The Boss Man and I

Judging by the toilet bowl stains in his private bathroom, the boss man shits a lot of blood. Good. He shits what he drinks. Everyone who works here is pale, chalky, even Rahib. The copy paper has the healthiest complexion.

The boss man, because of his brazen love affair with money, assures me that no matter how barren or unhealthy my relationships become, there is always work, and that work stabilizes life by filling any gap like adhesive caulk. The unbalanced thing is that my work enriches the boss man while draining energy that I could put into relationships. But that's the system. I can't change the system. And the system is not the boss man's fault, although his motives elude me.

I have a choice. I could remove myself, give up material comforts and learn self-reliance. I could be poor and take shit and smile. I could refuse money, abhor it. I could be Jesus.

But I'm not Jesus and I don't choose that. I'm scared. I'm scared that if I made that decision it might not stop there, that I'll end up running through a dark tunnel pursuing an illusory and impossible goodness, through pain and pain and pain. I'm scared of falling and suffering.

That's life.

The nice thing is that I can always replace "I" with "we," or, if necessary, "me" with "us."

Meditation on buying drywall screws

The hardware store has a distinct lovely smell. Each aisle contains the potential of labor, the potential of the accomplishment of building or repairing, of cleaning or lighting or moving electricity from one place to another, hopefully avoiding the body as conductor or even conduit (and the taste of pennies). There is metal and wood and rubber and plastic. There is paint and paint thinner and solvents and solutions. I wander, not knowing anything, imagining chain jewelry and chain weapons measured from spools, hats made of orange funnels, music in a drill bit, laughter from a ball cock. With knowledge and the right tools, any wish can be granted. In a hardware store, a man becomes a child, small but vast.
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Three Links?

Really? I don't do links -- but maybe I should -- I mean, I'm generally saying something about interconnectedness, but probably not putting enough effort into connecting.

These are bits of internet debris that I find interesting, in no particular order (a lie: of course there's a particular order):

1) Growing roadkill

2) Housewifery

3) Comic 287

This is a cheap, easy post, a microwave dinner of a post, so I think I'll do it more often.
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Suggest titles in the comments

I can't explain my driving compulsive perfectionism to others, nor would I want to. My train's wheels squeal and spark against the tracks. My own words stagger back and forth against the walls of my mind, dehydrated but defiant, stunned by the cruel rigor of my demands.

So they rebel. In that spirit, here's my (latest) effort at hip-hop:

(Untitled)

Challenge me son, and I'm not so nice
I'll cut you apart on my recording device.
When the crowd falls quiet, then I get the panics,
So I hide in a corner, and I chew up a Xanax.
I don't like to curse, but what the motherfuckin' heck...
Crazy Johnny's my name, I'll stick a needle in ya neck.

That's how I'm gonna get laaaaid!

When you step to me, I step on back,
Because you stink real bad and you whyme weal wack.
You remind me of Jimmy, he talks like a clam,
And when he gets drunk, he gives his wife a choke-slam.
Now he's in therapy, and it's good for him...
He's more sensitive, and I'm with Mrs. Jim.

That's how I always get laaaaid!

We'll blow up the chorus, don't linguistically bore us.
Brave the danger, explore us
Because it's death to ignore us.

If I don't make sense, just feel my tone,
And check the vibration, now stroke my bone.
Take a taste of my skin, it's honey sweet.
And I ain't got no foreskin on the end of my meat.
Most of my life is about my penis...
But don't worry 'bout the herp, creature of Venus.

That's how I never get laaaaid!
---

Problem/Solution/Com- plication

Problem: The sun goes down too early.

Solution: Tell the sun you prefer a little more buildup, a little more romance, before things get hot and heavy.

Complication: The sun gives you a dozen roses, opens a bottle of wine, and grills you a delicious dinner, and somehow doesn't burn it, and seems content to sit and gently touch and kiss for hours, or is it days, or is it weeks now?

Crops die. Everyone starves.
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Walking with Whitey

It's a grim future for whitey. In the purple dusk he walks and curses those who do not know how to use a sidewalk: the left side walkers, the same pace walkers, the three abreast walkers, and the cyclists.

"God damn you," he thinks. "Walk on the right side. Walk slower or faster than me. Walk single file -- there's mud around. Bike on the street like everyone else. Risk death like everyone else. You're not special. You're not even white."

Oh, no whitey. Oh, ugly whitey. You're going to fail, and then you're going to seek revenge, maybe inspired by Cheney's book, and then you're going to fail spectacularly. The world does not move according to your order. The world does not have manners. The world is chaos, and you must learn to find delight in that chaos, in strange and foreign experiences, in confusion and terror and tacos. But I see you can't. You can't get mud on your pants. You won't.

I'm sorry. I regret that I can't help. I'm busy not becoming you.
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Diagnosis and the beat

Doctor, the reason I haven't sought treatment before is that it's been my lifelong goal to be clinically disco. I've always dreamed of sequins and polyester in sequined, polyester pajamas. I've always immersed myself in disco's throbbing intricacies to remove myself from society with the goal of becoming a funky mystic.

