I don’t want to start any shit here but-
If your god tells you that certain people are going to hell (or anywhere- especially Iowa- sorry Iowa) if you do something it doesn’t approve of, then I say you should get a new god. Because what kind of lame omniscient being are you worshipping that would be such a jerk? Is your god a five year old? Do you really want to go to his birthday party that bad that you’re worried about making him cry? I mean, if you turn out to be right and that kind of god actually exists then your god’s kind of a punk. Know what I’m saying? Maybe you should tell your god to MAN UP and not be such a wuss. It’s a big world out there and freaking out every time two dudes say they love each other is really gonna knock the energy out of you. Let’s save the hellfire for murderers and rapists, okay? Listen, dude, just because you started the band doesn’t mean you always get to decide what we’re going to play.
That might seem non-sequitous, but it makes PERFECT sense to me.
When I was five I wanted to be a brontosaurus when I grew up. I haven’t moved that much further beyond this point since then.
Recently I was asked what my Christmas wish would be. No restrictions, just the opportunity to receive whatever I wanted. Now, I know these types of things are usually a set-up. Sure, you want to say “Money! Rent! A car that runs on dreams and emits only the sound of babies laughing!’ but you know as soon as you do that your jerk friend when asked next is going to sandbag you by saying something like “World Peace and the assurance that all children will be warm and happy.” What a cock, right?
So, while recently enjoying an especially heartwarming car ride with some very close friends up to the north side this question was passed around. The answers were pretty much what you’d expect, but what stood out to me was a friend’s answer in saying “I wish that I felt the way I did when I was five.” This has stayed with me for the past week. I wish to change my answer to this one.
Not everyone had a good childhood experience. In fact, I’m realizing more and more every day that many of us didn’t. Without going into too much detail I can say that I had a good one. Truly idyllic. But it isn’t the feeling of playing tag or worrying about the monsters I was SURE were awaiting a careless foot or hand under my bed that I wish to experience again. It’s the feeling of possibility. The assurance that a long and happy life stretched out before me and that I could be anything I wanted to. That this experience of living was just beginning and any of my wildest dreams would be possible. The world is a child’s oyster because you have the time and unrestricted imagination to attempt anything. To aspire to anything.
I am not a pirate. I am not an astronaut. I am not a firefighter. I am not a cowboy. And I don’t think I’m unhappy because I am not any of those things. Most of them (with the exception of a cowboy) I no longer want to be. But I really miss the feeling that I could. Y’know? How do I get that back?
Now I work with children and in the music business. The music business is a soul-crushing monstrosity that can make me not enjoy anything. Especially music. I also work with children because I see in them that hope and I want to make sure someone is fostering it. Because only cynical douchebags shrug their shoulders and say “That’s life.” Plus, kids are totally cool.
And that’s why I’m trying to find a different job then the well-paying one I have now. I don’t buy that “everyone hates their job” shit. I don’t cotton much to that kind of defeatism. Fuck it, I’m still a five year old. Now somebody get me a job listening to music and eating delicious sandwiches. FIND IT.
Sometimes I feel like this blog is a Seinfield-ian “What’s the deal with…?” only with feelings. Maybe my Christmas wish should be to grow the fuck up.
It has begun snowing here in Chicago again.
If you’ve never been to Chicago then you might not know that the only thing more intense than our weather is our ability to talk about it. It’s an inevitability. With minus zero winds and freezing rain we talk about weather (a conversation topic usually reserved for awkward moments on dates and at bus stops) with an excitement and fervor usually reserved for politics and sports. Everyone has their own theories on what will happen day-to-day with the weather, each person agreeing that trusting the “Weatherman” is a cardinal mistake and the equivalent of listening to eastern mystics or trying to divine the wind pattern from the entrails of birds and chicken bones flung against the ground. What can be agreed upon is that weather becomes a monster in Chicago. Cold freezing impasses at intersections and shin deep slush anticipating ankles and dry socks. One walks down the street swearing into the wind and when finally climbing aboard a bus or train is greeted by a host of red noses and empathetic eyes as the caked snow sloughs off shoulders to become puddles on the floor. But somehow this intensity of pure cold hell becomes a badge of honor. We literally weather the weather. Perhaps our complaining is really bragging. We snuff at others who come from warmer clients and enjoy enlightening new residents as to the severity of the winter they face. “You think this is bad? You just wait.” is the preferred answer to autumn cold complaints. It is our shared burden and our collective pride. I dread it, hate it and thrive on it.
