“I’m quitting,” I told him, allowing a little pride to creep into my voice. I felt pretty good at that point, on day one, and it was easy then to convince myself that this whole quitting deal was going to easier than I had anticipated. A fucking cakewalk, the self-satisfied grin on my face said. Ian looked at me with a weary, red-eyed skepticism, as if I had told him that my cock was made of gold.

“That ought to last a good long time,” he said, in a sarcastic monotone.

“Damn right,” I said.

The next morning, as I was standing in my kitchen, shakily trying to make my coffee without weeping from the stomach cramps that wracked my miserable body, I couldn’t help but think of where this all started. I can’t deal with not having coffee, and it’s hard for me to think of a time when things weren’t that way; as long as I can remember I’ve gotten up and had to down a solid two or three cups in order to face the day. This isn’t because my days are particularly tough to face (“I HAVE TO COPYEDIT THESE REPORTS…OR THE TERRORISTS DETONATE THE BOMB DUCT-TAPED TO MY SACK!”), but instead because…well…I don’t know why. That’s the thing. I have no explanation as to why I do it, why I need it.

Coffee seems too innocuous, too commonplace to be the sort of thing that addictions are made out of, and if I am actually chemically addicted to drinking it, I can’t lie – that’s the lamest fucking dependency in the world. I fancy myself, from time to time, a writer – and this is the best that I can do? Hunter Thompson did every drug you can think of. Poe did so much absinthe it’s possible he died because his brain exploded screaming from his skull. Dan Brown has to feed on the still-beating hearts of children in order to get himself going. I need something like that, not fucking breakfast blend!

Truth be told, I blame my mother. She doesn’t really do the coffee thing now (not until they start making a blend that tastes like merlot), but back when I was eight or nine, she’d have a cup of coffee and breakfast, come over and kiss me on the forehead, and then leave for work. I would wait until I heard the front door slam, get up from my spot on the couch, walk to the kitchen where she had left her mug, and grab it. She generally didn’t finish, and what was left was the sugary, creamy quarter-inch of refuse. I downed it quickly – it tasted like candy, but with a slight intriguing aftertaste that set off tiny chemical receptors in my brain that I didn’t yet fully understand.

I understand, of course, that this is fucking gross. Seriously. I had access to whatever sweets I wanted, whatever candies and ice creams and sodas I could name, and for some reason, I decided it was an awesome idea to sneak over to the kitchen and drink my mother’s leftover coffee. I don’t know why I did this, but I do think that it was the place where I started needing the stuff in a way that I cannot totally explain now.

Maybe it’s just the power of routine. Maybe it’s a chemical thing, an actual electrical synaptic response that’s been triggered by the mix of shit that I’m ingesting regularly. Maybe I’m still just a child and I can’t help but allow myself access to all of the things I crave, whenever I feel like it. Come to think of it, that’s not childish – that’s what adults do. What we want, when we want!

A few thoughts:

1) Don’t we need to revamp the thinking paradigm of people that populate horror movies?  I’m all for a bunch of teenagers sprinting around like chickens with their heads sawed off, screaming like idiots and generally making themselves easy targets, but I pose this question to you, reader: when’s the last time you met a teenager that didn’t have a near-encyclopediac knowledge of popular culture and, therefore, an intimate awareness of horror movie conventions?

I’m not proposing that people being chased by future movie monsters stop on a dime in the abandoned machine shop, quizzically cock their head to one side, and chirp, “My goodness, this reminds me of the axe-to-the-face-scene from Friday the 13th, Part 7!”  However, I am proposing that we at least bestow upon characters just a smidgen of self-awareness, at least as far as culture goes.   Freddy Krueger, for instance, is such a ubiquitous, well-known presence in the film world (at least for people in the general region of my age) that it’s automatically silly and jarring to my ability to suspend my disbelief to see people who have zero knowledge of him.  That person immediately starts to strike me as totally, bizarrely cut off from the world that I inhabit, and as such, I have no attachment to them and no interest when Freddy decides to dance an Irish jig and playfully remove their still-beating heart from their body.

