| I was coming home from work the other day as a neighboring apartment was being cleared out and cleaned up for a new tenant. As usual, I’d never known who/what lived in this apartment before, so his/her/their/its departure was just another thing one notices on the way to the mailboxes. As I walked by, though, the building manager and the painter did one of those junior high things where they see you coming and abruptly stop talking. They didn’t start again until I had passed. What they didn’t realize was that I’d heard just about everything I needed to hear before they noticed I was there. As I’d been coming up the stairs, the building manager had been saying, “...and of course, there was blood everywhere. I never did think we’d ‘a gotten it all cleaned up. But it was obvious he’d been depressed; every time I seen ‘im comin’ back from the grocery store, it was never asparagus in the bag. Never cauliflower or pomegranates. Always a six pack, a bottle, you know what I mean. Always lookin’ at the floor. Never did think the blood would come up. Ah, well; that wasn’t the first time. Not even in the last few years, if ya wanna know the truth...” That was when I accidentally made a squawk that roughly meant, “Holy s***!” and they noticed I was there. They clammed up until I went to “get my mail” (read: eavesdrop some more.) Yes, the topic of the day was People Who Have Died By Their Own Hand in the Building, Possibly in Your Apartment, and How We Hush it the Hell Up. The juiciest nugget I got from the post-squawk conversation was when the building manager mentioned how much dead bodies pissed off the landlord. I can well imagine! I imagine apartments can be conducive to that sort of thing. A lot of people here are older and typically live alone. They make some money, but not a ton. I don’t see too many visitors knocking on doors. I don’t ever hear anybody having a party. Yeah. I can see it. Especially lately. Only in hindsight this year did I realize that February almost always sucks, but all my other Februarys would have to gang up and beat the s*** out of Christmas before they sucked as much as February 2001. Finding out I live in Suicide Village Estates was just the perfect after dinner mint to February 2001’s Feast of Death and Hurting. There had been turmoil from about mid-December on, actually, beginning with Dr. Joan’s car crash and gaily skipping right along to Susannah dying in January. All of a sudden, though, after that it just seemed like everything was going to hell. A couple of days into the month, somebody else I knew in high school died. Just to mix things up a little, this one was not after a long illness but rather a violent, icy, median-hopping car crash. He was on the way back to grad school, you see; he had had some rough times, but he was finally getting his life together. He and his fiancé were buying a house! Yes! His fiancé! All my dead friends have fiancés! All my dead friends are finally Turning Things Around! Otherwise, the dropping dead wouldn’t be nearly appalling enough! Right on the heels of Susannah’s passing, all the same people had all the same feelings to deal with all over again, including my ambivalence towards the deceased. The thing I remember most about him was his tendency to correct me (incorrectly) about song lyrics. I remember him fighting with Adam about the lyrics to a Faith No More song and just wanting to go buy the poor guy a hearing aid, because he had no friggin’ clue what he was talking about. I remember him always hitting on Karen and making me feel like her big brother: “Hey! You stay away from her!” I’ve always been very protective and judgmental where Karen’s suitors are concerned. Still. Dave was a really nice guy (his name was Dave.) I was really glad to have talked to him the last time I saw him. Unlike many of our classmates, he seemed to be well-rounded and mature and had his head in what seemed to be a pretty good place. Now, of course, he’s just dead. The thing is, that was not the only thing like that that happened that day. I found out about his death via e-mail; the message immediately following it in my inbox read, “Everybody pray for Sue from RHA. She was just in a serious skiing accident and lacerated her liver. They’re not sure whether she’ll live through the evening.” The message immediately following that read, in part, “my fiancé just got out of brain surgery.” I didn’t check my mail for a day or two after that. I did spend a couple of days shouting, "Jesus Christ!" to no one in particular (except, I guess, Jesus Christ.) This time, I didn’t go to the funeral or the wake. “Are you going?” “Nope! Absolutely not!” This time, I didn’t even know any of the other bereaved people; I didn’t know Dave’s friends or family or fiancé. I only knew the gentleman in the box, and I’ve had enough of that for one year. This led to a minor confrontation between Karen and me in our neighborhood watering hole when I told her Dave had died and that I planned to sit out the festivities this time. She got on quite the high horse about it and began to talk to me in a way that, under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have stood for at all. Her summation was, “Shame on you. Even if the family doesn’t know you, it will make them feel so much better to see a big group of people who loved their son.” “And my hugging his mom may make him come back to life and do a jolly dance, but I’ll never know, because I’m not f***ing going to see another dead