The War Below

Every day, every few minutes: battle.

It is not a balanced fight. Each time the opposing sides rush each other, there is a strong faction and a weak one. I am not King Leonidas but I encourage the morale of my fellow warriors. It’s a subtle game: showing strength in the face of unavoidable destruction.

Wave after wave of enemies flood the turn and if you’re not careful, if you’re not quick and cunning, you may get beaten twice in one morning. The riders above show no mercy. Their strength is the inertia of their numbers.

Until Spring unveils her bosom of light, we will remain below; trapped in this frozen anus jockeying for the best position on the transport vessels to another battle in another station.

Oh, but if I could only cry out to both sides! I would join them in an alliance worthy of the majestic underground pythons we ride so thanklessly. It does not have to be this way! We could form lines and be patient and maybe even delay the train from leaving without our fellow man………

A dream that will never be made manifest.

I Don't Look That Old

A guy at the deli used to sell me beer in high school – I wasn’t tall enough to put the money on the counter yet there he was, filling my prescription. He’d charge me like twenty bucks for a sixer of bud light or something and I’d go off into the woods with eighteen friends and sip it down and… wow, I’m off track.

So on a Monday, I’m rested and happy. Usually, I spent the weekend taking long showers and sleeping in. By Thursday, I’m seven different seasons of exhausted and the only color in my cheeks is reflected off the dried coffee stains on my shirt. This particular Thursday, I left work around 8:00. God hates me for missing Ash Wednesday.

As I trudged home from the subway, cold air slapping my beard, tugging my tie, I turned into the market to do my grocery shopping: a quart of whole milk, a six-pack of bud light and a can of tuna. Two people have that grocery list: crack-heads and musicians. Holding cash, expending all of my energy to stay vertical, I heard the guy at the register whisper into a pillow at the other end of a tunnel. “Sorry?” I said. And he said, “I.D.?” Thoughts lined up in my head:

Was he talking to me? And for that matter, where was I?

Look down at my items to make sure he was ID-ing me for some sort of weapon: A gun or perhaps a Samurai sword. Nope, just a can of tuna, a quart of milk and some bud light.

Oh! The bud light! Shit. Right.

Wait a second; it’s nine-thirty on a Thursday night. Does he think I’m going to somehow make amphetamines out of my groceries and smoke them behind the gymnasium before calculus?

Dude, gimme my fucking tuna and bud light so that I can eat dinner and cry myself to sleep listening to old Cranberries albums, wake up, dump the milk into a carafe of coffee and go back to work.

A half-groan, half-sigh. It’s alright, I get it: Despite my vibe, my rhythm, half-wearing a tie and fully wearing exhaustion, I just don’t look that old.

I was a man

It wasn’t raining outside, but it may as well have been. I was slumped comfortably on the couch with my hands around a mug of tea and my feet up on the table. Next to them, my laptop was playing the West Wing. By anyone’s standards, I was in heaven: comfortable, relaxed, entertained and without deadline or due date. After an episode or two (I was in one of those television series DVD marathons), my girlfriend came to lie next to me on the couch. Like a koala using her parent as a soft extension of a tree, she clung to me and promptly fell asleep. As the West Wing ran faster and faster, racing between camera angels and jokes and political pitfalls, her breathing slowed and drew deep.

I know what I looked like in the mirror before going to the couch: I was a boy with short brown hair and a scruffy beard. But now, after just a few minutes, I was a security blanket, a fireplace, a house, a fence, a guard dog, a hero, a friend, and all I had to do was keep lying there. In fact, if I did anything else, I’d transform back into a boy on a couch. Measured in whiskers, bills to pay, and children, we climb on this mountain. At the bottom, a boy fights and wins. At the top, a man has fought and lost. You always thought it was about getting laid and making money and you didn't realize until it was right on top of you (or next to you on the couch) that she had to decide you were more than a human; that you were a superhero. And she did it by falling asleep. What power. What grace!

That’s why it’s all so damn funny. All the slammed doors and broken relationships and people you never hear from anymore. Lost battles and dead soldiers that crease your eyes with grey wrinkles. I was a man.

