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.

Great Roosevelt's Ghost

Let's talk a bit about investments.

There are the obvious ones: spend some money to make money, have kids so they can become caretakers later in life, put meat in oven and get hot meat later. This is pretty basic stuff here. Without realizing it, we all make a bunch of tiny investments each day. The reason we never pick up on this is because of the inherent risk factor in the things we do. Getting up and going to work in order to make some scratch for beer or whatever is an easy choice; it has very little effect on your life overall. With no risk involved and the reward being so routine (you goddamned alcoholic), the math becomes involuntary. Every decision made during the day, even the banal ones like when you choose to use the bathroom, are made in order to maximize some sort of future return. And you never see it.

But what about the high-risk decisions you make?

These can be a matter of scale, like when you place a big-money bet in a dead pool and Bob Barker refuses to die (he's always going over the actual regulation time limit). A chance was taken, and nothing was gained from it. Investments like this tend to be real assholes, because the calculations involved in them are not routine. We're risk-averse by nature; the tendency is to play it safe and avoid all the ways in which we can be killed, maimed, or otherwise fucked. People who go nuts and do shit like sky diving or become rodeo clowns or teach elementary school are actively bucking the trend. The high risk is inherent, and the reward is variable, but the thrill is constant. Adrenaline becomes nature's consolation prize for being a geography teacher.

What I've been doing lately is making a series of high-risk, long-term bets. It's terrifying. My plans for the future make so much sense to me, but I'm getting a lot of glazed eyes and slack mouths from observers. It's tough not to let this shake my confidence. The only thing to do is double down on this stuff. Losing a big bet hurts, but folding on a bluff is a killer.

Appropriate gambling postscript,
adam

Inverse Valediction

This new Blogger format is terrible! Look at all the white space. Not only am I rusty after having not written anything serious in months, but the blank canvas stretches for days! You sit down to bang out a few words and Blogger wants to remind you about how small your penis is. Pretty decently sized, but you don't have to be all in my face about it.

All this feels wrong. Every sentence gets deleted and rewritten and shitty. My work voice has overtaken my creative voice absolutely; I mean, I just used a goddamn semicolon in a blog post. This isn't the New Yorker! Or Highlights! This was Exit Theory. It all used to flow so naturally. Honestly, it feels good to get all this out and admit how awful I am now. Blank slates are always good, right? Blankness, or the inherent blankicity of things, seems to be a common theme I've touched on twice in two paragraphs. Let's make it a blog post!

I get wrapped up easily in appearances. For years I've tried to impress people by doing what I think they would want me to do to impress them. Read that sentence again, and hit yourself with a hammer. This is how I thought, and it's how a crazy person thinks. These rules which seemed so important are actually very dumb, and were always this way. It's a lot like trying to recapture the "good times," as nebulous and treacherous as those can be--things today are smaller, and more insignificant, and how didn't you see that before, you dummy?

One could spend time focusing on the past, and mistakes, and shames. And indeed I do, and often, as I find myself startled awake just before dozing off, remembering how I accidentally shook a man's hook instead of his left hand. And that's just a "for instance," but really, that's the kind of thing that shoots into my brain right at the moment of slumber. I suppose it's better than a gun? It's certainly no less startling. But again, these are the types of things a person--a bearded, lazy, out-of-practice, back-in-the-game idiot--needs to embrace.

Regrets just get to be so much baggage. So, I'm going to say goodbye to my old way of doing things. I'm going to bite into the neck of life and shake the shit out of it until I feel confetti or whatever courses through life's veins dripping from my chin. Bring it on, huge Blogger work space. Time to see whose proverbial penis is the biggest!

Stay young, however you can

Even the word is ugly—“budget.” But as I sat down and started calculating numbers, crunching figures, and setting long-term goals, an awful seed began to germinate. I’m scared that I started to grow up.

I never figured myself to be the guy to plan things or take precautions. For as long as I can remember, that was something that the weak had done; those too scared to live life at full throttle kept receipts in their wallets like Costanza. But when you can see things itemized on a list—I spent how much on shitty DVDs I bought to decorate my shelves?—reality rushes up like high tide. You can drown on responsibility.

I’m enjoying this box of wine, because as far as I can tell, it will be the last one I ever have access to, ever. Things that I thought were small, like my “meager” booze budget, have ballooned larger than the GDP of many third-world countries. Part of me is proud, and part of me is eyeing AA pamphlets.
The point of all this is growing pains—the figurative ones, not the real ones—are like mountain cats. You can hear them scratching, but you never see them until they pounce. That’s one positive, I suppose: I’m going to stop spending frivolously, and instead carry a large knife.

The summer before I went to college for real (no post-secondary enrollment option shit), I worked in my father’s factory in the boxing/unboxing department. At 6 A.M., I’d wake up, get out of my car, walk into the factory, grab a handful of hairnets and beard nets and razor blades, and go to work. Four hours were spent placing boxes of expertly-designed fish “products” into boxes for consumers to buy and eat while the other four were spent in a freezer throwing slabs of fish onto a forklift as they made their way to the “cooking facility” where warlocks turned it into crab and lobster and sauce. Alchemy—turning lead into gold—has been debunked, but what can you call a person who turns the meat of one species into the meat of another anything but an alchemist? I did this thing, and for money, and when I went to college “for reals” I never had to worry about money.

