, her hair adrift on the pillow. It's time to cut this man loose, admit you have a problem and either hurl yourself off a gorge or take up a relaxing hobby, such as building model cars. Take care of yourself, kiddo.
--Creepy
Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--
I am a 41-year-old recovering addict with eight years of sobriety. I have not been in a loving relationship for over 10 years. Truthfully, I am scared to death of actually finding a mate.
Everyday I rush home after work, hide away until the next morning, and repeat. Initially in my sobriety, the solitude was fine. Now I am so lonely I could puke myself to death. I know I could meet women, but I don't know where to start. I am intelligent, attractive, and so confused. I just want to feel again. I want a new life, this one went off track somewhere in the 1980s.
--Down and Alone
Dear Downer --
Let's face it, love is elusive. When you're down and out, running from north to south, what more can you do? When I'm horny and lonely (which is often) I like to go to a bar and get a little loose. One thing leads to another until at some point in the night something "clicks" and I usually wake up the next morning in a different room than where I began the day. Sometimes another person is next to me and typically they are alive. Jesus loves you, kiddo. Get screwed up out of your head and the sex will follow.
--Creepy
3.03.2010
close reading
He's getting closer to two now and getting nearly as attached to books as he is to television. In both cases he's looking for ritual, for safety and a world in which he knows just what to expect. This is why for a while his reading included just one or two books, just like his watching included just one or two DVDs vieweed ad nauseam.
{By ad nauseam I mean fuck you late-stage Children's Television Workshop, fuck you Paul Rudd in an Earth costume, your comedy does not reward a 200th viewing}.
In books now N. is reading in his own personal way. It may sound all Parenting 101 (which it is) but it was helpful to see how Kelvin and Justine are raising their kid -- bringing her at a young age through multiple reads of the same book in a row, letting her focus on different details besides the linear narrative. N. will typically tolerate two reads of a book in a row now, the first generally linear, the second time him steering toward scenes that confuse or interest him, or scenes with many small objects in them that we can name one by one.
The beauty of the naming ritual is that its power dynamic is fluidly reversible. During these reads I'll ask him to point at something that I name. That game has largely changed its rules to where he now points at whatever he feels like and I name it. Him not understanding the power dynamic positions him well to subvert it. Perhaps him choosing to ignore the power dynamic would be a better way to describe it.
It's been encouraging to see him reach for books for self-contained entertainment. At night as an early part of his bedtime ritual he'll sit in his crib with all of his books, several open at a time. We're either cultivating a child with multiple reading interests or one with a serious attention deficit or both. The argument for heredity v. environment wouldn't be clear in either case. Just a few weeks ago I couldn't imagine him reading on his own and there it was growing beneath the surface. More happens than we can see, in everyone.
A good part of early parenting is a crashing bore and a forceful drag. It's like becoming a completely different person, losing the balance of your marriage and your life and how the hell are you going to protect this kid from a world in obviously accelerating decline. There were things in the beginning that kept us from instinctively believing it could work out at all, and on some level I think that volatile mental poison is still with us. You can lose your center and get to a point so twisted you find work your sole relief. What I know is that the times when he and I read together bring a deeper kind of joy, I think to both of us.
{By ad nauseam I mean fuck you late-stage Children's Television Workshop, fuck you Paul Rudd in an Earth costume, your comedy does not reward a 200th viewing}.
In books now N. is reading in his own personal way. It may sound all Parenting 101 (which it is) but it was helpful to see how Kelvin and Justine are raising their kid -- bringing her at a young age through multiple reads of the same book in a row, letting her focus on different details besides the linear narrative. N. will typically tolerate two reads of a book in a row now, the first generally linear, the second time him steering toward scenes that confuse or interest him, or scenes with many small objects in them that we can name one by one.
The beauty of the naming ritual is that its power dynamic is fluidly reversible. During these reads I'll ask him to point at something that I name. That game has largely changed its rules to where he now points at whatever he feels like and I name it. Him not understanding the power dynamic positions him well to subvert it. Perhaps him choosing to ignore the power dynamic would be a better way to describe it.