Ladies Man

A few years ago, a girlfriend accused me of giving her Mono.

“Hey hun, how was class?”

“I just came back from the hospital – he say’s it’s Mono.”

“Whoa! God, that sucks but at least I’ve already had it so I can take care of you without fear of catching it.”

“James you gave it to me.”

“I, uh… what?

“You gave it to me. You gave me mono.”

“I gave you mono. I gave? You mono? I had mono in high school – like, four years ago.”

“Yeah, well the doctor says it can come back and you could’ve given it to me so you did.”

On a sunny but not-too-warm day in April, the same girlfriend wanted to take a nap together. She loved taking naps. I have no idea why she stayed up all night and napped for hours during the day although there is a very real possibility that as a fetus, the doctor injected her with some bizarre Middle Eastern bat DNA. Unlike our typical daily coma, she insisted this day that we sleep outside. But not on main campus. No no, she wanted to sleep on a smaller field near one of the dorms. As I said, it wasn’t that warm so naturally, she slept on top of me. We were like a beached-whale sandwich. Imagine trying to relax with 150 pounds of girl putting your diaphragm through Dolph Lundren’s workout.

Do you think people in their dorm rooms saw us down on the ten foot patch of grass below? I wonder if they thought, like I did, “What the fuck are they doing out there? Is he about to get laid at three in the afternoon outside of Skidmore Hall?!?” And what do you suppose the tour walking by thought? “Wow, if I send my kids here, they too can pretend they’re sea lions during mating season. Gosh, I can’t think of a better way to spend one hundred and sixty grand!”

When I was sixteen, a girl I’d been dating for a few weeks told me she loved me. Naturally, I said it back. Sixteen. I think I had located a whisker a few days before. Wait, no, it was an eyelash.

There was the girl who spent an hour trying to find me in the hallway just so that she could slap me for something that she heard I did. (I didn’t do it.) The girl who looked like Kermit the frog. The girl who ten years later realized she likes girls. There was the girl who only wanted to be friends. There was the girl who told me that muscles mattered and seeing as I don’t have any…

I wonder: If I wasn’t in my present situation, would all of this be so damn funny? Stay tuned…

Fail

One of the best dreams I ever had ended. I was skiing and flying and people were in awe of all my power. Occasionally, I knew that it was a dream but I fought back the little voice imploring logic and reason so that I could stay dreaming as long as possible. And it wasn’t perfect. It was far from perfect. But it was a dream and like all of my dreams, it was wonderful.

When the alarm clock bashed on the door, I tried to ignore it knowing that I was being flushed down the toilet. And that’s really what waking up feels like, don’t you think? You went from swimming on a beach in southern California to floating in a toilet with paper and hair and piss. Round and round and no matter which way you swim, you’re out and it’s over and “good morning, Sunshine!”

I hate my alarm clock. I mean, I love my alarm clock and my job and my girlfriend but if I could just go back for a second… just a brief moment… no. It’s over. I’m awake.

The question now is whether or not I should go back to sleep. Try again for the unattainable: the perfect, never-ending dream. If this were a movie, the last shot would be me closing my eyes. A happy ending where we all agree that the point is to try and keep trying and life’s a journey.

Sorry to break the fourth wall but at this point, both in writing and in reality, I don't know what to say next.

Dust, dust and more dust.

For Bill.

Are your observations facts? Is your mind, your brain and is your brain, a biological machine?

Do you have to go somewhere to be somewhere?

The road up wound around like a dusty cartoon dollop of whipped cream. Me, slowly breathing while temperature fluctuations from wind and sun, clouds and rising elevation, blah blah blah. Such a lovely day.

My computer and phone were packed away in a saddlebag. I hadn’t turned either of them on for three days. I was the calmest I’ve ever been in my entire life.

A decision: I wasn’t moving; the earth beneath me was moving! You can accelerate or turn around but you’re a silver ball on a wooden toy and the ground is moving - you are staying in the

exact

same

place.

Well, wait a second: it does matter if you pull the trigger or if you let the man on the beach walk away.

