http://robvs.tumblr.com/

(Or: “ Running as a metaphor for metaphors, and the prime example of the type of thing you hate to...

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:57:57 -0400

(Or: “ Running as a metaphor for metaphors, and the prime example of the type of thing you hate to do, but do because you know you’ll love it/feel good in its wake (see: writing/eating salad/wearing most kinds of pants) and the realization that doing such things makes you mature and sensible in very recognizable ways, but at the same time, insane in a much subtler way that’s maybe even harder to explain than my theory that there’s no such thing as a decade.”)

You’re gonna make me say it, so I might as well say it, instead of spending the next however long it takes to read/write this not saying it like I tried to do when I wasn’t saying anything – thinking it, yes (then and now for what I guess was eight-fucking-months all told) but not saying it… so “yes.”

And “you were right.”

And “fuck you.”

And while we’re at it, here are the answers to the rest of the questions I asked me for you: “No, I don’t like the new Daft Punk song,” “L.A.’s okay. I really like the taco trucks,” “James Blake, Youth Lagoon and Colin Stetson, in that order,” “the episode where Rory and Lorelai are in a dance contest, The Doctor and Amy meet Van Gogh, and Andy and April get married,” and yeah, “you’re probably right, it’s probably silly to swear off anything, or announce a plan of any kind, whether it’s one about doing something or avoiding something else - because, yeah, I know that it (the announcement) is supposed to make things stick because of the external pressure and all that, but if no one reads what you wrote about not writing anymore anyway, is there really any pressure, external or internal, to not write anymore? And were you even really writing in the first place? Or not in the second? Did anyone just hear a tree fall? Was that you? Did you fart?”

Who knows?

I stand by my “fuck you.”

It’s been a long eight months and I’m a runner now.

That’s what’s up (and I expect you to hold me to that).

—-

“When I’m running I don’t have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can’t do without.”

― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I don’t really like spring-boarding off of quotes, but I’ll do it here so I can use this as a disclaimer of sorts so I don’t have to Google “disclaimer quotes” to find a good one off of which to spring-board this: If you want really great insights into running/life/writing – and you should know this by now, even if you just landed here accidentally by Googling “disclaimer quotes” in quotes (which I gather from modern usage is now an appropriate term for quotation marks) – I am not an apt dispensary. Instead, you should be reading the book quoted above, because it’s great and Murakami is endlessly observant and wise… and that ultimately means his thoughts on any one thing are probably more elucidating than my thoughts on any other thing, which is my way of saying, “If you wanted to learn about the mechanics of those two-person hand-powered see-saw-ish railroad cart things that prisoners always seem to use when trying to evade capture in old movies in which everything seems weirdly sped-up and they’re eventually caught, you’d probably learn more about them (the carts) by reading Murakami’s thoughts on flan/whittling/haberdashery than you would by reading my thoughts on the carts’ composition or that of the prisoners’ triceps as pump their tired arms in retreat and try, in vain, to find some rhythm with one another and gain ground on the horizons of the free world.

But yeah – that’s part of the appeal of running.

The not having to talk and the not having to listen.

The not having to even think – about anything: me, other things, or how the latter affect the former, and how the former misinterprets the effects.

Because isn’t that the dream? Finding a state where you don’t feel the need to yammer constantly and reflect and analyze and survey and debate and reduce everything to its smallest parts so you can take every tiny fragment and smush it together with other fragments to form some kind of over arching modular maze of whatever the fuck this is… because this is a perfect example, though it’s impossible to expand upon because I just want to be running and not thinking about this.

But I don’t want to be running either… not until I’m done.

And I don’t want to be writing this either, but will, I guess, when it’s finished.

There’s a part of me that wonders (sometimes while running/writing, but usually after) whether I actually enjoy anything, or if I only like the memories of things I did reluctantly and then reluctantly enjoyed. And sad as it seems, that’s actually been a helpful consideration (and a motivation to run), as it reminds me to imagine what future things will seem like in the further future after they’ve past… like on Saturday when I almost skipped a beach party because I only knew a couple people who were going, but then imagined it having been fun in hindsight instead of not being fun in some paranoid forged foresight, and I ended up going and in actual here&now hindsight remember the things that would have been impossible to foresee: reconnecting with people I didn’t expect to see, drinking rapidly before the impossible Pacific, and, in the passenger seat of my car on the ride home, punching a hole in a watermelon and scooping out the contents with a cradle-shaped hand I pretended was a yellow excavator’s electric arm stained flesh-colored by some combination of rain and limestone run-off).

When I don’t want to run, I think all that (maybe minus the watermelon).

And when I run, I try not to think about running (just as I’m trying not to think about writing right now).

And I guess the lesson is: if you want to ruin something, think about it before/while you do it.

Harp on it.

Imagine everything that could go wrong.

Puddles and writers’ block. Leashless dogs with a taste for testes, and sentences holes impossible to close that, when patched with parentheses and a wink, always read sophomoric and remind you that you’re not really “a writer,” just a drunk word juggler with a punctuation fetish, wearing his self-obsession like a backpack.

Tie yourself in knots thinking about the end, the finish line.

Count miles and minutes and words and potential reception.

Scrutinize every step and knee twinge.

Hustle to catch up to the guy in the red shorts who passed you with ease or stare at an adverb with abject fear wondering if you’re using “respectably” respectably.

Or just let go and end up elsewhere (the only thing I’ll admit to wanting without a wink). To be able to get lost in any task and not in the thought clouds above it, where tangentials buzz like electrons and distract as if they were tangible and “tangentials” was really a word).

Because that’s the only time you can really enjoy things – when you’re not wondering if you’re enjoying them, doing them right, getting anywhere, improving, lifting your knees high enough, breathing at the right times, developing your character(s), giving the right amount of scene description, going the right way, showing in lieu of telling, making enough to “get by,” loving another person for the right reason(s), getting enough protein, keeping enough distance between you and the car/bike/runner in front of you, using “disinterested” correctly, drinking enough water, staying sincere…

And I’m at the point in this where I’m not really sure (and why not write it?) Because I lost myself in the last few paragraphs, but have to start thinking about how to wrap this up. (And will I like it? And does it make sense? And is it really about running? And is running really even about running? And is anything really about anything? And do I even believe in anything or thing and not just thing’s parallels that serve as parables that I can write out to maybe, one day, remember? And should I delete this paragraph or say, fuck it, and consider it a flawed transition/reflection, but let it ride and not think about it too much and let it be a torch for that very idea?)

If you’re reading this, I stopped thinking. If you’re not, it’s my fault.

(And, yes, you are and yes it is, because I really like the play of “fault” and hadda leave it… not sure if that’s under- or over-thought, but there it is… sitting on the screen like a five-lettered insect watching you all warped and multiplied through the compound dome of his eye. He’s iridescent and you’re doubled over in doubt, but the weather’s nice and Taco Zone is open late).

And I don’t really like punctuating with quotes, but I’ll do it here so I can stop writing about houseflies and thinking about not thinking and tacos, and maybe find the time to go for a run and block out the white noise:

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

- Ray Bradbury

—-

On next week’s (month’s? year’s?) Rob Vs… :

Where can a column entirely devoted to self-conscious hyper-analysis go after its author, in successive columns, 1) swears off writing and 2) lauds the benefits of abandoning self-conscious hyper-analysis?

Also, Rob buys a food dehydrator!

OR: “A delayed semi-internal dialogue/semi-explanation of a semi-long delay, that touches...

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 23:00:31 -0400

OR:

“A delayed semi-internal dialogue/semi-explanation of a semi-long delay, that touches upon – among other things – visual art, serendipity, May Day crowns, analog promotion, approachability-envy, the area where assholes and agents overlap, the definition of “retirement” in the post-Jordan/Jay-z faux exit era, and the maddening little sabotages that transform labors of love into chores if you don’t watch your ass and/or get your head out of it.”

THIS ESSAY: Give me some background on why you’re fake-retiring and telling writing (and, in turn, me) to “fuck off?”

ME: The idea wasn’t to say, “fuck off” to you or to writing and waste all the nice new business cards I just ordered from VistaPrint…

The initial idea was to say, “fuck off” to Facebook and Twitter and all the other e-platforms where I should be marketing myself/my writing, but can’t really get a firm foothold as I can’t really figure out how to plop down and promote/grow without feeling like a total fraud/asshole.

TE: What does that have to do with –

ME: Will you let me finish? I’ll get there.

