Stage 1

Welcome to gate four. She’s sleeping on the carpeted floor of the terminal. I glance at the clock. Fifty minutes until six in the morning. Enough time for the album. I take the headphones and plug them into the laptop in front of me, and keep writing. About what, I’m not sure. About what I’m doing, right now. About this trip, or journey, or mistake, or adventure, or whatever you’d like to call it. Honestly I haven’t yet hit upon the right word. The execution of a whim is something that defines one’s character. I do know that. I think in this case it defines me as a romantic modernist. Or to put it another way, a masochist. But there’s an element of a normal person in me somewhere. I know this because that tiny little piece of me feels dirty and abused. I’ve fought that piece back a hundred times, one more won’t be difficult. It gets easier, in fact. Which makes that little piece feel even worse. The growth of insanity is exponential. You start out writing a short story or two, maybe running around in the woods singing to yourself, then pretty soon you’re booking flights hours before they occur and driving oversized vehicles to far away airports with an enigmatic human being (who is maybe even further down the path to insanity than you) sound asleep in the passenger’s seat.

So how did I get here? It all started with a truck, and a stick, and fragments of ice being chipped off the windshield by bare, shaking hands. No. It started with a phone call. No, not even that. It started with a graduate school audition. Further back. With a kiss. Further. With a fascination with children’s books. With jazz. With a birthday. With a kiss.

It’s no use tracing these things through labyrinths of decisions already made, just like it’s no use thinking through all the decisions that weren’t made. You’ll get hopelessly lost in either direction, I can promise you that. But one thing I can tell you is that it feels amazing having everything you need to survive in a backpack by your side. I often wonder how it would feel to have everything you own in that backpack. I hope to feel that someday, but I should be careful, wishing for something like that. But hell, wishing is the one place I don’t need to be careful, and I have no intention of doing so.

Then again, I did wish for this. Didn’t I?

My living has become as careless as my wishing. That must be the real danger.

Stage 2

In the first plane, I could see down to the ground. It was dark. The cities below were glitter scattered on a tabletop. It felt like I could reach down and brush it into the air with my fingertips.

The wing outside the window wobbles against turbulence. She’s looking out the window now. I’ve learned that she sleeps with her eyes open, a lot of the time. It must be tiring, seeing even while you sleep. As for me, I can’t sleep at all.

Everyone looks tired on a plane, and in an airport. Anyone you come across smiling broadly for over three seconds is immediately labeled as either a jackass or a stewardess. It’s strange how even in these lab-rat conditions no one can help judging the people around them, sizing them up as morons or business slaves or vacationers or staff or baseball fans or military or anything. I guess I fall in the first category.

Two small children just walked by. I had forgotten children existed. The air gains a certain freshness as they pass, but it fades quickly as their father leads them back to their seats.

No clouds to see. Just a light grey all around this roaring javelin of a machine. I wonder what it will be like, over there. I wonder what it was like, back there. I really can’t say anymore. Is this what I’ve been needing to jar me out of my sleepwalking existence? It seemed like it at first. But now I only feel deeper asleep than I ever was, slipping into a dream.

Waking up is just not in the cards. Not for a while now. So I’ll take what I’ve been given, and scour every inch of this preposterous rabbit hole.

Stage 3

I walked until my feet hurt. The library was a cathedral. I read The Communist Manifesto on the highest floor until I was falling asleep. I’m so tired now my vision expands with each inhalation and shrinks as I exhale. I haven’t slept in an amount of time that eludes me. I fail to understand where I am. I know no one in this town, not a single person. And I’ll be honest, I could get used to all of this. I’ve never felt so deep in a dream before, so far removed from my life.

I sat on that dock, listened to that album, watched all those cars across the bay flow over the bridge in a stream of white pinpoints. Then the album ended, and I listened to the lapping of the water against the wooden beams.

I’m hoping by the end of this, my mind, rather than throwing up its usual walls and mirrors to obstruct that which is true from reaching the other end of the wire, or even worse, reforging itself to be utterly desensitized to even something as absurd as this, will suffer some sort of implosion, and suddenly I will be in my life again instead of outside it. I can’t say that I need this to happen, because I’ve been living fine out here. But it’s about time I came home.

I’m not going home physically until I go home mentally.

That’s a lie, I’m going home Sunday no matter what. But I feel like something might actually happen, this time. I feel like what I’m reaching for, just this once, I may actually grasp before these days are done.

I’m not depressed right now. Just distant. Painfully distant from myself.

Merciful God.

Stage 4

The morning was kinder to me. I feel like myself today, whatever that means, even walking through such alien surroundings. Not entirely alien. Very human. I know these people, in a way. Their struggles are just as irrelevant, trivial, and self-afflicted as mine, and seem to them to be excruciatingly important. Just as mine seem to me.

I walked down from the campus’s towering hill and soon found myself on the lakeside. I spotted a trail of some kind and followed it. Freeways, built on concrete pillars thrusting out of the water, arched above me as I hiked through the wetlands on muddy pathways and floating platforms. The mountains were almost black against the sky, and were flecked with splotches of white. They loomed far out in the distance, and the clouds skimmed over them, children in the eyes of wise old men. I sunk into the amalgam of urban and natural and felt free and safe and even young.

After a while I found myself on the other side of the marsh that borders the lake, and in the midst of an arboretum. It was filled with colorful winter flowers and towering cedars. I sang a few songs as I walked in their shade. The sun was shining brightly through the clouds, and a light rain was falling. I was filled with a joyous melancholy. Sunlit rain is something I had forgotten could be.

Just like I have forgotten to be, for so long.

Or some such nonsense.

Stage 5

We fell asleep. I dreamed of ghosts congregating in our room, standing around the bed, watching us. They had no eyes. They were only fuzzy, three-dimensional shadows vaguely human in form, as if they could hardly remember what creatures they once resembled. One by one they waded into the bed, their legs moving effortlessly through the mattress and sheets. We lay there, clutching one another, and each time one of the ghosts passed through us, we shivered. They didn’t seem to mean us harm. I think they just wanted to feel alive again. And for the split second they passed through our dying bodies, perhaps they did feel alive, and the memories of life flooded their vaporous heads, while ours were filled with strange dreams of solemn visitors and green fields spotted with doors.

