BLOG @ smFriedman.com

Warm and Safe

2011-07-10T22:38:00.000-04:00

For the time being, I direct you to my photo blog "Warm and Safe." Posts are fairly regular there. Thanks for being my friend!

WINg

2011-04-25T17:44:00.001-04:00

Apologies for once again being silent. I'm moving to Los Angeles in a few weeks, so work and mental insanity have been taking precedence over things like blogging.

But I'm excited to tell you that the last video I've done for WIN-Initiative is done and up! Enjoy.

Christian Witkin bio

2011-03-11T13:47:00.000-05:00

Back in the summertime, I did a video for friend and photographer Christian Witkin that was something of a bio piece to highlight his background and his intent as he enters the motion video/film world. I shot, edited, and composed the score for the video over several months, and I'm very happy and grateful to note that the video is on his agency's website!

I cannot embed it, but you can watch the short video by clicking here.

Construction continues

2011-03-07T13:30:00.000-05:00

The foreman of my blog's construction crew informed me that there are some structural problems that need dealing with. So a couple guys came out today to make the text viewing area smaller, in an effort to optimize construction space in the surrounding area.

Let me know if this is looking better for you folks with smaller monitors.

Digz

2011-03-07T13:28:00.002-05:00

Back in the fall, I shot a spot for my friend's new clothing line, Digz. I'm very excited to say the teaser (which I edited as well) is now viewable online at their website!

Tu Habitación Helada

2011-02-21T14:49:00.001-05:00

Back in November I went to Puerto Rico to shoot a music video for a band called "Nota" with Spanish photographer Ruben Martín. Ruben and I immediately took to each other, and he called me not too long after to work on another video. This time, it was for Spain's Ana Toroja. I was the SteadiCam operator for the entirety of the shoot, and I'm really excited to have been able to contribute. Embedding isn't allowed, so click here to watch it on YouTube (Sorry, no HD yet!)

The Crew Arrives

2011-02-19T16:12:00.000-05:00

So it looks like the construction crew is making their first move since they went on vacation! A couple guys showed up this morning with some adorable little blueprints to survey the land here at the blog.

Hopefully they'll be showing up with the rest of the crew soon...

About WIN - Complete!

2011-02-19T15:47:00.001-05:00

As I mentioned last time, the WIN video I've been toiling over for weeks is finally done. I'm very excited to share it with you:

WIN-Initiative from WIN Initiative on Vimeo.

WIN 2

2011-02-16T10:24:00.001-05:00

My silence over the last week or two has been no accident. You may recall my post not too long ago about the 10 BEST 10 video I made for WIN-Initiative, a young and hip stock photo company here in New York City. Since that video, I have been working pretty tirelessly (the past few days in particular) to complete a video for them that outlines what the entire company is all about. I finished it quite late last night, and I'm just waiting until it goes through all the proper conduits before sharing it with you. I'm very excited to share it, because I learned one or two new skills to make it, including doing some animation in Photoshop!

But I can't share it with you yet. So I'll share this instead. When I made the 10B10 video that I showed you, I also made a second one with a completely different concept. Going for the more sleek and commercial look, I put together this second spot. The music and editing are me, the images belong to past 10B10 winners.

Enjoy.

10 BEST 10 2011 Trailer from WIN Initiative on Vimeo.

When a Scarf is more than just a Scarf

2011-02-08T19:09:00.020-05:00

So on Sunday, it turns out my (unintentional) pick was right. Hurrah for people!

I know that my friend Lauren, for one, was very excited by the victory, but no doubt by now that excitement is wearing down. So I wanted to give her a chance to gloat and celebrate just a little bit longer.

Not long ago, Lauren sent me the coolest scarf ever, which she knit herself. A night or two later, testing a new lighting setup, I was wearing the scarf. What started as purely a test evolved into a photo shoot when I discovered that the scarf doubles as a gigantic mouth. Hilarity ensued. My two favorites:

(Sorry they're not larger. I'm working on hosting the images from my own domain)

PS

2011-02-06T13:32:00.002-05:00

I know with today's background change it might seem like I've picked a side.

I promise, I haven't.

2011-02-06T13:09:00.004-05:00

It's Super Bowl Sunday. I will be diligently working at home on a project I'm doing for WIN Initiative, a startup alternative stock photography company based out of SoHo, here in New York. In honor of National Advertising Day, though, I wanted to share an ad of sorts that I did for WIN a few weeks back. The video is for their annual 10 Best 10 competition. Since this year they decided to partner with Hipstamatic and are allowing people to submit lo-fi/lo-res imagery, I decided to appeal to the deity of lo-res, the 8-bit platform. And voila! Turn your speakers down a notch or two and enjoy:

(the video is available in up to full 1080p resolution at youtube!)

Under Construction

2011-02-05T19:02:00.000-05:00

In honor of the construction of my new blog, I've hired a top-notch construction crew to work on the background. It's going to take a long time, I'm told, but it'll be worth it. But rather than hide it from you, I wanted you to be able to watch the construction unfold. So over the coming weeks, maybe months, you'll see guys in and out of here with hard hats, tools, trucks, all kinds of random stuff. I've seen the final blueprint, and it's going to be fantastic!

But for now, it's just an empty field. Alas.

We're live.

2011-02-05T16:57:00.000-05:00

Changes coming slowly but steadily. You will notice now that you're currently at blog.smfriedman.com! I'm very excited about this. Some more layout changes are coming as my dream blog becomes a reality.

So, you know, come back soon.

Some changes

2011-02-04T23:35:00.000-05:00

The blog is going to be finding a new home soon. It may be with Blogger, and it may not. No matter who is hosting it though, you will soon be able to find it within my own website! You can visit http://www.smfriedman.com and click on the "blog" link, or you can simply go to http://blog.smfriedman.com ! Changes are still underway, and in the meantime you will perhaps notice formatting changes. Just bear with me as I work to bring the blog up to speed for 2011.

As always, thanks for reading.

Website update!

2010-07-21T17:20:00.002-04:00

Slowly digging into all the material I've shot over the last month, picking favorites, and doing touch-ups. Today I uploaded two new photos to smfriedman.com: a headshot from the Ithaca shoot, and a commercial image I shot for CultureFix, where my most recent group show was. Enjoy!

An Art Show! Pt II

2010-07-10T11:23:00.003-04:00

Last night's opening was fun! Tons of live music, a decent showing, tons of great artwork, and free bottomless hibiscus iced tea! My camera died so I only managed to get off a few snaps. Going back today for a while, so I'll try to get some better ones for you. In the meantime:

My name in bright lights. Or, at least, very nicely done handwriting.

That's my work at the top right!

An Art Show!

2010-07-07T11:45:00.003-04:00

Very excited to tell you that I will be participating in another group art show being curated by Lia Woertendyke, who got me my first show not too long ago down at the South Street Seaport. Whether you made it to the last show or not, hope all you New Yorkers can come to this one!

I will be showing/selling three long-exposure night photographs (16x24) and two abstract photographs (24x36).

The show is at 9 Clinton St. It will open Friday July 9th at 7pm and last until Sunday July 11th at 10pm., opening on both Saturday and Sunday at noon. There will be varying talks, performances, and events within the market. Should be an all-around good time!

SOOOOOO busy.

2010-07-03T15:47:00.004-04:00

Did you miss me? I missed you too. In the past week, I've done FOUR headshot shoots! Before that, I was snapping away all across the country on a road trip to Seattle via the southwest!! So I've been a bit busy. I'll have some of those pics up soon, once I start touching them up.

In the meantime, I'm very excited because I met a lovely gal at local artisan pizzeria Saraghina, an Italian named Rosaria. She and I will be doing a shoot most likely this coming week, and I'm so excited about it that I decided I want to shoot some Kodachrome of her. So, I had to test out my old 35mm camera. Most of the photos are pretty bland and purely graphic, but I snapped a couple lovelies of Billy that I like:

Can't wait for next week!!

Pictory!

2010-06-04T18:59:00.005-04:00

I'm very excited to tell you that the above photograph of mine was included in the web photo mag Pictory for their most recent feature, a portrait of New York City! It was an open call for submissions, and the selections were guest curated by Josh Haner of the New York Times Lens Blog. My photograph is item #33! I am thrilled to be included amongst many other great photographs and photographers in Pictory's exciting six-month anniversary showcase.

Wow the Business (Or: Wow, the busy-ness!)

2010-06-01T13:15:00.006-04:00

Been a number of days since last I wrote. My apologies! I've had my hands quite full with a number of different projects that I'm very excited about.

First off, I EDITED and SCORED my friend Cai Hall's Director's Reel! You can view that here on her website.

On top of that, I edited and scored the Teaser Trailer for a web sitcom that she directed, entitled "Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn." That will be up shortly. In the meantime, Nick Blake (the writer and producer) is featuring one of the photos I shot of the cast on his website, and I suspect that the trailer will be up there soon enough.

ALSO, I've done a number of portraits that I'm excited about, and there are more on the way. I have three shoots coming up at the end of the week!

First, headshots I did for the lead actress of my feature film (which is currently in the editing phase, with minor reshoots in August). Two of my favorites, which also ended up on my professional site:

Also did a great shoot for my friend, musician Tatiana Kochkareva. Here is a personal favorite:

Going away Monday for about a week to help my friend Jon move to Seattle... hoping to take a lot of pictures while I'm gone.

Moderation and upcoming

2010-05-19T10:06:00.002-04:00

Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks for me! I apologize that you haven't heard a whole lot from the Dead Chinchilla. I have a couple of fun shoots that I did for friends... one for my musician friend Tatiana, and one for engaged friends Isis and Jim! Those photos will be arriving soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

Also, I'm excited to say I've taken the first step in reducing comment spam finally, after a rather grotesque comment was made by a spam bot the other day. So from now on, all comments will require word entry verification. Here's to no more advertisement comments, or worse!

Something Awesome

2010-05-05T22:41:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, I had the pleasure and privilege of shooting the cast of Something Awesome, being directed by my good friend and roommate Cai Hall. And what a shoot it was. I already knew the cast was a ton of fun to work with from having shot the pilot episode myself, and from shooting stills on their most recent shoots, but I had no idea how much fun it would be to just let them let loose, direct them into delirium, and snap picture after picture of their funny, beautiful faces.

We shot a lot of different looks to correspond with different points in the series to come, different character portraits as well, but one photo stands out among them all for me as the penultimate shot, the be-all and the end-all, and I couldn't help but share it with you. Here it is, in its untouched glory:

Billy Boy

2010-04-27T01:37:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago I wanted to test out the new strobe kit I'd gotten (the Dynas), so I enlisted the help of my ever-ready roommate Billy, and had a little bit of fun. I was ever so slightly trying to imitate the photos Matt Hoyle did for a recent Halls campaign. But really the goal here was to have fun. While we got some really funny ones, I ended up picking three to show you that I thought were the coolest. Enjoy!

Know someone who's interested in up-and-coming photographers? Send 'em to the Dead Chinchilla!

Fun with Strobes

2010-04-25T23:13:00.012-04:00

Today my cousin Jared came over for a quick lesson on lighting, and how to use a strobe kit. So we had some fun playing around with my new Dyna-Lites, and I let him play around and experiment on his own. Here are a few of the ones he took of me (pardon the bad hair day):

Then I came up to bat and frankly, he did a much better job than I did this time out. Here are a couple I snapped that weren't bad, though:

If you're seeing spots, it's not your imagination. There really are black dots all over those photos. Why, you may ask? Well, when you shoot with strobes, you stop down your aperture a great deal. What this means is that there's a lot more in focus than might usually be. So those spots are actually mini specs of dirt, pollen, and other debris on the censor of my camera!! That thing really needs a cleaning, boy...

Photo Show!

2010-04-24T19:07:00.005-04:00

Well, the opening was great! We got a pretty sizeable crowd (early in the night, all 150 programs were alreayd gone!), and the art was all great. It was quite exciting to have my first show. I wanted to make sure I looked sharp! Well, it turns out that if you're at the space until a half hour beforehand cleaning up, then you go home to shower and get dressed up, you're going to be late.

But, no matter! People were very curious about my photos, reading the binder of information and taking photos. I went back yesterday and snapped a few myself to show you! Check it out:

The photos were all taken on a single roll of expired 35mm Kodachrome during a road-trip I took last summer from Portland to Los Angeles. I wired fluorescent fixtures on the inset wall, then installed flatheaded nails in a grid pattern, into which I squeezed 4x6 prints from the slides. On the ledge was a binder divided into three sections: 1) an introduction by me, 2) several documents outlining various data concerning Kodachrome, and 3) a section of correspondences with many of the people from the photos, all from that month-long trip period.

The show will be up until next Thursday, so if you're in the New York City area, come check it out! It's at 210 Front St., at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan.

Well, hello!

2010-04-22T10:40:00.003-04:00

Did you miss me?

I haven't forgotten about you. Life takes one on lots of twists and turns, and it can be easy for old friends to get temporarily put on the backburner. In this case, you've been on the backburner for almost two years. For that, I apologize.

However, here I am! I hope to be posting with pseudo regularity once more. This post is to tell you, briefly, about what's up that you can look forward to.

Tonight, my work "The End" will be on display in Manhattan's South Street Seaport area, across from the "Bodies" exhibit! I am participating in a group show called "Overstimulated." There will be photos to come from that for sure.

Also, I just bought my first strobes kit! I'm planning to switch into photography full-time over the next year, so this is my first big step through the door. I did my first shoot with my roommate Billy, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. There will be photos from that soon enough.

I apologize for such a brief post after such a long hiatus, but alas I must finish setting up my work for tonight's show!! Keep a lookout.

Sunrise

2009-06-07T05:08:00.005-04:00

Without so much as a whisper, the sun started to come up. Low at first, not even grazing the horizon and giving the sky a diffuse baby-blue glow, then all at once, boring through the trees like molten gold dripping through grating in a foundry.

Lara and I had been sitting on the front porch swing, sipping from glasses of cool water, the glasses sweating against our fingertips. We had been talking in hushed tones about the summer as though it were already gone, as though it had already slipped through our fingers like so many lovers, unrequited or otherwise. I wasn't tired, not one bit, and neither was she. She had a glint in her eye, a fierce intent to cause mayhem and havoc upon the sweet sweet summer, ready to take it down like a gazelle. I knew how she felt, and though my body felt heavy my mind sprang and leapt, flames licking at the roof of my skull. It was the feeling of being young, the inexplicable need to Do and Be. It crackled and popped and hissed through our veins as the interminable heat struck pockets of water, and I could feel that this was going to be a good one.

Then the sun was up, and gravity started tugging at my mental processes and my eyelids started to droop. When Lara saw this, she smiled at me. She grabbed me by the hand and led me up, walked me back through the house up to bed. My arms and legs twittered with the restless energy of weary stimulation, which no amount of stretching could remedy. Only the sound, sweet medicine of sleep. In our bedroom, she closed the lights. We made a soft, gentle love, the kind that made me pay attention to everything, but with no focus on the ultimate goal, on climax. Just a passing, keen awareness. A transcendental concentration both honed and drifting. I noticed the stubble on her legs, noticed her soft but slightly chapped lips against mine, the softness of her pubic hair against mine, and the way she gently tapped her fingers against my back when I withdrew from every gentle thrust.

The barrier between wakefulness and sleep was a thin and fluid one, but when sleep came, it was filled with the scents of saffron and jasmine.

The New York City

2009-02-18T12:56:00.001-05:00

The wind was kicking dust up and down Broadway as I walked home in the evening quiet. This was a “day” month, so the city was closing at seven-thirty. I bumped into Jon, who was on his way to shut off Time’s Square.

“God damn waste, those things,” he would say. “Could have left them out altogether.”

I was glad I caught him tonight. I needed to talk to him. Not about anything in particular, I just needed his company. His gruff assuredness helped me feel rooted. I walked alongside my bike with him up to 42nd, and sat in the middle of the street while he went down to the switchboard. The Coke ad was always the last to go, some kind of tribute I figured, and finally they were all off and all was still. The moon was full, and after a few minutes my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight. It spilled graciously in and out of the streets, subtle but necessary, kissing everything gently with a blue-silver whisper and rendering shadows that were less jagged than the daytime ones.

I rode my bike up to the south side of the park by Columbus Circle to my apartment. I didn’t feel like walking around the park tonight. I just felt like listening to music and eating dinner. Sarah would be coming over soon, and I felt like making love tonight so it would be a nice evening. I’d keep the lights off and open the blinds nice and wide, so we could bathe our naked bodies in the azurian metal air. She was no prize, Sarah. Very average looking. But this was what I liked about her. She wasn’t stunning, or “out of my league,” I wasn’t “lucky.” You couldn’t use any erratic terminology that suggests a sympathetic downside on the other end of a scale, a trough in which to inevitably find oneself. She was somewhat womanly, kind, and of a balanced temperament. All of the middle-ground qualities that made me feel comfortable. I enjoyed our relationship because we gave each other all of the things we wanted and needed without feelings of insecurity or overbearing.

Up in my apartment, Sarah was already waiting. I walked in and she came up to me, and kissed me gently. I leaned my bike against the wall inside the door and closed the door behind me. I pulled her in close to me, sharply, surprised by my immediate arousal. I put a hand down her pants and felt her get warmer and wetter on my fingertips. She unbuttoned my pants and began to pull at my already-erect penis, eagerly. The tungsten bulbs were on, dimmed, in the room, but there wasn’t any time for me to care. I pushed her against the wall by the kitchen area, pulled out my hand and tasted it, then undid her pants. I yanked them down. Mine had already fallen to the ground. I thrust myself deep inside her. All of her sound and movement stopped. For a moment she just gripped the back of my t-shirt. My muscles, too, remained tense, caught in the moment of force, and then as her body adjusted, made room for me, I pulled back and began the locomotion of the thing. She kissed me as I came, our lips locked together in suction, our bodies wet, and I sank into her.

I woke up twenty minutes later, both of us on the kitchen floor. The room was a comfortable temperature, and we lay sprawled out like victims of some horrible crime. I chuckled at what a sight we must be, pulled my pants up, and started cooking dinner. Unlike most people, I was actually the second person to live in this apartment. The man before me hadn’t been here long: just long enough to leave marks of his presence. There was a burn mark on the stove from something-or-other, a nick in the wooden dining room table, water marks in the tub in the bathroom, things like that. I liked it, though, the lived-in feeling of the place. I would go into other apartments that felt lonely, cold, unvivacious, and feel glad about my own place.

Over dinner, Sarah and I talked about the construction.

“It feels like they just finished the Village, and already they’re moving further and further south,” she said. “It’s too soon.”

“That’s the way it’s going to be, I think. I mean, the bigger the city gets, the more revenue they’re generating on a daily basis. The whole place is going to grow exponentially, I think, just because they can do it.”

“Do you think they’ll finish on time?”

“Yeah, probably. At this rate.”

She paused for a minute. “I don’t think I want them to finish.”

She stared at me when she said it, and I stopped chewing. I sort of looked around the room for a minute, swallowed the food down my throat, and got at little morsels caught in my teeth with my tongue.

“I don’t think I want them to either.”

In the morning, we jogged together through the park. A few canoes bobbed in the lake, waiting for their daily loads. Birds chirped, but for the most part it was quiet. No traffic yet. All the drivers wouldn’t even be waking up for another hour, probably. It was a clear day, so when we got to the top of the park we stopped and squinted. I could see the wall, far in the distance, nothing but empty, completely unspoiled land between it and us. They hadn’t even begun prepping it yet. No bulldozers, no fences, nothing. I dreamed about the space a lot. The feeling in my dreams was hard to convey. It was a desperate feeling of needing to consume the space. I needed to run around in it, yes, but moreso I felt the insatiable desire to have it for myself, to wrap my arms around it and press it inwardly, into me, to wrap myself around it and never let it go. I would go there sometimes, in reality, alone. I would sprint into it. But soon I would run out of steam and just sort of sit there in the grass, catching my breath, and realizing the enormity of the thing.

When we got back to my apartment, I hopped in the shower. She got in with me, and we made love again. It wasn’t as intense this time, but still enjoyable. Ever since my first girlfriend, I’d always enjoyed having sex in the shower. Sex is a dirty thing. Not in some unconscionable way, but just in the sense of fluids dribbling everywhere, bodies meeting and sharing, sweating, the whole thing leaves one physically unclean. So doing it in the shower always made me feel satisfied, pleasant, knowing that the whole time I was fighting the battle of keeping clean while enjoying the pleasure of the act.

I made it to South Ferry on time. A wasteland of construction and emptiness to
traverse to get there, but one that seemed to get smaller and smaller by the day. I liked that they had opted to do the subway system before any above-ground construction. They had planned well, obviously. The whole thing, really was well-planned. I had to give them that.

A new bakery was opening in SoHo, the northernmost bit that was finished, so I grabbed my breakfast there that morning.

Marty greeted me warmly at the stairwell.

“Hiya Max. How are ya?”

“Hey Marty. Fine, thanks. You?”

“Good, good.” He always greeted anyone boomingly and laughingly, like he’d just heard a great joke and was on the verge of sharing it. “You’ll be driving the first one out today, if that’s alright with you.”

“Sure, sounds fine by me.”

I sat eating my bagel with cream cheese, the last morsel finding its way into my mouth as the klaxon sounded. Marty clapped me on the back and said, “Well, here we go.”

Counting Candles

2009-01-06T23:53:00.008-05:00

Dearest Johnathan (or is it Jeffrey now?),

So much time has passed since the last time we spoke that, frankly, I'm quite certain that neither of us has any idea whose fault it is. And at any rate, I'm not here to point fingers or try to decide where blame should fall.

You were right about Clarissa. It's been just over a month now since the funeral, and, frankly, each day that she's gone she disappears that much more readily. It'd be cruel and inaccurate to say I'm glad she's gone, because I'm not. You can't be glad about something like that, I don't think. Those kinds of feelings dig their way up your bloodstream, a vile snake that bobs and weaves against the current to your heart, and sometimes in only a few days your veins have all turned black with contempt. The dead don't care and the living can't help you. Anyway, it's not that. But I find with each passing day that I am more and more aware of how little she helped, how little she really did for me when she was around. The teas, the various meditational practices, the trips that found their heads at unusual times and their tails in even more unusual places, they were all... what was it you called them? Sidestepping the point, I think that was the phrase you used. And the girl did it to herself, you know. Satisfied, that's the word.

