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If you're anything like me, (I'm very sorry, and) you may have gotten to a stage in your adult life when you feel safe to assume that your parents will no longer have an urge to live vicariously through you. Sadly, you are wrong, but you're in good company. I always vanquished any attempt to live through me as a kid; my poor father was cursed with a son who was a lithe 5'9" by the time he was seven and had an insatiable competitive passion… for collecting comic books. (You can laugh, but I was cutthroat on New Issue Thursday. There are only so many Incredible Hulk #340s to go around, man.) Most dads might reward a kid by taking some time out to play catch with them; in my house, Dad could only get me to play catch by promising me some kind of reward afterwards. Thank God for that Atari. (Sorry, Dad, wherever you are. Cheer up, though; being a geek landed me a job!) Anyway, I didn't have stage parents or would-be coaches, so I was under the general impression that no one was ever going to live through me again. This is because I am a moron, and because I did not yet have a nice apartment. Just as the project of refinishing the basement at home was winding down, just when the last set of new drapes had been purchased and returned to JC Penney's, just when all the walls had been papered, just when it looked like the frontier that is my parents' house had been fully exploited, God smiled down from heaven and gave my mother a whole new set of rooms to decorate. The fact that they're actually my rooms is incidental in a way that parallels Manifest Destiny eerily. I mentioned that I needed some pictures to hang on my wall, and like inviting in a vampire or feeding a strange cat, that was pretty much the end. I haven't ended up finding any pictures, but I am now the proud owner of a "throw" rug ("throw"? it's 5' x 7'! there's no throwing it anywhere! it could be a moon base), an honest-to-Gawd non-folding wooden dinner table rescued from my cousin's basement, kitchen chairs, matching kitchen chair cushions and tablecloth, and 1400 catalogs. I love it, though. I'm into it. Her zeal is contagious; a couple of hours with these catalogs, and I'm having religious revivals over halogen lamps. (I think I'm having a second childhood; when I was 3 or 4, my mom would give me the Christmas catalogs in September and I'd look at the toys and electronics for 7 hours a day until New Year's Eve.) Best of all, as a housewarming, she bought me the rug. I was astonished. She even paid attention to what I said I was looking for. "Mom! This rug is amazing. Thank you so much. I don't know how I feel about the little flowers around the edges, but I like the color so much I can deal with the little flowers." "Throw rugs have flowers." "Well, yeah, this one does. And I like it." "They have flowers! "I really don't mean to get into a thing about—" "They just do." "All throw rugs have flowers." "Yes." "All throw rugs, everywhere." "Yes." "Everywhere on earth." "They have flowers around the edges. It's a style." "Well… good then. I like the style. Thank you for your help." "You're sure you like it?" "I love it." "You don't want me to take it back for you?" "Don't you dare. This is my favorite rug in the apartment." "I can take it back." "I have an emotional bond with the rug, Mom. Never in my life have I felt so complete. Please let me keep it." "My feelings won't be hurt if you don't like it. I still have the receipt." "Mom, I hereby vow that this is the most exquisite rug I have even seen, and that you are the most thoughtful mother and attentive decorator who has ever walked upon the firmament, and that the rug is so gorgeous that I will roll it up and consummate our relationship the moment you leave, all if you will please just stop offering to take it back."
"So you like it?" I have enjoyed the small bonding opportunity the apartment has afforded us. My mom only used to visit my old place on the off chance she could witness a felony in the parking lot. If there has been one snag, it was the day she came over with the shower curtain. "Look what I got you!" "You got me something again? Oh, shucks. Ma, you're the best!…" "I was at this new store, Kohl's, and they're having a sale there and everything is almost free! I got you a shower curtain! It was a dollar! Look!" "That price tag says $.99, all right! Hey! It's a… Star Wars… shower curtain! With… great… big… space ships all over it! And… and lasers! I remember how bad I wanted one of these… about fifteen years ago!… Tha—thanks, thank you! This is… lovely!" "I know you always say I never buy you the Star Track stuff you like, so I saw this and knew you would be surprised!" "No argument there! Heh… although, actually, I've kinda been focused on, ya know… kinda… de-emphasizing the whole 'children's playthings, dateless wonder' motif of the apartment…" "You don't like it? I can take it back." "No, no! I like it! It's very thoughtful! It will look really cool, probably." "What dateless? Where the hell is Kelly?" "Oh, she's around. That's all kind of, ya know, complicated. Like I've told you before. Every single time I see you." "I've always liked her." "Ohhhhhhhhh so did I. Hey! Let's go put up that shower curtain!" So now, the bathroom is all decked out. With the light shining through the laser beams, it's like bathing in a disco. And who wouldn't want that?
