New Jersey, Part III
“I haven’t the gut for writing anymore,” I decide sitting in the stairway that leads up to the backdoor entrance of the Comfort Inn on Route 57 in Hackettstown, New Jersey; chain-smoking. Wearing a t-shirt in the lovely spring weather, seventy-degrees and clear, sitting lengthwise on a step halfway down the stairway, the backdoor propped open with an old piece of wood: and I’m always in and out; and I’m always start and stop. Sure, sure, I’m always expectation: on the bleachers rooting for some kind of found meaning, purpose, beauty or sympathetic set of ears. But I’m never agenda: on the field, giving one hundred ten percent for a scholarship I know I’ll just drink away anyway. I never espouse too much of anything when it comes down to personable barebones (at least save underneath the bleachers), but that most certainly never stops others from guessing-slash-assuming-cum-hypothesizing-cum-judging. And often the most rat-fink-fucked end of the deal is above all else I just want-slash-need to drip heavy and quick into a pair of foreign cochleae. To exercise some demons with some found meaning. To have those drips ripple and resonate. To have those ghosts meet me at the bar, fool me into thinking they are strangers, and then after I’ve bought them a few pitchers, they’ll buy me a cab home.
Let the one liners live again. Let truths be transmitted with truncated sentences. Death to fillibustering and ! Life to circumlocution (be it prolific or otherwise, I suppose) and onwards and upwards with half-answered half-questions we weren't half-concerned about ourselves anywhichway you put it (them).
The rigmorale of setting up a new computer can be so disheartening. At least in my case.... while the newer macBooks come all pimped out with the technologies that any web programmer would want, these sweet, internal programs don't come turned on. The first time around I found this a little frustrating. After having my brand new macBook stolen the day after New Year's in Vancouver BC, picking up yet another laptop & now going through the same process all over again.... this is effing hell. Apple, please, if you're going to ship your comps with all these whistles & bells, why not turn them on (especially considering that a good deal of people are buying these freakin' things just for this reason)? It isn't that we can't go through the process of activating all the features that we want, but why should we have to? This is like buying a new car, spending a whole day driving 'round & having fun with it, only to realize as the sun sets that you have to install the headlights yourself. poopid, i say.
The one thing I always find interesting 'bout moving my self to another computer is going through old files which you had left to rust on the old machine. In the spirit of a spring cleaning, when starting fresh with a new computer I like to go through all my old files, blowing off the dust, scratching away the patina.
In the melancholy vein of what I've been reading on some other Eugene bloggers sites, I thought I'd post this one file I found; I think I wrote this some eight months ago or so. Still, it pretty much sums up where I am any more.
I could have tackled it had it not been smarter than me. Being born from me, it knew how I’d work. So it spent most of its time hidden away. It would come around, make a day or two miserable, & then quickly disappear, taking all evidence of its self with it. & this is how we cultivate sorrow, or at least something synonymous with sorrow.
Now I study earlobe structure on the back of faceless heads ahead of me, waiting in line for a cup of coffee & some pasta salad. I eavesdrop on other’s conversations just to remind myself that people do things that I do not. People visit states like Illinois. People move across town to be closer to their grandmothers. People watch television shows on ABC. These people’s earlobe structures are never right.
I’ve never before so strongly wanted something to come home to. A pet, a roommate, a lover; a television show on ABC. Something that will speak to me, something that will empathize, something that I can take to coffee shops with me, to assist in the search. I wish crosswords could read my mind, I wish they could tell me Hot or Cold or Warmer as I attempted to solve them, giving me a clue, perhaps a “rhymes with” when I’m stumped. I wish crossword answers would acrostically spell out the names of people I love.
There are only so many times that I can find reminders of past passions & impetuses, of all these past lives, through re-intonating stranger’s laughs, by re-calculating the distance between their eyes, until I have recreated in everyone a figment of someone else. There are only so many puzzles & searches & games of Hot & Cold that I can play before I am the bet at stake. There are only so many windows I can look out remembering views shared with others before I forget what was looked at; there are only so many streets I can walk down remembering hands held before I forget the context of the walk.
(There is only so much that hyperbole can accomplish.)