So, I decided to take a new friend’s advice and go all Thomas Paine on LA’s proverbial ass (and literal bookstores) and do some unplugged analog pavement brick-and-mortar promotion – or, as they used it in the pre-Web days, “regular promotion.”

I printed up 300 forty-page chapbooks (full of short stories, novel excerpts, essays and one ridiculous self-serious black-and-white photo of yours truly that I hate, by my GF begged me to include w/ the bio) with the intention to give ‘em out for free at local bookstores, with the hopes that a few people might dig them, might pass them to other people that might dig them, and together, they might start a small grassroots thang that might end with me being paraded around Silver Lake in a crown on a waiting room chair covered with a blanket (the chair, not me) on a makeshift float like Allen Ginsberg on May Day in Prague in 1965 before he was expelled because, I guess, the Czechs of the time didn’t like long-haired yahoos, sexual liberation and/or finger cymbals played a-rhythmically.

And to do this – print the chapbook, get the following, get the May Day crown, annoy Prague – I figured I’d need some kind of bonkers cover for the thing that would encapsulated its writing’s tone and intention. Over the next week or so, I toiled over this for hours and hours and, in doing so, discovered that:

A) the lumbar on my chair is kinda shitty

and

B) I had far more fun designing the book’s covers than I had in writing anything between them – or for that matter, anything in the last five years or so.

Go figure.

TE: What else happened around the same time, Rob?

ME: Thanks for asking, essay! You’re the best friend a transition could have!

Around the same time, I found an old Canon FTb while looking for a balled-up piece of brown paper I had taped into a rough sphere and was using as a basketball to justify both my procrastination and the plastic hoop I wedged atop the white door that hides a perpetually off-balance washer/dryer-combo whose noises make people wonder who lives in the room behind the white door and “like, what the fuck do they do in there, man?” (to which I like to respond, “horny robots,” and “fuck like metal rabbits, son!”)

My roommates gave me some quick lessons on operation/lighting/composition, I loaded it with film, took a shitload of shots, developed them at shady-looking spots around LA/Glendale/Pasadena, and realized that liked the process (and outcomes) more than I enjoyed, you guessed it, writing anything in the last five years or so.

So, that’s why “fuck off, writing!”

That’s why I’m kinda retiring.

TE: Would you like to expand upon some reasons for this, both internal and external?

ME: Sure.

Even before I started fucking around with photography/sketching/design, I had a creator-rooted envy for visual artists (and to a lesser degree, musicians). As a writer, I was (and am) jealous of any art that’s approachable; that requires very little investment from its audience. You walk by a painting and, within a few seconds you know whether or not you like it, even if you don’t why. There’s nothing burdensome about digesting fine art or music; no long process to undergo to find appreciation. In some cases, it finds you: it’s graffitied on walls or playing on the radio.

As someone who writes somewhat dense and esoteric shit – that’s a fucking wet dream; a world without waiting… a world without query letters… without giant manuscripts in mailbags… without long explanations of intention, tone and style.

It’s this at a party:

Important-Looking Woman with Red-Framed Eyeglasses: What do you do?

(Man loads photo on iPhone, shows woman.)

Important-Looking Woman with Red-Framed Eyeglasses: Here’s my phone number. Let’s work together.]

as opposed to this:

[Important-Looking Woman with Red-Framed Eyeglasses: What do you do?

Man: Here read this (hands her 15-pound manuscript)

(Woman drops manuscript as she walks away, breaks man’s fifth metatarsal.)

Of course, there’s more to it than reception and intact toes.

As I said, writing just isn’t fun anymore, and hasn’t really been since I started doing it professionally.

It has its moments, of course.

Writing for a newspaper had some peaks/perks/lessons to teach.

Writing several novels has been challenging and gratifying, even if they’ve yet to find a agent/publisher.

A few enjoyable freelance gigs (in blog curating, conceptual fiction, ghostwriting) keep me motivated/happy/paid from time to time.

Even writing this (you) is occasionally fun - if often only in hindsight. (Seriously, you can be tedious, and so self-serving that the end point is hard to remember before the end point… sometimes after too. I’d really rather be eating a taco right now or throwing that balled-up piece of paper around, then looking for it in the corner, which has its own set of joys – and electronics – to discover.)

There is some fun here though… enough from time to time to keep me from tacos briefly. There are still those old moments where the right combination of letters/words feels magical and turns me into a little boy that just hasta show someone else what he’s stumbled upon.

Those moments become more and more rare though, esp. when you dive into “the business behind words” and deal daily with dull and emotionless editors… or constant query rejections… or failed MFA bids… or bullshit copywriting and SEO gigs that reduce words to a commodity… or waste-of-time job interviews with waste-of-life assholes who say they want “a creative writer,” then pass you over because “you’re a real writer,” and they want “someone who has more marketing experience”… or a jackass literary agent (one of the few times I’ll name names), like Al Zuckerman at Writers House, who – true story – recently replied to my query with a super-brief form letter saying he wasn’t interested in representing my book, but perhaps, I’d be interested in buying his book, “Writing the Blockbuster Novel.”

There’s nothing magical about that.

It’s just nonsense and bullshit…

TE: But, isn’t this kind your own fault, Rob?

ME: Fuck you, essay. Go take a time-out in the humping robot room! (Rob does his doctor-ordered metacarpal exercises until the essay walks away, closes the door.)

“Rob vs. Writing” is right, though. I did do this to myself by assuming I could twist and mold something I loved into something I could live off of.

It’s hard not to wince now – while ghostwriting someone’s Artist Statement or being the unemployed dude writing interview tips for recent grads – to think of the writer’s “job description” I adopted so long ago from Howl: “to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death…”

That’s what I’m not doing.

That’s how you retain the role of “artist who loves his art.”

You accept the shame and rejection.

You filter outward.

You have faith that it’s worth something more than the paper (or computer) you write it on, and, that it will find its target someday.

I still believe that…

I just haven’t been doing it.

Instead, I made words into a commodity and slipped to a place where writing isn’t holy anymore, just something I sell to any company/individual that wants funny landing pages, smart Q&A answers, quirky marketing.

I’m still a long way from thinking that being sincere means not making sacrifices. But I’ve kinda drifted into the other direction – where making sacrifices means not necessarily destroying the artist, but discouraging him to the point that opening a word document seems like a chore.

So, so sorry, essay.

You were right all along.

TE: So what now?

ME: Now, we wait it out and see what becomes of art’s fun and writing’s lag.

In the meantime, I’m slowly building a portfolio with sketches and photos and posters. Next week, I start an Intro to Graphic Design class at Art Center in Pasadena… If I like it, maybe I’ll enroll somewhere fulltime next fall, pursue something in design and try to avoid making the same mistakes I made with writing.

I know new fun fades and reinventions are expensive, but I’m okay with that.

What I’m not okay with is feeling absolutely passionless about what was once the only thing I was passionate about, and responding to it by getting discouraged and bitter, and throwing balled up paper at imaginary robots…

That’s not what I wanted from this.

TE: So what about me/this? What happens to us?

ME: No idea, coyote. All I can tell you what I told the ghost of Milton Lantham when I saw his giant-ass mirror at the LACMA:

Anyone who would commission a mirror this large was destined to see himself go extinct in its reflection.

Or: “an over-analysis of not wanting to overanalyze things followed closely by a...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:49:03 -0400

Or:

“an over-analysis of not wanting to overanalyze things followed closely by a baseless decision to give up things that keep you alive with the hopes that they might paradoxically keep you alive longer, despite the half-fact that you’re not sure they’ll work or if you even want them to…”

In a recent panic of job applications, I applied to a freelance position at SparkNotes (or as I know it, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Literature” to CliffsNotes’ “Literature for Dummies.” Maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows… ) Yes, as a writer, I think those guys suck in principle, boiling down great crockpots of prose-chili into shitty-ass microwavable meals that make students/diners think literature/dinner is about getting the delivery of the Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast, and not the whole mad experience that is ordering it drunk from a sober/pregnant waitress with a “Rhonda” nameplate necklace at four a.m. and hearing her bow to the onset of morning sickness soon thereafter in a nearby bathroom. (Built-in point: Imagine that last sentence in a SparkNotes plot summary of this paragraph: “The author believes that SparkNotes cheapens a literature reader’s experience by stripping fiction bare and highlighting substance over the style that carries it.” Yeah, that’s the point. But the greater point is that sometimes the point isn’t the point. Sometimes literature’s point is Rhonda’s point, is James Joyce’s point*: “If you want something worth needing, you have to work at it until you need to vomit.” (*Not an actual quote from James Joyce or Rhonda.) And if you think that only applies to readers, sniff the breath of any writer returning to his or her seat after a trip to the figurative – but still misinterpreted – vomitorium. We’re on some Denny’s shit here – the servers get sick more than the customers, and believe it or not, the meals taste better for it.) Of course, I see the counter arguments for the existence of study guides: Educators have made this shit a necessity by treating art like a commodity and/or an earth science, and fall back on gauging student understanding with quizzes built w/ the same respect to substance over disrespected style. Because how do you really test style, beyond asking what the author is trying to do? And – another counter nod to the opposition – what the fuck is Ovid saying/what the fuck is hexameter/ I have plans tonight – can’t I just read the SparkNotes/CliffsNotes, or, you know, just watch the fucking movie? But I digress… (And I don’t think Epistulae ex Ponto would make a very good film, for what that’s worth.)