Enough thinking for one day, I decided. The motel was about a hundred and twenty miles behind me and the next one was probably another three hundred ahead but the more important task of riding up the mountain demanded my focus.

Leather seat, rubber wheels, chrome and the dust on the side of the road… (I bought gas two states ago and spent about six bucks on it – everyone should travel this way)

And on and on to the top. What will I find when I get there? Probably exactly what you think: a beautiful view, a quiet moment and a road back down again. Perfect. That’s all I want. Find a mountain, ride to the top of it, and look around. Ride down and repeat.

Do you have to go somewhere to be somewhere?

Latin, Logic and How to Raise your Kids

It used to be slap bracelets. Remember slap bracelets? Those things were fucking lethal and we all loved them. Then it was Nirvana. Then Titanic and Leo. Then College applications. Now, the latest fad seems to be getting married. That means that the next “big thing” will be children. Naturally, I find myself looking forward and asking questions about what kind of father I will be. Not the annoying questions like, “Will I be a good dad?” but more specific, unsettling questions like, “How many words can I use to explain why something is against the rules before Sacajawea (my future daughter) tunes out?”

Kids don’t listen – when they’re five, it’s because they can’t and when they’re fifteen, it’s because they don’t want to. What are you supposed to say?

It all comes back to Latin. In high school, we were told that “back in the day,” (Ceasar’s day?) the order of the words in a given sentence did not matter so long as all of the grammatical parts were present. Our textbook arranged the words so that we would have an easy time understanding the sentences based on our predisposition to English. Mathematically, I am fine with this. Two plus three equals five and guess what? Three plus two also equals five. Magic. But the rub comes in when Ms. X, my junior-year Latin teacher, told us that in addition to jumbled order, there were no spaces between words in ancient Latin texts. This was too much for me. The fact that we’re reading Latin words arranged for our ease was one thing but to find out that the spacing was added by Ecce Romani made me feel like an idiot. Latin! Our Latin!! Dumbed down so that I could understand it. Aeneas’ mother wasn’t this depressed when the Greeks fucked up her boudoir and murdered her husband.

After years of therapy, dad-issues, and anti-depressants, all stemming from that awful false-discovery, I read yesterday that spaces were most likely added to Latin text by accident hundreds of years ago. The idea is that when the words stood shoulder to shoulder, Latin was difficult to read prohibiting the majority of people from even bothering try. Ask yourself: would you read all seven Harry Potter books if the brilliant sentence, “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure,” looked like this: AFTERALLTOTHEWELLORGANIZEDMINDDEATHISBUTTHENEXTGREATADVENTURE. And just for kicks, let’s mix up the order within the clauses: THEMINDTO WELLORGANIZEDDEATHGREATADVENTURENEXTISBUTALLAFTER. At this point, it’s important to note that for ancient Latin, majuscule was Twitter and punctuation was Myspace, you know what I’m saying?

In a school setting, where the core premise is “teachers talk, students learn,” you’d think someone would separate the textbook author’s changes and the 13th century’s changes but perhaps Ms. X was too busy managing a room of twenty teenage boys. Although it would appear I am angry at my teacher, I’m really much more frustrated at myself and everyone around me at the time. It’s not her fault that none of us were listening. In fact, it’s probably a miracle that we took in any Latin at all, mixed, broken-up, or otherwise.

So when it comes down to Oswego (Sacajawea’s unborn brother), how much can I expect him to take in as I pontificate on the finer points of peeing inside, as opposed to on, the toilet?

It’s simple, really. How many kids would read all of my writing above? How many would read all of it and walk away with my ideas accurately floating in their reality-TV, internet porn, cesspool brains? Even if they did read all of it, how many more pages would they have to read afterwards before their seventeen-hour SATs at 5:00am?

And as the mighty greeks slip out of the horses belly, a twist…

It doesn’t matter what I tell them. They'll either take it in or they won't. I can guarantee, however, that they will take in every teeny speck of my energy, failings, compassion, anxiety, and love, regardless of how I express it.

This piece came together after reading “Against Camel Case” by Caleb Crain, in the November 23rd issue of the New York Times Magazine. You can find a copy of the article here.