friend this month.” That’s what I was thinking. What I was saying was, “Yes, you’re right. I know. I’m sorry.” Circumstances. Susannah’s fiancé was sitting right next to me; this was not an argument I was going to get into. More importantly, she was upset just like me. She’d really liked Dave. I just wish my grief and how I handle it could have been taken into account without me having to forcibly remove her from the inside of my throat. So we dealt with Dave passing. It was around this time that my aging father severely injured his second knee and went into the hospital for another surgery. This worried me more than a little bit given the year to date, but I was quickly distracted from worrying about my father a couple of days later when my sister spontaneously began to gush blood. I don’t believe my sister would want the details published. Once you read them, neither would you. Suffice it to say that one day my sister was doing her various household chores when she couldn’t help but notice that she had begun to spout life from a leak somewhere. “Oh my!” she doubtless said. “A great heaping deal of blood! I suppose I should speak to someone about this. Maybe I’ll call the doctor, but first hey look the floor THUD.” Pieced-together anecdotes tell us that consciousness was lost once or twice before she dragged her bleeding body across the floor on her hands to the phone and got an ambulance to take her to the emergency room. After that, it was all pointless phone calls from the stoner guy she lives with: “Dude, she was totally excruciated. The paramedic looked freaked. Good luck with that.” CLICK. So my parents were calling distant hospitals, and then they were expecting calls from hospitals, and since they had recently ditched call waiting any phone call from me could only result in them missing the vital ER information, meaning I wasn’t really allowed to find out what was going on. It was quite the party. It is at times like this that living several hundred miles away from everyone who cares about you does not come in handy. Still, I live maybe half an hour from my folks, and I still found myself thinking the same things I thought during Joan’s car crash: What if something like this did happen to me? I live by myself. No one would find me. I’m rarely expected anywhere. People are used to me not being home when they call. Well, I’d pretty much just die, wouldn’t I? How ‘bout that? Of course, a week after all this happened, my sister returned from the doctor with antibiotics and the news that she was “perfectly fine.” What-damn-ever. I’ll be following this story closely. Now, while all of this was happening, my car finally died. No, that’s not true; it didn’t so much die as it begged to be killed. First, there was the increasing mockery as the car’s purple paint continued to fade into a bright pink. Then the tape deck broke. Then there were the adventures in getting it started. It didn’t start after a rainstorm; something inside it was getting wet. It didn’t start when it was cold; it enjoyed seeing me stand in the snow. It didn’t start if I had gone more than 18 hours without starting it; it got comfortable. I began needing to go and drive my car somewhere I didn’t want to go every few hours just to keep it in practice. Then the power steering gave out. Again. With that, I patted the dashboard gently and said, “Go ahead. You’re only making it easier, my friend,” and began to shop for a new car. Any love and sentiment I had for my formerly stalwart Barneymobile was dead and buried. I needed a car that didn’t handle like a pirate ship. I’d seen an injury and a death from car wrecks in the last six weeks; no more screwing around with the Bastardmobile. So, while all of the above was going on, I was able to devote myself to my two great loves, cars and finance. If only I’d had to win the new car in a game of touch football, it would have been the best month ever! I learned a lot about people and the world during my brief car shopping stint. Primarily, I learned that people just nakedly, cheerfully lie to you when you’re buying a car. During the car commercials? Yeah. All that fine print is at the bottom of the screen for a reason. It says, “Everything we are not currently saying in the fine print is well-crafted fiction. There is no car in existence that costs this little. The price we just mentioned is if you get it without seats and window glass. P.S. It is somehow legal for us to do this. Actual price based on the fact that you are under the world’s thumb. Offer not valid, period.” And if you go to the dealership and say, “I saw your ad. I’m here for the car you explicitly said you were selling for $11,000,” the salesman just looks right at you and says, “Oh, yeah. That’s a great big lie.” Smiling. Happy to be a liar. Happy to have tricked you into coming and talking to him. “To get it for that price, I’d have to take off the windshield wipers and puncture the gas tank with them. That price takes into account that paint costs extra. No, with air conditioning and tires, that comes to $48,000. Now, if you want yourself an AM radio.