chapter six: old man winter's opus

writing's gotten so much harder than the last time I did it. I've lost the ability to forget about a paragraph I just wrote. I mean I never forgot about it, I had the bare essential details to mind as I plowed along, but I've completely lost touch with my native tongue- it's like my hands warped over these months and can no longer grip syntax the way they used to. the way I liked to.

so I'm out of practice. so I'm postponing the hard work of starting all fucking over again. so I'm being locked into a pattern of making five or six blog posts a month so I can feel less than shitty about existing for all that time.

so what if I go from being somebody's "writer friend" to their "friend." am I seriously worrying about status when I'm this young?

am I seriously worrying about hitting my creative zenith at eighteen?

even if I am, it won't do me any good. either way, I get hit.

chapter five: panda hunting

went to six flags today with cousins and aunt. while there I had a weird idea- if everything that exists is counterbalancing something else, if all we see is only stable because somewhere else in the universe the other half of the see-saw is photonegatively poised and still in space, what's keeping a roller coaster in stasis? what is it about modern times that neccessitates a two hundred foot drop and six dollar ice cream?

maybe it's because we've become a boring and unremarkable species. we've gotten out of touch with what we used to call fun. maybe thrill rides are our answer to salaries and honda civics- brief, picant bursts of speed spread over endless expanses of grey.

I went on the Superman ride and said the following words at the top of the first hill: "Buckle in and enjoy this motherfucker." it seemed like the right thing to say. the buckle dug into my hip and left a shallow, pale avulsion which I expected to bleed, but did not. eventually that skin will fall off.

other than that, I walked away unharmed.

I worry that without any real danger, the feeling of suspense will cheapen and devalue until our species becomes a numb, unfeeling, boring lot. I'm not sure why I worry, since I'm still having an okay time of things- other than the dread that this "okay time of things" is an illusion I've cast for myself, so that I don't get distracted by these big boring stretches. maybe it's because my kids will turn to even more extreme behaviors than the ones which my generation love so dearly. maybe if they get my skepticism, they'll question everything so much that they'll never have a good time- but more importantly, never a good fake time.

when we got home, my cousins played a cruel game with my dog, where they take one of his stuffed pandas and hide it somewhere. I look at him and wonder about the moment of domestication, about the wolves who looked from these strange, featherless birds to their cubs and said, "From now on, we will be small." my cousins take my dog by the collar and tell him to wait while they hide his toy, and I wonder what keeps him there. I look at the frantic scurry that carries him after they let him go, and wonder about all the generations of wolves it would take to pervert that old prowl into this clumsy, incompetent gait.

dogs do that; presidents go quail hunting. (on a related note, I heard a song in the country themed part of the park with some lyric about having boots on your feet and hunting your own meat. after hearing that, I was stricken with a sudden, desperate urge to shoot at wild game.)

but those words, "buckle in, enjoy this motherfucker," seem right and wrong at the same time. it all comes down to sarcasm again: knowing there is nothing to laugh about, knowing that, at best, the happiness you find in an amusement park is just a straw-man argument to be used against yourself while debating the value of human life, but laughing anyways, cackling like an absolute fiend, seventy miles an hour, one hundred fifty five seconds.

chapter four: semiautobiographical

I remember a few months ago when I was so starved for human contact that I was afraid to look anybody in the eye for too long, in case a dam broke below my brain and all the years I spent apart from people finally itched and scratched up to the surface. I was once so afraid that somebody would guess how perfectly, terribly alone I'd been that I became even more alone.

what else should I say? that I'm scared to death that the reason I'm bored all the time is because I'm boring? I'm old enough to know not to wish I wasn't my own victim, that every mess can be blamed on some mysterious, ubiquitous tilt that's been following me around since forever and ever ago. that excuse dried up a long time ago. no, the communists are not to blame, I am.

the irony is that I'm fine. I'm perfectly okay. there is nothing physically broken. in fact, I'm in pretty good shape. sure, I don't get enough sleep, but I'm not allowed to complain about that. I grew up in an unbroken home. I'm going to college. I'm a young white male. but every time I start writing about what a good life I have, and how blessed I am, and how lucky I was to get born into what I hope is just a shell, I want to tear everything off, rip the mud off and douse my raw skin with peroxide and gasoline.

other people shrug that stupid, presumptuous horse shit off like nobody else existed.

nothing I'm writing about is deep enough to leave a scar, and the cure for that is to go deeper and write about that, but who has the strength for that?

weakness, man. I'd like to feel like I can tackle something. or make something last. but now I'm handily back to Ecclesiastes, about how no mortal can leave a scab on the earth that won't get blown over and eroded. I'm not worried about that yet- I just want one of my five year olds to play frisbee for a fucking change, instead of standing around waiting for the assholes to do something else. the way I used to.

