CURRENTLY ENGINEERING A JAILBREAK

The Adventures of the Batwoman, pg. 131

2012-01-18T11:56:00.000-02:00

I have been re-rewriting my 132-page "The Adventures of the Batwoman" comic script these past few months, just for kicks.

It was a very crude script from 2005 that I'd left pretty much unfinished until now.

This is the next-to-last page (pg. 131), which I've just finished and that I'm particularly proud of:

----------------

PAGE 131.

Panel 1.

Sunset: At the courtyard outside Eclipso’s fortress, Batman and the Batwoman talk, as in the background the remaining superheroes wrap up their business for the day. Batwoman looks unsettled, uneasy, not sure what to expect from the grim, tight-lipped Batman.

BATMAN: I was talking to the elder Green Lantern and… the Justice Society has recently begun their Super-Squad training program…

BATMAN: It’s the same program they have Power Girl and Sylvester Permberton in…

CAPTION: --says the Batman brooding under the last rays of the sun, a psychopomp of sorts, sentenced to guard the borders of the night like a herald of things to come--

BATMAN: Lantern wants you in, Kathy.

CAPTION: --a Faustian bargain if any, thinks Kathy Kane AKA the Batwoman, expecting a barter or trade-off that never comes.

Panel 2.

The Batwoman takes off her mask, holds it in her hand and stares at the Batman right in the eye. She’s holding back her tears.

BATWOMAN: I thought you didn’t approve of me.

BATWOMAN: I mean for chrissakes, isn’t my costume too bright? Or don’t I punch too lightly? Do I keep myself in your top-notch übermensch physical condition?

BATWOMAN: Don’t I smile all too often?

CAPTION: She puts on her best brave face and stares Batman in the eye: if there’s any emotion on his, the mirrored eyepieces from his cowl do not let it show.

Panel 3.

A half-smiling Batman (!) puts his hand on her shoulder, in an older brother kind of way. Batwoman smiles nervously.

BATMAN: Kathy. Batwoman. I recommended you myself.

BATWOMAN: Well, I… Well to be quite frank with you, I was positive you were going to throttle me for that parachute stunt, and now you come from out of the blue and offer me club membership?

BATMAN: I’ll throttle you during debriefing. Then it’s on to the JSA with you.

CAPTION: But there is a catch to this game, of course: That curve ball you never see coming, that car coming up your blind side.

Panel 4.

Continuing: Holding back her tears, she stares deeply into Batman’s eyes. This is a very touching, tender moment for Kathy.

BATWOMAN: Batman, I…

CAPTION: That last syllable lingers in the air for the months to come.

Panel 5.

Cut to: A flashback panel of the Batwoman, in a tattered uniform, hanging from a rope as if it were a trapeze, in the rocky runnels of the League of Assassins’ headquarters in Tibet (from #04).

CAPTION: The bat has completed its cycle. A circle has been closed and a purpose in life fulfilled.

CAPTION: And now it’s time to fly home.

Panel 6.

Cut to: Kathy Kane, dressed in a circus outfit, hangs from a trapeze under the big top, above applauses from the crowded bleachers below. Kathy in this shot is positioned exactly like in the previous panel, so as draw a parallel between both.

CAPTION: She will follow her heart.

CAPTION: She will go back to the circus.

CAPTION: She will know peace and joy.

Panel 7.

Cut to: Kathy Kane lies dead in the darkness on the sawdust of an empty circus tent. There’s blood coming from her side, and also a dagger smeared in blood (the discarded murder weapon).

CAPTION: She will die within the year, murdered, caught in the crossfire of a bloody game of vengeance between Ra’s Al Ghul and the Sensei for control of the League of Assassins.

Galactus beckons, tomorrow beckons...

2011-12-30T19:24:00.003-02:00

Say, there's 2012 up ahead. Isn't the world supposed to end or something?

Typical: I finally get a girlfriend, the world ends.

Tamagotchi

2011-11-24T10:12:00.001-02:00

I have never really told anyone about this, but I've always wanted a Tamagotchi...

Waiting for the rain

2011-11-23T09:57:00.001-02:00

The sky is overcast up there far in the distance past the Interstate where you can’t touch the clouds, always out of reach, thick damp gray like cotton candy soaked in whitewash hovering above green hills on the horizon line like a bad omen open for divination, about to unload, discharge, pour down its truths elsewhere.

It’s closer to sunny here though, with large empty patches overhead, torn free from thinning mist-like cloud banks scattered all over by the wind. Those empty patches project intermittent circles of light down on the ground, over the tall buildings, wading erratically along jammed thoroughfares. Moving shadows are cast without rhyme or reason and go mostly unnoticed by the thronging crowds. Some of them brought along their umbrellas, just in case, when they left home for work.

There’s an overall melancholy in the air today, not really a sorrowful mood but instead a general slowness to everything, for action, attitude, buffering the self against volition or initiative: There should be lightning soon over there and with it the smell of ozone, the smell of wet, and the growing pervasive feeling one should have stayed home reading a book instead. But then, almost no one reads books anymore, so it’s a feeling devoid of purpose.

I remember one particular rainy afternoon at my grandmother’s house many years ago, going over the old books in the cabinet above her ancient armoire and coming up with, among several others, a copy of Through the Looking Glass that belonged either to my mother or to her siblings, complete with the ghostly Tenniel illustrations. I remember sitting down on the white plush couch with my back to the open window and the dark gray sky above, and devouring that book with a glass of chocolate milk, maybe cookies or freshly-baked cake as well.

I’m not the one to say that back then was necessarily better in any absolute sense, it did have its highs and lows just as everything else does except on rainy days candyglazing the past seems so much more tempting, easier to do and to come by, either by fantasy or force.

My ode to yesteryear

2011-11-17T12:24:00.001-02:00

Thursday, November 17, 2011.
9:15am EST. Right now on my MSN Messenger contact list:

Ten persons online, seven of whom are girls: Five of whom I've slept with and the other two I swear on a stack of bibles I really, really, really tried to take home on any given Friday or Saturday night but they were just too mean to begin with.

Ahhh for the days of yore, right?

Hehh. I can't go home again but heck if I can't brag a little.

Again with the Bride of Frankenstein

2011-11-16T09:34:00.000-02:00

Out of all the Universal monsters I'd say Dr. Frankenstein's Monster was always my least-favorite. There's just something about the big, slow, dim-witted hulking strogman motiff that has simply never appealed to me.

But then-- and this has happened many times over in the last what, three years or so-- you sit down to watch either of James Whale's Frankensteins, the first one or the Bride sequel, and man there's Karloff stumbling, wobbling, the big lummox, under all that makeup you'd swear it was a sickly green past the b&w... you stand corrected.

I mean sure, Bela Lugosi kicks major ass as Dracula-- that ethereal European accent from god-knows-where is just to die for, and just the way he walks about the set with that cape-- not even Batman does that to a cape. But then you're watching the Bride of Frankestein and the Bride hisses at the Monster, casts him aside, and he turns to Pretorius and says, We belong dead!--- Wanna see Bela Lugosi do it. No Dracula, no Wolfman, no Mummy, no Invisible Man, no Phantom of the Opera, no Creature of the Black Lagoon (a runner-up favorite, by the way, and overly under-rated).

The Bride of Frankenstein just has got to be one of my favorite movies ever: From that madcap first scene with Lord Byron you surely don't see coming to Elsa Lanchester's being onscreen as the Bride for what? Five minutes tops? But that makes an impression to last an eternity With all her goddamned chilling hissing-- Terrific movie, terrific movie.

The 11/11/11 post

2011-11-11T14:16:00.001-02:00

Just for the hell of it, right? Just to make sure we got this down to paper.

I was eight on 8/8/88 + it rained only on one-half of this playground in the building I lived with my parents. That was pretty cool, because I’d often wondered until then whatever happened at the tail-end of raining, where wet stopped to give way to dry, the border, the transitional medium.

I was 19 on 9/9/99 and Jimmy and I were already in College and for some reason we were not working that day, or maybe we both were in-between jobs. So we went out to the comics shop and I bought a DC Comics compilation of sci-fi stories from the 1940s to the 1980s. There was one story in that collection that would eventually sort-of, kinda inspire me on the tattoo I’d get years, years later.

Then if you look up the post on this blog for 10/10/10 you’ll read of the e-mail I’d sent Cybill, strictly a friend then, and one in a rather cumbersome position at that (again, then), to thank for her company on the Bon Jovi concert we’d gone to together a few days earliers. Which sort of speaks volumes, I guess, on asserting that these days are fast indeed.

I’m 31 on 11/11/11 and I’m working from home. No, scratch that. I’m at home pretending I’m working but in fact I’m not doing much of anything simply because I’m way disappointed and upset with my dead-end job. Also because I’m kind of queasy today. Too many trips to the boy’s room this morning. It’s a good thing I stayed at home. From instant messaging Cybill’s asking if I’m feeling better. Yep, I type back. Then I ask her is she’s coming over tonight and she says of course she is.

‘A’ is for Abraxas, ‘B’ is for bullshit

2011-11-10T08:49:00.002-02:00

Bryce had been telling us over sushi he’d do it with poultry his magic I mean and in the back of my head I kept zoning out, much to Cybill’s chagrin, because all I could think of was that zombie movie with Bill Pullman even though there’s like an ocean in-between the two crafts and I was probably just taking the easier way and allowing in stereotypes anyhow, preconceptions and prejudices. But suppose I go Buddhist, but to follow a fat deity? And I’m certainly not going Catholic only to molest little kids.
But see, there’s Bryce droning on and on of his craft and strange madcap rituals with chicken and all of a sudden my Bill Pullman figment phases out to this funny syndicated newspaper strip I must’ve read back in the mid-1990s I think it was Dilbert nononono, not that, it was from a Robotman strip, you know years before they made away with the Robotman and the strip was renamed Monty? And on that specific strip, memory hazes a bit right now sorry if I veer off somewhat from its actual content, but the Robotman was kind of chastising Monty on all the McNuggets he would eat and that some day the spirits of all the chicken slain would come back to haunt him? The sheer definition of Karma.
That’s the joke I was to tell Bryce but Cybill would probably throttle me because she’s sort of partial to Bryce after he gave her his old iPad before she went on PTO to South Africa so she could post the usual stuff on Facebook.

But point is Bryce does it with poultry and seashells, Jimmy does it by listening to old black men, long since departed, Cybill herself has a bracelet with Nazar charms dangling from it, allegedly to fend off the evil-eye, and her mother-in-law gave me this little medal of some Saint so I could keep it in my wallet because it’s supposed to be blessed or something and I’ve since had it misplaced, naturally unintentionally but that’s Magic for you.

vIvE lA rEsIsTaNcE! (2011 remix)

2011-10-24T08:45:00.003-02:00

If you ask me what’s changed or even take a step back, coyly so as to inquire of what would it take for either the or a change to take place I’d do by best Bogart flicking the tail-end of a cigarette butt to some dark, damp gutter somewhere and tell ya nawww, changes nothing kid. Because it doesn’t, really, and it shouldn’t: We fight on, this side of the Earth still preaching out with your immaturity card but that’s not it, that’s just fighting dirty from their side, maybe your side too swear I’m not judging you but I won’t be the one to pull hair, just stick to those same old tactics proven wrong and ineffectual, perennially hoping, going for that mythical, self-styled proverbial dent in the mundane that I’m pretty sure that’s never to come but that’s not the point—

—and from the bible: When god was showing from the top of a mountain, I think it was either to Moses or Abraham or to any number of those guys, really, the Promised Land there below but there was this catch see, guy would only see it but never make to it and I don’t really remember the point inferred, because there’s always supposed to be a point in there somewhere.
But then in the back of my head, hah, I kind of imagine that same scene but now god’s showing it to the stage persona of Joe Strummer and you know Joe right? whasshesayin’? Joe’s telling god he’s not working for the clampdown.

Because me, really, when I look down there it’s often from behind plate-glass down to terrible vistas spreading out past the horizon bereft of free will dystopian in all their glory quasi-lovecraftian in nihilism and jumbled up situations twisted motivations and— oh right, time for another good old one from the bible even though you’ll probably flinch by the time we’re through with this but if you do, girl, it’s because you did not get the metaphor right. But there’s jesus christ, Boy-Wonder, there atop yet another mountain— if that’s a leitmotif like the Batman song in the cartoon, only geographical, I’m missing it too— and he’s talking to someone. Noooo you’ll never guess to whom. And look-ey my twentyfirstcentury brethren! Lo! I give you the Steve Jobs. The tempter. Tempting boy-jesus with an iPad. But do you think kid’s happy with running Windows? Oh he’s not. I can’t hear either of them from down here but I’m pretty sure jesus is complaining about his Internet Explorer freezing when he opens multiple tabs or something.

(but why is the son of god on windows in the first place, you’re asking. But nonononono that’s not the point.)

(I’ll tell you what the point is all about)

(shhh I think someone’s been browsing for porn when out alone fasting in the desert)

(but you can’t really jerk off when you’re hungry, can you?)

—Which brings me to the point in all this, from where the world turns: See, remember 1984? Not necessarily the book, there’s also the movie with the wicked Eurythmics soundtrack, that’ll do as well: Yeah, so. Remember when Winston kept getting fewer chocolate rations all the time?
Now that’s too mean even for a dystopic future: I won’t take my chocolate bar being taken away from me by the establishment. Sure, throw in free speech and sexual diversity for all I care, but me babe, I’m in for the chocolate.

Written with the Notepad app of Cybill’s iPhone while I waited for her to shower (9/9/2011)

2011-09-14T15:10:00.000-03:00

"I think my period's due or something," said Deborah with a flick of her wrist, ashes to the carpet like ill tidings, like the cigarette in her hand negotiating its own way out of a Faustian bargain, any bargain, pick a bargain, always a catch in there somewhere, name your poison, nicotine or those sour, sour droplets for the stomach cramps once the barman manning the blister card starts yelling Last Rounds. She shrugged, still, shaking off the notion of a coping mechanism unsure even to herself, then took one last drag from that selfsame rationale before putting it out on Pieter's spew-colored ashtray. "But Carmichael's late nevertheless."
"Carmichael's an ass, Debs."
"Let it go, Pieter," Deborah responded without taking her eyes off the dying embers of her cigarette on her room-mate's ashtray.
"Well he IS an ass" --emphasis-- "and you shouldn't go on sleeping with him like that. Please tell me you make him wear a condom." Pieter's voice had been starting to sound more acidic than usual, she surmised, and correctly so, on the account of his not getting his fix of cock and balls ever since that pavement artist, god what was the creep's name, left him last July. Still, too many theories for the season alone and not enough butterflies fluttering over the dandelions at that tiny little garden near the Mall as with all the Summers before this one.

This one does not advance the plot but it's pretty cool anyhow

2011-08-22T14:37:00.001-03:00

Okay there was this song in the back of my head sometime halfway through High School I'd say circa 1996 or thereabouts and I'd asked Dennis about it since he was the big kahuna, know-it-all, when it came to '80s tunes but fact is I could barely recall the melody, let alone the words. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he said to me, or something to that effect.

And now, mean right this second, here in this braindead future that 2011 has gone on to become I'm sitting at the office doing some crap job or whatever and very half-assedly so, and Pat Benatar is singing Sex as a Weapon in my headphones and... that's it. The song I was trying to recall in '96. Total recall. Right there. Right here. Right now.

Snoopy the author reaches nowhere

2011-08-19T16:51:00.001-03:00

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times and it was also a dark, stormy night and from where I'm standing I can pretty much see Snoopy sitting atop his red-roofed doghouse typing well into the late hours without stopping but actually reaching nowhere.
I have this writer's block thing going at the present hence the idiotic start for this post and incidentally maybe she did do it because she had a writer's block. Food for thought there. Just don't attempt to pre-heat it in the oven. Hah!
Drum roll--- then new paragraph.

I'm supposed to be working right now. No scratch that: I am at work but truth be told I'm doing a terrific job in procrastinating and frantically pleading for my muse to present herself and give me some great top-notch writing but in lieu of Calliope all I got is some mid-1980s synthpop going on the iPod.
Was that an intentional double entendre? Oh it was and it so sucked!!
OK, once more--- drum roll--- then new paragraph.

Gonna begin reading a new book today, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and it kind of scares me a little. Well not scare but thing is there's a couple of books of his I'd read a while back--- those were V. and The Crying of Lot 49--- and if you want me to be completely honest with you I have no idea what I got from those two books. Pynchon's works scare me witless because I have no idea what's going on most of the time, and the times I do get what's going on I simply don't understand it. Kind of prone to obscure, unclear referencing, that guy. Well, like myself with the Sylvia Plath jokes really.
Yeah, now I guess I've just compared my writing to Thomas Pynchon's. This post of mine is most certainly not going too well: Drum roll--- then new paragraph.

Ohh I’ve just thought of something else too: Superhero costumes.
Here’s a very good reason as to why comic book superhero costumes are skintight: They’re compression suits. You know? Like those suits athletes use to improve performance? That’s it, right there. Positively brilliant.

And that’s it for today: Drum roll--- and out.

The "Dog carcass in alley this morning" post

2011-08-15T15:03:00.000-03:00

Ever woke up with that feeelin of "Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach" ringing in the back of your head? You know, like a carrion bird awaiting for food? That ominous nagging feeling of dread with no reasonable explanation or reason? when even the sugarless coffee tastes bitter than you'd expect?

Wow, I think I might have just outrorschached Rorschach. Now stop writing because it's only cool when I'm emulating Jack Kerouac or Bret Easton Ellis, but when I start doing a very half-assed mid-1980s Alan Moore, ooooh it's time to let go of the word processor...

Did Wendy Harris marry a Communist?

2011-08-06T22:28:00.002-03:00

Halfway through Philip Roth's I Married a Communist-- enjoying it quite a lot, even though I'd never really warmed up to Roth before. My father's a big fan though, he's kind of into the Jewish thing in literature, etc. Maybe, I'm thinking, I'd never really warmed up to Roth before because I might have started at the wrong end-- I mean, The plot against America or somesuch as opposed to say, American Pastoral. You get the idea.

But before I go-- not really relating to it, but sorta, barely, something, an idea for a DC comic book—Just so as I write it down somewhere:

Okay, setup is the Green Arrow saying something like:

"As long as no one ever questions on which side of the Marshall Plan Rex Tyler stood, but of course that’s all incidental now. I mean, that was before he went big and bought out old man Bannermain in the sixties and became one of America’s biggest captains of industry from Blue Valley to the Slaughter Swamp. Guys like Tyler, Chuck McNider, even that runt Al Pratt… it would take a dimwit like Johnny Thunder to miss out on their political preferences. Imagine what a JSA gathering must have been like in the late forties, with big man Alan Scott sucking up to Truman and really running the show behind Bird-Brains’ back. Ever wondered just where that proverbial buck stopped? It stopped right there in Civic City, my friend."

And T.S. Elliot was never into comic books anyhow

2011-08-02T09:25:00.000-03:00

August is the cruelest month, bringing in
Exclusive action figures from the San Diego Comic-Con, arriving
The same day as Cybill’s birthday, teaming up
With my own mother’s birthday too.
Then Father’s Day, quenching
The dying embers of my paycheck etc, etc etc.

I will show you fear on my credit card bill.

“John, I’m only dancing”

2011-07-25T16:15:00.001-03:00

There's this nagging fear raising every hair on the back of my neck as I start typing into a new blankspaced notepad-- like, every time, alright?-- a primal fear scaring me witless that it's supposed to be just blogging, reassuringly so, but that I might end up sounding like the goddamn Unabomber or something, like the Norwegian shooter? You know? Like preaching some manifesto? This is a journal, this is a collection of missives for someone (you!) whom will probably never read it as so, also as in, this is ESOL practice. What would, I don't know, David Bowie for instance, say about that?
"John, I'm only dancing."

Then as if half-secretly trying to discredit myself I go for a random posting from years back and this is what I find----

“Maybe I do regret not kissing her by the swimming pool back in that sunny Saturday in '94, but that’s all.”

----and it makes me smile and it’s such an honest smile because all of a sudden I realize it’s possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever written and that I’m such a screwball for ever doubting my own writing.

In dreams

2011-07-20T11:40:00.001-03:00

Martha tells us her dreams from across the table, she’s sitting close to Dennis and there’s the cigarettebutt of a candle in a drinking glass casting ghostly shadows up on her face, they flicker idly making a dancing pantomime out of her white blouse. She is telling us of the pie, of a clonazepam-plus-wine-induced dream she’d had of a pie that she should cut into 16 equal slices and even though she did have one of those 8-blade pie cutters using it twice did not amount to her reaching the correct proportions. And what do you dream about?, she asks me.

I seldom dream of sex or of comic books, I answer her flat-out as if trying to prove a point and it’s the absolute truth because I all-too-often dream of regular idiotic mundane situations like a conversation at work or something even though the night before I’d had this dream in which I was in bed with Cybill and Lucy Liu in a threesome and it was pretty cool even though I’m not really a big fan of Lucy Liu movies nor had I watched any lately. Cybill, sitting by my side says she rarely remembers her own dreams, but says she did remember the one from a few weeks ago, in which Dennis was dating someone she’d never met. Now Dennis himself from the other side of the table doesn’t say much, of course— sort of says we’re sissies for taking sleeping tablets, something like that, then of course sips once more from his champagne glass and orders in a second bottle.

(Some of) the ones that got away

2011-07-13T15:47:00.000-03:00

I have no excuse for stop posting, really. For the oddest of reasons, whatever it is, I simply cannot stop writing.

For instance— I was kind of rummaging for nothing special on a pen drive I’d found earlier this morning and that pen drive alone has a folder named To do, which pretty much contains aborted posts for this blog. There are tens of files, some of them barely a handful of words long, some of them that go on for pages.

There are poems in there, haikus, unfinished scripts for movies, comic books and cartoons, half a dozen aborted, barely not even started novellas and short tales, you name it. I wish I could tell you each of them would get me a Pulitzer but that is not the case.

Either way here’s my excerpting from some of them, loosely ranging from 2007 to 2009:

I. From file ‘fellatio.doc’:
On fellatio (the word if not the act)

We were walking across the mall, M**** and I, going back to the office after lunch the other day, and I told him: “You know, if you really think about it, not too many people know what fellatio really means.”
“What does it mean?” he asked me.
I told him.
“Oh,” he said. “That.”

