Note To Self, Buy More Bullets

READING: Clock of the Long Now – Time and Responsibility (“When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs in the past.” – Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska)

LISTENING: And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, OSI, Van Halen, Pre-Stevie Fleetwood Mac, The Mars Volta, Puscifer…

The time has come to pare down my possessions in preparation for my upcoming move to the Department of Awesome.  Now, I happen to like black trash bags.  There’s something final about them.  I buy ‘em by the shitload (metric) and I like ‘em strong.  Once I’ve made up my mind that something has to leave my life, it goes in a black bag sealed beneath a sturdy square knot.  There’s no coming back from one of those.

I’m looking forward to purging.  There’ll be black trash bags of old clothes destined for thrift stores in little piles around the floor; bags destined for the recycling bin, or destined for Freecycle.  Still others will be handed off as fast as I can get on the phone.  I’ve got piles of plain black t-shirts to sort through, and hangars holding up dress shirts purchased with good intention, but never worn.  Turns out I’m just not that guy.

I’ve got five or six pairs of shoes, some I never wear.  Well-polished Doc Martens: stay.  Continent-weary Chucks: stay.  Comfortable and practical Keens: to be replaced by a new pair, the old ones discarded.  The rest: go bye-bye.

I’ve got four or five extra sets of sheets, some of them reserved for guests.  I won’t be needing so many of those,  just as I don’t plan to be entertaining ‘guests’ any time soon.

Craigslist isn’t an option.  As an Aries male, when I make a decision, that’s it — time to carry it through.  I don’t want to wait around for someone else to waffle over their decision, thereby impacting mine.  And I don’t want to hear, “Well, what you might want to consider is –”

No.  I don’t want second- or third-fucking-guesses.  I don’t wanna be told to “wait” or “reconsider”, and I certainly don’t want to be told that I should have done it “this way or that way” after the fact.  That serves no purpose.  Indecision drive me to distraction.  If you’re the kind of person who stands in line hemming and hawing about what looks good on the menu, don’t come around for dinner.  If you need twenty minutes at the post office to decide what kind of stamps best accent your eyes; please, state this on a plain cotton t-shirt, bold letters, both sides, so I know to avoid you.

Now the hard part — how do I make the distinction between what stays or goes?  I’ve got a number of bags: one large suitcase for extended trips three weeks and over; a smaller one for overnight jobs when I need to travel light; a Crumpler backpack that holds all my gear for shoots, including a laptop sleeve.  I’ve got a small hiking pack that perfectly holds a first-aid kit, Camelbak, raingear and a change of clothes.  I’ve got another full-size pack that holds my tent, sleeping bag, mess kit and change of clothes.  Finally, I’ve got a courier bag that I use every day whilst traveling around the city, valued for it’s rugged design.  Getting rid of one impacts the rest.

The books are no problem — there’s always a used bookstore willing to take my dog-eared treasures, and I got rid of my DVD collection years ago — Netflix works much better.  The keepers went into books to conserve space, and the jewel cases found their way to the trash after I turned my CD collection into electrons.

Kitchen stuff is easy: I don’t have a lot of it, ditto for large furniture — a desk, a computer, a papasan chair, a table to hold up the television and DVD player and a table and four chairs with which to support dinner.  Those can: stay.

It’s got to be binary, yes or no.  The weight bench: goes. Space considerations.  The 15-pound barbell: goes, the 25-pound barbell: stays.  The hammock: goes, the bed: stays.  The large black carry-all which holds my emergency radio, cold weather survival gear, .45 holster, knife collection and camp light: stays.  All the crap leftover from being a Windows user: gone.  The old cell phones: destroyed.  The meticulously maintained files of paid bills: inferno.

The love letters: go, the gun: stays.

(Note to self, buy more bullets.)

TWM

Blood is Thicker Than Vodka

Long story short, I left the country before the L.A. riots, and didn’t get back till after the O.J. verdict in November of 1995, having fulfilled my obligation to The Man. When I showed up without warning on Michael’s doorstep, it came as quite a shock.

“Holy shit!” I’d caught him completely by surprise. “What’s up, man!” he shouted, embraced me in a huge hug, thumping me on the back. Michael was a chain-smoking fireplug who’d moved furniture for years. “Where the hell ya been?”

“Europe,” I dead panned. “Can I come in? I’m really thirsty.” We laughed and he led the way. “Hey, look who’s back from outer space!” He had a house full of guests. I’d managed to arrive on his birthday. We talked for awhile, got caught up on old times. He seemed genuinely proud of what I had done.