I'm leaving, leaving. growing distant like a good soldier. I'm trying so, so hard to enjoy the nice things in my life while I'm still around them. every morning when I walk into work I try to think about how rare a thing it is to work with kids in fresh air. and I keep trying to feel a lightness in my heart, or a tennis ball in my throat, and I've never stopped aching after waking up from a dream I could fly, and it's never happened again. eighteen fucking years. it'll never happen again.

chapter three: multi-tool; blood red hair.

suggestions range from a microwave oven to a george foreman grill to an iron to a tie rack. of these things I would use not a one.

maybe when I get my little red rowboat, I'll bring a battery-powered foreman grill with me, so I can cook the fish I catch. and now that I've bought this handy grey multi-tool, I can measure how long these fish are, take the hook out of their gills and scale them. I can use a knife of either of two sizes to eat them. when relatives and wives wanted to visit me, they'd go down three miles of dirt road, hike a bit and find my little basement by the lake. I would feed them fish, roots, berries and maybe some meat, if I decided I needed a bow. it would be a happy, quiet existence.

is that a mark of pathetic-ness, that when you boil me down to the bedrock, when you strip the mammalian scab off of my reptilian brain, that I'd just like to go fishing in a red rowboat?

what I'd like to do is go to UMass, find somebody with hair the color of blood, and drive recklessly with them for a weekend or two. run red lights, drive against traffic, make illegal u-turns at irresponsible speeds. I'd like to walk up the hill at work and find my girl waiting with my keys in her hand to drive as far away from this sarcastic mess as far could ever describe.

am getting the tattoo, sometime next week.

there are so many distractions that I'm beginning to forget what I was trying to concentrate on in the first place. these distractions are painful enough to blind me to the bit of it I actually remember, so that the only reason I believe there was once something very decent and alive about me is the tearing of my flesh when I pretend nothing ever happened at all.

chapter two: boxes

some things aren't worth taking. some not even worth looking at.

the month after I turned fifteen, two things happened: I got dumped in a way so casual it was nearly adorable, and so nearly-adorable that I almost felt bad that I'd been dumped. shortly thereafter I got an award for creative writing. I took a needle and a pair of pliers and stuck that award into my bookshelf. above that place I wrote "wall of bullshit." I have been shaving pieces off that award for every story I write. some day that award will turn into a tiny nub of paper, and I'll go to cut another piece off and it'll crumble in my hands, get torn up under my fingernails. what I would like is another award to slowly, lovingly amputate when I'm done with thise one.

I won't bring my walking stick, air conditioner or sabre, although I'm bringing my fencing mask. at UMass, you never know.

nor am I bringing the electric guitar my parents got me when I was in the fifth grade, nor the twelve-string guitar my dad got at christmas five years ago, because I am still worth shit on the guitar, and because in the five years since that twelve-string guitar has been in our possession I have been farming strings off it to feed the electric guitar which I am still worth shit on, seven years later.

I'm bringing blankets, pillows, bed spreads, but they're all new- I'm not going to bring the mattress I've been sleeping on since the second grade, and I'm not bringing the splash of paint on my windowsill which looks like tits. I'm not going to bring the sounds of my neighbor's kid being conceived in any form but disgusting, unfortunate memory.

I'll bring my flash drive; I'll bring my laptop; I'll bring my beaten-up ring. but I won't bring the hundreds of pages of shit I wrote in high school, and I won't bring the heavy green folders I stole from my sister's orchestra which I converted into portfolios. I labeled them "My Flaming Youth", and devoted a pocket of each for freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years' output.

this folder will go in a box, and that box will go away in the basement, because some things are not worth taking.

chapter one: flightless, featherless birds

hard day. most are. have been sleeping alright. haven't been writing. feel like shit about that, and deserve to.

have to write a story about a van that gets stranded somewhere in the desert, but first would like to explore an origin story. I think adam and eve is a bunch of bullshit, a guilt-trip story penned by a primitive, literate minority, vampires of morality who wanted everybody to feel bad enough and ashamed enough to get along.

what a remarkable idea it is, that you're innocent until proven guilty. and the converse, too- is it not amazing that a story about two rotten apples spoiling five hundred thousand years of human history somehow doesn't stick on the way down?

here's how i would write it. there wouldn't be a snake. having a different creature as an antagonist is pointless. it's more horrifying if your villain resembles your hero- a funhouse mirror effect.

there would be two birds flying around under the firmament. they'd be the only birds for miles around. they wouldn't have beaks or claws, because they wouldn't have any use for them- we're still in the garden of eden, here. they'd absolutely hate each other and pray to God for the means to kill each other. and he would answed those prayers and give them sharp talons and hard beaks.

then they'd tumble around in the air a bit, and peck at their faces until their eyes could no longer look at God's face, and mangle their hands until they could no longer hold their work or wives or worship without aching in a horrible way, and they'd fight for so long that nothing remained of their once-gorgeous plumage, until the pale, waxy skin it once covered became bare and bloodied. they'd try to stay in the air, ignoring the wounds they'd given each other, and they'd try to bellow at each other the hateful words they had once known, but their tongues had long since turned to ribbons and pulp. they'd sink slowly to the ground they'd once only deigned to shit on.

a few days after blacking out, they'd wake up completely alone, recognizing a small spark of the old closeness they'd felt so near to heaven. the majority of that spark would be hidden to everybody, including themselves, and they would spend the rest of their lives looking for something like that, but within/among themselves.

because that's really the best thing you can call a person, a flightless, featherless bird.