So, the SN lit. editor sends me a kind letter saying he thinks I’d be a good fit for the gig and requests that I summarize the first 47 pages of The Hunger Games to make sure I can relay/analyze plot (and am not the type of reader who doesn’t notice when an author switches tense mid-story for no reason). Long story short: I didn’t do it. [“The author’s possible motivations: 1. A lack of motivation. 2. He can’t get a copy of “The Hunger Games” at a Los Angeles library because every dormantly-violent kid in the county checked it out/reserved it, when his or her sexually-fucked-up mother dragged he or she to the library to get “50 Shades of” whatever-the-fuck the color is – 3. He’s not going to buy a book he doesn’t really want to read to write something for an application to a freelance gig that he’s not even sure he wants.] I later convinced myself that the real reason was all that shit I said above the shit above, the shit about waitress v. omelet, and how “it would ruin literature for me,” and a bunch of other nonsense that made my general disinterest seem more interesting/ethical.

So, Then – well, actually, let’s do this SparkNotes summary in advance, so you can decide if you want to keep reading: [“After deciding not to read The Hunger Games, the author decides to stop eating for 30+ hours and go see The Hunger Games in a discount cinema.”]

And, if you’re still with me, here are all the details you missed:

That same morning, I picked up the Harper’s that’s been in my bathroom since Super Tuesday (and, I guess Cyrenaica’s bid for semi-autonomy), read Steve Hendrick’s fascinating story about his 20-day fast and its health benefits, forewent breakfast and decided not to eat for the next 34 hours. What does that have to do with anything? I’m not really sure. Maybe it was a subconscious build from the hunger part of The Hunger Game. If you can’t figure out where it’s going, I’m not going to do the work for you… I’m not a Denny’s Waitress.

My last meal – which sounds more Jesus-y than it should – was the ¼-bag of Doritos (Nacho Cheese, best flavor hands down) I ate while watching something with my roommates the previous night. (It was probably either Twin Peaks or Downton Abbey. We’ve been watching both series concurrently for the last few months, switching back-and-forth between episodes. I’d definitely recommend the pairing if you ever want to know how it feels to be off-balanced/like one of those people at the bus stop/strip club/Costco who’s perpetually disassociated and forgets social mores and propriety from one scenario to the next. I was going to write about it proper (the feeling) but what can you really say about flipping between wartime Aristocracy drama and Lynchian self-winking nonsense, other than that it leaves you feeling like a ping-pong ball in a tennis match between a director you want to like but can’t, and a Facebook friend who bitches about Cheesecake Factory wait times, hashtags #firstworldproblems w/ faux-perspective and unknowingly nails #firstworldreaction by LOL-ing at advantage instead of doing something to counter it. Me: 15, David Lynch/That Bitch: Love… *wink*) [“Here, the author uses a tangential paragraph to announce his unrelated dislike for the “First World,” as well as its self-aware trendsetters, Twitocrites, tennis players and overrated directors. He then winks an apology, which could be interpreted any number of ways, which can be interpreted to be his intent.”]

Fasting is one of those things (like running, unemployment, salad, abstinence) that sucks while you’re enduring it, but leaves your brain with an oil slick of positive associations that tricks you into enjoying the pain hindsightedly, and makes you think you “could have gone longer,” at it, even though you know you couldn’t have. The only reason you even get through what you get through is that voice in your head (mine is played by Tom Waits) that reminds you that the shit, whatever it is, is finite. The finish line, the job, the dessert, the sex, they’re all there… shuffle that with the cardiovascular benefit, the absent dress-code, the colon-cleansing, the orgasm (and, in some cases, cardiovascular benefits, absent dress-code, colon-cleansing) – there’s the push/incentive that makes you think it was bearable/want to repeat it.

So, was it bearable – the fasting? Well, I obviously survived it, so “yes,” but also “no,” because it wasn’t as easy as I think it is now that I just housed six veggie tacos and an RC Cola. With that in mind: Sure, it was easier than I thought it would be. [“In this passage, the author contradicts himself and Frisbees bullshit discs to the three people who kept reading after his advance chapter summary. He doesn’t appear to care either… What a badass!”] I wasn’t hungry, per se – more frustrated by the inability to ingest anything other than water. I guess it came down to more of a scheduling thing than anything else. Working a desk job/as a freelancer have transformed eating into more of a leisure-lusted activity than anything done with sustenance or nutrition in mind. It’s about using 12 p.m. or sunset as an excuse to close a Word .doc you weren’t writing in anyway. So, when that’s not an option, shit, as they say, gets real.

Some time in the mid-afternoon – usually around the time I wanted to sleep anyway (so, 1 through 6 p.m.) – I began to feel really surprised/annoyed. Surprised b/c I wasn’t hungry/didn’t feel weak. I’ve always had a weird suspicion that I was hypoglycemic for I-don’t-know-why, and this pretty much put that to rest. The real problem was that I always confused the symptoms of boredom with those of low-blood sugar: Irritability, discomfort, inability to focus. I had those – though I didn’t really know why at the time, probably on account of the inability to focus and the way it made it hard to separate cause from effect, or really do anything but think about realities of the flesh v. those created in the mind – which, now that I can half-focus, doesn’t really seem to matter, because who cares if you’re irritable because you haven’t eaten or you’re irritable because you think you’re supposed to be when you haven’t eaten… After a while, you feel like a mimic octopus beaten at his own game.) [“Unbeknownst to the author, he was also irritable/foggy-headed b/c he’d been weaning himself off caffeine at the same time and was anxiously waiting to hear back about an interesting job for which he’d had two interviews; one for which he ended up being “the runner-up,” and currently wants to write about, but can’t until he know that the, um, runner (is that right?) has finished his probationary period and won’t be fired in favor of the same author, who eventually gave in to his growing boredom/frustration and decided to do something passive: watch The Hunger Games, a dystopian fantasy YA Novel whose themes, as described by someone who ended up writing for us (SparkNotes), are: ‘The inequality between rich and poor; suffering as entertainment; the importance of appearances’ (For balance, our competitor (CliffsNotes) lists them as: ‘deception; identity; manipulation; rebellion; reality versus the Games,’ but are you really going to trust a study guide that mispunctuates its name?”]

I don’t know if it was the movie, my brain forgoing glucose early in favor of Ketone bodies (and slight euphoria), or the discount cinema (one that looked like a gymnastics training center built for the 1984 Olympics, and then shoddily reverted into a cinema), but I had a great time watching The Hunger Games. The plot isn’t much to fling shit about. (It’s basically a mash-up of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Lottery, The Running Man, Lord of the Flies, The Most Dangerous Game and, of course, Battle Royale – which just started streaming on Netflix, BTW). And besides Jennifer Lawrence, the rest of the cast didn’t leave much of an impression. Nevertheless, it was entertaining and engaging, and allowed me to watch hungry children fight and stop thinking about eating/food for a couple hours.

And that’s the idea at the heart of my oversimplified under-analysis: Things are more bearable when you’re not thinking about how unbearable they are. Life, in moments like these, becomes more of an experience, and less of a perpetual study of experiences… It’s rare and beautiful, and – [“After deciding that his last point finally connected with his first (and contradicted everything that followed it), the author decided to stop writing, open a bag of Doritos and watch “Battle Royale,” on Netflix,” leaving the end open to interpretation.]

Or: “Walking cultural fences that: a) cordon off corners of a farm of which you...