Stage 6

From the windows of the small prop plane the snow-drenched Blue Ridge looks like furry scoops of vanilla ice cream. I tell her this. She tells me I’m strange. I have no retort, comical or otherwise.

As it turned out, my Latin professor was on the same plane. She gives us a ride back. The three of us talk of language, then of music, then of government, then of the human purpose. I listen intently to the two of them, and try to listen to myself. The roads are clear, and the snow is clean and white. I’m home. And maybe more than just home. I feel quiet, strong. For a little while, maybe, I am the man that little boy wanted to be.

Backstage

That’s a pretty good script. But there’s still one question left. Should the movie be a comedy or a tragedy?

Ah, hell. A movie’s a movie. Sign the fucking contract.

In the year now behind me, I traveled to twelve states, thirty-six cities and one other country.

And I’m bored to hell with all of it!

Let us see, Ryan (me), if we can’t do better in this new decade (even though, technically, the new decade doesn’t begin for another year).

Okay, I say.

I have roughly two free round-trip flights to any city in the continental United States. I think that maybe I will go to Boston and San Francisco. Maybe Portland. I want to go to Portland.

Do I want to go to Portland more than Boston or San Francisco? I don’t know! I’ve seen Boston before, sure, but there’s something going on there in March, so hell, maybe I’ll see Boston again.

I have a weekend excursion in Lexington in March, too. There I will see my two cousins and a handful of other Very Important people in my life. There are so few, these days!

The government is about to pay me one-thousand U.S. dollars for being a non-dependent school-going citizen, so maybe I’ll go to a foreign country this year. Not Japan, okay! Perhaps I will go to Vienna, or Graz! Who knows!

Come to think of it, I have a girl-cousin in Graz. Her name is Susi. I have no idea if she reads any of this garbage. I can only hope that she doesn’t — for her sake.

Okay, sorry: enough with this going-places-doing-things talk. I’m awfully sad to have to talk about this stuff, but it’s been bubbling around in my head the last few days, because all I’ve had to do is think and sit around. There is, I will have you know, roughly three feet of powder-soft snow on the ground, just outside my bedroom window. I contemplated jumping from that window and landing in aforementioned powder-soft snow, though really, how am I to hop onto an airplane with crutches? How unsavory! I dashed this dream and instead made pesto-filled tortellini complimented with diced bell peppers and a whole onion! It was fantastic. I think I’ll have it again real soon.

I really need to find another room in the house to do this. I get in the same two-in-the-morning mindset when I sit down to write this stuff. Here I am, at the very end of my bed, soggy with midnight gloom, thinking of dead friends again. It’s the same thing, man. The same thing every night! I have a lot of stuff I write and never do anything with, because it just sounds like I’m trudging through sludge, and maybe I’m not comfortable with revealing that. So, it’s just sitting on a sever somewhere in California, waiting to be digested as sticky malaise. Maybe I’ll do something with the junk I keep in my attic, so to speak, but maybe not.

Though I must say, it’s a nice idea that I’ll be paid for writing stupid crap like this next week. I’m tickled silly with the idea!

That was a lie, actually. I don’t really care. I know all of it is going to be minced to hell to adhere to the standard that everything that is going into the newspaper must be odorless and colorless and hive-mind. Well, hey! I’m not the one filling out the checks, do I don’t give a good God damn what happens to the mindless slop that I’ll be typing up in ten-to-fifteen seconds!

I’m just being a jerk on purpose. Man. Okay, I’ll stop.

I’m not really interested in paychecks with my name on them, or newspaper articles with my name on them. If they allow me to write under a pen name, I’ll gladly do it. I schedule to think of something wonderful to call myself in the bath tomorrow. See, I don’t have anything to do tomorrow, because there is three feet of damned snow on the ground.

I shoveled my walkway like a psychopath yesterday. I felt like a real American out there — it felt awful.

You can’t walk for ten steps without having a heart attack out there, I swear. I’m probably long-dead and haven’t yet realized it. I’m probably just a faceless ghoul clattering away at the keys on a laptop, and my corpse is frozen stiff under a mound of godless ice, just outside my bedroom window. That’s probably what happened.

I really should jump out of that window, come to think of it.

Maybe not.

I want to go to more states and countries this year — probably shouldn’t risk a broken neck.

I only ever want to go anywhere because if I keep doing the same thing for so long, I’ll end up turning the knife on myself when I cut the bell peppers to sprinkle onto my pesto-filled tortellini dinner. I’d better not put myself in a position where that is my only option!

Then again, might be dead!

Do the dead haunt planes? I don’t know. Someone, somewhere has had a heart attack on a plane, I don’t doubt it.

God, I really need to stop this!

I need to start writing in the living room!

Or from planes!

No, no — only jerks write from planes. What a jerk thing to do, write on a plane.

See, really, I’m going to stop this right now. Even I don’t give a fat, slobbering fuck about what I’m doing every day, or what I have done, or plan to do. I’ve got this whole “don’t be disingenuous” thing going on from now until I’m dead (am I dead?), so it would be detrimental to my, uh, mental health to continue to pelt you, whomever you are, with information about what career I want (hah!), or where I intend to live (nowhere), or whatever. Whatever, man!

Whatever!

Jumping out of the window right this secon–

lol

By God, the weather has been fooling with me quite a bit in the past few weeks!

Make up your damned mind, says I.

See: Just last week, I tell you, it was damn near blistering outside. I checked my mail in a t-shirt! It’s the only time I ever go outside when Old Man Winter is breathing down my neck. It used to be, in the summertime months, that I would stroll around the neighborhood in pants that felt like pajamas (corduroys, folks), munching on a Gala apple like a deep-breathing fiend. The neighbors never said much about it — they never say anything about anything, come to think of it. The old man two rows down would suck down his cigarette and glare at me like he hated my shape, or the music of my teeth. He’d sit there, arms crossed, seething with hatred at the fact that a post-war baby has his own townhouse, and by God, checks his own mail!

