What I Want to Listen To, As I Drift Gently to Sleep

Oh, Joyce

“Life is incoherent and dangerous and treacherous and ultimately unfathomable.”

-Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes

Sometimes you might find yourself wishing that it were possible to train a little white cat to say to you, when you are loose in the world, that your life is not entirely unsalvageable. Which might not be a word.

This Moment, Right Here

I’m currently sitting in an overwarm, moist Starbucks on Lexington Avenue. It’s raining outside and I’m drinking tea and eating some food bar made of what appears to be industrial glue and bird beaks. I’m waiting for a prescription to be filled so I can go home, chat with the cat, and make a list of all the things that are wrong with my life. On that list: foodbars made of glue and bird beaks, overwarm Starbucks and the entirety of Lexington Avenue. Really, it’s the worst street in the world.

When I was a skinny kid in Upstate New York I loathed gym class. I often felt like fresh meat thrown into a chimpanzee cage. What can I say, kids are vicious. After one particularly grim festival of hazing, the gym teacher took me aside and said, “that shouldn’t have happened.” He was right, of course, but also lazy and of the mind that such things were good for building the sort of boys who would don helmets and bring scholastic glory, so he let it keep happening. Eventually I stopped going to gym altogether, instead cultivating my appreciation for inhaled chemicals in the dark room.

Of course, one needs Phys Ed credits to graduate from a public school. When it became apparent that I might not graduate, as I was lacking two years of gym, a compromise was reached wherein I agreed to run the track for six hours and in return the gym credits would be fudged. I walked the track for six hours, listened to the first Garbage record eight times and imagined small birds as they pecked out the eyes of everyone in my small school.

Just a little memory, right now.

Have You Ever Noticed?

Have you ever noticed that when you chat with someone most every day and then suddenly they go on an international and tropical vacation and you can’t chat with them how adrift you’ll feel? It’s like there’s things I have to say! To say nothing of run-on sentences. Sigh. I’m losing my mind.

As With Anything, There’s an Explanation

Today

Today I am somewhat not good. Not terrible, but not good. I try to like my life, but on days like this it can feel trap-ish (which is of or like a trap, I’ve decided). I dunno, it’s like an old vice grip that is suddenly clamped on your head, and now you have to do laundry or make chili with it tightening incrementally.

I remember calling certain triste musique ‘cry cry music’ when I was a skinny kid. Like Mazzy Star or really slow Chopin. You could make a cry cry mixtape and walk around and be moody and teenage. I’m too old for such things now, so I guess I’m just going to write some incomprehensible stuff here and hopefully it (or this or whatever) will go away. Or it’ll just sit here, like a person who you think looks like you on the subway, except when you pay closer attention they’re ugly and dumb and probably getting off at the wrong stop anyway.

Dear God and Also Jesus

You know how tired I am? Very tired.

You know what I did at work today? Played several games of Hangman with a coworker.

Do you like my confession? Good. Now get out, I don’t like men in robes.

Did You Know?

I used to carry around either the collected works of Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath or both and read them when I was in High School. I was wickedly depressed at the time. Well, wickedly and obviously depressed, which is the only depression kids were allowed to have in the early bits of the 1990′s. Now they’re very different, I understand, the childhood depressions, what with early puberty, food additives, parental abdication and the introduction of Wii-based exercise regimens.

Cake Stomp 2010

As brought to you by Craigslist:

And just in case you sickos were wondering, this is a non-sexual cake stomp.

God the internet is weird.