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:18:00 -0400

Or:

“Walking cultural fences that: a) cordon off corners of a farm of which you assumed you assumed sole ownership, b) use wit to reassure you of the accuracy of your world-view and c) connect you with like-minded strangers who also recognizes the absurdity of life but try to enjoy it anyhow, only to lead you eventually (the fence and strangers) to holes in the welded mesh where commonalities starts to have the opposite effect, making you 1) question your individuality, 2) lament the fact that you can’t comment on your corner of the farm as well as only recently recognized pasturemates and 3) recognize i) true cultural other-side-of-the-fence-ness, ii) the perpetual futility of pointing projectors at cultural mirrors and iii) the possibility that your only salvation as a ‘cultural pundit’ lies in recognizing your failures to recognize society’s, and blogging about it all as self-defense”

INTRODUCTION OF THEMES:

If you can’t relate to this, you can probably stop reading now, because that probably means you’re either: APPLE) well-adjusted, BANANA) totally oblivious to the necessity of adjustment, or CALAMANSI) generally thrown-off by writers who: PARENTHESES) exhaust all ordering devices by the second ‘graph of an essay, EXPONENTS) use “probably” twice in the first sentence of said ‘graph, MULTIPLICATION) say “said,” and/or DIVISION) call paragraphs “‘graphs.”

Believe me, I envy you. (Please excuse my deliberate alienation strategies.)

If you’re still with me, but couldn’t glean the topic from the clusterfuck above, we’re sitting on the three-forked fence between: *Feeling annoyed and isolated (and, in turn, cool but kinda sad) because nobody gets us/we don’t get anyone, *Feeling harmonious and safe (and, in turn, perceptive and kinda brilliant) because a few others get us/we get a few others, AND *Feeling annoyed and isolated again (and, in turn, lame but kinda happy) because everyone get us/we get everyone.

Again, not sure if anyone can relate. If you can’t: Congrats, because that’s kinda the point. If you can: deferred samesies; retracted “congrats.” Because the polar feelings (and sometimes the central one) suck, but there’s something almost charming and reassuring in the obliviousness of being in the former pasture; something that you lose and can’t regain when you find yourself in the latter.

But wherever you are, it doesn’t matter. We’re talking about me, as ever, and I’m a recent convert to the latter, because of things like this:

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS:

I’m not principally hung-up on the idea of getting paid for ideas that I came up with but didn’t act upon. (We’ll get to that – though, unfortunately, we won’t really have time to cover the time last week when I invented Cap’N Crunch-infused vodka, only to learn later that afternoon of the existence of Froot Loop-infused vodka, then consume it from a Gulag-ish steel cup two nights later a Russian bar.) I’m talking about the comic (XKCD) and the central concept of the particular strip (coming up with ideas and not acting upon them) and the area where they relate and make me feel like a dumbass.

But let’s back up first: I started reading XKCD casually in 2009, usually when my friend Phil would forward a link along with a subject that read “Bet you can relate to this,” or, later, a subject comprising just a sideways winky-face, which I knew was meant to mean, “Bet you can relate to this.” I read the strip more regularly in the last year or two, and now probably send its links as often as I receive them.

Laugh, copy, paste, send. Open, click, laugh, reply ;)

But there’s a finite number of sideways winky-faces one can exchange with a friend before he or she searches through Gmail (and in my case, finds 41 messages in which the letters “XKCD” appear; 12 of which have both the letters “XKCD” and the word “relate”) and undergoes the drift – it’s really more like a migration recognized in hindsight - from feeling like he or she has found a like-mind in the otherwise prison cesspool of the internet, to feeling like another inmate… In my same case, the other “inmate” makes you feel smart for relating to his or her clever recognitions, but in time you recognize that relating to a recognition isn’t a recognition. And if you recognize this, you lose a lot of what comedy – art in general – delivers: the sensation that you’re part of the team; that you’re a secret comrade of the comedian and not just the hyena-sounding part of the laugh-track. Right?

And now, this is the part I said we’d get to, where I recognize that I’ve not only lost this artist-or-at-least-part-of-the-team uniqueness I erroneously assigned myself for thinking something “unique” or “relating” to a like-mind that “also” thought it - but now I’ve started throwing kindling on the meta-fire by reflecting on the months since this recognition that I’ve spent like the fool in the above comic who sees something great, thinks he invented it, and feels entitled to some share of the payout despite his delusion and inaction.

So, what do I do? Ask XKCD-wiz Randall Munroe to pay me for relating to/”pioneering” jokes about the availability of labcoats, parenting failures/cougar successes, a stupid reliance on lists/search-terms/priorities, dadaist tendencies, and my Paul Simon-ish feelings of faking it? Or, should I just relax and recognize that I’m becoming dangerously self-aware (and try not to recognize that Munroe already recognized the necessity of this recognition and then try not to link to the evidence?)

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

Yes, I suppose that’s it:

Try to be normal, stop thinking so much, try to realize that relation is a good thing and, like I said, above: that it’s sometimes enough to be the audience/tenant and not the artist/architect… to recognize someone else’s recognition of the absurdity of life and try to enjoy it (vicariously) anyhow… to try not to admit that a small part of me isn’t angry at myself for thinking I thought something I didn’t think/wasn’t alone in thinking, but jealous of whoever actually thought it (first)… and maybe only then angry at the tiny part of myself that doesn’t want to be in any club that will have me, and that has (that part of me) an obnoxious-hipsterish tendency to make me define myself only with things with which others aren’t defining themselves yet… (But can I think this and still sincerely yell at a hypothetical hipster? “Hey! Get on the fucking bike path! You already stole flannel, and the music I liked – and now I can’t like either because you pretended to like both and then stopped liking them because everyone else liked them – and now I don’t know if I stopped liking them because of you liking/disliking them, or because of the logic that made you stop too… and now you almost hit me with your bike!” It all gets a little confusing: my idea of “individuality” and liking it in (and under) my own terms/definition, when I can’t seem to remember what those were because of all the quotes I/we see/place around them – and “are they there to separate the concepts from the contexts of the sentences presenting them?” or “are they there to show the plastic-ness replacing the concepts’ lost plasticity?” – and what about the quotes around those? And can it go on forever? And if it does is it “ironic?”)

I think I lost myself (“Congrats, because that’s kinda the point.”)

So the plan now, I guess, is to embrace the confusion. Then, throw it out and focus on the nice moments when finding a common mindset in the too-big world can be so fucking reassuring that you don’t mind who thought of it first.

I’ve been doing that with Fleet Foxes’ newest album (Yes, I still dig them, even though they’ve been cool for “too long” now… and yes, I just found out that they had an EP before the first LP… and no, I’ve never heard it and am okay with that…) - becoming okay with feeling the same feelings it represents (over-extended youth, worthless selfishness, etc.) and enjoying the companionship of relation again. Does the fact that I’m okay with relating perfectly to the title track mean that I’m about to abandon it, or that maybe I’m finally recognizing that it takes a little humility to laugh (or cry), and that the art of enjoying art and being a “well-adjusted” person is to admit wrong, admit you missed the point, say “Fuck All” to everyone else, find definition and happiness in the wake of whatever you saw passing and kinda enjoyed, and finally filter things through your own perception and stop caring so much about what others think?

Not sure - but there has to be some settlement (or at least irony) in allowing yourself to relate/not fight lyrics like these:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

And there can’t be any comfort (or sincerity) in setting up social parameters that make you the reservoir for paradoxes like this:

To be unique, you have to abandon the relations that validate uniqueness.

Not sure if there’s an answer herein (or if there even is an answer), but it’s encouraging, for now, to recognize that rebelling against this weird peace (pre- or post-recognition is moot) would not only be foolish, but also: KINGDOM) begin the spin of another stupid cycle to which I relate, PHYLUM) make me even less individualistic/more impressionable, CLASS) make another cesspool-swimmer waste time correcting me, and ORDER) create another pseudo-paradox in which I’m associating with the recognition of reverse personal rebellion, and still rebelling against it (no external link needed).

So, let’s stay here for now…

And If you still can’t relate to this, thank you!

I’m unique again.

(*Sideways winky-face*)

OR “Continental Breakfast in the Era of Globalization: A look at what to expect when you’re...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 01:31:00 -0400

“Continental Breakfast in the Era of Globalization: A look at what to expect when you’re expecting donuts and get all-you-can-eat eggs/muffins/biscuits/“hand fruit,” and a broad analysis of the age-old question, “If every waffle Rob eats in excess of three makes him both increasingly happy and increasingly sleepy, how many waffles should he eat if he hopes to stay both positive and conscious while driving through bleak stretches of I-90 Wisconsin that remind him of George Washington?”