…” And they just have no problem with this at all. They’re just absolutely matter-o’-fact about being this roach motel of an industry, luring you in with the sweet smell of a cheap car and then trying to stick you in one that’s vastly more expensive, and oh incidentally, not what you want. They think it’s a great way to conduct business and don’t see why I would be less than inclined to respond to the sales pitch, “Deceit is a way of life for us here at the Toyota lot. We can’t be trusted. Now give us all your money.” (Another thing I learned is that, when it comes to picking out a car, people who aren't particularly close to you feel absolutely no compunction about telling you you have bad taste. You'll say which cars you're looking at, and people will just immediately chime in with, "That ugly wad of s***? You would actually buy that? A Polish steel factory from the sixties could puke a better car than that! Do you have brain damage?" I mean, is it wrong of me to think that's an insult? Where the f*** do people get the idea that it's okay to talk to me this way?) It was about two days before I was looking into no-haggle dealerships. I decided the bare minimum of what I wanted, decided to settle for nothing less, and stayed there until I got it. “Well,” the salesman said at one point, “we have a car here on the lot that has some of what you wanted. Doesn’t have a CD player, though. Now, we could order you a car that...” “Put one in.” “Sorry?” “Get the car here on the lot and put a CD player in it.” “Well, I guess we could, but that might take...” “I’ll wait. Go now.” Downside of the no-haggle dealership: they gave me $.45 for my trade-in. My dad was beside himself. I was just glad to be done with it. The car was, in a way, a nice distraction from everything else. I was starting to develop some more emotional quirks, due in no small part to the fact that half the people I knew were having a nervous breakdown and/or dying. Drinking too much and bursting into tears in public. Talking about packing all their belongings into the car and just driving off. I felt like I had a lot of bogeys to keep on the radar. And I still found myself locked into that tape loop of high school reminiscence. I had gotten stuck in a moment I couldn’t get out of. I found myself driving past the places where I used to hang out at 2:00 in the morning for no reason. At one point, I caught myself downloading Billy Joel’s greatest hits because it reminded me of a bygone period of my life. I almost had to go take a shower. Most jarring of all, my high school was putting on “Carnival,” which is noteworthy for reasons other than the fact that it was the worst musical ever written. The worst. Until someone tries to bring Scary Movie to Broadway, this one wears the tiara. I don’t even know how to explain it. It godawful lyrics ring in your ears for days after you come into contact with it. “See that cloud?/ I just might/ jump right up/ take a bite!...” “I think I need a smile/ and who cares if it’s real/ or painted with shellac?...” “Now a kiss!/ Now a kiss!/ Why a kiss for meeeeee?...” Its plot hinges on the idea that a grown woman does not realize that puppets are not real people. Its emotional climax pivots on the female lead looking into her man’s eyes and saying, with a straight face, “You’re... you’re the puppets?” It really has to be seen to be believed. But that’s not why it was jarring. “Carnival” was being co-directed this February by my friend Ken. When Ken and I were seniors in high school, Ken was in “Carnival” at Karen’s school. I was one of the behind the scenes stagehand types. Karen’s school theater was so wee and meager that all of the musical accompaniment for the entire production was done by a single piano, like a grade school recital, making the lameness of “Carnival” shine through like no other production in history. That lone piano was played by the recently deceased Susannah. The confluence of circumstances was damned near overpowering given the state I was already in. I went to see the production and had about fifteen equally strong and opposing emotional reactions. The potency of the memories combined with the bitterness of how it had all turned out combined with the melancholia over mortality combined with choking back tears of laughter at how unimaginably bad the actual play is combined with joyous admiration of what a good job the kids were doing with what they had to work with combined with a feeling that I am suddenly very, very old. The best part was when I opened the program and saw that the show was dedicated to Dave. The octogenarian sitting next to me was one of those fans of the high school, meaning he loved it so much that he kept tabs on everything that happened to anyone that had ever graduated from any class there. He was flummoxed by the fact that Dave had died and he hadn’t heard about it. “Wha, what’s this? Says here young feller class a’ 93 died. What’s all this? D’you know this feller?” he said, poking me in the arm like he had some business talking to me. I don’t know what made him guess I was in the class of ’93-I assume it was my boyish good looks-- but I dutifully replied, “Yes, actually, we traveled in a lot of the same circles back then. He was driving back to graduate school, you see, when this car jumped the median...” Suddenly, like half the people in the theater seemed to be turned around and listening to me telling this f***in’ sixth-hand story I didn’t even really want to be thinking about. “Hey, everybody! Blondie over here knew the dead guy!” I felt like some kind of minstrel. “Now, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale/ a tale of a kid who’s dead.