The rest of the evening wasn’t as festive. There were a lot of guys there from the old days, friends of Michael’s who didn’t particularly care to see me again for one reason or another. Nothing I could really put a finger on, but there’d always been bad blood between us. Something about me always made them shake their heads in disbelief, or look down their noses at me.

I’d been at Michael’s for an hour or so before I wandered into the kitchen for a fresh drink. Michael had stepped out back to conduct ‘business’, which was always handled outside. House rules. Abide by them, or leave.

The kitchen was tiny, dominated by cigarette smoke. There was barely room for the appliances, let alone five guys crammed around three sides of a card table playing Euchre. I hate Euchre. Knowledge of that stupid fucking game is some kind of weird requirement to live in Ohio.

The counters brimmed with stacks of paper plates and bowls of food, platters of finger foods, bags of pretzels, two-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper, and an army of liquor bottles.

I stood leaning in the doorway, watching them. Waiting for the right time to speak. “So. What’re you guys been up to?” I smiled, tried to sound friendly, casual even. The reply came after a brief pause.

“Aw, you know. Chillin.”

I fucking hate that phrase. I feel like punching a goat when someone says it. Especially when the speaker bobs his head and shoulders slightly as he speaks, as if to lend more weight to his words.

“So what’re you been?” He didn’t look up when he asked me, and didn’t sound like he really cared one way or the other.

“Aw, you know. Europe,” I deadpanned. After a pause and a shrug, of course.

“Huh. Must be nice to be rich,” grumbled another from his chair in the corner. I forget his name, but I remember his sullen expression. Slapped down a card. Drew another. Exhaled plumes of smoke through his nostrils. No eye contact.

“Wasn’t a free ride.” I put emphasis on the last word, felt my teeth grinding. I was boring a hole through the top of his fat head with my eyes, daring him to look at me. “I made sacrifices to get outta this fucking town. Sold my soul to The Man. Otherwise I’d still be on the couch. Chillin.”

Moments passed, and subtle looks were exchanged. The second hand on the wall clock could have broken concrete. I waited for the inevitable.

“So, ya fight in any wars?” There it is. This wasn’t about me going to Europe. It was all about ‘had I proven myself, tasted blood, walked through fire, seen some shit’, or was I still Mike’s weird little bookworm cousin who dressed in black and acted like he knew too much? There wasn’t going to be an answer good enough for them. I could have handed them Hitler on a stick, but they’d have just grunted and said it was ‘cool.’

The follow-up question was slow to surface, but it surfaced nontheless: “You kill any bad guys?”

“Hell YES!” I shouted, slamming the handle of the butter knife down across the breadboard with the edge of my hand, sending it into the air. It spun once, landed in my hand and I gripped it with what I felt was an action-packed crouch. The sight of the knife in my hand combined with my sudden outburst had grabbed their attention. They weren’t ready to deal with this.

“There we were! MILES behind enemy lines! Taking heavy fire from a nest of blood-thirsty KRAUTS! Cut off from our rendezvous with the Scarlet Pimpernel, our inside man in the French RESISTANCE! The lives of my men and the success of this top secret mission hung in the balance! And so, armed with nothing more than the tempest of my LOINS, I rushed into the bunker and whipped them all to DEATH with a ROLLED-UP COPY OF PENTHOUSE!” Arms over my head, I let out a blood-curdling battle cry and screamed the last line. “GOD BLESS AMERICA! GOD SAVE THE POPE!”

Actually, I didn’t say any of that. I wished I had. Instead, I told them my job was to build, arm, actuate, refurbish and repair smart torpedoes and underwater mines. I explained how underwater mines worked, how they generated a series of bubbles so strong they could punch cracks in the underside of a destroyer. That was my job. And that’s all it was to me, a nine-to-five job.

Off the clock, I could be found in a cab, on a train or on a bus. I told them I’d seen famous works of art and rubbed elbows with celebrities. I’d filmed the ruins of crumbling monasteries and medieval castles. I’d gone swimming in the sea, and climbed Mt. Etna. I’d hiked through abandoned villages half-embedded in black volcanic rock. I told them in great detail about the night some friends and I camped in a World War II bunker crawling with mice, but how we’d stunned them into stupidity by flinging flash bang grenades down the passageway. I demonstrated my (fading) grasp of conversational Italian. I painted vivid pictures of fresh blood oranges eaten straight off the trees, and bitter brown espresso sipped at corner cafes. I talked about the old Sicilian men in their wool suits on rickety wooden chairs under a sweltering sky. I mentioned the time I’d gotten lost in a vast underground burial chamber with only a camcorder to light my way. I’d talked about touching the graves of knights, and how I’d stood so high on a mountaintop that I could see the curvature of the earth. I talked about ancient battlegrounds, and falling off barstools in pubs that were older than America. I showed them my tattoos. I described my life in Scotland and Sicily, and what it was like to see the velvety spiral of the Milky Way at midnight from the deck of an Italian minesweeper sailing off the coast of Tunisia.