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So, my problem with being a semi-authority is getting to be… a… problem. Let me start over. I sit at my desk, and over my shoulder I hear him. He's like some kind of caged, ill-fed animal, like one of those dogs in a news story about a criminally neglected home. The cameraman pans across the living room full of garbage and old newspapers and unchanged diapers, and then they cut to this animal in a chicken wire cage in the back yard, its hair out in clumps, its teeth bared, a noise coming out of it very much like the low rumble I hear over my shoulder all day. He sounds a little like Yosemite Sam, except the cursing is composed of actual profanity instead of the "rck'n frck'n" stuff Sam used to do. First, it was all about the Benjamins. He grumbled under his breath like a pirate that he wasn't making any money. He didn't say anything productive, mind you. He just kept leaving Starbucks job applications around the office. I can think of better ways to start a meaningful dialogue. Since a large part of how much you like your job is who you work with, and ergo I didn't want to see anyone unhappy, and he really wasn't making all that much, I talked to the higher-ups and got him a raise. Shortly thereafter, he declared that his chair was a piece of crap. "No back support! I can't get any work done sitting in this!" He kept tinkering with it and taking it apart and screwing with it until he finally just ripped the back of it off in this horrifying little display one morning out of absolutely nowhere. Then he just sat back down in it, as if this were normal and completely justified workplace behavior. Not so much passive-aggressive as passive-explosive. I said, "Well, that can be frustrating I guess. Nobody should have to work with a broken chair. Maybe he just didn't realize that he just had to ask for a new one." And I told him, "We're pretty good about replacing things that aren't working if you ask," and I saw to it that he got a new chair. (Actually, not to dwell or anything, but it's a fairly swank chair. Armrests and one of those barbershop lowering things. Four functioning wheels, without a trace of that weird limp shopping carts develop in their old age. Lovely shade of green. I would be happy to work in such a chair.) From that point, he began to hiss and spit profanely at his computer all day in truly violent bursts, eventually announcing about once a day that he was fed up with its poor performance and storming off to God knows where for various arbitrary intervals. I thought, "It really is kind of a slow computer, plus I'm afraid he might beat me," and I saw to it he got a new one. (If the chair was swank, don't even get me started on the computer. I think we bought it from NASA.) A day passed before he declared that the new one had a s***ty sound card and began plugging in and unplugging various speakers from around the office and cursing. With a computer fast enough for him to get some work done, he finally had the opportunity to realize that our internet connection was too slow for him to get any work done. Helpfully, he took a little time out of each day to share this information with the rest of us. We got a T 1 connection, and the first thing he said when trying it out was, "This is hardly any faster at all." With a computer fast enough for him to get some work done, and a chair comfy enough to get some work done, and an internet connection fast enough to get some work done, he was finally, at long last, free to complain bitterly about the work he was being asked to do. This is a waste of time. This is busywork. This is total bull****. We don't know how to run the company. We've never heard of a cost analysis. The search engines are too unpredictable. We might as well not even charge the clients, since the campaign's going to be so bad they're only going to get their money back anyway. Sometimes, our taxing and senseless demands on him—to work on his clients' sites and let them know what work he's doing—get to be so frustrating that he has to burst and storm off to God knows where for various arbitrary intervals.