Every now & then, I’ll buy Export A greens & relive my life one cigarette at a time. I’ll remember Sunday afternoons spent chain smoking in a rocking chair, a radio tuned into a two hour long first-wave ska program. I’m in north Idaho, Sandpoint Idaho, living in a singlewide with my surrogate punkrock mom & her three-year old child. As I chain-smoke the tray fills with ash & butts & Caitlyn, the three-year old, scolds me for not fully putting out my cigarettes. She goes through the entire process of snuffing out a butt, educating me, her still infantile hands more adroit already than my shaky ones. I watch her performance, humming along to Desmond Dekker, completely unaware of how many times over my heart will feel broken, unaware of how many eyes my eyes will search.
I’ve become an armchair anthropologist. In my dreams I’ve been published in a few note-worthy scientific journals.
i’m not sure what the specific reasons where or at what specific point along the drunken all-nighter this happened, but at some point in the evening someone had a bunch of Star Watch weeklies in one hand & a lighter in the other. & then immediately following me picking up the Star Watch weeklies & pulling my purple lighter out of my pocket, someone else has their orange lighter out & is holding it underneath the outstretched papers. & then this is certainly an example of those magical moments when drunk friends come to the same idiotic conclusion at the same exact time, but then someoneA & someoneB are dragging an old, sweat & semen & vomit stained mattress out into the road, Star Watch torches in hand. & then the mattress is in the middle of the road & the papers are underneath it & stuffed into the one ripped-open corner & then that isn’t working, no, not at all, not near fast enough, so then both A & B are holding their purple & orange lighters to the frayed edges of the ripped-open corner & then yes, oh yes, that mattress is on fire. & then as a fantastic example of how drunk strangers will nearly immediately agree & condone the stupid decisions of other drunk strangers, it wasn’t more than two minutes later, because yes, that mattress really was on fire, & it didn’t take long to get the neighbors’ attention, because it was seriously ON FIRE, but it wasn’t two minutes later until some strangers half a block away come carrying an old, sweat & semen & vomit stained couch to add to the pyre. & then all the bystanders & drunks went back into their homes & read books like The Velveteen Rabbit or The Berenstain Bears to their sleepy children by the soft, warming light of the burning furniture. like motherfucking christmas.
but then the fire department came & ruined everyone’s holiday. & to further villainize others whilst exonerating myself & my cohorts, i would like to make mention of how i once heard from someone delivering the Star Watch paper (this in response to my question of how in the effing-eff i could get my name taken off the Piss-People-Off-Every-Week-With-Our-Lousy-Shit-Entertainment-News-“Paper” list), that the Star Watch is actually brought into the community & paid for by the Baker family. & for those of you who don’t live in Eugene or who just don’t know, the Baker family owns the Register-Guard (is it hyphenated or not anymore?), Eugene’s local (& also lousy) daily newspaper. so i blame the Baker family for my stupid drunken decision to light old, filth-stained furniture in the middle of the road. the Star Watch enabled the entire thing. the Bakers are a bunch of enablers.
the Bakers & pabst blue ribbon. i’ve said my peace.
I ran into a friend & local blogger today at the grocery store where I used to work. Immediately following our hellos & hugs she says, “you haven’t blogged.“. wowzers. Though perhaps a bit of a long one here, Mrs. R — this one’s for you.
Her comment shook to the surface some ruminative thoughts I have been having recently, thoughts related to this blog yes, but also ones of a much broader scope. What she said would have probably stayed there, in the past tense, had I not also received a myspace message from a friend in portland, another whom I haven’t spoken to in quite some time, wishing me a happy birthday. First, these are nice (tongue-in-cheek-in-heart, if y’know what I mean) reminders of things I wish I were able to find time to relax in: blogging about my day to day, spying on friends via myspace; engaging in an online community that not only do I find rewarding, but a community that I believe has & will continue to, in ways we cannot imagine, completely reshape who we are & how we are. This online community (& hopefully you know I’m not just referencing myspace here) is tantamount to evolution, & survival is contingent upon evolution. If given the proper alcoholic stimuli & enough time, & I could bore you to the point of regression with my praise of technology, the interweb & the future in general. & then here I am trying to remember the last time I bookmarked something in Ma.gnolia. bother.