That was then, though. Now, who in hell knows what’s going on outside. There was seven inches of the powdery white stuff on the ground, just two days ago. The sun has had its way with most of the leftovers, and the snowplow man has done what the snowplow man does best — covered it in chemicals and sand and mixed it all together with every shade of Hell! It looks like the streets have mounds of coal just piled up every which way. Snow really only looks fantastic when it has first fallen, huh?

And now Dante has walked into my living quarters to inform me that it is to snow tomorrow night, for God’s sake! And again on Friday night. A few showers, he says, and it will continue into Sunday morning. That sounds positively fantastic, I say! Now, will there be a hurricane and a few God damned tornadoes thrown in midweek just for the hell of it? The weather seems to think this sort of flip-flopping behavior is perfectly acceptable!

It was almost sixty degrees just one week ago, and then the rains came rushing in and washed our sunny days away. Now it’s just snowy and warped. This geographical dot on the planet has no idea what to do with itself, and it’s making me shit-bricking confused as well. I’m confused!

Before I stop talking about the weather — the only thing that uninteresting people ever talk about with uninteresting people (whom they barely even know on any meaningful level of human companionship), I just want to again remark that I’m delighted at the recent snowfall. Dante has told me — and I’m just going to have to believe him, here — that he thinks it may be a significant amount of snowfall. I consider five inches to be significant, because it pushes me into a place of thinking that warns me, calmly, in a tranquil voice, that I shouldn’t leave the house, because what in the hell else are you going to do other than stay home, jackass? and that it’s perfectly acceptable if I put on oatmeal-colored clothing and sip tea from the center of my bed while wrapped in a microfiber blanket, enjoying imaginary worlds on my television. This is all I ever want out of a weekend, man. When it snows, what the hell else matters other than what is available to you in your home?

I think that having six-to-twelve inches of crunchy water on the ground is reason enough to just be. Every time it snows, and how relatively rare this is, someone I know (and I know so few, these days) utters something deplorable about “being bored” and “man, this blows!” Hey, fuck you! Pick up a book, asshole! Do some push-ups!

People like that take their girlfriends to Applebees and offer to pay for the meal, like they’re doing them a God damned favor!

People like that look at themselves in the mirror and think their facial hair looks pretty decent, when they can’t really even grow facial hair!

People like that only like music because the lyrics are dimly, vaguely related to the things going on in their own lives!

Snow is great! Snow is a valid excuse to shut down many of the overhead processes in the brain and just be in a place that you want to be! Sheesh, and here we’ve got these mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers saying that they’d rather take their girlfriends to Applebees, because Applebees has “date meals” on the menu. What a crock of shit, I say. You may as well dress yourself a burlap sack with arm and leg holes if you think that sounds better than slowly, warmly digesting various forms of beautiful art and warm beverages from the center of a queen-size bed.

These people, man!

And now Dante has informed me that maybe, just maybe, I’m getting a little too worked up, here. This is a side-effect of friendless loneliness, he says. He’s rummaging through the garbage as I say this, and I’m the one with the problem! The little guy isn’t even trying to eat garbage, God help him, he just likes the sound paper bags make when you fold them with your hands. (I reuse paper grocery bags to line my trashcans.) And Dante, well — he’s got little hands. That’s a lot of folding he could potentially do, and you don’t have to tell him that. Together with his brother Virgil, they’ve been opening and closing the door to my living quarters for the last two weeks. I keep it shut to trap the heat in — it’s been snowing, don’t you know — but they just won’t have it!

I’m the one with the problem. Tsch!

Applebees. Tsch!

Here’s a nice thing that happened recently, and didn’t involve either the weather or people whom I don’t like: a dear friend came up to visit me. Oh, joy!

We played Demon’s Souls for a whole day and a half, I tell you. It had been hell to find that game. It was on clearance at some big store that carries everything and isn’t Wal-Mart, so I called and drove and finally tracked it down in a town called White Marsh, just north of Baltimore. Maryland is, by and large, a marshy place, I figure. I’m not sure what the titular “white” is denoting other than the dominate race of the slack-jawed yokels who live there. It was the only store in the whole damned state to even carry the game in the first place, let alone clearance it out! I wanted to have it in time for this dear friend, who ended up loving every second of our gloomy excursion together. I ended up driving up to White Marsh through Baltimore’s sludge-dripping ozone in order to avoid what would have been four dollars in tolls. It’s not exactly a “deal” when you have to pay for tolls, let me tell you.

So: Demon’s Souls acquired, I drove home and anxiously waited for this friend to show up. He ended up gifting me a succulent fruit that may have been a peach and a box of cookies, kindly donated on account of my birthday by his beehive-hair-having grandmother. She’s a lovely woman. I’ll . . . have to write her a thank-you note. I have a lot of these to fill out, actually — for the first time in a very, very long time, somehow, miraculously, generally everyone remembered that one time I was born, and that I still exist. How pleasant of them to recall little ol’ me!

For the love of Christ on the cross, Dante, either stay in my room or leave!

He has just come in the door huffing and puffing. He doesn’t have hips in the traditional sense (he’s a quadrupedal and all), though I imagine if he did, he’d have his little hands on them right about now. He’s flustered, I’m sure, because I’m writing instead of stroking his head and saying his two favorite words: “food” and “hungry”. He knows “hungry” because I always ask him, “Are you hungry?” just before feeding him whatever it is that he eats (God only knows, really). I am sorry, I have to said to him, I cannot feed you right now, as I’m writing something for no one to read!

Anyway: this friend of mine — this dear, dear friend (friends become quite dear when you have so few of them!), he enjoyed the hell out of Demon’s Souls. I would be doing you a disservice if I told you that I didn’t, too!

Really, we were giggling and passing the controller back and forth like little children. It was one of the best moments of 2010 — and I’ve already had my fair share of things to do in this new year we’ve living in right now. We were just so gum-sticky crazy to play that game. It felt marvelous.