At the time your tone was always accusatory, and I consistently felt as though you insisted I take a side. But in hindsight I know that challenges were pleas and I mistrusted, mistreated you in the trenches of the fits. I know you know this, but it wasn't my fault. It wasn't me.

Anyway, she's dead now and I see the point and isn't that it? Isn't that all anybody really gives a shit about? Wasn't she a vampire, and when you kill the head you kill all the rest of it? Or is she a hydra? Was. Was. That's something you never get used to, the changing of tense. It's hard enough with my fiction to go through and make sure I'm using the right tense all the time. Now I have to do it when I speak, too?

I can feel myself digressing, but you always said start in the middle and the beginning and end will sidle up fashionably late.

Isn't it time you came home? Sea legs get tired too, don't they? At the very least, please call. The gravel in your voice helps me sleep more deeply than the aromatherapy candles, which I should throw out anyway because they were from her.

Yssa turns eight on Friday. I hope I count the candles right...

Au clair de la lune...

C

Bath

2008-08-11T00:39:00.002-04:00

I was reminded the other day of that time we took a bath. Do you remember that time? It was your old apartment, when you lived a town over from me. I mean, yeah, it had to have been that time, because that was when we dated. But I was thinking about it, because I think about bathing with other people a lot. Well, not a lot, but I think about it. It's something I want to be doing more. Bathing with other people. It's kind of like a nice thing that you can do with someone, to invite them into your personal space but also force them to do the same with you, and you're both sort of naked like children and there's no room for animosity or anything. You know? Like if you're in a bathtub with someone, there are only a few things you can really do: wash, make love, talk, or get out. I mean I guess you could drown someone, but there's something about being naked in a tub of water with someone that makes you want to kill them, even less than you ordinarily would want to kill them, which is hopefully not at all.

But I was reminded of that time we took a bath together. I've only bathed with two other girls in my whole life. The first time was a shower at the Jersey shore. Seaside Heights to be specific, which is a total shithole. I hated pretty much every moment I was there. I was there with my high school girlfriend and her friends after her prom. The first night consisted of... no, I don't even want to talk about it because the whole weekend sucked. It was cold and rainy and a bunch of shitty things happened. But at one point we took a shower together, at my behest, in the motel shower. It was silly, because all I really wanted to do was have sex, but the startling awkward bareness of it all, like we were two naked children, made me not want to have sex. I couldn't even really help her wash herself, and she did not really want to even look at me naked. I tried not to stare at her naked body, though it was one of the few times that I ever really looked at her fully nude in the light. The second time was with you. The third time was with the girl I dated after you, and it was really sexual, which I enjoyed because it was what I had wanted. It was a partial fulfillment of that fantasy.

But when you and I took that bath...

It was wintertime. Very cold outside. It had probably snowed... I think in my head, on most of the nights I spent in your apartment there was snow outside, ice on the roads, and your apartment had the warm insulation of bodies and heat and mess. Your place was so messy. The scent was warm. I didn't like walking around your apartment barefoot because it felt so dirty. But I did it anyway because when you are naked a lot of the time, especially after sex, you don't put socks or shoes on. I think especially after sex, it's rude to put socks and shoes on because it seems like you're leaving. Right?

So we took a bath. We left the door open, I think, so your rabbit could get in and out. I think I would hear his pitter-patter every now and again.

I think we made out a little bit, but mostly I think we just sat and talked. I remember, I think my penis floating in the water, sticking up due to a combination of bloodflow and laws of physics. At any rate, though, I remember the end of the bath. The water had lost its heat, despite our warm virile bodies that were so used to sex, to friction and passion. And I remember I sat behind you, clutching you. We were huddled in water that I don't think even came up too far. Maybe your drain didn't seal tightly, and gradually the tub had been draining? That makes sense. It would justify both the water level and the temperature.

We started shivering, though, because the water was getting cold. I liked the naked clutching in the water, and I was trying so hard to put off getting out. But it got to the point that we couldn't stave it off any longer, though we knew the first moments getting out would be even colder. We dried off. I stepped onto the bathroom floor reluctantly, grinding my teeth at the thought of the filthy floor and my wet feet. We dried off, and we walked into your bedroom. The lights were out, minus a few Christmas lights, I think. I remember it being very dark. Darkness and wintertime, those are the things I think of when I think about making love to you. But when we got into your room, I imagine we must have crawled under the covers together, and undoubtedly had sex. Sex with you was always enjoyable, and in retrospect I feel a great affection for you and for those times, even though the affection really came after we dated. But most likely we made love in your warm bedroom, with the winter just outside. I probably skipped class the next morning so I could sleep in with you, the white white light pouring in through your window, and we probably even made love and then ate breakfast. But it all seems to come from that memory of the bath.

You remember that bath we took? It was nice.

A list of Shore Points

2008-08-07T23:02:00.004-04:00

We piled into the car and flew south. Betty was riding shotgun and immediately began assembling a list of shore points to hit. Sandy Hook was a must; we'd been there in elementary school to talk about its historical importance, or fossils, or something like that. All we could remember was the bizarre mass of people who didn't seem to appreciate the beach for one of the two reasons we were there that day - to appreciate whatever it was we were there to appreciate for class, or to swim and play and be kids in the ocean. We had to go to Sandy Hook at this older age, to set the memory straight if nothing else. Benny was in the back seat, refusing to wear his seatbelt.

"Benny, put your god damned seat belt on, for Chrissakes," I yelled at him gleefully. He immediately began throwing himself around the entire backseat as though he were on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, or bumper cars, without any restraint. His legs soared around through the air in a way that I was genuinely confused for a second, seeing him in the rear view mirror. I didn't have that much space in the back, did I? Immediately upon Benny's performance, Joon began barking and jumping around, watching Benny and presumably enjoying himself just as much, although perhaps a little worried about the safety of his best friend. When Benny sat up straight again, Joon started licking his face and panting. Benny scruffled Joon's fur and kissed him back, put on his seatbelt, and instructed Joon to sit down in his own seat, which Joon did properly and with a smile. Joon didn't really do much of anything without a smile, come to think of it.

"Buckle your seatbelt, Joon. We don't want you suing Rory if we get in an accident. Isn't that right, Sally?" Benny directed spat his playful insults at me while Joon looked back and forth between the two of us, getting in on the joke.

"I can't plan our glorious trip with all this ridiculousness going on!" Betty pushed play on the CD player in the dash, and immediately the LCD sprang to life, a vibrant red background, and Sigur Rós cam on with Gobbledigook. An absurdly good choice, if you can call it a choice.

"Ahhhhh," I exhaled, as though finally getting the rest of my body into a hot-tub. "One of these days I have to learn Icelandic so that I know everything they're saying. I must know!" I proclaimed. Betty giggled and guffawed incredulously. There was a whole lot of rib-poking going on.

One hour into the drive, the hour of the day finally smacked us each in the face. Benny was passed out with his mouth wide open, and one arm draped dead across Joon's shoulders. Joon rested his jowls on Benny's fire-orange board shorts, awake but placid. Betty had long since abandoned her list and the two of us had completely forgotten the point of going to multiple beaches in the same day (the idea had originally reminded me of those folks who bike from the east coast to the west, dipping a tire in each ocean, and for a moment perhaps our mission hadn't paled in comparison in importance and significance). By now our purpose was dubious and Betty rested her head against her seatbelt. Her curly auburn hair blew wistfully behind her, occasionally across her eyes and face, being met with a blink and a finger to coral it behind her ear once again.

She looked at me, and I looked back at her for a quick moment. She was smiling in the way that had first drawn me to her. These days we were both feeling a bit tired, and it was showing. To see her smile at me genuinely and for the weariness in her eyes to be the sunrise's fault instead of my own was a breath of fresh air not unlike that I expected to breathe once we got off the highway. The smell of the salty breezes for me is always a palate-cleanser.

I wanted to kiss her, or mouth "I love you," or somehow bridge the gap between us, but I knew that any attempt to do so would only point out how big that chasm had actually grown, and so instead I settled on planting a genuine grin on my face, readjusting my grip at 12 o'clock on the wheel, and continuing to coast. My left hand picked at a fray of my jean shorts, pulled it clean off. I rolled it between my thumb and middle finger into a fuzzy little ball and flicked it mindlessly onto the floor.

My Brief Experience With the Time Tunnel

2008-07-16T11:10:00.008-04:00

My elusive transgressions are what got me here. It's important for me to outline my experience with the Time Tunnel, because it is an astounding one (if only to me, having been through it myself).

I found myself on a beach, at a resort not unlike a Vegas hotel of a high caliber. I wondered, in fact, whether the beach and ocean were man-made. All of my days felt thin and nondescript, like air. I could not pin down how long I'd been there, why I was there, or what I had been doing since my arrival. One afternoon, a large sea-eel found its way to the beach. It was of a staggering proportion, and it fought wildly to try to attack some of the beach-goers. But once it reached the sand, it lost its propulsion and momentum, and lay largely ineffectual on the sand. The teenage boys began to climb onto it and ride it like some alien steer at a bull-riding contest. I found myself altogether fearful, awestruck, and disgusted by the scene.

I walked to the restaurant and bar at the hotel. At the bar, I ordered a drink. Something a bit tropical, perhaps, something to cool me down and also get me liquored up. The waitress was attractive and wore a ridiculous shirt of many colors in a pattern whose rules escaped me. It was the kind of shirt one would see a waitress in at such a place, the kind whose imposing dogma was clearly forced on the girl, who was just there as a summer job to make money, a local, but the bizarre collision between her beauty and the shirt's ludicrous existence made her seem that much more attractive. I fantasized momentarily about tearing the shirt off of her in some closet around the corner and having passionate sex with her. I knew immediately that this was probably not an option. So I went about waiting for my drink. A young man, about ten years younger than me, sat down next to me. He seemed not to notice me, and ordered a drink from the attractive girl in the multicolored cage.

A few moments later, she returned with his drink. I caught her eye and asked her, politely, whether she'd forgotten about my drink.

"No, sir, it's coming." She was still friendly, and hurried off with her tray in hand.

As people at tables got their food and others their drinks, I got the distinct impression that she had either forgotten about me or was purposely denying me my request for some unfathomable reason. I called her over again and asked what had happened to my drink, still as respectfully as possible. She suddenly became very irritated with me and tersely told me to wait, that my drink was coming and I shouldn't be so impatient.

I moved my seat to a more crowded area of the bar about twenty five yards away, around the bend of the bar. I hoped that sitting amongst more people might make me more visible and less easy to avoid.

A woman came and sat down next to me, not in the best shape, and wearing a floral dress whose ugly brilliance rivaled that of the waitress's shirt. There was a tray on the bar in front of her, and onto it she placed a small baby. Somehow I missed the baby altogether. The girl next to me whispered to me with one hand over the side of her mouth, like a Japanese gossip, that wasn't it so cute? I didn't know what she meant, and she pointed to the squirming, naked red flesh on the bar. Though it was not adorable, it was not hideous either. It had the chubbiness of most newborns, when the joints where all the bones meet are less defined, and the spots where they close are more just meetings of two blobs of meat, such as where the upper and lower arms come together at a line of contact. It squinted its eyes at me. I smiled, simply because it was a funny sight to see.

Just as it became clear that my drink was not coming, a peculiar thing happened. A woman sat down at my barstool. She was a large woman, with a frizzy mullet and a leather jacket. She was butch, manly, and gave the impression of being either a biker or being from New Jersey, or perhaps both. She did not even acknowledge me as I fell backwards off the stool. She simply settled herself in and got the bartender's attention. I stood up lividly, and began to make a scene. She ignored me. Everyone, in fact, ignored me.

I suddenly felt a loss of control of my body, not in a blinding rage, but rather in a sense of a loss of gravity. I felt the sensation of falling, but rather than falling I felt myself being propelled forward at a blinding rate. Suddenly, I was standing on the beach. In the startlingly clear water, I noticed something floating. It seemed to be a body. I approached it quickly. I discovered it to be my own body, resting on its side in the fetal position, knees bent up to the chest, eyes wide open and hands tucked underneath the head, as though sleeping in a bed. Instantly, I lost my own physical perspective and became unified with that body in the water, seeing through its (my) eyes. I remembered what had brought me there, remembered a sense of malaise that had led me to the decision that life was boring and I was better off dead. I remembered walking into the water and, without pomp or circumstance, drowning myself.

As before, I felt the feeling of freefall and propulsion forward. I arrived in the same position on top of the bar. I was sitting comfortably in the baby's body, looking out at the woman who had taken my seat at the bar, as she received her drink.

There was no time for the experience to sink in. Soon, I was floating in a nondescript void, being addressed by young voices. They explained to me a process that I was about to begin that seemed not unlike a Buddhist sense of rebirth, except it did not seem to involve being reborn at all. Rather, it all seemed to take place in this bizarre space that lacked any real definition to time.

First, they said, I had to overcome my fear of heights. They tethered me to a bungee of some kind, and careened me off a cliff. The whole thing is really rather comical. I enjoyed my freefall, screaming and laughing the whole way down. A couple other tests ensued, in each of which gravity seemed to take on a different value. When my bungee-jumping days were over, the voices seemed pleased with my progress and introduced me to the next step. They returned me to a physical body somewhere in the hotel. I walked down a corridor, past doorways of rich, finished wood, and potted plants. It was a lush interior. Suddenly women began to appear out of the doorways, and various objects in the hall began to morph into the same. Soon, the space was filled with all naked women. I laughed again. The young voices told me I could enjoy myself, but that I was to pick only one to ultimately end up with. It seemed a rather comic illustration of what I had spent much of my life doing: sleeping around, when all I wanted was a single beautiful companion.

I found myself walking around, as all of these women stared and smiled at me, examining them all as I might furniture. I caressed some of their flesh, as though feeling the material of a couch. Some of them engaged me either verbally or physically, and I found every experience to be rather wonderful. I was enjoying myself, to say the least. Each of these beautiful women seemed to express, one way or another, the desire to make me eternally happy. And though I found the prospects infinitely good, I also found myself largely uninterested. Rather than "choosing" one of these women, I turned and walked back down the corridor, and down the stairs that had brought me there to begin with. Though the hallway had been well-lit, only a few steps down I was already engulfed in blackness. My continued descent began to yield some clarity to the forced night.

Below my feet I could see a landscape. Water crashing against cliffsides, small buildings that seemed made of straw and clay, a lush green forest splayed out beyond them. A few pinpoints of light could be seen here and there. Everything was awash in the deep-sea blue light of the moon, and I was shocked by my ability to make out as much detail as I could. Soon, I was walking down the dark streets, cobblestone, in what seemed to be a 16th century or so village. I wore simple, earth-toned clothes and carried a sword. I entered the dark streets of a particular neighborhood and was confronted by a small man with a hood whose shadow covered his face completely. He attacked me, and sent him reeling over a low fence, and he careened down a cliff into the waters below. Despite the violence and menace of it, it seemed rather commonplace to me, and I continued along the way.

I entered a pub. Finally, I had found someplace to relax. I was suddenly with friends, as we entered, and I professed my jovial desire to drink heavily. I felt happy. I sat down at a table and looked at the menu. The beers, as many as there were, did not bear the names of their manufacturers or the names they had been given. The bar-keep was a tall, balding man, with a rough, manly voice. He explained to me that on the menu, all beers were named after their hops. As a result, they all bore names of only vague familiarity.

"So I have to figure out which beer is which based on knowing the hops?" I asked him.

"That's right."

"Do you mean to tell me that someone who comes in here might, conceivably, not be able to know what beers you serve here?"

"Yes, sir."

One was called Exilim, or some such thing, and I was mildly sure that it was a stout that I'd had before. I ordered it.

The bar crowd was loud and welcome. The lighting was all a yellowish-orange, turned down low, and gave a warmth to what had been a largely cold traveling experience. People began singing traditional songs. I got the distinct impression that I was somewhere in the someday-to-be United Kingdom, quite arguably Ireland.

My friends and I were enjoying ourselves. I got up to walk somewhere (where, I don't know). I took my eyes off of my friends. In moments I found myself in a dark room. There was nothing in the room, save for a couch, a table, and a man in olde-tyme executioner's garb sitting on the couch, a sack-like hood over his head and face. He was thick around the midriff, one arm draped over the back of the couch, and he breathed heavily. He seemed unaware of my presence and did not move, simply sat there and worked the air into and out of his lungs. I felt a sharp, urgent sense of foreboding and, despite my confusion, was somehow able to will myself down into the floor, and found myself standing on my feet, once again, in the bar.

The crowd had changed, as had the layout of the bar slightly. I recognized my things on the bar, and sat down at them. A small messenger-style bag, a book, and a beer. The book bore a doorway on its cover, an ornate, finished wooden frame seen from an angle as though approaching it down a corridor. From within came a light that illuminated the wood finish, but did not give away the contents of the room due to the angle of approach of the photographer. My beer was half-drunk and sweet looking, not the dark stout I had expected I'd ordered. It looked tasty all the same, and thirst-quenching.

Nearby, I spotted my friends, and I sat with them.

"Where've you been?" My friend Aaron asked me, huddled over his beer and surprised by my sudden arrival.

"What do you mean? I've been here," I said.

"What? We couldn't find you when we were going to another bar, so we just left without you."

"Well, I was right here!" Perhaps they just hadn't looked hard enough. No matter. They were back and so was I. I went to the bar to grab my drink and my things.

"I knew you'd be back," the bartender said. He had aged noticeably, and his voice was much wispier than it had last been. He was still tall, but much ganglier. He was a bit more friendly than I remembered him. "You've been gone a long time."

"Where was I?" I asked him.

"The Time Tunnel," he said nonchalantly.

"How long have I been gone?"

"About fifteen years."

My eyes widened by my confusion and fear, and my mouth paralyzed by the same, he continued, "Yes, sir. I knew where you were, which is why I saved your stuff."

"How did I get there?"

"Well, you're still in the Time Tunnel, technically. You have been for some time, I'd imagine. This bar exists within it. Sometimes you will find yourself jumping for no reason, when you lose your focus on your activities. The room you were just in, however, you can get to with the following incantation: Emm, eff, dome. I don't know why you'd want to go there, though."

I walked over to my friends, who were sitting at a table across from the bar, to try to explain this to them. They appeared not to listen. At the very least, they were incredulous.

"I'll show you." I took a step back.

I chanted the brief phrase and my feet slipped through the floor. My body seemed to invert itself, as though in a mirror, through space and time, with the point of contact of my feet on the floor being the focal point, and I was then standing on the floor back in the dark room with the executioner with the hood over his head. This time he stood. He looked at me, or at least turned his body in my direction. As I began to retreat away from him, he lunged and began running full-speed at me. He tackled me to the ground and began to pummel me. I tried to cover my head with my arm. Though I didn't actually feel any pain, the situation was still not one in which I wished to find myself. I called the incantation again, and as before the floor reflected my physical body into the opposite plane. I was back in the bar, still on the floor. Another man, with long hair and a Viking's facial hair was attacking me.

"Ok, you're right, you're right!" I yelled, hoping that I had simply gotten caught up in a disagreement, and that it would assuage his anger to hear my admission. It worked. I had been covering my face with my arm, and when I removed it, he was already gone. I stood and walked to the bar.

"Hello, again," said the bartender. "It worked, I see."

"Yes, it did."

"I saved your things for you again." He pointed to a large, hideously teal suitcase behind the bar.

"Thank you."

"Your friends have your book," he added.

I turned to my friends, sitting once again at the same table, except I realized that the bar was now on the opposite side of where it had previously been in the narrow space, and that the table was now next to it instead of across from it. They were all drinking and talking loudly, and my arrival heralded no fanfare. My friend Michael, in particular, ignored my presence altogether. I found my book on the table, and someone handed it to me.

"This is not my book," I said.

"Yes it is," said someone, perhaps the bartender, perhaps a friend.

I looked at it closely. It was my book, but the cover had changed. Now, I could see flames billowing and licking out of the wooden doorframe, with small bits of wood and rubble burning all around like small, quiet torches.

"It is my book, but the cover has changed," I said aloud.

My beer was several tables down, and I started to go get it when I realized that doing so might send me careening through the Tunnel again. I turned back to find Lani looking me straight in the eyes.

"Lani, I need you to hold my hand, and keep your eyes on the group the entire time," I told her. "Can you do that?"

She smiled, and I took it for a yes. I grabbed her hand. I couldn't fall through any holes if I were holding her hand, and she were in visual contact with my friends.

I turned safely toward my beer, a couple small tables away, and I reached to grab it. With it in my hand, I turned to find Lani and my friends still there, still chatting away. I thanked Lani and took a seat at the bar immediately next to them.

It was suddenly clear to me, though, that the bar was past closing time. We were the last few left. Now, the bar was on both sides of the room. I sat at a smaller one that had no actual drinks behind it, and behind me was the original bar with all of the liquors waiting patiently to be drunk. The bartender, seeming a bit younger now, sat on a small couch alongside the old bar, next to a girl. They held hands and she rested her head on his shoulder.

I pulled my Moleskine notebook from my bag and began to write, to put literary form to my experience. I felt a great urgency. The words flowed out of me with ease. For some reason, though, perhaps its greater surface area, I changed to looseleaf paper, and the words began to bleed. They didn't make sense. I couldn't put my thoughts together. At the bottom of the first page of loose-leaf, my train of thought was gone and I was struggling to write the next three words.

"It won't work," the bartender called to me from the couch.

My sense of urgency heightened. I felt panic-stricken. I figured he just wanted me out of there to close up. I needed to write this all down, before it, too, might slip away from me. I concentrated on beginning the next sentence, "My elusive transgressions..." My hand wouldn't follow. I just kept thinking it, staring at the space at the bottom of the page, then at my hand and pen, then back at the page.