Disclaimer: If this seems more scattered than usual (which, I know, is hard to imagine), it’s probably because you’re projecting onto this column your own latent dissatisfaction with your sex life/the price of baby spinach/the pace or outcome of ‘the war on terror’/what passes for customer service at Jamba Juice, and not because the author of this column was up until 3 a.m. last night drinking lychee Soju/Saporro/expired box-wine, and freestyling half-naked in a hard-hat for three hours with someone he’d just met while someone else he’d just met filmed the cypher in HD with the plans of posting a condescend edit on Youtube to be broadcast to millions of people he’s never met… (Link to come, link to come. Yes, yes…)

Ahem…

Something To Do With Breakfast:

I said I was going to wake up early and use the fancy-ass “business suite” nook-thing with the dark-stained desk and the dimmer-switch-controlled track lighting, just like the handsome John Edwards-look-alike (the senator/asshole, or really any of the white guys on JE’s Wiki disambiguation page) featured in the inlay of the Hampton Inn brochure: black suit, blue tie, smiling and arranging a PowerPoint for a company whose steadily-increasing profits are made evident by an upward-running red line on a graph with no other data (I mean, why even make a graph?). I was going to be him in the morning, smile and everything (save for a suit, because mine was in a plastic trunk in a car with everything else I owned). I was not going to again be the man I was the previous evening – the one that goes down to the front desk in an inside-out t-shirt (from which he removed the collar with safety scissors) to fax a cancellation request to his health care provider because he could no longer justify (or afford) paying $400-a-month for the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can go see your distracted doctor to assess symptoms you made up in your head… (How about a provision in this health care overhaul-thing that stipulates you have to pay out-of-pocket for treatment and diagnostic work for ailments that turn out to be psychosomatic illnesses you self-diagnosed after watching a “House” marathon… just a thought.) I also wasn’t going to be the same man who said he’d “come back for the confirmation,” just because he knew he’d want another free cookie later in the evening.

I was going to write and use the desk and all that… But did I write at the business nook?

No.

Because the bed was too fucking comfortable, hugging my hips and whispering promises about Trader Joe’s Cookie Butter in my ear and pretending to be a boat on a sea of lava, so “if I get up to use the bathroom without hopping on the other bed and swinging onto the tile with the aid of the luggage cart – well, then I’ll burn my feet, of course.”

And the curtains were too thick, flowing red velvet the color of an old red velvet cupcake, making the room too cave-like, too easy to pretend you’re in the womb (gross!) or maybe just a Muppet in Fraggle Rock (yay!), or at least a Fraggle Rock set designer who fell asleep during filming.

And – can you tell? – my mind was (and is) too-fucked… road weary… cotton-stuffed… [and, yeah, confidence-shot after getting 10-straight rejections from grad. schools and getting the continuing silent treatment from lit. agents, a combo that leaves me writing bullshit exchanges like this:

“One-time, Timothy’s wife, Mary – who he once described as an unsuitable clod with a persuasive rack – phoned him while he was at a party hosted by mutual acquaintances:

Mary: Did you tell Al and Krants I said “Hello?”

Timothy: No, I told them your fanboat capsized while you touring the swamps of New Orleans and alligators ate your stupid body.

Timothy didn’t actually tell Al and Krants that. (In fact, he hadn’t even spoken to Krants yet, as she was drunk and busy writing a song on piano she called “Hairy Black Mamba” which she played by depressing only the black keys – as many as she could at once.)”]

And so, what’s more consoling for a scratched soul/ego eager to treat lava-burnt soles than free breakfast? (And, yes, it really is “free,” because the majority of my cross-country trip expenditures, from gas to accommodations were covered by various mid-western colleges at which my girlfriend/travel companion was contacted to perform sets of her cheerful folk-pop… And that’s also the reason I was in a Hampton Inn and not camping/sleeping in my VW/subjecting myself to one of the $29.99 spots that I normal crash and sleep on top of the bed in a sleeping bag like this – hi Kevin!)

So breakfast.

Let’s talk about it, shall we?

(Skipped in this analysis of free breakfasts were the trio of houses of relatives/friends along the way in NJ and OH and WI – the last of which is apparently the abbreviation for Wisconsin… Trying to keep this concise, so, key memories only: Filipino breakfast cakes while pretending to shop at a fictional store using a plastic shopping cart to stop a child from crying while mulling over some kind of wavy realization that kids’ toys always mimic items associated with parental chores like shopping/cooking/cleaning, and that sucks, because all kids should be freer than that and raised more like my friend Dylan’s son who thinks he’s a pirate/car/rockstar and woke me up recently by screaming “Dad, can we listen to Metalica and eat pancakes?” … French-pressed coffee with a waitress I met the previous night (not what you’re thinking), while she and I (and her boyfriend and my girlfriend) discussed 90’s music and why ThirdEye Blind might be the best band ever (but probably aren’t)… Waffles and juice with a precocious kid who made me quiz him on state capitals and dinosaurs, because there’s a broad misunderstanding of life which makes parents/teachers think kids are going to need to know US Cities and the gestation period of a brachiosaurus, when all they’ll really need to know is how to A) use MS Excel and kiss ass, or B) siphon gas and understand the politics and social hierarchy of boxcarfolk…

So, The Hampton Inn – Appleton, WI…

Motherfuckers set the bar high at the HI with freshly made eggs, a waffle station, legit oatmeal with a nice sampling of accoutrements, sealed yogurt packages and a fresh selection of oranges, apples, bananas (in a container marked “hand fruit,” which – for whatever reason – I find positively fall-down hilarious.) Did I double-down on plates, house two waffles, drink a liter of OJ and dribble a bit more out my nose while giggling at the name “hand fruit?” Yes, yes, yes, yes… Oh, hand fruit.

The Days’ Inn, Eau Claire, WI

Observations: pre-formed egg patties aren’t eggs, freshly-made hashbrowns aren’t the shape of a sponge, granola bars aren’t a good substitute for oatmeal, yogurt makes people uncomfortable when served from one big communal tub… As I explained in an argument w/ my girlfriend about the trouble with having breakfast in a “mid-grade” hotel from feasting the previous night at an “upper-mid-grade” hotel: “It gets the job done, but without the wow-factor… It’s like using a regular restroom hand-blower after becoming accustomed to the Xcelerator or that sweet Dyson joint – You go from being blown away to feeling like your hands are being dried below the gentle nostril-breaths of a sleeping infant.”

Wingate Hotel and Suites, somewhere else in WI (that I don’t feel like looking up on a map, because the western edge of Wisconsin looks like the profile of George Washington and that motherfucker was creepy.)

So – quick aside: We almost had a sweet Fairfield Inn b’fast, but there was some miscommunication w/ the hotel desk-guy and I wasn’t able to cut-through it on account of the fact that my charm was counteracted by a road-ragged appearance and my repeated utterance of the word “bullshit,” which I realized later may have made me look more like a homeless person than a real sincere dude who wasn’t trying to “bullhit anyone.” So, Wingate it was: soggy waffles, so-so scrambled eggs on biscuits and water (“Sorry, sir, the OJ machine is busted up”) were enjoyed while we watched an infomercial for a hair crimping thing, listened to a family talk about buck hunting and wondered what an OJ machine is and how one gets “busted up.” (Also, women still crimp their hair? Where?)

The Rodeside Inn next to a big pile of dirt in a part of Utah that I don’t think Google Maps knows about –

Considering we were the two of six people in the hotel, a count which includes the proprietor and his wife who slept behind the desk, (I mean they had a door - and apparently a kitchen, b/c it smelled like they were cooking a yellow Thai curry), it was a pretty good showing: Orange juice (from an OJ machine – and, shit, I’d love to have a peak in there… Is it like the Frostie machine at Wendy’s, where a dude has to fill it with goo once a day?), nicely-browned waffles, hand fruit, and off-brand cereals like healthy-o’s (Cheerios), chocolate poms (Cocoa Puffs), Tutti-fruities (Fruity Pebbles) and Extra Pluses (Your guess is as good as mine). We finished up our last free meal while listening to a kindly looking old man and his wife prepare notes for their podcast on S&M called “Chain me to the Mast.” Okay, that didn’t happen. They were actually talking about the weather, but it’s fun to pretend that old southerners are talking about S&M and weather-terms are all just euphemisms, where “warmfront” means “ball-gag,” “Eastern seaboard” means “mouth” and “El Nino,” well, that still means “child.” (Oh no! we shoulda called the cops!)

