Get out of the cold

I've been confronted with numerous ways to escape being "single" in the past few weeks, although none of them are exactly what I want. The hazards of love are delicate thing.

On Friday, my friends and I decided that bar hopping through Hopkins was a great idea. It was. I ate this juicy Lucy that made things shimmer and pale in comparison. But a bar later, I discovered Derrick Williams, international copyright lawyer, who resides within. The Wild Boar is a terrible bar; the popcorn is awful and kids years--almost decades--younger than us were bogarting the pool tables. That left the shuffle board table open, and we played shuffle board. It's a terrible, fucking awful game. There's salt every where and you have to keep track of the score. Are you kidding? It's 2012. That is retarded.

As we left the Wild Boar, we noticed the exterior sign was broken--someone had ripped the legs off of the sign on the rear entrance to the building. I remarked to my friends that "this is some serious bullshit" and that "we should sue for some such bullshit" and we decided to return to the minivan. But as I turned around, some hot, extremely drunk broad opened the door, heard the end of our conversation, and said, "This is awful. We should sue about this sign."

Long story short, she invited us all in to a class-action lawsuit against the bar and its shitty sign. Like a gentleman and a practicing lawyer, I offered to represent us in the trial as a practicing international copyright lawyer. There was a small conversation that followed during which I realized that this lady was drunk. Like, DRUNK.

And I could have had that. But as a king of the lower-middle class, I had more important issues to attend. Part of me is always going to wonder what happened to the hot, drunk broad that wanted to engage in legal briefs with me. It's unfortunate that she liked that awful bar but as god as my witness, I will see her again. Bronson Tuggs, international copyright lawyer, takes only yes as an answer.

Continuum

I've stopped and started four times now. Get a grip.

Relationships are a nightmare. My day-to-day interactions with peers, coworkers, and friends are all pleasant enough, but I find myself viewing these types of things as a battlefield more and more often. Conversations become sorties, words become weapons, laughs are tactical nuclear strikes. I feel like a World War II soldier whenever I write a Facebook status update: in the trenches, shivering with trepidation, waiting for someone anyone to do something anything to break the stalemate, scribbling a letter to my sweetie back stateside about how the junkslut at Subway used too many green peppers on my Fastball sub.

Suddenly, a "Like." Validation. We aren't fighting and dying on the constantly-redesigned-but-never-improved timeline for nothing. Whenever a "friend" signs off of Facebook chat, I struggle to remember her face. Profile pages line up in tidy white lines; wall posts may as well be grieving families placing a trembling hands on a head stone. "good to see you the other day lol." Somewhere, a dove flies by a setting sun.

And this is the easy stuff! I have an unhealthy reliance on virtual interactions because of the structure. In person you have to be on and that is exhausting. Electronic personas are always charming, always aloof, always calculated. I never worry about saying the wrong thing online because the medium is the message; plausible deniability behind a screen and keyboard. My meatbag body and mind and voice crackle with energy. There's no control. It all just happens, whether I want it to or not.

Which, sure. No regrets, right? But there's a haunting permanence in exasperated responses. I love everyone, and it's so much easier to type than say. A raised eyebrow, a nanosecond of frown--these things are more devastating that bombs.

It's winter, though. Cold times and cold thoughts and stolen moments of warmth are the point.

Elevator Music

This is a list of things that make me envious:

--People who wake up early enough to eat breakfast.
--People who sleep in long enough for lunch to be their first meal.
--Musicians.
--Magicians.

There's a commercial on television with Papa John. I'm going to call him Papa for the rest of this entry even though I don't recognize his authority as a father figure or an elder in a small Italian village. Regardless, he's talking about how football and his brand of edible frisbees are the "perfect... combination." The flow of sentence is impeccable until he reaches that point, at which time he has a minor stroke or something. I'm not worried about Papa at all; in fact, what I am worried about is professionalism in commercial production. Papa stutters so obnoxiously that I am considering never patronizing that establishment again, and that's the take you use for your national commercial? Standards.

Just...standards.

Tudo o que voce sempre quis saber

Too many aspects of our lives are universal. Today I went to the dentist, and left with my thirst sated, what with all that blood. Even with impeccable dental hygiene, those charlatans with pointy sticks will draw. If any dentist reads this, please take this bit of advice to heart: just... stop it with that.

So here we are: I didn't like going to the dentist. Does anyone? How unique! I want to meet this person with a bizarre probing fetish. Actually, no.