Wouldn’t it be nice to change that one of these days, perhaps develop some sort of a fleeting emotional attachment to the faceless hundreds of teenagers doomed to be eviscerated in horror movies?  I’m not saying we need to make this fucking academy award winning shit, but I am interested in watching characters that are closer to real, or interesting, or at least halfway removed from being brainless sacks of meat valuable only as a victim to the evil dream monster/burny man.

2) I wonder how burn victims feel about this flick, and moreover, it’s place in popular culture.  Clearly, no one is inspired by this movie to actually start fearing people who have suffered burns, but the implicit message, really, is unfortunate: People that look like that are creepy.  I don’t believe this myself, but I’m surprised that some activist group hasn’t made cheap, easy headlines already by feigning disgust and uproar because of Nightmare on Elm Street’s insensitivity to a particular sect of handicapped people.

Think about it this way: there’s really no other handicap that I can think of that would inspire a legendary film villain.  Can you imagine a movie based on a dream monster that, for instance, is confined to a wheelchair due to partial paralysis?  You’d never see that!  People would fucking lose their minds!  It’d be the same thing (and rightfully so), no doubt, if you made an evil force physically characterized by the fact, for instance, that it was a midget!  Or a conjoined twin!  Or an albino!  Whatever physical deformity or irregularity you can conjure up – I can’t envision a circumstance in which it would suddenly be socially acceptable to portray that thing as the defining physical characteristic of a teen-slaughtering, joke-slinging master villain.

Now, granted, maybe we’ve just reached a point where even the perhaps insensitively-portrayed burn victims can look at this, chuckle softly, and say “Fuck.  That is a stupid-looking movie, and I would be totally doing myself a disservice and wasting my own time if I gave it a second thought, especially in regards to my sense of self-worth.”  I don’t know why that person is so freakishly articulate and calm, but hey, it’s possible.  And if we’ve hit that point, that’s great, and I applaud those people, wherever they are, for taking a step back and being able to realize some things are just stupid shit that we should ignore (re: this movie).  However, my sense is more just that, for some reason, this is one of those things that we’ve decided as a culture to accept, regardless of how it could hurt somebody’s feelings.  That doesn’t bother me, but I do find it interesting, especially given the fact that we live in a time in which seemingly every other thing that could possibly offend someone generally ends up doing just that.

3) I am totally fucking seeing this movie.  I am totally seeing this movie, perhaps in theaters (but probably not, because I’m a giant pussy and I will scream like a fucking child when that man with the claw hands comes out), and I am going to cheer my fucking head off when these kids get annihilated.  I’m a little disappointed that Jackie Haley is doing the Rorschach voice so blatantly, but I am excited that he’s the guy this time around.

Now, I realize that compared to the people who actually had some sort of experience with the real thing, with winds strong enough to blow you or the house or something the fuck away, my awe in the face of last night’s events here is probably at best a little quaint, and perhaps at worst infuriating to the point of strangulation.  Please, forgive me – I’ve got a limited well of life experience to draw from here, and so when I get weather events I have to ascribe them undue importance.  But, like I was saying, last night:

The weather report said 60 mph gusts were possible.  This led to no real action from me, save two candles lit in the bathroom and, just before bed, actually asking Marissa, “Do we own a flashlight?”  It was more than a little humorous, to be honest, to realize how overwhelmingly unprepared we are here at my house if there ever was actually some sort of weather-related emergency.  When the volcano erupts, friends, I have to tell you that it’s probably not going to be that leads the hearty band of scrappy survivors into the next iteration of human existence.  You’ll be able to spot me pretty easily – I’ll be the guy screeching miserably because his flesh has all been burned off by liquid magma.  Do me a favor in that instance and spot a brother a fire blanket or some ointment or something.