It's been encouraging to see him reach for books for self-contained entertainment. At night as an early part of his bedtime ritual he'll sit in his crib with all of his books, several open at a time. We're either cultivating a child with multiple reading interests or one with a serious attention deficit or both. The argument for heredity v. environment wouldn't be clear in either case. Just a few weeks ago I couldn't imagine him reading on his own and there it was growing beneath the surface. More happens than we can see, in everyone.
A good part of early parenting is a crashing bore and a forceful drag. It's like becoming a completely different person, losing the balance of your marriage and your life and how the hell are you going to protect this kid from a world in obviously accelerating decline. There were things in the beginning that kept us from instinctively believing it could work out at all, and on some level I think that volatile mental poison is still with us. You can lose your center and get to a point so twisted you find work your sole relief. What I know is that the times when he and I read together bring a deeper kind of joy, I think to both of us.
3.02.2010
the ghost of Michael Jackson
That first night when you get home you say "I'm losing it." So? I say. I'm losing it more. You say I definitely have it backwards, that in fact I'm the rookie prince of losing it, you its crown queen.
I say give an example. You cheerfully describe obsessing before you're even down the subway steps that morning that you've left the burners on. At the office you spend 7.5 hours in a fetal ball under your desk, missing three conference calls and an austerity meeting. What's more some visiting clients complain for not the first time about your screamed admonitions.
I reply that I called out sick and I've been sitting right here in front of the burners for the past 11 hours. I know they're off, I've been here all day trying to work up the courage to stick my head in the oven. It's when I lower the door to reveal the charred remains of my work computer and the still-smoldering severed head of Anderson Cooper that the game definitively goes to me.
A couple mornings later when you wake up you're shaking and I say what's wrong (skeptically) and you say you're worried about a comet hitting the earth, that it was in your dream right before waking up and now that you've woken up you're paralyzed in fear because all you can picture is gravity turning on itself and the earth breaking apart into free-floating fragments with people floating instantly into space looking at each other like what do we do dodging taxicabs and floating park benches at odd angles. I say what a coincidence for you to mention that (planting a light and only half-patronizing kiss on your forehead).
I show you my list from the night before (when I couldn't sleep I was so excited about the prospect) of the next 100 known objects asteroid-or-larger that could significantly impact the earth. In accordance with the scale of potential impact for each I've drawn a large and brightly-colored adjacent smiley face in magic marker. I think I have you beat until you flatly assert (rubbing my shoulders like "Go get em, champ") that sometimes a dream is just a dream, there's really no way the earth could be destroyed by a comet or asteroid and the only way it really could be destroyed would be was if you left the burners on, thus triggering a chain reaction ending in the halt of life as we know it here on earth/possibly throughout the universe. Then you clutch my wrists (believing it nonetheless necessary to fight your dreamed inverted gravity) and the game goes to you.
It's close but Game 3 goes to me when I vow to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death by submerging myself completely in a tin drum full of scorpions (and all you have by way of rebuttal is three bound diaries filled line by line with the question "Can the burners become self aware and On themselves?")
I know you'll bring your A-game for the rematch and am not surprised late Wednesday night when you sneak onto Neverland Ranch, start four nice kettles of tea to boiling, and leave with the burners on. While it's possible that they'll remain that way in perpetuity, adding slow and murderous incremental heat to the universe -- that it's all your fault and that it's indeed now only a matter of time before the eschaton -- what's absolutely certain is that Game 4 has gone to you, because all I've got in response is a YouTube video in which I don whiteface and a velvet bathrobe and, purporting to be the ghost of Michael Jackson, beg anyone who will listen for forgiveness over an illegitimate Casio beat. For a moment there is hope as the video's comment thread grows contentious and views skyrocket. Said hope is dashed when a CNN Breaking News Alert reports a suspicious and all-consuming fire over a 200-mile radius with Neverland as its epicenter.