I hope to see that rat bastard again soon, I do. We’ll continue our despondent story together. Until then, I think that I will continue to have overwrought correspondence with his brother. I am enjoying this relaying of ideas and language! With the one I have the slaying of ghost-knights and fire lizards, and with the other I have an information overload sitting in my inbox every other day! I’m a happy man, all things considered.

Maybe that last sentence was a joke.

And anyway, maybe it’s partially true if viewed in the context of these woefully infrequent sparks of human interaction. Maybe I do feel dandy when I’m slaying or talking with these brothers! And I say “infrequent” because the other colors of my existence are damp and shady. I’m going to do something about that real soon. My only solutions thus far have been 1) do push-ups until muscle failure, 2) gurgle too-delicious-to-be-real protein shakes (blended with four to five ice cubes, one banana (sometimes two) and a boastful amount of peanut butter), 3) read exciting literature post-muscle-pump and 4) hell, play Demon’s Souls. It just doesn’t feel right playing it alone, though. I get sort of frightened all by myself. There’s scary stuff in that game, okay!

I think I’ll go to sleep now. I end a lot of these things with some sort of indication that I no longer feel like being awake (see: alive), if only for a handful of hours. I’ll be alive again tomorrow, maybe. I say “maybe” because, hey, who knows! It could snow again and I might not realize it, and if it’s enough snow, maybe my roof with collapse and I’ll be buried in an icy tomb. That sounds like an all right way to go, if we may be honest with one another. The weather has been so restless lately that I would only be a little shocked and only a little frightened if it snowed so much that my modern home and it’s modern roof could not tolerate the weight of the snow resting on the ceiling of my bedroom in a would-be freak snowstorm.

Now I know what to pray for tonight!

Who knows if I’m even kidding about such things, nowadays.

Tee-hee, dear diary:

Hey, just kidding! I wouldn’t do that . . . I don’t think! Anyway, yeah. Man, I’ve been having a hell of a time getting in the mood (to write) here recently. I prepared some green tea, a gala apple and a halved cinnamon raisin bagel slathered (read: dripping) with delicious, all-natural peanut butter as a sort of aphrodisiac — a lubricant, if I may — to writing this muddled garbage.

As the bagel popped up out of the toaster, I sort-of made a promise to myself that I would, at the very least, attempt to sound like a normal person, if only for tonight, and if only for the fact that breaking that promise (to myself) meant forfeiting the digestion of a cinnamon raisin bagel oozing with all-natural peanut butter (which I had to stir myself (because it’s only water, just enough salt and peanuts (all it should be, really))). Seriously: I said, Ryan, if you don’t type up something that a not-crazy person could call “halfway decent to read” and not a “bumblefuck catastrophe”, that bagel is going straight in the trash can.

And so here we are, friends and foes.

But, see: the midnight snack I’d prepared just wasn’t cutting it. It wasn’t enough, I tell you. So, I sought out excellent music. I won’t say what it is, of course, because then it’ll turn out that everyone is driving around listening to this here excellent music, and I’ll feel like a total jerk, futzing around in a ball-pit for ninety-year-old men. I’m not a big futzer, guys.

I can’t have that, you see.

So, it’s working. This stuff is really good. ______ _____ is a really, really good “band”. I hesitate to take “band” out of quotation marks, because, you know. You know how it goes.

I feel like I’m alive inside of a Donkey Kong Country sequel. It’s terrific. This is great writing-at-midnight music.

[Note: Play this album, ____ _____, whenever writing anything at midnight [Okay, noted.]]

The reason I’ve been having a hard time writing is simply this thing here: roughly eight-percent of what is actually floating around the surface of my mind ends up on this website, this proof that I exist, and have existed, and will continue to exist so long as I type words and place it here. My keystrokes just aren’t fast enough for what I actually have to say, you see. And I type quite fast, I might add! Plato said — what? — that the realm of ideas is the best world, yeah? And that reality is a replication of internalized, infinite ideas, and that art is a replica of a replica?

See, this — this right here — is all a bunch of smoldering ash. This is dust compared to what goes on up here.

For instance: I’m writing up this enormous pile of rubble about going to another country, and being in that country, and being with bros in that country — but, it’s just not clicking. I’ll post it, anyway, so that you can scroll through it very fast with your mousewheel, and pretend you read it, and pretend you ever read anything. You may then shrug, suck in roughly ten seconds of stagnant air, and burp very loudly and hope your roommate doesn’t hear it. Maybe you live alone, I don’t know. I wish I lived alone, sometimes. A lot of the time, really. It’s all I’ve ever wanted in life: to live alone. What a thing that’d be. Anyway, jerk, I’m trying to say something here.

Yes: I know what happened in that country I went to, all right? I saw it, tasted it, slept soundly in it — hung out with some dude’s mom in it.

Hugged Dan Lama in it.

Several times, in fact (there is photographic evidence of this on the internet, if you’re curious (you’re probably not curious at all)).

(This doesn’t sound even remotely coherent, does it? Even less so, with me jumping out of my psychobabble to tell you that you must know that I know what you don’t.)

So, I mean, I know what happened, you don’t care what happened, and I’m the one writing it! For whom, damn it?! Me, I guess!

See, I’ve never kept a personal journal for more than a few months, because, really, who am I kidding? I’m writing for myself both on this here website-thing, and in all of those countless journals I’ve never seen to completion (see: my own death), but the difference is that, if you so felt like it, you could read what it is I’m writing. With the whole paper journal thing, I mean, you’d have to break into my house to read it! That’s a whole hell of a lot of effort just to be bored for two hours! Writing to yourself, for yourself in a journal you keep in your bedside table — talk about a disingenuous load of stinking garbage. I’m in the mood to be real, however horrifying and stupid and sad and unreadable though it may be sometimes (all of the time).

Uh, man. I’m really going to put up this essay, I promise. It’s not going to be interesting to anyone with eyes or ears or an organ between those ears, but if you’re sitting in your bedroom, and you can’t remember really even having friends in the last, hell, year, you should give it a once-over with those creepy, twitching eyes of yours.