…” I dug up my “Carnival” CD and played it in my new car everywhere I went for a week. For a couple of days there, I was on some pretty shaky real estate. Finally, I got to the point where I either had to buy a bottle of Jim Beam or I had to deliver the smackdown to a couple of my demons. I chose the latter and began to get together with all the people I was worried about and say, “Hey, jackass! I’m worried about you! And also the following fifteen things!” and just get it all out of my system. Lots of long walks, long car rides to nowhere, and long distance phone calls. Again, I won’t go into detail (the part where the story gets good is always the part I leave out. doesn’t that suck for you?) but it left me in much better shape emotionally. Plus, a couple of weeks went by where nobody died. To my knowledge. Except for Buffy's mom, but that was just TV. Of course, life still had its share of downs; my computers at home and work both broke to varying degrees last week, but frankly at this point if it ain’t animate its breaking doesn’t concern me anymore. (Obviously, my computer still works well enough.) Put it all together, though, and I think you can all understand why I chose to sit out February.
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| March: the Cosmic Apology. Whenever things tend to be going really poorly (or too well), or whenever the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen manages to be topped by something even dumber, I have become fond of reassuring myself with the axiom, “The pendulum can only swing so far.” (This phrase was donated to my vocabulary the day Ken’s mom was introduced to the show “Xena, Warrior Princess.”) One of the problems with this bon mot is that there’s no officiating body on whether it’s actually true or not. I mean, what’s to say that it isn’t all downhill from here? I’ll tell you what. March, that’s what. I’d been feeling about as low as a fellow can feel without morphine coming into play. You know this. You don’t even need to go back a whole entry. These last few days, though, a couple of things have just snapped the sunshine back into focus. I have been sitting at the keyboard for ten minutes trying to figure out a way to continue this story without being completely predictable and sad, which is to say I have been sitting here for five minutes trying to move forward without actually typing the words, “See, I met this girl...” Because I think that’s pretty dumb, don’t you? “Mope mope, brood brood, things are terrible HEY a pretty girl all better!” No. The things you really need in life should be self-contained; the trick is not finding someone who makes you feel good, but finding what makes you feel good inside that cobwebbed rusty tool shed you call your own head. And I’m still not really there yet. I just happened to have a chance meeting with someone who reminded me where a lot of those things in my head were located. And now I just want to make sure I don’t sound like some pathetic swooning schoolgirl. Besides, it wasn’t like that. We’re just friends. So quit snickering. Long set-up, shortened: A woman who didn’t know me but knew of me from all sorts of places and things we had in common dropped out of the clear blue sky the other day and asked if we could get together for coffee or something. Since this was not someone I knew, and my risk-taking tendencies lean less towards the bungee-jumping and more towards the seat-belt-buckling, my nature was locked in conflict: the desire to go out with a potentially interesting (interested?) woman for the first time in a presidential administration vs. the desire not to get chloroformed and stuffed into a car trunk because I was stupid enough to go out with some potentially psychopathic stranger. I decided the best thing to do would be to e-mail a couple of my most level-headed friends a summary of the situation and see what advice they had to give me. My prediction was that I’d hear, “Are you nuts?! I saw this on ‘Dateline’ last month, and then on ‘20/20’ about two weeks later! And then ’48 Hours’ the following evening! Don’t hook up with charming strangers unless you like credit card fraud and being bricked into a wall in someone’s cellar in several pieces!” That was what I thought my friends would say. Their actual replies were all along the lines of, “Of course you should go! What the hell else have you got going for you right now, Lothario? Hurry, before she changes her mind.” So I weighed the options without really weighing the options and called her, and we set up a place and time to meet. She walked through the door at around 9:30, wearing an eager, nervous expression and a hat that made her head look like a strawberry. (SO cute. I wanted to put her in my pocket and take her with me like a good luck charm.) And before I knew what was going on, I was looking at my watch to see that we’d talked for six hours. It was the best night I’ve had in a long, long, long long long longlong time. It was like my whole life took a great big deep breath just as things were getting claustrophobic. The evening had all been intensified by the fact that she’d had a chance to read much of the writing you’re reading right now and enthusiastically loved a lot of it. I’ve never really understood this reaction, but I’ve always preferred it to the poo-covered hate mail, so no dental inspections for the gift horse today. The point is, reading a couple of chapters of my life story had given her a way of looking at me... I felt like some kind of sage or poet laureate or something. When I answered her questions, I half expected to see a notepad produced. She was talking to me like I was a national