But sometimes it’s majestic. Sheets of ice that stretch across the lake heave and crack while icicles descend crystalline off the gargoyles on the gothic downtown buildings. On late nights, with beer jackets wrapped tightly around us, the pristine uninterrupted expanse of freshly fallen snow glows orange under streetlights as if bathed in a candles warmth and we catch snowflakes on our tongues as we struggle laughing through cold drifts, our ankles dry and cheeks flushed. We strip to long-johns and cuddle under covers reliving childlike games of eskimos and arctic tundras.
Today the flakes fall lightly and the air is crisp. I’m going to take a walk and listen to Arcade Fire’s Funeral on my ipod. I’m through worrying about the fucking weather.
In my opinion, Thanksgiving is for eating food with friends, reflecting on that it’s the family you pick that you’re truly thankful for. Plus, there’s beer.
But sometimes Thanksgiving is traveling to the houses of current girlfriends to meet their families, making my life seem like the Woody Allen movie I never wished it would be.
One was in Green Door, Wisconsin. The girl I was dating at the time was the daughter of a nurse (lovely woman) and a circuit court judge (total asshole). Now, I’ve always gone over well with parents. Sure, there’s the whole “I’m getting with your daughter” awkwardness, but I can be a pretty self-effacing guy when the chips are down, so I wasn’t too worried. But this father. Yikes. To preface, this was a law family. Everyone was associated with criminal justice in some sort of way. They all had that authoritarian attitude that makes you feel distinctly uncomfortable for being the art college student who believes in the decriminalization of drugs for economic, social and selfish purposes.
At any rate, the first instance of “I cannot believe this fucktitude” was when we were sitting down for dinner and her father made a point to spell out my name for her uncle, a local County Sheriff. He did this so the uncle could, I shit you not, run a check on me in between dinner and pie. “He checks out.” he winked at the dad as he sat back down and buried a lump of pumpkin pie in his fat piggish face. I silently brooded in anger over this invasion of my privacy and also thanked god that the pot-dealing charge I had been hit with when I was seventeen had been expunged from my record.
Seriously, this shit was like my own personal Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but with the racial tension replaced by people talking about Nascar. Awkwardness the whole night and only later would I realize that the fact that the girl I was dating thought all this was normal and acceptable behavior probably signaled the first cough in the death of our relationship.
That Thanksgiving sucked.
I get tested pretty regularly, but just to make sure, I monitor my behavior for kayaking, rock climbing and horseback riding on the beach. If television is any indication, people with sexually transmitted diseases LOVE that shit.
Did you ever have a mini-society at school? That’s where the teacher prints out a bunch of fake money and the kids in class are assigned to groups to “produce” something to sell to each other in an educational exercise that demonstrates commerce and the importance of free trade! Super duper!
anyway
In third grade on the eve of the start of this exercise Dan, my best friend of 7 years and the boy with whom I someday hoped to live out my days with in our giant treehouse chucking rocks at girls and living out the idyllic prepubescent existence, had no clue what to do for our assignment. Neither did I. We couldn’t make anything. We were too lazy to try to and we were convinced that wrapping colored pipe cleaners around pencils to sell was completely lame. What to do? With two hours left we were fast approaching the very real possibility that we would flunk a completely unimportant and silly assignment. But then-
While shuffling through a deck of cards, Dan had an amazing idea. We would open up the first and only casino in the class’ mini-society. He’d deal blackjack. I’d deal poker. We wouldn’t have to produce anything. If we lost our money so be it.
So what happened? What happened? WE TOOK THAT FUCKING SOCIETY FOR EVERYTHING IT WAS FUCKING WORTH. Buying stuff to buy stuff was only fun for some of the more shallow kids. The rest wanted action. And that’s what Dan and Gus brought to the table. High stakes poker and blackjack. Walk in a third grade schlub and walk out a fictional millionaire. The kids were hooked. Some bet their entire allowance of cash and lost it all. They couldn’t stop. Dan and I were like Biff Tannin in Back to the Future 2. The class was our oyster. Sometimes we would buy candy for everyone in the class from somebody who brought it in to sell. We were like the twin monopoly guys. Then, when there were only a few minutes left at the end of the exercise we took all our cash and bought everyone out. Dan and Gus owned the entire society.
I remember Mrs. Stamford being very upset by this whole exercise. She never conducted it with any of her subsequent classes after that.
Dunno why I just thought of that.
You’re probably familiar with the story about Icarus whose father Daedulus fashioned wings made from wood and wax so that they could escape from Crete after being exiled, right? Then Icarus flew too close to the sun which melted his wings. He dropped like a stone into the ocean and drowned.