That brief conversation dawned upon me a brand-new theory:
You can actually say “fellatio” aloud anywhere, and no one will bother you.
With M**** as a witness I tried at the Shopping Center, then in the elevator, at the office, including when talking to the Management. It was something like, “….so you sir, when you’re actually comparing the- fellatio- ratio between those two points on the chart…”

What I really think is that, in reality, everyone knows what fellatio means, but everyone who knows thinks the next guy doesn’t: Like, here I am saying fellatio to M****, who says he doesn’t know the word.

II. From file ‘gnothi_seauton.doc’:
Gnothi seauton, pt. I

So fast-forward to say a month or two afterwards and there I am, on a Friday night at home in the future, scotch-taping some funny-looking scribbles to the inside of my door. Then I’m sitting on the couch, morosely, barely moving, slouching, contemplating.
Enjoying the silence.

“Know thyself” it says in Greek; it’s supposed to have been written over the entryway to this temple of Apollo at wherever, really. Philosophers employ the expression to symbolize man’s need for self-awareness and self-cognizance: understanding oneself as the first step to understand those around you and all the crap.
I wouldn’t know any of that, though. I totally ripped it off some Batman comic book I’d been reading.

III. From file ‘spit.doc’:
Pondering some of life’s greatest questions

I’m in the bathroom at the office, okay? And all of a sudden I get this nagging feeling I must spit.

Should I spit at the sink, the toilet, or the urinal?
Is there a proper spitting place at the bathroom?

IV. From file ‘several_haikus.txt’:
Tonight at the park,
windblown petals on the ground
-- my damp evening blues.

A few years ago,
asking, How to eat oysters?
-- Rev it up and go.

A phonecall away,
Yeah, she says but never comes:
College in Summer.

Earlymorning dark,
the book of poems unread.
Hey Jack Keroauc...

Two brunettes in heels
borrow fifty for a cab
Then say Good morning.

Roast chicken on sidewalk,
past stores that have since closed down
--Ode to my hometown.

Long line at restaurant,
families waiting for tables,
come Election Day.

The god of doorways

2011-07-11T12:03:00.000-03:00

On Saturday November 8th, 2009 I was well into my second-day plunge into the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan and I was adamantly decided on learning everything. I could, as I’d intended to back in ’91, age 11, to see and hear and read everything, go everywhere. Back in ’91 my mother stood Sphinxlike at the end of the sarcophagi and told me it was time to go back to the hotel— a change of millennium duly leaped and some loss of hair later, and such time stopped being the issue—

——— there was ——— there was, well, everything, of course ——— but there was also my going out of this exhibit of rare Japanese Katana samurai blades just flown in from Japan, and wandering just a tad from aimlessly across content-rich aisles, isles ——— and stumbling upon Robert Frank’s The Americans lining up wall upon wall in an exhibition of its own ——— the black and white-ness of it, the gelatin prints of people and places and a time and a zeitgeist all its own, now relegated to the haunting of in-between the covers of oversized hardcovers, etc. And the intro bit from Jack Kerouac, of course.

I wish it could go on forever, I remember thinking. I thought I was thinking of the exhibit per se but then later on I had this weird, weird notion that maybe— just maybe, for a split-second— I was echoing the prayers of an entire generation, this mythical idea that a country had of itself once upon a time, now long since fading-out, to black.

(Then later on I went to see Springsteen play MSG, for the second night in a row, the very endpoint of my sliding across time)

The day before I’d gone to the Guggenheim for this amazing exhibition of Kandinsky’s works: The pieces started out at the bottom of the ramp and evolved chronologically as you climbed upwards: Association to music, Bauhaus, the war, etc— the old country, see, directly the opposite of the whole thing at first glance but no, not really, we’re still talking of time passing and perceptions shifting— and it’d given me this real crazy notion, an idea, that if I walked up the ramp very slowly and paid attention to everything, let all content sink in, absorb, learn everything, cramming everything I could in my head just like when you’re 15 and you’re attempting to memorize the entire Chemistry textbook before the midterms because you’d pretty much slouched the months before— and when I reached the end of the exhibit at the top of the ramp I’d dash back to ground level real fast and just take potshot glances at the paintings and try to remember it all just as everything I’d just learned about the artist started to sublimate off my head— exactly like it would happen when you started taking the Chemistry test back in High School, all the whitening out where before a few minutes there was fertile, colors blending, abundant content, all the palettes fading to white—

First there’s black and white and then there’s a burst of colors and forms and shapes and then there’s only blank and you realize time’s up, you’ve reached a wall, time to go back, time to white out, no time at all but some things do stay with you forever— Bruuuuuce!— case in point.

There’s always the road back and there’s the road ahead and there’s always the road not taken: But always the road, always there, just about to take you somewhere—

Consider that the only permanent element in your life is the medium in-between states.

Winter, 2011 (a haiku)

2011-07-11T12:02:00.000-03:00

Heard it through windows,
Winter's rasping and lisping--
The comforter's warmth.

Alphabet soup

2011-07-08T08:31:00.000-03:00

I’m thinking if I were to spin everything I’ve ever read into a web, like a literary mandala of sorts, Jack Kerouac would fall pat-on in the middle of it but not sitting like a Buddha but more like piercing like an axle through it all: Yggdrasil as opposed to the Bodhi tree, right? Get the metaphor?

Of course there’s the Jack Kirby annex to the web as well, in permanent expansion, and that’s probably where I get all that nuttier stuff: You’d think I’d spend glorious Summer afternoons indoors back when I was a kid wolfing the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, isn’t that so? Not really. They were probably all Marvel comics anyhow.

Time passes

2011-07-06T09:08:00.000-03:00

Time passes and Cybill and I are driving home one Saturday evening, back from the cinema, from the new Woody Allen movie. She is telling me about this kid who went to College with her and majored in Armenian or something like that, while most of her friends, herself included, majored in English, maybe French.
Armenian names usually end in -ian, she is saying, followed with a list of what she tells me are common surnames. They all end in -ian, as promised.
Once she’s done I add one last name to her list. “Kardashian,” I say. She looks at me in a queerly funny, what-the-fuck-kind-of way.
“What?”
“Video killed the radio star,” I smile.

So time’s passed and it passes still, and if I look back to the months before I’ll see many things like my abortive job hunting, fallen short, busted kneed running at the park for the umpteenth time and gaining weight because I stopped working out altogether, also stopped writing for no real reason and it ought to be such a crime, and I get stuck halfway through a Virginia Woolf novel, then Cybill making such good friends with the boys, our repeatedly going out with Bryce and Dennis, hitting bars, restaurants, emptying bottle after bottle of champagne, wine, vodka. “I’m getting fat,” I bitch and moan around to everyone. “You’re not fat, you’re happy,” Dennis says before ordering the next round.

Maybe it was not supposed to be like this but maybe it was. The most incredible thing about it all is that we’re not really wondering, not really thinking about it: Time passes and we glide along, unstuck, uprooted, changed, first lost then later found.

For all the wrong reasons

2011-05-09T12:56:00.000-03:00

Slept for 14 hours straight this weekend, no booze, no medication, no sports the day before. I have come down with a bad case of flu but it's not only that. I'm... weakened?... I think. Have stopped running, also. Have stopped doing exercises. Have stopped with the diet.

It's a funny thing because Cybill and I have been spending all days together now. I love that; I love her. But I'm most certainly not used to this whole cloud-9 thing: I'm supposed to draw my inner strength from frustration, envy, angst, from negative emotions.

That's how I would run, by the way. Did I ever tell you that?
Whenever I was running I would keep forcing into my mind all the negative feelings and memories I could muster. Then I would grind it all on asphalt under the rubber of my Mizunos.

And this is how I'd begin the book I'll never write:

2011-05-02T08:43:00.001-03:00

“But seahorses have no hooves, Andie” had been John’s words as he’d helped himself to the odd-colored Heinz dressing just over the salad bar during brunch earlier that day and she couldn’t help but think it looked just like bottled licorice in liquid form. Maybe it was the benefit of hindsight finally shedding some light on their relationship but the irony of what it had to do with condiment, if any at all, was completely lost on her. Still, that he had completely missed the point with her metaphor— of that Andressa was sure of— that the view of the sea from the spacious terrace outside did reverb into the master suite like horses galloping in the distance.

Maybe the change from Philadelphia to L.A. had been too much abrupt, the move itself done in more haste than either of them was willing to admit or at least be willing to be held accountable for, but the Network did indeed order John to be closer to the Studio for this season of the show: He had been promoted to head-writer after all and larger responsibilities seemed to hang from above his head nowadays just like the sword of Damocles— One well-placed gag into last season ender’s script, something to do with the lead character going to Haiti and joining the Tonton Macoute despite being obviously the white, blond, cornfed all-American type (something like that— Andessa had never watched the show) and now here they were with their bedroom terrace overlooking the Pacific and a kinder, gentler stampede of figments softly stealing away the silence at night.

See ya in May, then!

2011-04-12T15:58:00.002-03:00

Hey, ahh. I'm taking a few weeks off from writing. Back in April 30th for Walpurgis Night 2011. See ya in May, then!

Egregores

2011-03-27T17:49:00.000-03:00

I.
A thronging mob of street performers in clown makeup clash against a public demonstration either pro or against something I wasn’t really paying attention to, before a newsstand vendor on a crowded thoroughfare at lunchtime on Sunday.
They both stop, halt, barely avoiding one another then look the other way before coming together once more. Some of them look down at a streetside wooden shelf in front of the newsdealer: Crisis in Japan, fear of nuclear disaster upfront on the cover of the week’s periodical.

Their glances cross one another’s; they nod and go their separate ways. But the fear of fallout remains.

Everywhere you go the fear remains, people scared of nuclear energy, people scared of the even-worse fatwas to ensue the toppling of the week’s muslim dictator, the collective fear of traffic and crime and growing up alone and by god the mileage of one’s car per liter of fuel.

That’s how we live but that’s also ho we die.

II.
I had Cybill sleeping in my arms yesterday afternoon after lunch. We were both naked under the soft cool of the air-conditioner and my bedroom was all closed shut, tight against the scorching heat outside. She just lay there in utter silence but her footsteps reverberated inside my head like thunder pushing the mother-storm over the horizon, its booming soundwaves rippling out, crashing against all of my future expectations, exposing my nude vulnerability to a collective fear of an uncertain tomorrow and the fragility of my status-quo.
“What are you gonna do for the rest of your life,” her closed eyes asked me without a sound, “And who are you going to be with?”

I thought of you for one second, then thought of her for two.

Three seconds after that, the fear set in.

Fire

2011-03-20T19:17:00.001-03:00

...currently in times of war... hang on... kind of unexpected though... But seriously: Whoa....

All tomorrow’s parties

2011-03-13T13:40:00.001-03:00

Dear Lyla, what can I say?

The rubber straps of my flip-flops glow in the dark.

It’s late at night on a Friday and I’m walking across the living room towards the kitchen with an empty glass of wine in my hand. Sixteen Candles is on TV tonight and I’d rather not go out for a change. All the lights are out save for the TV’s eerie bluish glow behind me now. The rubber straps of my flip-flops glow in the dark.

This will probably make no sense to you, but as I stay home tonight and do nothing, talk to nobody, all the plots advance on their own, multiple story arcs connect: Cybill’s apple, the blonde, the wine, the TV, Dennis’ motley crew, the Springsteen bootlegs, the park, the flip-flops, a recent photograph of you, spending a fortune on comic books this month, my job that sucks & I’m looking for a new one.

Vacations from work start today. I don’t know it yet, but tomorrow I’ll wake up at 6am and jog for over 12 miles at the park in slightly more than one hour and a half. It will nearly rip me to shreds and pretty much total the rest of the Saturday but I’ll do it anyway, and then when I’m over at Dennis’ for drinks before dinner he’ll clearly point out that all the effort must be for something, that I either want something too bad or desperately need to get away from it.
I’ll tell him of Cybill and I’ll tell him of Cindy and above all I’ll tell him of yourself— only not really, only in broad brushstrokes, no details, hardly any names. He will say nothing, smile and then casually mention he’s invited Tess for dinner with us but she’s just called in to cancel it for no good reason.

But I don’t know that yet. It’s still Friday.
And the rubber straps of my flip-flops glow in the dark.
And I so dearly wish you were here.

Ouroboros

2011-03-06T12:24:00.001-03:00

I’m running laps around the pond at the park and on the water all the ducks are swimming in one perfect line, one after the other, against the early Saturday morning sky, cloudy and gray.

I’m running mostly for the exercise but also because I’m confused— there have been all the travails of the weeks before yet in the end something unknown steps in and messes up everything, then Cybill flies off to parts unknown, or way-too-known, taking the obvious apple with her for the holiday and god only knows what happens when she gets back and Cindy herself goes back to her boyfriend who’s lost weight or something and then for what seems like the thousandth of times but it’s actually only the second Tess calls in shortly before we go out to dinner and says she’s down with the flu, leaving me alone staring at the South African Pinotage I’d bought especially for the occasion even though that was kind of cheap from my own part if you think about it but I wasn’t really too keen on dishing out too much money on wine anyway because it was mostly for when we’d come back to my place after the dinner, which would have been at some fancy pricey place already and I’d half-expect for her too be a little buzzed by then anyhow.

So no matter what I do I just seem to run in circles unable to veer off some great terrifying Karmic wheel and even when I do my best and actually break free I end up at an entirely another cycle just to fall back on the usual tracks, stepping up from a zero to this number eight lying down, the snake eating up its own tail.

When I was a kid, Mandalas scared me witless: I couldn’t bear to see one on a carpet or on a tapestry or tattooed on somebody’s arm. And now I think I know why— yet these ducks here at the park if you think about it, they swim yonder in this one perfect straight line, like an arrow skipping over the water, not only going somewhere but getting there.

The judge of all Earth

2011-02-27T13:11:00.000-03:00

“When I first met you I thought you simply weren’t aware of what you could do,” says Bryce’s friend Giancarlo, very matter-of-factly from across the table, the usual untapped potential-slash-diamond in the raw chatter. “Then I started paying attention in you and came to the conclusion you willingly downplay it.”

I don’t want to tell him he’s wrong and I don’t want to tell him he’s right but above all I do want to tell him— but can’t— of what happens when things are not held back and ripple outwards, unrestrained, over other people’s lives. I do want to tell him— but can’t— of Cybill, of the apple, of the aggravating consequences, stringencies— I want, almost need to explain to Giancarlo all the gory details and point out the exact moment in time in which you realize you’re playing in a fixed game out of which will only come no prizes but only pain and regret.

But I also want to tell Giancarlo that my skin is burning searing-white-hot and she’s scorching in her own sheets at night herself despite her arrangements and that there’s no guilt involved when something feels so right: But also that if a given line in the sand is crossed and a genie pops out of the bottle then buddy, there is no going back to the old buddy system, come tomorrow, come next week, come what might.

Flesh, my friend? Flesh is a mean, mean mistress.
Know that much.

Faye's coda (a haiku)

2011-02-20T14:41:00.001-03:00

He's stuck in traffic
seeing redlights dance in the rain
-- Elsewhere Faye smiles.

On creative writing using ESOL

2011-02-13T20:22:00.000-02:00

(I'm breaking character for this one, OK?)

Giving names to my characters was probably the biggest breakthrough on my writing so far. At least that’s the impression that I get— that I can cut loose, looser, no longer hampered by calling someone “F.” or “F____” or a bunch of silly Xs— for instance, that girl who went up to Canada? The one from the nightclub, whose upper lip curls up at midsection like a cat’s whenever she smiles? That’s Faye. Totally different person than Franny.
Franny’s a former girlfriend whom the protagonist-slash-narrator is not entirely comfortable with the idea of recalling to life, so she doesn’t get mentioned very often. And Faye’s a hell lot cuter than Franny, to boot.

When I was in High School I would read this comic book… The Flash, you know, guy in red? Runs fast? Sports as a logo that same jagged lightning bolt you used to give me such much hell about when we were in College?— Okay, granted, I still read those this day & age, but some fifteen, twenty years back either the writer or the editor of said magazine had a recurring joke for whenever he couldn’t mention a particular name or brand:
Whenever the writer needed to call in a brand of fast cars or motorcycles into the plot, he would call them Romanaclef. Like, a motorbike was a Romanaclef 5000 — Get it? It was a pun on Roman à clef, which was exactly what he was doing.
God I used to think it was the smartest joke I’d ever seen. Still find it pretty clever, though.

Given my utter lack of a plot and my inexhaustible lack of capacity of actually coming up with one, being able to call a character by his, her own name is a major headway into giving an iota of meaning to the bunch of words I end up laying down on paper. And it also accounts for my lack of structure, too: I don’t have to map out comprehensive character bios for each of them— just let the characters speak those bios for themselves as we go— take Dennis for instance: Dennis orders the drinks. Dennis knows the coolest bars, the fanciest restaurants, the trendiest clubs. I’ve compared him to the Dean Moriarty to my Sal Paradise on occasion. He gets mentioned a lot. — Now sweet little TJ on the other hand. I think that kid must have been mentioned only once or twice: She’s the former girlfriend who dumped the protagonist-slash-narrator one Christmas Eve a few years back. Amazing in bed too, she was. I mean, if you ask the protagonist. I think he still has the scars somewhere…

Of course if you’re actually paying any attention to this I might be contradicting myself here, just a tiny little bit: Why in god’s name would one ever need to map out a character in a roman à clef is an entirely different story.
But I’ll so kindly ask you to overlook that part.

Now the next step: Naming places in ESOL.
What should I do about names of cities, streets, neighborhoods?
São Paulo has been São Paulo for years here, but what happens when I get to say, Santo André? Santos? I’d been using the same silly Xs or blank spaces for a while but then it started to truncate the text more than I could bear so I ditched mentioning places altogether— but sometimes places are as important to the development of a character than a note on his or her past actions.
So should I find suitable American-based stand-ins? Should I start calling Santo André, Trenton, New Jersey? God what do I know of Trenton… see, there’s a problem right there. Plus that would make official the country switching, as if the language or the character names aren’t enough— and São Paulo’s already such an integral part of the narrative by this time. I’m not sure I want to go and change that— at least not right now and not with this format.
Food for thought there. But I’ll let it flow, ride it along, let the answer find itself.
Let’s see what gives with that one.

Still, major headway has been made.
I can’t tell you how comfortable I feel right now in writing these posts. How much I have been thoroughly enjoying them. Especially now that naming my characters has allowed me to tether one post to the other and despite the lack of a plot, it still conveys a somewhat cohesive sense of continuity— which ultimately I think it is what life’s all about, right?

Retrieval

2011-02-06T18:35:00.001-02:00

“Just relax,” she says to me and we start from there only we don’t: From where I’m standing it just seems so easy for her to say it but then she makes another comment, throws some offhand truth to the wind and it’s clear she’s got her own demons too— we all do.
We all do and some nights those demons, those dybbuks, djinns, the screwups, they feast on hungrier and the fireflies twinkling in our eyes go on brief, tentative dates with razorblades yet the pen remains mightier than the sword.

Swords, spades, ploughshares, pens: All different strokes of the same keyboard, some faint plastic clanking ringing through the late hours, remembering the past, creating tomorrow, weaving shadows and candyglazing what needs a little color: I turn my head to subjects outside.
Fact: I make for a lousy main character and I’d rather write instead of everyone else gravitating by me in their own orbits around their own suns. I’d rather be a comet myself, a falling star shooting in, out and through everyone’s life just a little bit, for a little while— see, listen, learn, fact-check, then off to Pluto or Mars, saturnine.

And boy there are copious notes in the back of my head— written down across the years as life gets in the way and everybody dies just a little death every day of their lives—

There’s Jimmy, age 18, about to throw up in the back of my father’s car as we’re parked at some gas station somewhere in our hometown the Summer before we all leave for good, while on the front seat I’m sliding my hands underneath his friend’s blouse as Eric Clapton plays on the radio—

There’s yourself a few years later, telling me you learned how to eat with chopsticks from your father and it’s the only time you’ll ever mention him to me—

There’s Franny not being there the only time I ever really needed someone because it’d gotten so dark and confusing—

—And I’m taking it all in, memory babe, Johnny Mnemonic— Taking notes as the years get shed off like dead skinflakes peeled away one by one, snakelike, a little contrived but that’s okay—

Cybill’s grandfather on TV at an ad for some supermarket. Monika teaching me how to do push-ups Kung-Fu-style with my knuckles. Johnny getting pissed off at a prank that gets a little out of hand. The endless phone conversations with Paul, a poor substitute for actually being there. College with Luke and the time he befriended a filthy stray dog and named it Dust Mite.The hundreds of times Dennis got to order the drinks without looking at the prices on the menu. The handful of times Kristen shied away while making love. The one time Faye turned her face when I tried to kiss her at a nightclub then went up to Canada and got married.

Erosion

2011-01-30T17:10:00.001-02:00

It’s a Friday night and we’re all meeting together at this restaurant for dinner and I think celebrating Kay’s promotion at the Bank or something like that. I’m sitting right next up to Martha and she’s showing me some photographs of myself she’d taken last year with her cell phone at yet another restaurant but I’m not sure I understand why she’s showing me the pictures because I’m so tired from working late these last couple of weeks I’m not really following her train of thought and I’m zoning out at the end of each sentence of hers.
Then Bryce giggles then mentions something about turkeys but none of us are having turkey and I get a little too addled because there aren’t turkeys on the menu then I realize it’s some funny comment or something someone he knows has posted on Facebook which he’s browsing on his iPhone. Then Dennis orders more champagne before I even realize the first bottle’s already empty. Monika to my left says she’s been training and I just nod even though I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, and someone mentions someone else owing him seven bucks and I find it too odd a figure to be owed, and as I look at myself on the mirror behind Martha I notice my eyes are sunk deep and bloodshot.

There was this nightmare I had on the last day of 2010- I dreamed all my friends were gathered somewhere, I think at my place, and we were all talking and laughing and stuff but there was someone else there too, a presence, something dark, sinister, unwanted. When I lifted my eyes I zoomed in dead on to this somebody else, neither male nor female, with amber hair and amber eyes and pale skin.
That he-she smirked and pointed his-her bony finger at me and said I knew who he-she was, that he-she lived inside me and I would never be able to escape, and things were just bound to get worse from then on.
I recalled reading somewhere that if you looked at your own hands in a dream you’ll wake up but I couldn’t move, I was frozen with fright. He-she stood up from his-her chair and loomed closer. I clenched my teeth so tight I woke up from the pain in my jaw.