When it was over, you could cut the tension in the room with a knife. I’d gone too far. I’d rubbed their Midwest faces in it, but good.

“I’ll be in my office.” I grabbed a bottle of cheap vodka from the counter and sat on Michael’s front stoop staring at the swirling snowflakes. I thought about nothing and killed off half the bottle in about an hour, hiding my vomit in a snow bank. Somehow I woke up on the couch under a warm blanket. My Docs were untied, sitting nearby. Mike’s doing, no doubt.

I guess it’s true about blood being thicker than vodka.

 

All Great Things Must First Wear Monstrous and Terrifying Masks…

Attention marketing types:

“People sleeping on/
trains don’t give a good goddamn/
about your billboards.”

On the Metro ride home yesterday, I found myself fantasizing about the reversal of gravity and those brief, panic-ridden seconds before everything not already bolted down would suddenly go flying north. All around me, people would be grasping desperately at building ledges, crammed into bus stops, stuck safe inside the subway, and trapped at work. Those in traffic would have it the worst, doomed to explore the outer reaches of space in their brand new Hummer, wholly unprepared for the rushing sound of precious oxygen to go whooshing out through the rubber seals. Might as well start the engine, and turn up the radio. There’s not much left to do at that point but enjoy the view and think kindly upon your life…

The Metro is like some kind of anthropologist lab experiment; the set scowls of those who know they’ve been fucked every day of their lives, and when they wake up, they’ll be fucked again. The cartoonist indifference, the minor indignity which adds up up over time. Time rolls on, wholly unaware of our perception of it. We chop the river into pieces, and label it ‘years’, ‘months’, ‘seconds.’ It wouldn’t matter if we labeled it ‘rye’, wheat’ or ‘potato’. Did we begin to age faster from the moment we first created the calendar? I’m sitting in a rail car moving at X speed along unblinking steel rails.

07JAN08 – Staten Island, New York. This trip has so far reaffirmed my desire to avoid big city life. It’s loud, hot and way too fast. I have the distinct impression that with one wrong move, I could slip, fall, and be eaten alive by the sidewalk, yelping and screaming as the city devours my legs. A large man named Paulie from the pizza place on the corner will shrug and say, “Enh, it’s New York, whaddya gonna do?”

Winter has a way of making things look worn and tattered. This can be compounded by staying in a Staten Island Navy Lodge with a glamorous view of the parking lot, and an honest-to-fuck trundle bed that creaked like the belt of a fat man when I pulled it down from the wall. Right now, all I want to do is wash my face, brush my teeth and kick off my Docs – proof positive that I’m getting older. I can remember a time when a cold drink and a wild time were paramount upon arriving somewhere new.

Hotels used to keep pads of stationary in the occupants rooms. All I’ve seen lately are notepads, and shitty Bic pens with the hotel logo on them. It’s as if we have lost the opportunity to be elegant, to sit down and compose our thoughts on paper, or express ourselves in complete sentences. Everything is moving faster, sentences are getting shorter, attention spans are shrinking. Or maybe we’ve just shifted our medium.

09JAN08 –Later, on the train home: the job went smooth. I packed in a king-hell hurry and flung myself into the back seat of a Lincoln Navigator as we raced off to the Staten Island ferry. Saw the Statue of Liberty from the bow, and was buffeted by winds so strong I thought I would lose my glasses. Took the 1 Red to Penn Station, a heaving, groaning thing, that crawled toward me like an old farm horse begging for a mercy round. Times Square was too much noise, and too much flash; like taking a Viet Nam vet to a fireworks display in the swamp. I was braced for craziness, anticipating thievery, and moving too fast to look around properly.

But now that I’ve dipped my toes in the waters of this town, I can begin to see pieces of the attraction, and the necessity to document it. I could happily wander the streets with a point-and-shoot camera and fill the entire memory card in ten minutes with portraits, details, buildings, and a thousand different perspectives. It never ends. It’s like doing anything hot, loud and fast enough to be considered formidable, and then spending the next lifetime trying to recap that original high. I tend to function much better with a guide when I visit a new jungle, otherwise I find myself falling forever into the organic machinery of a single flower, or the weird bark of some tree, feeling as though I’ve seen it all.