I don't listen to other music. I fear that different beats will pollute my pristine four-on-the-floor pulse (DUB-thub-DUB-thub), despite my EKG's and some doctors' advice. But having gone so long with the same beat, the same beat -- dancing, shopping, even masturbating to it -- I'm exhausted. I wake up in the middle of the night, heart thumping and hips churning. Now that I've given up cocaine and Quaaludes, I need sleep.

I know that disco lies mostly in the dance steps and others' perception of these. I know that as soon as I shuffle my feet, even before I speak and fill the room with my spinning reflections, people will call me disco. This doesn't bother me in itself, but it's a laziness when strangers don't even evaluate the funkiness of my opinions. It bothers me when they reflexively distance themselves, maybe to protect themselves from the beauty of the disco beat.

Inside I feel that beat and it hurts. I breathe it. I work it to make a living. I break it down. My four seasons are Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Donna Summer.

But still, Doc, I don't know if I'm clinically disco or just pretending. How could I know? The most disco are the ones most convinced that the world sees them as singer-songwriters. Do you see me that way? Do they still make Quaaludes? Doc?

Fun with language and babies

If a baby goose is a gosling,
And a little moose a mosling,
Then an airplane liquor bottle is a bozling,
And a Native American fetus a paposling.

One Perk of Apartment Living

My janitor, despite the stink from his armpits and maybe from his dink, if you must know, onion and sour milk, believes that changing light bulbs is holy: bringing light out of darkness, a series of miniature miracles only loosely related to electricity. Counterclockwise, darkness comes out, clockwise, light goes in. He deserves praise and respect. If he is Jesus in a jumpsuit, then he might forgive actions taken in darkness in exchange for honest regret. Either way, he improves lives. He improves my life.

Subway Observations & Questions & Conclusion

His nose hair curls from one nostril to the other, like a nose ring on a bull. Is he dangerous? Is that what his wife and mother use to control him, to keep him from romping around the house and running into the china cabinet? And where does it start? And where does it end? Maybe it's infinite, a hair eating its own booger-y root. I do not want to be this close to this man.
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Sharing an Instant

Maybe human relationships should not govern our lives. Maybe solitude is the natural state of existence, a quiet commune with the blue light of the universe, alone with a beating heart and a rumbling tummy. Maybe, but how god-awful boring. I prefer to hang out with crazy people. I like their warm nasty bodies and their stink and their hair and their stinky hair.

To dismiss another person wastes an opportunity to feel as they feel, most reliably to hurt as they hurt. The sameness is lovely: a pair of smiles, a pair of purple grimaces, a pair of sophisticated apes. A connection enriches both lives, even if that connection goes unrealized at the time.

We are electric streaks in a cold, mostly empty universe. We are all alone in the instant before death. Against this backdrop we form relationships with others or with the mysteries of life, sometimes one within the other. We love what feels good or at least what feels familiar or at least what tastes sweet and feels sticky. We love to dip an apple on a stick in that shit, that caramel love.

A person has a limited number of chances to share the heart-quickening pleasure burst of spontaneous mutual discovery. Although there are unlimited discoveries, there is limited time only. Unshared, discoveries mean little, and a single shared instant can define a life or two. It happens daily.

A chance at sharing taken and failed improves future chances by increasing tolerance for failure, the emotional equivalent of lifting weights. This lightens and lessens worry. Laughter radiates and inadequacies slip away before they turn destructive. Empathy strengthens social magnetism. Making friends gets easier.

Each person has secrets that comfort can tease out. The essential extraction method is creating comfort through hospitality, through offering more than you should. The secrets, the juicy sinful berries, reward the sacrifice, the fatted calf. Hospitality starts inside with an expansion and outside with a touch, often shared warmth, food and drink. Me, I prefer an excess of both and get mixed results.

Relationships lead to other relationships, then common experience, familiarity, sometimes intimacy. A friend, like grout, fills emotional gaps and strengthens everything. A bunch of friends form a community. Life is nicer in a community, even of a community of stinky crazies.

Problem/Solution/Com- plication

Problem: Erection on the train.

Solution: Get off.

Complication: That depends, doesn't it?
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Indivision

The capitalist system is a tower to enlightenment as long as the wealthy do not seek further wealth, but rather what lies beyond wealth -- to articulate life. I envision a spiritual class, moving among the people like globes of soothing light, spreading relief and making predators and boss-men weep at their own wickedness.

The fundamental problems are the failure to recognize the inevitability of suffering and the belief that more wealth will prevent it. Excess wealth creates excess poverty and exacerbates suffering. We become agents of suffering and equal recipients of its wrath. We don't all need to be musicians constantly startled by their proximity to the divine, but as capitalists, to please elevate something over money. Music is easiest. Then community.