Speaking of not having friends: I’ve been eating a lot of avocados lately. And I’m getting a very, very long (and retarded) essay published in a literary journal that I submitted it to on the final day they were accepting submissions (we call this “the deadline”) as a joke. They liked it, I guess — or, at the very least, they weren’t completely mortified with whatever it is I said in this particular essay that you may or may not have read before (probably not). I don’t mention avocados at all in this essay, and boy oh boy do I wish I had. I’d have been their star writer, had I throw in a few mentions of that sweet, sweet fruit-nut-thing.

Anyway, I write and work out and eat avocados because all of my friends have gone away, and none of them will return my phone calls. I’m seriously at that point, now. The “no one calls me back” phase of life. I hadn’t been anticipating this for, shoot, another twenty years or so! I don’t mean to slander anyone here, but that’s non-confrontational child-adults for you. How am I ever supposed to get anything done with all of this non-confrontational childish-adulthood drooling sludge all over the floor like all-natural peanut butter dripping off of a cinnamon raisin bagel!

I am “moving home” in a year’s time, and I have no idea why. (I plan to eat avocados and work out and write dumb things there, too.) The first thing I’m going to do is buy a bike, and a really, really nice pull-up bar. I figure it’s all I’ll ever need to be “happy”, having those two things. My brother once told me, in private, after having dangerously (stupidly) lit a cigarette on a gas stove (he doesn’t smoke), that he only ever works out so that he can “feel” bigger than our father. I have no idea what in the hell he was trying to communicate to me, as our father has never been an abusive or imposing figure, but I didn’t want to spoil it for him, so I let him talk to me about very strange concepts while sucking down nicotine like helium-candy. I guess I sort of got the message, in an indirect and unintentional way: he wants to be a big dude, because he doesn’t know just what in the hell else he’s supposed to do. And his ex-roommate-slash-gay-guy-friend told me once, candidly, that people who get a lot of piercings/tattoos only do it so that they feel like they’re in control. I guess that makes sense, too. I’m not that way — not at all — but I fully understand the desire, or addiction, I guess, that people get when they pump blood into their stringy, wiry muscles and make them big, fat, blood-hungry cannonballs. I mean, next to masturbation (which I very much dislike), it’s the only way I know of to naturally (see: without the use of something made in some dude’s bathtub) feel something inside, when all you’ve felt for a very long time is a lot of nothing. Or at least things that no one ever wants to feel for more than maybe thirteen seconds. See, I get that. I want that.

I want my body to produce candy-sticky-choke-me-sweet chemicals and gas my entire body in good (temporary) feelings. I would be delighted to feel that without having to resort to the ol’ rub down.

Maybe that’s the closest we can ever get to shaking God’s pinky finger with our entire bodies.

Or, at least, the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like I have friends, and that they exist somewhere, and that if I call them and want to see them, they’ll have the decency to call me back and confirm that yes, God damn you, I want to see you as well, Ryan, friend-oh-friend, benevolent ruler of the Kingdom of Forgotten Stuffed Animals!

Instead, the candy goop in my lungs and veins will fade away, and that incredible, delicious insurgence of sticky-red-stuff surging through my appendages will give way to old-age-fatigue, and I guess maybe I’ll take a nap in the evening of a summertime I can see coming upon me like dark fireworks.

Ah, yeah, maybe that’s what it will feel like!

That’s what it feels like now, anyway!

I have spun this record twice, and these words far too many times. Maybe it’s time to rest my head for a while. I apologize, friends and foes, for the measly eight-percent you’re viewing now. I promise you that the Real Thing is spectacular, horrifying and dizzying. I feel drowsy now, just thinking about it.

It’s how I always feel, though, I guess.

My grandmother reminded me, just the other night, that my great-grandfather was a country lawyer, and a self-proclaimed failure. He was a dizzy man, too. He put a pistol in his mouth, couldn’t take the pathetic feeling of being dizzy all the time. His son — my grandfather — found him asleep forever, slumped over on his desk in his study. That little boy grew up to tell a young woman, just before World War II ended, that he was a sad, sad man, and he could never make her happy. She said, I don’t care about that, and then they had four children, and one of those children — the youngest, a girl — said something of the sort to a man who was neither abusive nor imposing. They ended up creating a little boy who became a man who felt dizzy, and who went on to tell every woman on earth, at the very same time, that he doesn’t think he can ever make you happy, and that he’s very sorry for that.

And now that little boy, who is now a man, rests his head, because God damn it, he’s dizzy, and God damn it, he deserves a little rest, every now and again.

Aw, hell, I don’t feel like writing anything right now.

Today is the worst day of the year, and maybe you were aware of this. I apologize if you were. As a human being who has stretched and pulled himself in various directions in the last four damp, tasteless years, I can tell you with boner-in-my-pocket confidence that I’m not in the mood to tell anyone anything they don’t want to hear for the rest of my God-exploding days.

It is my birthday. Twenty-something years ago, a man met a woman, turned to her with lust in his eyes, and created a baby boy for reasons that he’s still trying to figure out. Or maybe he just stopped wondering decades ago, I don’t know. That seems probable.

Every year he calls me up and reminds me that I’m a year closer to death. I think he feels comfortable knowing that we’re all on this train to hell. He feels content to know that we’re all dying in centimeters every second. Our birthdays are just a nice roundabout way to measure things cleanly.

Whenever he tells me this — that I’m dying — I tell him, Father, trust me, I hadn’t forgotten.

But, really: I don’t want to write anything. Can’t I have a day off, Lord? Can’t I not think about anything for a whole twenty-four hours?

Why can’t that be my birthday present?

Maybe I’ll give that to myself, this year: a day of nothing.

Well, shucks, that’s not much a birthday present, my mom would say.

She never says “shucks,” though.

Never do I. I just thought that was sort of funny.