Think.

My elusive transgressions. My elusive transgressions.

My hand moved the pen, but there was no clarity to the motion.

My elusive transgressions... my elusive... my...

Saturday Morning

2008-05-31T13:41:00.001-04:00

"My head feels like it's in a bubble made of jelly," I said. Elizabeth giggled.

The rain started to break up the heat just before one. We'd been laying in bed all day; I was nursing my hangover, and Elizabeth was nursing me. The cool, silent rain was a welcome relief. We were sticking to each other when we touched, and the heat was not conducive to my headache and dehydration. Still, it was fairly quiet outside and I found myself blissfully unaware of the bustling city only a mile or so away.

Lizzy started singing, in a quiet tone that couldn't quite decide whether it was a whisper.

"Rain drops keep falling on my head, (deedly dee) but that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turnin' red," she sang-slash-whispered. It made me close my eyes and smile. It was one of those rare, delightful moments that already feels like a memory before it's even over.

The thunder started gently rolling in from the distance. I could hear it tumbling, tripping over itself, over the far off clouds, in an effort to be close to us. A flash shone in through the windows. Elizabeth's fingers dawdled over my chest, pretending to be small people walking on strange, uneven terrain. But they seemed carefree all the same, the tiny people fingers.

Anatomy of a Short Story II - "Lightning Rod" Revised

2008-05-14T21:59:00.002-04:00

Dear Nancy (wherever you are),

“It was 1967,” I can remember Dad saying, standing on a chair. We were giggling. I always loved this story, because it made me feel close to him, and close to you. Mom was always shaking her head from the side, somewhere, but smiling all the same.
“The race riots in Newark erupted. At nights, they closed the Bridge Street and Jackson Street bridges, and carloads of people would drive around in the darkness, lawlessly looting and destroying property, even killing people. We were advised to sleep on the floor, with the lights out, so that even if they shot through the windows with their machine guns, no one would be injured.” That was the part of the story where I always stopped giggling, and got serious. My mouth would fall agape, and my eyes glistened at attention.
“But my father always stood guard. No one could sleep, because we kept hearing them drive up and down the street, occasionally hearing bullets firing or glass breaking.
“One night, we were all on the floor in the living room, when we heard a car stop outside. I heard a man walking up the drive, then up the steps to our front door. I was petrified, frozen. But my father, who was already standing by the door, flipped on the lights both inside and outside of the house. In the midst of this thick darkness that had engulfed the neighborhood for days, suddenly light flooded everywhere.
“My father threw open the door. The man standing there was stunned by both the light and my father’s presence. My father was unarmed, and the man had a bat.
“’What are you doing on my property?’ My father asked him ‘I’ve done nothing to you, and you’re here threatening the lives of my family members.’
The man stood staring at him, in complete disbelief. My father stood staring back, not moving an inch, nor a single muscle. After a moment that lingered unendingly, the man scoffed, but turned and walked back down the path. My father watched him return to the carload of his friends and drive away. When the car was gone, my father closed the door and stepped back inside. The lights had been his weapon against the man. I will never forget the silent power my father wielded, the battle that electricity had helped him win.”
That was the best story Dad ever told us. Now I have one that’s just as good.

--

When I look back on my late teens, sometimes I have to laugh. It’s amazing the way you can feel on top of the world, like you know everything, at that age, and yet looking back on it you can see you were still a baby. I am often reminded of my youthfulness, and of the love that Dad and I had shared, that we shared until the day he died, almost twenty years ago today. It warms my heart with such a fondness, and thought sometimes my heart is heavy with your absence, I can’t hold myself back from laughing at my own immaturity at times. One story, in particular, replays itself again and again in my mind. It is my favorite story, because it was the time in my life when I felt most alive. And in my solitude, now, and old age, I need these kinds of comforts. Especially without you.
It hadn’t been long at all since everything went dark. A year, maybe less. At first, there had been an aversion, a hesitation to adjusting our lives. A couple days after the electricity went, the inky black of night was total. It took that time, Dad said, for all of the light pollution to escape the atmosphere. We were sure that someone would figure out a way to bring life back to normal. But after the first week we realized that we didn’t have a choice. Whether they were coming or not, we had to adjust to survive. After a month or two, we seemed to have forgotten, already, what life had been like.
People started to set up new shops to deal out the necessities, whatever they could find and could spare for others, for trade. The biggest problem was food, since so many people had been used to going to the supermarket. Jimmy Herbert (you remember him?) taught himself to hunt. He went out and traded some of his things for a gun, and before long he was selling pelts and meats outside his house every evening around dusk. It reminded me of when we were all kids, and he would fling pebbles at you with his slingshot as you left for dance class. You would dart across the lawn in your pink tutu, and he would pop out from behind a bush, hawking some battle cry, and he’d nail you every time. I was inevitably watching from the window, laughing.
Maybe as a culture, as a species, we’d been hearing about the apocalypse, global warming, and international catastrophe for so long that when something finally did happen, a little sputter of a cataclysm, it wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d expected. Maybe we all breathed a sort of collective sigh of relief, cut our losses, and got used to it. In truth, I felt happier without “modern” conveniences. I’d begun phasing them out in my personal life anyway. The one thing I did miss though, which I missed desperately, was the internet. God, how I missed the internet! The feeling of connectedness it had afforded had been as necessary, pervasive, and continuous for me as breathing. It had been the only thing that let me keep up with you, too, which was of tantamount importance.
It was just Dad and I. We did everything possible together. We were the same person, age and gender aside. For a while after the Wave (that’s what people were calling the electropulse, I think it’s called) he was fervent about keeping the two of us together.
“Becky,” he said, “desperate times call for desperate measures. I love you dearly, and I’d like it if you would stay here. I’ll work all day to make sure that we’re warm, and have enough to eat, if you’ll promise to stay here with me.” I’d never seen him so serious, so I chuckled a little bit. But he kept his word for a while, avidly providing and making sure we would be fine.
And we were. He just couldn’t bear to lose me, really. Mom was gone, and you’d left home; I was all he had left, and in truth, I felt the same way about him. He took care of the two of us, and although I was old enough to be living on my own by society’s previous standards, our new way of life kept me home, kept me under his roof. I rather liked it, in fact, and felt no need to leave. I was in my early twenties by that point.
On the one hand, feeling safe under his wing made me feel and act like a little girl sometimes. He even followed suit; he started calling me Bug for the first time since you and I were kids. Yet other times the level of responsibility I had around the house had made me feel like a grown woman. With no ostentatious parties, no art galleries or dance clubs, it was hard to actually feel like a twenty-something. The whole age bracket had become obsolete. For the most part, it felt like being caught in a time warp. I didn’t resent it, though I occasionally was jealous of you, because I know Europe must have been fun beyond your wildest dreams. The points of light dancing across the surface of the Eiffel Tower, in particular, were (and still are) an image I always came back to when I thought of you.
After a while, though, Dad became depressed. There was no work for him to do, in the sense of his trained craft. Since no one had electricity, no one needed him to do any rewiring, or set up outdoor lights, or install appliances. The thing he’d loved and dedicated himself to, electricity, had, in a single moment, simply ceased to exist. It was a tough blow for him. I gradually (and happily) took over the responsibilities, and he grew quieter, turning himself inward. His silence drew me further into him, like a vacuum, made the necessity to love him and be with him even more overpowering.
I tried everything to cheer him up. I’d go to Nuys, about two hours’ walk, to get him that jerky he loved. I’d write poems during the day and read them to him, perform them on an imaginary stage, at night. I wish you’d been there, and we could have performed the plays we used to write as little girls. While I never failed to put a smile on his face, he would wait until he thought I was satisfied and wasn’t looking before going right back to sulking. But I always saw it.

---

One day in March I was digging through the attic when I stumbled upon an old cardboard box. It was labeled “Ithaca – Senior Year.” I opened it up to find a photo album. I pulled it out and flipped it open hesitantly, not out of fear, but rather in anticipation, a last breath of air before this future would pass behind me. And then the book was open.
On the first page was a man with a beard. He wore big, gaudy black sunglasses, despite being indoors. He was making an absurd face and picking his nose. I caught myself off-guard when I let out a laugh, a big burst of one gone as quickly as it had come. I turned through page after page of people in their early twenties, with rooms lit up at night, computers ablaze with information streaming at them in high-definition at high-speed. These were people only a bit younger than I, enjoying every luxury I didn’t have. The only thing in the photos that burned brighter than the electric bulbs were the eyes of the people they illuminated.
I was so enraptured by the photos that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask myself who they were photos of. About twenty pages in, I had the answer anyway. The photos were of the same bearded man and a lady. They were kissing, they were hiking, they were drunk at parties with friends. They were Mom and Dad. In the opposite photo, Mom was looking at the camera. I hadn’t seen Mom’s face in a decade or so, but I knew it was her with instant familiarity. It was the same familiarity I feel catching a translucent reflection of myself in a storefront window. She had the same curly brunette hair, the same narrow frame, the same green eyes. I was frozen.
But my paralysis gave way to adrenaline, and I glided down the stairs at full speed, as though I were afraid that if I didn’t show the album to someone else fast enough, it would disappear as thought it were a dream. I couldn’t have that. This was too precious! I couldn’t afford not to share this with someone. I flew into the kitchen so quickly that I nearly vaulted over the countertop island.
“Is this you and Mom?!” I yelled, practically accusingly. But Dad wasn’t startled. He took a fraction of a glance at the photo I was opened to, and suddenly his eyes glowed like the twinkly lights you and I had strung up around the childhood room we shared. He didn’t respond. He took the book from me, his eyes trembling, and stared for a good long while at the photos, occasionally turning a page. I stared at him, rather than at the new photos he was overturning. I could read every word of his every thought just in his face. I was struck by my own awe.
We spent all night up in the attic, digging through boxes of things I’d never known were within a few yards of my sleeping head. There were your things, there were Mom’s things, even my own things from when I was a baby. There were plenty of photos, but also posters, CDs, notes from friends, videotapes. Our twinkly lights were there, too. Dad told me about every single item that I didn’t recognize: where it came from, whose it was. I had lived through the Blackout, could remember even before it, but the stories he told me were so much more real, more vivid, and the past seemed more alive than anything outside of the attic.

---

The following evening, after the last morsel of meat from Jimmy’s hunt had been eaten and the last plate cleaned and set to dry, Dad went out to the shed in the backyard. He undoubtedly had enough tools and supplies in there to last him another month of house calls; he hadn’t touched them since the Blackout. That night, and every day that followed, he set to work doing maintenance on the wiring in and around the entire house.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I remember asking him, with a sort of timid dumbfoundedness that seems comical to me now. Somehow I thought he’d gotten confused, or worse, I feared he was going senile. I considered it my duty to ground him in the reality of the situation.
“Don’t worry, Bug,” he would tell me, “you’ll see.”

You’ll see.

After a week or two, the house had lights everywhere. You can’t imagine how many lights. All of the old fixtures remained, and there was at least one new for every old. There were big lights in the living room and lights pointed off the roof at the backyard. There were little baby lights lining stairs, lining the pathways around our home. They stared down every dark corner of every dark room. I can remember wishing you’d walk in the front door, saying “Hey everybody, I’m h--“ and stopping short, flabbergasted by the place. The whole scene in the living room reminded me of a photograph I’d seen once at one of the museums we went to in New York, of a man sitting in a cluttered room with a canopy of lightbulbs hanging above him, almost threateningly.
Dad worked all March. Each morning I woke up like it was Christmas, in the still of early-morning, to watch him work.
“Morning Dad,” I’d say with a smile.
“Morning, Becky!” It was like being in a commercial for coffee. Sometimes that was the only thing we said to each other until dinner time, but I didn’t mind. It made me feel like a kid again.
On the first of April, he stopped working. I remember it very vividly, thinking it was an April Fool’s joke. I’d woken up a little later than usual. When I walked downstairs, the house was quiet. I was frustrated with myself, thinking he’d already gone out to the shed and I’d missed wishing him a good morning. Stepping outside onto the back porch and into the chilly air, I looked out at the shed. The door was shut, and the lock was still on it.
By the time I got back upstairs, I was no longer scolding myself for waking up late, but was instead angry with him. I was angry that he’d stopped working on this project I couldn’t even understand, angry at his laziness, angry that I felt I had nothing to look forward to. But the anger was just a ruse for the fear I felt. I was scared that maybe he’d given up hope, regardless of what his goal had been.
I burst into his bedroom, where he was still sleeping.
“Dad!” I yelled. “What are you doing?! You’re supposed to be working!” My petulance overpowered my reason. Even as I’m writing this, I’m blushing a little in embarrassment.
He opened is eyes, and with the same calm and certainty I had come to expect, he smirked and said, “What, a man’s not allowed a day off?”
“Well, yeah, but…” I searched for a reason why today couldn’t be his day off. “You can’t yet!”
“Why not?”
“Because!”
But, looking at him, I was soon charmed. My face loosened and I smiled. He smiled right back. “I promise you,” he said, “that I’m not done working, and that very soon I’ll have a surprise for you.”
When he finally did wake up late that morning, he left the house with a backpack full of water and a lunch that I made for him.
“Here’s a list of some of the lighting fixtures that need to be screwed in. Could you take care of that for me?” I nodded. “Great. I’ll be home late, so if you wouldn’t mind making dinner for the two of us but eating without me, I’d appreciate it.” Ever the egalitarian. Begrudgingly I assented, and he walked out the door with a fresh kiss on the cheek.
I felt the desperate urge to follow him, but I didn’t need to. I knew he was going to the junkyard on the way to Summit. I followed him with the binoculars as far as I could, then set upon my responsibilities.
I completed his list and cooked a whole pot of stew, so there would be plenty for him when he got back. I lay on the couch reading. When I had to light a candle to be able to see, I started worrying. It didn’t normally take him that long. When he finally got back, I could hear him whistling as he came up the path. He walked into the house, feigning surprise that I’d stayed up waiting for him. He was carrying a long metal rod in one hand, and in the other a heavy box. I could tell from the sweat on his face and the loud “thud” that the box made when he put it down, that it was that weight which had kept him out so late. Likewise, the backpack he was wearing made a clanking sound. Undoubtedly he would have had to stop many times along the way. Despite my anger, I didn’t ask questions about why he didn’t ask for help, or what it was he’d brought back.
“What is this, the inquisition?” He would have asked. You know all about it; when Dad is keeping a secret, he keeps it. So I reheated stew for him and went quietly to bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, Dad asked me if I wanted to exercise with him in the basement some time that day. We still had the old elliptical exercise machine in the basement, as well as the stationary bike! They hadn’t been touched in years, dormant even before the Blackout. Since Mom died.
”Why?” I asked him. It seemed like a ludicrous idea.
“I wanna get rid of this gut!” He shook what little of his stomach would jiggle. He was probably just feeling out of shape given the time it’d taken him to get back the previous night, but he was skinny as ever. His age was really starting to show.
I laughed.
“How am I going to maintain my girlish figure when you won’t stop feeding me?!” I giggled again and gave him a loving hit on the shoulder.
“Ok, dad. Let your food digest, and then I’ll come exercise with you.”
The machines didn’t turn on, but that wasn’t the point. I was just glad to see his good humor and sentiment hadn’t subsided back into depression, and now that it seemed he was not going to work anymore, it would keep him active and feeling good. We didn’t need to log our heart-rates or distances traveled, so the lack of power was irrelevant.
We ended up exercising every day as the April rains rolled in. We would go down to the basement and get on the machines and ride at leisurely paces, often for hours, pretending we were traversing the beautiful European countryside, sometimes pretending to be on the way to visiting you. And we talked about anything and everything. Sometimes the conversations that started those mornings persisted through dinner.
The thing we loved talking about most was electricity. I had no significant interest or knowledge in the topic, but he had no shortage of things to say, and I never wanted him to stop talking. When he would stop talking, I would ask more questions.
“Dad, I was talking to Jimmy yesterday,” I said one day, while we were touring France, “and he said that a mechanical generator would still work, that it wouldn’t have been affected by the Wave. Is that true?”
He smiled and said, “I’ll be right back.”
He walked to the closet in the musty corner, the one where you and I used to pretend to be spider-hunters, throwing the dusty beams from our Little Mermaid flashlights around the room. When he came back, he was carrying a large metal contraption. It wasn’t the box I’d seen him come back with that day from the junkyard. It was something else. Something dusty. It had been there for a long time.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He pulled out a chain from underneath the treadmill that I hadn’t noticed before. He hooked it onto some round, moveable part on the box, then stood up.
“Do me a favor?” He asked.
“What?”
“Get on the treadmill and start jogging. Leisurely pace is fine. I just need to go get something from upstairs.”
“OK.”
He left, and I got on. I jogged for all of thirty seconds, before my excitement took hold and I felt like sprinting. When he got back downstairs, I was already starting to sweat.
He laughed. “OK, OK! Go easy, I don’t want you to pass out before the unveiling!”
I slowed down, and laughed the little breathy laugh I could.
“An electric generator or electric motor that uses field coils rather than permanent magnets needs a current flow to be present in the field coils for the device to be able to work. Even if there’s no power in the field coils, the rotor can still spin without producing any electricity. So, really big power station generators used to utilize a separate, smaller generator to get the field coils of the larger one electrified.
“See, they were prepared for the possibility that there might be severe and widespread power outages at some point. They weren’t prepared for what we’ve ended up dealing with, but they were at least prepared to a certain extent, if not on the necessarily large scale.”
He produced a light bulb, socket, and cable from behind his back. My heart jumped and I ran faster again.
Screwing the light bulb into the socket, he continued. “Anyway, if a power station were to have been completely isolated from any power source, which is called ‘islanding,’ they knew the stations would need to perform what they call a ‘black start’ to excite the fields of their largest generators, in order to restore customer power service.”

He plugged the wire into the box.

“It’s called ‘excitation.’”

---

Upstairs, it was getting late and the rain was coming down hard. It was the first thunderstorm. It was the thunder that had interrupted the moth dance our eyes were doing around that single bulb. The moment the thunder clapped, his head jerked upward, and he went out to the shed. He came back to the house with the metal rod. Down in the basement, he pulled out the junkyard box, which wasn’t a box at all. It was a square, metal thing with two metal nubs protruding from the top. One had a plastic cap on it with the single symbol, “+.” The generator still hooked up to the treadmill, he added the new box to the chain.
“Bug?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Time to start running for real.”

--

When he came back downstairs twenty minutes later, I was drenched. At that point, the thunder was practically on top of us, loud as all hell, and the lightning could be seen in sharp bolts within a mile of the house. Dad told me to stop, so I stopped. We walked out to the front lawn.
He looked up at the roof. I could see the rod, on its side.
“Son of a gun,” he said, and he climbed onto the roof for what was presumably the second time. I steadied the ladder as he climbed. He secured the pole in a slot he’d made, and hooked up a hidden wire at either end of it. I was watching from the lawn. That was all I could do, was watch.
“Come down, Dad!” I wanted to yelled to him from below. But I said nothing.
“I got it, Bug! I’m comin’ down now! Hold the ladder.”
But before he could even get a foot to the first rung, the lightning struck the rod only a few feet away from him, and he missed his footing and slid right down the roof. There was no big dramatic scene, no hanging from the gutter, no screaming for help. In a matter of just a second or two, he’d gone from the roof to the lawn. I just stood where I was for a moment.
“Dad?”
I shook the cobwebs out and took a step forward, but was halted by another bolt of lighting. It was right ahead and above me, hitting the bar squarely. I was blinded for a split second, and then stood there. Nothing.
Lightning has a higher probability of striking in a particular place once it has already. People think the opposite. By the time I got to Dad, it hit again. A third time. Just as bright, just as startling, right over our heads.
But this time, the brightness stayed. I was confused, despite the clarity. The bolt had come and gone, the clap loud alongside it, but the light had stayed, I knew, because my irises were straining to stay closed. Kneeling over Dad, I’d been so preoccupied with concern for his condition that it took me a moment to realize what was happening.
The lights in and around the house were all on. Our entire property was lit up, light pouring out of the windows, down the hill. I was dumbstruck by the sight of it. I completely forgot about Dad, who could very well have been dead beneath me for all I knew. The bulbs didn’t quite maintain a constant luminosity, but rather they pulsated rhythmically as they all shared the common power source. The light and the rhythm were hypnotic.
I looked away for a moment. I could make out the wall of St. Simon’s. Then, looking a bit further down the hill, I could make out figures coming toward us. They were all coming up Marison St. I looked down to see Dad grinning at me, despite the blood I could see on his old Levis. The orange light falling on his injuries seemed to nullify them, to assuage the throbbing pain he undoubtedly felt.

As the neighbors arrived at our property, they all stood in awe, holding one another. One woman gasped, purely accidentally. It was, undoubtedly, a knee-jerk reaction. She covered her mouth sheepishly and looked around, embarrassed.
When her hand came away, a grin was there to fill the space. Mrs. Jenkins looked at her and laughed, and started dancing around like a lunatic. A jubilant, fire-eyed lunatic. The children followed. Some danced around Dad, who was sitting up by then, as if he were a campfire. The youngest children lay on their bellies just under the little lights of our path, batting at them, admiring the tiny fairies that dangled above them. Still others danced as brilliantly as if they were the first on Earth to see this.
Once my eyes adjusted to the bright light, I couldn’t see anything but our house and yard; everything else was swallowed up by the night, as though all of the darkness of our property had been displaced and made the rest of the dark night more concentrated, like getting into a full bathtub. The rain didn’t bother a soul.
The lights illuminated the lawn, my face, and my eyes, but then they shed light on smaller things. Stolen kisses in an elevator in Manhattan and making love for the first time at the beach in Florida, the lights from the nearby restaurants tiny in the distance. The small samples of perfume from magazines that I would smell while wearing Mom’s clothing. A broken pact with my childhood best friend, Liza. The deep recesses of my memory froze like fugitives under flashlights. Thoughts I’d stashed away with the old appliances, somehow. It was a reunion party, and I was there wearing my most beautiful polka-dotted dress. I cried, and I smiled, and the tears mixed with the rain in salty-sweet drops that watered the earth below my feet.
But then another bolt struck and the lights flickered and blew out. Sparks danced down to the lawn. My smile followed after them. The darkness closed back in and got more watered-down, more permeable, as before, yet somehow more complete than before. The filaments had borne too much heat, and our fields of vision succumbed to momentary blindness.
The storm subsided and the stars reappeared. It took time before the parents reluctantly carried children down the slope back to houses, and Dad, weakened perhaps more by the spectacle than by his injuries, stood on his good leg and leaned against me.
I walked him into the house and sat him down. I dressed the wound, got him a small glass of Scotch (Chivas Regal, what else?) to manage the pain, and readied him for the trip to the hospital, like dressing a child for a romp in its first snowstorm, or the first day of school. Like he dressed us for ours. I looked at him, and he looked back. The lights in his eyes, untouched by that final bolt, were still on.
Nancy, I miss you ever so dearly.