And then college ended, and I had jobs lined up that didn’t pan out and was on the proverbial street. Graduating from college and not having a job meant moving home to the family. This was before the recent recession where such occurrences were commonplace and expected; this was a bright badge of dishonor visible to all those to whom you described your dreams of success. And so I took a job lying to people and selling them things they didn’t need, and spent my off hours drinking. Young Adam, Innocent Adam, was a sensitive man unaware that people constantly look for frivolous reasons to spend money. With a Delorean and flux capacitor I would gladly go back in time and smack sense into these people.

I hate to say it, but two “careers” later and here I am, staring at an itemized list of what I spend money on and choking back horrified laughter. What can you do but laugh? It’s so easy to blame outside forces for my current lifestyle of paycheck-to-paycheck roughing it, but when the evidence is so pristine and goddamned organized, what can you say? In a misguided, semi-romantic sense, I always imagined that I would be my own end. Coming face-to-face with that reality is not nearly as poetic as I had imagined. And the worst part of all? Tomorrow I have to go back to work, smile at my peers, and start the process anew.

There was a time when opportunity knocked and all you had to do was open the door. Today, opportunity lives in the house, and you wait until it goes on vacation before you break in and steal a necklace or flat-panel. Sometimes I miss just having a future. These days, you have to take one.

Homeless at my house

My apartment is just great. Here are some great things about it:

--Last week, it snowed in my kitchen. Above my stove is some sort of vent which is professionally covered by a piece of cardboard and some black duct tape. During a windstorm, I noticed it was getting perilously cold and investigated the cause. I saw my cat frolicking playfully as the snow came through the vent. All I could do was sigh and apply another layer of duct tape.

--I haven't rearranged my furniture in months, but I still find new and interesting ways in which to stub each toe with regularity. In these delightful situations, I hit the ground and scream a litany of profanities which invariably draws the attention of my landlady, "Pam." Pam is a great person; she cares about things and people without the slightest hint of cynicism and wants to spread the good news, as it were. But there is a dark streak to her, as evidenced whenever I fuck up around here: she invites me over to see her birds. It's one of the only times she isn't talking incessantly about the shit happening at her job or around the building or crazy tenants in 14. We just kind of stand there and look at her birds. I never know how to get out of these situations. It's me, Pam, and her birds, and after a length of time she deems appropriate, she says "goodbye" and I make the excruciatingly long walk back to my apartment. I live directly across from her.

--Laundry happens on Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings. I'm already up for the cartoons, so why not multitask? I don't get ready or anything. I roll out of bed and gather shit up and go downstairs. Two weeks ago, Pam was giving the keys to the new girl moving in to the apartment near the laundry room. In a desperate gambit to avoid a long conversation with Pam, I ran from the staircase to the laundry room door only to nearly bowl them both over. In her infinite wisdom, Pam takes this opportunity to introduce me to the new girl. There I stand, carrying a hamper full of underwear and bath towels, hair crazy from the night before, wearing my Zoobaz with the hole in the crotch so large that if I wasn't wearing undies my penis could unfurl out of them like a mighty sail, and I take this moment to say "Hey, if you need anything, I live up in 8." I have not seen this woman since that fateful encounter. If by some chance you are reading this, girl who lives below me, I promise not murder you or anything. I'm pretty sure I won't!

My Gift to You

It's been so long since I've done this. Writing about myself feels weird; I'm used to writing about my characters. Before the end of this post, I will have waded hip-deep through a sewer in search of a kidnapped dog or something. You know, something heroic and ridiculous.

Tomorrow I travel north and see the family which is both exciting and instantly tedious. My Christmas break is like sand slipping through fingers and I need to web that shit up. Spending time with my family is great; spending days is going to be a hassle. But the booze flows freely and there are sure to be numerous gaffes. Ought to be a bizarrely good time.

There is always a crunch to see long-lost friends during the holidays, because everyone left the MOTHERLAND and moved to some far-off locale and good for them, right? But unless the Venn diagram of our lives coincides serendipitously, I have a hard time making the effort. This is probably the reason why most people remember me fondly but loath me in actuality. Honestly, I can live with that.

What else? My generosity with Christmas gifts--at least monetarily--has reached a new level this year. In regard to creativity and personality, not so much. Getting someone a gift they like is great. Getting them the means to get something they love is better, though. Sure, it's basically the gift of more work, but if you don't want the fucking free money I'll find a use for it.

Of course, this is all preemptive. Maybe everyone will love the opportunity to get out and enjoy some after Christmas sales! We are in a recession, assholes. Do your part.

Once again, I'm convinced I'm dying. That's pretty much it. I'm not sure what's killing me, but it's not me. The lack of control in the matter is distressing. I persevere still, because why not? My inner super-villain (Jungle Jim, who takes the powers of all animals in the jungle one at a time) loves torturing those around me.