The argument on the biggest proof that God doesn't exist goes to me (found footage of alligators eating a kitten) over your "Because burners were invented without an automatic shutoff mechanism."
For Game 6, which has been announced as paper-scissors-rock, I play scissors; you kick me in the groin, shove me to the ground, stick a shiv in my gut, and mace me where I lay. In your eyes I see victory; in my peripheral vision I see the movers carrying the oven out of our apartment; from your whispering lips I hear "rock."
As I write, my love, you're in the kitchen, ruminating over the fine print to the microwave instructions. You always look so beautiful on the verge of articulating a new worry. Game 7 is tonight (if necessary).
I say give an example. You cheerfully describe obsessing before you're even down the subway steps that morning that you've left the burners on. At the office you spend 7.5 hours in a fetal ball under your desk, missing three conference calls and an austerity meeting. What's more some visiting clients complain for not the first time about your screamed admonitions.
I reply that I called out sick and I've been sitting right here in front of the burners for the past 11 hours. I know they're off, I've been here all day trying to work up the courage to stick my head in the oven. It's when I lower the door to reveal the charred remains of my work computer and the still-smoldering severed head of Anderson Cooper that the game definitively goes to me.
A couple mornings later when you wake up you're shaking and I say what's wrong (skeptically) and you say you're worried about a comet hitting the earth, that it was in your dream right before waking up and now that you've woken up you're paralyzed in fear because all you can picture is gravity turning on itself and the earth breaking apart into free-floating fragments with people floating instantly into space looking at each other like what do we do dodging taxicabs and floating park benches at odd angles. I say what a coincidence for you to mention that (planting a light and only half-patronizing kiss on your forehead).
I show you my list from the night before (when I couldn't sleep I was so excited about the prospect) of the next 100 known objects asteroid-or-larger that could significantly impact the earth. In accordance with the scale of potential impact for each I've drawn a large and brightly-colored adjacent smiley face in magic marker. I think I have you beat until you flatly assert (rubbing my shoulders like "Go get em, champ") that sometimes a dream is just a dream, there's really no way the earth could be destroyed by a comet or asteroid and the only way it really could be destroyed would be was if you left the burners on, thus triggering a chain reaction ending in the halt of life as we know it here on earth/possibly throughout the universe. Then you clutch my wrists (believing it nonetheless necessary to fight your dreamed inverted gravity) and the game goes to you.
It's close but Game 3 goes to me when I vow to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death by submerging myself completely in a tin drum full of scorpions (and all you have by way of rebuttal is three bound diaries filled line by line with the question "Can the burners become self aware and On themselves?")
I know you'll bring your A-game for the rematch and am not surprised late Wednesday night when you sneak onto Neverland Ranch, start four nice kettles of tea to boiling, and leave with the burners on. While it's possible that they'll remain that way in perpetuity, adding slow and murderous incremental heat to the universe -- that it's all your fault and that it's indeed now only a matter of time before the eschaton -- what's absolutely certain is that Game 4 has gone to you, because all I've got in response is a YouTube video in which I don whiteface and a velvet bathrobe and, purporting to be the ghost of Michael Jackson, beg anyone who will listen for forgiveness over an illegitimate Casio beat. For a moment there is hope as the video's comment thread grows contentious and views skyrocket. Said hope is dashed when a CNN Breaking News Alert reports a suspicious and all-consuming fire over a 200-mile radius with Neverland as its epicenter.
The argument on the biggest proof that God doesn't exist goes to me (found footage of alligators eating a kitten) over your "Because burners were invented without an automatic shutoff mechanism."
For Game 6, which has been announced as paper-scissors-rock, I play scissors; you kick me in the groin, shove me to the ground, stick a shiv in my gut, and mace me where I lay. In your eyes I see victory; in my peripheral vision I see the movers carrying the oven out of our apartment; from your whispering lips I hear "rock."
As I write, my love, you're in the kitchen, ruminating over the fine print to the microwave instructions. You always look so beautiful on the verge of articulating a new worry. Game 7 is tonight (if necessary).