And, you know, maybe he doesn't realize it, but there's a whole room full of people doing his exact job. It's like living on a volcano. We keep making sacrifices, but it just keeps erupting. I feel abused; I do everything I can to make things easier, but no matter what I keep feeling like this guy is going to take off his belt any minute. I don't know what happened to this guy. He lives alone, so I don't know what he's got going on at home. I just can't go to bat for him anymore. I have never been exposed to such naked contempt from another human being, made all the more mind-boggling by the fact that when you just come out and ask him what the hell is wrong, a switch flips inside his skull and he's polite as can be. "Is something the matter? Is there something I can do for you?" "Oh, nothing really. Just kinda tired. Don't mind little old me." "Oh… um, okay." "You stupid mother******." "What?" "Nothing. I'm gonna go get lunch. Want anything?" The other day, he came in to work with a song from the South Park movie, a song which I believe is called "Shut Your F***ing Face, Uncle F***er." Every time my boss would ask him to do anything, or send him a message, or talk to him at all, he would click a button and play the first line of the song ("shut your f***ing face, uncle f***er!") and then turn off the song and amiably do whatever was asked of him as if the sound had never occurred. It's like he's got a printout of that "101 ways to freak out your roommate" e-mail forward on his desk with check marks all over it. Later, a coworker and I were casually discussing how the MTV Video Music Awards get lamer with each passing year, and what a shame that is, and he turned around out of nowhere and snapped, "What's really f***ing sad is that you were actually pathetic enough to be pissing your life away watching the f***ing Video Music Awards. I didn't know anybody over the age of thirteen was that f***ing sad." He wasn't joking. He was not smiling. He wanted me to be dead because I watched some MTV. What do you say to that? Who talks like that to other people? I have no mental flash cards for this behavior. I don't think my jaw left the ground all day. I'm too confused to smack him. "Do… do you not realize that I'm your supervisor? Was that not made clear to you initially? Before you start some kind of anti-authoritarian, Dilbert-esque rant, could you at least consider that you're in a ball cap and jeans coming and going as you please? Where did you work before this, that this job looks bad to you? Were you a fisherman? A game tester for Nintendo? What?" I mean, I know everyone has their own work philosophy, but I don't think there's any career training that advises violent outbursts against an employer. NFL training camp, maybe. I have never been around anyone who made me think, "You know, he may be the devil." You look in his eyes sometimes and think, "Yeah, he may very well have some company in there. Time to involve the clergy." So, the solution to this problem is obvious. Very difficult, but obvious. Normally, I have a dowdy middle-aged angel on my shoulder saying, "Don't be too quick to judge that young man. He is just an emotional person who sees himself as some kind of in-your-face Adam Sandler figure or some such poppycock. Let's not be hasty." At the moment, though, that angel is holding a riding crop and shouting, "Ready!… Aim!…" ----- This has been a big week on the roller coaster. We are, after all, coming up on the one-year anniversary of the event Ricki Lake might entitle, "Surprise! The Wedding's Off!" Actually, that's more Springer. Ricki's titles are those long, drawn-out stanzas with the not-quite rhyme and meter. "I Know You Think That I'm All That, But I'm Getting Busy Behind Your Back." Hoochie. But anyway. It's been a year. A year today, actually, of rug-out-from-under-me, crotch-kickin' livin'-la-vida-joke-a singlehood. It still depresses me, the moments do still occur, but I think that's more out of habit than anything else. Mostly, on those occasions when I find myself thinking about it, it seems less like my life and more like an awful movie I'm picking apart. "Why would she keep talking to the guy about how they were going to raise their kids and what kind of house they were going to live in if she was running around with the other guy? Why would she tell him they were just 'going into a new phase of the relationship' with the other guy waiting in the wings? Ye gods, the plot inconsistencies! These characters were written by a chimp with a head injury!" Unfortunately, sometimes the only part of your life you really get to write is the dialogue. We had some decent lines, I guess. I really shouldn't think that way. I should have a hand in the plot. More and more, though, life feels like something that happens to me rather than something I'm making happen. So much of what I want to do involves all these other uncooperative people who I think of as friends or lovers but who think of