I’m looking at my own reflection on the mirror at the restaurant tonight and all of a sudden my mind goes blank. I blink and it takes a split-second too long to reopen my eyes. Then for no reason whatsoever I realize I’m bound here, to this, to myself, and that no matter what I do I’ll never get to walk on the moon in my lifetime, and for some reason it just makes me sad.

Move along!

2011-01-23T18:31:00.000-02:00

So the office moved to this nearby town ok? Due to tax reasons and other stories I suppose but it's cool I can deal with it for a time. Coolest part was, who gets to coordinate the move from the regional offices? Yours truly. Have you ever moved part of a company to a different company altogether (we were bought out) in another location with another network, systems, etc? Awesome. We got to do EVERYTHING. You name it, we did it: Facilities, staff, network infrastructure, systems, testing, employee communication, asset control, hauling equipment, etc. A bit overwhelming, true that, but awesome!

We finished the last leg per se on a three-day run starting last Friday morning and ending this Sunday afternoon. Barely go any sleep: But how cool was hauling all that equipment across town past midnight last Friday under armed guard?

To be quite honest with you-- I thought we were not making it in time and I got this close to throwing the towel late last week when everything was falling apart and a new nightmare would pop up wherever you looked but then there was this huge funny argument about transferring some assets... fifteen cheap headsets and a microwave oven, actually... it was so absurd it was as if were being held back by petty crap and that bit gave me a second wind and man, Lyla, did we ace it or what...

Ready for going live tomorrow, now I gotta get some sleep.

Surprise party

2011-01-16T21:20:00.000-02:00

So it was my birthday the other day see and the guys had all gotten together to throw me a surprise party but Dee sort of botched the surprise when he invited me over to this very, very fancy French restaurant we go to sometimes, and said I should meet him at his place before that. Thing is, Dennis never does advance warnings.

Still it was pretty amazing and they had decorated Dee's place with comic book figures and so on, but it was kind of odd when I saw the table all laid out like that, decorated, all that food and the drinks and the fancy cake they'd bought, and Cindy was so cute wearing a Wonder-Woman t-shirt and gave me a toy Batmobile, and Jimmy and his wife gave me a book of Bruce Springsteen pictures and Kay and Monika gave me a really cool dry-fit t-shirt for running----- and it made me fell so odd because I have such a hard time either accepting or understanding people can actually care about me. Must be some sort of defense mechanism. I don't know.

Still was was tons of fun and we stayed there up until two or three in the morning even though I had to work the next Saturday...

Emerald City blues

2011-01-09T12:23:00.000-02:00

A dialog box pops up onscreen once I turn on my computer and it’s a message Heather must have sent me while I was offline. Call me when you read this it says alongside her new mobile number. We haven’t really spoken to each other for a few months now ever since this kind of nasty falling out we had last June, in which she left my apartment in the middle of the night in fact almost slamming the elevator door in my face for something I might have done or said.

But that’s the cool thing with Heather though, we always bounce back: We started going out some five years ago and ever since that first night she slept over we’ve been seeing each other in installments, for periods of one to two months, then not seeing each other for say an entire half-year, and starting it all over again. Most times I treat her like trash, but sometimes she treats me like trash too.
Maybe in the end we’re just using one another. Or maybe we really do like each other but we’re not entirely honest about it.

Of course by the time I see her message the first thing that crosses my mind is that I’m definitely starting the year getting some, which prompts me to call her up right away.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” she tells me from the other side of the line with a very cold, detached tone. “I’m moving to Seattle a couple of weeks from now.”
“You’re moving to where?!,” I ask her, wondering if I heard it right the first time. I mean, Heather probably couldn’t even spot Seattle on a map the last time I saw her.
“To Seattle,” she says slowly as if explaining to an old person. “That’s in Washington, in the Northwes…”
“I know where Seattle is,” I don’t let her finish her line.
“Cool,” she says flatly, then goes on to explain she’s enrolled at this course or another in Seattle and that she’s expected to live there for at least a couple of years, emphasizing all the proper words almost perversely.
“Cool,” I say flatly, not really meaning it, then bid her the proper farewells and good lucks, and invite her for a sendoff dinner and maybe a few drinks, who knows.
“Sure, that will be great, who knows,” she replies, but not really meaning it.

“An iPhone, a puppy, and a fruit basket”

2011-01-03T18:53:00.000-02:00

When Dennis told me he’d invited Tess over for our traditional Sunday dinner I just gave him a half-smile in return and said she was a major babe. Not that she isn’t though, but to be completely honest with you I thought it was kind of asinine from his part, not to mention a little rude, given that Tess had ditched me a few months ago after one particularly terrific night out, no explanation provided save for a rather uncharacteristically blunt brush-off in which she claimed she was going to be unavailable for the ensuing four or five weekends from that day on.

It’s not that I was holding any kind of grudge against her. I wasn’t— the brush-off notwithstanding, Tess probably remains the sweetest person I know— It’s just that I was pretty sure it would inevitably get kind of awkward at the dinner table and in fact it did for a while, but once we finally got to the bottle of champagne any lingering awkwardness gave in to our discussing feasible replacement gifts for the Wise Men to present baby Jesus with.

Dee said the way he sees it, the birth took place at some boutique hotel and the parents were divorced, so if he were one of the Wise Men, he’d probably give an iPhone, which prompted me to suggest how about an iPod, an iPhone and an iPad?
Tess remarked it was probably better off as an Apple commercial instead and I agree, then we’d pretty much settled on an iPhone, a puppy, and a fruit basket.

Either way, that’s how we handled the awkward bit in it.

Still, that said, at some point during dinner Dennis asked Tess if she was seeing anyone. I think he might have done it on purpose just to piss me off. Dennis does that kind of thing sometimes.
She said no though, and went with the old familiar routine of how hard it is to find a decent guy these days, etc. I’m not judging her for saying that but it was kind of lousy. Of course our eyes never crossed when she said that. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Or maybe it was. I’m not sure.

Still, in the end she gave me a ride home and it was pretty cool because we really hit it off when we’re alone, as if saying our lines on cue from a script. She even joked of our getting into another bet and stuff. Which is how we went out in the first place: We were at this nightclub once, when we came up with this wager of sorts to determine if the barman was gay or not: If she had the guts to walk over to him and sort of flirt with him, I’d take her to see Cats, front row and all that. And she did, and I did, but somehow we didn’t. I mean, not in the end.

And last night, when she pulled over to the curb we sort of looked at each other for a second too long and that’s where it got really awkward. I’m such a cretin at figuring out non-verbal communications, sometimes I think I might have Asperger’s or something.

And then as she left and her car disappeared up the street among this sea of bright lighting leftovers from Christmas it started to rain and the oil in the asphalt glistened like soiled, marred rainbows on the ground and each droplet from the rain distorted them further more, making them ripple irregularly, and made me think of all loose ends being yanked off their 2010 tombs and filing up to bite me in the ass in 2011.
—a leitmotif, urged as a gift to the newborn year ahead, if any, in lieu of the iPhone and the puppy and the fruit basket, so help me god.

The week in limbo (a poem in free verse)

2010-12-26T18:36:00.000-02:00

Strange old concrete
horizons bereft
now of cars,
an off-season, a summer
sizzling past with light
soft summer rain.

People to miss— trudge on—
unfamiliar faces,
year-end
refugees absconding
like lost loves lost and
never regained.

Congealed in amber: seven days,
last call
to arms, to none,
‘twixt Xmas & hereafter—
Father Time looks back, sees sorrow, rethinks
& ultimately forfeits his game.

Cindy does Annie Hall

2010-12-20T18:50:00.001-02:00

“I can’t believe the nerve, walking along like that in broad daylight,” Cindy says angrily with a wave of her arms as we pass by this guy she used to date, purely by chance, and he’s with some girl now but they never notice us.
“Yeah I know, in broad daylight right in the middle of the evening,” I reply as we struggle to catch up with Dennis and Roseanne a few steps before us, driving a wedge with our elbows through the thronging mob of late-Sunday evening Christmas shoppers, towards the Japanese restaurant for dinner.
“And he was holding her hand! Like a couple! How dare he!” she rants and raves, refusing to accept the whole situation.
“Yeah I know, walking hand-in-hand with his fiancée, that’s more than absurd, it’s… it’s outrageous! Preposterous!”
“I just can’t understand it,” she reasons, trying to make her point, “She’s fat and she’s got bad hair.”
“You have straight long blond hair Cindy and blue eyes— you look like a… like a Panzer division pin-up model. You’re practically cover-girl material for the Lebensborn— next to you the entire world’s got bad hair, that’s not even an argument!”
“Hehhh hehe” Dennis chuckles from the middle of the crowd, “C’mon you guys, if we’re not fast enough we’ll have to wait ages for a table!”
“Cindy’s got issues, Dee. I think she needs therapy.”
“What I need right now is a drink” she says, vents, but when she looks over her shoulder I’m already signaling Dennis with my thumb sticking out to my lips, meaning booze.

All the girls of December

2010-12-12T14:31:00.002-02:00

We’re all at this bar for some year-end party and I think Maddie’s coming on to me you know all whispering close to my ear and the touching too— especially the touching but the power’s out because of a fallen light pole or something— the power’s out on the entire goddamn grid and the bar’s dark and the free drinks amount to nothing and she ends up brushing me off even though it’s not even what, eight or nine in the evening and I think I’m drunk already. So then I leave— I really do.

But before that I was sort of saying this whole amount of crap not to Maddie but to the tall brunette with the implants but we were just laughing it off but this is De-cem-ber for chrissakes and I’m supposed to have lots of great sex in December but December, 2010 sort of carries the same bad vibe as the rest of the year and this just sucks man. So I get nothing at all— and just leave.

I walk home the whole hour-and-a-half— thinking all kinds of trash even though I’m quite prone to text-messaging Dennis and begging him to take me to a nightclub, any nightclub really as long as there’s enough champagne and loud music but I don’t.

I don’t because all of a sudden I’m walking by that same burger joint I once went with you and Paola and Paola’s boyfriend like a decade ago and Paola’s boy-toy was named after Italian food even though she was two-timing him with Luke, good old Luke with the sideburns and the attitude and all the pot he kept stashed in his refrigerator I think for moisture and whatever befell that crazy old kid anyhow?— It was in the same night I met your brother, then 12 and it was the fist time I ever heard of Harry Potter because he was reading it and it made such a big impression on me because he was only 12 and reading it in a foreign language, and after that your mother told me I had a firm handshake. We made out on the couch at your grandma’s then went over to Paola’s where we made out on her mother’s couch too. But that was ten years ago and memory blurs, fact becomes fiction becomes fact.

Also right in front of the burger joint— you wouldn’t believe the coincidence— else Jung’s synchronicity — lies Helga’s loft, one of those cool, expensive two-story apartments entirely in off-white and Helga is this tall, blue-eyed girl from Norway— from honest-to-god Norway where trolls live whom I met walking down the street a December some three years ago and we went out for a short while then she started with madcap ideas about moving in together and I simply disappeared, man.

Then a few days ago...

Then a few days ago I was browsing Leon Vickers’ profile on Facebook and there was this note from sweet little TJ— Leon’s friend from a few years back with whom I went out also in December but she dumped me by phone on Xmas eve and it kind of sucked. There was this particular Sunday in December, 2006 that sweet little TJ and I stayed in bed from dawn to dusk and only stopped fooling around to eat (in bed) and to watch Sid & Nancy on DVD (also in bed) then she finally told me she was up for everything, anything but a few days after that she called me up and told me she was going back to her fiancé. I asked her if that was that and she said it was indeed. Merry Xmas I told her back.
Later on when I was having dinner with Jimmy he asked why the back of my hands were all marked and bruised and I just smiled in return. But there in Leon Vicker’s profile in Facebook a few days ago sweet little TJ looked so old, so miserably old and married and soiled and she was just 19 back then: Maybe it was the make-up but she looked so goddamn old and her smile just seemed to curve at all the wrong angles it just killed me, Lyla. It was so sad my heart just sank.

Then there was December last year when this former girlfriend, Jimmy’s cousin the dead-ringer for the ghost-eyed hot chick from the vampire flicks stood me up on New Year’s Eve at Dennis’ and I think we never really spoke again after that even though there’d been this passionate kiss in the rain the month before when we attempted to reconcile.

Looking back there was also that New Year’s Eve at the turn of the twenty-first century— necking with Gwen in the dark, on a mattress on the ground— at her rich dad’s time-shared apartment at some beach wherever where rich doctors time-share apartments for their daughters to take lost boys and make out on mattresses on the ground just before dawn, with that dope Harvey Apollo snoring on the bunk-bed right next to us but dopey Harvey Apollo never said a word about it during breakfast the next day, whatta pal.

Then of course there were also all the gloomy, dark Decembers wasted away with Franny, with poor doomed Franny whom I guess I might have loved or not either way all those Decembers amounted to nothing at all in the end either.

But it’s December all over again and it’s warm and stuffy and I’m supposed to get laid a lot not sulk. This one’s been such a fucked up lousy year and I can’t even remember the way you look like anymore— I can’t remember the sound of your voice or which movies you liked not even the smell of your sweat— All I wanna do right now is slip on that iPod, Sinéad O’Connor singing The Last Day of Our Acquaintance, pop a couple of pills, turn off the lights, turn on the A/C to make the world of my bedroom so very cool and I want to let go hey Lyla one of these days I’m gonna cash in what little I have and pack my bags and just go, man— disappear— sublimate from this goddamn world else simply slash my wrists, jump off this eleventh floor window, blow my damn head off, because I’m so jaded— so sick of wearing this same old wrongskin, so bored, sick and tired of waiting for the world to end but it never does:

To hell with tomorrow: I need my fix of today right now, tonight, and I don’t even like it in here that much anymore.

Still life, with irony

2010-12-06T19:37:00.001-02:00

It’s a warm Thursday night after the rain and I’m sitting on a concrete bench at the park, watching the tall illuminated Christmas tree in the distance from the opposite side of the lake. I’m holding my legs tight against my body, crossed over at the shins, waiting for the sweat to cool off my shirt before going home for dinner.

The bright Christmas lights flicker on and off and shift to a different color following a fixed pattern only to start again at the beginning: It goes from red to white to green, then to a myriad of variant pulsing abstract drawings shadowdancing in white, before going back to red again.

If you want me to be perfectly honest with you it’s pretty lame as far as Christmas trees go but I stay like that indefinitely anyhow and lose track of time altogether. There’s nothing going on in my mind and it just feels like touching something, somewhere else entirely as if plucking a piece off creation and hiding it in a box underneath god’s bed while he sleeps soundly, oblivious of myself: All my past tomorrows melt away into ensuing yesterdays— everything connecting then falling apart then re-connecting, etc— very, very limited in range and scope and wingspan and with this clear end in sight, dreadfully so— it kind of sucks in that aspect but not a lot, not really, no big news here right?— but I just shrug and choose to ignore everything because it’s not really making much sense and all in all that’s one cheap Christmas tree over there anyway.

Then there’s this deep voice booming from out of nowhere asking me if I plan on staying around here much longer. It goes something like this: “Do you plan on staying around here much longer?”
When I turn around I see a figure clad entirely in back— the security guard droning around nearby as far as short-lived metaphors go, telling me it’s well past ten and he needs to lock up the gate, and if I choose to stay I’ll end up having to climb over the fence in order to go home.
I frown for a split-second then tell him I’m pretty sure that gate isn’t usually locked before eleven. He says it’s his first day on the job.
“Hey congrats then, man” I tell him as I stand up and shake the dirt from the bench off my ass with a slap to my shorts, then bid him goodbye and trudge home for a shower and some dinner.

I’m quite positive there’s a message in all of this somewhere, somehow but just look at that tree again, will you? It’s so half-assed it just kills me, perish the thought.

“Let the games begin!”

2010-11-29T19:47:00.002-02:00

I.
“You look like crap,” says my cousin who’s standing on the sidewalk before me near the entrance to his building. It’s 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday and I’m crouched by the curb, tying the shoelaces on my battered Mizunos and when I start to look up at him the first thing I notice is a very large dragon tattooed on his left shin, crawling all the way up to the thigh. His legs are slender and smooth, shaven entirely. It takes me half a minute to figure the large blocky ‘M’ with a dot above it embroidered on his cap: It stands for iron man, that triathlon… sports… thing.
“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” I tell him as if apologizing and of course in the back of my head it secretly translates to my not getting any sleep at all, having come over almost directly from Jimmy’s party the night before.
“I can smell the booze from up here, you know” he says with a smirk but not disapprovingly.
We are running together in this 10K race competition this morning.

II.
Most of last night I remember in brief flashes of memory:
The last thing I remember well is I think Cindy standing on the other side of the counter, asking me why the champagne on her glass looks different from everyone else’s, redder. It’s because she had poured herself the cheap-ass Lambrusco instead and never realized.
She ended up throwing up over a wastebasket at the parking lot before we made it to Kay’s for some life-saving pasta after the party. By then she already had three or four band-aids stuck to her ass, over the fabric of her dress. I’d found those in her purse and I kept putting them there every time she bowed down to vomit as Dennis held back her hair.

Then there was when I went to the freezer and found the bottle of Stolichnaya. I went up to Monika and Martha and when I was just about to pour some orange juice on my glass Monika reprimanded me with a slap to my wrist. “We’ll drink it straight” she said with the usual stern look and icemaiden composure, which after a friendship of 15 years I'm pretty sure mean an inner smile.
I ended up pouring some orange juice after she’d turned her back to talk to Martha anyhow.

We left the party with Kay. Monika was in the front seat with him and me and Dennis and Cindy sat in the back. Dennis had a plastic cup filled to the brim with Baileys and we were drinking it all up as if chocolate milk. “Who wants an espresso?” he’d slur before passing it around. Martha followed us behind with Bryce in his car.
I have no idea where we got the Baileys from. I think it was Martha, who poured the entire bottle on that plastic cup before we left. I think I remember her giggling because she’d spilled much of it on her cleavage or something.
The rest of it was mostly a blur, I think.

III.
I only fully realized what I’m doing well into the race, there by the third or fourth kilometer. My sweat reeks of stale champagne and I’m panting like a dog, and even though I’m not exactly experiencing my top performance I’m actually holding my own, surprisingly enough given my poor condition: Looks like all the training in the park must be paying off after all, what do you know.

It’s then, halfway into the course when I start noticing this sharp pain on my forearm and when take a good look at it there it is, an inch-wide wedge-shaped burn mark that as sure as hell wasn’t there the night before.
Later on today, when we’ll meet up Jimmy for dinner he’ll tell me he’d burned me with somebody else’s lighter during the party to stop me from stealing all the strawberries from the topping of his birthday cake.
“Really?” I’ll ask him. “Wow.”

I end up finishing the race in 47 minutes, 29 seconds, though: 273 out of I think 2162: Not bad at all, you know? That’s well above average, especially for a drunken idiot. Not bad at all indeed.
My cousin of course finishes it in 39’, and his brother in 42’, and as we’re standing by the swimming pool at this swanky country club they belong to, sometime later, they get me to enroll at this other race coming up next Sunday.
This time though, I think I’ve learned my lesson and I hope to do it clean.

Lighten up, chum

2010-11-22T19:36:00.000-02:00

I.
There’s a big-screen LCD TV in the middle of the living room when I come home from work on Friday. It’s not supposed to be here and it sure as hell wasn’t here earlier in the morning either. The fruit cake leftovers in the kitchen point out to my parents having come over in the afternoon. They have a spare key.

I stand motionless in front of the new TV set for I think fifteen or twenty minutes, pissed off as hell. As a personal rule I’m not supposed to take anybody else’s money or expensive presents in life— least of all from my parents— because it sort of muddles everything and it would simply justify everyone calling me a spoiled brat and I guess that bottom line, all mistakes have got to be ultimately my own.
So there I stand trying to make up my mind, halfway between returning the gift and dropkicking it all the way down from the eleventh floor, wondering what sound it would make as it reached the ground

I’m tired, though:
I’m spiritually tired and I’ve been dragging chains as long as the goddamn Titanic lately and this has been a shitty year all and all and I could use a break and I guess fighting mom over a TV set would be something of… ahnn counter-productive. So I don’t.

Of course by this time I’ve already sat down on the couch and I’m sort of going up and down the channels with the remote and I’ve started wondering if I could get away with breaking that rule just this once, that a tiny wee peccadillo into the evening wouldn’t really hurt in the big picture, right? Okay, maybe just dent it a bit but I could live with a dent, couldn’t I?
Okay then, just this once.

Hey, big screen TV, then.
Cool.

II.
The following morning there’s a scorching sun up in the sky and down here on Earth I’m going to the park to run a few laps around the lake. I end up bumping into this cousin of mine who used to be like, really, really fat until three years ago and now he’s an honest-to-god athlete whereas me, I’m, I dunno, fit, lean? It’s conceivable I’m actually faster than he is for short distance sprints but he’s a long-distance runner with at least twice the stamina and that’s what it counts.

I am able to stick with him for most of his running, matching his speed, though, and as we’re finishing off the last lap (his fourth, my second) we’re both dead tired and I ask him whether he’s ever thrown up after pushing it real hard when running.
He looks at me mystified.

“What? I’m just asking” I tell him, “It’s not like I’m throwing up right now”.
“No, it’s cool,” he says. “Just as long as you throw up away from chicks and stuff”.
“Like, have you ever…?”
“Thrown up after running?” he asks me in return. “Happens all the time if you drink milk shortly before pushing it real hard.”
“Milk? Really?”
“Oh yes. Are you used to drink milk before running?”
“All the time,” I tell him.
“Dude, it’s a no-brainer,” he says. “You drink up a lot of milk before training and once you get on with your ribcage heaving like fuck, up and down, panting like a dog, you’re bound to projectile-vomit anyhow.”
“So it’s not just me?”
“Nope,” he says.
“That’s reassuring,” I reply, and then he reminds me we’re both enrolled to this 10 or 15K running event the following Sunday and I tell him about Jimmy’s birthday party the night before.

He just smiles and reminds me that milk isn’t the only kind of beverage that induces throwing up.