2.24.2010
fascists briefly thwarted by mediocre art
It's 2000. We've probably been drinking or smoking grass or both. It's probably a weeknight.
Me: "Let's play a show."
You: "Cool, I'll play guitar."
Me: "Cool, I'll play Rhodes through 14 pedals I don't know how to use."
You: "Should we practice?"
Me: "Sure."
We practice. Once. During the practice it feels like we're living on different continents in cultures with vastly incompatible languages. I try to change to a simple lead but you don't follow it. I try to follow what you're doing (some of which would be actually be interesting if we ever synced around it) but you change it up into something discordant and lousy as soon as you catch me at that.
It sucks so we give it a name -- Moronic Emphasis, I think it was -- and take it on the road. Specifically to Desmond's, this bar on Park in the 20s It's a Thursday or Friday night and we're opening for Enter Sandman, which is this terrible not-quite-punk band led by this terrible-not-quite-communist who in 1994 legally changed his name to Sandman. So it's not really the name of the band so much as it is the name of this guy Sandman who enters. You know that I'm not making this up.
The show feels like something of a coup. You've got your guitar and I've got 14 pedals I don't know how to use, along with a Fender Rhodes piano with half the keys broken that weighs about a thousand pounds. We play for 20 minutes. I try to lead but you dodge that expertly, I try to follow but you kick me under the piano. A tritone goes off between us and you smile to yourself, like, yeah, that's the one.
A girl says "are you guys going to start?" She's trying to heckle us but the joke's on her because she just watched us meanderingly noodle without talent in opposite directions for 20 minutes. We stop. Whatever irony in her reaction is neutralized by the fact that she can never have the time back. I get kind of shy on stage (especially when I know it's awful) but as your and my final chords go off vaguely within the same minute and somewhere on the same circle of fifths I get up the nerve to look up.
There are about a dozen frat guys in the bar, or what we would have called frat guys in college and what in another milieu might be called fascists. Anyway, my point is that all of these chumps look downcast, as if we've ruined their nights, like somebody let a pledge die or something. A few say angry things but the joke's on them, they just watched us noodle without a shred of talent for maybe half an hour to 45 minutes.
Enter Sandman. I always thought he was something of a nimrod but he did stick up for us that night. He said "Some people just don't know experimental music when they hear it." Then he launched into some bullshit first song and I bought us beers and we pretended to be happy with how it had gone, performing in lock step for the first and only time in our lives.
Me: "Let's play a show."
You: "Cool, I'll play guitar."
Me: "Cool, I'll play Rhodes through 14 pedals I don't know how to use."
You: "Should we practice?"
Me: "Sure."
We practice. Once. During the practice it feels like we're living on different continents in cultures with vastly incompatible languages. I try to change to a simple lead but you don't follow it. I try to follow what you're doing (some of which would be actually be interesting if we ever synced around it) but you change it up into something discordant and lousy as soon as you catch me at that.
It sucks so we give it a name -- Moronic Emphasis, I think it was -- and take it on the road. Specifically to Desmond's, this bar on Park in the 20s It's a Thursday or Friday night and we're opening for Enter Sandman, which is this terrible not-quite-punk band led by this terrible-not-quite-communist who in 1994 legally changed his name to Sandman. So it's not really the name of the band so much as it is the name of this guy Sandman who enters. You know that I'm not making this up.
The show feels like something of a coup. You've got your guitar and I've got 14 pedals I don't know how to use, along with a Fender Rhodes piano with half the keys broken that weighs about a thousand pounds. We play for 20 minutes. I try to lead but you dodge that expertly, I try to follow but you kick me under the piano. A tritone goes off between us and you smile to yourself, like, yeah, that's the one.
A girl says "are you guys going to start?" She's trying to heckle us but the joke's on her because she just watched us meanderingly noodle without talent in opposite directions for 20 minutes. We stop. Whatever irony in her reaction is neutralized by the fact that she can never have the time back. I get kind of shy on stage (especially when I know it's awful) but as your and my final chords go off vaguely within the same minute and somewhere on the same circle of fifths I get up the nerve to look up.