treasure, not like people at work or at home do. She talked like I was really worth something. Like I really had something extraordinary to offer. It reminded me of things about myself that I hadn’t thought about or felt in ages. Years. It’s not because there aren’t people in my life who make me feel welcome and loved. I have tremendous friends. Genuinely giving people. I had a friend buy me a crock pot the other day for no f***ing reason whatsoever. Just, knock knock!, who could that be?, crock pot! Abnormally, freakishly thoughtful people. So I’m not trying to say that I was leading this Dickensian life in the coal box, and then this woman came along and taught me how to live again, and my heart grew three sizes that day. Nothing like that. It’s just that the nutrients your soul gets from kind acts of friendship cannot make up for the powerful vitamins you get from beautiful women acting the same way every once in a while. You can’t make up for one with more of the other. There’s no such thing as soul veganism. I also don’t want to make it seem like her best feature was the liking of me. I just have really specific rules for myself about the sorts of things I can say here. I will say that she was a really inspiring person to me. After school, she took off to the other side of the country and built herself a life from the ground up with nothing more than her wits and a solid idea of what she wanted to do next. She packed up and hit the road with a question mark at the end of the arrow on her road map; I’m paralyzed with fear and indecision when the sandwich shop is out of my soup. She had a really healthy attitude about a lot of things, and a laid-back outlook that I preach but often cannot practice. I also loved how much we laughed when we were together. Very few people really make me laugh, and I wear off after a while. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend of many years wherein she said one of the things she liked most about our early relationship was laughing so much. I had a kind of opposite-Goodfellas reaction to that: “What, am I not funny anymore? Do I not amuse you? In what way am I not funny?” She said, “No, that’s not it at all. I guess I just sorta got used to it. I have come to expect amusement. You’ve spoiled me.” Ever since then, I’ve always relished the beginning, before the ear has recorded all the rhythms and timing of conversation, that period when none of the jokes are inside and none of the material has had a chance to resurface. Opening night. I killed on opening night. I left her company reluctantly, but with the unmistakable sense that I was electric and bulletproof. It just about, although not quite, redeemed the rest of the year to date. I say “not quite” because, although we did get together again a couple of days later and again had a great time, she was only around for a few days visiting town. The rest of the time, she lives several, several hundred miles away. (You grammar cops may have already divined her departure from some prominent usage of the past tense above. I just hope you didn’t ruin the ending for any non-grammar cops. These stories are tricky enough to tell as it is.) So, the divine hand of providence gave me a free sample. Then she was back from whence she came. A few months ago, having someone that amazing around for a couple of days only for her to be wrenched away just as I was getting a real taste for her would have been capable of really depressing the s*** out of me. But frankly, that was when everyone I knew was alive. The worst I did after she left for the last time was look up at the sky, point, and say, “Pacific Northwest, eh? Ha ha! Good one, there, God! Got me again!” When there was no blasphemy lightning, I took that as His way of saying, “You’re welcome.” ***** I would be a churl and a twit not to mention the right hook of this one-two knockout punch of a weekend, namely my friend Chris’ third annual high-falutin’ dinner party which I have come to think of as “the gastro-orgy.” He throws this party every spring to exorcise his overpowering biological urge to cook French things. He feels compelled to fix us sweetbreads and duck, so we do the right thing and eat up. You know, for his benefit. Oh, and also possibly because everything that comes out of his kitchen rocks my nads. Confit of duck! Salmon en Papillote! Lobster custard garnished with caviar! Was your dinner garnished with caviar? Your spam sandwich? I thought not! It took us four hours to finish it all. Chris is why I no longer risk giving up foods for Lent. Even the other guests were cool. Chris’ girlfriend even came in from out of town, because it was Beautiful Women From Out Of Town Weekend 2001. It was the kind of week that reminds you you’re alive. Here’s hoping the pendulum has further to swing.