Yours Always,
Rebecca

With My Eyes Closed I - Sound

2008-05-09T18:58:00.008-04:00

With my eyes closed.

Someone accelerates in the distance, and down below, children giggle. They seem a funny combination, one suggesting danger, risk, and adulthood, and the other a playful innocence, in no rush and with no adulteration.

Now and again, there's the faintest pitter-patter of water against my window and its sill.

My phone alarm goes off. Reminding me yet again to buy toothpaste. I haven't got any left; I've been living off of the remains of a travel-sized tube for days.

Honk.

The wind is coming straight at the glass, and I can even hear it whistling through the cracks where my windows don't quite seal out the outside.

The twitter of my computer. If I unplug it from the wall, the twitter will go away

There is a sound emanating from the kitchen, like if water were just a little more solid, and you dragged it across metal. Almost the sound of the steam heat in the wintertime, but it quickly drops away.

More cars rushing, more, more wind and rain sounds. A growl, but whether by human or beast I couldn't say.

In this silence of afternoon, with my eyes closed, it's easy to think I'm somewhere. To think I'm anywhere.

The radiator threatens to heat for a moment, barely whistling, and hesitates, a bit unsure. The valve is nearly closed, so not much is getting through.

A wind chime somewhere.

The intense pop of the steam against the steam valve, or perhaps the heating of the metal against different joints. Like a miniature machine room coming to life in the morning hours.

The absence of the church bell tolling just moments ago. How that bell now could have filled the space. I think of the church we went to visit by Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, where we went to see the monks chant. I went out onto the front steps and looked out over the view. I recorded it. I took out my tape recorder, audiotape, and recorded the view, the silence, the chanting vaguely behind me. The sound of peace and tranquility. I recorded it, like May Kasahara recording the face of Toru Okada doing his impression of Noboru Wataya in "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle." I wonder what that sounds like now, that view...

The refrigerator clicks on and hums, and my cellphone beeps to signal a text-message arriving. I find myself angry and bitter at their stealing me away from my fantasy of warmer, prettier times past. I know that if I open my eyes I will not be on that veranda with Italy splayed out before me, but rather tucked into the gray Brooklyn I inhabit on this cold, dreary, rainy afternoon. It would be a disappointment. But it is an inevitability.

Up

2008-04-30T19:53:00.003-04:00

Julia walked Lloyd out further into the golden field. It was late afternoon, and Lloyd had a hard time distinguishing which was brighter: the sky, or the ground. He squinted, as he often did, and the bright sun made his squinting eyes tear a bit at the corners. Julia's hair, now just past her shoulders, matched the surroundings splendidly, and Lloyd watched as it floated effortlessly in the light breeze. All was quiet, and the feel of her hand in his palm was calming. The whole scene gently bobbed in front of him lazily like a buoy on a calm lake surface, disturbed by the occasional ripple. It was moments like these that gave Lloyd his appreciation for the Midwest, and for Julia. Colorado is a nice place, he thought. This field felt like the right reason to have moved there.

"They have no idea how it got here," she said. Lloyd had actually momentarily forgotten what they were doing there in the first place. He hadn't even noticed the ladder.
"Can it support my weight?" He asked.
"Definitely. It gets a little wobbly toward the top, but it won't snap."

Now they were standing at the base, looking up. Lloyd couldn't help but wonder again to himself how, exactly, this thing had come to be here. There was no sign of anything else having been nearby that might warrant needing to climb it, and especially no sign of reason for ramming the thing into the ground. Still, in his languid state all he felt was a mild, satisfying curiosity.

He started climbing. At first there was no hesitation or withholding, which is not to say that he climbed swiftly. He simply had no reservations about it. But as he neared the middle, the physics of the whole thing started to dawn on his equilibrioception. The sway of the ladder, though ever so gentle, became noticeable, and his grip got tighter. Also, the smile started to fade from his face.

He paused. He looked down at Julia, who was staring back up at him. She didn't expect him to climb to the top, he knew. And, he kind of knew he wasn't going to make it up there too. For a moment, he stood there on the ladder, about halfway up, in the middle of a field in Colorado. The color returned to his cheeks, though they had never been pallor. He climbed down. When his feet came to rest on the ground, he continued to feel the levity he'd felt moments ago before his ascent, and he found himself looking back up at the top of the ladder, debating climbing it again.

That night, Lloyd and Julia lay close to one another. The window had no blinds, and the glass pane was open just a bit. It looked like a movie. In fact, the blue light bouncing off the moon came in through the windows just like in the movies. But, had they opened their eyes, it probably would have just appeared white.

Movie Night

2008-04-16T21:00:00.002-04:00

I cooked Ramen noodles when she came over. I needed something to do with my hands, otherwise I'd be a nervous idiot, I knew. Maybe a desire to exhibit skills in something was mixed in there somewhere, some masculine desire to show off (so I choose to cook?), but it's mostly the nerves. The ramen started out as a bad idea, because it forced even more small talk than would have previously been necessary. But it turned out alright. Also, I was excited to use my brand new cooking chopsticks, which are much larger than normal chopsticks. Undoubtedly, this was overkill, and maybe it looked comical. But it maked me feel important.

We lay on my new futon, now. It is important that the futon is new. I wouldn't have had the confidence to invite a woman over with the old futon frame. This futon could actually pass for a bed, if it weren't for the armrests on the side. And it's definitely big enough for two people.

"Good job on the noodles," she says.
"Thanks. I cook these a lot."

She smiles. At least she's friendly, accommodating. I also can't help but notice she's pretty. I feel guilty about it, despite the fact that it's the reason she's here in the first place. I quell my sudden, if minor, urges.

"We have two choices."
"OK." She looks at me, as if understanding that what we watch is important, but also completely unimportant. She understands the duality there, the tender duality. I lost my virginity, for instance, while "watching" The Mothman Profecies. Choice is important. And, ultimately, completely unimportant. But still important. You follow? It oscillates. When we're choosing, it's important. When we're watching, it's important. When it's on but we're not watching, it's not important. When it ends and we don't notice, it's not important. But tomorrow, or the next day, or if it ever gets talked about, it's important. The Mothman Prophesies.

"Our choices are Amelie and Lost In Translation." I've seen both, I want to watch both again, and both suggest that I have decent taste in movies but also knew not to suggest 2001: A Space Odyssey or worse.
"I've seen both of those."
"So I have I."
Pause, smile, "Lost in Translation."
Good choice.

Twenty minutes in, we both finish our noodles at the roughly same time with a final slurp. She knows how to slurp noodles. Points. My laptop starts to get hot on our legs, a sensation I sometimes enjoy. But it is harder to displace and distribute the heat to avoid burning when I have more than my own legs to worry about, so I just put it down on the bed.

She turns onto her side and rests her head and a hand on my chest, in a very familiar way. This makes my heart race. I worry that she will hear my heart race, which makes it race even more. All of these, these are familiar feelings. She lifts her head, and props herself up.

"I can hear your heartbeat."

She looks at me. Our faces are very close. I blink. In the blink I can't see anything, and in the blink I am with someone familiar. It is a wonder I am not surprised, when my eyes open again, that I am with a stranger. For a flash, just a quick moment, we can actually feel the gravitational pull between our noses, recognize it as being separate from the pull of the center of the Earth, recognize it as both unavoidable and negligible, as both important and unimportant.

Bedford

2008-03-31T18:21:00.005-04:00

The young woman serving me wasn't Greek, she told me, despite what her features proclaimed. While I didn't find her to be overtly attractive, I found myself attracted to her. Her curves, both in hip and in hair, were voluptuous, and her breasts ripe and full, barely hiding behind a narrow apron. We made small talk over my cup of jasmine tea, which bore a strange taste I couldn't identify but chalked up to the type of jasmine. She brought me her favorite Greek pastry, whose name was melamacaroon, or something of the sort.

It felt good to be in this cafe, whose dimly lit interior and primarily wood furnishing bore the impression of a French bar in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and reminded me specifically of my favorite cafe in the town I'd lived in prior. I was surprised when the server told me it'd had a soft opening the very month I'd moved here, seven or so months ago.

I patiently drank, ate, and read all of Tolstoy's "Redemption." By the time I paid my bill, she was nowhere to be found, my server. I thought it a shame. I'd had no real intention of asking her out, but it was a shame nonetheless that I couldn't at least bid her good evening. Who knows what fancy of fortune might have befallen us otherwise...

I walked out with my pile of books in hand, under my arm. I wished I had a small bit of rope or twine to bound them together and carry them, like a schoolboy in storybook England. I made a conscious decision to come back here every night possible, to read by the faint candlelight and flirt subtly and tastefully with the curvy server.

I walked a block in the direction of home, then turned around upon deciding it was too cold to walk, too cold to really be the end of March.

Underground, I awaited my train on the platform. My books still tucked under my wing, I watched motionlessly the passengers-to-be as they strolled down the stairs, as I was wont to do. I had in fact developed the terrible habit of observing strangers unabashedly, caring little if they raised their eyes to meet my gaze. I treated them as faces on a television screen.

My back against a painted steel beam, a man crossed between me and the tracks. Dressed all in black, including a leather jacket, he listened to metal at an unreasonable volume in his headphones. I was momentarily startled by his sudden proximity, and like any reasonable person transitioned my anger to subtle contempt, which I fruitlessly exhibited by glaring at the side of his hood.

He disappeared quickly as he'd come. After a moment I'd forgotten him, and a cold breeze emanated from the tunnel before me, signaling the arrival of my train. A slow arrival, and one confirmed by a friendly, pre-recorded female voice over the loudspeaker overhead.

The train glided at a meandering pace into the station, as though browsing an aisle in a food market, no conductor at the helm. When it stopped, I stood before the last car awaiting the opening of the doors. They opened and a few people stepped out. In front of me, the man in black from before turned to glare at a man who had just exited, perhaps grazed his arm, and his glare exuded more hate and desire than my equally futile one from earlier.

This was an unsavory character, I thought to myself, one to be avoided at all cost.

On the train, only one stop away from home before it even moved, I crossed to the other end of the car. before me, an Asian woman bore a cartoonish appearance, her hair seemingly glued in a strange, unnatural style with straight bangs and exploding pigtails. She was overweight, and caught me staring at her twice. Better, I thought, than upsetting the man in black. I avoided his visage entirely, save for one brief glance which, thankfully, slipped by unnoticed.

When I stepped off at my stop, the man in black did too, and his steady gait kept him reasonable ahead of me. No incident to be had tonight, I noted thankfully.

My walk home was brisk and uneventful. In the comfort of home, I cleaned my teeth and disrobed. As I turned out the light, my tongue caught a hint of the strange jasmine flavor once more. The light extinguished, I slept.

Paris, Je T'aime

2008-03-17T22:07:00.003-04:00

When I get home, the gas is off. The gas is still off. I am prepared for this. I put rice in the rice cooker, and I open a can of beans. When the rice has cooked, I heat the beans for one minute in the blue bowl (the big one, not the little one), in the microwave, making sure to stop it periodically to stir. When it is done, I put half of the rice into the bowl and mix it around, saving the other half for tomorrow.

I go into my room and close the door behind me. I sit down to watch "Paris, Je T'aime." I become mesmerized. I find the stories each concise, captivating, and I fall in and out of love as the characters do. The feelings are new feelings, but old feelings. Feelings long since forgotten but consistently remembered, sometimes fondly.

By the end, I am immobilized. I find it so complete, so perfect, that I smile. My lips curl and my eyes narrow. When there is no where else for the corners of my mouth to go, when they've hit a wall, there is still more to be done, more ground to be covered. Emotion wells up from my stomach, up through my windpipe, and it sits at the back of my throat. My breathing becomes shallow, and my eyes well up with tears. Slowly the warm, salty water fills my eyes, until the surface tension is too much to bear, too much to hold back, and then all at once the tears are across, down, down my face. Some beckon at my pursed lips, others can't be bothered and stream down to the edge of my jawline. Some seem to be caught in a moment of hesitation, but the warm waves that spring from my eyelids dash in behind them to push onward! onward!

Soon my smile has gone, but the tears persist. I find I cannot stop them. I am no longer happy, no longer in love, even with a fantasy. As the credits roll and the characters slip away, the worlds they inhabit wither and vanish, I am left with the wellspring of my sadness. The things I find so terribly real have found an opportunity, as the gates of vulnerability have suddenly been flung open, and they seize upon me like Roman soldiers, no man too great to sacrifice himself for the good of his cause, to give of his whole self. Images flash across my consciousness, each too fleeting to be held for a moment. This is my release. There can only be so much to take, so much to be had, and I have had that.

All through this, I can only think of one thing. I must call Sarah. I desperately want, need to call Sarah to tell her that I love her. Nothing makes more sense in this moment of honesty, the madness of verity from the mouth of fiction; it would not matter what she said. It would only matter that she has said it because of my proclamation. Only then can I truly feel accomplished, justified, avenged!

But I have no number at which to reach Sarah, save for her old number here in the United States. I call it. Even an old voicemail box greeting would be enough for me. But the number has been disconnected, and only a recorded man's voice is on the other line.

"The number you have called is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this message in error, please hang up and try the number again."

Yes, I have reached it in error! There has been some mistake. I have made some mistake. I have made it so many times! I want to fix that mistake now. I am ready to fix that mistake. So I pick up the phone and I dial Sarah's number again. And again. Over and over, I call Sarah. To tell her what I've been doing, to tell her about the movie, to complain that my gas is out, to tell her I love her, to ask her to come to Los Angeles to see me. I call her once for every mistake, and each time the man tells me to call again if I feel I've reached him in error, if there has been an error. Soon, the man stops answering. There is just silence. There are no more mistakes to be made, and no more mistakes for which to make up.

So, quietly, I turn off the lights. Quietly still, I slip off all of my clothes, as though I were trying to hide my presence. As though I were attempting not to wake a sleeping brother. Naked, I feel small, smaller than I am. Like a shaved dog. It is cold in my room, even colder outside. Clutching myself, I crawl onto my bed, under the covers. The orange light from outside pours in and leans against my walls, against my frame in my bedding. My mind, my eyes, all is quiet. All is calm. This is the first time I've been to bed before ten in ages.

Photography

2008-03-03T20:22:00.002-05:00

Despite its inception as a PHOTO-literary blog, the Dead Chinchilla has not featured any photography in some time. That is why I'm pleased to announce my official Flickr address, which will be a permanent fixture in the links to the right on this website. Thank you for your continued support of the Dead Chinchilla!

Anatomy of a short story

2008-02-28T18:57:00.003-05:00

Devoted reader(s?) will remember a not-so-long-ago short story I posted entitled "Lightning Rod." A lot of the things that I post on here are just outlets for small creative bursts, or stories that I don't intend to follow up on. Some things, though, are more important than that. I have been working diligently on this story since that first post and have had several people read, reread, correct, and criticize it. There is now a much newer, more polished version! There will be one more version, which will be the final version, so bear in mind that this middle draft is in a transitional space. However, I wanted to share with you the process of creating, evolving, and completing the first short story for which I intend to seek legitimate publishing.

As always, I would like to strongly encourage you to post your thoughts about my writing, be they small corrections or larger thematic concerns, or anything in between or outside of that field. Most importantly of all, enjoy!

Lightning Rod

When I look back on my late teens, sometimes I have to laugh. It’s amazing the way you can feel on top of the world, like you know everything, at that age, and yet looking back on it you can see you were still a baby. I love this particular story because I am reminded of my youthfulness, and of the love that my father and I had shared, that we shared until the day he died. It warms my heart with such a fondness, and I can’t hold myself back from laughing at my own immaturity at certain parts. Above all, it is my favorite story because it was the time in my life when I felt most alive. And in my solitude, now, I need these kinds of comforts.
It hadn’t been all that long since everything went dark. A decade, maybe less. Already we were long forgetting, though, what life had been like. Everyone had moved on emotionally, and day-to-day structure was based around a new way of life: new chores to be done, new social structures. And for the most part it was easier.
It’s surprising, really, how little time it had taken for people to adjust. Maybe as a culture, as a species, we’d been hearing about the apocalypse, global warming, and international catastrophe for so long that when something finally did happen, a little sputter of a cataclysm, it wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d expected. We all breathed a sort of collective sigh of relief, cut our losses, and got used to it. Personally, I found that I was a lot happier without “modern” convenience. I’d begun phasing them out in my personal life anyway. It was probably just the beginnings of teenage rebellion. But one thing I did miss, which I missed desperately, was the internet. God I missed the internet.
At first, for those who’d been old enough before the Blackout, night-time was the hardest. After the sun went down, and light switches didn’t work, they’d become very introverted. During the day it was easy to distract oneself from the lack of electricity. People seemed to treated it like a blown fuse or faulty wiring, something for which they simply awaited a handyman’s touch. But at night, it was undeniable. We lived in suburban Pennsylvania. Route I-80 ran right alongside it. The lights wouldn’t turn on. Stereos wouldn’t play. Electric stoves wouldn’t boil water. The city was far enough away from the city that the inky black of night was total. Eventually, everyone was used to it.
My mother was loving, but quiet. I loved her tenderly as she did me, but I found I didn’t identify much with her. Growing up it hadn’t been a big deal, but after the Blackout the rift between us widened. It was not because we didn’t love each other, because we did. We simply handled the whole thing differently and we understood that we didn’t really have much to give one another. My older sister, Nancy, was stoic like mother, and they kept each other company. The only difference was that Nancy and I had always been close, and became giggly girls late at night or under the warm eye of our father.
The relationship Nancy and my mother shared was mirrored by mine with my father. My father had been an electrician, and I his little girl. I adored him, and we did everything possible together. We were the same person, just with different gender and an age divide. For a while after the “wave,” as people called the pulse that wiped everything out, he was fervent about keeping the family together, providing, and making sure we would be fine. And we were. He took care of us, and although I was old enough to be living on my own by society’s previous standards, the new way of life kept me home, kept me under his roof. I was in my early twenties, but being safe under his wing made me feel and act like a little girl sometimes. And he followed suit, calling me “Bug,” a nickname he hadn’t used with me since I reached double-digits.
After a while, though, Dad became depressed. There was no work for him to do, in the sense of his trained craft. The thing he’d loved and had dedicated himself to, electricity, had, in a single moment, simply ceased to exist. It was a tough blow for him. While my mother’s quiet had made me grow distant from her, my father’s silence pulled me in.
I tried everything to cheer him up. I would convince Nancy to help me stage little plays for him in the living room. I’d go a town over to Nuys to get him the jerky he loved. While things like this put a smile on his face, he would wait until he thought I was satisfied and wasn’t looking and go right back to sulking.

---

One day in March I was digging through the attic when I stumbled upon an old cardboard box. It was labeled “Ithaca – 2007.” I opened it up to find a photo album. I pulled it out and flipped it open hesitantly, not out of fear, but rather in anticipation, a last breath of air before this future would pass behind me. And then the book was open.
On the first page was a man with a beard. He wore big, gaudy black sunglasses indoors. He was making an absurd face and picking his nose. I caught myself off-guard when I let out a laugh, a big burst of one gone as quickly as it had come. I turned through page after page of people in their early twenties, with rooms lit up at night, computers ablaze with information streaming at them in high-definition at high-speed. These were people only a bit younger than I, enjoying every luxury I didn’t have. The one thing in the photos that burned brighter than the electric bulbs were the eyes of the people they illuminated.
I was so enraptured by the photos that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask myself of whom they were photos. About twenty pages in, I skipped the question and jumped right to the answer. The photos were of the same bearded man and a lady. They were kissing, they were hiking, they were drunk at parties with friends. They were Mom and Dad.
I glided down the stairs at full speed, as though I were afraid that if I didn’t show the album to someone else in time, it would disappear as thought it were a dream. I couldn’t have that. This was too precious! I couldn’t afford not to share this with someone.
I flew into the kitchen so quickly that I nearly vaulted over a countertop.
“Is this you and Mom?!” I asked, practically accusingly. But my Dad was not for a moment shocked or startled. He took a fraction of a glance at the photo I was opened to, and suddenly his eyes glowed like LEDs with a new battery. He didn’t respond. He took the book from me, his eyes trembling, and stared for a good long while at the photos, occasionally turning a page. I stared at him, rather than at the new photos he was overturning. I could read the content of every photograph in his face. I was struck by my own awe.
We spent all night up in the attic, digging through boxes of things I’d never known were within a few yards of my sleeping head. There were plenty of photos, but also posters, CDs, notes from friends, videotapes, and an entire box of Christmas lights. I had lived through the Blackout, could remember even before it, but the stories my father told me were so much more real and alive; they transcended the Blackout. That night unified past, present, and future for me in a way just out of my cognitive grasp.

---

The next day, he got to work. He had had his own shed, my Dad, a workspace with a toolbench and every supply he could need. At the time of his last customer, he’d had enough tools and supplies to last him another month of house calls, and he hadn’t touched it since either.
That day and every night that followed, when the town got dark, my father set to work on the wiring in and around our house.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I would ask him. Somehow I thought he’d gotten confused, or feared he was going senile. I considered it my duty to ground him in the reality of the situation.
“Don’t worry, Bug,” he would tell me, “you’ll see.”