There are about a dozen frat guys in the bar, or what we would have called frat guys in college and what in another milieu might be called fascists. Anyway, my point is that all of these chumps look downcast, as if we've ruined their nights, like somebody let a pledge die or something. A few say angry things but the joke's on them, they just watched us noodle without a shred of talent for maybe half an hour to 45 minutes.
Enter Sandman. I always thought he was something of a nimrod but he did stick up for us that night. He said "Some people just don't know experimental music when they hear it." Then he launched into some bullshit first song and I bought us beers and we pretended to be happy with how it had gone, performing in lock step for the first and only time in our lives.
2.23.2010
calendar as iconoclast
During today's big meeting, the one where shrewd business analysis was supposed to single-handedly get our organization out of the trouble posed by this crap economy, my attention kept wandering to the decorations on the walls: leftover jack-o-lanterns and ghosts from Halloween. It felt odd to me to be putting our fingers to the pulse of February 2010 with the decor calendar set back 5 months.
It reminded me of times that for whatever quasi-traumatic reason I've stopped advancing, years in which I've gotten stuck, 1982, 1993, 1997, 2000 and others. A person can get out of those jams, but it usually takes a couple years. I wonder if the person in charge of the decorations got laid off in early November, and the windows'll be that way for ever. I wonder if the decorations are older than 5 months old, maybe a year and a half, etc.
Today I just wanted to peel them off the windows, but a) I had nothing to replace them with (fuck it, shamrocks?) and b) I thought it might seem a little creepy, a full-grown man walking around the conference room with a handful of pumpkins and ghouls during a serious business conversation.
It reminded me of times that for whatever quasi-traumatic reason I've stopped advancing, years in which I've gotten stuck, 1982, 1993, 1997, 2000 and others. A person can get out of those jams, but it usually takes a couple years. I wonder if the person in charge of the decorations got laid off in early November, and the windows'll be that way for ever. I wonder if the decorations are older than 5 months old, maybe a year and a half, etc.
Today I just wanted to peel them off the windows, but a) I had nothing to replace them with (fuck it, shamrocks?) and b) I thought it might seem a little creepy, a full-grown man walking around the conference room with a handful of pumpkins and ghouls during a serious business conversation.
mono no aware
He pulls the car to the side of the road, opens the trunk and sets up his things. A lawn chair, a radio, a 6-pack in a big brown paper bag. The beer is still kind of cold. It's late afternoon, an hour or so before the normal end of work. He unfolds the chair, sits down carefully between the tight plastic arm-rests, opens a beer, and watches the town below. It's Tuesday.
Squeezed into a lawn chair on the side of the highway that runs above his town (and with it his townspeople, approximately zero of whom he likes and about 5 tops of whom he knows) he surveys the damage of his life, its brief peaks and dull lulls, fleeting moments of right action and destined feeling, grinding attempts at love, etc. He opens a second beer. Things are generally fucked, not in any epic or imminent way, just, things have settled under an Eeyore storm front that appears to have real stamina. On the radio some expert caller says: "Johnny Depp is my favorite actor. He's so versatile."
As he drinks the second beer he thinks about his daughter, his one good thing. There's a memory of her he loves, of the first time he noticed she had her own interest in the books they'd read to her. One Sunday morning she'd simply pointed at them and at her crib and said something vaguely akin to "books." She'd spent a couple of hours paging through them, sometimes upside down, sometimes muttering a story to herself, lost in the same five books for a couple of hours. There’s an uncomplicated pride sitting and watching her read and when she looks up in her crib, a year and a half or so old, he senses recognition between them, of a thing pure and perfect that has passed between their eyes like saying the same thing at exactly the same time, or meeting an old lost friend by accident in a place completely random and beyond routine.