It is often a frustrating & quite ironic circumstance that I work so much on the interweb, that I haven’t the time to engage the interweb. With both of my jobs I’m currently spending the majority of my time building web applications. I’m honing my programming skills, rereading techie books. Those sites which at one time I simply used, used & enjoyed, I’m now examining, figuring out how exactly they might have programmed this or that element & how I could incorporate that into what I’m working on. I’m critically pricking & prodding the User Interface instead of allowing the User Interface to guide & enthrall me. & try as I might, I cannot pull myself out of this mindset.
& it is this somewhat beleaguered balance of paycheck to prowess that keeps me in this quasi-state of flux where while I feel that I must always be working, always applying, proving & promoting myself, I also feel that I have steadily begun racing down the path toward certainty. I work with a web firm in town, Blink New Media. Weekly we meet, typically from the comfort of our living rooms or porches, via Skype. At the end of each meeting, I find myself somewhat contemplative & mesmerized. I catch myself saying, “wow, this is what I do.” It still hasn’t sunk in yet. I am getting paid to do something that not only am I good at, I also exceptionally enjoy it as well. I’m not at a comfortable enough point in my life yet to quit the doubt in the back of my head, that fear that another dead-end job with meager pay is just waiting around the next corner for me.
I started Cleopatra’s Nose two & a half years ago, when I slept in the utility room of a ran-down one bedroom house on Monroe Street. I was just a few weeks off from being unemployed & paying bills on credit. I played in a band & borrowed wireless from my neighbors’ unsecured connection. I had just recently planted the start from an avocado pit. I was in a fresh, exciting relationship & was blessed with a deeply sincere, symbiotic relationship with my roommate & good friend, bgg (I’d love to link something to his name, but alas, he is interwebedly incognito). Things are much different now. Though I still don’t have a bed, I live on my own now, in a great little apartment downtown. I am the furthest from unemployed that I possibly could be (I know this isn’t true. Not even a year ago I was more employed than I am now, holding fort at three different places.) & my avocado plant is doing quite well.
Robin, I thank you for the gibe. It seems that oftentimes it requires enticing for me to sit down & catalog something here on Cleo’s Nose, but afterwards it always feels nice.
kasb — I will most certainly be your penpal, especially if by penpal you mean the person who crashes on your & Harv’s couch in Nashville during my upcoming late-summer-2007-drour-of-the-southern-states. (Of course you know, but a “drour” is the classic “drinking-tour”)
numbers
Between my friend with me here & I, we have three cigarettes. While not wholly discouraging, this, considering that, thirty-seven cigarettes shy of two full packs aside, we are perhaps reaching the azimuth of spring’s quick flight into summer, & that I’m slowly exhausting a thirteen dollar bottle of red wine & that tomorrow will be that last day in an heinous stretch of working every single effing day, a stretch that most immediately could be physically inferred by ex-ing off each & every box on a calender page flipped to the month of March, so’s I mean literally thirty-one days straight working every single day, but truthfully the number of said stretch would be more accurately represented by taking the factorial of 6 & then dividing that by the number of cigarettes which I & my friend have right now, but that considering tomorrow will be the last day of this awful, awful stretch of working a ‘hole bunch & that then tomorrow’s tomorrow will be my first day off in a really long time, it is, this lack of cigarettes that is, a most unpleasant & unwelcome ingredient to this otherwise tasteful cocktail.
I just finished my first large project at my new job. It is this new job that affords me the luxury of taking days off & still the paying the bills congruently. It is this first large project that will decide if come May thirty-first two thousand seven, the same May thirty-first that will be my twenty-sixth birthday & also when the contract for the position I took is up for renewal, I will still be taking days off & paying bills at the same time. Yesterday, I worked fourteen hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair surrounded by a horse-shoe desk working on the final touches. Yesterday when I got to work in the morning I believed I had seven days to work on the final touches. Yesterday at nine twenty in the morning I was told that the fellas that be wanted the final touches in twenty-four hours time. Yesterday at nine twenty-one all I could think was ‘eff’.
I did a count after I was finished. In the past week I have written nearly four thousand lines of code. The Safety & Environmental Metrics Dashboard is finished. At least the beta version zero point three is finished, which is all that the powers that be were looking for.
& now I have three cigarettes, seven hundred fifty milliliters sans two glasses of red wine & only twenty-four hours to go before a weekend. a very well-deserved weekend.