III.
Shortly afterwards I’m walking around the park aimlessly with my iPod on, barefooted, t-shirt off and all that, and then I find myself standing before the bronze statue of the WWII aviator—and true enough he’s always there, year in and year out, and meeting him is like marking the spiritual transition from Spring to Summertime, like a still-life psychopomp of sorts.

And you know what? That’s true enough.

Here I am under this terrific sun, with a big screen TV that dropped from out of nowhere and I’ve just been green-lit to spew milk after exercising. People should actually pay to live like me. I mean, this is the life!

What else can you expect out of it, right?

Introspective, ‘10

2010-11-16T18:55:00.000-02:00

There are two little girls nine, maybe ten once I step into the elevator and they are giggling but not at one another but in fact at their iPhones: “And what time do you think is there in Europe right now?” the blonde asks the brunette without taking her eyes off the mobile. “Dunno,” she says and both of them resume giggling.
“Nine p.m. in London and ten p.m. in Budapest,” I say very matter-of-factly, as if not there at all. “It moves up a notch on the clock as you head East.”
“How about the USA?” the brunette asks.
“Seven… six-five-four,” I count down out aloud and tap my fingers on my thigh with each digit subtracted. “Four in the afternoon in New York. That’s Eastern Standard Time.”
“Do you work with clocks?” one of them asks me. I forget which. I just smile and say nothing in return.
The elevator stops at their floor and they get off: As the door closes the blonde girl turns back, looks at me puzzled and asks whether there’s any Daylight Savings Time in North America. “Yup,” I tell her, “Only it’s kind of backwards from here.”
“But do you work with clocks?” she insists.
“I know time.”

Much later that night I’m watching an old Woody Allen movie on TV, in black and white. The living room is dark and the blinds are half-opened so as to let some of the moonlight in: When I was a kid they used to show Woody Allen movies on TV some Saturday nights and I’d watch them sometimes alone and sometimes with my parents—
—I know time, I’m saying to the little girl as if Holden Caulfield to Phoebe but it sounds a bit askew, somewhat off-centered, without direction: Suppose I could backtrack every year and start anew, and they would still come out muddy in the end—
— “Not everyone gets corrupted,” says the Mariel Hemingway character to the Woody Allen character when the movie ends. I’d never get what she meant by that when I was a kid.

And I…
I made this real lousy joke the other day.
There was this photograph of my sneakers lying around my living room at 6 a.m. that I’d posted on Facebook for no special reason other than goofing around and there was this book on the floor nearby. I think you couldn’t even see the cover but Jimmy somehow spotted it dead-on and said William Burroughs made for some rather unsavory reading that early in the morning. I told him I’d rather have Burroughs for breakfast than Sylvia Plath for supper.
It remained a pretty good joke up until I realized it left a bad aftertaste in my mouth that clung for days and simply would not wear off: All in all it’s been that shitty a year.

I think the Ramones wrote a song about this, too...

2010-11-16T18:54:00.000-02:00

It’s a little past three in the morning and Spring outside is stuffy and warm. Inside we’re at this party even though my alarm clock will go off in a few hours but never mind that, I’ve been trading up the vodkas for the champagne and white wine so it’s mostly cool now, it really is.

I’m talking to this guy I’ve just met, we’re sitting side by side at he end of the room talking crap and kind of trying to outdo one another making funny comments about the mid-80s videos on the big screen TV on the wall in front of us, in the distance.
All of a sudden he leans over, whispers something in my ear.

I say nothing but stand up and trudge my way to the kitchen with heavy steps, trying my best so as not to fall down. The kitchen is empty and I close the door so as to find myself some silence and peace— I could definitely use a glass of water for a change but all I find is some orange juice. I take a large gulp straight from the bottle and wipe my mouth with the back of my hands. And then it finally connects, clicks. Startled, I put down the orange juice and return to the living room:

“Now wait a second,” I lean over and ask the guy as I try my best to refrain from laughing. “Did you just ask me if I want to sniff some glue?!”
He smiles wide, gives me the two thumbs up.
I burst into laughter.

Silverfish, silverfish attack!

2010-11-07T21:01:00.004-02:00

It's a silverfish attack and they seem to eat silicon...

Indestructible

2010-10-31T21:30:00.000-02:00

I’m sitting on the couch on a Monday evening with nothing on but my shorts, listening to the heavy rain as it pours down outside. I stay like that, quiet and still, for a long while. This hasn’t been the greatest of days, see.

What were the lines again? Party-boy thinks he’s indestructible. That has got to be a personal favorite, Lyla. That’s what they have been calling me now, you hear? Everyone, from Jimmy to Dee and Kay to Cybill and to god knows who else: Party-boy. Space cadet. The big kid. A screw-up. And true to form, I guess I’ve pretty much earned each one of those.
My mother came by the other day: She asked me how I was and I gave her the usual smirk and told her, “You know me ma, I go lightly”— pun intended and all that. She just looked at me disapprovingly and reminded me I’m over thirty years old. The emphasis was all hers.

It’s raining outside and this hasn’t been the greatest of years, see— and if you want me to be perfectly honest with you, these haven’t been the greatest last five or six years either and I guess in the end it all sort of boils down to my total and complete inability to adapt to life after College. I mean the joke has got to be on me on this one, right?
Textbook irony.

Then I stand up and walk away from the couch, into the kitchen. I open the freezer and I’m sort of bummed to find the bottle of Stoli I’d bought to play Monopoly on Saturday night with Billy and his wife almost empty. What were Billy’s words again? “Man, you drank more than half that bottle by yourself and you’re still standing!”
So I take the Stoli with me, and on a second thought I go back to the freezer and get the unopened Absolut as well.

Then I walk over to the bathroom, get the small unmarked plastic container behind the medicine cabinet and empty its contents in the palm of my hands, leaving discarded blisters behind and a tiny constellation of anxiolytics and tranquilizers plunging down into the toilet. The vodkas follow suit, oozing slowly, half-frozen. It takes me an eternity to empty everything, or so it seems.

The muscles on my back go taut, I clench my teeth: I’d like to tell you I’m doing this because I’m clean now, because I’m stronger than all of this but... Truth is, I fall down and fail all the time, repeatedly: If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year is that I’m not indestructible.

But I’m goddamn resilient, so I end up flushing everything down anyway.
Then I go back to the living room as the rain turns into a storm. There’s lightning now.

Then I look to my battered old Mizunos standing by the door, like twin stray puppies just begging to go outside. I put them on. I also pick up a dirty, smelly t-shirt from yesterday’s wash pile and put it on, too. Then I go to the park to sweat it out under the heavy Monday evening rain.

Down all the days, '10

2010-10-24T21:30:00.000-02:00

“Are you even listening to what I’m saying?,” Dee’s friend asks from across the table and if I take a step back down through these last couple of years it will just feel like some old routine that’s been rehearsed indefinitely with nothing good ever having coming out of it. Dee’s friend owns this jazzy alternative bar near my place and Dee often goes there for a nightcap and some conversation and sometimes I’ll tag along like Sal Paradise to his Dean Moriarty, more interested on their vodkas with pineapple than anything else, really.

It’s a Tuesday evening and we are having pizza and wine at this restaurant we’re quite partial to, coincidently enough just across the street from our old College campus: It used to be a derelict Colonial-style house back then, since remodeled.

It takes me a few seconds to connect, though, and once Dee’s friend’s question finally registers I find myself looking up at her from my glass and in the back of my head I’m frantically diving in for any last words that made the cut before I zoned out entirely: “You were talking about the sliding metal door with a view to the kitchen...”
“I was,” she says with eyes locked against mine.
“Right,” I nod in response, deadpan as hell, as I pour myself more wine.
“Is he always like this?” she asks Dee to her left.
“He’s amoral, that’s what we all like about him,” says Dee. “Plus he’s kind of polite too.”

She frowns upon hearing Dee’s words then looks back at me, puzzled, and I have a brain-dead half-smile on my face for no special reason whatsoever.
“Yeah, I’m kind of polite too,” I echo Dee’s words out aloud but I’ve already drifted off to somewhere else entirely.

Maddie & the Bunnymen

2010-10-17T17:33:00.001-02:00

“You’re probably the only person here not wearing black,” says Maddie very matter-of-factly as we climb down the stairs into the concert hall towards the GA floor: Another week, another rock concert.

I’m wearing battered jeans and a forest-green t-shirt under this very old plaid flannel shirt that must be over ten years old. My sneakers, dirty and threadbare, are the same Mizunos I use for jogging. Maddie on the other hand is sharply dressed in tight-fitting black denims and a tighter-fitting black blouse, with high-heeled leather boots reaching close to her knees. Her strawberry-blond hair is long and straight, cascading neatly all the way to her lower back. I give her the once-over from head to toe as she steps ahead of me and you’d swear anyone with those abs and that ass and that skin should be at least fifteen years younger.

The lack of a swimsuit model bod notwithstanding, the rest of the audience shares both Maddie’s preference for color and age range.
As we stand in front of the stage waiting for the show to start, she notices this short, stubby character in a black leather jacket with a bald patch and a bad curly ponytail: Maddie tells me she clearly remembers the guy as a regular from her clubbing days— standing atop the stairway at this nightclub or another back in ’88 or ’89, wearing black lipstick, all coked out, ghosts in his eyes. “He hasn’t changed much, though,” she says, “I mean apart from the goth make-up, thank god, because that would be downright scary!”
I can’t help but nod in agreement: “You have a mighty memory.”

Echo & the Bunnymen are playing São Paulo again and post-punk bands from the isles are bound to attract that sort of audience. It’s my second Bunnymen concert and Maddie’s third or fourth; she’s probably the only other Bunnymen fan I know.

The Bunnymen are playing their most classic album in full, backed by a small six-person orchestra of strings: The songs from 1984’s Ocean Rain are moody with a somber, heavy tempo and the lyrics are mostly overwrought save for the Singles— it’s an album to be listened at night, in the dark, by yourself, but whenever the Bunnymen play live they play with very strong guitars and a deep bassline— and the audience goes absolutely crazy.
And this time, though, differently from the Bon Jovi concert last week, I actually know the words.

Once the show starts Maddie is dancing right in front of me: She dances softly with her eyes closed, in quiet introspection, her arms wrapped around her body— quite the opposite to my jumping around like a spastic fifteen year old, shouting and yelling and screaming all the time.

Maddie is married, though, and her husband looks just like Brad Pitt— so once she ties her aforementioned long, straight strawberry-blond hair up in a bun behind her head and a trickle of sweat runs down the exposed back of her neck, I’m relegated to just imagining how nibbling at her earlobes must feel like— I can taste the salt of her sweat on my tongue just as I can taste the metaphors from Ian McCulloch’s drunken crooning onstage: Another week, another playing the heterosexual gay friend at a rock concert for a hot chick.

Then sure: I’ll text-message Alyx once the show’s through now that she’s back in town and I’ll ask her if she’s up for something tonight. She’ll tell me she’s already tucked in beneath a pile of comforters and maybe another day, who knows. Then I’ll just shrug with indifference and give Maddie the once-over for the umpteenth time as we leave the concert hall through the parking lot, to look for a cab home: She’ll light up a cigarette and lean against the wire fence by the sidewalk, looking sexy as hell as she buttons up her black overcoat against the late-night cold wind.

CODA:
And from the lyrics to tonight’s Ocean Rain, then:
“All hands on deck at dawn /
Sailing to sadder shores /
Your port in my heavy storms /
Harbours the blackest thoughts.”

(Nobody left but us these days)

2010-10-10T10:31:00.001-03:00

You upstage the mundane with grace, my dear, he said, typed Montgomery Peer, quoting himself in staccato bursts from the keyboard, stopping once in a while for one allegedly-last sip from the coffee mug on his desk, and back again.
Peer then bit his lower lip, just slightly, before clicking the mouse to send Cybill the e-mail: In Peer’s private little world, he would know he liked people when he’d start to behave like a hyperactive fifteen year-old next to them.

This happened of course in the ensuing morning after all had been said and done and the entire Wednesday had been put to waste and quite properly so: It was something of a dog-day for everyone that reached its climax halfway across a bridge en route to the stadium, walking by the thronged traffic across the river, Peer looking over his shoulder to see Cybill as she actually leaped a stray dog in the way and he smiled first to laugh later.

Peer’d told her, more like an epigram than a joke, really, that if he’d had a time-machine then & there, he would end up mailing himself a letter, to two or say, three years before, and it’d begin with, Dear Peer, and this is how it ends.
The rest of the letter he kept to himself in the back of his head: Not his future to foretell but wishful figments to crash headfirst into— Either way, she did do it with grace as she’d been doing everything else ever since he first met her.

That Wednesday peaked with the ersatz Captain Crash and his stand-in for the Beauty-Queen from Mars shouting from the top of their lungs as the last of the great Arena Rock kings, hailing straight from Jersey (where else?) blasted onstage for close to three hours—There are all those things you’ll go through in life without being able to tell people because of the rules, the laws, the mores, the golden bands and binding ties— yet Peer couldn’t help, avoid, detain himself from falling in love with the girl— well maybe not love-love, not really, be honest, but lightly, more like having each heartbeat of his skipped to match each word from her lips, above the din, the chanting of the crowd, Cybill’s voice risen over all those as she sang along and followed the chorus— so ladylike, like some blueblood royal family or something, but also so girlish too— in jeans and a sweatshirt— plus those ubiquitous cool, sexy, catlike Bette Davis eyes— Singing on, playfully, whimsically, sure to have a sore throat the next day— a singalong catharsis from the drudgeries of everyday and all the confessions she’d thought best to never tell him but maybe hint at, at best, whatever— Whatta pal! thought Peer with a sincere smile to himself.

“These days are fast...” she sang on until her voice maxed out and ultimately gave in.
GOGOGO, he never stopped.

—Then bumming a ride home afterwards with a chapter of the secret society of the super-villains, more by chance than anything else: There in the car, if you heard it carefully enough and really paid attention, you’d end up plucking a few stray truths instead of simply leaping over them too, like with a stray dog on a bridge.

Men in cities

2010-10-03T20:26:00.002-03:00

Dear Lyla,
What can I say?

Bugsy Malone is on TCM tonight and it’s inevitably bound to take me back to an afternoon with you ten, eleven, twelve years ago over tex-mex burgers and onion rings.

Sometimes I find myself wishing things could have gone just a little different, you know, at least so I would know what to say to you when writing these posts: I don’t even remember what kind of movies you like and just the other day I was watching The Lady From Shanghai and I realized Orson Welles is such a dead ringer for Vince Vaughn and for the oddest of reasons I wanted to tell you right away. At least so as to know in which side of that fence you’d stand. Almost sent you an e-mail then & there, fact, and would’ve done it, all too true, if it weren’t such beyond all those rules we’ve never even bothered to actually make.

There’s this girl I know—her marriage hasn’t been going all too well lately—and we kind of like the same movies and the same songs so we get to talk a lot every now and then: Just the other day I had switched the background image on my computer at the office: I’d replaced Reneé Magritte’s The son of man for two pieces from Robert Longo’s Men in Cities series. Robert Longo was the guy who directed the video for New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle, just so that you know, and she did—and she walked over to my desk and made the usual funny remark that the two of us probably fell off the same spaceship, stuff like that.
I looked up at her and said that knowing there were still people like her around was the sole reason for my not slitting my wrists just yet—It was supposed to be a joke but it just didn’t come out like one, and quite honestly so. Sad but true. Thing is, she just looked at me and her eyes filled up and my eyes filled up too and she touched me very lightly on the shoulder, a gentle tap actually, and said she knew how tough things could get every now and then, and told me sometimes we just have to hang on.

I think it was the nicest thing someone’s ever told me in my life.

About a girl (a haiku)

2010-09-27T19:07:00.000-03:00

Conveying a new mood,
yet my tempo to unclog
-- Rain on, you damn bitch.

Spring, 2010 (Cassandra and the crown-prince of the Screwups)

2010-09-19T13:48:00.000-03:00

It’s a Thursday morning when Dee calls in to tell me he’s got the rest of the day off, then invites me for a luncheon at this real trendy, sort-of exclusive place he knows that only opens on weekdays for lunch.
I’m sitting atop my desk at the office looking past an ocean of cubicles, at the large windows that comprise the entire façade of the building, and the windows don’t open and all ants within are marching downtrodden, gray-faced, beat, and it’s such a lovely day outside with all the hallmarks of the first month of Spring—sunny but cool, with the buds at the trees starting to bloom and blossom—then all of a sudden the entire scene inside starts to seem so sad and forlorn that it ends up calling out for some needed distance from the Machine.
“Whatever, let’s do it” I tell him as I go through my appointments and deliverables for the rest of the day without too much care or regard, to shrug most of them off, then I rush past the doors, right through the elevators taking the stairs down instead, then go outside to finally hop a cab and GO!, man.

The restaurant is a cozy, cute little hallway that sits maybe ten, fifteen and then there’s a large counter with the cashier and the espresso machine, and besides those, two large freezers with take-outs for sale, and past them a large window up on the wall with a large white-tiled kitchen where all the action happens. We get to sit at an adjoining room, really an aisle or a corridor that ends at the restrooms and the funny trash bin that springs open automatically, where maybe five, six tables are lined up under a clear roof and it’s all sunlit inside and plants hang from vases overhead, and when I order the pasta with calamari and lemon, Dee advises me to go for the shrimp stroganoff instead.
“Stroganoff’s, like, too plebeian for an escapade,“ I tell him with a sneer. He says no, that I’m wrong because it’s their best or something, and I so stand corrected. We are served by the owners themselves, a trendy young couple in their mid-30s.

We talk of jobs and money and heartbreaks during lunch, maybe also gossip a little about people we know, then wrap up the conversation with the usual friendly competition of who’s got the darkest circles underneath the eyes. Dee always claims victory over this as usual, but it’s mostly out of sheer ego plus that disheveled widow’s peak thing that makes him look like a leaner, more fashionable Bela Lugosi. I let him be.

The flagship of the house, he explains, is the cheesecake with the homemade raspberry jam so we order two for dessert. The raspberry jam is actually pretty good, in fact probably the best raspberry jam I’ve had yet. Dee says it sells for forty bucks a jar if you want to take it home but I just shrug because I don’t really have anything to put that jam on in my refrigerator back home.

Before we leave I ask Dee if he thinks these days are ever going to end. He asks me what I mean and in return I ask doesn’t he feel there are missing pieces, holes in meaning, an overall lack in purpose? He asks me why would I actually want these days to end and I say nothing for a while. “I guess I don’t want them to end,” I finally respond with a cocky half-smile.

From the other side of the table he scratches the side of his head and instead of the expected dire fatalism out of some Brontë novel he tells he’s pretty sure things are going to turn out all right for me in the end. “Really?,” I ask him and he says yes, absolutely then proceeds to foretell all of our futures: Mine, Johnny’s, Bryce’s, I think Kay’s too, I fact everyone’s, packing some uncharacteristic unbridled optimism. “You’ll find someone cool enough in time, you’ll see.”
When I ask him if he’s just found religion or something he smiles and says no, but resumes the usual programming and says he’s probably dying before everyone else anyway. I decide it sounds far more fun if taken as a joke so I never question that assertion.

We part ways a few blocks from the restaurant—the two of us: Cassandra and the crown-prince of the Screwups—He goes to look up DVDs at the large FNAC nearby, his own fortunes to predict and an entire afternoon to lay waste to, while I walk slowly to a small plaza overhead to get a cab back to the office with either twenty or twenty thousand bucks in my wallet and nothing in particular to think of in the back of my head, as the flower buds and the trees bob and sway under the mild breeze of the early Spring afternoon.

Down to Earth

2010-09-13T19:47:00.001-03:00

First orbit:
“Yeah but I sort of already own Kill Bill on disk,” says Dee during lunch and from across the table I’m sitting with the small of my back against the red leather upholstery of the sofa, just watching the conversation in silence, not really participating nor paying much attention.
“But do you have it on Blue Ray or like, regular?,” asks the other guy, Dee’s friend, the lawyer, very casually.
“Regular,” Dee nods then picks up the last fried rice cake from the bowl at the center of the table and pours some ketchup on it. I remain silent, not really bored but obviously more interested in chewing on a fingernail until it stings then bleeds.
“And what kinds of movies do you like?,” the lawyer turns to me and asks but I’m too far away, zoned out, so it takes me about ten seconds to register the question and react.
“I don’t know,” I finally look up from a bleeding cuticle. “Movies in general, I guess.”
“No, really,” Dee explains, scholarly. “He’s like, really into movies and stuff.”
“You’re such a space cadet sometimes,” the lawyer tells me accusingly, “You know that?”

Second orbit:
“You’re not a teenager anymore, you know that?” asks this girl I work with as I’m watching her eat in the cramped office pantry while I sip from a cup of coffee. “Yet you insist on living like one.”
“Because I’m playing hooky from a very dull conference call right now?”
“Not that,” she says, emphasizing all the right words. “It’s just that I just can’t believe you actually think you can keep up with this lifestyle of yours for so much longer.”
“Like… which lifestyle?,” I ask, not understanding the question.
“Like living by yourself, not letting people in, not having anyone to care for,” she says with such gusto you’d swear she’s savoring every word. “That kind of stuff.”
“I don’t know,” I look up from my coffee and stare into empty space for a couple of seconds before continuing. “Maybe it’s just that I haven’t really found anyone to let in yet.”
“And have you been looking for that someone lately?,” she tilts her head to the side with a wry, condescending smile, and then I know I’m beaten.
“I guess I might have been playing hooky from lots of things lately…” I give her a shrug before finally leaving the room, maybe as a sign of things to come.

Third orbit:
“I think Capricorn is an earth sign or something,” she says just before the show starts. “Means you’re supposed to be very pragmatic and everything has got to be either black or white with you, right or wrong, no gray areas in-between.”
“And what sign are you?,” I ask her in return.
“Scorpio,” she says.
“That’s an earth sign too, right?”
“I’m not sure, I don’t think so…”
“Well, I don’t think scorpions are like, supposed to fly like those big mean cockroaches and stuff,” I tell her with a half-smile. “That would be pretty goddamn scary…”
“No, that’s cool, I don’t think scorpions fly, either,” she says and returns the smile but understanding that smile is like divining the future—
—and I can’t—
—so I don’t—
Then the lights go out and the curtains go up, putting the conversation to a halt and leaving me slightly unsure if I have just entered one of those gray areas I’m supposed not to like, because yes, they do suck big time and I’d so rather be treading on surer ground than standing on these still waters.