Lately, with girls, I’ve been no stranger to falling great distances and the smell of singed feathers, but that’s probably my fault for throwin around the greek-myth metaphors. I should probably watch more television to re-up my pop culture quotient. So, who’s this Zooey Deschanel character everyone’s talking about? Is she in them new talkin’ pictures?
Shucks, I couldn’t make a Twilight joke right now to save my ass.
So, I’m a dude who believes in science. Shit, I’m no SCIENTIST, but when it comes to the mysteries of the universe I tend to think it has more to do with gravity and atoms than Jesus or a giant turtle that carries the earth on its back, although that would be fuckin’ sweet. I get into arguments about the afterlife (nothing, dead in the ground) and in my opinion anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution has more in common with a monkey’s intelligence than any normal human.
I feel this way for two reasons. The first is simply because I enjoy being given a little evidence to back up theories and ideas that are thrown my way. The second is because I feel that through science the world and universe are revealed to be impossible and incredible, even more so given the boundaries of science i.e. gravity, entropy etc.
But lately? Man, lately I’ve been craving some real magic. Remember that Bigfoot hoax awhile back where those two hikers reported to have frozen the body of one and found three more living in a cave outside in Georgia? Dude, it was on CNN. I knew it had to be false, of course, but the hope and excitement burned in me like a child trying to stay up to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I, at that moment, wanted all the storybooks I read as a kid to be validated. If there are Bigfoot then there could be Nessie, giant eagles and chupacabras, right? I desperately wanted my world revealed to me to be exactly as fantastical and incredible as the kids I teach still think it is.
It was a hoax. I was left to content myself with the coelacanth. Shit.
I really love the analogy of something being so rare that to find or see it is like “spotting a unicorn” because it implies that unicorns exist. I also like it because I’m super childish.
Romanticism comes in many different forms.
Sure, you could lock eyes with her across a crowded ballroom and grow infatuated with the way she holds her glass and the delicate laugh that sighs from her lips as she makes idle discourse with foreign dignitaries.
But you could also get the same feeling from that conversation you had with her where you asked her how her experience in Paris was wherein she described having sex with this random guy on Jim Morrison’s gravestone, but the guy started to get burning hot and then he turned into a werewolf that chased her through the streets and you didn’t realize until she started singing that shitty song by Bush that that she literally just fed you the opening sequence of American Werewolf in Paris. Then, my friends, you are a smitten kitten.
Yeah, sometimes that “moonlight, June light and you” crap can take a long fuck off a short shit.
I don’t cry. Ever. Crying is for women and babies! Am I right, guys? All right! Let’s go get beer! High-fives all around! Let’s go! Wait, I gotta grab my phone. I’ll catch up with you guys. All right! (another round of high-fives)
Okay, they’re gone.
So, sure. I cry when truly big shit happens like the death of loved ones, when Obama was elected, Wednesdays, etc. But there some very certain wuss circumstances in which I cry: Movies. Movies that necessitate that man-crying “woof” where we clear our throats and think about how awesome that time was when we were accidentally delivered two pizzas and only charged for one. You know. Gooood times.
But which movies? It’s probably pretty cliche, but Braveheart gets me every time. Maybe it’s a dude thing, but man. FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOM! No amount of anti-Semitic alcoholic Australian antics are gonna ruin that for me. No way. But that’s an easy one. That’s a gimme.
It’s no big deal to cry during ET. It’s a sad movie. It was built to fuck with your emotions. The difference is that it really gets me bad. Like those crying Twilight fans bad. Hell, one time I was out on a date with this girl- one of those dates where you sort of realize in the first few minutes that it isn’t gonna work and that you’re going to be forced to spend the next three mind numbing hours listening to them talk about their friends. Yeah. At any rate, I don’t even remember what movie we were going to, but ET was being re-released in theatres. As soon as that ET music started I realized that I might be about to openly weep during a PREVIEW. But I was keeping it cool. Angling my face away from the side where she was sitting and thinking about kites. Then, of course, right at the end of the preview ET points his finger at Elliot’s chest and says “RIIIIIIGHT HEEEEERE” and I make one of those intake-of-breath sounds like a truck just backed up over my nuts. I blubbered. So busted.
Then there’s that part of Robin Hood where the rooster sings Not In Nottingham. A friend of mine was watching this recently when I awoke hung-over and fragile after my birthday. I had to leave the room when the bunny gave that crumb to the mouse. Holy shit. I was not ready for that. Waterworks.
The last is TV commercials. I know I need a vacation when I get teared up during insurance ads and shit like this. But that’s probably Tom Waits’ fault.