Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Breaded Control

Last night I dreamt it was my brother's birthday. A gift he received was a video game controller, deep fried and breaded. One had to eat their way to its use.


This would be the most American invention of all time.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Fattening

I am fattening myself up for the winter with meat and carbs and piles of books to rip up the mind until it bleeds and pools of platelets create a layer between my skin and the cold air. 

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Blood Blister Be-Gone

Today I finally got rid of a blood blister/scab I've had for about two weeks. I got it from home brewing. There was this bottle from my last batch I hadn't fully cleaned out, at least not very well. Caked mold remained at the bottom from the remaining mash dregs. Thus I soaked it in hot soapy water for hours and then proceeded to thrash more hot liquid around to really break it up. I succeeded. But it resulted in the aforementioned blood blister between my thumb and forefinger. I was beginning to worry about my body's ability to heal it was taking so long. It looked almost like a mole. I was starting to get used to it. I secretly referred to it as my power mole. 

It went down the shower drain. A beetle can maybe play hockey with it. 


I don't think my brain synapses function correctly first thing in the morning. I kept getting weird phrases in my head while doing my morning, get-ready-for-the-day rituals, like "animal cat punches" and "sudden fritter freeze." And they kept looping in my mind like a scratched to hell piece of vinyl spinning. 


And then I'd picture the blood blister dissolving slowly. 


On my train commute to work I overheard two older, white men. Wearing nice suits. Both balding. One was skinny, with tight cheek bones, the other was fat and pouty. The fat, pouty one kept muttering "stupid democrats, goddamn liberals, god I hate them." Whenever the skinny one would respond to his droopy grievances the train would rattle loudly and I couldn't hear the specifics. I imagined the pouty guy calling me a young stupid punk and then imagined myself shouting back "you don't know me, what makes you think you know me! I just have a stupid grin on my face because my blood blister finally healed! Cannot I not feel jacked about small victories!"

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

I Plan on Firing Anxiety (Here is How it Will Go Down)

With the seasonal temperature shifts, I sometimes find myself feeling an explicable anxiety, a gnawing, ill-informed nervousness that follows me like I'm a heat lamp. I'm thinking of getting rough with it, cutting this anxiety loose, like in those sad boy loves animal movies where circumstances force him to tell it to scram despite every bone in his body hating the act of severance with the confused creature. 


Well, I wouldn't  feel so bad about telling anxiety to get lost. I just have to sit down and do it. I want to be a creature of comfort.


-----

Me: Mr. Anxiety, please take a seat.


Anxiety: I'm very busy...


Me: I'm not asking.


Anxiety: Fine, man.


Me: Listen, there's no easy way to put this, I've lost a lot of sleep over this, but we all deserve a peace of mind-


Anxiety: Cut the bullshit.


Me: Funny way to put it, that's what I'm asking you to do!


Anxiety: I don't like jokes, sir.


Me: You were assigned to me at birth with the intent to protect me by alerting me to real predatory dangers. Things change, the world we operate in develops down strange paths, and we take on new challenges, complicated challenges.


Anxiety: I haven't taken my break yet today...


Me: You'll get a nice break. Fact is you work too hard and you've hijacked your purpose. You're sounding little alarms all over the place, distracting my departments, dissolving all real resolve of mission, scattering priorities, depleting adrenal resources.


Anxiety: I work harder than anyone else!


Me: Yet you're ignorant to the fact that you've derailed everyone else's ability to work! You're holding this operation back!


Anxiety: I'm sorry you're not pleased with my performance.


Me: Worrying hasn't been an effective strategy. I'm sorry, Mr. Anxiety, but I'm letting you go.


Anxiety: Fuck you man! What will I do now?


Me: Evolve. Your severence is this shot of whiskey. Here. Drink. Relax.


Anxiety takes the shot, glares at me, and gives me the middle finger.


Me: Leave the door open on your way out. I like the breeze.


Fade to Black.

The Smart Toilet & Shitty Thoughts

Allow me to talk number 2 for a moment. I bet some day will come the invention of the "smart toilet." It will read back to you calculations about density, mass. It will tell you things about your health and bowel movements based on pH calculations and how it corresponds with what you had previously entered into the menu database for the meals you have eaten. It will tell you when that pizza you had on Friday is fully digested. 


Because let's all face it, it's human instinct to take a look at what we've expelled from our bodies. 


I sometimes stop and think about what I've contributed to the sewer system over the course of the day. And that if we faced apocalypse and running water had stopped, convenience and grocery stores ransacked for bottled water, rivers dangerous due to people taking armed territory at sections, the sewer with it's dark river below us may become a last resort. I sometimes think about such a thing, and what sort of contraption I would manufacture with my own two hands and found objects to clean the water and purify it. It would perhaps take a lot of strainers and boiling to re-allocate steam, to more strainers and boiling to really get the shit out of it and avoid a stomach ache. 


The sewer is a resource. And if never touched, 1 million years from now, what will have become of all of the human waste, dish water, detergent, bleach, cleaning supplies, Drano, dead skin cells, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, vomit, blood, fingernails, hair, motor oil, and a variety of other items, after having sloshed around and drifted down as gunk lining the bottom of the sewer floor. Will it become its own type of rock, caked layers pressed, that can be burned for fuel?


