A single plastic container, all alone

My wife made this comment, offhandedly. The subject: a plastic salsa tub that she had just washed, now destined for the recycling.
It struck a chord in me, and I immediately blurted, "That is going to be the title of my next blog post!" though I had no notion of a topic for said post. And so, in the tracks of the great word-painters (inebriated, stumbling through the black, bleak blankness) I contemplated this single sentence. Could it describe the grotesque tableau that surrounds the average man? Plastic containers... stationary figures... solitary...

I've been reading Kafka, if that is not obvious already.

I guess I have no choice but to surrender this sentence to pure poetry. Something ethereal and serendipitous provoked that prose. And yet something deep-seeded and tyrannical within me desperately wants to make it my own, to swage and sinter it into a uniform theme, an impression, an epos. Yet my hammer is weak, my anvil soft, and no matter what my concentrated effort, unadulterated this phrase stands stronger alone.

And thus is life. To detect inspiration, unprovoked, and clutch and claw at it, and occasionally fall flat. Only occasionally, though, for that is art.

Suck on that, Princeton.

I just finished watching Mystery Science Theatre 3000, The Movie. I was returned to 1995; Clinton was the president, Gorbachev jokes were still vogue, and humor was a simple equation for my friend Brett and I. Most sleep-overs took place at his house, considering he had Oregon Trail on the computer, super Nintendo, unlimited Nerf toys and satellite television ... whereas my house had public radio and was wood-heated. To be fair, though, my house had superior food. At Brett's, meal time was typically sugary cereal or white rice with butter. My mother, on the other hand, would prepare vegetable lasagna, sautéed tofu sandwiches on home-made bread, pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

In retrospect, my house developed us as physical young men quite effectively. We were compelled to play outside by the complete lack of lazy enertainment inside; kicking soccer balls through the laundry line supports, hitting rocks with baseball bats against the corregated walls of the International Curling Club, throwing water-balloons off the roofs of downtown businesses after scaling the fire escapes. Granted, Brett had a sizable collection of Super-Soakers and a Slip 'n Slide... so on hot days, it was really a toss up.

However, Brett's house held the coup de grace... the nudie channel. Somehow Brett was able to decipher the pass-code of the parental lock on his satellite receiver. If I remember correctly, it was the expiration date of his father's credit card. (Please don't ask me how he knew his parents' credit card information... not only did my parents not own a credit card, we did not own a microwave, a computer, or a CD player.) So, after guffawing at Mystery Science theatre 3000 and stealthily ascertaining that his parents had truly retired for the evening, we would punch in that sacred numerical cypher and gawk at the nubile bodies afforded by the soft-core cable porn industry of the day. Those are sweet memories.

Anyway, recounting this is relatively pointless. What chiefly compelled me to start orating about it was the simple fact that the fictitious hero of the movie was wearing a UW-Stout sweatshirt. Suck on that, Princeton.

So, my slovenly posterior has defaced this chair irreparably. My two months spent out of work have passed quickly, and the calories and carbohydrates have mounted within me in haste. The rain sinks me, and I miss my bike.

A muscular woman on television beckons toward some bizarre machine, a spindly, spidery confluence of tension bars and flywheels and cable-winders. Her arm is veiny. It encourages me to try a free trial; to unfold this glistening miracle of modern mechanics and reshape my o-so-pliable physique. This cyprian employs the devils of the sales-trade, plumbing the depressed and sleepless to fatten her pocketbook with the spoils of commission.

My own objectives are far less clear. Why do I sit at this black hour, listening to the rodents who nest in my attic and the late night adverts for personal-enhancements, typing into the silence? Why, indeed.

Spoiled

Outside an unfortunate rattles glass in pursuit of deposit refunds. His tattered shambles lean precariously into the recycling bin and he sweeps a gloved hand back and forth to stir up the cream. Glass money. A strange connection there, with the tribes of old, using unwieldy stone currency and this modern vagabond scrounging for large, fragile nickels. His face weather beaten, scowling, he mounts his aluminum steed, his plastic bag saddlebags dangle like testicles from either handlebar. Half filled with the spoils of the day, two dollars and sixty-five cents worth of returnable bottles and cans, they clatter-clang back and forth as he peddles down the alley.

I am spoiled. Sometimes I let that creeping anxiety depress me. Yet a glance out my window provides the relief I need for today. Because here I am, seated before a massive, high-tech gizmo wired to the world wide web, space heater blowing warm air up my pant-leg, speakers streaming a radio station in San Francisco. I have nothing to bitch about. I am just peachy.

Sabbatical

Flunkies don't get to take sabbatical. Only career junkies. I recently read that Bush spent 2 years out of the last 8 on vacation. I sincerely hope that President Obama takes an equal amount of vacation time, because I am sure he will be working much harder.

I had a dream last night that I am going to record here for reasons of archive. This blog is a morgue file for my thoughts, and this is just another crinkled page to jam into a box for possible future applications.

I stumbled backwards into a room, bumping into a large billiards table. "Watch it!" a voice scolded me. I turned to apologize. To my surprise, I was standing face to face with an oversized midget who scowled at me as his companion leaned his normal size torso on his undersized arms.

"Sorry," I muttered as I turned to leave. My elbow once again jostled the table.