I can’t say at all what the actual speed of the wind was last night, but I know that we at least felt and heard something that sounded pretty fucking strong; all night we heard the drizzle of the rain transformed by the wind into machine gun chatter against the windows, the rattle of the glass in the frames, sirens blaring every few minutes from Central Avenue below us.  At one point I heard a tremendous bang from downstairs; thinking (totally irrationally) that  a power line had fallen over or that a window had broken, I rushed downstairs and looked out our kitchen window.  No power lines, of course, but all of the seven deck chairs outside of the apartment had been blown by the wind into a fascinatingly neat pile of furniture that was (and still is) lodged up against the door.

The wind advisory advertised by the weather service lasted only until 1 this morning, so I’m sure that the most dramatic activity ended sometime right around then, perhaps just after I managed to calm down, tell myself both that there was nothing to be done and nothing likely to really happen.  And as I write this, sitting at my kitchen table by the window, there sounds like there’s no wind at all, and the rain has totally stopped, and there’s a sliver of blue sky visible in the bank of clouds hanging over Dover.

It’s okay, though, because while clearly I’m not the same person I was back then, more importantly, I never had much of a handle on video games in the first place.  They were something that I sort of enjoyed, but mostly took part in because my friends were.  Sure, I loved Sega Genesis as much as the next nerd back between the ages of 9 and 13, but by the time I started hitting high school and the games started involving guns and multiplayer and shit like that, I feel like a subconscious part of me somewhere must have already been saying something along the lines of “Okay.  Cool.  This is something that I’m not going to be able to deal with for much longer.”

This isn’t because of any sort of moral discomfort with the aforementioned gun-centric games; I had some great times playing Counterstrike with my buddies in high school.  However, those times were never really strategic victories.  The times that I can remember, for instance, are general situations in which I would either A) Run blindly into the map where I thought enemies might be, firing blindly with the Parra and screeching, “Covering FIIIIIIIIRE!” or B) Spend 20 or 30 minutes not playing, but instead trying to think of the best possible name for my character.  If I could think of something that made people giggle out loud when my character entered the map, that was a win.  If not, well, again, then it was time for the running-blindly-with-the-Parra-strategy.

I remember those sorts of things fondly, but they reinforce exactly what I’m talking about, which is that the times that I had fun were never based on really sound understandings of the intent of the game I may have been playing; instead, they were generally characterized by me being able to find some sort of unintended loophole in gameplay to exploit so that I looked memorably like a retarded person.  This is both because, again, I am mostly that stupid, and also because I simply cannot keep up with the speed and complexity of your traditional modern game.  Something in me refuses to process it correctly, and I quickly become bored, discouraged, and distracted, and find myself looking for something funny to do instead.

But my friends got a kick out of them (and many still do), so it was the sort of thing I tolerated for the sake of being around them.  At this point I’m actually glad that it was something as innocent as video games that captured my high school friends’ imaginations; it would have been really uncomfortable if I’d had to find some way to generate comedy out of making meth in someone’s basement or ritual sacrifice of small woodland mammals.  At that point, I probably would have suggested we go get some pizza or check out a movie or something, but who knows if they’d have been able to tear themselves away, you know?

-

Here’s a quick story about my friends and video games.

My friend Alex has lived in this house for his entire life.  It’s his parents’ house, and it’s cavernous.  It’s this way for a reason; he has three brothers and sisters, and so the place that they all grew up in needed to be able to accommodate six people comfortably.  However, the brothers and sisters in questions are significantly older than him, and so by the time I started spending time at his house, sometime around when I was 13 or 14, the siblings had all grown up and moved away.  The house  that suited six people just fine felt endless when it was filled with just three; there were lots of empty rooms, and for some reason that I can’t totally explain, it felt creepy.