You’ll see.

After a week or two, our house had lights everywhere. All of the old fixtures remained, and new ones had been added. There were big lights in the living room and lights pointed off the roof at the backyard. There were little baby lights lining stairs, lining the pathways around our home. They stared down every dark corner of every dark room. He worked all March. Each morning I awoke as though it were Christmas, in the still of early-morning, to watch him work. It made me feel like a kid again.
On April first, he stopped working. I woke up a little later than usual. When I walked downstairs, the house was quiet. I was frustrated with myself, thinking he’d already gone out to the shed and I’d missed wishing him a good morning. Stepping outside onto the back porch and into the chilly air, I looked out at the shed. The door was shut, and the lock was still on it.
By the time I got back upstairs, I was no longer scolding myself for waking up late, I was instead angry with him. I was angry that he’d stopped working on a project I knew nothing about, angry at his laziness, angry that I felt I had nothing to look forward to. But the anger was just a ruse for the fear I felt. I was scared that maybe he’d given up on his goal, whatever it was.
I burst into his bedroom, where he was still sleeping.
“Daddy!” I yelled. “What are you doing?! You’re supposed to be working!” My petulance overpowered my reason.
He opened is eyes, and with the same calm and certainty I had come to expect, he smirked and said, “What, a man’s not allowed a day off?”
“Well, yeah, but…” I searched for a reason why today couldn’t be his day off. “You can’t yet!”
“Why not?”
“Because.” Looking at him, I was soon charmed. My face loosened and I smiled.
He smiled right back. “I promise you that I’m not done working, and that very soon I’ll have a surprise for you.”
When he finally did wake up late that morning, he left the house with a backpack full of water and a lunch that my mother made for him. He told Nancy and me to make dinner and do some handywork around the house, fixing loose screws and the like. Ever the egalitarian. He told us to eat without him, but to save some food. He’d be back a little bit late. Begrudgingly we assented, and he walked out the door with a fresh kiss on either cheek.
When he got back, I was already in bed, my worry keeping me awake. I could hear him whistling as he came up the path. I didn’t go to meet him because I knew he wouldn’t want questions, so I left him be. I was simply glad he was safe. Out the window, I saw him walking with a long stick of metal, as well as a big box. It didn’t seem exorbitantly heavy, but it also didn’t seem like it was easy or light enough to carry over long distances. He made a trip out to the shed, and one to the basement, heated up his dinner, and went to bed.
We had an old elliptical exercise machine in the basement, as well as a stationary bike. They hadn’t been touched in years, dormant even before the Blackout. In the morning after his trip, at breakfast, Dad asked me if I wanted to exercise with him in the basement some time that day.
”Why?” I asked him. It seemed like a ludicrous idea.
“I wanna get rid of this gut!” He shook what little of his stomach would jiggle.
I laughed.
“How am I going to maintain my girlish figure when you beautiful ladies won’t stop feeding me?!” I giggled again and gave him a loving hit on the shoulder.
“Ok, dad. Let’s digest and then I’ll come exercise with you.”
And I kept my word. The machines didn’t turn on, but that wasn’t the point. I was just glad to see his good humor and sentiment hadn’t subsided back into depression, and now that it seemed he was not going to work anymore, it would keep him active and feeling good. We didn’t need to log our heart-rates or distances traveled.
We did it every day as the April rains rolled in. We would go down to the basement and get on the machines and ride at leisurely paces, sometimes stopping but remaining downstairs, and sometimes the conversations that started those mornings persisted through dinner.
The thing we loved talking about most was electricity. I had no significant interest or knowledge in the topic, but he had no shortage of things to say, and I never wanted him to stop. When he did stop talking, I asked more questions.
“Dad, why is it that bulbs always used to blow out right when you switched them on?”
“Well, the filament inside the bulb is pretty delicate. As the bulb ages, certain parts of it can no longer sustain the rapid changes in temperature from the sudden influx of electricity, and those parts shatter under the strain. That disconnects the two ends and disrupts the circuit, halting electricity from flowing through.”

---

It was getting late and the rain was coming down hard. It was the first thunderstorm. The moment the thunder clapped, he went out to the shed. My mother yelled at him to come back inside, but he wouldn’t be deterred. He came back to the house with the metal rod, went down to the basement, and when he came back upstairs twenty minutes later, he was sweating. By then, the thunder was practically on top of us, loud as all hell, and the lightning could be seen in sharp bolts within a mile of the house.
He climbed up to the roof carrying the rod. I knew what he was doing. The box in the basement, the exercise, the rod, the sweat on his brow. I knew exactly what he was doing. What WE were doing.
I steadied the ladder as he climbed. He secured the pole in a slot he’d made, and hooked up a hidden wire at either end of it.
I was watching from the lawn.
“Come down, Dad!” I wanted to yelled to him from below. But I was simultaneously petrified and excited beyond belief, so I didn’t say anything.
“I got it, Bug! I’m comin’ down now! Hold the ladder.”
But before he could even get a foot to the first rung, the lightning struck the rod only a few feet away from him, and he missed his footing and slid right down the roof. There was no big dramatic scene, no hanging from the gutter, no screaming for help. In a matter of just a second or two, he’d gone from the roof to the lawn. I just stood where I was for a moment.
“Dad?”
I shook the cobwebs out and took a step forward, but was halted by another bolt of lighting. It was right ahead and above me, hitting the bar square. I was blinded for a split second, and then stood there. Nothing.
Lightning has a higher probability of striking in a particular place once it has already. People think the opposite. By the time I got to my Dad, it hit again. A third time. Just as bright, just as startling, right over our heads.
But this time, the brightness stayed. I was confused, despite the clarity. The bolt had come and gone, the clap loud alongside it, but the light had stayed, I knew, because my irises were straining closed. Kneeling over my father, I’d been so preoccupied with concern for his condition that it took me a moment to realize what was happening.
The lights in and around the house were all on. Our entire property was lit up, light pouring out of the windows, down the hill. I was dumbstruck by the sight of it. The generator battery we’d been training this whole time was actually maintaining. I completely forgot about Dad, who could very well have been dead beneath me for all I knew.
We lived up on the hill by St. Simon’s, and most people could see our house from theirs. They were all coming up Marison St. I looked down to see my father was grinning at me, despite the bone coming through his old Levis. The milky light falling on his injuries seemed to nullify them, to assuage the throbbing pain he undoubtedly felt. As the neighbors arrived at our property, they all stood in awe, holding one another. One woman gasped, purely accidentally. It was, undoubtedly, a knee-jerk reaction. She covered her mouth sheepishly and looked around, embarrassed.
When her hand came away, a grin was there to fill the space. Mrs. Jenkins looked at her and laughed, and started dancing around like a lunatic. A jubilant, fire-eyed lunatic. The children followed. Some danced around my father, who was sitting up, like he was a campfire. The youngest children lay on their bellies just under the small lights of our path, admiring the tiny fairies that dangled motionlessly above them. They danced as brilliantly as if they were the first on Earth to see this. One couldn’t see anything but our house and yard; everything else was swallowed up by the night, as though all of the darkness of our property had been displaced and made the rest of the dark night more concentrated. The rain didn’t bother a soul.
The lights illuminated the lawn, my face, and my eyes, but then they shed light on smaller things. Stolen kisses in an elevator in Manhattan and making love at the beach in Florida. Small samples of perfume from magazines that I would smell while wearing my mother’s clothing. A broken pact with a best friend. The deep recesses of my memory braced like fugitives under flashlights. Things I’d stashed away with the appliances, somehow. It was a reunion party, and I was there wearing my best dress. I cried, and the tears mixed with the rain in salty-sweet drops that watered the earth below my feet.
But then another bolt struck and the lights flickered and blew out. Sparks danced down to the lawn. The darkness closed back in and got more watered-down, more permeable, as before, but it somehow seemed more complete. The filaments had borne too much heat, and our fields of vision succumbed to momentary blindness.
The storm subsided and the stars reappeared. It took time before the parents reluctantly carried children down the slope back to houses, and my father, weakened perhaps more by the spectacle than by his injuries, stood on his good leg and leaned against me.
I walked him into the house and sat him down. I got him a glass of Scotch to manage the pain, and readied him for the trip to the hospital, like dressing a child for a romp in its first snowstorm. I looked at him, and he looked back. The lights in his eyes, untouched by that final bolt, were still on.

Ankle Socks

2008-02-27T23:21:00.002-05:00

Ankle socks.

MY GOD. ANKLE SOCKS.

You don't understand. When I run out of these socks, these socks that are NOT EVEN ankle socks, they're almost HEEL socks, they're just short enough to not peak out their weary heads from the rim of my sneakers, and yet long enough to never catch under my heal, when I run out of them I'm so angry. It means the approach of laundry day. It means it's time to start wearing ill-fitting socks until I clean all of my clothes. It means gold-toes.

ANKLE SOCKS. They're coming. I got the e-mail today, the email from the internet that says, "Your ankle socks are coming!" Such a sweet ring to it, I could kiss that digital postman, no matter how he may smell or sweat, or curse at me when I ask him if there's any mail for me.

I'm not just getting a pair. I'm getting twelve pairs. 24 perfectly shaped socks. No more of these gold-toed, worn out worthless foot mittens. No. From no on, no one will see my socks, and I will be so happy about it. I can wear them, whether my feet are clean or not. No need to distinguish between, "Oh, these are the clean-foot socks" and "Oh, I haven't bathed in two days. Gold-toed it is." Never again. My feet will be cloaked in the skin-tight, ankleless heaven-sent cotton design with arch support, all day, every day.

This is going to be AWESOME.

Winds of Change

2008-02-10T15:39:00.000-05:00

Outside, the far buildings become matted with the dark clouds behind them, despite the bright sunlight in the west landing bold on their faces. In short time, the winds pick up. They whistle through the halls, here unthinkably on the 22nd floor. A moment later, my glance is cast out the kitchen window. White streaks shear sideways. The snow comes harder and harder, as the gusts become constant windstream. I watch as a few lucky pieces of debris dance high between and above the concrete giants of TriBeCa.

Across the way, though, is a large cardboard box. Its square shape spins and flies, peering into the windows of the apartment buildings that my own window faces. This is not a thing meant for flight - its architecture screams this fact. And yet, it continues to flail effortlessly hundreds of feet in the air, until the wind brings it crashing down on a metal awning, the sound reaching me a moment later.

The unwelcome flakes, months late and thus forgotten otherwise, descend in god-sized handfulls. Crosswinds collide and swirl in ethereal swarms high above rooftops, their contents escaping to land below on car alarms and pedestrians, collecting on an unprepared, bracing ground.

Windowsills start collecting powder in minutes, and I imagine streets become unnavigable with cold sheets. My range of vision, though clear within this apartment, outside is milky and hazy in the distance, and grainy up close like a small film stock blown up to fill an Omni screen. When I go to look at the streets below, they are still black. Convection currents make the snow nearest my window fall upwards. Perhaps only a finite amount of snow has fallen, and the winds refuse to let it settle down below.

Regardless, the winds of change are dancing outside manically, curmudgeonly wringing their hands. The people below shriek, some gleefully, and others in defense. A winter delayed has arrived all at once, commanding the sudden and unwavering respect of millions. And a moment later, it's gone. The sky is a creamy blue with intermittent clouds, and a white bag falls gracefully before a brown-building backdrop.

Faces of the Dead

2008-01-24T22:51:00.000-05:00

a few nights ago i had the worst dream of my life. i attended a film festival that i was a part of putting on, featuring live action effects.

in one film that had no live element, it was posed as old documentary footage sent from one person to another. it was of two couples who seemed on a weekend getaway. first it was about the two couples and their kids, but then they left for a cabin in the mountains.

the two had fun inside and out by the lake. then the men left on an errand. the women got a bit drunk. a camera on a moving conveyor belt went upstairs to find them naked in bed, where they looked at and touched one another's bodies. the skinnier one looked at the other and said, "it's as though we were twins! how your body mimics mine." she touched the other's vagina as an assurance. the two kissed gently. it was not about the sex, it was about the kindredness.

when the men returned home from their trip, the husband of the skinnier woman (both women were blondes) was infuriated by what he found. he went for his shotgun. he put a bullet in his own wife's head. then, he ran down the stairs to find his male friend, who he felt owed him something, and put a bullet in his brain too. he collapsed to the floor.

the wife of the other, now dead, man, came down the stairs and sat down a few steps above the now-sitting man with the shotgun. she pleaded with him calmly, saying it was all innocent, not sexual, that there was no need for all this. he turned slowly and aimed the gun at her forehead. slowly, a bullet was emitted. it slowly, tenderly, arrived at her head, where it gently burrowed in as her skull rearranged itself to accomodate the new visitor. she fell to the floor a misshapen mess, her skull now oblong, her eyes void and strange. a mess of flesh and blood adorned the space around her head. i cold see her face through the floor, as though she'd landed on glass. her slacked jaw lay slightly open and dislocated.

the husband, feeling some sense of obligation, dragged her outside to the daylight of the autumnal field. with the gun, he put a nickel into the open exit wound, and tried to close it with ligaments of still-attached skull fragments.

the film ended. i had tried so hard to keep my eyes closed and covered, but somehow i'd still seen everything. i awoke to the realization that this had been the single worst thing i'd ever seen in my entire life, and i lay awake completely unsure of what to do next, opening my eyes to momentarily scan the room and then clenching them tightly under the covers. i fell back asleep moments later.

The Clouds

2007-12-17T19:23:00.000-05:00

It wasn’t the view from the mountains in Utah, when I looked in my rear-view mirror to see the flatlands I’d traversed, far away and quiet beneath a desperate sun, and behind big brother mountains trying to steal the show.

It wasn’t the night as I passed through Colorado approaching the Rockies, as the mountains loomed in the pitch-blackness and the sky rained down more shooting stars, clear as the others, and clear as the lights nesting below them, more shooting stars than I’d ever seen in the rest of my life combined.

It wasn’t the frost growing on my windshield and windows in floral crystals, up in the mountains of Vail, a town pretty and quiet, alone in the night.

And it wasn’t the sudden white-out of snow kicked up from the powder for no more than thirty seconds.

It was the clouds. Only twenty or so feet above my head, the clouds lay frozen. The wind didn’t blow them, and they could not be mistaken for the clouds high above looking like cotton, nor could they be mistaken for the fog which shrouds everything evenly. These silk webs had been draped ever-so-carefully over the roofs and streetlamps, lumpy in spots perhaps, but unmoving. They braced like mosquito nets, and lay perfectly still despite the wind, right above me.

It was their stillness that struck me at my core, as I feared in that moment that I had entered a timeless place from whose grasp I might never escape.

Of all the things I saw that day, it was the clouds that scared me most of all.

Lightning Rod

2007-12-11T02:00:00.000-05:00

(Editorial note: The following is a short story called "Lightning Rod." Moreso than other stories I've written here, I'd like to encourage you to leave comments about the story, feeling free to go into as much detail as you like about both positives and negatives, and to share a link to this story with friends you think might enjoy it, so that they may be able to provide more feedback. You can do this by right-clicking on the post time at the bottom of this post and clicking "copy link location." Thanks!)

Lightning Rod

It hadn’t been all that long since everything went dark. Already we were starting to forget, though, what life was like. Everyone was moving on emotionally, and day-to-day structure was based around a new way of life: new chores to be done, new social structures.

It’s surprising, really, how little time it took for people to adjust. Maybe we’d been hearing about the apocalypse, global warming, international catastrophe for so long that when something finally did happen and it wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d expected, we all breathed a sort of sigh of relief, cut our losses, and got used to it. Personally, I found that I was a lot happier without “modern” convenience. I’d begun phasing them out in my personal life anyway. The only thing I did miss, which I missed desperately, was the internet. God I missed the internet.

Night-time was the hardest for most people. After the sun went down, and light switches didn’t work (or in some young people’s cases, weren’t even there at all), people got very introverted. During the day it was easy to distract oneself from the lack of electricity, easy to make up excuses for its absence. A blown fuse, maybe. Or, just as easily, one might have said one was too busy to turn on the lights. But at night, it was undeniable. The lights wouldn’t turn on. Stereos wouldn’t play. Electric stoves wouldn’t boil water.

My mother was loving, but quiet. I loved her tenderly as she did me, but I found I didn’t identify much with her. Growing up it hadn’t been a big deal, but after the big blackout the rift between us widened. It was not because we didn’t love each other, we just handled the whole thing different and we understood that we didn’t really have much to give one another. My little sister was like her, and they kept each other company.

The relationship they had was mirrored by mine with my father. My father had been an electrician, and I was his little girl. I adored him, and we did everything possible together. We were the same person, just with different gender and an age divide. For a while, though, after the “wave,” as people called it, he was just depressed. There was no work for him to do. The thing he loved and had dedicated himself to had, in a flash, simply ceased to exist. That was a tough blow for him. While my mother’s quiet had made me grow distant from her, my father’s silence pulled me into him like a black hole.

I tried everything to cheer him up. Me and Nancy would stage little plays for him in the living room. I’d go a town over to Nuys to get him the jerky he loved. While things like this always put a smile on his face, he would wait until he thought I was satisfied and wasn’t looking and go right back to sulking.

---

One day in March I was digging through the attic, looking for God knows what, and I stumbled upon an old cardboard box. It was labeled “Ithaca – 2007.” I opened it up to find a photo album. I knew what a photo album was. I pulled it out and flipped it open hesitantly, not out of fear, but rather as though I knew it was filled with amazing secrets, the likes of which would change my life, and I just wanted to spend a few last moments in anticipation, a last breath of air before this would become a time I would look back on, and then the book was open.

On the first page was a man with a beard. He wore big, gaudy black sunglasses indoors. He was making an absurd face and picking his nose. I caught myself off-guard and let out a laugh, a big burst of one gone as quickly as it had come. I turned through page after page of people in their early twenties, with rooms lit up at night, computers ablaze with information streaming at them in high-definition at high-speed, and the only thing in the photos that burned brighter than the electric bulbs were the eyes and smiles of the people.

I was so enraptured by the photos that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask myself of whom they were photos. About twenty pages in, I skipped the question and jumped right to the answer. There were photos of the bearded man and a lady. They were kissing, they were hiking, they were drunk at parties with friends. They were Mom and Dad.

I ran down the stairs, nay, FLEW down them, as though I were afraid that if I didn’t show the album to someone else in time, it would disappear and be as a dream. I couldn’t have that. Couldn’t AFFORD it.

I flew into the kitchen so quickly that I nearly vaulted over a countertop.

“Is this you and Mom?!” I asked, practically accusingly. He never for a moment was shocked or startled, though. He took a fraction of a glance at the photo I was opened to, and suddenly it was as though his eyes were newly-swept chimneys that had been packed shut with mold and soot for ages. He didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to. He took the book from me, his eyes trembling. He stared for a good long while at the photos, occasionally turning a page. I stared at him, rather than at the new photos he was overturning. I could see their content in his face. I was struck dumb by my own awe.

We spent all night up in the attic, digging through boxes of things I’d never known even existed, much less within a few yards of my sleeping head. There were plenty of photos, but also posters, CDs, notes from friends, videotapes, and an entire box of Christmas lights. I had lived through the Blackout, lived before it, but the stories my father told me were such that made the old time so much more real and alive, made me feel so connected to it that it made the blackout obsolete. That night unified past, present, and future for me in a way I couldn’t grasp, and didn’t need to.

---

The next day, he got to work. We lived in a small town, a suburb, and my father had had his own shed, a workspace with a toolbench and every supply he would need. After his last customer, he’d had enough tools and supplies to last him another month of home-repair jobs.

Every night when the town got dark, my father set to work on the wiring in and around our house.

“What are you doing, Dad?” I would ask him. “The electricity’s gone, remember?” Somehow I thought he’d gotten confused, or maybe he was going senile. I considered it my duty to ground him in the reality of the situation.

“Don’t worry, bug,” he would tell me, “you’ll see.”

You’ll see.

After a week or two, our house had lights everywhere. There were big lights in the living room and pointed off the roof at the backyard. There were little baby lights lining stairs, lining the pathways around our home. They pointed at every dark corner of every dark room. He worked all March.

On April first, he stopped working. I woke up early, as I had grown accustomed to doing so that I could watch him work on days that I had no responsibilities. When I walked downstairs, the house was quiet. I was frustrated with myself, thinking he’d already gone out to the shed and I’d missed wishing him a good morning. I stepped outside onto the back porch and looked out at the shed. The door was shut, and the lock was still on it.

By the time I got back upstairs, I was no longer angry with myself. I was angry with him. I was angry that he’d stopped working on a project I knew nothing about, angry at his laziness, angry that I felt I had nothing to look forward to. Mostly, I was just scared that maybe he’d given up, gone back to being depressed.

I burst into his bedroom, where he was still sleeping.

“Daddy!” I yelled. “What are you doing?! You’re supposed to be working!”

He opened is eyes, and with the same calm and certainty I had come to expect, he smirked and said, “What, a man’s not allowed a day off?”

“Well, yeah, but…” I searched for a reason why today couldn’t be his day off. “You can’t yet!”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

I was acting like a child, and I knew it. But somehow I didn’t care. Suddenly, my face loosened and I smiled. “Oh, I get it! April fool’s!”

He smiled right back. “I promise you that I’m not done working, and that very soon I’ll have a surprise for you.”

When he finally did wake up late that morning, he left the house with a backpack full of water and a lunch that my mother made for him. He told me and Nancy to make dinner and do some handywork around the house, fixing loose screws and the like. He always made sure that when he was gone, we were working. We liked it, because he would always make sure that he gave us one job that most people thought was just for women, and one job that most people thought was just for men.

On this occasion, he told us to eat without him but save some food. He’d be back a little bit late. Begrudgingly we assented, and he walked out the door with a big and a fresh kiss on either cheek.