Final orbit:
“You’re standing on Rio,” says Dee whom coincidently enough has just arrived from Rio. We are both standing in my living room, unrolling the Patrick Nagel print I bought him as a gift on eBay and had just arrived in the mail a few days ago. It’s Sunday evening and we still have some time to kill before picking up Kay’s wife for dinner.
“Actually, I think I’m standing on Texas,” I tell him with my mouth full, chewing from a Toblerone bar as I pin down the remaining loose corner of the poster sheet to the carpet with a plastic water bottle.
“I thought it was called Rio,” he says. “Because of the Duran Duran album, you know?”
“Yep,” I take another bite from the chocolate. “But it’s called Texas anyway.”
He nods, then takes a photograph of the print with his iPhone to post on Facebook.
“You’re not going to the restaurant wearing those, are you?,” he asks me accusingly once he notices the edge of my foot was caught in the picture and I’m wearing cheap rubber flip-flops. “You’re such a space cadet sometimes…”

A transit of Venus

2010-09-06T18:58:00.004-03:00

It’s a Monday morning there about eight or eight-thirty and I’m sitting atop an unoccupied desk at the office leaning my head back against the partition separating this cubicle from the next one, as I wait for this girl I work with to wrap up some test run with an ERP application or something, which I’m supposed to oversee but I’m not entirely sure.

“Hung over or still drunk this time around?” she asks once she notices I have my eyes closed as if basking under the fluorescent light above. I’m figuring that can’t be good in any way but to hell with it, really.
“I don’t know,” I shrug without opening my eyes, then pinch the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger. “Little bit of both, I guess.”

Last night, see, I was sitting at this plush sofa at the lounge of the nightclub, talking with this really cute girl I’ve been sort of interested in for the past couple of months—we were watching the bartenders work, trying to figure out who’s gay and who’s not—when I dared her to go over and hit on the one who looked like Clark Kent (albeit a very big, built, muscular Clark Kent), just to be sure.
She looked at me and said, absolutely, she’s take up the wager for a ticket to see Cats: She even has student discount and pays half-price (she reasoned).

“You’re on,” I told her, all cool and all that, but somehow it seemed a lot more amusing before she actually went up to the bar and started whispering something in Clark the bartender’s ears and he whispered back in hers, both giggling as they went, then she came back a while later with a big grin on her face:
“Nope,” she said with a sneer, “Definitely not gay”.

She raised her hand as if calling for a high-five then sat down by my side: She said his name was Francisco, then reminded me I owed her the ticket to see the damn show.

Someone took a picture of the group as we’d arrived that night:
The dancefloor was closed and being used as the entrance to the club, so that you’d come in through this large empty room with all the multicolored LED lighting embedded on the wall, blinking, flashing on and off, changing colors—our silhouettes pitted against the concrete columns like tiny Venus blotted out in transit against the glare of the Sun—same thing when we left, the whole thing seasonal, cyclical, purely incidental—the sheer logic or reason of the moment scattered in the night, like buckshot or an archipelago.

Saturn at equinox

2010-08-30T19:04:00.000-03:00

“No, I’m actually a year older than you” she says from across the table during lunchtime while forking any remaining stray fries on her plate. It’s past two p.m. and we have probably lost all track of time altogether but I figure to hell with it, I haven’t really seen this girl in what, say one or two years.
She lays down the fork with one last lone fry still on it, uneaten, and looks back at me with a smile so open, so beautiful, really, that I could easily mistake it for something else entirely: “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

I frown and don’t say anything, wondering whether there’s actually any flirting going on in here, and if so, which one of us is actually doing it.

I make some stupid half-assed remark, supposedly funny but not really and clearly out of place. She rolls back her eyes a bit, disapprovingly. “Either way, it’s not really like we can postpone the decision for so much longer” she continues, “Else I’ll get to that age when the woman has got to start considering freezing her eggs or something.”

“Like… why?” I ask, completely missing the point.

“Because there’s an age limit, see, a safe margin,” she says then drones on about the risks and hardships of human fertilization after a certain age and all that but to tell you the truth it’s kind of lengthy and she makes it sound so serious and grown-up and stuff like that, that I end up zoning out of the conversation altogether and only get to pick a few scattered bits here and there.

“By the way, how old do you think Rick Astley was when he did that Never Gonna Give You Up video anyhow?” I ask her from out of the blue.
She says nothing, bows down her head and starts playing with the golden ring around her finger for a long while, slowly.

Silence reigns absolute for the next full minute or two.

“What…?” she finally says and looks up but not to me but to the pleasant sunny afternoon outside the restaurant: It’s still the last month of Winter, though, and it’s one of those years in which there’s an extra day until the Spring equinox comes along.

Like potshot guessing at a worldmap

2010-08-23T21:01:00.001-03:00

------------------------------------------------
Note on the following text: This is a little experiment in which I’ve tried to combine the different writing styles of two of my favorite authors: the terse, emotionlessly-vague sentences of Bret Easton Ellis, with Jack Kerouac’s bop-like spontaneous prose-- then taking it to the max by forfeiting the use of punctuation altogether, kind of like Kerouac on steroids (or benny!).

It’s not so bad when you read it aloud to yourself, you know. It kind of worked…
------------------------------------------------

It’s a cold morning there around 7am two weeks ago and Zee and I are waiting for the bus to work kind of sleepeyed bummed nothing else to do but throw around some meaningless casual conversation then she says she’s taking some days off from the office pretty soon and going on vacations but she’s got no idea to where she’s supposed to go to which I say maybe you should just like take potshot guessing at a worldmap I suggest like in that movie The Last King of Scotland or something but only the guy never really went to Scotland but somewhere else entirely and I don’t think a girl like you would you know actually enjoy going to such a place to which she promptly responds yes I know that film but she halts for a while as if savoring the taste of her own reply in midstream but without really smiling see and it’s a little unsettling when she does that but a good cute unsettling then finally continues the sentence by saying yeah that I’m right and she’d never actually enjoy going to such a place indeed anyhow and I think one of us ends up suggesting Argentina or Canada or wherever but I’m not really sure which one of us because I’m not paying much attention to what we’re saying but in fact only to herself because look at her willya she’s way too classy for this class clown antics of mine.

The conversation ends just as it started in the first place and I pretty much forget about it for the next couple of weeks and I’m pretty sure I don’t even get to see Zee again in those intervening days maybe except for the odd scattered note left on Facebook or Messenger or something but that’s strictly incidental.

Either way time passes and it’s a slow day at the office so I’m fooling around Goggle looking up sites on Reductive Art like you know like Minimalism and stuff like that and sort of trying to either remember or discover the name of this really cool painting by I think this either Swiss or Swedish artist I once saw on an exhibit at the park near my place one summer a few years ago and it was a painting with red and pink-hued parallel bars stacked against an all-black backdrop but I’m sort of momentarily distracted when this tall gorgeous brunette with the implants walks by my desk and what I end up typing on the search engine is a bunch of utter rubbish say random letters all bundled up so when I press enter Google Images flashes up these magnificent photographs of red and pink-hued sunsets over beaches in Bali Indonesia instead which suddenly takes me back to the conversation with Zee and I start to giggle because it’s funny kind of like when crazy people say they get orders from the devil to do something or go somewhere but let’s just face it if you’re like me and you don’t have a purpose or place to go to in your life because the whole gig’s pretty much shot after you turn 30 anyway you’d pretty much start taking up suggestions from anyone or anything or anyhow wouldn’t you say?

Three haikus

2010-08-16T08:00:00.002-03:00

I.
Maybe, then, tonight
walking home at two a.m.
-—tomorrow beckons.

II.
This girl I know, see-—
she will stop in midsentence
Like sunlight through dust.

III.
Let it rip, he says,
and smiles in his black denims-—
Outside it's August.

Big city serenade (Broadway Boogie-Woogie)

2010-08-10T09:50:00.000-03:00

I.
It’s a little past four a.m. on a very cold Saturday morning and I’m leaning with my back against this tree, out in the darkened streets, now just a few blocks away from home: Eating this chocolate bar I’ve just bought at the convenience store at the gas station where the attendant told me I was not supposed to lean with my back against the gas pump for a change: “I’m like, sobering up,” I told him, but maybe slurring just a little too much.
The streets are all quiet and empty outside and you can almost touch the silence as it drapes down over the bleak reddish skies, invisibly crisscrossing the ether in-between the buildings like a ragged, thick old comforter. The city opens its arms wide ands draws me in: I take a deep breath and don’t fight the ebbing away.

I’m looking at this specific ten-story apartment building from the mid-sixties as it protrudes from behind the flower shop at street level, across the street from the tree I’m standing against, particularly mesmerized by the way in which two prominent broad brown-colored strips akin to bas-relief protrusions run down the façade and sandwich a third line in the middle, pushed back about a feet into the structure, in off-white—the elevator shaft, maybe.

There are minuscule windows peppering the brown columns like squared portholes, and at this time of the night—of the morning—only two or three of them are lit: It reminds me of this painting I once saw when I was a kid, I think it was ’91 and I was in New York with my parents: We were at the Museum of Modern Art and I vividly recall escaping my father’s obsession with the Modiglianis, then standing transfixed before Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie for a long while: My father asked me if I was really that much into abstract art. I told him that it looked to me as if someone had frozen an Atari game halfway into the playing.
This very building now, see, some twenty years later, also reminds of that painting.

II.
If I close my eyes tonight and let all the silence crash in, the imaginary sounds of the chocolate bar breaking apart in my hands then melting away under my tongue become the very chorus of this lullaby I’m humming to the city: Like a thin, lean Buddha soaked in vodka under his own private Bodhi tree, praising these cold 4 a.m. empty streets—baptized in the champagne and oysters over the checkered tablecloth at a French bistro downtown, somewhere—meeting with the godhead at the dance floor of a nightclub or another—communing with the spiritual glitterati fellaheen standing in line for a table on Sunday evenings at some glass-walled temple of nihilism and great pasta—making half-honest starcrossed confessions of lost loves to whoever listens to drunken rambles at the tail-end of a party—trudging these silent streets forever, into infinity, like the Wandering Jew of old—but not really cursed, more like blessed in ignorance—with a heart bare of purpose or intention, no drive of our own but some sheer deadbeat momentum carrying us home, to bed, sometimes alone, sometimes not.

Quoting from Ginsberg to Kerouac in a letter, '52

2010-08-02T09:32:00.000-03:00

"None of us are strong enough to battle society forever, really; it's too sad and gray."

Allen Ginsberg in a letter to Jack Kerouac, 1952.
Excerpted from Carolyn Cassidy's memoir, Off the Road.

Boschian

2010-07-26T09:17:00.001-03:00

I’m watching this girl from the opposite side of the bar as she leans over the counter when the bartenders are all looking away, and scoops herself some ice for her drink even though the nightclub is sort of exclusive and definitely not cheap, and she’d probably get all the ice she wanted for free, and with a smile. There’s this song playing real loud even though I’m not really paying attention to the lyrics, and therefore I can’t really make up my mind whether Paris is burning or dreaming, or both, and there would be some irony in it tonight, see, at least if I cared enough to notice it myself.

But I don’t, not really, because I’m still looking at the girl and she’s wearing a low-cut black dress that leaves most of her back exposed, and when she turns away from the bar and returns to the dance floor, you can see this huge streamlined tattoo with the silhouette or a rising sun spanning her shoulder blades all the way down to the small of her back, half-hidden by her hair—She then fades away into the crowd and I’m drawn back to the glass in my hand, half-pretending the champagne hasn’t started tasting a little too sour.
It’s past four a.m. now, I think—but I’m still not sufficiently buzzed so as to think of going home.

Day breaks later on and we’re sitting on stools having cheese and ham on bread at this greasy little joint underneath the offices of some big metropolitan newspaper downtown, just a few blocks from the club. There are newspaper clippings in frames over the tiled walls. I’m looking at them but my mind’s blank so I don’t really make out a word they’re saying.

Someone offers me gum as we hop a taxi but I say No, thanks, I just want to go home and take a leak and a shower. Somewhere, I’m quite sure, Paris must be either dreaming or burning, but that conclusion would sort of depend on your frame of reference, not mine.

(This one’s for Clay) – ‘10

2010-07-19T08:17:00.000-03:00

I.
It’s near 10pm on a dry night that’s unusually warm for this time of the year. It’s the very last warm day before the cold and rain return for good, and I’ve just finished stretching against a tree after jogging for six or seven miles at the park.

I take off my t-shirt and lie down with my back to a concrete bench by the shore of the lake: From this spot, the lights from the skyline uptown where the large thronging avenues meet with investment banks and movie theaters reflect against the moving lake surface and eerily tilt sideways, to and fro, like searing white-hot dancers just an inch short of touching one another and interspaced between the golden glare of the sodium vapor lamps along the trees.

When I open my eyes facing the sky above there’s a yellow star perpendicular to my body: The arms of Scorpius stretch outwards from the yellow heart that is Antares as if trying to encompass the infinite.
By this time, the jogging crowd has already thinned out and the park is almost completely empty. It feels like I’m standing alone on Mars. It feels like some damn Ray Bradbury tale.

My panting subsides and the sweat eventually cools off before disappearing altogether: I wish life would go on forever like this, like tonight.

I think of going for available girls on the phone book in my mobile, and I’m somehow relieved once I find out there are no longer any available girls left to call anymore.

II.
The Messenger window flashes onscreen and it’s ____, just arrived in Prague for the week. When I ask him how he likes it so far, he tells me the girls there don’t seem to wear bras at all, and that he doesn’t understand a word they’re saying. I look at the blinking window for a full minute without thinking of anything.

“I suppose…,” I type back, a little confused and unsure if I’m able to spot the Czech Republic on a blank world map anyhow.

III.
I look up living people on Wikipedia but can’t find my name included in the list.
It makes me think for a moment but then I’m distracted by something else entirely, maybe porn that’s just finished downloading, and I never give that a second thought.

IV.
Much later that same night, I’m leaning against the sink in the bathroom at home with no clothes on. I’m watching my reflection on the mirror as if making copious studies of all these wrinkles that have started to appear on my face as of late: I force a smile and the skin on the outer corners of my eyes folds and a crow’s foot or two stands out as if prepped to take flight.
I start to sigh but end up shrugging.

I rummage through the medicine cabinet among the condoms and the lubricant and the peppermint throat tablets to find the Lorazepam I’m not supposed to have, and wash one down with a sip of the Stolichnaya I’m expected to, even though my alarm clock is set for 5:30 in the morning.

I go for a long hot shower as I wait for my mind to melt away, and when the windowpane starts to fog I run my fingers over the glass and draw the word DYSTOPIA in large, irregular block letters as if actually expecting it to convey some unspoken meaning or intention, but that train of thought reaches nowhere, gets derailed, drowns in chemistry, fogs away.

Evenings in Academia (Either way, it only happens after the dessert and the espresso)

2010-07-12T10:09:00.004-03:00

I.
It’s Saturday night and in a surprising break with not-so-recent tradition I get back to my place before eleven p.m. and absolutely sober.
We were all just out for pizza. It was supposed to be the International Pizza Day or something just as dumb, or at least that’s what I was told afterwards: Not that pizza’s ever stopped us cold in our tracks before but to tell you the truth we were still utterly trashed from the previous night, which properly started with the Veuve Clicquot and spiraled downwards through the wee hours in this cool martini bar which we’ve become quite partial to lately, that serves the overpriced trendy drinks with cucumber, wasabi and the works.

The best part of living out weekends like a veritable vampire in wintertime is, I’ve just decided, the bits in which I get handled by the doorman post office parcels on Saturdays nights: Boxes written in Chinese mean I’ve gone trigger happy on eBay once again with the ridiculously-underpriced, six-dollar, shipping-included comic book action figures straight from Taiwan or wherever, whereas boxes hailing from Germany more often than not denote Amazon.

Tonight’s postmarking reads in German and was more anxiously expected than a newlyweds’ first born: Oh, here’s the usual bundle of comics of course but this time added with Bret Easton Ellis’ brand-new novel, Imperial Bedrooms. Which is the sequel to Less Than Zero, published some twenty years back. Which is my favorite book, and that’s mostly because it’s short and terse and mostly void as far a general meaning is concerned, and especially that all the characters are amoral, which sort of exempts me as a reader from that rather annoying process which is identifying with a fictional character: I can barely relate to real people these days, for chrissakes.

Thus ye mighty book-writer, this I beseech of thee: Don’t make me fall for Tiny Tim or Superman—and thankfully enough, Bret Easton Ellis never does.

II.
True story: I once held my ground on a literary argument for like a full hour against this guy with a Doctorate degree on nineteenth century literature in Portuguese. It happened last November at this deli in New York just before the Springsteen concert though I can’t for the life of me recall either how it started or how it ended, but I thought it was pretty cool because I’m such a space cadet most of the time and the guy was so like quoting from critics and academic theses and stuff, whereas all I could think of was an inch beyond Wikipedia or the Discovery Channel, really.

Which sorts of validates the popularity of Adam Sandler movies, I suppose, even though that has nothing to do with anything in here.

III.
Okay, honest to god now, call your perfect evening:

Mine is, and I so apologize for the unavoidable cliché here, having dinner with you at a nice trendy French restaurant. I’m having either the duck or the rabbit but more probably the duck and I have no idea what you’re having because as time goes by you become more and more a fictional character in a memoir even though you still send me the stray e-mail or two every year. We’re drinking cava in lieu of the champagne but don’t ask me why because that point’s sort of moot: End of the day, anything but orange soda, really. And we’re discussing books. Or, at least you are discussing books and I’m just—again—holding the fort on little more than a wing and a prayer and going back to why I’ve read The Great Gatsby for like five times because I so wanted to like it but it just never connects, never clicks, doesn’t do anything to me and let’s be very, very frank: Anyone with half an education would still maintain the author’s own private life is usually so much more interesting anyhow.

Oh, and we'd order two bottles of the cava, by the way. Just to mention. You know, the burden of great conversation: You’re such this brainy girl and never drops the ball and stuff. Me, I'd be struggling to keep up with you while trying not to mispronounce the names of the dishes on the Menu.

Evening ends with—after dinner we—Oh come on. We either have really kinky sex until sunrise before passing out drunk, or a Guardian of the Universe comes to Earth and deputizes me a Green Lantern to battle Major Disaster or Dr. Polaris, or pick a super-villain, whatever really.

Either way, it only happens after the dessert and the espresso.

Go forth, Amazo, and destroy Isabella Swan!

2010-07-05T08:49:00.001-03:00

If I ever actually lived in the make-believe world of comic books and such, first thing I'd ever do would be to steal the inert carcass of Amazo the Amazing Android from the Justice League of America trophy Room there back in Rhode Island, and have it re-wired so as to go forth and destroy that girl Bella from those annoying teenage vampire movies of late.

Now don't get me wrong: This isn't my delving deep into chick-flicks by any chance.
It's just that:

a) That girl Bella looks like this really crazy girl I used to go out with a few years back, who would talk to her cat and I suspect ended up breaking up with me because that cat must have told her so, and I have no idea why but I still think of her + like her quite a lot-- so whenever those goddamn Twilight traillers pop up, I sort of think of her, smitten as a pussycat;

b)...and sort of root for the werewolves to slash her throat or something, but that's mostly because not only she dumped me years ago, but she also stood me up on a date we would've had last New Year's Eve when we briefly flirted with a revival of sorts (which speaks volumes of my total lack of brains giving in to my heart);

c)...And that goddamn trailler has since become more ubiquitous than Robert Downey Jr...

d)What can I do: I'll live through the end of my days having a thing or three for crazy girls with big brown eyes and I had this picture of her holding a Green Lantern action figure and smiling and she looked so damn cute, which always made me think of...

Of...
Of......
Of.........

Wait. Heck. Jesus. This is still a post about bad vampire movies, right...?
Oh god, this post's been officially hijacked. I'm a total loser. If only I had this killer android with the powers and abilities of the Justice League to do me justice...

Go forth, Amazo, and destroy Isabella Swan!

Forty seconds

2010-06-29T16:16:00.001-03:00

The stopwatch in the back of my head goes off the moment she starts yelling at me, hurls the comforter aside, jumps out of bed and makes to the bathroom in three, maybe four quick strides. This is a rather nasty habit I came up with a while ago, that I mentally time how long it takes for girls to get out of my place and swear never to see me again.
She hits the astounding 40-second mark by the time she gets to the elevator, now fully changed and her backpack in her hands.

Either Cupid's definitely off-duty tonight or it's just gotta be some goodamn new world record or something: Forty seconds to end a two-week relationship.

Forty seconds, that's what it took this time around: From the onset of the incident (whatever that incident is, mind you) to the classic looking over her shoulder through a half-closed elevator door--"And I never want to see you again!"-- hesitating to see if I'm following her, begging for her forgiveness, that kinda stuff -- and it is half past one in the morning after all.

I stand in the doorway saying nothing but flinch once I realize we've left the TV on in the living room before going to bed, and now TCM is showing Ferris Bueler's Day Off-- and I'd so rather watch Ferris Bueler's Day Off instead of humoring skirt for a kowtow tonight-- and it's so cold outside-- so I simply don't, and I watch her disappear as the elvator door closes.

Then Cameron says something funny in the movie.
And Ferris says something funny in the movie.
And Ferris' gal says something funny in the movie, too, only I never remember her name-- which is something I only realize after the movie's over-- and probably speaks volumes of my current predicament.

But it's so easier not to face it, so I turn off the TV and go to sleep anyhow.

Crisis on Bizarro World / Crisis on Lexor (An imaginary story)

2010-06-21T09:27:00.001-03:00

I.
The best part of those annual Justice League / Justice Society crossovers they’d had in the Justice League of America magazine from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s was that each year the plot would involve a different theme and bring upon different guest-stars, as the two teams would cross the dimensional barrier separating Earths-1 and 2 and meet.
For instance: Crisis On Earth-3 brought out the Crime Syndicate, an evil counterpart of the Justice League, whereas Crisis in Eternity featured the long-gone heroes of Fawcett Comics—from Captain Marvel to Mr. Scarlet.