I think that tomorrow I’m going to wake up and do one-legged push-ups while simultaneously practicing a language (I won’t say which). I tried that earlier tonight, but it was just something sort-of educational and not the information-shoved-up-my-ass scenario that I’m aiming for. See, if I can combine packing on hot, wet muscle with [a language that I want to learn], that’s, you know, a hell of a way to manage time. I figure, if I can’t point at the clock and tell it, “No! No, God damn it! Stop it!” I may as well pack in as much life-stuff as I can. I’m stuck in this shit-ass rainstorm-even-when-it-isn’t-raining sack-of-rat-corpses of a state, and I’m in a bad way both up and down, so all I can really do is self-improvement. There are worse fates, I guess.

I’m stuck here for the next twelve months.

After that, it’s self-improvement in favorable climates.

By that time, I’ll be mourning another birthday. How old will I even be then, I don’t know. I’ve stopped counting. It’s all I can do to sleep these days — to forget how old I really am.

In reality, I haven’t been around all that long. It feels like I’ve been shuffling through a thousand long winters, but I haven’t. My perspective is all rattled around and smoky, here in Reluctant Adulthood. I’ve been pacing and dropping dishes recently. Sometimes I look around and shake my head and forget what I’m even doing in whatever room I find myself in. This isn’t a play on words, here, I’m serious: I literally find myself places, now. Just what in the hell is going on, I wonder, and suddenly I’m in the middle of a shower, or washing dishes (which I sometimes drop (which breaks my heart)), or I’m driving a car on a highway and singing songs written by dead heroes of mine. I mean, I guess they’re my heroes. Younger Ryan thought that the way they plucked a guitar string and sang spider-web-thin into a microphone warranted “hero” status, and maybe I still believe that, I don’t know.

A dear friend — a hero of mine — replied to a very long email I wrote him with a very long response. He said something wonderful that resulted in dark fireworks sparking behind my eyes. He said, more or less, that little me and little him are the heroes of our consciousnesses. He said, when he loses his way, he turns to little him. What a novel thing to do. I realized, once I’d read this, that I do that, too, only I’d never quantified it like that, which is odd, since that’s all I do. See, I don’t just keep my bookshelves disgustingly organized, I do this with thoughts, too. All the time. All the fucking time, I tell you. I never get a break! (This is why I need tomorrow off — the day of my birth. I’d like to shut down and just eat meals and bathe without any tidying and re-tidying and re-tidying of the brain.)

The closest I’ve ever gotten to admitting that I turn to my old self for guidance is wondering, constantly, “Would little me approve of bigger me?” The answer was invariably, “Fuck no, man.”

This friend of mine has spun my rocking chair around. I think that I will wonder about things related to our conversation for another two or three days, and then I’ll reply with something that maybe he’ll think about.

And it’s what I’ll do for the rest of my time here in this God-hating commonwealth.

That and one-legged push-ups on the tips of my fingers. I want to leave this place a steam-huffing psychopath, muscles on top of muscles, mind twitching with electric heat and invisible chemicals.

It won’t be so hard.

Twelve months until the next worst day of the year. I can make it that far, I wager.

Aw, shucks, I’ll sure as hell try.

We were waiting for Socrates on a street corner. Derek had gotten the call a few minutes ago and we knew he would be here soon. We huddled together. It wasn’t that cold, but we needed to huddle together. Socrates was coming, and maybe we were scared, or maybe we were excited. We huddled together. The roads were wet. The wind was slow and carried a faint odor of storm drains.

We checked our watches to see how long it had been. We all wore watches, back then. I think mine is lost now. Maybe I dropped it in a gutter somewhere. I don’t remember. Jake still wears his on some days, but it doesn’t run anymore. You can get your ear as close to it as you want and you won’t hear anything, unless you shake it. It can still rattle, at least. Like one of those toys for infants to help them fall asleep.

The light would turn red and the cars would stop at the intersection, and we would look into the windows for familiar faces. All we saw were framed pictures of men and women, and they looked like ghosts through the fog on the windows. They would sometimes look back, but we would all turn away and look at the ground or the sky or the restaurant windows across the street. Then the light would turn green and they would speed off, splashing brown water on our shoes. All we could do was shake the spare droplets off and remain standing.

“We’ve been here a while,” said Jake. “A long time.”

“We’re still here,” said Derek.

“We may be here a while,” I said.

Jake was staring off into the gloom of the street. Jake thought a lot. We all thought a lot. Jake just liked to remember, most of the time. And I can’t blame him. There wasn’t always a lot to look forward to. But I looked forward a lot of the time anyway. And I thought about Socrates. A shiver went down my spine when I mouthed his name into the darkness. I didn’t expect him to be a great man. I expected him to be a spyglass, though which we might see something beyond ourselves, or of ourselves.

Derek was tapping his foot and slapping his palms against his thighs. Maybe he had found a rhythm somewhere in the white noise of the city. I listened, but all I heard was the buzzing. He was making something up. I thought about explaining the temporal elements of rhythm to him, how music was only beautiful because it existed in the moment, because it would fade and die. But now was not the time. Derek wasn’t like me. He was here, constantly, even when he didn’t want to be. I was too but my thoughts were usually somewhere else, and so was Jake but he always seemed one step ahead of his memories, like they were holding him back, but he wanted them to. I know that now. We had chosen who we were, the blame and the pride was ours to have, to play with, to dance to. We stood on the street corner, and I began to silently hope something of myself would be left by the time Socrates arrived, so that I would still have somewhere to search for answers, and a vantage point to search from.

We had built ourselves up into machines we didn’t fully understand. Input and output, and by the scientific method we were still attempting to discover what was in between. But if every input changes the mechanism it slips through, how can we ever hope to guess an output? Each time we searched we added new gears and passageways. I stopped myself. My head was beginning to feel like a vacuum tube again. I let it rest and fill itself up with shadows and car headlights. I felt it brimming and foaming over again, already. Fuel for thought. I could only take in so much before I had switch on again and process it.

“How long ago did he call?” asked Jake.

“I don’t know,” said Derek.

I laughed. It was forced, and I hated the feeling of forcing a laugh. The feeble noise bounced off the buildings and spread itself thin, and then was gone.

