It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.
I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.
Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.
The thing about pleated pants is that they are disastrously unattractive. I don’t know what it is about certain people that makes them think that this phenomenon does not apply to them — a lack of style? a failed understanding of the very concept of aesthetic beauty? — but they exist.
Awake, late, hot, naked, reading a couple hundred pages of someone else’s dream and wondering how I got here, but we both know that’s exactly the kind of half-secret half-mystery that I’m never going to be able to answer.
I took the day off from writing at RoastBean because I spent the whole morning writing checks to pay my company’s bills and my hand cramped up. I wasn’t using my pen, and I’m not all that used to writing by hand anyway, so doing it for 2 1/2 hours with minimal break was more than my pathetic extremity could take.
I also reached out to a friend today for some help. You would think (if you know me at all) that I would have a well and truly deep grasp of the fear of failure. Which is true, by the way. The problem is that I don’t know how to write about it in an interesting way for more than a couple sentences at a time.
Turns out that consistently joking about how much I suck at life does not make for a compelling narrative. I know, I know, I was surprised, too. But there’s also the distinct possibility that I’ve never composed a compelling narrative in any case. So, you know, have that argument with yourself.
If anyone has advice, please, by all means, let me know.
I have been trying to be a patron of the new coffee shop on the corner of the block near my job. The coffee is good, the prices are comparable to Starbucks, and they had the stones to open up literally across the street from a Starbucks in the middle of a recession.
I have started moving forward on a project that I first came up with two years ago. What do you get, I wonder, when you combine mixtapes and short stories, matching a mix to each story and loading yourself down with a host of rules and strictures to make everything go together? I don’t fucking know, and neither do you, but if we’re all lucky, we’re going to find out.
When I was in middle school (which, for me, ran from sixth to eighth grade), every sixth grader was required to take an “exploratory” class as an elective. Which, you know, required elective. Very funny, right?
Anyway: this exploratory class covered the four main classes that could be taken as electives as a seventh- and eighth-grader. You had one quarter each in basic (not BASIC) computer programming, tech ed (shop class), art, and home ec. As far as such things go, this was a pretty effective way of exposing kids to the choices available to them.
As everyone knows, we are all unique. There is evidently something in everyone’s personality that makes them different and worth knowing.
Leaving aside the fact that I have never seen in most people anything that makes them worth knowing, I have to question whether this alleged “uniqueness” in fact exists.
I (on the good days) consider myself a fairly gifted person. I like to think I can write well, that I’m well-spoken, maybe funny, attractive, have opinions worth sharing, that I’m smarter than the average bear (and for that matter, the average human), and super fucking humble.
So what?
So, I’m reading the accompanying article on Death Cab for Cutie’s session for Daytrotter when when I get bludgeoned by this question: “If this isn’t love this time, then what is it now?”