The Crises varies down through the years and so did the guest-stars: Crisis in Apokolips? Bring on the New Gods. Crisis in Yesterday? Here’s Jonah Hex and the Viking Prince. Crisis in the 30th Century? There’s Mordru and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Nazis won World War II on a parallel world? Here’s the Freedom Fighters in Crisis on Earth-X. And so on.
Editor Julie Schwartz sure ran his distance with variations on that ever-popular theme.

But—in hindsight—he missed one:
They never did Bizarro World!
I mean, can you imagine a “Bizarro JSA”? How cool would that be?

So here’s my dreaming up of that “forgotten” JLA/JSA team-up that never was, in a straightforward Julie Schwartz-like plot:

II.
This is a two-parter.
First part is Crisis on Bizarro World:

The villain Brainwave crosses over from Earth-2 and makes Bizarro (Superman foe) to fall in love with the JSA’s Power Girl, and kidnap her from Earth-2—because Brainwave himself is in love with Power Girl and wants to marry her himself.

Bizarro kidnaps Power Girl from Earth-2 and takes her back to the Earth-1 Universe, to the planet Htrae (“Bizarro World”) and he’s about to expose her to the Bizarro duplicator ray—so as to make an imperfect copy of PeeGee—a contingent of JLAers and JSAers arrive to save the day.

The JSAers are exposed to the duplicator ray instead, which causes the creation of a “Bizarro JSA”—The Bizarro JSAers are not only imperfect versions of the heroes, but they’re also teenagers where the JSAers themselves are middle-aged. For instance: Bizarro Wildcat, a middle-aged boxing champion would become Kitty-Kat, a teenaged girl. Dr. Fate the magician would have his Bizarro version as Potshot Kid. And down from there. Intentionally silly and wacky as Bizarros should ever be.

Part one would end with a hook as Brainwave would expose Power Girl to Golden Kryptonite, permanently erasing her powers and turning her into an ordinary human—So as he could finally marry her.

(On a sidenote, the very best part of reading pre-1980s comic books is mentally replacing the word “marry” with the most f*cked-up fetishist term one can think of whenever a super-villain wants to “marry” a super-heroine. Like, remember the old Superfriends cartoon when Darkseid would want to “marry” Wonder Woman? Man, I bet those high heeled boots and magic lasso could work wonders indeed…)

III.
Part two is Crisis on Lexor:

The Golden Kryptonite didn’t work on Power Girl because it’s from Earth-1 and she’s from Earth-2. That should have been a no-brainer, right? So, as PeeGee is about to kick the tar out of Brainwave, the villain brings her down with a mental lightning bolt (what? No, really!) and takes her to the planet Lexor.
Lexor of course is the red sun planet in which Lex Luthor is deemed a super-hero and Superman is considered a super-villain.

On Lexor, Peegee’s powers disappear (red sun, remember?), and so Brainwave is finally able to marry her. But the JLA and the JSA, having defeated the Bizarro-JSA on Htrae, arrive just in time to save the day. Trick is that the local population doesn’t like the super-heroes, and the JLA/JSA end up being taken prisoners by the locals, because they would never fight innocent people.

In the end, however, as Brainwave may have found safe haven on Lexor, Lex Luthor himself arrives from Earth and oddly enough, sides with the heroes—mad as hell at Brainwave for brining chaos to his perfect world and threatening his people.

Story ends with the JSA returning home with PeeGee safe and the Brainwave in tow, and Luthor stating to Superman that their truce was only temporary, blahblahblah, The End.

Mid-year review, 2010: Dawn should be breaking anytime now…

2010-06-16T09:44:00.002-03:00

I.
It’s Saturday morning there around 5:30 a.m. and I’m trudging home under a not-so-light, end-of-Autumn rain, bloated with all the champagne and the vodka from last night. Temperature reads there about 50 degrees and I’m soaking wet. I zip up my leather jacket and tuck my hands in its pockets as I pass by the Arts Museum marquee where the homeless sleep sheltered from the downpour, then laugh out loud as I remember the chain of events that led up to now.

They’ll text-message me in a few hours. The girl will text me the inevitable, interminable thank-you note with an apology ultimately boiling down to hoping there’s no vomit on my shoes, and when I tell her that whatever happens on Friday evenings stays on Friday evenings, she’ll reply saying that’s why she likes hanging out with guys like us. The boy, on the other hand, particularly prone not to either conveying emotion or using punctuation, will send me the single terse, concise statement that last night was-- and here’s quoting-- “fucking BIZARRE!!!!!!!!”-- will all those exclamations to boot.

II.
We were already a little hammered by the time we’d arrived at the nightclub, there about midnight or one a.m. At least two of us were blaming the cinnamon on the cocktails but that’s mostly a recurring joke in the métier: There was no mention of the two bottles of champagne tagging along the cocktails, naturally-- but the next two once we got to the bar at the nightclub terrace would prove to be a little more than the entourage could handle. The nightcap-- the fifth bottle back at ____’s place after all was said & done-- was only for the brave and the strong;

We are at the bar at this amazing open terrace at the club, on the balcony of the second floor of an old office building downtown with a view to the cathedral and old art-deco buildings that just aren’t made anymore, and the girl starts to freak out when she notices this famous soap-opera actor by our side. Look at the shoulders on him, she says. He’s dressed up like a goddamn Eskimo, I tell her, then excuse myself to lookup for a stun-gun at the reception area to subdue her if she tries something tacky like asking the actor for a photograph or something. Only, not really, because I’ve just left to look for the bathroom, only to find it underneath the goddamn, honest-to-god stuffed head of a moose hanging high on the wall. The line for the boys room is like four times the line for the girls room. It’s that kind of place. But it’s cool. We’re cool.

Things start to blur as I get back to the bar.

As the actor slips the barman a piece of paper with his phone number on it, and the barman is already, like dating someone or another we know, the girl goes absolutely nuts because he just can’t be gay!. The waitress stops by-- she’s cut her hair real short and we compliment her on it even though the girl later tells me it makes her look like some militant lesbian for women’s lib or something, even though I still find it quite appealing. I’d like to lick her nape, I say, then lick her entire back all the way down to her asshole. But then the waitress swears by the size of the barman’s dick and says it’s a no-brainer the actor’s after him anyhow. I’m absolutely at sea because I can’t for the life of me connect the pieces in the conversation to figure out how we even came from ordering drinks, to the size of the barman’s dick.
The actor’s dressed up like a goddamn Eskimo anyway, I emphasize, then the girl bows down and starts to throw up on my feet-- and the guy starts complaining about either the actor or the barman or both, and I freak out myself because I don’t want vomit on my shoes then we have to leave anyway because the night is pretty much shot.

Some other things also happen. There's a lot going on tonight. And someone mentions one of those Japanese Tengas during conversation, which is pretty odd.
Either way, we get to laugh a lot.

III.
I get to tuck the girl in and even give her some chocolate milk. She asks me if I want to lie down with her and I say yes, only not in the state she’s in. The guy overhears it all and mentions it was strangely out of character of me not to take advantage of the situation. I just shrug, and tell him I think her hair is smelling of vomit anyhow.
Then we open another bottle and drink it up very fast while talking trash.

By the time I leave it’s there about 5:30 in the morning and it’s started to rain.
I zip up my jacket and notice how weird it is that it’s still pitch-black dark. I mean, look at the time: Dawn should be breaking anytime now-- only it’s not.

Of bats and ducks. Not about scorpions, though

2010-06-08T08:59:00.001-03:00

It’s Monday night there about ten or ten-thirty pm. I’m at the park and the wind is freaking cold. I have just jogged for say, six or seven miles and now I’m doing some stretching exercises leaning against a tree by the lake before going home for dinner, a shower, and by god, bed.

The sky is mostly cloudy, those ominous orange-white clouds hanging so very low above the city, leaving but a small pocket of night-sky with actual stars to be seen through: One single constellation, which I’ve come to call not-Scorpius during my nocturnal joggings for the past few months – but that’s mostly for no particular reason whatsoever, because I’m pretty sure Scorpius is the only constellation I can recognize at a glance. Maybe it’s because of the distinct, eerie yellowish glow of Antares. But that constellation up above my head right now? Definitely not Scorpius.

There’s so much going on in my head right now: It has not been the kindest two, three weeks now for a convergence of different factors altogether piling up and becoming this one intense ball of bad feelings. The problem with having bats in the belfry, when said belfry is inside your own head, is that you can’t take the easy way out and look for a hotel for the night. The orange juice with the Stolichnaya often helps, granted, and so does all the fancy eating-out on Saturday evenings. But it doesn’t make the bats go away, see, and that’s why I jog at night two or three times a week: Bats are still liable to fly while drunk, but decidedly not after seven-mile laps around the lake during winter nights. So since I can’t beat the bad stuff with sanity and common sense (and alcohol) then I’ve decided to do it with endurance – and it actually works.

But I digress: So I’m leaning against a tree at the park near my place tonight, after my running’s done, stretching out before going back home okay?
Then, of course, as the audience cries for much-vaunted pathos and a plot-twist is sorely needed to for the climax to spice up this post, a duck comes out of a bush by the lake and charges at me.

Fuck. And here’s my thinking only goddamn geese did that.
What do you know.

Miracle Monday, 2010: "Oh Deadly Darkseid!"

2010-05-17T08:50:00.000-03:00

I.
So.
Miracle Monday, 2010 and I just can’t stop thinking about those wonderful Superpowers action figures from back in the mid-1980s.
There was this specific time in which….

Well. The setting was Darkseid’s throne room on Apokolips (namely, the top of my desk). The story per se would revolve around Darkseid and Lex Luthor making plans and schemes and ... yadda, yadda, yadda... defeat Superman once and for all.

That specific Luthor action figure was based on artist George Pérez’ designs for the comics-slash-toy line: The short-lived, but fondly remembered "battle suit" look. In the comics, which debuted there around with the toyline, Luthor was depicted as having found that armor, as opposite to having created it himself, in an abandoned laboratory on planet Lexor. Luthor’s Lexorian battle suit (named War Suit) granted him strength and invulnerability close to Superman’s, plus the ability to emit powerful bolts of pretty much all known kinds of energy as a weapon. That suit was so damn powerful that when Luthor employed it against Superman in its very first outing on Lexor, he ended up destroying the entire planet instead, killing his own wife and daughter.
Luthor’s suit lasted for another couple of years, tops, and vanished for good during the Crisis on Infinite Earths in ‘85. It would eventually inspire a myriad of other suits, and looks, and weapons for the "post-Crisis", Wolfman-slash-Byrne-revamped Luthor afterwards, up until this day.

But I had entirely missed out Luthor’s War Suit comics debut, mostly because I was too absorbed with Chris Claremont’s X-men at the time (well, who wasn´t, right?), but also probably because, from what I remember, that mag was never published in Brazil anyway. But that’s why our lord satan created eBay, isn’t it?
So -- since I had no idea of the War Suit’s orgins or powers back then -- I had to make do with what I had: Comic book-ey logic plus a fertile imagination: It was, thus, pretty much obvious to me that A) Luthor’s armor was made of green Kryptonite, B) That its gauntlets would emit "nuclear blasts" (blame it on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, what the hey!), and C) that it was a product of Apokoliptian technology.
Oddly enough, the early-2000s version of Luthor’s War Suit from Jeph Loeb’s Public Enemies story arc was indeed a product of Apokoliptian technology. And had built-in, weaponized Kryptonite fragments. So there for being twenty years ahead of my time.

But Darkseid’s boon to Luthor wouldn’t come for free, of course, though, and that’s why, at least as far as the top of my desk was concerned, Luthor would eventually have to re-pay the favor. Luthor did it so, as I imagined it, via my reading lamp, which became a machine capable of amplifying the power of Darkseid’s omega beams.
I was, naturally, leveraging the gimmick on Darkseid’s action figure: That toy had this slit on the top of his head, see, so that ambient light could filter through the transparent red plastic in his eyes and make it seem as if his eyes were actually glowing with the omega effect thing. Without the need for the annoying batteries, to boot.

Then...
Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I would spend so much time setting up the plot for the story, most of the times I’d simply never get around to actually playing with the figures. But it’d go something like this: Superman would be lured to Darkseid’s throne room on Apokolips, Luthor would soften him up with his War Suit, then activate the reading lamp machine in order to Darkseid to deliver the killing blow. But he would never get around to it, because Superman would call upon his trusty Supermobile in the nick of time. And that was the cool, slick, sci-fi Superpowers Supermobile, not the dorky 1970s version from the comics-slash-Superfriends cartoon-slash-Corgi miniatures, with the big hands on its side.
Of course neither Luthor not Darkseid were a match for the mighty might of the Supermobile, and evil would thus inevitably lose.

But it was not their fault, though. I mean, Luthor was supposed to have a vehicle of his own, see, the Lex Soar Seven, which was like, seven thousand times cooler than the Supermobile, with a mean landing gear that doubled as a claw to capture Superman, Kryptonite-laser cannons and a big, bad removable chunk of green Kryptonite molded in translucent plastic powering its engines.

...but that ship was never sold in Brazil either, so by the time I found a mint-in-box version on eBay many, many, MANY years later, the whole desktop and reading lamp thing didn’t quite cut it anymore, mostly because of Midnight Oil, College, vodka, and girls.

Does that mean C.W. Saturn ends up winning anyhow? Wow. Really?
Wow.

II.
Truth be told – I just guess I wrote all that just to tell you that hey, guess who’s just spent a fortune over the weekend to buy all the seven action figures in Wave 12 of Mattel’s Superpowers revival toyline, DC Universe Classics, just to assemble all pieces required to build that giant, badass Darkseid figure…

Looks so damn cool over the TV set, let me tell you that much!

Number of Iron Man 2 action figures so far:

2010-05-09T20:06:00.000-03:00

Eight and counting...

Walpurgisnacht, 2010

2010-05-02T21:21:00.002-03:00

On Walpurgis Night, 2010, I come home from work there about 7:30, 8pm, plenty of time to change my clothes, drink some milk and do all those push-ups and such before doing the usual laps at the park – only I don´t, not this time around, because I end I crashing on the spare mattress in my room, borderline pass out, really, and sleep for about two, three hours before waking up hungry like fuck, and have dinner and a shower, and sleep again for almost fourteen hours straight.

I haven´t been getting any sleep.
Not kidding. I´ve been sleeping like, two to three hours per night, on average for the last three weeks or so, and that´s even counting the nights when I sleep at all: Worst part is, I simply can´t stop – I get out of bed at 5:30am every morning, work out, go to work, work for like, 10, sometimes 12 hours straight, come home, jog for 10Ks... and still, no sleep (On certain nights, that saintly Russian medicine that goes so well with orange juice is the only thing that knocks me down).

So I crashed so hard, burned out and such, last Friday night I ended up missing out the entire evening! – No shit: I spend the entire year waiting for Walpurgis Night, no special reason provided, and when it finally arrives, I... finally.... sleep?

Oh well: As far as offbeat holidays are concerned, I´ve got tons of catching up to do on Miracle Monday this May, anyhow.

And now: Planning ahead for the near-future

2010-04-25T19:13:00.001-03:00

I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place...

Wait. What. Again?!

2010-04-18T20:10:00.002-03:00

Regardless of happens in the weekend afterwards, regardless of where I end up at which time of the night and with whom and all that irrelevant jazz: The weeknights before are an entirely shitty chapter upon themselves.

See, this is me: Lying on the couch at what, eleven p.m., iPod on, a sore throat, down with the flu, and also with two bags of ice over my knees. Sure, big news there. As if all that he-man running in the park at night, more often than not in the rain, wouldn´t amount to this. But this is not even like, the top-offender this time around: What really bugs me is this coin I have in my hand, and this thing I keep doing with it, every night, with this deadbeat, bored look on my face, in which I just keep passing it in-between my fingers, dancing over my phalanges.

I´ve figured that, if I repeat it enough times, it oughtta be enough to make it true: That I´m not heartbroken, that I haven´t just fallen for a girl after she´s boarded a plane to live in a different country to go live with someone else, that I´m just lonely tonight and a little frustrated because I´m over 30 years old and that it´s just the painkillers talking, anyway.

There´s all these things I should have told F. before she went, and all these things I should have done instead of acting like a total jackass at the nightclub last week and... Oh crap. Crapcrapcrap.

It´s gonna be like this for a while, right?
It´s always like this for a while, but then it passes, too.

-------
PS: (Somewhere in the back of my head, a choir twenty thousand voices strong chant in unison: I told you so).

(Thieves like us)

2010-04-12T01:25:00.001-03:00

I.
We are caught in-between the bursting of the strobe and the flickering of the purple and pink haze of the neon lighting above the dancefloor. There are two guys kissing each other to our right, two girls kissing each other to our left, and this huge, broad-shouldered guy crossdressed as Tinkerbell waving a baton like a cheerleader amidst everyone else: We are all multiplied by a million, dancing as we watch our own reflections repeating themselves after one another on the mirrored walls, afterimage upon afterimage, superimposed to forever and kowtowing to the beat of the DJ.
This nightclub used to be a catholic church, many years ago. This is so cool.

Human League starts playing after an endless parade of modern techno-whatever, really. I pull F. closer to me and whisper (shout?) in her ear that ____ should be popping up any time now. She nods as I pretend not to notice the smell of her hair: She´d just had her visa to Canada revoked due to some technicality or another, but she´s due leaving the country for good come next Monday this time around. I bite my lower lip, close my eyes and make peace with all the gods I´ve never had.

As predicted, and not missing his own beat, ____ appears from out of thin air; crawls back from wherever he´d crawled forth I think ever since we´d arrived a couple of hours earlier, only now a little tipsy, with a glass of champagne in his hand. F. says she bets he´d been on the prowl. I tell her, yeah, on the prowl for liquor.

A few hours later we repeat the exact same routine, with Talking Heads instead.

II.
It´s past six A.M. and I´m sitting on the couch of my living room in my underwear only despite the cold morning outside: The first rays of the morning break across the sky and filter through the half-opened blinds. I´m holding my shirt in my hands, thinking twice against actually showering before going to bed: She is leaving for Canada next Monday and all I have left of her, for good now, is the Emporio Armani She lingering in my clothes, on my skin.

I bite my lower lip and close my eyes, trying to dismiss the somewhat annoying fact that regardless of all the holding hands and the cuddling and embracing on the throwpillows back at the club, she actually turned her face away and pulled me back when I tried to kiss her. She´s got this French boyfriend-slash-fiancé now. I should have known better – if I really cared.

But it´s past six A.M., see, and all´s been said and done.
F.s boarding her plane within a day and leaving the country for good: By the time I open the faucet and the hot water starts pouring down on me and washing her perfume away, she´s definitely gone for good: A scar gained, a medal missed, a drop in the ocean.

In the back of my head, New Order starts playing Thieves Like Us.

III.
Way earlier that day, B. asked me during lunch if I still thought of you: I don´t know, I told him, just a little, sometimes a little more than just that.

It was a pretty honest answer.

He said that´s what´s probably holding me back from taking some next step as far as relationships are concerned. I told him naww, that if he ever got his hands on a time machine, he might as well go back in time and tell the nine-year-old me that I´d grow up to become exactly the kind of person I wanted to be when I was a kid.

It was a pretty honest answer, too.

A week in late March, 2010

2010-04-04T22:33:00.003-03:00

MON
On Monday I get all grouchy because it starts pouring in the evening, just as I get on the bus home. I´m supposed to jog on the park on Monday evenings, see. Not doing that makes me grouchy as hell – so I just stay home and work out with the dumbbells instead.

TUE
On Tuesday evening I totally take a French leave from the office even though I´m supposed to do whatever at this Happy Hour they´ve come up with. Only, it just looks like it might not rain for a change so I make my point so as to be at the park as soon as I can, and catch up with not having jogged yesterday.
The next day I discover how powerful an excuse “I can´t miss on my training” really is.

WED
On Wednesday evening some lame meeting runs for longer than anticipated so I barely have the time to get home and take a shower – I meet this girl for drinks at eight, nine o´clock p.m. and we head to this fancy Asian-style bar near my place I´ve become quite partial to in the last few months. She says she loves it and that I just know the coolest places (it´s true, I do, but most of them I totally steal from ___´s.). We pour down the vodka like there´s no tomorrow, and since I´ve been give the next two days off, it means the night ends up at half past three in the morning when all the bars we´re trying to hit next up have closed doors: We talk about Brave New World (me an bout the book, she about the movie), Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, and whether it was right for Sinead O´Connor to rip the pope´s picture on Saturday Night Live all those years ago or not, and the time she french-kissed another girl. Last joke of the night is about this girl, a mutual acquaintance whose eyebrows are so thin and sparse she looks like she´s undergoing chemo – then we pretty much hop on a cab, each of us taking separate ways.
For some very bizarre reason, it never even occurs to me to actually hit on her during the entire evening, not even when Sinead O´Connor was brought up and it´s such a given for an old move of mine with the DVD with the living room lights off...

THU
On Thursday I wake up at what? Two in the afternoon or something?
Royally wasted.

FRI
On Friday I laugh out loud for about five entire minutes once I find out some paper I did as accreditation for my post-grad´s achieved a near-perfect 9.8 score and it´s going to be published on the University´s Library: I did it on less than five hours, and the other two-thirds of it that are not blatant copying from other people, are just plain old cheating: I wrote it like a romance and made everything up -- all this creative writing here is paying off, what do you know.
Of course it´s later on, Friday night, and I´ve been sort of stood up by this other girl, whom I´m supposed to be going out with or something, so my dinner plans at this fancy restaurant are pretty much shot to hell, and so is the sex that´s supposed to have ensued: I end up eating some Chinese alone on the couch watching either Heroes or House or both, and drinking the remains of a bottle of Stolichnaya I found at the back of the freezer.
Later on, when I go out on the streets, dead-drunk and looking for some late-night ice-cream, I end up petting this cute girl´s Boxer and saying “Attaboy, Poindexter” and then telling her something lewd (else just a very bad pick-up line, really), who pulls up the dog to her side and walks away saying, “His name is not Poindexter” through gritted teeth.
Cute girl though – but in hindsight the dog was just really after the Lo Mein sauce I´d spilled on my t-shirt during dinner.

SAT
It´s Saturday evening and I´m at M.´s place having a beer on the kitchen as his one-year son is unwrapping all the million presents he got at his birthday party earlier that day, and bringing them up to show us.
It´s one of those quiet, quaint, peaceful moments that make me stop and wonder and rethink a thing or two about life -- even if for just a second.