People are connected to place and to each other. The myth of individualism, where a person by virtue of his or her actions and decisions is the sole creator of his or her fate, endangers all of us. It's mostly to whom you're born and what's in your genes.
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Recycling

Sally spends the morning vacuuming cobwebs and lint from her unfinished basement because yuck, cobwebs and lint do not belong there, and what if Jesus stops by with his white robe and white gloves to check for dust?

She hears the baby cry through the monitor and hauls her wholesome thickness upstairs to attend to that. She lifts him out of the crib and presses her face to his. He smells like powder. Sally smiles and gurgles. "Oh Adam, you look just like hubby," she says.

Adam spits up in her mouth.

She swallows it.

Unlocked

It's a peculiar old lock on this chest, these ribs and skin, these two odd hairy dials, but it must be unlocked to let the emotions out. They exert pressure. If kept inside, they'd rot and stink and turn to tar.

The key to the chest is empathy, which when it resonates at a certain frequency it turns the tumblers and out spills a hot torrent of feelings. These feelings can be strong like booze or certain teas and equally intoxicating and calming as if we were all the same.
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Balance

Throughout the day, I use the social skills I have to try to make others more comfortable. Come the evening, I need some balance.

I'm sure I could learn to appreciate speed metal, but loud angry noise is simply inconsiderate. Anyone can be inconsiderate. To disturb with psychological nuance, to be artfully antisocial, takes more skill. Ear to the floor, I keep a journal of the downstairs neighbors' conversations, the more mundane the better:

6:14 P.M.

"What do you want for dinner, honey?"
"Meatloaf, kitten."
(me stifling laughter -- kitten meatloaf...)

The next day arrives. I go to work. I come home. I take out the journal, a microphone, and the only musical instrument I own: a triangle. I open the journal and ring the triangle:

Trinnnnnnng.

It's exactly 6:14 P.M.

"What do you want for dinner honey," I shriek into the microphone.
"Meatloaf, kitten," I bellow.
(me stomping about, giggling uncontrolled)

Balance.

Hair

In the elementary schoolyard, sniffing the new girl was an effective way to get a few laughs, force someone else to introduce me (I was shy), and appear crazy enough to deter Timmy the Bully. Now, twenty years later, I wish I could go to therapy to control my hair-sniffing compulsion, but it is my choice to want to sniff hair, and it underscores my virtue when I deny myself. The hilarity is over. Life is to be endured.

Oh, but it's awful on a crowded bus, standing at nose-level with a beautiful head of chestnut hair glimmering in the sunset and just needing to bury my face in it like a cool sweet pillow and just snort the strands into my sinuses and sneeze and sneeze and sneeze on the neck below, the warm neck below, so warm and like a goose...

Instead, as the stops go by, I shake and sweat like I'm holding back an insistent bowel movement. I count backwards from one thousand by sevens. I breathe. I suffer. I vote Republican. If I shan't have pleasure, no one shall.

Rodent Gratitude

A black squirrel scratched its way up the window screen. Its belly, gray and fat with dumpster trash, pressed against it, bowing it slightly. I lay mostly unclothed on the bed beside the window, clutching a miniature baseball bat (not a euphemism) and hoping it wouldn't find the squirrel-sized hole (not a euphemism) in the screen just a foot to its left. If it jumped through the hole onto the bed, I would club it to death like the sexy-tailed rat it is.

The breeze felt cool. The squirrel climbed left and poked its head though the hole. Its jaws worked as if chewing. I looked into its black eyes and cocked the bat.

"Gheee-ta-ta-ta-ta," it said, producing a seed pod from somewhere and dropping it on the windowsill.

Was this the same squirrel I braked for this morning? There aren't a whole lot of black squirrels in the city, at least not on the North Side. But squirrels don't remember. They certainly don't know where I live.

"Reee-ta-ta-ta," it said.

"Thank you?" I replied.

It dashed down the screen to the ledge, then onto the tree, and it was gone. I picked up the pod and took a bite. Tasty, nutty. Maybe I should have said "you're welcome." It certainly is welcome.

Problem/Solution/Com- plication

Problem: "Hey," your brother says, "you really need to clean your ears. Looks like you got cheddar in there."

Solution: You buy an ear canal irrigation system. Obviously you're too high-class for Q-tips. The warm water flushes out the wax and suddenly you can understand what people say, and it's not always nice.

Complication: You wake up from a dream about a military march because there's something tickling your ear. Then you remember your brother bragging about inventing the first centipede syringe. At the time, you thought you had misunderstood -- due to the ear wax.
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No less an animal

My love, in your silver eyes I find my direction, and in my direction my center, and in my center my balance, and in my balance my strength. You are my strength. We, entwined, are.

I am a determined conqueror, a fierce short-haired little carnivore, my eyes blood red and my teeth fangs. I bare my gums when threatened. Feel the hardness of my shoulders, the lean and the bone. You shape me, you tame me, and I shape the world for you. Shall we entwine our bodies?

And now curled in the cool white sheets in the cool grey light I am no less an animal, but I am no longer scared, no longer dangerous, but rather tender and affectionate.