When he got back, I was already in bed. I could hear him whistling as he came up the path. I saw him walking with a long stick of metal, as well as a big box. It didn’t seem exorbitantly heavy, but it also didn’t seem like it was easy or light enough to carry over long distances. He put the box in the basement, then took the rod right out to the shed, locked it up. He ate a quiet dinner alone and went to bed.

We had an old elliptical exercise machine in the basement, as well as a stationary bike. In the morning, at breakfast, Dad asked me if I wanted to exercise with him in the basement some time that day.

”Why?” I asked him. It seemed like a ludicrous idea.

“I wanna get rid of this gut!” He shook his belly with one hand. He didn’t have a gut. I laughed. “How am I going to maintain my girlish figure when you beautiful ladies won’t stop feeding me?!” I giggled again and gave him a loving hit on the shoulder.

“Ok, dad. Let’s digest and then I’ll come exercise with you.” And I kept my word. I was just glad to see his good humor and sentiment hadn’t subsided back into depression, and now that it seemed he was not going to work anymore, it would keep him active and feeling good.

We did it every day as the April rains came in. We would go down to the basement and get on the machines and ride at leisurely paces, and sometimes the conversations that started those mornings wouldn’t be finished at dinner.

The thing we loved talking about most was electricity. He had no shortage of things to say, and I never wanted him to stop so I asked more questions.

“Do you know why bulbs always burn out when you first turn them on?”

“No, why?”

“Because more power comes to them at first, much in the same way that it requires more force to START pushing an object, to overcome the coefficient of friction, but then it gets easier. So, an old bulb is easily overwhelmed at first by the slightly higher amount of electricity. But you need that initial burst to get it going.”

---

On the night of the first big thunderstorm of the season, it was getting late and the rain was coming down as hard as it could. At the first clap of thunder, he went out to the shed. My mother yelled at him to come back inside, but he wouldn’t be deterred. He came back to the house with the metal rod. He went down to the basement. When he came back upstairs twenty minutes later, he was sweating. By then, the thunder was practically on top of us, loud as all hell, and the lightning could be seen in sharp bolts within a mile of the house.

He climbed up to the roof carrying the rod. I knew what he was doing. The box in the basement, the exercise, the rod, the sweat on his brow. I knew exactly what he was doing. I knew what WE were doing.

I steadied the ladder as he climbed. He steadied the pole in a slot he’d made, and hooked up a hidden wire either end of it.

I was watching from the lawn.

“Come down, Dad!” I wanted to yelled to him from below. But I was petrified, and excited beyond belief at the same time, so I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t have to.

“I got it, bug! I’m comin’ down now!”

But the lightning struck the rod, now only a few feet away from him, and he missed his footing and slid right down the roof. There was no big dramatic scene, no hanging from the gutter, no screaming for help. In a matter of just a second or two, he’d gone from the roof to the lawn. I just stood where I was, for a moment.

“Dad?”

I shook the cobwebs off and took a step forward, but was halted by another bolt of lighting. It was right ahead and above me, hitting square on the bar my Dad had set moments before. I was blinded for a split second, and then stood there. Nothing.

Lightning has a higher probability of striking in a particular place once it has already. They tell you the opposite. By the time I got to my Dad, it hit again. A third time. Just as bright, just as startling.

But this time, the brightness stayed. I was confused. The bolt had come and gone, the clap loud alongside it. But the light had stayed. Kneeling, by now, over my father, it took me a good thirty seconds to realize what was happening. The lights in and around the house were all on. Our entire property was lit up, light pouring out of the windows, down the hill. I was dumbstruck by the sight of it. The generator battery we’d been warming up this whole time was actually maintaining. I completely forgot about Dad, who could very well have been dead beneath me for all I knew.

We lived up on the hill by St. Simon’s, and most people could see our house from theirs. They were all coming up Marison St. I looked down. My father was grinning at me. I could see the bone coming through his old Levis. He didn’t seem to mind. The light falling on his injuries seemed to nullify them, to assuage the throbbing pain he inevitably felt. As the neighbors arrived at the property, they all stood in awe, held one another. People gasped, purely accidentally. It was, undoubtedly, a knee-jerk reaction. Those who did looked around, embarrassed, and covered their mouths. The gasp had just slipped out. This was not something they hadn’t seen before, but it was as if they were the first on Earth to see it. When their hands came away, grins were there to fill the space. Mrs. Jenkins laughed and started dancing around like a lunatic. A jubilant, fire-eyed lunatic. The children followed. Some danced around my father, who was sitting up. The youngest children laid on their bellies right up at the small lights of our path, waiting for them to illuminate their faces with the warmth and brightness of a thousand small flames.You couldn’t see anything but our house and our property. Everything else was swallowed up by the night, as though all of the darkness of our property had been displaced and made the rest of the dark night more concentrated.

But then another bolt struck and the lights flickered and blew out. Sparks flew everywhere, danced down to the lawn. The darkness closed back in and got more watered-down, like before.

As the storm subsided and the stars reappeared, parents carried children down the slope back to houses, and my father, weakened perhaps more by the spectacle than by his injuries, weakly stood and leaned against me. I walked him into the house and gave him some Vodka and a few Tylenols, some of the last we had left. I would take him to the infirmary in the morning.

Toes

2007-12-03T14:36:00.000-05:00

"Whosever toes touch further has slept with more people!"

We ran and slid underneath sheets of Plexiglass dangling from above. I slid nearly to the end, nearly to the wall. But you slid further. My toes rested gently against the Plexi sheets, and I kept them perfectly still because I thought an accurate reading would be important to determining the winner, but you kept your feet up, so they knocked around all of the sheets like windchimes. And it wasn't enough, so you laughed and swung your right leg out, onto my side, knocking around my sheets of fictional people I'd slept with as well.

We sat there giggling for a second, but it had been ages since I'd seen you last. Like every time, our pause gave way to emotions. But this time...

"Mia," I said, "I miss you desperately. All the time I miss you, all the time I wish you were with me." And I told you. I don't know how, I don't know what I said, but I know I told you. I could feel the tears welling up, but I wasn't looking at you, I was looking at my toes, and how many people I'd slept with, real or imagined.

You got serious, and I looked up at your eyes. They were glossy, which made mine drip.

"You have got to let me go. Whenever you're with other people, I'm holding you back from having anything real with them. You're not giving others a fair chance."

"I don't want to give others a fair chance. I want you to love me," is what I should have said. Maybe I did say it. You paused, pulled out a small bit of dark paper and charcoal and began drawing a circle over a drawing you'd already started, some sketch. It seemed meaningless.

I got your attention again, and our eyes met. They spoke for just a moment longer.

You got up and went outside, down the rocks, into the water. I followed you. You were drawing, you were laughing with the other boys outside, splashing about in the cool ocean pool below. I went down to the beach, walking along the sand. It was suddenly getting dusky as I made my way further and further. The mosquitoes started biting in a mean way, and the ocean getting just as cross, so I turned around and walked back.

Art sites

2007-12-02T15:10:00.000-05:00

In and on the way to LA I've discovered a few art-related sites that I wanted to share with you:

passingby.net - a website of just videos of people looking out windows of trains, cars, traversing the landscapes

Todd Hido - Photography that in some series reminds me of my own

Crime Paintings - Courtesy of BoingBoing, paintings done from photos of crime scenes

A Plat Ventre - "Flat on one's belly," photos of people lying flat on their stomachs in France in very strange places.

Enjoy.

Dear Luke

2007-11-29T21:24:00.000-05:00

today was a curious day. in the morning, i awoke in LA and began reading 2012. I thought it interesting that the big shift happens on the winter solstice, dec. 21 2012. my birthday is the following day (often my birthday is considered the average solstice because the date hovers around there). also, i found that his description of saturn's return every 28.6 years to the position of one's birth interesting, as it will be my 28th birthday that the shift happens.

Quetzlcoatl followed me around all day today after that. at the Griffiths Observatory, i saw the sculpture of james dean's head. the plaque below bore an inscription of a poem from the legend of Quetzelcoatl, a shocking coincidence. then this evening, i was told by my friend bill that the production company that rachel goldenberg and others have done work for here just finished shooting their take-off of the up-coming Michael Bay picture, which is based on 2012. did you know this was happening? you must have. you must be tearing your hair out, that one of the worst filmmakers of our great nation has taken it upon himself to capture one of the most important issues for you (not to mention the thing about which you are intending to make a movie!!). i know what that's like. they've just finished shooting the adaptation of the ONE BOOK i've ever wanted to adapt into a film. it's starring, among others, danny glover and julianne moore. lame.

anyway, thought that i'd let you know about all the Q-coat jazz happening to me today. enjoy asia.

s

Los.

2007-11-29T20:59:00.000-05:00

At the border of California, a friendly woman confiscated my ever-depleting bag of tangerines. They had been my best companion: nutricious, tasty, great for both my breath and energy. But I had no choice. The apples could stay with me, though, because they were from Washington.

Not long after my crossing, I stopped at a gas station. I stepped out into the cool, comfortable, flavorful California air - my first taste in some time - and walked into the station. The young teen working there was on the phone in the garage, but when I walked in to get his attention, he was friendly. I was not greeted with the indifference or anger that I have come to expect. Not a moment of our interactions was hostile, embittered, remotely unkind.

As I finished fueling, a beautiful stray dog strolled up, its nails clacking against the pavement, and the teen and his boss fed it bread. This seemed to be a ritual, which made me glad. By the time I went to get food for it, the dog had already scampered gleefully over to the next station.

As I-40 wore on, I arrived at one of the most spectacular moments of my trip; the sun setting on the mountains and desert of SoCal painted a landscape too beautiful to not be fictional, not be the artist's skewed and embellished interpretation. I took photos and marveled. Route 40 had been nothing but kind to me from the moment I got on. I chased down the sun, and it seemed to hesitate, delighted by my desperate onslaught, my yearning to remain in light just a bit longer. But as promised, it ducked behind the horizon and left me yet again to the dark. I worried about my bearings, but checked a map and was comforted once more.

I pulled off for gas just before Barstow, where the only light came from the stars and the single gas station. I admired the stars, the brightest I'd seen on my entire trip. I was mere miles from I-15, the home-stretch.

Interstate 15 was a battlefield from the moment I got on. Moments before, I was in the quiet of the Californian desert, and the fastest driver on the road. Somehow Barstow had been harboring all of the people of LA, waiting to unleash them when I made the change.

Drivers weaved around me on either side, and it seemed that while going a little faster than the speed limit seemed to quell their advances, it did nothing for my nerves. The road was packed with cars. There was no time for stargazing.

I was no more comfortable as I approached the city limits. But as the basin lay before me, I could see the greater Los Angeles area in stunning, shimmering clarity. The roads, houses, and hills were speckled with pinpoints, as though it were a vast field of electric poppies. I have arrived, I thought. I had arrived, indeed.

Dear Sherryl

2007-11-29T20:28:00.000-05:00

When I left Johann's Hondura yesterday, I had a smile plastered to my face. You made my wait in Oklahoma City not just bearable, but enjoyable. Your friendliness was a welcome relief to my lonely drive, and I was eager to follow your instructions on my way to and in Albuquerque.

I had an early dinner in Amarillo at "The Big Texan." The service was friendly, the atmosphere nice, and the food delicious. I walked out just as the sun was setting on northern Texas, and I found myself bewildered by where I found myself both physically and metaphysically. I got in the car and drove out of town as all the lights were coming on and the sun absconding.

I pushed on through the darkness and out of the southern hospitality, into the deserts of New Mexico. As I came through the hills, Albaquerque sprawled out elegantly before me. I pulled off just as I got into town and stayed at the Econolodge. My lodging was compact and comfortable. The map indicated I was on the east side, but I was nervous after your warnings of avoiding the gangs of the south side, so, I took everything out of my car that was of any real worth to me and kept it in my room all night with me.

When I woke, consciousness came with ease and I could see sunlight peering around the blinds.

I opened the front door, and I was in the Midwest.

Sincerely,
Sam Friedman

PS - If you see that pretty young lady who was also in the waiting room again, tell her I said to make sure she visits Tokyo. She won't regret it.

LA trip mini-blog

2007-11-29T20:26:00.000-05:00

Today I woke up in Los Angeles, California. I've been wanting to write about my trip out and my experiences here, so I'm beginning the LA trip mini-blog today here on the Dead Chinchilla. The next few posts will deal with this extended trip of mine. You'll know that it's a mini-blog post because it will have the "LA trip mini-blog" tag at the end. Enjoy! The first installment is, "Dear Sherryl."

Carlon

2007-11-20T16:56:00.000-05:00

The other night, I took a series of photos for the New York City band "Carlon." It's been a long time since I posted any of my photographic work on the Dead Chinchilla, so I wanted to share a bunch of them with you.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=1sf2dhwf.a439t5hb&x=0&y=-ex4c6x

Let me know what you think, and share them with your friends! The works are under a Creative Commons license.

And oh, what's this? Now, the Dead Chinchilla is ALSO licensed under a Creative Commons license! YIPPEE!!!

Don't know what that means? Check out the Creative Commons website

California Dream

2007-11-14T09:04:00.000-05:00

In a dream this morning, I awoke on a patch of grass in California... specifically, an island southwest of Baja California. I awoke, and you were next to me. I awoke to the site of a large, snaking bridge over water, to absurdly blue waters and equally green hillsides, and strange sculpture.

I asked you, "Where are we? What day is it?"

You replied, "It's Sunday! We're in California!" You were laughing, because we had been there for days. I had no recollection of leaving New York, the trip, the things we'd done in the prior couple of days.

We immediately began climbing some rock walls. There were children about, climbing and laughing, and I had to be careful not to curse as I expressed my astonishment and disbelief over where I was and how I'd gotten there. When we got to the top of this mountainside, there was a Buddhist monastery, and we found a bell no bigger than a cereal bowl that made a sound so loud it could be heard all down the side of the mountain.

"This place is fantastic! I wish I'd brought my camera," I lamented.

"You did."

The Language Gap

2007-11-11T14:47:00.000-05:00

The other day I was sitting in the terminal of the Southwest Florida International Airport. Next to me was my cousin; he was playing a game on his Playstation Portable (PSP). I casually asked him what game he was playing.

“Star Wars Battlefront II,” he told me.

He started explaining to me how the game works. Basically, it consists of conquering planets by killing everyone on them, and buying people to add to one’s own army, in order to conquer more planets. I laughed at how basic and absurd the concept was, marveling briefly at the continued theme of manifest destiny, and how it had nothing to do with Star Wars whatsoever.

“Well, there are Jedis in it, too,” he assured me.

I went back to whatever I was doing prior, which most likely had something to do with zoning out, when he laughed.

“I’m really pwning [sic],” he says.

I asked him twice to repeat himself, before I realized he was not saying anything that had to do with “ponies.”

“Pwn” comes from the online language called “Hax0r,” a language developed from countless young Americans playing Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs), desperately trying to get a particular point across in as little time and as few keystrokes as possible. The word “pwn” developed from the continuous misspelling of the word “own.” To “own” someone is to defeat them, to beat them, or to generally dominate them. The letter “p” is right next to ‘o,” and when engaged in constant warfare, there is no time to go back and correct a small error.

I have used “pwn” vocally before, but I have always used it ironically or sarcastically. More often than not it has been accompanied by a vocal adjustment, frequently to be a terrible impression of Eric Cartman from South Park. So, it wasn’t the word being used that confused me. Rather, it was the context of the word: it was being used seriously.

This word was a part of my cousin’s active vocabulary, a word whose origination and validity are as assumed and accepted to him as random bag searches. It hasn’t occurred to him that it isn’t actually a word at all. And he is not all that much younger than me. It occurred to me, at that moment, that language is evolving extremely rapidly to keep up with the snowballing of technological advancement. I may still be computer literate and savvy, but my lack of toleration for spelling errors and absurd colloquial speech sets me apart from the younger generation coming up now. And even as I say that, I have to suggest that the word “generation” is coming to represent a shorter length of time.

While I felt no sense of panic, this experience was the first rap on my “you’re getting older” door, and it felt funny. I am just shy of twenty-three years old. There was a time when I would be considered an elder, and death would have been just around the corner, but now to even suggest that I might want to start getting my affairs in order is either hilarious or morbid. At the same time, it seems that the rate of antiquity and obsolescence is rapidly increasing. There is much talk and speculation about taking a significant leap, be it evolutionary or technological, in the very near future. While this moment at the airport was simply a moment standing out amongst many plain ones, it certainly piqued my interest: are we approaching a tipping point? Will I be left in the dust?

BQE

2007-10-22T19:13:00.001-04:00

There's a moment on this strip of road, Oh! how I want to write some ballad, a poem, anything classical and outmoded, to this moment. It is a capital "M" Moment. It is north of the 26th exit, but south of the 32nd (I know this because those are the only two exits the space between which I've yet to occupy). All of a sudden, you need only look to your left, and there it is. There's nothing but water and a small building between you and Manhattan.

It's almost six o'clock. The sun is setting behind ripply clouds, facing off inches away from the Statue of Liberty, who stands her ground like a seasoned fighting dog. Ordinarily her flagrant pride annoys me, but here it is apropos and majestic. The sun flashes beams, stripes the horizon with gradients across the spectrum of visible light, and the SoL is all business looking right back at it. And then you look to the right of that, to the center of the huge panorama splayed out along your left side like a nubile woman posing for a portrait, and there is the southern tip of Manhattan, with buildings jutting out of what looks like a thin strip of concrete, floating on the water, and the seaport market is there, and these buildings all have the orange sheen that the surface of the sun itself must bear at sunrise. The buildings stand proudly to say goodnight to the sun, ready to take on the blue, moonlit glow of a night of parties, late-night office hours, and midnight pizza orders. And to the right (North) of that, at the other end of the open air, are the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, stretching graciously across into the outer borough of Brooklyn, rolling out the carpet for commuters.

This Moment. I could say it takes one's breath away, I could say it makes time slow down, but neither of these are really accurate, nor true. In fact, time almost speeds up, because you desperately want to cling to the moment a bit longer, just a bit - like begging your mother to let you stay up a half hour later to watch one more television show - but your mother says no, the BQE says "Aright, move it along, there's traffic up ahead and I'm in a rush to get you there." Because you're going 45mph and the road is clear, if only for a few minutes more.

This Moment. It is like being launched full-speed into the air on a cloudy day in late fall, being launched so fast you clear the Inversion Layer and it's just you and open sky, sun, and you reach the crest of your beautiful arc, you're suspended, feeling that moment of weightlessness like an astronaut-in-training or a birthday-boy Stephen Hawking, and you think, This is what it's all about, this is why people love this place so much. There is that one perfect moment of clarity, the likes of which people spend their whole lives chasing.

And the people around you, they don't see it! By God they just fly past the Moment, because what else is there to do with moments, capital letters or otherwise? And your little capsule starts plummeting back down, accelerating at roughly 9.8 meters per second every second, back into the clouds. They get your windshield wet as you fly through them, back down into the grey blanket below, and you pass under an underpass in the car, and the moment is gone. You didn't get your cellphone camera out fast enough, and if you had, would it have been worth it? Would you have gotten the framing right? Even if you had, you know you'd have spent too much time missing the moment trying to record it, and that picture would be so damn small it wouldn't even be worth making into a desktop pattern anyway.

Sufjan Stevens wrote a symphony about the BQE, thirty minutes without words (gasp) in an age of two-minute pop. He saw that Moment. He lives here in Brooklyn, and he knows all the nooks and crannies, and by God he found the Moment nestled safely under a quarter-pipe rooftop of an obscure hundred yards or so of highway. My hat is off to him. Now it's my Moment, too.

Games of Chance

2007-10-21T21:00:00.000-04:00

For the average person, there is no connection between the following: Rabbit, Alopecia, Oral sex. But now, for me, there is.

In New York, I don't see as many strange things as someone might think. For the most part everything is within the limits of normal, though there is the occasional weirdo/wacko. What I have been finding is happening much more frequently is that I encounter people from my past. Foreigners to me, at this point, sometimes who exist in a memory so obscure that nothing outside of their face is recognizable. But it happens to me multiple times in a week.

Today, I was walking to my car. Standing on the opposite street corner were a man dressed plainly, with long hair and large black-framed glasses, and an incredibly tall woman who looked like a Russian model. I crossed the street so that I was at the corner diagonal to them, and I turned my head for a second look. They were joined by a man in a bunny suit.

The man in the bunny suit was waving at me, which was hilarious and simultaneously slightly unnerving. I turned forward, to figure out if I was the person he was waving at. I was. I turned back to him. He was waving again. The other two joined him in beckoning me over. I said, "This is the strangest thing I've seen in some time."

When I got over to them, they asked me if I would take a photo with them. I said, "What for?"

"The Look Book."

"OK. Let me put my things down."

I put down what little I was holding and I stood between two people, the likelihood of whose personal space I would ever enter was individually next to nothing, so putting them together made me nothing short of confused. A Russian model had taken my arm (the woman was easily a foot and a half taller than I), and a man in a bunny suit had his arm around me. I smiled, wondering what kind of smile a man in my position wears. What kind of smile should I have been wearing? Was I manifesting it properly for them? I wanted to make sure I did it right. But then I just thought about who was on either side of me, sure that that would give them the smile they were looking for.

As I walked away, the woman was howling with laughter, saying it was amazing. I turned over my shoulder and asked if it had come out alright.

"Yeah, it's great. You wanna see it?" Asked the guy who had snapped the photo.

While he showed me the photos (which were, in fact, sensational, if only in content), I asked about the look book. He said something about fashion. I can't remember what he said now. It doesn't matter.

Tonight, I got home and remembered the bizarre situation in which I'd found myself. I searched Google for "look book." And I stumbled upon the Look Book, a portion of the New York Magazine website. I searched through the entries half-mindedly, not sure what I was looking for. At the bottom of the page was a funny picture of a bald girl with huge sunglasses. To the left, the caption, "Stephanie Rainer*, receptionist."

I was stopped dead in my tracks.