Why’s it creepy?  Honestly, I couldn’t tell you the exact reason.  I think that it has something to do with the air, and the rooms.  The house has somewhere around eight rooms, perhaps more, but the thing is that Alex’ s family tends to keep all of the doors in the house shut.  I don’t know why this is – perhaps to make sure that his several dogs didn’t get into places that they shouldn’t, perhaps to trap heat in a particular section of the house, who knows – but I do know, that to me, it made the house feel compartmentalized, all hallways and angles, and still in a strange way, as if the air never moved.  His mother smokes, so there’s a slight hint of cigarettes and staleness, too, and, now that I think about it, the sum total of the feeling that one get is that this is a house in which no one lives, and no one has lived for quite some time.

That’s certainly not the case, and I’m bring overly dramatic here, but to be fair, when you’re 13 and you’ve stayed up all night playing video games and mainlining enough sugary soda to kill a few farm animals, your imagination can tend to run away with you.  You start thinking of things; the heaviness of the silence, the shuffling of the dogs’ paws downstairs, the potentialities that could be hidden behind closed bedroom doors.  Of course I was overthinking, and perhaps dreaming on my feet, but you couldn’t have told me that then.  There were times, simply, when I couldn’t help being creeped out.

I remember one time in particular.  Appropriately enough, it involved Starcraft.  I was at Alex’s house, and as we tended to, we stayed up all night, drinking soda and playing games and recording ourselves saying stupid shit on his computer.  This was pretty standard; we were 13 or 14, not exceedingly popular, had no cell phones or cars, and didn’t really have a whole lot of anything else to do.

At one point I took over operation of the computer, and as I was new to the video game arena, at least compared to Alex and the rest of the people that I knew, I was very excited to get access to a machine that had Starcraft on it.  I didn’t have the game, not at that point, and so to be able to play it, even though it meant Alex didn’t really have anything to do, was amazing.

I wasn’t very good (and I’m still not), but I was mesmerized by the game.  I must have played through four or five levels.  Now, Alex, I’m sure. sat behind me in one of the other chairs in his computer room for at least a while.  I don’t know if he said anything (again, I was mesmerized), but I do know that at some point, while I was engrossed, he got up and silently left the room.  This was no big deal, obviously, and I sure as shit didn’t care or notice – I had the computer game that I coveted at my fingertips and nothing else to do but stretch out and move around inside of it.  I was in heaven.

I think after two hours or so I got stuck on a level; I can’t be sure which, but I have some rather vivid memories of the level in which you’re the Terrans and you have to build a base and hold off the Zerg for 30 minutes, until your transport can come and whisk you and the survivors off of the planet to safety.  I’m pretty sure that I lost this same level, in exactly the same way, three or four consecutive times.  Now, as I’ve said, we were up all night, so I probably didn’t start playing until four or five in the morning.  By the time I took a break to stretch and see what Alex was doing, it must have been seven or eight in the morning.  It was the summer and we were off from school; nothing mattered, we had nothing to do, and no place to be.  I wasn’t worried about the time or my lack of sleep.

What I was worried about, however, as I got up from the computer and started walking around, was the silence.  As I mentioned before, Alex’s house has that still silence to it, as if you’re inside of a place that no one else has been inside of for several years, and for some reason, there’s not a whole lot creepier to me than being the one in that position.  I figured he must have wandered off to bed; it was pretty early, after all.  I shuffled from the computer room upstairs, to where the bedrooms are located.  I looked in his, but the bed was empty.

“Huh,” I thought.  “Weird.  He must have passed out in one of the other rooms.”  I went across the hallway from his bedroom to the bathroom and pissed, not yet thinking about anything in particular.  Without really performing the action intentionally, I went from the bathroom down the upstairs hallway to the other bedrooms and slowly, carefully opened the doors to them, too.

Both empty.

At this point, a thick wave of confusion and sleeplessness had fallen over my conscious mind like a fog; I was struggling to understand what was happening.  Again, I was significantly sleep-deprived and I had been absorbed totally in a video game for what must have been three or four hours by that point, so it’s not surprising that I was having trouble putting two and two together.  I knew, even then, that it wouldn’t work out, not the way that I wanted it to, but even so I walked back down the carpeted hallway of Alex’s upstairs, crossed through the bunk room (a large room that splits the layout of his upstairs in two and houses all of the assorted, random, useless shit that the family has accumulated over the years – it looks like a carpeted attic) to where the last bedroom on that level of the house was located.  I knew before I got there that I would find it empty.