SUN
On Easter Sunday I´m back at my parents´, much to my chagrin and obviously against my will, but it has its moments: Like when I made everybody sing Happy Birthday at the lunch table, and when they asked me why I said it was to celebrate the birthday of the baby Jesus, who was hatched from a lizard´s egg about two thousand years ago.
It´s of course later that day and I´ve since come back home (the holiday traffic notwithstanding), and meet up with ____ for dinner at this trendy restaurant with the low-lighting and the high glassed walls: There´s this guy at the table to our right and he´s from Denmark or something: he´s talking about off-shore funding with this drp-dead gorgeous girl but his accent makes him sound just like oArnold Schwarzenegger – sorta looks like him too – I look up from my trout and the vodka-and-lime, at _____, and tell him that we just know the coolest places.

And if you thought that giant bunny in Donnie Darko was creepy, check this out:

2010-03-28T21:50:00.002-03:00

"And your skin is turning orange," says my mother´s voice through the receiver, "from eating all those raw carrots of yours."

Riding the bus to work with Zelda Fitzgerald

2010-03-20T23:47:00.003-03:00

The collector manning the turnstile on the bus tells Zelda Fitzgerald he´s out of any change to spare. All I got´s a ten, she says. He shrugs and apologizes with a condescending half-smile, then signals her to let the other passengers in: maybe they´ll provide him with the needed coins. Goddamn 30 cents. She shrugs as well, same a condescending half-smile as his, with the remarkable difference she´s got all her teeth to show and what a half-smile it is at that.

Now. That´s not really Zelda Fitzgerald, though, and mostly because Zelda Fitzgerald died in a hospital fire like eons ago. She´s an ersatz though here´s hoping to minus the booze and the mental institution. It´s the placeholder nickname I´ve given her because of her striking resemblance to the third result that Google yields when you look up Zelda Fitzgerald images: The one with short hair, in profile, though the picture doesn´t quite do the namesake justice. My Zelda has even shorter hair and looks way, way better than F. Scott´s – We´ve discussed this over croissants and orange juice one afternoon years ago: One of the most important facts of life is that The Great Gatsby is way overrated anyway.

But look. This girl is another thing entirely, really.
You know the type: The kind of girl who makes you go Please. Be. Single. every time you see her coming up the street, so damn cute, so damn classy it almost hurts.

It took me like, three months to barely start saying Hi to this girl while waiting for the bus to work. We share the same bus, the same bus stop but let´s be quite frank here and draw the line on establishing that coming on to girls on the bus stop has gotta be the dating equivalent to asking for anal intercourse during the first-date dinner: we´ve all got friends who claim the feat to themselves, but no, not us. So I don´t, and I have to count on my public transportation blessings and wait for the proverbial rainy morning with a crowded bus so as to give her the seat. Next morning and all ensuing mornings, Zelda´s got the Hi thing going already.

Thus once the collector relegates her to waiting in line for spare change, much to her chagrin, I never miss the beat and step up to pay her fare. Don´t need to, she says. Not a problem, I tell her, though once I slip my pass through the card reader at the turnstile the red light goes off and tells me I have no credit myself. I was pretty sure I had like, close to a hundred bucks worth of credit on my bus card but my last recharge must have happened a thousand years ago, even before my vacations. That´s never happened to me before, I tell her with a phony yellow smile and just the proper amount of innuendo. She gets the joke from the get-go, smiles even if just slightly, then asks the collector if he´d have the change for two passes instead. Yup, he nods. She pays up, gets her change, we pass.

Now, if one of the most important facts of life is that The Great Gatsby is overrated, another one is that we are all inevitably bound to fail in life: Any victory is an illusion and regardless of our success we´ll all reach a point in life when we get to Screw Up Big Time, and that´s pretty much why Marvel Comics ever came up with all those team-ups in which Spider-Man fights Daredevil: Every time Spider-Man (weightlifting capacity: 9 tons) punches Daredevil (not even half a ton) for the last say, forty years, Daredevil says he´s only survived the punch because he “rolled with it” just in time. Now, I have no idea what the hell does to roll with the punch mean, maybe except for the odd rock and roll chorus piece and the eventual comic book, but the outcome is pretty clear: That´s how Daredevil survives being punched in the face by Spider-Man. So you got to roll with the punches, man.

Case in point:

Do you know how much I make a year, I ask her and she frowns in disbelief. Three hundred bucks a year, that´s what I make. What, she asks, Out of that con, I mean, I say, a sucker a week or so. Oh that was nothing, she smiles, it happens, no big deal. Oh but big deal, I insist, then tell her as soon as it´s time for my lunchbreak I´m so charging my pass with like, ten grand or something. Okay, she nods, finds the only vacant seat in the bus and offers to take my backpack. Oh you wouldn´t want this filthy knapsack over your pants. Is it that dirty? Oh like you wouldn´t believe. How come, she asks. I use it when I´m out jogging and stuff. You run?, she asks, then tells me she know this guy who ran the marathon last week (which is real annoying, because like everyone knows a guy who ran the marathon last week, up to the point where any marathon that´s happened on the week before starts sounding like some goddamn mantra or something). Nahh, I don´t do marathons, I tell her. Point down to my legs: I got this thing with my knees, you know, from running. Have you ever see a doctor about it?, she asks. Yeah but he always tells me to stop running and that´s not what I want to hear. I know what you mean she says, I used to do ballet, busted my ankles once but just couldn´t stop it (on a sidenote, the real Zelda Fitzgerald was a ballet buff as well).

Then we max out on the filthy backpack as a conversational piece and the inevitable awkward silence sets in. Then I remember I´m supposed to be like, real good at Disaster Recovery, at least at the office, so I´m expected to find get Out Of Prison cards with a certain ease: First time I saw Zelda talk on her mobile, I made a bet with myself that she´s majored in psychology despite the fancy tailleur and the stern, laconic composure, or because of them: This girl is a Corporate psychologist, see, she´s just gotta be. But what else am I missing here? What´s to leverage? Oh yes: There was also this briefcase this girl was carrying one time, see, a few months back, which had the logo of one of our vendors: I tell her about that, asks if she works there because I have a friend who… No she says, they´re a vendor of ours she says. Really? I ask. One of mine too. What do you work in, she asks me. Human Resources, I tell her (oddly enough, not a total lie). Really? She asks. Me too. Oh where? She tells me of her job, I tell her of mine. I sort of boast just a tiny little bit while still making the point so as to keep on sounding like a space cadet just so as I won´t sound like pretentious or something. But that´s like, expected, right? Then a few sentences down the road she tells me she´s majored in psychology.

I get off the bus with her e-mail written down in her own handwriting on the inside cover of this HP Lovecraft book I had with me, and then I…

…then I…

…. Well I just….

Oh god.
Look at this girl. There´s no way in all of hell this girl is…
Oh god.
I´d do everything… anything… twice over. I´ll burn all my The Flash comics, then buy everything on eBay once again just to have it burned a second time. I´ll let go of cable TV and internet porn forever. I´ll trade running on the streets for religion. I´ll even stop stealing food from the people I work with. But please. Just please. Just Please. Be. Single.

Space cadet reaches an amazing conclusion while running laps around the lake

2010-03-14T20:53:00.000-03:00

I´m lying down on my back on the largest lawn in the park at noon, all by myself. It´s the middle of the day in the middle of the week and the park is pretty much empty except for the odd married old couple or the occasional jogger (myself included). The sun is peaking high up in the blue sky and there´s not a cloud to be seen. The heat, unbelievable as it is, has stripped me down to my running shorts and multiple beads of sweat all over, period.

Silence reigns supreme on the lawn except for a jetliner crisscrossing above every fifteen minutes or so, and the perpetual droning of the ubiquitous dragonflies swarming about. I take a deep breath and make a point so as not to forget to do that thing with the diaphragm just like that girl who took Yoga taught me a few months back: I inhale and here´s the faint, fresh smell of the recently-mowed grass, clinging to those last traces of last night´s rain, coming in with the air.

I have nowhere else to go, see, and nothing else to do: I was running laps around the lake a few minutes ago, and every time I run, I run scared witless of messing up with my knees (again) so I end up interposing instances of just walking in-between the laps. But this time was different: I found myself in that legendary, nigh-unattainable state of mind halfway between the nihilist and the space cadet, and by the time I realized that, I´d been running for almost an hour, somewhere during that fourth lap around the lake, without stopping for a walk, and running faster every lap. Not scared witless. Not even thinking. And the best part of it, I could´ve run so much longer. I simply stopped once I realized what I´d been doing.

God I´m such a pussy sometimes. I mean, this is no superhuman feat: Here´s my bragging about a six, seven-mile run when old people will run ten or more with ease. Coming to think of it, I think I´ve been treating my patelae like other people treat their religion: Like an imaginary friend, you know? There´s absolutely nothing there but you just press on with the dogmatic faith, buddy, because some jackass in white told you to.

Ah the last days of vacations. I´m due back to the office in a few days but until that happens, to hell with it, really. I´m here on the grass under this scorching sun and I have nowhere to go, and nothing to do, and no one to see – and hey, come next Monday, I´ll come back to the park in the evening after work, and then I´ll see how long I can take before my knees fall down.

Recurring themes, a breakthrough or two, and the inevitable Bizarre Love Triangle (2010)

2010-03-04T14:05:00.003-03:00

This girl I´m having dinner with tonight is leaving for Canada in a couple of weeks, for good. Canada by now, of course, has since become a nexus for intertwining plotlines in this story, in the long run: All the female characters here seem like they either came from Canada, or are going to Canada, or went to Canada once in their lifetimes. Sort of like mythical California, you know? How this hero´s journey of our is inevitably bound to lead us to the Pacific, either to drown or be reborn? But I digress – while plotlines continue to merge.

It´s early March, 2010 and this girl I´m having dinner with tonight – this drop-dead Chilean blonde I´m having dinner with tonight – is leaving for Canada in a couple of weeks, for good, to live with her (I suppose) drop-dead gorgeous French boyfriend who works for Air-France and the works. This is a send-off dinner date so the only things happening after the dessert are the espresso and the cab home, not to mention my picking up of the check. See the plotlines merge here too?
“Knowing you, it´s so likely you got to choose this place on purpose,” she tells me with a sly smile, almost feline, as she fiddles her food with the fork for a while. I look down at my own plate and the left corner of my own lips curl up in a half-smile: “Whoa,” I mumble, “Don´t you think the confit de canard goes like, way better with a little irony thrown in?”

But this is not only a send-off dinner date, but a dinner in which I get to merge different plotlines: I have to be perfectly straight with you here. This must be my first date in what seems like centuries now. I haven´t gone out with a girl in ages though I´m not entirely sure why. I want to find something, someone, to blame it on and I can´t tell you enough how tempting... how easy... it would be to simply call it upon your not showing up last November and then wrecking my world or something, but that would just be the drama-queen in me talking. It was something of a bitch, granted, and that´s also quite probably a word I must have used to name your mother during the ensuing weeks or something, really, but in the end I guess we´re all inevitably drawn back to the very rules of the games we choose to play, and regardless of my usual questioning of authority, I´m no exception to that.
Truth be told, I often get way too much caught up in my own dealings, and find myself way too much left to my own devices, to even remember there´s an entire outer world right there. Somewhere, but out there nevertheless.

And then, apropos of that and apropos of everything else too, I´m drawn back to this old comic book I used to love when I was a kid: See, this is my going back to the old, late-1980s Hawk & Dove mini-series once again. I once stated, only half-kidding, that I did the interiors of my place to look like Hank Hall´s dorm room in College in that story. That´s only half-a-lie, you know. But as I´m sitting on this fancy restaurant with the aforementioned drop-dead Chilean blonde with the feline smile at my side, I get to recall another line from that story: So, Hank Hall´s parents barge in the dorm room all of a sudden and Hank is talking with Dawn Granger, who happens to be not only this drop-dead gorgeous blonde but also the superheroine Dove, who´s taken Hank´s brother place after the brother died, and Hank´s mother looks at Hank´s father, or vice-versa, whatever, and says how nice it is to see Hank being interested in girls once again.

2010, first post: There will come soft rains

2010-02-07T17:39:00.001-02:00

I.
It´s a night of the week, pick a night, really, during the past week and I´m sitting crosslegged over the desk in my living room without anything on but the nylon shorts I wear for running on the streets during the evenings. The lights are off and I´m still soaking wet from the storm raging outside. It´s been raining like that for what seems to be a century now.

This is supposed to be Zazen meditation, by the way, in order to quell down not only the cramps in my calves but also the burning from this real nasty cut I got, somehow, on my lower back: “You should definitely see a doctor about that one,” I was told, only I never did.

I think I ought to have a mantra for this, I´m guessing, like using one of those koan saying things or whatnots in order to ohm me along the way to painkilling enlightenment. Upon reaching out to the totality of my being, though, all I´m able to do is zero in on some random Wikipedic piece of knowledge I get to pluck from god knows where but since as far as undiagnosed ADD is concerned, beggars trying meditation can´t really be choosers, I opt to go along with the flow:

I´m sitting crosslegged over my desk trying to synch my respiration to the opening line of a Sara Teasdale poem. God knows where I got that one from. It´s supposed to be about nature and how nature endures even after the war how it will outlast man and so on. Whatever, really. There will come soft rains, it says on its very first line. It´s also the poem´s title and my mantra for the evening.

II.
It´s Saturday night and the Teasdale line comes to mind once more, this time in fast staccato bursts as if trying to keep up with the flickering of the strobe hanging above the dance floor, which is painted in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern imitating the linoleum from long-ago 1960s-era kitchen floorings. The walls are exposed bricks made to look cool enough with the whole rough-edged charm thing going: Trendy as you might expect from such a place. Then there´s just a blank piece of the wall just by the DJ´s booth which is not covered by bricks, but a slick black area over which the sketch of a girl´s face, three maybe four feet tall, has been painted in white in terse, irregular brush strokes as if emulating schoolroom chalk: Each flash of the strobe lights up the drawing like a ghost.

I can´t take my eyes off hers: I´m mesmerized.

Then two girls short of being in their 20s start kissing each other next to me. Then two more. I take one last sip from my vodka and orange juice and wonder just where the hell have we stumbled upon this time around – and whether I have or haven´t grown too old for this:

Thirty years old and doing the l*sbian teen nightclub scene. That will be the day. It is the first and only day of the month with open skies, no rain at all. But, There will come soft rains, says the poem. Who am I to say otherwise?

III.
The week passes, January gives way to February and more rain beckons at the tail-end of each working day like an oily blot or gray shadow uncoiling from its damp recess behind the horizon, then oozing itself across the urban skyline: There will come soft rains.

2009 season finale!

2009-11-01T19:00:00.003-02:00

I´m looking at this girl from across the bar and... No, wait. Hang on. That´s not how this one goes.
It goes something like:

Aww to hell with the rest of the world, I´m going to NY to see the Boss play the Garden!!

Still life, with Cthulhu

2009-10-25T22:56:00.001-02:00

I woke up on Sunday morning and I realized I´d just been through a nightmare: There was this eerie mansion on the outskirts of town, it was all brand-new and lavishly-decorated and empty. There was a pool-like structure in an indoor garden filled with human eyes sprouting out of the ground like flowers. The eyes were shut and never budged even when punctured with the penknife I´d just happen to have with me.
Afterwards there was this huge ceremony, like a wedding, at an adjacent ballroom, with the only difference being that, instead of Jesus Christ, there was this tiny green Cthulhu hanging from the cross above bride and groom, tentacles and all.

I woke up and looked at the book over the night table: “Whoa,” I told myself. “Easy on the Lovecraft, buddy.”

Of course it was either that, way too much H. P. Lovecraft during the day, or the drinking binge with _____ the night before, that started with the champagne at this swanky hotel bar at eight in the evening and ended with more champagne near three a.m. at this pretty cool bar downtown with mirrored walls and neon lightning up the ceiling, but of course that happened only after we´d gone back to the restaurant in which we´d had the shrimp soufflé with the Riesling, to pick up ____´s birthday present- namely the mid-1980s Rolling Stones, that he´d left behind after dessert.

Applied science

2009-10-20T21:10:00.003-02:00

It´s the 20th of October and I´m rummaging through some leftover Post-Its scattered over my desk at the office.
On one of them, a very poorly-drawn Dr. Fate is warning me I have up until the 31st to submit the Introduction to this Monograph I´m supposed to be writing as a requirement for my MBA accreditation-- which I´d completely forgotten about so far.

"Ten Days?! Jesus Christ!," I exclaim aloud to myself. "I could probably come up with my own space-program and terraform goddamn Mars in ten days!"
Then I make a bet with myself that I can get it done in less than two hours.

"And this is...," I smile, crack my knuckles against one another and whistle the opening lines to the Jackass theme song, "Extreme monograph!"

Never stop

2009-10-14T23:39:00.003-03:00

Post #400: And thus it comes to pass the time for coming up with the script for the season finale arrives: The screenwriters from Hell have all prepped up their typewriters and polished up their hooves. They take a puff from their cigars and blow the smoke over the rotting blank sheet of paper in front of them. SCENE 1, they type. Then a smile, oh so pitch-black and devilishly. SCENE 2, they type. Then 3 and 4 and so on.

They all do have a plot in mind, mind you. It´s all the screwing up creeping up and piling up like a gestalt of bad ideas all rolled into one: It´s the ingrown toenail-gone-half-hemorrhage, it´s the patellae getting blown to bits all over again, it´s my almost getting fired on 9/11 for bypassing SAP roles restrictions for my team then again my almost getting fired on 10/11 for pulling up stunts to bring up everyone´s attention to risks in data security. It´s also, and I guess mainly, the heartbreaks and the passing ups, it´s all the hang ups and the passing-throughs, the long weekend nights wasted staring at the wall or behind empty glasses in crowded nightclubs. It´s F. calling me up like months ago to say she misses me like hell and me, well, I just shrugged and pretended not to care, cool enough to freeze white-hot Napalm burning in the jungles of Vietnam, then speeding up with everything, moving so fast the ensuing months passed like early morning sunlight refracted through a drop of water.
Yet the screenwriting guild under Satan´s employ type on: SCENE 5, 6. SCENE 20, 21.

Maybe life´s telling me to slow down, to think or plan a little before acting, to stop moving so goddamn fast as if I´m fleeing from this entire twenty-century ahead. Maybe.

The screenwriters from hell take a little break: They go for a drink of water, free internet p*rn, whatever really. When they come back into the room and face the script lying on the typewriter—alas!—the surprise.
Someone, someone has sneaked in and continued the script from where they stopped, right there as the plot climaxes. They find written down the following words:

THERE IS NO LAND BEYOND THE LAW WHERE TYRANTS RULE WITH UNSPEAKABLE POWER. IT´S A DREAM... FROM WHICH THE EVIL WAKE UP TO FIND THEIR FATE... THEIR TERRIFYING HOUR...
--THE SANDMAN.

They look up, outraged, exchange suspecting glances amidst one another: Who could´ve dared... Then their attention is caught up by someone standing over the window sill, a silhouette against the full moon outside.
“Ta.. da.. da-daaaaaaa-daaaaa!,” I chant that mid-1990s Batman cartoon leitmotif with my arms spread over my head, holding up the bottom of my jacket like a makeshift cape. “Okay, fine”, I tell them. “Maybe you did get me with my pants down, something like that. And maybe I do have to slow down a bit, cool off a notch, think up some. I´ll grant you that. But I´ll never stop.”

“Going away on vacations for a week won´t save you, you know,” says one of them.
“You´ll be back within a week after you´ve gone,” says another.
“Perform as many miracles as you like,” says a third one. “But once you´re back it´s still November and that will give us plenty of time to catch up.”

“Yeah well about that.” I think for a moment as I sit down over the ledge with my legs hanging inside the room. Then in the back of my head, from out of the blue, Fleetwood Mac starts playing Go your own way. I think of the streets of Manhattan a couple of weeks from now. I smile at the screenwriters from Hell: Regular people get Norns or Furies knitting up their fates in a strand of wool, something like that. I get short baldy cigar-smoking screenwriters in Hell. Saying they want to catch up with me, no less. God. Okay, fine, I tell them: “You guys wanna catch up with me, you´d damn well better get yourselves a Maserati.”

You know you´re straight when...

2009-10-04T20:32:00.000-03:00

I was watching TV last night and Sex and the City was on HBO (the movie, not the series). I sat through the entire movie even though I didn´t get like 2/3 of the jokes. “I think I´m supposed to laugh on this one,” I´d often think as someone crapped her pants, and someone else just wouldn´t go back to her cheating husband out of sheer spite.

I liked the bit with the sushi, though.

Lost in the moment

2009-10-01T21:23:00.002-03:00

I´m sitting back on the couch in my living room with the computer on my lap, writing this under the pitch-black darkness of a blackout. Bruce Springsteen rages on through the MP3 player.
The back of the room basks in the bluish-silver glow from the monitor and is reflected back against my nape by the wide two-paneled window just a palm beyond the sofa.

There´s this airplane-shaped pencil sharpener resting tucked, half-lost, half-found among the throwpillows at my back. My grandmother gave it to me as a gift a few days ago, some memento from this little resort town we´d used to go back when I was a kid.
“You so used to love airplanes, do you remember?” she told me over the phone when I called in to thank her. “Do you remember how you used to know the names of all airplanes that ever existed?”

I´m holding the little faux-brass plated toy in my hand, watching its sleek copper-plated surface turn green against the lit-up blue monitor screen: MADE IN CHINA, it says. It´s the miniature of a B-1 Lancer bomber. It´s this tail-end relic from the waning days of the Cold War now, firebombing caves into cinders under Mid-Eastern desert skies.

K. got married last weekend and I was the Best Man sitting at the front row, no, second-front row with this gorgeous girl I used to know from long ago, back in the day, College and stuff, by my side. She was wearing purple. All the maids of honor were also clad in purple.
When the priest, this amiable if not a tad annoying, short, stocky little friendly stump in a white cape like a medieval Liberace minus the diamonds, began fooling around as to how the bride had ensnared, dazzled, captured the groom´s heart, K. slid his hand behind his back and gave us all-- the audience- the thumbs-up sign.
You know. Right off the bat: Firebombing the congregation just like that, just like a Lancer or a popstar.