Sometimes I think these thoughts. Not as a fixation, just drifting what ifs in my mind at some points of the day. Shit worth thinking. Because shit is always happening all over the globe, slipping away below us to a story we rarely bother ourselves to imagine because it may be grotesque. 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Vacuum Man Gets Vocal

I've been thinking about this guy I saw the other day at the California Blue Line stop, at the tail end of the day's home rush hour. A line had formed to go down the stairs from the platform. A guy with long, flowing black hair came trotting up, swinging a vacuum cleaner by the handle slightly as he moved. The people descending stopped off to the side the stairs, as far over as they could, to allow him up. The guy became angered by this accommodation and began yelling at them as he ascended "Ahhhh, fuck you, get out of here YOU! Get out of here!" When he finally got to the top, the line began to move again. The guy yelled at some one waiting for a Northbound train, under the heat lamps. "You too! Fuck you!" Some people across the platform started laughing at him and he yelled something un-intelligible, like "aaghjyoouyuyauuuyuAHAHHGSuiu YEah yeah fuck you ahsuujkkuujfuck!" 


I was at the end of the line going down.  I had the urge to mess with him. I wanted to tell him to "suck his own dick off with that vacuum." Just to rile him up. But I didn't. That wouldn't have been a level headed thing to do. It would have been mean. I could have wound up with a vacuum cleaner base fracturing my skull. And I thank my inhibitions for showing up to work at that moment.


Now if I had been on the other side of the platform, with the electrified track space between us, a taunting remark on an irrational man telling people to go fuck themselves would have been a fun thing to fling. 

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Pseudo Night Terrors

Last night I had a dream in which I found out that I was a ghost. I was visiting a small New England coastal town, met with some friends by an old industrial yard, drank an assortment of Mexican beer without limes and hit rocks out into a field with metal baseball bats. We parted ways as dusk came along. I noticed a general lack of activity on my walk back to our hotel. Some lights went on in various apartment windows, yet I noticed no people meandering the rooms. They looked empty. I thought perhaps ghosts were flickering these lights.


I stopped in at a church because I heard nice organ music. I walked in on a meeting of the priest and various church staff members. He looked at me and accused me of eating all of the communion bread. I denied it. 


I returned to our hotel. My girlfriend was lying on the bed with a cucumber peel mask spread on her face. I leaned in to kiss her hair. She awoke, startled. "Who's there?" 


"Me."


"Where?"


"Right here."


"I do not see you."


I touched her head. "Do you feel me?"


"Yes."


"Can you smell me?" I breathed in her face.


"Yes."


"But you don't see me?"


"No. Maybe I have something in my eye."


"Can you see the picture on the wall?"


"Yes."


"Can you see the piano in the corner?"


"Yes."


"But you don't see me?"


"No..."


------


At one point I awoke from another dream. I had fled to live in rural Maine because I fell victim to identity theft. I received a phone call at my cabin, from the perpetrator, telling me to look across the lake at the other houses. He was in one of them looking at me with binoculars. He laughed. When I awoke from this my girlfriend was in the midst of her own night terror. "Oh my god oh my god!" She shouted as she sat up in bed. She sometimes does this and at the time of it, I fear there is a bug pestering her face. She is not very lucid, partially sleeping still when I ask her what is wrong. She calmly says "nothing" and is very confused why I am asking this.


I got up to pee. Coming back to bed my body blocked the street light and created a shadow. My heart stopped for a brief moment until I became cognizant of the physics of current photon play. 

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Generational Pissing Match

This morning I was sitting in my recliner, cat in lap, reading A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I came to a part where Gertrude Stein was telling Hemingway his was part of a lost generation. Stopping for a moment to sip my coffee, I saw a flash in my mind of Sarah Palin expressing her disgust at me for sitting on my ass and reading an outdated book by a writer she believes to be a lunatic asshole. 


"What's wrong with reading a book?" I asked.


"You read filth that corrupts you, that gives you stupid ideas, and makes you think you're entitled to things you don't deserve!"


"And do you deserve, respect? Your generation is the one that set in motion the end of the world. Whether you like it or not, miss, your generation collectively is the Anti-Christ." I lashed back, an imagined out-let for anger. "My child will probably be born with asthma, thank you very much, smoke stack champion!"


As a disclaimer, there are many in my life (parents, Aunts and Uncles, extended family, landlords, colleagues, clients, friends, friends of the family, etc) who are actually are down to earth, thoughtful, respectful and level headed. They understand the struggles that my generation faces in our young careers. It's the political leaders, corporation leaders of my parents generation that get under skin and where I intend the following expression of disgust. 


I get the sense that the middle aged politicians think so lowly of my generation. But their parents' generation thought little of them, and back on to their parents' generation who thought little of them. A vicious cycle of low confidence in and attempted understanding of their own spawn because they've slowly realized they can only control them so much. And it fuels the pissy angst they feel towards the engine of society they have fed into another complex, mushy disaster. They cling to old philosophies on how to fix this, not realizing it was these old, musty thought processes that caused kinks in the work flow of a society. And they want dish out disparaging remarks on their children's generation because they'd be embarrassed if it was some punk kid that found the solution. 


The problem lies not only in a class conflict. But a generational one persists. We've been taught that we must work hard to get ahead. But many are trapped in a stage of life where hard work is actually, unfortunately not paying off, on a wide scale, because the shareholders are scared to sprinkle what's in the kitty. And those that are out in the workforce as collection agents of sorts to suck in consumer exchange to fill the company kitty, are made to feel like assholes for questioning when the shareholders might feel comfortable enough in the base of this kitty to open its valve.


There grows this distrust in the previous generation for having told them to work hard and reap what one deserves. And then as a result, the old generation in turn gets mad at the kids for being mad at them. They complain that we complain, and then they go and complain with such fervor it would make a mountain hides its cliff face. 


But I will not be discouraged. I will continue to work hard, because one day, when the old generation has to call it quits on their political careers, and people from mine start theirs, maybe things will finally be revitalized.