Anyway… I was going to talk more about breakfast, but I’ve kind of grossed myself out. So, back to writing:

“Scotch seared Timothy’s throat as he envisioned a fourth universe in which a man in full Soviet military regalia knocked on the door of his little yellow house and asked to use the bathroom, demanded when denied, marched to the half-bath on the ground floor, took an enormous shit that clogged the toilet and, upon exiting the bathroom, startled Mary, who was, for a reason unknown to the soldier and Timothy, laying out phylo dough on top of the front-loading washing machine in the sunroom abutting the half-bath.

“Sorry for intruding. I just really had to go number two.”

His English was broken.

“Who are you?”

She took a step back.

She was always stepping back.

He offered her hand fruit and she quickly gave-in to his advances, gently folding her small body into his high-pressure zone…”

OR “the answer to the question “And if so, when?” and 25+ other questions...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:29:00 -0500

“the answer to the question “And if so, when?” and 25+ other questions worth posing when you find yourself standing in front of a small German-made hatchback and wondering 1) how many big, rectangular things can be jammed into a container meant to move people and not their As-Seen-on-TV kitchen appliances, 2) how long one can postpone so-called adulthood and all the snazzy doodads that come bundled with it, and 3) how to know if you’re making the right decisions… at the right times… for the right reasons.”

I. THE ORIGIN OF “AND IF SO, WHEN?” – an intro in which “you” means “me,” as “we” decided that going 2^nd-person with this one might makes it feel a little more relatable/less exclusive – like, ending phone calls, with, “I’m gonna let you go,” instead of the more honest, “I’m gonna let me go.”

You reach a certain point during a cross-country drive when I-80 loses the charm it maybe never had and settles into a long snooze across the Midwest that promises nothing but roadkill and infuriating bumper stickers – and certainly delivers.

You get bored.

Get bored of the boredom.

Break-up the boredom with things that aren’t boring, but are fleeting and, when gone, make the boredom seem all the more boring and permanent.

Using only the first four bars of a song to guess whether the hosting radio station is secular or Jesus-tastic proves too easy.

Rating the hairstyles (from 1.0 to 10.0) of other motorists becomes less feasible as you move farther from heavily populated cities (and you even get bored with weighing the possible correlation between the geographical absence of professional sports team and professional hairdressers).

After a while you even exhaust your old standby – the “I’m going on a picnic…”-game – by setting the bar too high in Jersey with “I’m going to hell because…” and twice topping it in Pennsylvania and Ohio, respectively, with the fun-but-limiting “I’m going to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and bringing…” and the decidedly-unbeatable “I’m starting a porn Web site and am considering called it…” (some fetish-porn favorites that briefly bonk boredom on the noggin: for male inserters “Urethra/Merethrea” for female ones “Ovary/Undery,” for swingers: “MEAT the Neighbors,” for fans of good Chinese missionary with bad Chinese translations: “Man with Birch Branch Enters Her Garden,” for rainforest canopy exhibitionists: “Zipline Fuckfest…”)

This is when the last remaining source of entertainment seems to lie in slipping into a new character and encouraging your companion to do the same. If you’re me (which we already established, you are), you interview your accomplice in the style of a nervous 8^th-grade girl, awkwardly asking loud questions with halted delivery and no indication that you/she understood the response to the previous question. If your travel partner is Phil (which, if you’re me – which we already established you are – it almost always is), he pretends to be a middle-aged Native American man who volunteers to explain the history of both central Iowa and the cultural middleground of his people; how, “oh yeah, this all used to be the land of the Winnebago,” (which, yes, is a tribe) and “oh yes, my grandfather used to run with Mother Buffalo before brother Walmart moved in and starting selling Brother Slim Jims for $0.94” (which, yes, is insensitive and inappropriate, but admissible when gravy has been a major component of his (Phil’s) last six meals (breakfast/lunch/dinner X2) and he’s not quite thinking clearly (or thinking that you – or I – will ever write a column about his bad impersonations and how he still calls Native Americans “Indians”…)

There emerges something indescribably hilarious around the 15-minutes mark of the fake interview, when the 8^th-grade girl asks:

“How do you, a native man in the Americas, think you would be doing if your grandfather’s home-place wasn’t now a KFC restaurant that also sells the Pizza Hut products… and, if so, when?

And so, “And if so, when?” becomes that thing that gets you through the next 300-ish miles (until it fades also and you latch-on to the belief that you and he (Me and Phil) can do decent impressions of David Letterman and Paul Shaffer, respectively, and start riffing on how kids are always carrying backpacks and “what’d’ya think’s in ‘em, Paul?”)

That’s a long-intro to explain the origin of “And if so, when?” so, I’ll keep brief the part about how it never really left my mind, but at some point it just changed context, stopped being hilarious and started reminding me that I need to stop stammering and falling into-and-out-of convenient characters, need to start figuring some shit out before I get run over by the proverbial WalMart herd and find myself forced to subsist on breakfast/lunch/dinners X365 of actual Slim Jims…

II. THE QUESTION THAT PROMPTED US TO PACK OUR CAR, become a plural entity and start hashing through all the other questions that resulted from doing just that (packing/pluralizing)…

It’s been almost a year since I (we) headed out to New Mexico to live in an adobe hut, eat beans, drink hard water from a blue plastic bucket and write our latest novel. In the months since we’ve been back East, we’ve been applying to MFA programs, pitching the new manuscript, freelancing and wringing our hands over the silence of agents/the fact that out girlfriend is 3,000 miles away/the recent recognition that the only thing that frightens us more than failing to get into a grad program is succeeding in getting into a grad and, fuck, having to succeed.

And hanging like a flying squirrel over all of that shit is “and if so, when?”

We don’t settle instantly on an answer, but a question (just like we did when the suffix eventually caboosed “Are you going to quit your suffocating newspaper job and write for yourself…?” or “Are you going to stop throwing all your recyclables in the regular garbage or at least stop pretending you believe that someone actually sorts it at the dump…?”

We tell ourselves that things will pick up any day now.

We acknowledge that “doing our part” might not save the whole planet, but might do a little something; might even preserve a section of it just for us – a gift from what’s-his-name? That guy that everyone on I-80 sings of/for with such purity and intention.

We pack our car and, if you’re still me (which I think you are, but am less certain), you and I ask yourself the following questions before we leave, punctuate:

Can you start a new life with all your old shit in tow?

Should you pack an exercise ball in lieu of a chair (and, if so, should you really expect it shape your core while you browsed craigslist for free bikes and copywriting gigs)?

Is it true that relationships change when you’re living with someone for the first time?

Will your girlfriend still want to be your girlfriend after she spends 24-hours/day with a boyfriend whom she quickly learns is not nearly as interesting/funny as he is hyper/insecure?

Can you “network” in LA without feeling like a complete douche?

How hard is it to get into an environmental science program with no real experience/references?

How hard is it to get a security deposit back from a landlord that doesn’t like you and always carries a pipewrench?

Is it possible to focus when the four fun people you live with are not, are having the young week’s second “Patron Night” and watching “Birdemic?”

Was the height of an economic downturn the best time to quit your unrewarding job or the worst?

Does suffering really help art?

How many fishtanks must a restaurant maintain for you to be willing to overlook sub-par food?

Is – or was – “Mozart died poor,” or “Kerouac lived with his mom,” ever a good response to people who passive-aggressively judge your commitment to a craft that’s yet to commit itself to you?

Would a jury of your peers really convict you for punching a woman who, upon learning that you didn’t have a SmartPhone, said “Oh poor thing. Do you really expect to make it in LA?”

If, when packing your car with all the nonessential shit you’ve acquired in recent years – the chef’s coat, the poncho, the chef’s poncho – you recognize that less really is more, does that mean you should apply that lesson to all facets of your life and stop trying to stuff hatchbacks like pick-ups, and sentences (like this) like paragraphs?

At what point is it healthy to realize that “being meta” is a crutch (and poor grammar)?

Can we stop pretending that a country in which a family of four pays more than $1,200/month for health insurance is “the greatest country on earth?”

Is trying your hand at improv the last obstacle between you and the cliché version of “you” your friends already kinda think you’ve become?

Is a lack of financial security the biggest obstacle to a happy marriage?

When your battery is rated for five years, do you think that’s more or less binding than, say, Greek yogurt’s expiration date?

What’s exactly is specific gravity and should I bother using it as a metaphor?

Has anyone ever died from wanderlust, and if so, was it because he or she indulged it or ignored it?

Are you really saving money by shopping at Costco?

Will you ever be happy, or make someone else happy?

And can two people who aren’t entirely happy really make one another happy?

Will you ever feel settled/comfortable/content enough to stop questioning everything?

And if so, when?