The sun's starting to set. On the radio another Rhodes scholar says: "New Jersey is just alright, but our part of it is pretty cool." He opens the third can off beer and watches a flock of cognitively impaired birds trying to make up its mind whether to stay or go. Maybe they're just practicing for an imminent departure, maybe the weather has gone crazy and confused the shit out of them and they now think an hour is a season. How birds know to fly together, who decides when it's time to pack it in for the night or change the flight path. He imagines for a minute what it would look like if he and Rachel were birds, birds twenty years married, arguing like total dicks about which way to fly. The better metaphor would be of people who argued with the same innate skill and synchronous rhythm that birds flew, for people to pause and look in wonder, how do they do it.
It isn't that things are absolutely unsalvageable. Yes, there is his divorce from Rachel (five years final, still echoing in his mind as if it happened a day ago), his weight (epic, out of hand), his job (a man up to his neck in shit and those are the coffee breaks, like the old joke about hell), his love life (stilted despite being chiefly imaginary), his utter lack of meaningful pastimes (never-opened birdwatcher’s manual, 35-mm camera with roll of mediocre natures shots from 1997 he knows he will never develop), but in the pro column there are also dinners with Joanna, and within those, subsets of dinners in which her eyes and his align in that old recognition of books, of alone together, of we are here in this each of us their own and we will never knowingly hurt each other and that is love. He never lets his daughter pay for dinner. Sometimes the tip if she really gives him shit about it. Once on his 50th birthday he let her pay half. His hope is that she’ll be happy, that all of this that has come to pass might have a purpose.
Cars on the highway. If one skidded out of control this way he could kick himself out of the chair and roll down the embankment, still holding the beer. How did he survive that, etc. Then he’d collect himself (running with the beer) to check on the car, now further down the embankment, flames shooting out the windows. The courageous final sip of beer, the sign of the cross and the dive into the car, emerging with 3 survivors (including an infant still in the safety seat, held in one hand). And from then on things would be different, he would awaken in a hero’s glow of right purpose. Maybe he should beg one of those cars to skid, sipping and drinking beer looking straight ahead like bring it on, forward the light brigade.
It’s hard to tell how things would have gone had Rachel’s mother not died of cancer, just a couple weeks after Joanna’s 12th birthday. How it did go was that he tried to be there for her, to put away the dooming angst that flowed between them like festering water in the blocked up sewer system of a doomed suburban town. But no matter what posture he assumed (hand on shoulder, hand in small of back, hand held out to her sleeping form, resting awkwardly on the top of her head so as not to wake her on those nights when she did sleep straight through). He had tried to extract the tension from his voice, to replace it with a gentleness that must have felt foreign and insincere to them both. Then things had gotten fine, it seemed, fine and sort of quiet between them, and a couple of years had passed before he knew it, years that pushed them as far apart as two under the same roof could get. When they saw each other now around Joanna milestones they managed a civility and warmth that surprised him, as if nothing had happened, as if they had known each other in a completely different life, a life they remembered as bad but possibly not so bad as the loneliness that followed, and could they love other people as the damage faded.
On the radio someone’s trying to make war sound positive. The sun is less a factor now as the night takes over and draws the town and him into it. Lights go on below, one by one and in clusters. He opens the fourth and fifth beer together, taking sizable gulps of each as the last color fades from the sky. Now it’s true dark and each light is a life, each light is a life that could be broken or whole, each light is a life in flux if it knows it or not.
Squeezed into a lawn chair on the side of the highway that runs above his town (and with it his townspeople, approximately zero of whom he likes and about 5 tops of whom he knows) he surveys the damage of his life, its brief peaks and dull lulls, fleeting moments of right action and destined feeling, grinding attempts at love, etc. He opens a second beer. Things are generally fucked, not in any epic or imminent way, just, things have settled under an Eeyore storm front that appears to have real stamina. On the radio some expert caller says: "Johnny Depp is my favorite actor. He's so versatile."