I will be drunk.
brief summary
i’m gonna take a break from reading an internal sales assessment pdf for a wireless telephony company & attempt to overcome the mentally stymieing fact that i haven’t written anything, blog entry or otherwise, for nearly two months & see if i can attempt to jot something down here.
firstly: i’m not reading an internal sales assessment for fun. i’m not actually even reading the entire document, only pages 19 through 28. the internal sales assessment is work related, it’s for a job that the web firm i contract with is courting. the job would be sweet & i’m trying to learn a li’l something something about the client & their products/services. but it is an internal sales assessment. y’know, the type with CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION - RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION printed in the footer of every page. these things are dull to those parties employed within the company itself; they are catatonic to parties otherwise associated. i had to stop for my computer’s sake, i do believe that if i read the phrase “vertical markets” one more time i won’t be able to contain the vomit to my mouth alone.
secondly: though i have successfully managed to tie up every day from here until april 5th with work, after that things are going to change. i will be leaving the natural foods store whence i have derived headache & heartache, laughter & love, for the past two years. “leaving”? i think the word manumission is more apt here. which isn’t to say that i won’t miss it, because i will. this store has meant quite a lot to me. i was there helping it learn to crawl during its infancy, i was with it when it fell out of that oak tree & broke its arm, i was one of the first people it called the night it stole its first kiss. i feel indebted to that store & those people for many, many things, but it is also very much time to be moving on.
thirdly: it was only yesterday that it dawned on me that i might have forgotten exactly what it means to relax. it is amazing how quickly one can renege on aspects of their life both fundamental & essential, if given the proper stimuli. the right factors, harrowing enough conditioning, & things that once provided dear sustenance can become acidic to the palette. for these past long, long months, i had believed that i had found ways to relax; now, i’m realizing that i had mostly been cultivating methods of disengagement. be it born from whatever reasoning (& that is an introspective alleyway that i think i’ll explore solo), i have been inverting myself, prospecting avenues & nurturing relationships that while not wholly unhealthy, aren’t completely in line with who i know myself to be. regression of a sorts, yes, but also angry passion. ok, maybe i’ve gotten off topic here. how this relates to relaxing is this: i am a person who likes to relax, who likes free-time for friends & creativity, & i have seemingly been on a course to void my life of those things.
fourthly: all these readings of internal sales assessments, tying up of days & neglecting of the playful, relaxed side of myself, has perhaps finally started to pay off. i decided somewhere near christmas last year that i was going to hibernate for the winter. this was after months of debauchery. it has been a good hibernation, regenerative. & the debauchery was necessary, it was a form of catharsis, & it paved the way to where i am now. seeing things more lucidly, having a better grasp of where i want to be going & what i want to be doing.
fifthly: chimneys only wish they could smoke as much as me.
& sixthly: there is a lot of ground that needs to be covered here on cleo’s nose, & it needs to happen soon. here’s hoping that soon will be real, real soon.
playing the hand you are dealt
i went deep into my graveyards,
found my ghosts there...
at least ghosts are good company.
-bishop allen
G. 1: I am attempting to organize a Euchre club with co-workers.
G. 2: I have started playing online chess again.
G. 3: I’ve started sneaking McDonalds breakfasts again.
My dreams are really fucking bothering me of recent. I am not someone who remembers dreams; & for good reason, this. As I child I dreamed vividly, always wolves (both the real type which ran circles around my bed, forcing me to curl into a tight fetal position, & the Looney Tunes Red Riding Hood Wolf type, with plaid newsboy, a literal pack, gang, of them who would throw me into dumpsters) & HUGE spiders & massive dragons who slept in gigantic, open rooms with pink walls & who only awoke once I entered the room & then only to consume me, alive & screaming. & I had these recurring dreams for years. I quit dreaming.
Since then there are only four dreams which I can remember. One is just an essence of a dream, an unknown girl’s face, a languid stream. The other three are etched into my memory. Two I had when I lived in the midwest. They were both acutely surreal. One ended with my mother, face painted as a clown, weeping in a steep stairwell, as I was at the bottom of the stairs, in a room full of pianos like sarcophagi, going from piano to piano, striking the minors softly. The other from Madison was striking enough that I wrote an entire ‘zine centered around the premise, incorporating the dream itself into the material. The final of the four I had in Eugene & the Freudian elements of that dream still frighten me.