me as… I dunno… some kind of entertainment center. A gift vendor. Words on a screen to be deleted without reply. The thing is, when someone decides they're done with you, there's no democracy there. Friendships and relationships are group efforts, go team!, but that doesn't mean you get a vote at the end. "I don't want to talk to you again." "Well, that's certainly fair, but I'm afraid I have to exercise my veto power. I'll see you at dinner." That quasi-reflection doesn't have much to do with my ex-, but rather with someone I had hoped would become a good friend of mine who kinda evaporated instead. The ex- and I are all right, I guess. She's happy, and I'm not miserable. I mean, I'm supposed to be going over to her (and her boyfriend's) place some time this weekend to hang out, so I can't say I'm too mad at her with any credibility. The only time I really get upset is when she minimizes the relationship in hindsight ("we were never REALLY engaged, you know"), like she will the minute she ever reads this. I just wish I had someone of my own, just somebody to hang out with every once in a while so I didn't feel like an experiment in prolonged pity. As it is, though, I've got nothing better to do than sit here and write this. (raises back of hand to forehead, wails dramatically)
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Sometimes, I let so much time pass that I cannot remember the events that took place in my most recent entry. "Is that really the last time I sat at my desk?" I need to put fingers to keyboard about this weekend. Frankly, though, it's about seventy-five degrees outside right now, and this feels a little bit to much like homework. Perhaps another time. |
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After that long a pause in entries, I'm always tempted to begin my next entry with some kind of crazed, foaming ramble. Prophecy mingled with Backstreet Boys lyrics, something like that. Unfortunately, that would require prolonged listening to the Backstreet Boys, and if I don't have the will to sit down and write every once in a while I certainly can't manage that. Speaking of prophecy, I opened my mailbox last week to discover a letter in the mail from my father. I immediately assumed the worst, because my dad lives about fifteen minutes from here and, last I checked, was still being allowed access to a telephone. (Although you wouldn't know it from the way he acts. Come to think of it, I've been on this planet nearly 25 years, and I'm almost certain I have never seen my father use a telephone. He never answers when I call, and when I'm with him and the phone rings, he just shrugs and lets the machine get it, a defeated king whose castle bell never tolls for him. It is this behavior that I blame for my own tendency to let the phone ring and ring despite the fact that, unless someone else moved into my apartment while I was at work, nobody else is ever going to answer it.) I admit to a little nervousness as I opened Dad's letter a bit hurriedly. I assumed it would either be a random act of kindness or a summons. Luckily, it was the former. Sort of. In an act that proves once and for all that my mother and father are becoming the same person, Dad had mailed me a clipping from the newspaper, presumably to affix to my refrigerator with a "Garfield" magnet. The article was entitled, "What to Do When Children Stop Going to Church." I guess it was a nice gesture, considering that it constituted perhaps the third time in my life that Dad and I communicated about religion (not counting parts 1-45 of the continuing lecture series, "The Gay Man's Place in Hell.") I found myself less than touched, though, because what it basically boiled down to in my mind was that my dad wondered one day whether I was going to church without him being around to make me and decided, without really any evidence to go on, that I wasn't. I mean, what makes him think I'm not going to church? I've never told him I was going to skip church. I've never put up a fight about going to church with him like my sister has. I've never engaged him in any contrary theological debate. He's got some nerve just assuming I don't go to church anymore! Of course, I don't go to church anymore. But that's not the point! I've covered my tracks very well, and I'd appreciate some credit! Actually, that's not even true. I've started going to church a lot more since I moved; I probably go to church a lot more than I did when I lived at home (where the church was right down the street from a Toys R Us and where I had about as much kinship with the parish community as I did with a tree full of spider monkeys.) (It should be noted that I never got accused of skipping church when I was actually doing it, living under my parents' roof and communing with the action figures every Sunday morning. I'm reminded of a Tom Sawyer story in which his aunt spanks him and, when he declares his innocence, she says, "Then this is for all the