I know Stephanie Rainer. And it was even more bizarre to be seeing a photo of her, because I had just had a casual thought about her recently (also recently I'd had a casual thought about a girl named Nikki with whom I'd spoken once in the past two years or so, and she sent me a text message within a day of that thought. Synchronicity is a strange thing that, supposedly, is happening more frequently these days...). But to be seeing her on this website, that was bizarre.

I went to camp with Stephanie Rainer. I was very young, and camp for me was partly a place to explore the wild, confusing, disgusting yet intriguing world of sex. Not actual intercourse, but all of the wet bits leading up to it. One fateful day of spin the bottle led to an act of fellatio with Stephanie Rainer.

I went to school with a boy named Zach back then, with whom I also went to camp. He knew about this interaction, and he managed to tell many of my friends the following fall that I'd received oral sex from a girl who had no hair. You can imagine what this did for my self esteem for some time to come. A select few still remember this fact about me.

The crazy part is, I never knew why she didn't have hair. After people stopped crying from laughing so hard when they heard that this had happened, the next question was inevitably, "Why doesn't she have hair?" I didn't have an answer. I knew she didn't shave her head; it was too shiny and smooth. Most people suggested that she must, then, have cancer. I couldn't think of another explanation, so I figured they were right. I then thought it insensitive of me to have never given her my sympathy.

As time wore on and I watched Arrested Development, I came to the conclusion that she suffered from Alopecia, because I'd seen her many years after I stopped going to camp, and she was just as fine as ever, so I knew she couldn't have had cancer. But reading this article, she SPECIFICALLY ADDRESSED her hairlessness as being caused by alopecia.

The obscurity! The... the... FUCK! How do these things happen? Why? Who is in charge here? I want to speak to the manager! I can't even put into words what a peculiar domino effect this is. And this is the part where you start asking yourself, "Jesus, what is the point of all this raving? Where's the conclusion to this story? This isn't literature. This is filth." Well, you're right! I thought of ending it with something witty like, "And THAT'S why you don't talk to men in bunny suits on the streets of Brooklyn." But would that really be appropriate? Wouldn't you feel cheap, like a low-paid prostitute doing obscene things? I can't do that to you. I can't waste your time and then cheapen the whole thing with a throw-away line. So I won't.

What I will say is this. Things have happened here, strange coincidences, that are nothing short of psychotic. What is extraordinary about Manhattan is that it's almost like a black hole. It has an intense gravity, and things keep entering it. They get packed in tighter and tighter, never stopping. People from the past show up, because light starts bending very peculiarly at the center, and so time functions in an altogether new way. People are here because they couldn't escape the event horizon. The streets are a stage for a very peculiar kind of theater that is being played every day. And I'm starting to think that I have too much time on my hands, and am ending up with front-row tickets to this show every day.

*I have changed the name of the person about whom this is actually written, because, well, she probably doesn't want me to say this.

Chance encounter with Joan

2007-10-07T22:31:00.000-04:00

Joan Shoek is wearing the same grey sweater, black tights, black-framed glasses and bowl-cut that she sports in my memory of her, my only memory of her. That’s pretty shocking, considering this memory of her is from when we were in 2nd grade, and now we are in our early twenties. But there she is, on the A riding downtown, and she’s wearing that outfit.

I didn’t like Joan in 2nd grade, but I think that it’s because I had a crush on her. It wasn’t just the crush, but it was her talent. Joan was a good writer. It was evident even at that age that she was a writer, a damn fine one, and that it would be her career path for the rest of her life. She had the same aura about her that I would imagine perhaps Sylvia Plath, except without all the death. I have no idea if I even have an accurate conception of Sylvia Plath. I have no idea what my conceptions of Sylvia Plath are based on. Some kind of loose archetypal gesture.

I disliked Joan because I knew she was a better writer than I was. I had a list in my head, ranked in order from best to worst writer, of all the people in the classroom. Here is what that list looked like:

1 Joan
2 Me
3 Everyone else in the class

I guess what I didn’t like about Joan was that she made that list three items long instead of two. But I hated that she was better than me, and I hated that I admired her. And that I was attracted to her. Most likely those are things I’ve attributed to the memory of her long after the fact, although it’s perfectly conceivable that I had all of those feelings at that age, and have only through the glorious lens of puberty acquired the language to describe them.

How Joan recognizes me is a mystery. I wonder if I’m sporting the same outfit as in her memory as well? But this beard, surely I don’t have this beard in her memory. It would be uncanny if I did. Do I? And in her memory are my Fruit of the Loom briefs two days old?

We are sitting across from each other and she seems as excited as I am to be seeing her. She speaks with the same voice as in my memory of her, her words kind of chewed-on and rounded as if she were speaking with the back of her throat and her wisdom teeth.
“Joan, do you remember me?”
“Of course! How are you, Sam?”
“I’m doing alright, how are you?”
“I’m doing fine, thanks.”
“Where are you off to?”
“Nowhere in particular.”
“Would you like to go get coffee someplace?”
“Sure, that’d be great.”

I knew she would like coffee. She’s clutching a black Moleskine and a pen, in which I presume she was about to write something when she got on the train. Most likely something good. Most likely something better than what I would write, given an identical prompt.

When we get off the train, she walks out first. For a moment I’m behind her, and I find myself admiring her figure. She is trim, slender, with milky white skin. Her breasts are small and slightly pointy. Her clothing is not overly flattering. More specifically, it is not contour-fitted above her thighs. I realize that while the plaid shirt under her button-up cardigan and the black shorts she’s wearing over her tights weren’t in my original memory, they fit in neatly under the clothes of the memory and sit quietly as though they’d been there all this time. I realize I am checking her out, and I’m momentarily having sexual feelings for her, which is exciting and also kind of weird.

In the coffee shop, a very generically small and kitschy one with lots of wood and stuff, we are talking. I am fairly different from her in personality, but I tone myself down because I want her to like me. I don’t want to come off as arrogant, or unintelligent, or a bad writer. Because I don’t want to believe that I’m any of those things.

Joan’s hands and fingers are trim and slender like her frame, and I find it difficult to find the warmth and availability in her words that I want to hear. I want to hear a subtext that reads something like, “I’m lonely and sensual, and this chance meeting is the perfect opportunity to show you that I’ve grown up, that we’ve grown up, and that now our bodies do new things that are pleasant. I want to wake up to you on a Saturday morning and you can make tea while I drink coffee. I’ll even let you try to wean me off the caffeine. When we make love it will be gentle and you won’t mind being emotionally vulnerable with me, because you knew me before you ever got hurt.”

Although that subtext isn’t there, the subtext certainly doesn’t read completely adversely.

“Are you a writer?” I ask her. It seems silly to be vague and ask her what she does, because I know Joan is a writer. It’s in her blood, it’s her soul. It’s the only thing she could possibly be doing.
“Yeah, more or less. I mean, I write a lot on my own, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I work at as a proofreader at a book publisher.”
“That’s awesome, I really wanted to try to do that.”
“What happened?”
”I didn’t try. Not yet, at least.”

Fuck, I am a failure. Joan knows that I’m a loser and that she’s about to publish some great novel. She thinks I’m an idiot.

“Well, I’d be happy to give someone your resume, if you want to try now.”
Is this a business meeting? I don’t want to have this conversation with Joan! Why am I attracted to this girl? There is nothing here to sustain my passion, my emotion. I don't even think the sex would be good.
“Sure, that’d be great. Make sure you write your e-mail address down for me so I can send it to you.”

She opens up the Moleskine. The room gets louder, as if all of her lovely turns of phrases were seeping out of the binding, and she goes on casually as if she doesn’t hear it. She goes to the last page. She folds it lengthwise, making a firm fold with her silver pen. Then she opens the fold back up and rips easily and cleanly along the fold. A perfect tear.
“Here, I’ll write down all my contact info for you.”

She writes her name, address, e-mail, and phone number down. A surprising amount of information. Three-quarters of the way through writing it all, her cell-phone rings. It’s on vibrate, and she had set it down on the table, so with each vibration it dances a little bit across the table. Then when it stops, it sits silently for a moment in place. Then the dancing, wiggling it’s hips back and forth awkwardly but determined, wiggles another inch, then sits back down.
”Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me for a second.”
I make a gesture with my hands that is meant to say, “of course,” and most likely achieves that goal. I doubt she interprets it as meaning, “here, have some raw grain.”
I don’t really hear anything she’s saying, because I purposely look around and try to block out the conversation. I don’t want her to think that I’m an eavesdropper, that I’m trying to figure out what kind of person she is and whether I’m jealous of something, anything, because I can be a jealous person. I don’t want her to know that, don’t even want her to think it, because I’ve gotten better at it all and I don’t want to make a bad impression.

She gets off the phone and apologizes, “I’m sorry, I have to go.” She slings her bag over her shoulder, I didn’t even notice she had a bag, closes her Moleskine, and hands me the paper.
“You didn’t finish writing your contact information. You didn't even write your e-mail.”
“Oh God, you’re right. Well it’s fine, you can just call me or something.”
“Ok, sounds fine.”
We get up and out, up and out of the table, up and out of the coffee shop and its kitsch. Outside, I momentarily debate hugging her, and then am sure that I shouldn’t. Joan isn’t a hugger, no of course she isn’t.
“It was very nice to run into you, Sam.”
“You too, Joan.” She pushes the hair away from her eyes, and the bangs rest comfortably on top of her black frames and then run around the side of her face, not quite coming to rest at her ear. She turns to walk away, as she gives a soft wave good-bye.
“Hey Joan.”
“Yeah?”
“Would you want to have some dinner with me this week?”
“Yeah, sure, that’d be great.”
“Great, I’ll call you, then.”
“Ok.”
“How’s Tuesday?”
”Tuesday should be fine, as long as it’s after seven o’clock.”
“Fine.”
“Great, I’ll hear from you tomorrow then?”
“Yup.”
“Ok, bye.”
“Bye.”
The only thing that would make this better is if Joan were carrying a cello in a case. She should be on her way to the Philharmonic for rehearsal. I have no idea why I think that, but I’m still thinking it when I get back onto the subway to finish going home. When the train arrives, I get on. As I sit down, I start thinking about what to cook for dinner.

Freud

2007-09-18T17:36:00.000-04:00

(somewhat graphic in a sexual nature.)

My brain is trying to figure something out. I can tell, it's mulling something over.

For three nights in a row I have had a wet dream. This is a record for me. In the past, I've stopped at two nights in a row, which has happened on numerous occasions. Last night, aware that perhaps my body was just undersexed, it has been about nine months now since I had sex, I decided to masturbate. I have often treated masturbation as a purely mechanical, logistical activity like this. Something to do to take care of my body, like lifting weights, or avoiding too much sodium in my diet. In high school, I reserved a special time every week for it, rarely straying above two occurrences per week, rarely having time in a week for my sexual side, there is no time for spontaneity, no privacy for it, in high school.

The lights were out and I was ready for bed when I remembered the previous two nights' autoerotic occurrences. The first was a dream about my mother except she had a penis, the second a dream about my sister in which we had both been kidnapped. Neither were particularly sexual situations. In fact I believe both situations had been high-pressure ones, ones that threatened death. Somewhere my brain has been trying to figure something out, and Freud is somewhere, laughing so hard that he has shit himself...

So I masturbated. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. It was the thing to do. I'd already dirtied two pairs of underwear, a third needn't be victimized.

I went to sleep. In the only dream I can remember, I must have been in some primal sorority house, because the place was full of beautiful women, all wearing little clothing and well aware of what their bodies are for. I ended up in bed with one, a girl I had known long ago (I have never known this girl, but in my brain somewhere she was being made, along with a history that included me. Such a shame that she believed in it, that fiction). I couldn't remember her name.

"Do you remember me?" God dammit, what is this girl's name?

"I do, but I can't remember your name." I stared right in her eyes. I was embarassed, but more saddened. Not because I was afraid that this would ruin my chances, but because I regretted not remembering. She had been someone I actually liked, and I had been someone she had cared about. I think she was modeled after Clare, at least some rudimentary emotional foundation of Clare.

Somewhere behind me a voice laughed and said, "I can't believe you, Sam." It was sardonic laughter, mocking. It was the voice of a woman. It was most likely, but not necessarily, Kristen. I ignored her. This could still be salvaged, this shard of a relationship, this hope of rekindling.

My eyes stayed locked on the woman. We lay in bed. I had feelings for this woman now, again, always, where had she been? Where had I been?

But there was no sex. I somehow was penetrating the mouth of a large, blue, glass bottle. I was standing there, and she had been gone, on vacation, maybe, or the bathroom, was just returning. And I was penetrating the mouth of the glass, and she was watching, on all fours, as I orgasmed. There was anger, maybe bitterness in her face. Could I not have waited until she returned from vacation? As I pulled my penis out, the orgasm came a second time, with more fury, almost as if the first one had been a pretend orgasm. And it had been. My mind had invented an orgasm, but now, as my penis was leaving the neck of it, perhaps now there was no suction, now there was room for air to get out as sperm went in, now the orgasm came, and she watched. I do not know whether she was pleased. I think perhaps she was pleased. I think perhaps I was pleased with myself. In my dreams I often struggle with whether or not to orgasm, some little bit of me always aware that an orgasm will result in immediately leaving this place, the comfort of a pseudo-reality where I think I am properly disposing of my sperm, I can be thankful that THIS TIME it is not a wet dream and I will not be left to clean myself up later, but knowing somewhere that it is a fantasy. Some part of me always wants to orgasm while the other part beckons me to remember that I am dreaming, these two sides always at war. I have trained myself to try to win this battle, try to win for the cleanliness side. I have in many occasions realized in the dream that I am dreaming, with the sole purpose in mind of not having to wake up to a mess.

Again, one side won. And for the third morning in a row, I awoke to the feverish pulsing under the covers, in my underwear (and did you know, there is no actual masturbational gesture that is done? It is all in the mind, and the hands sit back and watch), my legs crossed as if begging, pleading to hold back the waves, and doing a good job keeping the gates closed. I relaxed them, opened up, but it was too late. There was no momentum anymore, and it all sat in me, festering like the dream, the persistent realization that my sexual expressions are just a dream. A small bit seeped out to ruin my underwear yet again.

New Arrivals

2007-09-17T20:45:00.000-04:00

Mike Wechsler, of mikewechsler.com fame has graciously added a link to the Dead Chinchilla. I would like to welcome all new arrivals with a short story about New Arrivals:

I moved here fifteen days ago. Fifteen days. That's two weeks plus a day. Although, maybe it's a little less, or a little more. I read that our calendar is not quite accurate, because, even with a leap year, we're not properly accounting for the exact number of days it takes for a full revolution around the sun. Because of that, my birthday is actually a day later this year, according to our calendar. It's not a round number, not even a round fraction. That's SO typical, God.

Two weeks and a day, today. The light on my ceiling flickers when you leave the dimmer knob at certain points in its rotation. This is something I know about my apartment. I have coursed almost every inch of this room. Like awkwardly learning the body of a lover I have placed things, moved things, touched things, in an effort to make my apartment familiar and make myself feel less vulnerable. When I tread lightly on one particular spot if my floor, my room coos. It started doing that after I moved in.

Fifteen days ago it had been two days since I returned to the United States, having returned to the USA five minutes before I ever left Japan. Japan fills a hole in my heart, but removes the filling when I leave. I can't take the filling with me to New York, or New Jersey, or California, or any of the other nearly fifty states of the union to which I have been.

In four days I will see an old friend. In seven days I will say goodbye to that old friend. In some days I will say hello to a new friend. In other days I will say goodbye to a friend for the last time. In all of those days, the days ahead of and behind me, I have eaten something. Anything. Everything. The city of New York eats all day every day but continuously defecates all over itself, whereas I prefer to only defecate once a day, and I do it away from my person.

Today is the tomorrow I promised myself yesterday, and tomorrow will be yesterday in two. Onward marches time, and occasionally I stop to rub my feet, saying Keep going, I'll catch up. Keep going, I'll catch up.

On the streets I want to say that to the people alongside of whom I walk, when I turn into a doorway, Keep going, I'll catch up, and when I'm done eating, or done working, I will drop into a slow, labored jog, and fall back instep with them just over a block ahead, find them walking at the same power-walking speed.

My friends all have jobs. Keep going, I'll catch up. My cousin got a promotion. Keep going, I'll catch up.

How many people have I let get ahead of me to tie my shoes? How few have finally stopped walking altogether, telling me they've had enough, to go on without them, and how many more will say it to me before I do too? When I do, will there be some winners' circle where they were all drinking water and OJ, eating cookies, like they'd all just donated blood, and have been waiting for me to stop running and join them?

I've been in New York City for fifteen days. That's two days and a week. The earth goes around the sun in more than three-hundred sixty-five days, but less than three-hundred sixty-five and a quarter of them. The city is covered in trash. My friends have jobs and I'm unemployed. The light in my room flickers and the floor coos.

It's times like these I prefer to turn around, jogging backwards in an awkward reverse-locomotion kind of way that makes my knees click and my sense of balance laugh, and take a look at the familiar faces behind me saying, Keep going. I'll catch up.

A THERAPY SESSION WITH THE HAPPY BIRTHDAY SONG

2007-07-24T21:41:00.001-04:00

Therapist: Please put that out. You know there’s no smoking in my office.
Happy Birthday Song: Fine. Sorry.
Therapist: It’s fine. You seem irritable. What’s on your mind?
HBS: I’m a terrible song.
Therapist: ----
HBS: It’s true. Everyone hates me.
Therapist: What makes you think that?
HBS: I was at Benihana yesterday for dinner with Elaine—
Therapist: How are things going with Elaine?
HBS: She’s maniacal. I’m pretty sure she’s trying to kill me. But the sex is great, so I’m just gonna ride it out, I think. Anyway, so we’re at Benihana, I’m enjoying my Sapporo, and all of a sudden I’m flying out of people’s mouths left and right at the table behind us. And no one is on fucking key. NO ONE. Everyone’s got their own key center of a song that’s only seven notes in the SAME FUCKING OCTAVE. Half of them aren’t even in the same key they started in by the end.
Therapist: How did that make you feel?
HBS: Besides being used? Embarrassed. We went from a nice dinner where we weren’t even arguing to me apologizing for something that isn’t even my fault. And Elaine kept telling me, “It’s not your fault baby, it’s not your fault! Let’s just enjoy our dinner.” But I couldn’t stop. I kept saying, “You don’t know what it’s like to be abused like this every day, every time you go out. You have no clue, do you?”
Therapist: Why do you somehow feel obligated to apologize for the behavior of others?
HBS: You know, at least when we go for dinner at her parents’ house and their family sings it, they manage to do a nice little vocal harmony at the end. It reminds me of how proud I used to be of myself. I wasn’t a hack way back when… I was an integral part of every birthday celebration. I was honored daily. Now I go to Beni-fucking-hana and they sing me off-key and totally disinterestedly, then they have the GALL to sing some alternate version – which is NOT Japanese, by the way. I know. I called up Tanjyoobi-Omedeto over in Kyoto, he doesn’t sound anything like that chorus of cat electrocution that they call Happy Birthday, which is just an overglorified jibberish version of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”
Therapist: It sounds like you have a lot of inner anger related to this.
HBS: You think?!
Therapist: I can’t help but think of the incident you told me concerning your 12th anniversary of being written—
HBS: Don’t even think about bringing my mother into this. I know where you’re going with this, and don’t go there. This has nothing to do with her.
Therapist: You know I don’t buy into Freud.
HBS: Well you can bet your ass I’m right there with you.
Therapist: We’re out of time anyway. I think we made some real progress today.

The Return of DeadChinchilla

2007-07-18T14:04:00.000-04:00

In a suburb of New York City, in New Jersey, on a cul-de-sac, in a bedroom on the second floor of a two-tone house, there sits a man. The man to whom I am referring is myself. It is my parents’ house.

In the room in which I am sitting, there are things strewn about, because I have just moved back in until I can move to Brooklyn, NY. These things include clothing, blank CD-Rs and DVD-Rs (because nobody in his or her right mind uses +R), computers, beds, guitars, and a very old dual-deck tape player boombox. The boombox is made by a company called Realistic. I've never heard of them outside of this tape player. If you have, I'd like it if you kept that little nugget to yourself, so that I can feel like my reference is obscure enough for the hipster community, so that I will maybe, finally, be accepted (although this is probably still somewhat unlikely). Basically, I'm asking you to keep it to yourself for the benefit of my ego.

Inside the tape deck, in deck #2 (which, surprisingly, is the deck on the LEFT) is a tape by a band called Restless Heart, a band that struck the perfect balance between rockabilly and 80's rock. This is one of my favorite albums of all time for reasons I will not divulge. Not because they're embarrassing, but because they are extensive and unrelated to this particular bit of prose. I will, however, tell you that the album’s title is “Wheels,” because I think you ought to listen to it.

To my left, on the desk, is an advertisement that I removed from an issue of my friend Dave’s Sports Illustrated. I ripped it out because Dave moved out and left it behind, so I knew he wouldn’t mind. It is an ad for Irish Spring's new body wash. It is a color ad.

The copy (that's the industry term for "text") reads as follows:

"I like my freshness like I like my emotions: bottled."

It goes on to talk about the body wash, where one might acquire more information about the body wash, and what company owns the copyrights to the body wash (I believe strongly that this particular part of the copy is supposed NOT to be read, because it is small and in a lighter shade of black than the rest of the ad. I guess you could say it's gray. Also, I believe this because I don't think anyone gives a shit, and people who make advertisements know that fact).

When I first read, "I like my freshness like I like my emotions: bottled," I was a bit confused. Were they being serious? Or were they joking because all of the people who read Sports Illustrated Magazine are jocks, and all jocks are known for bottling their emotions? “That helps win games,” I thought, “So maybe they figured jocks would find it funny, and secretly bottle up the feelings of exploitation and unrest that it had caused them, which would make them win more games.”

It seemed like a logical option. I figured, though, that it was probably not that.

But then I'd left myself only one option, and I was forced to grapple with the hard truth that the ad was serious. It was trying to convince me that it (the ad) likes both freshness and its emotions bottled, and I think it was trying to make me like those two things in the exact same way!