OR “why I loved my grandmother, but hated her wake – and reserve a weird hope (a death...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:27:00 -0500

“why I loved my grandmother, but hated her wake – and reserve a weird hope (a death wish?) that when I die, I’m outlived by at least one friend who will have the balls to notify everyone of my demise by altering the voicemail prompt on my phone to say, “If you want to pay your last respects to Rob, please come to the White Sands dunes of New Mexico where I plan to burn his skinny, pale carcass, drink Hendrick’s gin and read some of the more difficult passages from ‘Infinite Jest. Rain or Shine. BYOB. RSVP by the evening of…’ and on and on like that.”

I almost wrote this column about the lack of transparency/sincerity in the arts (after talking to my girlfriend about mythical Asian creatures that steal your slippers/ear buds/toe-socks, then reading this essay by Lorca shortly after finishing a freelance job for which I had to craft answers for magazine Q&A for a very gifted/successful/friendly photographer who felt pressured to sound “smarter” and “more conceptual” to impress a bunch of art-world bozos… “where’s the duende?” right? I’m asking both of us.) or about the inefficiency of the internet to help one definitively self-diagnose abdominal pain (after a week of wondering if the dull ache in my right side was the byproduct of a recent 5k or the night of pounding beer, beer, beer that followed at Spitzer’s, Vol de Nuit, Rabbit Club, etc.)…

But how much can you really write about the unfortunate necessity of appealing to superficial would-be patrons/curators? Or of the effects of fat deposits on the livers of surprisingly fast short-distance runners? Or the vexing reality that, no matter what symptom you type into WebMD, fucking meningitis is always near the top of the potential causes? …And wouldn’t laying out some oblique wishes for my funeral be more important if I am, in fact, killed by meningitis/hepatitis/ swallowing a blue Lego, than some swan-song screed (that’s been written to death by people much smarter than myself) about how “juxtaposition” is just a douchey way of saying that when something is next to something else it changes the value of each?

I think so too…

So… my grandma died. It was no surprise – she’d been zonked for weeks after a pair of pretty shitty strokes. She was 87 – almost 88 – but surprisingly lucid and able to maintain a sharp wit that didn’t make her funny so much as it made her feisty and very likeable. (If she didn’t like someone – which she often didn’t – she wouldn’t wait until everyone got in the car to leave and say, “someone should have really put that guy in his place,” like I always do. She’d hold up her finger until he stopped blathering on about the Federal Reserve and cured meats and say, “you know, I like salami and applaud the regulatory achievements of elastic currency policies – and I think you’re really a jerk.”) She also had a bonkers memory and always made it a point to remember everyone’s birthday, anniversary or, in my case, favorite Lego flavor.

And for a million other reasons, I’m really gonna miss her. But as the subhead implies – I really hated her wake/funeral. And I shouldn’t even really use that pronoun to make it exclusive, because I hate all wakes/funerals. And (Start a third consecutive sentence with “and?” Don’t mind if I do!) not because of the represented loss or the big impermanence reminders or because I have to wear too-small suit pants and have the same conversations with everyone in my family; confess that I don’t know what I’m doing with my life and try to explain to a Mary Higgins Clark-crowd the plot of my new manuscript that relies heavily on postmodern devices and the dialogue of a talking umbrella.

“What’s the detective’s name?”

“There is no detective.”

(pause)

“You hit any traffic on the way here?”

Yes, that’s part of it, but no…

What really has my boxer-briefs in a twist is more the general approach to death/dying/conversation at those things – the drugging and painting of the deceased to retain some (creepy) semblance of life. The formality of the dress, the pomp of the ceremony, the tone of conversations over casino rugs and chordal music in funeral homes that look like they were built by architectural firms that usually designed those stand-alone Mom-and-Pop donut shops that you see all over So-Cal and make you ask “did that covered carpark for the hearse use to be a drive-thru window?” and “why do we just have wack Dunkin Donuts on the east coast?” Add on the smell of flowers. Cold-handed handshakes. Accordion partitions you feel conflicted about utilizing, because “will more space make the gathering look bigger or smaller?” Then there’s the way some Catholics I know make such a thorough and awkward juggling act out of the celebrating/mourning/doubting of life/death/“eternal life” that the word “respectively” quickly goes M.I.A. and any of those verbs on any given day can match up with any of those concepts without any real difficulty. It’s like some kind of holy slot machine effect absent of confidence that only I can see – and it scares the shit out of me. What if it jams before the last lemon? Who wins? The payout? Why do I want donuts all of a sudden?

Is it just because I don’t really believe in God/an afterlife (or the idea that it should cost $6,000+ to die) that this all disgust me?

Hmmm…

On a recent road trip, my friend Phil and I had a long rambling conversation about the way we (21^st-century Americans? Catholics? Everyone ever maybe…) treat death in life, that is, the way we talk about (or don’t, as it were) the inevitability that we’re gonna die. And I know that’s a separate rant, as this is “Rob Vs. Funerals” and not “Rob Vs. What Causes Funerals,” but there’s a root there that shouldn’t be overlooked, lest it be tripped over – a repressed tickle that might make you ask “what’s so taboo about death” and “would we be able to come to terms with passings a little less artificially if, perhaps, we hadn’t been brought up believing that its acceptance as an natural inevitability was morbid, and morbidity was bad?” (That conversation, with Phil, held a similar point about human sexuality, but that’s another entry too…)

And what really sucks – and maybe it’s my fault – is that this is what I think about during funerals… I don’t honor or mourn or remember. I sit and stare in corners and eat Lifesavers and think about how fucked the common ideas of death seem, how they breed situations like these, how I’d be a lot more comfortable if everyone stopped loosely hugging me and asking me about my car and just let me read them portions of “Leaves of Grass,” how I don’t want this when I die.

And maybe – as Phil would say – “some people do.”

And “you have to respect that.”

And “it’s not always about you, dude.”

And, “let’s stop at McDonalds”

And that’s usually the point in the conversation (“you know, shoe on the other foot, man…”) when I get silent, turn up the radio, remember that it’s kinda fun to be a vegetarian at McDonalds, eat my parfait and my two apple pies and my medium fries, and ignore Phil/think about myself, snap-back to reality after a twenty minutes and have that same conversation about how you can drive for long stretches without paying attention to the road and only remember you’ve been driving after the fact, as you pull into Wall Drug, get jazzed about 5-cent coffee and forget about death/sex/fast food for a second.

But, not yet…

Because I’m not done talking about me; what I want out of a funeral and how, I think, it informs what I want out of the life its supposed to celebrate.

“It’s not really for you, though. It’s more for them.”

“Shut up and eat your 50 chicken nuggets, Phil.”

“It’s a 20-piece. The 50 is only available in certain parts of the country, usually around the Super Bowl.”

“Great… Either way. Let me think what I’m gonna think…”

And what is that?

It’s hypothetical, but goes something like this:

Fuck the flowers, fuck the casket, fuck the two days of pretending to mourn me while passing the so-slow time talking about the new Droid, Mitt Romney, MPG-ratings and what a bitch the traffic on the bridge is (whatever bridge it is). Fuck the soft-spoken white-hair man who has to try to wipe the smirk off my dead face and recreate my five-o’clock shadow with some super-duper fine-point Sharpie made specifically for morticians (and probably people who draw on ping-pong balls for reasons I’d prefer not to know).

Fuck that.

Burn me in the desert.

Gather around with your favorite alcohol. (No hard drugs. I don’t want to get blamed for your jail time. Seriously, we’re burning a fucking body. You didn’t think the cops were gonna break it up, poke around, search your sock?).

Bring a dog if you’ve got one.

A crossbow if you can get one.

50 chicken nuggets if it’s around the Super Bowl.

Laugh amongst yourselves about how much money I owe each of you; about the time I vomited during the moment of silence at a Sept. 11^th memorial and, later, had to leave my underpants balled up in the corner of a bathroom; or the time I shit on the hood of a car after making a friend pick-up a $250 tab on Paddy’s Day; the time I passed out on the lawn of a funeral home/in your baby’s playpen/ on your brother’s roof/in a booth at the San Gennaro feast…(You can cry too. I’m not against crying – just the context, the venue, the dry-cleaning costs associated.)

Just no nonsense about “dust to dust.”

No kneeling and praying.

No throwing a stupid flower.

Laugh and yawp and giggle ‘til you heave… toss a Frisbee… order a pizza… throw blue Legos into the blond flames above the blindingly white sands and say, “I think he woulda liked the juxtaposition.”