Confused, I walked down the spiral staircase that leads from Alex’s upstairs to the kitchen and dining room on the house’s ground floor.  The dogs, at least, were happy to see me, all four of them (I’m struggling with their names – Colby, Sierra, Rocky, and….someone), and their presence alleviated a little of the pervading sense of unease that I was grappling with by that point, but as I investigated the downstairs level, room by room, padding across the tile in bare feet, I was left with the same reality, regardless of the animals’ cheer.

The house was completely empty.

Now, these days,  I recognize that anything at all could have happened, all sorts of normal things.  Anything’s possible.  Alex’s parents may have had early errands to run, family matters to attend to – Hell, maybe they went for a walk.  Alex, on the other hand, could have been doing anything, as well – he was somewhat hard to predict (and still is), and it wouldn’t be out of the question for him either to be outside stacking wood or, alternately, wandering down Route 3 toward Plymouth in his pajamas.  Both have happened.  Both are possible.  However, those potential truths aside, I was 13 at the time, and my ability to soundly and calmly reason my way through an odd situation was not then what it is now.  As I’ve said, I was sleep-deprived and a little zombie-fied from the game I had been transfixed by.  So I panicked a little, at least internally.

I didn’t scream or yell or convince myself that they had been chopped up and killed in the night, but I did convince myself that it was time for me to leave.  Immediately.  And so, in shorts and a t shirt, I put on my sneakers, patted the dogs, took one last inhalation of the smoky silence that felt to my teenaged mind as if it was building, thickening, intensifying in some way, and left.  I walked out of the house, out of the driveway, and up Route 175 to my house, three or four miles away. It was a sunny day and it was early and quiet, so there were not many cars on the road and the walk was pleasant, restorative.  Calming.

I got home and my mother was watering plants in the back of my house.  It was about eighty-thirty by that point, and the summer sun was beginning to burn off the morning dew.  I remember thinking that it was going to be a hot day.  My mother looked up and smiled and said, “Where the Hell have you been?”  I must have been sweating, carrying deep bags under my eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I went in my bedroom and passed out for a long, long time.

Let’s also say that on top of your eight feet in height, you were four hundred pounds.  Again, your god-given physical gifts are not granted to you with an unfortunate catch, even in this department – your weight is almost purely muscle.  There’s little to no body fat on you.  You’re lean, mean, and you look like your triceps muscle could fuck a cement wall so hard it would travel thousands of years back in time.

Let’s say, thirdly, that, as I hinted beforehand, that you’re involved in basketball.  No, not merely involved – you’re in the fucking National Basketball Association.  You’re stomping around in the footsteps of the various greats of the game, and so prodigious is your talent, your natural ability, the sort of synapse-firing that leads to dunks from the free throw line that you are not merely following in their tracks, you’re obliterating what little evidence there is remaining of their presence.  That’s how big your feet are, in a manner of speaking.  You’re perhaps the most talented professional basketball player on the planet, in short.  In your mid-twenties, when the vast majority of your Earthly peers are still gauging whether or not they can afford groceries on a weekly basis, you’re nailing shots from ten feet out of bounds and setting fire to the public’s memory of Magic fucking Johnson.  You’re that good.

You’re Lebron James.

So, assuming all of the aforementioned – you’re a physical giant and you’re immensely talented – as well as other things not deemed by me to be worthy of superfluous explanation – you’re freakishly fast and unstoppable off the dribble, let’s say – let me get back to the initial query, which I have yet to pose.

If you’re all of these things…

WHY.  THE FUCK.  WOULD YOU EVER NOT TAKE IT TO THE FUCKING HOLE?