Staring out the window of the train on the way out of town, listening to the Pachebel Canon, eyeing the red brush strokes of the cloud formations and the good-as-dead fields of useless marsh, wondering what Indians used to hunt what animals where.

Note to self: In this moment, you feel hopeful. The coins of possibility are in your hand. Don’t lose them. It wasn’t so bad. Receding in the distance, the concrete fingers of that heaving thing… Do you think New Yorkers wince when a plane flies too low? How do they take it, crammed in tight with their faces to the Wheel? I’m watching out for graffiti, a pastime of mine, and sneaking peaks at old brick history. From here, all I see are power plants and cramped little hovels advertising Chinese takeout. For sale signs grace faded brick warehouses, and empty loading bays with giant puddles on their rooftops are but empty canvasses to hooded youths armed with Krylon cans.

A window, the light is on. Someone in that very apartment will be watching TV tonight. They will answer their phone in an offhand manner, their attention divorced between the voice of the caller and that of David Letterman. They will be assailed by pizza commercials, and late night dating ads. They will laugh at something, without knowing why.

Parking lots, pink houses, neon signs, and strip malls, none of it relative to your life. Metropark signs, solid yellow lines, billboards and 4-digit numbers on the sides of the trains. No smoking; a girl with a cup of coffee standing on the platform looks like someone you’d want to get to know, but that’s just how she dresses on Wednesday. Tomorrow, she could be an entirely different person. (Everyone in NYC looks so much alike.)

Sun sets in the high rise windows, fire lights the trees. Early man probably thought his gods had abandoned him when the sun went down; left him blind and alone among the wolves to fend for himself, and all the prayers and burned-up rabbits in the world weren’t gonna make a lick of difference when the fire died… parked cars, parked cars, parked cars and Motel 6 signs.

Half in, half out of consciousness now… does God have a favorite color? If he’s above such petty things, then what makes you think he’d listen to your pleas for the Seahawks to win? But if he likes everyone equally, why worship yet another politician who can’t make up his mind? That’s why the ‘popular’ button on the jukebox was invented. Sorry, I’m ranting without purpose.

You will be outlasted by a parking garage. How do you feel about that? What will be left of you when it’s time for you to vanish; when the violins and other gentle instruments are serenading you with a swan song, and your body begins to peel away like the pages in Grey’s Anatomy, flinging into the wind like something out of a Japanese Anime. Which part of you will feel the Fear first?

Yes, think on that: when the rest of the living world takes that first step away from you, and you see the human race clearly for the first time; their heads bowed, arms linked, marching in a circle, shuffling in the dark, propelled by fear, led by lies, each step made in the hopes that there will be one more to follow… Our minds are like a universe encased in glass, giving us the ability to see forever separately, but never truly touch it as one… and suddenly, everything you are and have ever known takes that first step away from you, and you realize with a sudden shock, “Oh, God! I’m dying!” What then?

Your hands grip tight but there’s nothing there, it’s like gripping at fog, and you realize the hands of the people you’ve been holding on to for your entire life have just slipped past your fingertips. Your parking voucher has expired. Your heart will leap in your throat as though you realize you’ve just lost your wallet, and you will seek immediate reassurance, some soothing or authoritative voice to reconnect your call and send you the bill. Will you laugh to yourself, as though finally getting the punch line of a long-gotten joke? Will you shriek in terror, with your hands to your mouth? Or will you see it as just another adventure, knowing that the secret You, the one you dare not expose to your closest friends or dearest lover, will never truly die, but that You are only leaving your body behind – will you finally accept that this was all a dream?

The distant light of a crucifix shines in through the darkness, superimposed over the reflection of the seat opposite me, like an embroidered logo for God’s Private Railroad.

For a man who doesn’t believe in God, I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. The older I get, the more I’m convinced it’s a trick; one that politicians, authority figures and those who claw their way into Middle Management use to keep the rest of us in line, placing strong hands on the necks of the meek, demanding penitence and subservience.

Why the hassle? Remember that woman you met in H.H.I? She wanted to go to New Orleans to give blankets and food to the homeless. You thought it was a good idea, and you offered to help but she wouldn’t take you. “We prefer those who believe,” she explained to you patiently, as though you were dull. You wanted to help your fellow human beings, but all she wanted was for these poor fuckers to drop their final defenses and pledge allegiance to the Great Magi in the Sky, so they could have a warm blanket and a can of Dinty Moore. How fucked up is that? What ever happened to teaching a man to stand?

That happened a long time ago, but it comes flooding back so clearly tonight, borne on the smell of melted plastic and burning rubber on this southbound train in the year 2008.

I’m tired. I want to go to bed.

TWM