I wonder why I share these things. The history of written thought is filled with lamentations about dental visits. To free our newborn country from the shackles of tyrannical oral surgeons was the reason we fought a war. Wooden teeth are the closest real analogue to freedom we may ever see. But if I hate the dentist, and you hate the dentist, and the dentist drives home to her house but can't bring herself to turn off the engine because that means she needs to go into the house and face the things she earned from her horrible profession including her husband-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder and their nascent dentist brood absorbing dark dental secrets through social osmosis, why talk about it?

The dentist makes me feel small. As a medical profession, it's pretty selfless when viewed detachedly--dentists, much like I imagine podiatrists, receive very little attention and respect for the positive outputs of their vocations. If I had a bunion and a podiatrist "cured" me, I'd be pretty jazzed. But the simple fact that life involves, you know, maybe getting a bunion or a cavity or whatever every now and then which requires me to see some specialist to inflict pain on my person in a therapeutic manner is science goddamn fiction.

You can't compare it to open-heart surgery or tumor cleansing or kidney modification or liver enlargement or body-part medical-jargon. If my heart doesn't come out of my chest today and the hole filled with a potato battery, I am going to die. But if I have a cavity? I'm uncomfortable. I may even get sick. But I can take care of it.

Perspective ends up concealing and congealing things. The reason I share these things is because my world view is mine. It is all I know and therefore supersedes all others. Right by default.

All you ever wanted to know is inside. Miner dig deep.

I carried it quietly

All of the framed pieces of art in my apartment hang crookedly.

For lunch, my boss and I got some greek food from this little hole-in-the-wall place taking up half of a gas station. It wasn't in the same strip mall as the gas station; it actually was half of a gas station. Although you'd expect some Mediterranean-class diarrea eating in a place this, the reality is quite different. These guys are as greek (Greek?) as you can get, speaking Aegean or whatever the hell. The terminology escapes me but these sumbitches execute the authentic.

Each time I leave that place I wonder about the physical space. It's awful. You got guys cooking or lambing or whatever on side--you scream at them you want a heee-row (or as I always get, a GYE-roo) and they give you a piece of paper. This paper is then taken to another, different counter where you give it to yet another, different Greek (greek?) dude who rings you up. This paper is stamped and you sit to drink your ginger ale and wait. It takes a long time--longer than it should--for a very soft-spoken g/Greek fellow to feebly mumble your number. If by some chance you hear it, you saunter up in all your slackness and pick up a tray of mythologies.

There's even like a sauce or something on it, I don't know. I'm no connoisseur of yogurt (yoghurt?) sauces, man. It's 2012. Greek (Greek?) restaurants need a yoghurt (yogurt?) sauce sommelier coming round, giving you some wine, recommending sauces for grape leaves and whatnot. The industry booms. Jobs:created.

There's a new Guided by Voices album and it's just nostalgia. Singing 'bout eatin' early morn donuts (doughnuts?) gets you thinkin' 'bout the way things were, the way things ought'n be. Wakin' up from your dream excited to write it down. Walkin' to school seein' people in the trees where you know they shouldn't be. Laughin' and laughin' and cryin' and laughin'. Fightin' sleep just as long as you could knowin' the dreamland is round that corner. When I was young it made sense.

Now it's sleep and black and driving to work listening to news getting informed feeling depressed because the world keeps spinning and when it stops we all fly off, a million billion miles an hour. Light-speed.

Things can be pretty horrifying sometimes. But it's those shadows in the corner of your room, hiding behind the door, what give relief in an all-too-needed physical sense. Running your hand across the surface and feelin' the impurities. The splinters are feedback.

A Start

To keep myself busy, I'm going to write this while watching Die Hard, also known as the best Christmas movie of all time.

This break has been odd. I've looked forward to the time off from work for weeks, but now that I'm reaching the end of it I'm ready for another. My contact with other human beings has been limited which is both a blessing and a curse. We're social creatures. I just wish everyone would leave me alone sometimes, too.

My resolutions for the new year are pretty basic: write every day, be a better person than I was last year, don't let depression win, and go on my great adventure. I'm not sure how to do many of them. You've got to try, though. I don't want the last interesting thing I do to be my suicide.

So here I am, dipping my toes into the pool. It's cold and unusual and fun and daunting and FUCK John McClane just shot a guy. I better get going.