-

I was watching the Cavaliers play the Nuggets a few nights ago (side note: I’ve missed watching basketball at night.  Adulthood concerns have robbed me of that simple, solitary joy), and at the end of the game, Lebron began behaving in a manner that puzzled me.  No, strike that.  Lebron began behaving in a manner as a basketball player that infuriated me.

After spending the prior three and a half quarters shredding the shit out of the Nuggets’ defense by getting anywhere he wanted to on the court at any time, by driving and mercilessly racking up three-point-play after three-point-play, Lebron decided to start…shooting long, contested jump shots.

Now, again, this is after he’s been mercilessly attacking this team for nearly forty minutes.  He’s put up right around 40 points, and double-digit rebounds and assists, too (not looking up the numbers, but he finished with the much-overrated triple double).  Nothing can possibly be done short of a prolonged campaign of napalm bombing within the arena to keep him from dunking on each trip down the floor.  Lebron is playing so dominantly as a slasher that when the other team scores, it’s automatically credited to him.  People’s hearts are exploding our of their chests in the crowd.  Holy men, several countries away and blissfully slumbering, are spontaneously developing Nike logo stigmata.  Dude is playing out of his goddamn mind.  And yet…

Here’s Lebron, launching a twenty-footer over Carmelo’s outstretched fingertips.  Front iron.

Here’s Lebron, pulling up for a three pointer from the left wing, over Carmelo again, after a few half-hearted jab steps (as if he needs to fake).  This is probably a 28 foot shot.  Same result – clang.

“Lebron,” I’m saying from my couch.  “Lebron, what are you doing?  That was not a tomahawk over three players.  That was not a high-percentage field goal, my friend.”

Before long, despite the fact that I truly dislike Lebron and the Cavs, I am feeling personally offended by this display.  Lebron has spent four consecutive possessions pulling up for contested shots over multiple defenders.  Again, this isn’t a problem for someone as good as he is, but if you’re going to do that, why not do it from five feet away, so that you can launch yourself at people like a fear-seeking missile?  The man shoots something like eighty fucking percent from close range, and there’s not a player or a team or a tactical nuclear weapon on the planet that can keep him from getting whatever shot he wants.  And if that’s the case, why in the name of all that is fucking holy would you be settling for jump shots in the fourth quarter of a tight game?

And that’s the other thing – it was tight.  The Nuggets were probably down somewhere between three and five the first time Lebron jacked a top-of-the-key shitfuck, and by the time he had done it three or four times, Denver was ahead by two.  I’m left to wonder: does Lebron realize what he’s doing?  Is he so far removed from Earthly concerns due to his talent that he can tinker with horrific shots that he knows he won’t make in the middle of a close game, just because he can?  He can sacrifice a game at his whim, like a goat upon a pagan altar, and feel nothing, feel no guilt that would compel him to stop playing like a fucking idiot and drive to the fucking basket because no one can do anything to stop you.

I’m stunned by either the arrogance or ignorance that this suggests – he’s either so good that he doesn’t give a shit that he’s doing things that are hurting his team in a winnable game, or he’s so stupid, so socially disconnected from what’s happening because of how good he is that he truly has no idea that seven or eight shitty jump shots in a row is the sort of thing that can stop a run for your team and build one for your opponent.

-

Lebron, do you have a wordpress account?  You will need one in order to comment on my blog entry about you, and I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say.  Maybe you could start your own wordpress blog account, and we could write blogs back and forth to each other, like twenty-first century pen pals.  Write back soon.

1) I remember the play that he made in the Eastern Conference Finals/NBA Finals in 2008 (see, right there, that should give you an idea of how good I’m doing on the memory front). During a Celtics’ offensive possession, the ball got tipped into the back court; House took off after it, along with one other player. I can’t remember the opposing player, so I’m choosing to insert Lakers legend Jerry West, now near 70, into my mental picture of how things went down.