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| Like I said the other day, I think the key to mental health and stability (with the puppies and the hugs and the jolly dancing lollipop elves) is filling your emotional needs from within, rather than relying on someone else to make you feel good about you. Deciding you must be great because someone tells you you're great is not only lazy but dangerous because, as I have learned amply, that person can always just leave. And what then? It's a cold and cynical world, where people are more than eloquent when it comes to letting you know how much you suck. Not Letting the Bastards Get You Down is a full-time job. So, like I said the other day, I think that's important. Like I also said the other day, I'm not quite there yet. I'm closer than a lot of people, but still, miles to go before I sleep. I've been thinking about this weekend, and how amazing it was to have someone looking at me that way. Somebody looking at this backward lumpen oaf and seeing... well, whatever it was she saw. Some kind of wordsmith guru gold-plated dragon slayer or something. And it occurred to me that I haven't really felt like that in a while. And then it occurred to me that the last time I did, it was because of a girl. And then it occurred to me that I'm really bad at following my own advice. To make myself feel better, I then advised myself to go have a snack, and that advice I followed very capably. (Several months ago, you see, I was going out with this girl I thought was really attractive. So attractive, in fact, that I had entirely ruled out the possibility that she would ever be the least bit interested in me and never even considered asking her out. She kind of announced she was receptive one day, and I was pretty friggin' insufferable after that. The ego boost lasted longer than the relationship.) So all of this stuff was rolling around in my head this week, and the bittersweetness of all these people who remind me I'm cool and then get as far away from me as humanly possible was lingering in a way that was more bitter than sweet. Last night, I decided, "Oh, this is idiotic," and took a walk to the coffee house to cheer myself up. I don't drink coffee. Always have hated the stuff. Don't even bother trying to sell me on it. "But they have these new mochas with frosting and sprinkles and ice, and it tastes like a milkshake! A milkshake made out of boiled bean powder and chimney ashes!" Save your breath for combatting your hypertension, o caffeinated Starbuckaroo. One more taste I'll never acquire. That having been said, I figured the coffee house would be an excellent place to cheer up, because every time I go there it's an absolute lovefest. My friend Adam introduced me to the place. He always goes there to grade papers; like many of my friends since college, any time he needs to get work done he goes to a crowded public place full of talking people. (I've never understood this either, but I'm about two rants over my limit already so let's keep this brisk.) Every time we went there, the girl behind the counter gushed all over us. It was amazing. I had been to this place half a dozen times this year, and she had never allowed me to pay for my purchase yet. It always led to this incredibly awkward moment, because she'd give me my stuff, and I'd stand there holding my wallet, and she'd just move on to the next person in line. I would be standing there with five crumpled dollars in my outstretched hand, pensively looking around like some idiot child who'd been sent to the corner store to buy Grandma a pack of smokes. "Umm... hey there. How much for the bagel and the ginger ale?" "Oh, stop it," she'd say and flutter her hand at me. "Just go on with that." Oh yes, I thought, I will be coming back here. Excellent customer service, and/or a grudge against the owner. And every time we came in, she would ignore everybody else and sit down at our table and chat us up. One time, she came over and brought us a piece of pie for no reason whatsoever. And despite the fact that we had never talked, she apparently knew me from college. (Big campus celebrity, don'tcha know. Yeah. Quite the badge of honor. Puts me in the same league as the cross-eyed 30 year old who still lived in the dorm and went to class in paisley biker shorts.) So you can where maybe this would be a good place to go when I'm feeling blue. The Good Will Cafe has been my emotional backrub a time or two in the past. With that in mind, I gathered up a book or two and walked over to the place. As usual, everyone working there was casually sitting around a table in the front talking when I arrived. "Hey!" I exclaimed jubilantly. When they looked up and saw who it was, they all went back to their conversation. Nobody even said hi. Well, that's not right. This coffee shop appears to be malfunctioning somehow. Maybe they don't recognize me in these shoes. I went up and stood at the counter and tried to sort things out. After a minute or two, someone sauntered up to take my order. I went for jovial. "Wow. A guy goes to Steak 'n' Shake a couple of times and everybody acts like he's committed coffee infidelity, eh?" "What can I get for you?" All business. Have I even had the opportunity to piss one of these people off in the last week? I placed my order, paid for it, and took my seat near the door. Normally, of course, having to pay money in exchange for goods wouldn't be a cause for distress, but under the circumstances I felt like I'd just been dumped. Dumped by a retail establishment. Not wanting to feel like I'd wasted the trip, I ate my bagel and read my book... and the whole time I was there, not only didn't anyone talk to me, but I was ignored with vigor, ardor, fervor, and -ors of many other kinds. Having described myself above as someone whose self-opinion is often at the mercy of others, you can imagine what this little excursion was doing to me upstairs. Ack! What the f*** is going on?! Tell me what I did, so I can stop doing It and post anti-It signs on neighborhood telephone poles and conduct an extensive It awareness campaign! I don't like this place! I liked the place with the free