things you did that I didn't find out about.") I've been trying to get into the religious swing of things, going to the same church I went to in college. In a lot of ways, though, it's worse than my parents' church (Our Lady of the Enfeebled Congregation) because, well, I'm not in college anymore. I don't belong at the college church any more than I belong at St. Geezer's back home. It's one thing to go to church alone; it's another thing to feel alone the whole time you're there. Besides which, the freshman girls are very distracting in a way that I would not describe as "prayerful." Nevertheless, I have been going. Too bad I'll never get my dad to believe that. I want him to know my upbringing wasn't a total loss, but somewhere along the line I developed this credibility gap with my parents. I was always a good kid; I was a straight A student, never had detention, never so much as had a note sent home to my parents. Never got into fights, never got into parties, was essentially ignored by my classmates, so invisible people practically hung their coats on me, it was a blast. Anyway, my mom volunteered at the school, and she saw all the s*** my classmates were getting into, and she saw how my classmates' parents were oblivious to most of it, and she basically drew the conclusion that I was up to all kinds of s*** she was oblivious to. The better I did, the more shady I seemed. "Where do you think you're going, young man?" "Well, I was gonna… ya know… go in my room and do my homework." (long pause) "Uhh- huh…." (eyes narrow) "What are you up to?" "Um… algebra?" "You're grounded." That's pretty much been the dynamic ever since. Even in adult life. You wanna have some fun? Try convincing my parents I don't drink. "Want a beer, son? Heh heh heh." "No thanks." (theatrical, exaggerated voice reminiscent of Adam Sandler) "Oh, noooo! Pardon me! I forgot, you don't drink al-co-hol!" (parents chuckle in unison) "That's… that's right. I sure don't. Thanks, though." (wiping away tears of mirth) "You don't have to keep it up any more, boy. You're old enough now, we don't care that you drink." "But see, I don't though. I really don't. I'm not kidding. It's all I can do to watch other people do it. Seriously." "Hee hee hee! God bless ya, you haven't changed your story in ten years! Seriously, though, you don't need to be embarrassed about drinking in front of us any more if you want a beer. We were your age. We know." "GRRR! I think swallowing mouthful after mouthful of diluted flammable poison for enjoyment is about the last f***ing thing God gave you brain cells for, it sickens me to think about it, and I had to go through a mountain of self-help books in college just to stop blurting out 'YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL!' at parties!!! New Year's Eve is like an annual visit to a POW camp to me!!! I hate alcohol!!! Can't you see?! I do not drink!!! For the love of Christ!" "No beer for you, huh? Want a Manhattan?" "YEEEEAAAAGH!!!" The "but I do go to church" conversation will go pretty much the same way. I'll be saying, "No, really. All the time. I have the church bulletin right here," and my dad will wave his hands and go "yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, the important thing is that you know it's important to me that you think about going to church again," and then I will have to kill him. Which certainly won't get me any closer to heaven. I just realized what started this. It was that damned wedding. Several months ago, we as a family drove to Kentucky to go to the wedding of an old, old family friend. The wedding, while nice, was not a Catholic wedding, which incorporates all of the elements of a normal mass into the ceremony so thoroughly that I often wonder what the bride and groom are even doing there, so unnecessary and ignored have they become at their own wedding. Anyway, the wedding we went to could best be described as Miscellaneous, since the chapel was Lutheran but the bride and groom weren't, and for that matter I don't think the minister was either… he had a white robe on, but at the end he said, "By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth" and I half expected him to hand them some gambling chips. When the wedding was over, we all got ready to go to the reception, but my dad balked. He informed us we had to go to mass. This struck me as odd, frankly. I mean, it hadn't been the most religious wedding I'd ever seen, but why would we drive four hours to skip out on the one thing we came to do? "Sorry, hon! We know it's kind of a big day, but frankly you're just a mortal. We got invited to a cooler party. Sorry. Buh-bye." And so, in the midst of trying to figure out how to go to church and the reception at the same time, I said the magic words: "We could always… ya know… not go to church. This one time." That was a long ride home. But at least now I know where this clipping is coming from.
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