"I said watch it!" I glanced backwards and noticed a small scorekeeping chalkboard affixed to the side of the table. It read:
1 wall shot = 10 points
2 wall shot = 20 points
Bumping the table = -25 points

and below it was scrawled

Chuck 30
Tyler 45
Noah -100

I protested, "I only bumped the table twice! Why am I at minus 100?"

and they turned to me and said, "We don't like you very much."

Little Mr. Sunshine

The sun shines again. The blanket of fog has finally dissolved, there are pancakes in the skillet, the radio plays Tico Tico endlessly as Rev. Mark Time pays homage to the Hudson River plane crash. According to him, that was the song being piped through the fuselage during Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's flawless water touchdown that saved all 155 passenger's lives. And I have no real reason to doubt the reverend, and no reason to believe him either.

Eggs sizzle. Tico tico is also the name of a nudist cruise by Caribbean Hideaways/Orient Bay.

Life, she goes on...

The Doldrums

The fog is starting to depress me. It presses in with it's stink of cinder and mildew. The meteorologists blame it on stagnant air, but I will call it the lazy winds, or maybe the unmotivated atmosphere.
Who can trust a weatherman anyway, sham soothsayers in their secondhand suits, waiving manicured hands at projections of isobars and conjuring visions of picnics in the unmaterializing sunshine.
So I say, out you damn murk. Let the lazy winds cast you into condensation-hell. Gnash your yellowed teeth at others, you doldrums.

What day is this?

The main thing that bothers me about being unemployed, besides the boredom, anxiety, monetary drain, self-pity and general pruning of any sense of self-worth, is the fact that I have no idea what day it is. I have no frame of reference. Word has it, some people in my predicament use television scheduling to maintain their clockworks. I, however, work in the reverse, and find myself wondering why my radio programs are not on this Saturday morning.

Everyday feels like Saturday. I am boggled when Tegan rises at 6 am, showers, wakes me further with coffee kisses to say goodbye...

Drunken voices, drunken parades, marching down the alley in front of the house, between the hemispheres of my brain. Shouts, exclamations, jubilation. Is it Saturday? Friday? What are you people doing, so rowdy and inebriated on a weekday? Is this.. a .. week... what day is it?

The early retreat of my better half signals school-night. Might be Sunday. But not Monday, because Tegan does not have class on Tuesdays....

Pride? Dignity? These are drown-able offenses.

Sinking in the bottle again.
Mohalo

Another Me?! Wha?!?!?!?!

I don't understand.

Another me?

Go down to Pattengill, 3rd place.
shit

Fizzled

So here sit I. I drink bourbon from a small jelly-jar. I drink gin from a larger jelly-jar, and water from a stainless steel canteen... if at all.
Unsolicited inspirations pinball in my skull like the free radicals between my cells. The ideas erode my confidence as the free-radicals chip away at my life-span; my own psyche promoting the anxiety that eats me, the alcohol I consume consuming me and my time.

Crap.

Winter term began for my wife last week. It will involve long hours at the hospital, with equal time spent in literary buffeting. The day before was a stressful undertaking, with weeks worth of catching up to do. Naturally, Tegan spent the afternoon organizing her sock drawer. "Study is much more difficult in an atmosphere cluttered." She said something along those lines. There is only admiration in these words, truly. How she copes with the pressures of nursing school and the annoyances of my presence, I am in awe of.

I decided to relieve her of the burden that is myself, retreating to the store to retrieve... things. The companions of alcohol (club soda, lemon juice) and the companions of evacuation (magazines, hygienic tissue.) I stood before a vast wall of white cylinders, stacked in plasti-wrapped battalions, occasionally stooping and squeezing, following instructions to procure gentler wipe than was available at our usual grocery haunt.
People came and went. I felt a bizarre camaraderie with another man who lingered for several minutes, perusing the american barge of toilet paper. Ahhh,,, the metaphors.

But my small jelly-jar is empty, and my larger jar unfilled. And my water canteen... well, nonexistent.

Mohalo

Where does this lead?

Ok, so the big question is, Does this go anywhere? Will I become some blog-o-bot, churning out useless (yet entertaining) drivel every spare moment - of which there are many in my newly unemployed schedule. Or does this fizzle.

I like that word. Fizzle. A verb and a noun, denoting both a lackluster blowhard and his occasional muse, a passion passionately fleeting. A fugitive epiphany. Maybe I will re-christen this blog "The fizzle."

I just picked up a book from the library called Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life. This was not acquired through some scholarly pursuit of existential allegory, nor a morbid fascination with the futile moribund. No, I was lead to this title by a book design blog.

Which leads me to my non-point. So far, the pretense of the introduction to this book stands as follows: Before wasting time caught up in rigid (and largely false and misleading, according to the author) study of an author (here, Kafka) ... Read them. Read them for yourself before reading about them. Authors of works are not their characters.

So this book has me thinking about critics and artists. Are artist inherently more intelligent than those who break down their works, or just more intuitive? Can the man with decades of studious bent standing behind a university podium possibly deconstruct a labor better than the engineer... Does the artist understand what his/her digits are fabricating, or are they simpletons following flight of fancy.

Which also leads me completely off point to: Who is the toiling pawn perfecting the spell guesser on this computer, and where can I mail a monetary tip to him?

I could tap-a-tap-a on into the blank night... following my own flight of fancy. But I will not. I will retire and hope to discover if this is truly a fizzle.
Mohalo