pie and the pretty waitress talking to me and... Adam. Talking to me and Adam. Goddammit. This isn't the Good Will Cafe. The pretty waitress just wants to hop into Adam's pantaloons. AGAIN. That's Adam in a nutshell. Adam is a simple man, an unassuming man who, through no fault of his own, exudes the exact same pheromones as a rock star. Without any intention whatsoever, every day Adam walks into a life other people would gnaw off their own arms for. Serendipity follows Adam with a sun umbrella and a comfy, comfy pillow in case he should fall or get sleepy. His roommate Ken has struggled with this side of Adam ever since we were in high school. KEN: I really like that girl Michelle. ADAM: Really? That’s amazing! Michelle and I just started going out. KEN: Huh. Well, now I really like this other girl. ADAM: That’s excellent. Are you two going out? KEN: No. No, she has a crush on someone else. Specifically you. ADAM: Sorry about that. I won’t go out with her or anything. KEN: Excellent. I feel much better now. Maybe I’ll take my mind off of this by learning the guitar. ADAM: What a coincidence! I’m the lead guitarist in a punk band! KEN: Oh yeah? Well... I just got accepted to my dream college! In Boston! ADAM: Hey, that’s great! We can hang out! I just got accepted into Harvard! KEN: Please die now. (years later) ADAM: Hey Ken! Long time no see! What have you been up to? KEN: Well, I just moved back to town. I’m applying for a teaching job at our old high school. I’m hoping for something in the English department. ADAM: You’re kidding! That’s amazing! I just took that job. KEN: Didn’t I ask you to die? Normally, because it is not happening to me, I find this side of Adam hilarious. At long last, however, the whole thing kinda came and bit me in the bottom. I thought I was really well-liked in this place where everybody knew my name. As it turns out, though, they just wanted Adam and could really give a rat’s ass about me. This revelation was not the pick-me-up I anticipated. On the subject of true friends and happiness, my friend Nicole was once fond of telling me, "It's just enough for me to know that somewhere out there, someone is my friend and thinking of me. In some corner of the globe, I have my friend. That keeps me happy wherever I go.” On these occasions, I was equally fond of replying, "Who the f*** are you, Fievel Mouskewitz? What's the point of having friends if they're not here to talk to?" On the way home from Café du Manipulation, however, Nicole’s words of wisdom were the ones that came back to me. I suppose I should have been upset to learn that these people I thought were becoming my friends were actually just kind of looking at me as Adam’s pet and scratching me behind the ears only to kick me when he wasn’t around. All I could think of, though, was an amazing woman I’d met over milkshakes a few days earlier. And that in turn reminded me of a really cute girl I’d never have dreamed of asking out. And that made me think, you know, I don’t suck. Actually, I may even kick some ass. And the fact that I just paid for my bagel doesn’t mean I’m worthless; it means they’re morons. And rather than feeling like I was deluding myself to soften my cappuccino rejection, it actually seemed plausible. I was pretty okay with me. That wouldn’t have happened a year ago. Maybe I don’t have as many miles to go after all.
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| God is filming a horror movie at my office. The geese are back for the spring, and they have brought their excrement with them. I have learned a lot about geese from working here, but no piece of goose minutia has been driven home to me quite like their "hygiene." I can infer from the past month that a) geese eat a lot of food, apparently Mexican in nature and b) they do not plan to stay in any one place for too long, because they sure don't set aside any space that they keep clean or take care of. Geese can't have nice things. While I certainly don't appreciate the birds' recent "Your Walkway, My Commode" initiative, that isn't what's scary about their return. What freaks me out is how any one species could exhibit so much pissed-off antisocial behavior and still mate for life. They found this office complex, see, and it's very obviously HumanLand. The parking lot should be a dead giveaway. Their agenda, though, seems to be to find the largest human population possible and then act incredibly indignant that humans keep being there. Every day with the hissing and flapping. I'm just trying to walk through the front door. Unfortunately, one of them laid her damn eggs about three feet from the front door. There's absolutely no reasoning with them now. "Hssss! Hssssssss! Get away from my eggs! This is an outrage! Don't make me molt at you!" Don't flatter yourself, flappy. Why would I want goose eggs, other than to prevent the birth of more geese? I mean, I spend the entire trek from the car avoiding the byproducts of your ass. In an interesting twist, these eggs are also a foot from a reflective glass window that mommy believes is another goose. As a result, she spends half of every single day attacking the window around the corner from my desk. The glass is smeared with spit everyone is afraid to clean. It's really quite charming. It's like they have emotional problems. Maybe all the feces is some kind of cry for help. This week, I got out of my car expecting to be hissed at only to find the lot barren. I briefly assumed that the geese