“He’ll be here,” I said, trying to smile. “He’s coming, I can feel it.”

“We may have missed him,” said Jake. He stifled a cough, and watched water glisten in the cracks of the brick sidewalk.

“Have faith,” I said, having none myself. “If we missed him than he’ll come again.”

I started to whistle. I couldn’t remember the song, only the melody. I had woken up with the melody playing in my head and it hadn’t gone away. I waited for it to cycle back to the beginning in my head before I began whistling to it. I couldn’t well interrupt it, or start it out of time with my waking. Surely my mind hadn’t missed a beat since I had acquired the melody in a distant dream world. Surely the tempo was still true to when I had slipped out of bed and back into the world of the dying.

It was a world full of life, because everyone was dying. Even Jake was dying, even Derek, even me. We had all accepted that a long time ago. As to if a concept can be accepted before it is fully realized, I have never been in a position to offer more than speculation. But Socrates, he would know. Or at least, he would know how to strain the knowledge from us, how to trap the pulp and let the pure water escape. We would all know who we had become, when Socrates arrived. Derek would know why he tapped his shoes against the bricks, and Jake would know why he gazed with such longing upon all that was behind, and I would know why I kept my eyes trained on a light I could never reach.

As we stood on the street corner, all of us could feel the tides of despair and hope, of doubt and belief, moving in and out. They submerged us for just long enough to leave us gasping for air as we escaped, and allowed us only the amount of oxygen needed to keep us alive under the next wave. This was living, and we had to keep breathing, and keep holding our breath, and remember when to do one and when not to do the other, and as long as we could do that we could live. But living was not only a matter of survival. It was a matter of fully recognizing the will to exist. We had all done it in different ways, that may be true. But we had all done it. And every moment was that test, and that question, and that answer.

The test now was to wait, and so we huddled together and we waited, together. Time and cars and water slipped by. Every element was crossing over others, crossing over itself, on the three dimensional plane. But as always, like the pain of losing a dream to the fog of awakening, like an aching somewhere between the roof of the mouth and the floor of the skull, we felt the impossible: a fourth dimension, in which everything was moving in the same direction. The waiting was painful. But the waiting was the process which united three disheveled individuals. We were across from one another, or close, or far away, or thinking of things close or of things far away, or struggling with the inside against the outside, or falling, or rising. But no matter the placement of our bodies or minds or souls all three of all three were moving, through the medium which defies all attempts at expression, in one singular direction.

We were lonely in every place, but never in any time.

And without time, we would be stopped, we would have stopped, and we would stand still, not only stopped forever but stopping forever, caught in the action of a lack of action, imprisoned by a solid state of doing. Not being, but doing. One cannot be without motion. And though we stood still that night, listening to the world collapse around that one little street corner, we were waiting, and as long as we were waiting the hope was alive, and as long as we hoped we moved, together, forward and outward and inward, always together in the singular purpose of the now, which was to become that which was not the now.

The ghosts of friction would assault us forever, from the past, from the future, from the present. But still the now will continuously become that which is not the now, and the world will flow, and the past will be made beautiful by its rust, the present beautiful by its intangibility, and the future beautiful by its promise.

We were waiting for Socrates on a street corner. And then one by one we turned around: Jake, then Derek, then me. He had been sitting behind us, looking on through the window of a coffee shop, sipping on hemlock, smiling to himself. We smiled back, and the image of his tired old face blurred as our eyes focused instead on our reflections in the glass, and we laughed like children.

I sleep like a stone next to her. In the morning she will mutter into my static-filled ears her dreams of California, and the sky, and caged animals. But for now I am a stone. I sink deeper into the murk of the lake, twitching to the music of ghostly currents as I slip further down. Bubbles rise past me, spinning my smooth shape with their effortless friction. They are messages from the black sludge below. It is calling to me. It wants to smother me again, and there is no reason to resist. I let myself fall. I think back to when I was loosed from the grip of a child, when my medium was the air. I skipped like an ancient discus across the water’s surface. One, two, three. The tempo increased, each jump closer to the next, until I was only a vibration in the liquid. Then I sank. And now I am sinking still. My memories are fading. I forget the rocky beach from which I was chosen, I forget my time as a source of wind and laughter, I forget how the sun felt on my round form, I forget the pleasure of spirit that I found in spasmodic dance atop the water, I forget how the droplets leapt around me. I forget, I forget, and I am still sinking. I am afraid of how comforting the darkness has become. I wonder if it was better to have flown once, or if it would have been better to sink since the beginning of time. But the choice was not mine, it seems. The child chose me for my smoothness, my roundness, my flatness. I was made smooth and round and flat by the tides. The tides were driven up and down by the moon’s cycle. The moon twisted in the sky by its own fearless momentum. Curses erupt from my design, aimed both outside and in, and the mud consumes me, and the need to be whole vanishes like a strand of steam, and time is a pinpoint, and I am a stone.

Hello, hello!

Let’s get right into this, because it’s getting very hot under here.

I guess I should tell you that I’m under a plushy microfiber blanket that I bought years ago. I won’t tell you what it is I’m listening to, but you’ll just have to trust my (expert) judgment, and believe me when I tell you that it’s very, very, very good music.

Getting toasty in here, for sure! That and I’m sort of hunched over in an awkward position in the middle of my bed with all of the lights out. It’s nearly midnight.

I am listening to incredible music in the dark, under a blanket, at midnight.

(I’d type with the monitor completely dimmed, but I don’t feel like proofreading this later on.)

Hell, if I’m not actually crazy, I might just invite such stormy moods into my life simply by way of all the strange and not-normal-people-behavior-inducing activities I take part in on a ritualistic, nightly basis!

Ahem!

Today I spent my entire afternoon in my living room. I did this because the heat is finally on, however low it may be, and it was practically thin t-shirt and hoodie weather in there. What a nice climate for choking on massive intakes of protein and being a jerk on the internet, I say!

I wrote about three-thousand words of my dumb trip to the Orient (haaaahhh!) and slammed against the wall and didn’t feel like writing any more about that shit today. I’ll get to it tomorrow, I think. When it goes *LIVE*, you may scoff at it and pretend like it’s bullshit, I don’t mind.