As he drinks the second beer he thinks about his daughter, his one good thing. There's a memory of her he loves, of the first time he noticed she had her own interest in the books they'd read to her. One Sunday morning she'd simply pointed at them and at her crib and said something vaguely akin to "books." She'd spent a couple of hours paging through them, sometimes upside down, sometimes muttering a story to herself, lost in the same five books for a couple of hours. There’s an uncomplicated pride sitting and watching her read and when she looks up in her crib, a year and a half or so old, he senses recognition between them, of a thing pure and perfect that has passed between their eyes like saying the same thing at exactly the same time, or meeting an old lost friend by accident in a place completely random and beyond routine.
The sun's starting to set. On the radio another Rhodes scholar says: "New Jersey is just alright, but our part of it is pretty cool." He opens the third can off beer and watches a flock of cognitively impaired birds trying to make up its mind whether to stay or go. Maybe they're just practicing for an imminent departure, maybe the weather has gone crazy and confused the shit out of them and they now think an hour is a season. How birds know to fly together, who decides when it's time to pack it in for the night or change the flight path. He imagines for a minute what it would look like if he and Rachel were birds, birds twenty years married, arguing like total dicks about which way to fly. The better metaphor would be of people who argued with the same innate skill and synchronous rhythm that birds flew, for people to pause and look in wonder, how do they do it.
It isn't that things are absolutely unsalvageable. Yes, there is his divorce from Rachel (five years final, still echoing in his mind as if it happened a day ago), his weight (epic, out of hand), his job (a man up to his neck in shit and those are the coffee breaks, like the old joke about hell), his love life (stilted despite being chiefly imaginary), his utter lack of meaningful pastimes (never-opened birdwatcher’s manual, 35-mm camera with roll of mediocre natures shots from 1997 he knows he will never develop), but in the pro column there are also dinners with Joanna, and within those, subsets of dinners in which her eyes and his align in that old recognition of books, of alone together, of we are here in this each of us their own and we will never knowingly hurt each other and that is love. He never lets his daughter pay for dinner. Sometimes the tip if she really gives him shit about it. Once on his 50th birthday he let her pay half. His hope is that she’ll be happy, that all of this that has come to pass might have a purpose.
Cars on the highway. If one skidded out of control this way he could kick himself out of the chair and roll down the embankment, still holding the beer. How did he survive that, etc. Then he’d collect himself (running with the beer) to check on the car, now further down the embankment, flames shooting out the windows. The courageous final sip of beer, the sign of the cross and the dive into the car, emerging with 3 survivors (including an infant still in the safety seat, held in one hand). And from then on things would be different, he would awaken in a hero’s glow of right purpose. Maybe he should beg one of those cars to skid, sipping and drinking beer looking straight ahead like bring it on, forward the light brigade.
It’s hard to tell how things would have gone had Rachel’s mother not died of cancer, just a couple weeks after Joanna’s 12th birthday. How it did go was that he tried to be there for her, to put away the dooming angst that flowed between them like festering water in the blocked up sewer system of a doomed suburban town. But no matter what posture he assumed (hand on shoulder, hand in small of back, hand held out to her sleeping form, resting awkwardly on the top of her head so as not to wake her on those nights when she did sleep straight through). He had tried to extract the tension from his voice, to replace it with a gentleness that must have felt foreign and insincere to them both. Then things had gotten fine, it seemed, fine and sort of quiet between them, and a couple of years had passed before he knew it, years that pushed them as far apart as two under the same roof could get. When they saw each other now around Joanna milestones they managed a civility and warmth that surprised him, as if nothing had happened, as if they had known each other in a completely different life, a life they remembered as bad but possibly not so bad as the loneliness that followed, and could they love other people as the damage faded.
On the radio someone’s trying to make war sound positive. The sun is less a factor now as the night takes over and draws the town and him into it. Lights go on below, one by one and in clusters. He opens the fourth and fifth beer together, taking sizable gulps of each as the last color fades from the sky. Now it’s true dark and each light is a life, each light is a life that could be broken or whole, each light is a life in flux if it knows it or not.
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