had gone to defend their eggs from another piece of glass or perhaps enrolled in an early family therapy session. Soon, though, I caught a rustle out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see a dozen geese standing rigidly in a straight line at the edge of the roof. They looked like they were practicing for the Synchronized Suicide Contemplation semifinals. They were all staring down ominously into the parking lot. Soon, my winged brothers. Soon. That's the vibe that starts my day. At that time of the morning, it seems perfectly plausible that you could walk into your office and find everyone dead with webbed footprints all over them. ******* I had a photo shoot a couple of weeks ago, by the way. Random? Oh yes. A local magazine was doing a piece on dot-com incompetence for its next issue and wanted someone from our company to expound on people who have done things right and people who've blown it online. Somebody decided that I was opinionated and verbose enough to give them what they wanted, and the next thing I knew I was mercilessly ripping on another company to a complete stranger. (The company, by the way, was Disney Internet Group, who never found anything they couldn't buy and ruin. So it's not like I was talking smack about some competitor or anything. It was kind of the equivalent of an aircraft carrier coming under attack from an angry bee.) I was pretty happy with how the whole thing went, (the reporter was well-versed in the journalists' art of being so obsequious that the subject feels admired and therefore comfortable spilling his guts about things he shouldn't; unfortunately for the reporter, I don't even trust people I'm dating anymore) but other than wondering how they would manage to misquote me I didn't give it too much more thought. Shortly after the interview, though, I got this call from a guy who said he wanted to take my picture. "Surely they're not getting pictures of everybody they talked to, are they?" I asked. I was assuming that the article was like one of those sidebar things, where they include quotes from ten or fifteen people. "Well, there were only the three of you," said the photographer. "We have some pretty cool ideas for the photo spread, though." They only talked to three of us, and they want to take a bunch of pictures. Huh. This could be a bigger deal than I originally realized. Kind of exciting. Mostly freaky, but kind of exciting. "Where do I need to be?" "We're doing it at 10:30 on Tuesday morning. We'll be meeting at an abandoned warehouse down by the riverfront, at the corner of Urban Decay Road and Drunken Hobo Avenue." "Okay, should I-- wait, where?" "You can't miss it. It's right past the train tracks; if you see the neglected children playing in sewer runoff, you've gone too far. See ya then!" CLICK Well, this just got about three different kinds of shady. The magazine in question has never been one that bowled me over to begin with. It's put out by the local business journal as some kind of supplement or something. You can't go into a store and buy it. You have to subscribe, and then on the third Wednesday of the month they leave it in an unmarked paper bag at the bus terminal at exactly 9:17 p.m. with the strict warning, "No cops!" That may be a slight exaggeration. Still, I had a moment when I said to my mom, "I'm going to be interviewed in a magazine!" and she said, "Ooh! I'll need to get a copy!" and I had to reply, "I... you know, I'm not sure you can," and the Impressed Parent factor immediately went all the way back down to 0. With this impression of the whole enterprise as a starting point, the phrase "meet me at the abandoned warehouse on the waterfront" was not doing a whole lot for me. I'll go, but the minute he asks me to take my shirt off, I'm outta there. I knew I had to be downtown by 10:30, and I don't live more than ten minutes from downtown, so I left at about 8:45 that morning. I love this city, absolutely and unconditionally, but part of loving is accepting flaws and our city's epicenter is a corner of hell that burst through the earth and kept on going. Completely bereft of any meaningful activity--the real trick in finding the abandoned warehouse would be determining which one the guy meant-- and yet apparently not enough room for a single two way street.
Should I have turned left back there, or up here? It is assumed that the labyrinth will be a necessary part of any downtown driving directions. 1) Take the highway 10 miles to exit 14. 2) Take a left into downtown. 3) Get ridiculously lost for half an hour. 4) Try to find parking for an hour. 5) Drive screaming into the Harris Hole. I try to plan accordingly. With over an hour to find the place, I arrived just in time. I parked my car at the abandoned warehouse and was introduced to the photographer and two men in suits who I guess also got interviewed. The photographer had us wade out into knee-deep weeds and hold up signs for an hour. I'm pretty sure the whole thing was an elaborate practical joke. The signs were blank; "We'll PhotoShop something onto them later," he said out loud while thinking, "something like, 'We are a bunch of great big tools! Get a load of what the photographer got us to do! The photographer is cool!'" When I walked out into the weeds, I stepped in somebody's sleeping bag. Thankfully, nobody was in it. In retrospect, it's probably for the best my mom won't be able to buy this magazine.
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