“Yer gonna bring me a Wii from New York, right?,” the Maid of Honor turns to me and asks, and just like myself, she´s totally lost in the moment, but for all the different reasons.

Armageddon days

2009-09-20T20:23:00.001-03:00

I.
Dear L-X-X,
What can I say?
K. is getting married after what, ten years? I think you´d remember him, guy roomed with me, you talked to him once, about some Javascript code thing back in the day. Via ICQ instant messaging, of all things.

K. is getting married after what, ten years, and it sure feels life´s one long movie and we´re finally getting to the climax. I went out drinking with _______ again the other night, we´re the Best Men. We were talking of all things considered, how incredibly cool it is to send off a pal like that into life´s long night with a beacon in his hand.

There are things we´ll go through life without ever telling anyone, but there was this one time we were all at home and I was flipping over the dictionary, to randomly find the one word that would supposedly go on to christen our mascot or something. It was the idiotic idea of the week, obviously soon to be forgotten with the rest of them all.
The word I found was, Lamplighter.

I´m not entirely sure what´s the meaning of this, but as I´ve just said, there are things we´ll go through life without ever telling anyone, not even ourselves I guess. Still, it´s kind of nice to actually know some of us are able to find their way into the night and through these Armageddon days, instead of plain´old bitching about it like this old drama-queen bit of mine.

II.
As for me, well, I´d been having a lousy week, hell, a lousy month. You´d have no idea: All the same old mistakes coming straight back at me like some old, time-tested Dickensian ghost and you know how I feel about Charles Dickens, right? A Tale of Two Cities aside, I can´t f*cking stand Charles Dickens, so by the time I got to Friday afternoon and this guy I know forwarded an e-mail he´d received from Madison Square Garden, saying Bruce Springsteen´s playing NYC in November, and had asked me “So why don´t you go?”—I actually hit Reply and started typing all the reasons as to why I couldn´t make it. I mean, freaking obvious, right?

But as it turned out, I couldn´t find one single reason.

So I pretty much stopped thinking, opened a second browser window, picked up my credit card, and five minutes later there I was going to my boss (!) to tell him I needed a week off in November because, Springsteen playin´ the Garden, y´know, and I just happened to have the tickets...

III.
So it comes to pass that 2009 is evaporating, sublimating, goddamn disintegrating, and with it all the cool things and the perks of being in my twenties. Somewhere deep down in hell I´m sure the Prince of Lies is laughing his ass off once his screenwriters handle him the script´s latest pages.
It matters not, see, because Lamplighters aside, we´re all doomed to fail anyhow. That´s how I´ve come to think of life: All our choices will inevitably boil down to bad decision springing free old ghosts and the older we get the more we get to hurt ourselves.

So if you really think about it, and I do, there´s only one way as to how to deal with these Armageddon days we´re living—and it´s by throwing a few curve balls, it´s by denting the memetics of the mundane.
It´s about, I´ve just decided, thinking up “Aww hell” and recalling to mind what I told myself this year´s motto would be: WWMCD?

MC wants to go to a Springsteen concert ever since he was a little kid and read some comic book in which Captain America duked out against the Superpatriot at the parking lot of a Springsteen concert, and the Superpatriot was beating the tar out of Cap (everyone knows the Superpatriot can bench like 10 tons while Cap´s like a glorified Batman) but stopped because oh, he didn´t want to miss the show.

It takes me back, you know.
And it will take me forward too, it will take me right through these madcap Armageddon days, with the usual cocky smirk on my face.

And Wegthor Be Still as Bright...

2009-09-07T23:08:00.001-03:00

I.
I´m sitting in a restaurant with my parents back in my hometown and my father is yelling at me as usual: Regardless of whatever it is he´s started with this time around, he´s ending it with the traditional, And you can´t go on living your life like that, you´re about to turn thirty years old. His words bridge the great divide of lamb servings and green scatterings between us, then sublimate like the distant droning of a bee wading through a Styrofoam box, and mingle with the white noise surrounding our table.

I´m having a hard time concentrating.

The sleeping pills I got from my mother last evening haven´t lost their effect entirely so I´m still experiencing a bit of zoning out every half a minute or so. My father´s words are lost to the restaurant´s din but I´m not even making an effort to pay any attention because I´m staring at this drop-dead gorgeous blue-eyed blonde two tables from ours, whom I´m certain I´ve gone to High School with like more than a decade ago.

I know this guy who´d swear on a box of Stolichnayas he got into a drunken threesome with her back in College. He´d had the blessing of attending the same College as she did, see, in the same middle-of-nowhere town where I suppose there were no better things to do than get into drunken threesomes with people you went to High School with.

Not that there´s anything wrong with that, I mean.
Me, I coasted through College by skipping class and going to the old arcades downtown.

II.
And my knees haven´t healed yet. F*ck.
I´m looking at this trophy blonde sitting at a nearby table at the restaurant and even though I´m supposed to be thinking of getting into drunken threesomes with her, I can´t really stop thinking of Jax-Ur for chrissakes. Jax-Ur. Jesus f*cking Christ. Guy was this old Superman villain from back in the sixties and just like the rest of his brain-dead Phantom Zone ilk, he was some sort of a moron himself if you really think about it: Set his rockets to space and blew up Wegthor instead.

Wegthor was one of Krypton´s two or three moons (I forget). So he killed a lot of people and ended up exiled into the Phantom Zone. Which is like, the perfect place for peeping toms to watch over drop-dead blue-eyed blondes going into drunken threesomes with your pals, if you think about it.

But my knees haven´t healed yet and I just want to go back with all the running in the evenings after work. I´d trade up a lifetime of drunken threesomes with that blonde plus a stack of Silver Age Superman comics-- for one last running up the street beneath a cold June thunderboomer, leaping over trash bags and oh by the time you get those endorphins going into mad drunken threesomes with you and all the caffeine in your blood...

III.
Story of my life, though: Set my rockets to space and blew up my patellae instead.
And Wegthor Be Still as Bright.

Hidden on the backstreets

2009-08-30T22:22:00.003-03:00

"So which one do you wanna see first?", says _____´s friend before what can only be described as a veritable Bruce Springsteen museum deep in the heart of S*o Paulo-- shelf after shelf filled to the brim from floor to ceiling with every bootleg ever not-released, every DVD mined from the wee hours spent redeyed in and across websites and forums and message boards. An autograph for crying out loud. Then the poster from the Born in the USA tour, nineteen-eighty-whenever.

"Dude, I have no idea where to start!," says the kid in Christmas morning in me.

He selects a CD he´s just burned from atop a shelf, slips it into the player. Says, "Miami, 1992. Check the backing vocals on this live version of Hungry Heart".

"That´s the song he wrote for the Ramones, right?" I ask him teacher´s pet-like, desperately seeking approval from the obviously higher authority.

He gives me the thumbs up.
The music starts.

“Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty”

2009-08-24T22:33:00.000-03:00

I´m listening to the classical music station on my headphones: They´re playing some Medieval piece inspired by this 14th-century poem, French I think, about either this ass or this donkey who becomes buddies with the goddess of Fortune and gets into nobility and court and stuff like that. It´s supposed to be a political allegory. Donkey ends up befriending powerful feudal lords and mighty bishops. Donkey marries with the goddess of Vanity with other metaphors such as Adultery and Lust being invitees to the ceremony. Donkey ends up ruling the kingdom, and discovers his (its?) purpose in life is to pave the way to the anti-Christ.
Regardless of anything, Medieval chamber music sounds so f*cking sissy it´s no wonder man actually outgrew stuff like the plague and the Crusades only to send radio-controlled toys to Mars.

I shift my weight from my left buttock to the right one atop the conference desk as I bend sideways to plug the network cable into this thin client terminal and almost knock the coffee mug off the table. I take another sip, then another.
Then another.

I´d wish for my knees to heal faster if it´d ever made any sense.
My knees hurt so much: I´ve busted them running over asphalt with a backpack once again. For like, the fifth time these last five years or so?

I slip my hand into my breastpocket for my cell phone and change the station for the old familiar rock station: The Church starts playing Under the Milky Way Tonight and this is the time you actually expect this train of thought to reach any station.

It doesn´t, though: I can hardly wait for working hours to end, to go home and fix myself some ice cubes on plastic bags on my legs...

Urban-jungle Boddhi-tree

2009-08-17T21:56:00.000-03:00

I was wandering across town the other day, it was a Sunday afternoon with the weekend just beat— regardless of well, anything at all— no purpose, nowhere else to go & nothing else to do, really. I ended up stumbling upon this drawing of the Buddha— spray-painted in black stencil upon the lower concrete walls of the would-be fountain flanking the museum— and...

There was this book by Jack Kerouac, right? Back in the fifties. That he wrote about the Buddha. And there were these words he used...
There was that sentence— “There is no hiding in a shattering dewdrop.”— whatever he meant by that.

I thought about it for a split-second or two, shrugged, and crossed the thronging avenue towards a McDonald´s for an ice-cream cone.

K.´s best men two months before the wedding

2009-08-02T13:34:00.006-03:00

“Bruce, you´re over 30 years old!”
Jezebel Jet to Bruce Wayne
from Batman #677, July 2008

I.
“How did we end up here anyway?,” I ask _____ in the middle of the thronging dancefloor at about two in the morning as I realize I was supposed to be somewhere else entirely, at this birthday party from someone from the office or whatnot. The walls and ceiling are all painted blood-red, the same color as occasional velvet drapes hanging from posters of old movies.
_____ says nothing for a few seconds, obviously having some difficulty in balancing the plastic bag hanging from his arms with the stuff he´d gotten at the bookstore at the mall way earlier this afternoon, plus the box of chocolates, with the dancing per se. Alice Cooper´s Clones is followed by Joan Jett´s... whatever, really. We´re dead drunk and in very poor state to actually mind the music regardless how good the DJ is. He finally looks up from either the floor or his bag or someone´s ass and makes the V-sign over his head with his free hand, as if conveying an Indian through mimic: “Lady with the feather,” he tells me, slurring.

There was a lady with a feather pinned through her hair, which was tied up in a bun in the back of her head. She was waiting outside the bar-slash-nightclub dressed in a red bustier thing with black stockings, like some French cabaret dancer despite the cold outside. Once she mentioned they were playing strictly New Wave songs tonight, ____ freaked out and just begged for us to get inside. And so we did, even though it was only ten p.m. and the club was practically empty (then). We sat by the bar and started drinking all the funny stuff they had on the menu. The waitress was a dead ringer for Phoebe from Friends though with a lot of tattoos over her arms and breasts, and she sort of laughed real hard when I told her to bring me next up, “Whatever, really”.
It was not more than an hour after we´d gotten inside and we´d already sampled a rather considerate part of their drinks by that time, and the place was only at half-capacity.
When I asked ____ where the hell was everybody, he winked at me and said they were all probably stuck in traffic as they all crawled out of the gutters at the same time once midnight struck. It was that kind of place, after all. I just hoped to hell that there were no persons dressed up like vampires coming, or some crap like that.

But of course the day had started way before that, which sort of explains why ______ not only had a plastic bag with books inside a seedy nightclub in the wee hours of the morning, but also a box with fancy chocolates he´d gotten from K. on the occasion of our being chosen to be best men for his wedding. At least I´d had the foresight to leave mine in the refrigerator back home.

II.
After luncheon at the mall where we all got together to meet K. and his fiancée for pasta and the passing along of the wedding invitations, ______ had followed me to my place even though the very reason for that utterly escapes me. We ended up watching this Echo & the Bunnymen DVD freshly arrived from the mail a few days before, then I put on some pants and ditched the soon-to-be trademarked plaid flannel shirt and bermudas, and we hopped a taxi to this cool burger place we´d only been once to, on the opening night and it was so crowded and the service had sucked, so we wanted to give it a second try.

We started drinking over the burgers: vodka with pineapple, it was about eight p.m. and we´d planned to part up, him going back to his apartment and I was supposed to go across the street from the burger place to this trendy nightclub which only plays Caribbean music, some utter crap like that, for a birthday party from someone from the office.

Dinner ended up earlier than planned, though, and we decided to roam across town looking for some place to continue with the drinking: Another cab hopped, another joint found. We´d been walking for I think not even twenty minutes, looking up possible watering holes, and that´s when we stumbled upon the cabaret lady with the feather in her hair.
I was ten p.m. exactly, and _____ looked at me and said, “Hey, can´t we go in for like an hour or two? You can always go to that Latin music crap afterwards. Like, later.”
“Aww what the hell,” I told him. “But you´re the one with the bag with the books and the chocolate.”

III.
“Make that two of those,” I told Phoebe the waitress but _____ said no, I was drinking it all up way too fast and even though I was in a fairly better condition than he was, he was sure I couldn´t keep it up all night.
“Jesus f*cking Christ,” I told him, “I´m a hyperactive child, alright? Fastest boy alive and all that jazz. I can keep this up for all night, for all my life, if I so choose. I´ll never stop.”

I might have eaten about half of _____´s chocolates while still at the bar a little before heading to the dance floor, even though he either didn´t realize because he was too drunk to notice, or because he never really cared. Either way, it probably accounted for my having more tolerance to alcohol than ______ --- and ____ is a pretty heavy drinker himself. But I can hold my own against most people, which is really strange because I´m not really into drinking and don´t drink too often.

“Aren´t you, like, freaking out because you´re tuning thirty, too?,” I asked _____ out of the blue. "I mean. Sometimes I just stop and look around my living room and I realize I´m about to turn thirty and I´m still spending like a fortune every month on comics books and action figures alone only to fill some idiotic, nameless void inside me, then there´s also all the sleeping around with girls I really shouldn´t hang around with, just for kicks, and then I sort of second-guess myself for a split second, and question what the hell I´m doing to my life..."
He turned to me dead serious, with the black circles beneath his eyes darker than usual and shrugged: "Yeah man," he said.
"But it´s like...," I looked up from my glass to the mirror behind the counter, and I realized I had this really scary though sincere grin on my face, "It´s like I have the perfect life now, you know? That I always wanted? And if those f*cking god-fearing rednecks want to hang me for that, then I´ll have their whole f*cking world burned way before that!"

Then the conversation shifted from James Whale´s Frankenstein films to growing up & getting old, but that part of the night was a little depressing and we pretty much had it soaked under more alcohol anyhow.

III.
It´s three p.m. and I´m following the streetlights back home, walking alone across this large avenue, passing the park then the museum, trying not to fall down and not to vomit, then I start laughing out loud once I recall _____ pointing to some kid he´d spotted in the nightclub a few hours before. “Look at that faggot in the white shirt,” he said, “Didn´t he use to go to High School with us back home?” Oh what the heck I told _____ and crossed the dance floor to hassle, bully the kid just like we´d do ten, fifteen years ago but we was with like, a thousand faggot friends who would probably beat the crap out of me, so I went back to _____, sullen, and told him no way. Kid´s father had a gym back home, was my mother´s aerobics instructor back in the day when the world got all Olivia Newton John crazed.

I get home, turn on the TV and fall back on the couch naked. Some girl who looks like Britney Spears is on Saturday Night Live and it makes me feel like jerking off for a split-second, but then I change the channels and sleep to the sound of Ben 10 on Cartoon Network, which is this real stupid show and I´d rather be watching Batman anyhow.

Knowing this twenty years ago would´ve made the Third Grade so much cooler

2009-07-27T22:37:00.000-03:00

So I was at the conference room earlier today and we were having a meeting about, whatever, really, and it came to pass that there was this large roll of masking tape atop the conference table, I have no idea why, it was just there for the plucking and fooling around with it.
I´d been doodling on my notebook in lieu of taking notes, obviously, though it´s pretty much because as I´ve remarked on occasion, time & again, I think of myself as selectively eidetic, whatever that really means. So I get to remember most stuff. Hence my doodling Aquaman fighting off the Ocean Master and Black Manta on my notebook while people just talked and half-bored me to death— the fictional battle was pretty cool and all that even though they were nothing but a bunch of stick figures. Though you could sort of spot Ocean Master´s signature pitchfork thing, also Black Manta´s helmet.
It was then I realized—I mean it was so freaking simple I have no idea how I never thought of it during Third Grade—If I took a piece of masking tape and applied it over the Aquaman & foes figures, well it pretty much gave the effect as if they were all all fighting underwater!

And that...

And that...

Oh well.
Some pieces just have their own end unto themselves, right? Or something like that?
Though later I did try placing the masking tape halfway over this drawing of H.P. Lovecraft´s Cthulhu, and it looked so damn cool, with the giant octopus-beast-thing crawling out of the ocean just like in the short story. What do you know, the whole underwater trompe-l´oeil thing actually works every time!

Midyear review

2009-07-06T22:19:00.003-03:00

And so it´s come to pass that Michael Jackson has passed away and Farrah Fawcett has passed away and Robert McNamara has passed away, and even the Doctor who pulled me out of my mother like close to thirty years ago, has also passed away: They all made front page news, even the Doctor.

Time passes and another full minute elapses here between paragraphs: The hitherto-nonstopping typing, that frantic, manic, staccato-like burst of typewriter fire from the screenwriters from hell under Satan´s Writers Guild ceases for a minute or two.
They leave their desks unoccupied for the time being, go for a drink of water (boiling water, that is). If you approach their desks and look over their papers you will get to see the script they´ve been writing for the last six, seven months: They are halfway through this 2009 of theirs, let me tell you that.

My classes have since ended.
We went to this bar last Friday to sort of celebrate and people asked me why I wasn´t going to Europe with them. It´s not like a guy like you don´t have the money, some said. I said nothing, not really, and not really caring too much anyway. Great guys though. Great girls too. They actually thanked me for making class so much fun, and said last Thursday had been the greatest day ever because of that thing we pulled in the back of the class, when we started trying to associate each student to a famous person: From Poltergeist´s Carol Anne to Mad´s Alfred E. Newman, we did everything and everyone. Charlie Brown. Alf. Super-Vicky. Bette Davis, for crying out loud, for the hot chick with the big, deep eyes (Better Davis was my favorite but I don´t think people got that one). I got to be this local crooked politician, some bald one with thick eyebrows.
A couple of girls asked me if I was gay. They said it was because of the things I´d say and how I´d say them. I think it was because of my naming someone Bette Davis, even though to my defense I was actually thinking of the song instead of the actress per se.
“Naahh”, I told them anyway. “That´s like, really dumb.”

This other girl sort of took me from the away from the bar at about close to 2 in the morning: Caught me by the arm and said she was hellbent on taking me home. It got pretty clear I was going to get some at last, jesus christ, some vindication was sorely needed after all that time. “Okay,” I told her.
Thing is halfway to my place she started blabbing about her boyfriend and their being like six or six hundred years together despite all their differences and so on, while me, I was just praying to hell there were still enough condoms at the medicine cabinet. Not that you´re actually either thinking or assuming you´re gonna be needing like seventeen of them in one night for chrissakes, but you know: boys will be boys. Also, there but for the grace of god, and all that jazz.

A minor plot twist: She parks in front of my building and we talk for like three milliseconds. Kiss on the cheek. She never comes up.

There are four condoms back in the medicine cabinet. I make the point so as to check it like, first thing upon entering the apartment, even before peeing, even before brushing my teeth or taking a shower.
And there was another one to spare in my wallet but that one was sort of old and I don´t even think it was textured, you know? “Ribbed for her pleasure”.

Screenwriters from hell indeed: Halfway through the script and just you look how far we´ve come without a single plot.
2009 carries on...

All in all, this Sunday kind of sucked

2009-06-28T22:16:00.001-03:00

So power was shut down this morning up until mid-afternoon, and water followed suit after noon. Some maintenance crap down the street, something like that.

Had nothing special to do, not really, so I slipped on some sneakers and went to see that god-awful Transformers movie: Knowing from the get-go it´d probably suck anyhow, but expecting to see some cool shots of F-22s in action-- which never really happened.

All in all, this Sunday kind of sucked...

It´s so much fun playing around with words (a poem)

2009-06-24T23:14:00.001-03:00

Sometimes I dream of warm Summer nights spent
outdoors among shrubberies sparse and thin, tall
trees bare of fruit feeding the fire at our feet with a
dried-out windfall of dead bark and bough and leaf
and twig.

Yet the fire cracks still at our feet in this dream and
its din is like the gentle snoring of a bearded wise
giant sleeplessly knitting throughout Creation with
needles silver though complexion like dusty
parchment.

Up I step to yell at the old man,
“Dontcha yield old man Father Time let it rip,”
then watch him wake to swing his scythe sideways
from East to West, horizon to proximity,
shoreline to sky, and I see all the weekends from a
childhood idyllic merged over those later straycat
blackhole years inevitably misspent in College:

Everything boiled down to a past only half-forgotten
but mostly rendered in rags apocryphal.

Then just before the sand ebbs away washed from
eyes shut tight I find myself a lone castaway on the
left banks of night´s beach under this Southern Cross
of ours, seeing you coast by to righter shores safely tucked
beneath Winter´s gray coat just like sails set high bridging
this great divide-- and us half a continent asunder.

The Purge (a haiku)

2009-06-13T00:59:00.000-03:00

Tonight undressing
all the chaos off my life,
from shoreline to sky.

Still life, with an M-16

2009-06-07T20:58:00.003-03:00

The other night I dreamed I was at the park, at this large open field surrounded by tall trees. It was a sunny Spring morning and I was utterly alone.
I had an M-16 rifle with me, god knows why, and I was practicing shooting at this range of trees closing in around the grassy heath in the distance. "Y´know, this is so cool," I´d say upon every round I´d fire.

When I woke up, I logged online and started looking up old mid-1980s Vigilante comics for sale.

Wavelengths

2009-05-31T19:16:00.001-03:00

All of a sudden all the girls seem have started wearing purple this Autumn, I´m thinking. Three years ago, it was May ´06 and I was at the mall having lunch with some friends from the office and there was this drop-dead gorgeous girl with her mother or something like that, and she had a periwinkle-blue sweater and when I came home that evening I sat down and actually wrote about that girl with the periwinkle-blue sweater even though I never got to talk to her, to know her name, or to see her again.

Maybe it´s just that I´m a little frustrated when it comes to girls right now, that I´m choosing the collective against the individual, not really being able to make a writer´s muse out a random shopping mall encounter this time around—or maybe it´s just that Autumn has indeed tilted to the lower-end of the spectrum this year, and that in order for things to work I should get my heart beating to shorter wavelengths.