Luckily, though, I was able to realize that just because the ad WANTED me to like my emotions bottled, just like the freshness of Irish Spring Body Wash, doesn't mean I HAD to like them that way. Realizing that made me laugh. And then cry. Then I yelled at my dog because it ate half of my sandwich off of my plate.

Then I became aroused by an advertisement with a woman with blond hair and very shapely breasts and buttocks. She was saying that every good cocktail has two things in common: Grey Goose and a glass. I wanted to have sex with her immediately, so I knew she had to be right.

At this point you’re wondering why on Earth I’ve wasted your time with this story. Well, stop your haughty complaining and I’ll tell you; I'm having a Grey Goose party tonight, and you're invited. Because I like you.

To See the New World

2006-05-08T22:01:00.000-04:00

And so it is with light feet that we tread these heavy boards in this, the midnight hour of our sleep.

The unbearability, or is it the inscrutability of our whispered glances that makes us tiptoe, pretending we know one is asleep and the other awake?

And when six feet under me is the low din of the refrigerator door soon to be opened, is it any surprise to you I keep my intentions to myself?

I'll smack my lips, as you soundly slumber not, to the tune of a toasted sandwich and my own melancholy ignorance,

or, rather, more correctly, my attuned miserly misery which forces me to open my eyes "to see the new world."

(Nerve) endings

2005-12-02T01:30:00.000-05:00

The people you love, when they leave, become illusive. You try to imagine them, and you can't. You try to remember the way they smell, the way they felt in between your fingers. And the harder you try to remember, the more you realize how fleeting your imagination is.

There is no way to ever get that image for more than a flash of a second. The moment you try to hold onto it, the moment you say, "Hold it, that's it!" it's gone.

The only way to remember is to find real people, and to look at them, smell them, feel them between your fingers. And then you said, "Hold it, that's it!" and you realize that this is not the person you love. And you leave.

"It all begins with a Smile"

2005-10-12T00:30:00.000-04:00

I'm walking down the hallway, and this girl catches me right in the eyes. She's got a couple pimples on her face, and she's got short brunette hair. She's not gorgeous, but she is pretty. I look back at her eyes for just a fraction of a second too long, and a smirk grows on my face. It is more a greeting, acknowledging that I got caught looking at her. And then, something weird happens.

She starts to smile.

This may not seem like a big deal, and maybe it's not. But I think that these moments don't happen as often as they should. People don't like catching eyes... it makes them uncomfortable. But I try to make eyes with anyone I feel like. And she gets it. And she starts to smile... a self-conscious and uncertain smile, but a smile nonetheless. And that's when this smirk on my face, which is usually kind of empty and more of a gesture than an emotion, starts curving around the edges. It starts to mean something.

And she gets it. Her smile starts hooking at the corners, and all of a sudden it's this big smile, this smile that means something.

A smile shared between two strangers. This is, I think, the most genuine moment that exists on the planet. Because there is no pretext, no preTENSE, no expectation. There is absolutely nothing surrounding this moment. And it is for that reason that this moment is the most important moment that can exist in the world between two people.

I hope I never see her again.

The Masochist takes a trip somewhere nice

2005-08-03T23:03:00.000-04:00

"Let's spend a week at the beach together," he wrote her in a letter from the seashore.

He never planned on sending the letter (but he had the money to do so). He preferred his words and sketches and wet sand to voices and spooning and soggy breakfast. He winced. The flashes of color in his eyelids reminded him of how much he'd had to drink all day and he wondered what the time was. He picked up a shell to listen to the ocean, but it was drowned out by the sounds of the waves which were already crashing at his knees. He put some sand down his pants and rubbed. He was getting a rash. He would get cream later.

Pale Green Things

2005-08-02T21:01:00.000-04:00

In 100 years we'll all be ghosts. We'll sit in front of TV screens, close as we want to get. We'll never flip channels. We won't fight over the remote control. We'll look at the screen, and we'll look at each other, and wish we could communicate on a level that allowed for misinterpretation. We'll be weary of the ecstatic heavenly journey and wonder how long we've been here together, how much longer it'll be before embrace is an option and a choice we'll make. The four corners of the earth won't be so distant as us from each other. We'll wish we could cry for ourselves, and remember when being alive meant wishing we could cry for each other. And what a gift that was. Do you remember? I do. And the TV keeps flickering. It doesn't hurt our eyes anymore, and no matter how long we stare at it, our eyes won't dry up and then tear when we blink. But we'll try.

The Inexorability of Stamina

2005-07-12T23:47:00.000-04:00

I haven't been this drunk in a long time... probably years.

Admittedly, I did it to myself. There isn't a single person I could possibly blame this on, and with the complete lack of visual and auditory perception, I'd say at this point it's a little too late to even bother.

So the question presents itself... What next?

There's a blonde in one of the back corners. She's dressed well, talking to some suit who's playing himself off real cool, got the top button undone and the tie hanging loose off his neck. Holding his drink down at his side, waving it around suavely as he paints some kind of elaborate picture. They're laughing at each other's jokes, the jokes that aren't all that funny, just sad or ironic little anecdotes from their lives that they laugh at because, well, they want to get in each other's pants. But nobody says that. You gotta dance the dance. You gotta play the game, even though with a flick of the wrist you could play the "let's get out of here and fuck each other's brains out. You know you want to," card. Nobody plays that card. Unless they're drunk like me. But when you're drunk like me, it's because you're not laughing at things that aren't funny. You're not laughing at all. You're plain miserable.

I turn down the idea of butting in to try and steal her, which will result in fucking her, getting hit in the face by one of them, or perhaps both. While I'm in the bathroom taking a piss, I stare at myself in the mirror. I put on my best stern face and try to act like I'm handling the situation with him. I tell him to get lost, the girl's not interested in his absurd atrocities, his lame stories about how he dislocated his shoulder snowboarding, or how his girlfriend ended up dating his sister. But looking at my own face, with one eye clearly more open than the other, I'M not even buying it. Quite frankly, I'm not even sure I understand the words coming out of my own mouth.

And I'm ENTIRELY sure the guy next to me doesn't either. I look at him with a sideways grin and eyes that roll back in my head when I blink. I try to snicker but it comes out in a spray of saliva. I fart, too.

I'm a wreck.

I hit my head on the sink when I bend down to wash my face. I throw a hissy fit until I realize that I didn't actually feel a damn thing.

When I get back out into the bar, the guy and girl are gone. They cashed in their chips. But people are starting to look at me cock-eyed, and I'm so fucking gone that I can't tell if it's because I'm so blatantly drunk or if it's because I've got a welt the size of my fist on my forehead and I think it's bleeding.

It's probably both.

I walk right out the front door.

On my way home, I vomit in someone's trash bin that's out by the curb.

Fuck, tomorrow's garbage day.

By the time I get home, I've forgotten to put out my own pail.

I get into my room and sit naked on the edge of my bed. I'm still awake but I'm lacking any kind of motor skills to accomplish anything. I ponder masturbating, but sitting there touching myself I can't help but feel like one of those stupid monkeys on TV that fondles itself and then looks around at other monkeys nearby, and you're not sure whether he's looking for some kind of attention or is really just not even remotely cognisant of the fact that he is, in fact, fondling his genitalia with his hand.

My vote is usually the former, but sitting here unable to decide whether it's my own hand or someone else's that's touching my incredibly limp fallus, it dawns on me that maybe that monkey isn't paying one iota of attention to the fact that he's fondling himself, completely oblivious to the fact that what he is doing would be wrong if he only had a few more chromosomes.

My lack of erection seems the satisfying assurance I was looking for that bedways is right ways. I nod in accordance and address the room in an accent becoming of the most stereotypical British butler I can think of.

"I shall now retire to my bed to slumber, as I shall not achieve an erection on this night, the..." I exaggeratedly slump my head down and lift my arm up to look at the date on my wristwatch.

"I'm sorry everyone, it appears that I have lost both my watch and my train of thought. I good you bid evening!" I laugh at my own joke because, clearly, no one else will. The blonde is probably riding the suit just about now.

I start to imagine her on top of him in my bed. She's butt-naked, riding him like he's a god damned horse. She's bucking so hard that her tits actually make noise when they get to the top of their ascent and the bottom of their descent. And they look fucking great. Better than I thought they did at the bar. She's got one hand on each of his hips and she can't decide whether to throw her head back and grind harder against him or throw it forward, getting her locks in front of her face just enough that the fire in her eyes doesn't burn him to death when he looks back at her.

My penis wants to play. I watch her tits, sitting on the edge of my bed, and bring myself to orgasm all over my wood floor. I look down at my hand, wipe it off on the edge of the comforter, and crawl to the pillow.

Just before I pass out I recall the audience I was addressing a moment ago. I throw up a hand in a single gesture of "goodnight, farewell."

2005-06-26T19:49:00.000-04:00

Untitled (Story below)

The Absence and the Heart

2005-06-26T19:39:00.000-04:00

I'm in Prospect Park at the Celebrate Brooklyn! concert. I'm walking out, and in front of me is a girl with a bob haircut.

She's a lot skinnier than you. She doesn't sound like you. But every time I look at her, I'm sure she'll turn around and it'll be you. Years have changed you... you met someone new and you've been dating him for some time now. He makes you happy.

But she doesn't turn around to say anything to me because, well, she's not you. But I start following her around.

I'm entertaining the fantasy that she is you, and I get that feeling. That feeling that comes from being so close to you I can almost smell your hair, which has almost no smell at all. I haven't been this close to you in what seems now like months, years. And after all this time being so close to you captivates me all over again. I'm flooded by memories of feelings, emotions, sensations, and they all remind me how easy it was to be hopelessly (or as you called it, hopefully) in love with you. How easy it is.

Hopeless is absolutely the right word. Through all the anger, the sadness, the frustration, and a sense of loss and being lost... at the end of the day I'm reminded that no matter what the reason, I was still thinking about you all day. And when I wake up in the morning, I realize I haven't thought about you yet, which makes me think about you.

And I follow you around for blocks and blocks. You and your boyfriend and a couple other friends stop to get some pizza. I wait a few doors down from the place on the other side of the street smoking a cigarette. I can see you in the front window as you laugh. I invent the conversations and stories for myself so I don't feel in the dark.

You pay the check and walk back outside. It is still humid and still plenty warm. It reminds me of nights waking up in a sweat... we've been sleeping naked with each other and our bare skin has been pressed against each other. We're stuck to each other. I lift up my arm and the air graces the spot that was sweat-sealed to your breast. The air feels cool on the spot. I kiss the back of your head and go back to sleep.

And you and your friends have already crossed the street, already headed right for me and walked past. I wonder, was I staring? Did you notice? Did seeing me face-to-face again spark up the memories you thought you'd forgotten, the emotions you thought you'd left behind, the spark that distance made so easy for you to forget?

I continue to follow you through the streets of this neighborhood. I wonder if you live with this guy here... if you've moved in together, if you're in love. If the sex is good. How big his penis is compared to mine. Whether he is as talented with his tongue as I am. Whether he appreciates the variety of tastes your body produces. Whether he loves you. If he splits the bill with you at restaurants, if he pays for the rent himself.

You all file up the stairs to a door, and you're at the back of the line. As I am about to brush past you, you look to your left at me. You smile. I smile back.

It wasn't you after all.

Neo-Punk as a solution to world hunger

2005-06-22T02:18:00.000-04:00

I have removed this post because I feel it is too close to my personal life and too emotional to be appropriate for the site. What I wrote was too personal of an expression, something better kept to myself. But I kept the photo, below, because I thought it was beautiful with the caption.

2005-06-22T01:58:00.000-04:00

on your wings we are carried to the sea

2005-06-21T00:54:00.000-04:00

my hat.

A series of short stories reminiscent of unhappiness... I

2005-06-21T00:51:00.000-04:00

I wake up and put my hat on. I go out the front door. I wear my hat out the front door and get in my car. I wear my hat in the car. I drive my car to work with my hat on. I work. I work with my hat on at work. I come home from workin with my hat on. I take off my hat. My hat was made in Vietnam and sits on my desk.

2005-06-18T21:50:00.000-04:00

Buffalo Farm

2005-06-18T21:48:00.000-04:00

Suicide would be a cop-out, but it's the first thing that usually comes to mind.

All day, every day, nothing to do, sitting in the same room full of bad emotions, a bad mess, a bad wall color.

I'm tired of recognizing prostitutes on the street, knowing them by name. Their stories are interesting but after a while, you listen, you hear their stories, and you realize they're all telling you the same one. Each woman out there on the street comes from somewhere different, somewhere unique, but they're all in the same place because those places they come from aren't that different.

And they know what it's like to be stuck in a bad place.

I get in my car at 1 a.m. I've been sitting, chewing on my fingers, thinking about all the same shit I think about during the day. I realized when my thumb started bleeding, just from biting the skin next to the nail, that I was destroying myself sitting here. I think about the lab rats that kill each other in confined spaces, and realize that I am both rats.

So I get in the car and start driving. I think of places I'd really like to be. For a while I drive around town in a stalemate because I realize that anywhere I go right now will be dark when I get there if I can get there on one tank of gas or less.

But I get on the Parkway headed south because I don't fucking care, because the journey is more important than the destination, right? Fuck that shit. I just need to go anywhere. I need to GET anywhere. Just to be there, just to see four walls I haven't seen before. Just to walk on ground I haven't cried on, haven't been angry on, haven't smiled on.

I go to the beach. I get there around 3. It's dark, the bars have let out, some people walk the streets. I resent everyone I see on foot because I know that wherever they're going doesn't require them to go very far from where they are right now. I resent them for being ignorant to the hour and a half I just spent on the road and I why I spent it.

I resent them for being happy, or at least for being comfortable.

I pull my car up as far onto the sand as I am comfortable with, as far up as I can get and still be sure I'll be able to back out onto pavement.

I listen to music and write a long, scathing letter. Then I write a sad one. They I write a happy one. They are all to the same person.

Suicide would be a cop-out, but it's the first thing that comes to mind.

I get out of the car and crumple the letters in my hand. I walk over to the water, leaving the door to my car open.

I stand at the waterline for a while. Every time the water comes up, it ices my feet, and each time it isn't quite as cold as the last. I've got the letters in my hand. I don't even bother trying to convince myself that I will throw them in. So I stand there for a while, my face dry from the salty air, dry from crying like a little bitch.

When I see the flashlight from the cop, I calmly turn around and he sees my face. He doesn't ask questions. He tells me to get in the car and go home.

I tell him OK.

I get on the Parkway north and stop at a diner that's open 24 hours a day.

Inside, the waitresses are faces I recognize. They all come from somewhere different, somewhere unique. And they're all in the same place because the places they come from aren't all that different from each other.

And they know what it's like to be stuck in a bad place.

2005-06-13T16:37:00.000-04:00

Sadie

2005-06-13T16:30:00.000-04:00

Every night for a few hours now, I do it.

Some of these girls are looking for hard fucking. They don't care who they get it from. "VERY ORAL DEEPTHROATER AND LOVE GETTING POUNDED...EITHER END.. " says one.

Sometimes they just want to service a guy. Looking to meet in the public library and blow me in the bathroom. Want me to cum on their tits.

And some of them want me to be bad to them. Want me to slap them around. Want me to bring four of my friends and fill up every hole in their body. Want me to deface and degrade them. And it gets them off.

Some nights, I go looking for something specific. Some girl who fits the perfect description... 18-22 years old, good looking, bored/single wanting someone they can have fun with. I never know what I'm looking for until I find it... Some nights I'm looking for a 30-year-old woman to invite me to her beautiful apartment and have her way with me. Ride me with her business attire on. Ride me with nothing on. Throw me in her gorgeous bathroom and let me have her in the bath, in the shower, on the floor.

Some nights, I just read every single one.

Girls who want to suck me off. Girls who want me to have rape-sex with them.

One girl tells everyone in the world that when she was 18, she went to a frat party and passed out. When she woke up, her vagina hurt and her mouth was sore. When she saw the video of her getting gang-raped by frat guys... it turned her on.

These are the girls that make me cower, make me sick, make me think what I'm doing is wrong. Reaching out like this is wrong, and disgusting. And these poor girls ask for terrible things that make me want to cut off my penis... kill every man in the world. Some of these girls I don't know why they want what they want, and I worry that they really don't want it, they're just traumatized or confused or the result of abuse.

But they really want it. They really want a young guy to cheat on their husband with. They really want four guys to fill them up. They really want it.

But I don't want to give it to them. I don't want anyone to give it to them. I can't save them. And I can't contact the ones who want what I want to give them.

So every night, for a few hours now, I do it. And when I'm done I feel dirty and ashamed, and I go to sleep alone, with no one to make me feel the safety, comfort, and affection I used to feel.

2005-06-10T00:57:00.001-04:00

2005-06-10T00:57:00.000-04:00

Brawn

2005-06-10T00:48:00.000-04:00

There's a man in an electric wheelchair, and he's watching as a construction crew builds a new Senior Community. His muscles are all very atrophied, and he can't move much.

He's got a thing for these big yellow machines, these big fucking arms and hands, fists, feet, legs. Brawn.

He thinks about what it would be like if he could somehow connect to one of these things... imagines sitting in the driver's seat with sweaty, eager palms. But when he gets there he doesn't need to move the levers. The machine knows what he wants. He imagines the arm of the beast as his own arm, and he imagines wielding it with brutality. He imagines being constructive.

It's when he's sitting in the chair, watching the machines, that he feels strong like them. Soon the work day will be over and the machines will slow to a crawl, tired. Aching. The men in the drivers' seats will go home, and he will have to also. At home he is not alone, and he is weak. He goes to sleep and dreams of bulldozers.

2005-06-10T00:29:00.000-04:00

St. Mark's

2005-06-10T00:23:00.000-04:00

It's late by now. Eight or so. There's a man in the subway station waiting for a train with a yellow circle to come by. He could take the train on the right, the express, but it would only take him to 14th street. He'd have to walk down to St. Mark's from there, or transfer to a local. He could just take the local on the left and save himself the trouble.

"I could save myself the trouble," he says out loud.

He is teetering back and forth. An attentive bystander would surely notice his decision-making process. But no one pays attention anymore. And he knows that, somewhere in the back of his head, but he mumbles to himself anyway, as if to somehow justify his behavior to those around him.

The express shows up, and he realizes the decision was easy.

Get on.

So he gets on the train. On the train he eyes a young teenage girl. She notices his glance, and he smiles at her. Not meant to be rude, not meant to egg her on, not meant to be seedy.

But she looks away, and he can see that she will never understand his glance, and if she someday does he will be a smeared watercolor of memory in her head with no face and no address. But she'll forgive him all the same.

He returns home to find his wife, who kisses him on the lips and tells him his dinner is in the oven.

Old Navy Performance Fleece

2005-06-09T22:25:00.000-04:00

I am staring at my first post and realizing what an impulse purchase this blog was. Well, it really wasn't. The truth is that I really want to start a t-shirt company called Dead Chinchilla and I was going to use this blog to advertise new photos and drawings to put on t-shirts, in an effort to get a response from people to see what they like.

And I think I may still do that.

In the meantime though, I looked at some photos by Evan and I found them to be really quite good. Looking at the photos gave me a sense of a silent calm... not a happy one, per se... but a real sense of settling, perhaps with a slight hint of melancholy, but settling nonetheless. Looking at them really made me feel as though all sound around me had vanished... Which leads me to my next two points:

1. I have now begun placing important links in my sidebar. These links include TheJetPlus! (Jordan and Chase's blog for which I do the occasional piece), Preshrunk (which I hope to get one of my t-shirt designs onto one day), online photo albums of mine, and the Evan photo album discussed above
2. This website, I think, I will dedicate to all of my photographic endeavors. I don't know if I'll be using blogger to host the photos, or if I'll simply discuss my new work and then link to it on a Kodak gallery. I haven't decided yet.

Also, you will notice that you are reading this. That is because The Dead Chinchilla has finally gone public. So congratulations on being one of the first on the Internet to read it. I am thoroughly humbled and embarassed.

I encourage you to post comments often if you feel so inclined. It is likely that this will NOT be an online journal in the sense of an aimless concoction of words in an attempt to share my discontent and disillusionment with you, an equally discontent and disillusioned human being who is more likely than not appalled by others' displays of such feelings in unconstructive ways, such as online journals.

Or maybe you're not.

As my photographs begin to weave themselves into the fabric of my emotional life, however, you may begin to see such discourse. Should it offend you, my apologies. Should it entertain you, great. Feel free, either way, to comment on the blog.

I would, in closing, like to say that it is my hope that I will find the internet to be an enjoyable and suitable place to display my photography... it would please me to find your photography elsewhere on the internet, and I would love to link to your work here so that others can see it. Perhaps we can manage to create a web of photographic reference and, ultimately, find a niche of celebrity in an arena as peculiar as this one.

I leave you with a photograph.

2005-06-09T22:24:00.000-04:00

the dead chinchilla motto

As I rise...

2005-06-07T20:16:00.000-04:00

Hello and welcome to The Dead Chinchilla. I have finally joined the blogosphere, for which I intend to kick myself later.

If you were unaware, I do not have a job.

I am incapable, at least to date, of forcibly placing myself under people for money. Despite my beliefs about prostitution, that is how I feel. So, between a lack of initiative, easygoing parents, and a lack of initiative, I have no job this summer. Other than working for Valerie, once a week, at 10 bucks an hour, to file information on the computer. Oh, and the time she paid me 45 dollars to have women smell colognes on my arm for an hour. That was pretty sweet.

When I arrived at home, I had a messy room, a long-distance and nontraditional relationship (read: seeing other people), a clear complexion, a live chinchilla named Dove, no original music I was proud of, and a bunch of other stuff.

I now have a messy room, mild depression, a fucked up complexion, the ashes of a dead chinchilla named Dove, a couple of original songs (recordings and one gig under my belt, too), and a bunch of other stuff.

And now, a blog. More to come as I decide what I'm doing with this...

2005-06-07T17:44:00.000-04:00

Welcome to The Dead Chinchilla