Within the past two weeks I’ve started to remember my dreams again, & as I said, they are really bothering me. I’ve recently been reading a Zadie Smith novel. I picked it up for three reasons, one: it is Zadie Smith; two: I noticed while flipping through it at the book store that, interpolated with the typical whistles & bells of modern novels, were many Jewish elements; & three: it starts off with a Franz Kafka quote. Though it is demanding of its own blog entry, I’ll briefly mention here how a few months ago I smoked some psychotropic marijuana, & while failing miserably at attempting to fall asleep, I decided it was up to me to rewrite Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, but not just that, no, my rewrite of “The Trial” would also heavily incorporate elements of “Moby Dick” in it.
Not long afterwards (either the pot or the book, I don’t quite recall) I started to have really disturbing dreams. Paranoid dreams. But not just paranoid dreams, also dreams which are bringing up ghosts from my past.
& now I’ve begun haunting my graveyards in my waking life as well.
a list of apologies to any of my friends who have, or still are, expecting something from me & now think, or are beginning to think, that i am a bad friend, a neglectful person or simply mean:
if i don’t call you back it isn’t because i don’t want to, hell it isn’t even that i don’t think of it, cause i do. i think of calling you, all of you. it is just that most times when i think of it i am usually indisposed, by which i mean i am usually stuck firmly in the bone-crushing jaws of either work or alcohol, & if i called during these moments our conversation would equate to little more than my blood-curdling screams through which, try as hard as you might, you wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise. in other words our conversation would be fairly one-sided & lackluster.
if i work with you & you smoke & it is decided that we will take a smoke break together & then as soon as we hit the alley i begin to sort of pace around, making half-hearted, monosyllabic remarks to whatever it is you were talking about: the 1) apparent disregard for you or for the fact that we are, as one, taking a time-honored & traditional smoke break together, & 2) my apparent disinterest for whatever it is you were talking about, isn’t like that at all. see, as i’m pacing around i’m actually attempting to disengage myself from the bone-crushing jaws of either work or alcohol, you just cannot see the sweaty muscle of the jaws nor the blood of my attempted manumission. & my apparently disinterested, primordial sounding grunts are actually just that. they are the grunts & sudden outbursts of someone caught in a life/death type struggle. while perhaps a little modernized, this is comparable to what one would have heard on the pre-paleolithic earh as some primate attempted to disengage herself from the bone-crushing jaws of a velociraptor.
penpals, those past, present & those of you to whom i promised a penpal relationship which hasn’t climaxed yet, shit which hasn’t even reached first base yet: i’m sorry because i really do love penpals. writing letters is so effected & kitsch. of course i love it. i mean, hell, i’ve even pulled out my old remington rand deluxe 5. i’ve set up this whole letter writing station in a corner of my bedroom. but see i probably haven’t told you ‘cause i haven’t yet written you that letter but i only sleep on sundays, which is the only time that i spend more than ten minutes in my bedroom. but every sunday i look at that remington rand & think of you. every last one of you.
if i’ve failed to make an appearance at your or your friend’s house after being invited, be it for a large scale foam party or just a small get-together, believe me, i have wanted to attend. each & every time. seeing as how i only bath on february that foam party would have been not only fun but also hygienically beneficial & the small get-togethers with neat drinks & even neater conversation? i love those. though there might be more than a few reasons for why i didn’t make the event, the most likely one is that your event was probably more than four blocks away & by the time it would have been fashionably late enough for me to darken your doorstep i was probably already past the point of attempting the walk-four-blocks sobriety test. that or i was already far past the point of attempting to free myself from the bone-crashing etc, etc, & my marrow was already nourishing something else.
if i work with you & you don’t smoke & the only interaction you get with me are those moments when i’m half running towards the break room for more coffee singing that i love to singa song or when i’m talkingreallymuchtooincredibly fast & seem like i must be on crack, i’m sorry if you’ve been worried & i assure you i am not on crack. i just hate the health care industry & have started taking primatene mist insteading of using my prescribed inhaler. please stop dropping the word intervention in casual conversation.