Then – once I’m good and cooked – feel free to call me a jerk. Or, you know, wait until you get in the car.

“What the fuck was that? Someone should have really put that guy in his place.”

OR: {“I don’t remember why Sophia (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) begin to...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 10:40:00 -0500

OR:

{“I don’t remember why Sophia (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) begin to question their relationship, why they think adopting a sick cat will help, or why I thought it would be a good idea to drink high-gravity beer from 2-10 p.m. and pay $13 to see “The Future” at IFC.”}

What I remember (presented as a background myself - and a first review - of my relauched column “Rob Versus ______,” which my friend Kevin commissioned for his now-defunct beer blog b/c I used to work for a newspaper and he thought that would lend an air of credibility to the site - a misjudgment evident in the fact that the column has been moved here and is no longer there, as there is no longer a “there,” for reasons I don’t really know, but assume/hope extend beyond my lack of credibility ):

I remember ditching everyone after the 6^th or 7^th bar and a couple slices at Joe’s. (Note: This isn’t the type of blog/column where I dish on the places I eat/drink and what I drank/ate at them and use sideways-winky faces at the end of sentences into which I was able to sneak a food pun ;). I promise not to rant on beers or food, or throw around gratuitous links to the places I ate or drank them, or gush on about attractive beer-nerd bartender who served them to me and how she favored low-cut shirts, lambics and the Philadelphia Eagles unless its absolutely necessary to the post. I would never do that…) Right. So, at some point, I broke away from the group after pizza and decided it’d be a good idea to go back and get more pizza: I ordered, couldn’t pay, left in an angry huff, realized I still wanted pizza, went back in a humbled huff after taking out $140 from one of those dodgy on-the-street ATMs that look like grey plastic urinals and smell like regular urinals and take forever to spit out the money b/c maybe they’re copying your account information, had another slice of pizza (fresh mozz.), overheard the people standing at the next elevated table-thing talking about “The Interrupters” and how it was playing at IFC, tried to hump my way into the conversation, got weird looks from people with messy hair and perfectly manicured eyebrows, left in a mini-huff missing New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest – or PacNoWe as I call it – where the pizza is so-so but the people are so much fucking friendlier than out here, tried to buy a ticket for a 10:15 p.m. showing, learned it was sold-out, almost left in another huff but was tired of huffing and walking and still far too drunk to drive back “Upstate” (where I’ve been staying after giving up my apt. to wander around like a dope in the South&North-West), bought a ticket for a 10:45 p.m. of “The Future,” tried to go into the theatre, was told to come back in 25 minutes, got a diet peach Snapple (which I don’t really like, but for which I retain a nostalgic attachment relating to an ex-girlfriend whom I didn’t like either but occasionally miss, I think, for no other reason than b/c she always had Snapple in her fridge) and spent the following 20 minutes standing outside of the theatre and texting my current-girlfriend to share the thread of non-Snapple-related nostalgia-borne sadness that’s kept creeping up on me in the Village ever since she graduated from NYU and moved to L.A. to follow her dreams of Four-Squaring every so-Cal Korean BBQ restaurant (and making it big in the music business).

Stuff about the actual movie (and me):

So, The Future.

Like I said, I don’t really remember the beginning. I do recall previews for “Black Power Mixtape” and “Shut Up Little Man” [both of which look pretty good and I hope to catch next time I, A) find myself too drunk to drive and walking around downtown with $130 in cash or, B) Google “watch movies online” or “free and illegal movies for people who don’t have shame or a job” and forget, after all that typing, what I originally intended to watch) and didn’t really perk back up, I didn’t, until around the time the aforementioned protagonists get the cat, Paw-Paw, and he/she/it starts serving as the movie’s occasionally-cute/occasionally annoying occasional narrator.

If you’ve seen “You, Me and Everyone We Know,” (which I actually liked quite a bit, in case you were wondering) you can prob. understand why one might mentally glaze over parts of any July feature, new or old, drunk or sober… Like its predecessor, “The Future” is at times quirky and adorable and perfectly awkward and filled-to-its-erect-nips w/ a conflicting pseudo-hipster-ish post-whatever relatability and a sincere real-world (contra-“Real World”) in-the-moment air of memorability which, like this sentence, seems apt and novel at first punch, but in hindsight makes you shake your head and ask, “what the dick does that even mean?” before forgetting most of it and updating your Facebook status to say you just did something forgetable.

The characters in “The Future” are unique (though there are less of them than in YM&EWK and the ones who aren’t July aren’t nearly as good), the dialogue isn’t trite plot-moving nonsense (but, again, there’s less of it and the gaps can kinda drag, especially if you’re drunk) and the film occasionally holds its weird weight in a winning balance by beautifully expressing the inexpressibles of relationships, be it re: career ambition, commitment issues or, um, things to do with sick cats (read: thin child-metaphors)… [Also, I want to use the phrase “issues in childless relationships between childish 30-somethings,” but couldn’t squeeze it into the previous sentence.] …but the movie fails more often by trying to be too vague, too meek and aloof in ways that my friend Jon might cite when ranting about how “awkward silence can be a subtle device - or it can just be awkward silence” – and (still on the failures-clause), it trips over its own silent/awkward attempts at stretching one prevalent battle of weirdo external vs. weirdo internal (LOVE vs. “who the fuck am I?” and all that) into a long-form interpretive character study in which the characters are all too aware of the folks with clipboards in the observation loft to act like real fucking people. (Remember in “Away We Go,” when the guy-from-The-Office’s character asks that-lady-from-SNL’s character, “Are we fuck-ups?” I like that line/moment, but despite its humor and sadness and apt hyper-self-awareness, I don’t really want to see it pulled like too-thin taffy into a 91-minute film that only mirrors a real relationship accidentally in that it somehow simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough.)

You want to feel for Sophia and Jason, but it’s like they’re not even trying (and maybe you could say the same for July as a director – and of course me as an audience, but fuck you.) Maybe they’d/we’d get somewhere if we could all just go out to drinks at a coffee shop that also serves alcohol (Think! Coffee?) and buzz on shots of espresso and glasses of wine until we let go of the cutesy vulnerable act and just say what’s weighing on the parts of our minds that script these little scenes of ours.

To figure Sophia out, Jason shouldn’t have to stop time/talk to the moon/walk around all glum and goofy and reactionary. And Sophia shouldn’t have to fuck a sign-maker or dance around trapped in a magically over-sized shirt. (“And the entirely unprecedented sentence award goes to…”) July, if she actually wants to say something, shouldn’t have to play it so damn safe by playing it so damn indie… (and, I know, I shouldn’t have to drink my ass off to enjoy a night in the city or a movie, but this isn’t about me… well, we’re still pretending it’s not anyway) This is about us as art and audience – and can’t we just set up the damn camera up and talk to each other anymore? – not adopt cats, not wink and dance our way around the knots of self-strung alienation, not leave the theatre w/ nothing to relate to but characters who can’t relate to anything/one?

Or, pretending aside, maybe this is about me – who I am and what’s in my bloodstream and what I want in a beer, a girlfriend, a diet beverage, a movie from a director that I thought I liked… and that brings us back to the whole credibility thing. What should be believed/believable and whose responsibility is it to lug the burden of belief/believing? Hmmm… “One more round, barkeep!” Yeah, not sure… so let’s just cut our loses and close here with a last thought on the movie before this becomes all about me/my lack of confidence/a too-normal childhood and devolves into some grand-scale criticism of this criticism - or maybe Belgian beer - and ends with me questioning the few remaining things in which I have complete confidence (literature, my girlfriends and dogs) and trying to compute margins of error in instinct which will inevitably open that meta rabbithole that pops up every election season and makes me consider the necessity of margins of error for margins of error…

So, yes, a last thought of the movie. (Consider our losses cut.):

Yeah, I was drunk (and hoping to see a powerful doc. about gang violence – not something that loaded up on hidden-heart and winks in place of punch) – and I was rather disappointed by the pieces of the movie I remember, because, really, if I wanted to volley awkward palaver and watch people dance in some co-veiled denial of their unsatisfactory footings in an increasingly pointless/increasingly mid-life existence, I wouldn’t have ditched my friends in the first place.

I’d reconsider, sit, take off the jacket I just put on, reach under the bartop hoping it had one of those subterranean double-hook-things on which I could hang it and forget it when I stumbled onto West 4th at 3:45 a.m. with my fly unzipped and card still open at the bar.

One more beer.

One more slice of pizza.

“I’m gonna pretend to go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror… Anyone want to adopt a cat?”