I was awake in the afternoon because the return flight from Tokyo has rendered me gum-sticky crazy and I sort of tempered my sleep schedule from something no productive human being could ever sustain themselves by to a downright grandpa sleep schedule. I wake up at six in the morning, for God’s sake! I was tired at eight p.m. I’m tired now!

Fuck, man. America. This place blows. I have a job and a life and, uh — well, I don’t have friends — but, you know. I have things going on for me here, and I’d completely forgotten about all of that on the other side of the world. What a great dream that was, way over there. And then pop! I’m back here, and everything is smoky and people are tar-coughing psychopaths, and not in a good way, either!

I can’t do this. I tell you — the more time I have to jerk around and do nothing, the less I feel like doing anything. I need pressure and time limits or else I’ll never be able to churn out buttery prose for you, you no one, you!

Seriously: three-thousand words are sitting on my computer right now, colorful sentences and (short) paragraphs and all. I talk about bathing with a fifteen-year-old boy at some point, and how he told me he likes baseball and having sex with his girlfriend even though her mother is a fucking ball-busting demon! His words, not mine (sort of)!

Someone — anyone — needs to keep me away from a computer when my mind starts whirling around like this. My eyes are buzzing and humming, and lord knows if the half of me that keeps this boat afloat even realizes that I’m awake and up past my bedtime right now.

Keep me away from a keyboard, I’m not even kidding!

This is the witching hour that I browse a certain social networking website and spout off god-exploding psychobabble to people who don’t even know that I’m still alive! And then they are rudely reminded that I am the following morning, and they never reply to anything I say because that would mean inciting the cloudy mood of a schizophrenic fire hydrant that is me!

Fuuuuuuuuuccccccccccckkkkkkk! Never again will I take a twelve-hour international flight in the evening. I arrived an hour before I left Japan on the same day!! If that doesn’t render a human being a drooling ape who sees only black and white and yellow, I don’t know what does.

Honestly, it’s best if I stop moving my fingers right now. The gears in my brain are popping off left and right, and I’m afraid of what happens when every part of me rattles and turns to dust and explodes. I mean — I know what happens. I’m just not sure what that means tonight.

Going to sleep, now.

I love you, you no one, you.

Really!

There’s something that I’m sure I’d like about you.

Maybe!

The man who signs my checks called me maybe thirty minutes ago. He asked me to come in for “around three hours” and run hot plates to clap-clapping people. That sounded reasonable enough, I guess.

Before I could say, “Nope!” I said, “O.K.”

I . . . agreed to go in and work today, if only for three hours.

This is literally a “call the doctor!” moment here, I’ll have you know. I need to contact a professional immediately and have him or her diagnose my current sickness.

Maybe the treatment options will include “voluntary hibernation.” I’d be all right with that.

I’m killing time by cooking rice and black beans and chick peas. I fried up green, red and yellow peppers with a quarter of an onion, and threw it into the protein-bubbling broth. It’s going to be a swell little meal, just for me.

It is, after all, bulk time.

Time to bulk.

Lord, I’m sorry. I’ll write something later. It will be about protein and my brother. The protein has nothing to do with my brother, although I’m well aware, as I’m sure you are, that he consumes a metric ton of it a day.

He’s training to be a helicopter pilot because they “kill the most people.”

“They’re the ones who come back all fucked up,” he tells me.

Man.

Ding. Rice is done.

I’m going to combine it with a can of black beans and chick peas and peppers three colors of the rainbow.

It’s protein time.

It’s bulk time.

Earlier this morning, I was pissing angrily into a Japanese-style squat toilet on a train going one-hundred-and-seventy-nine miles per hour. We’d just left Kyoto. We wanted to be in Tokyo.

As the stream spray-rocketed into the gray-plastic hole, I thought this: “I will put a pistol in my mouth with a degree in my hand. Whenever that happens, I don’t know.” I held my hand over a sensor to flush the toilet and whatever had been in me was sucked away instantly, terribly. It disappeared into the horrible black orbit of hell, conveniently located under the train.

Anyway, I’d like that degree now, thanks.

After that, I can see to the pistol bit. Maybe it’ll be a fun thing to do. I’ll devote a whole Sunday morning to it, actually, I think now.

Why in God’s name am I in an internet cafe in Tokyo? All the night trains to Akita were sold out, so here I am, sucking down milk tea (which I don’t even really like) while some fat slobs jerk off to manga at open booths that do not have doors! as they pour milk tea all over their adult-children bodies. It’s a hell of a Saturday here in Tokyo, Japan, let me tell you!

Man. If I’d gotten on that night train to Akita, hoo boy! That would have been something else. I was planning on flopping on to the station floor and screaming until my eyeballs popped open like eggs. I would have stood up and dusted off my jacket and caught the next train to one of the last-remaining samurai towns. Kakunodate, or whatever. I’d love to be walking around that place right now.

But, no!

I’m in an internet cafe hugging Nakano Broadway near the Sun Plaza. This is ridiculous.

I apologize, gentle reader — whomever you are, God bless you — for my absence. I’ve been too ball-blasting nuts to do anything with the English language in the last two weeks. What a swirling storm of nails and potted plants it’s been. Eggshells and acorns, over here.

Two nights ago I limped along in a snowy eleven-hundred-year-old city with a Frenchman in search of a convenience store. A day before that, I spent two nights in a city that my country blasted into oblivion sixty-something years ago. Before that, I was in warm little room in Virginia, thinking about the rooms I would be in days later.

And now, look at me, in a place with porn advertisements hanging over the urinals. The girls on those posters are showing off their basketballs to anyone who fancies a look. What a jerk you’d have to be to order any of that garbage. There are little hearts punctuating the page that say things that make you wish you were born dead. Jesus God, these ads.

I’ll say something nice and comfortable and sleepy soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe on Wednesday. Man, who knows! Who the hell knows, I don’t know!

Sleeping in this place, puh!