I can’t remember the last time that I saw a Polaroid picture and was actually enthralled by it.  Where I live, it’s not just common for everyone to have Polaroid pictures set as their social networking default pictures, it’s a daily occurence to see someone walking around with their instant-gratification picture-machine draped over their shoulder, bouncing it alongside their designer belts and ill-fitting tee shirt-esque garments.  Not only do I disagree with the treatment of these relics of photographic past, but the majority of the resulting pictures is appalling.

However…

During my morning run, I came across this beauty:

It is the first Polaroid that has impressed me in a while.  Hell, it’s the first portrait that has impressed me in a long time.  I can’t tell if someone cut it up in order to save the face or to remove the face.  I can just tell that whatever was done to this picture was with a very definitive amount of feeling.  And sometimes, I guess, that’s all it takes to impress me.

The following piece is actually intended to be spoken out loud, not read. I encourage you to go in a dark room, your closet, the top of your roof, a dim library, wherever, and read it out loud in the fastest, most frenetic, most childish voice possible. Try to sound innocent. Perhaps, if things treat me well enough tonight, I’ll record myself reading it… an endeavor that will definitely provide my nasally whine of a voice a few minutes to shine.

I walked into the library trying to make it look like I was walking in on any of the other days that I walked into that library because I went there all the time. There’s the desk over there where the pretty librarian sets her books down and slams the rubber on the cover hard and fast and moves on to the next book. She looked me up and down and waggled her eyes at me. I waved “hi” to her like on any other day.
She waved back at me and when I got past her I saw one of her hands pick up the telephone and dial the first three numbers of a phone number out of the corner of my eye. Her glasses slid off of her nose and she pushed them back up so that they would match with those funny dents they had left. I could hear her speaking quickly but had no time to make out the words because I had to get to my table and my book.
The shelves of books were piled higher than my head, sometimes looking like they were going to fall over, like shelves were on shelves, like the ones that my dad had made in the garage. I had never seen the shelves of books fall on anyone but thought they might because I can remember seeing the tool shelves fall on the car when I was reaching for the wrench to hit the snake. Continue Reading »

A very wise friend of mine once told me: “Sometimes embarrassing yourself to the point of permanent character mutilation is the best way to get a feeling across.”

And so…

The projects keep on piling up as I struggle to make myself as busy as humanly possible.  Take a look over on the left side for “The Covers Project” or click here to see my latest, probably most embarrassing endeavor.  Do me a favor and read all of the text at the top.

When I was growing up, my family lived next door to a perfect clan of six. My sister and I were the same age as their oldest two and so, despite growing apart in our high school years, we all still got together every year around the holidays for dinner. Celebrating Christmas a few days late with the Brady Bunch didn’t just alleviate the pains of letting distant relatives down, it also made you feel like you were on TV. And who doesn’t want to be on T.V.? Propped up and posed for the camera, laughing and cheersing each other.

It was during the most recent of these dinners that the youngest of my neighbor’s family, Tommy, began telling an anecdote about how he had managed to stay out far past his curfew when he was 16. He spun a tale of window leaping and tree branch swinging that would have made the Ringling Brothers look like they had muscular dystrophy.

What was more interesting than his fibbing at the dinner table was his willingness to do so. Here Tommy was, only a year after having committed the crime, and he was blurting out the trade secrets of teenager-hood to his parents. He’d taken a dossier of classified information and splayed it open to the Russians, to his mother, the Boris Yeltsin of adolescence.

Later, I asked him why:

“We have ‘free days’ ever since Sarah (his oldest sister) moved out,” he told me in confidence, over a beer in his snow-covered driveway. “When everyone is home for the holidays, we’re allowed to talk about whatever we want, admit to anything we’ve done, and my parents have agreed to not get mad about it. It’s gone, done, and they said we should all be relaxed on the holidays.” He took a last gulp of his beer and shoved a piece of gum in his mouth. Continue Reading »

I’ve begun a new “project.”  So far it is titled the “Disaster Project.”  Please go read about it by clicking here. Or you can look to the left under the heading “Pages.”  Hopefully it’ll be updated soon.  I’ll definitely be posting a reminder on the main page of this blog any time I update it.  Hope you enjoy.

Fear is the way in.  Fear is not something to fear.  Fear cannot be told to settle down and sit still.  It will shake its head and demand you lie down in the snow.  It waves its finger and looks you straight in the face and says, “You will listen to me.  The fact that I exist is the sign that you will listen to me.”  Fear does not want to stay.  Fear hopes that it will leave; you are but a cog in its plan.  Fear does not want to hurt you, but it will.  Fear is the thought in your brain right before those three words, the twitch behind your eyes when the red and blues are onto you, the crawl of your skin when your lover is gone.  Fear wants to leave you, it has better things to do.  Fear runs quickest when you open your eyes all at once.  Don’t peak through your fingers and pray for the least amount of blood, the car to be in one piece – this was a crash.

Fear will not require you once you have stared at it.  It is pathetic, sniveling, vain, and insecure.  Fear packs its clothes up, leaves you naked on the floor when you start crying out that you’re enjoying it.

But it leaves.  And fear is too proud to return for its CDs.

So I’m sitting here in Orange County. It’s a place so close to L.A. that you can hardly see your hand through the opaque, suffocating smog if you held it out in front of your face (never mind your eyes squinting shut from the chronic smoker’s cough you’ve developed over the course of your stay). I’m in Orange County, the place where Midwestern lungs and hearts go to die. I am having a coffee and a cigarette on a sunny morning, looking at the trees. Five minutes earlier, I felt my breakfast of a fresh orange, a piece of toast, and two cigarettes come surging up my esophagus as I pedaled my bike, hunched forward over my handlebars, towards this café.

What had appeared to be a sixteen-year old girl driving a Range Rover had just made an illegal left turn and almost clipped my front tire. I don’t know whether it was my sudden fear of death at the hands of the privileged and undeserving or my subconscious hope that I could vomit this close to the passenger side of her car that made me feel sick. Were it the latter, maybe then I could have leaned to my left and thrown a hearty Chicagoan OOMPH behind the mixture of orange peel and tobacco-blackened stomach acid, so as to spray the substance all over the side of her car.

Though it’s not likely, I wonder, “Maybe she won’t notice it and it will rot for days on the side of her car. Maybe the stench will be unbearable and her perfect life with her perfect boyfriend under her perfect blue sky driving through her perfect unending strip mall lined with perfect (and not indigenous) palm trees will come to a screeching halt because she doesn’t smell like the perfect Abercrombie model and now her perfect boyfriend won’t let her spend suck his perfect dick.”

Or maybe she would have noticed. Continue Reading »

These are not friends.
This is not life beaming at me from smiles
And rhythmic shuffling feet.
The sweat and lust and pulse
Of a hundred looks of approval
Hands nodding, swallowing the scene in the dark.
My tie is too tight.

Four years and a thousand introductions
Four years and a thousand open-mouthed embraces.
As many circular screamed arguments.
As many nights awake
waiting for this
bed to devour me.
As many times as I second-guessed tonight.
My tie is too tight.

Fingers fumble for a flask
Feet lose footing, try to keep a beat
Eyes evade a hundred stares of
Dizzied friends with
Perfect tits
Perfect dicks.
My tie is too tight.

23 years spent busy dying.  Time to follow Red.