Eddie hustled to scramble past the creaky legs of West. Filled with the spirit of your prototypical energy guy off the bench, Eddie catapulted himself over West’s shoulder, dove to the floor, and, just before he slid out of bounds under the opposing basket, managed to fling the ball back off of West’s body. The ball went off of West, both saving the possession for the Celtics and hitting West with such force that the entire lower half of his body exploded in a fine mist of blood and bone matter. ABC went to a TV timeout just as the screaming NBA legend was being dragged off the court, now nothing more than whiny torso.

2) I remember screaming (screaming) at Doc Rivers through my television screen to fucking play Eddie House during the 2008 playoffs. We were having serious problems scoring, and as a team we were displaying a mystifying, infuriating ability to play like we gave half a fucking shit. I blame this entirely on Doc Rivers and his decision to play Sam Cassell over Eddie House; I maintain to this day that if he had just played House as the first guard off the bench instead of Sam, we would have swept through the playoffs.

Cassell misses a shot by twenty feet? Eddie would’ve made it.
Cassell pisses his pants at halfcourt, revealing a heretofore totally unknown problem with controlling his facilities? Eddie hasn’t pissed his pants since the first time he saw The Ring by himself.
Cassell burned down an orphanage? Look at how cute that kid is that Eddie’s got on the sidelines with him all the time!

PUT HIM IN THE FUCKING GAME.

-

On the other hand, of course, I’m overjoyed to be welcoming a total fucking nutjob like Nate Robinson to town. I’m not saying that sarcastically, either – I really am excited.  I hope he leaps into the stands during a playoff game and tears an Atlanta fan’s head clean off and then dunks it from half court.

I didn’t go to work today.  This was at first because I was scheduled to take the GREs, but then, after I canceled them – seven of the eight schools I’m interested in do not require them, and I’m so terrified of the most basic algebra and geometry that I start whimpering like a lost kitten floating down a river on a log – it ended up being because I had already asked for the day, and goddammit, I’m taking it.  My boss didn’t start laughing hysterically or whip me on the side of the head with a torn-off television antennae when I asked, so why not?

I got up early, both out of habit and out of a coke-fiend-esque hankering for coffee.  I threw on some clothes in the kitchen in the dark, imagining Marissa trying to fall back asleep and silently berating me for being so loud and clumsy when I get up before her.  The other day, I got up, poured myself a glass of juice, and sat at the kitchen table.  I took a sip of my delicious juice, and then set the glass down – into thin air.  It clattered to the floor and basted me and a significant part of the kitchen in a fine mist of cran-raspberry, and so I set to crawling around on my hands and knees for fifteen solid minutes with some spray cleaner and paper towels, cleaning up my mess.  This shit happens all the time.  I don’t know how she stops herself from stomping downstairs and throwing me into a vicious ranger chokehold.

I went outside and downstairs, walked up the street towards the Dunkin’ Donuts, both because Cafe on the Corner isn’t open before 7, and because I am a slobbering zombie for that fucking chain.  Tell me whatever you want about how unhealthy it is, what’s in the coffee, the cast of Disney animals they test the blenders on, anything – I will still shuffle over there when I wake up, veritably half-dead, and mutter to the ladies behind the counter that I need a medium regular and I need it fast.  Call it addiction if you’d like – I call it love.

Before I could make it to my salvation, of course, I had to wait for the morning train to go by.  Dover’s got train tracks running right through the center of the downtown area, so several times a day Amtrak passes through, or a seemingly neverending procession of freight cars rumbles by at a crawl – like this morning – and cars on both sides of the tracks are stuck waiting for the most skin-crawlingly tedious fifteen minutes you’ll ever endure in your entire life.  The trains were sort of novel at first, since I’m originally from a place even more rural than here, and it was sometimes rare to see automobiles in my hometown, let alone the sort of hulking locomotives that go by three or four times a day in my current neighborhood.  The novelty wore off relatively quickly, though, right around the seventh or eight time my apartment started shaking while I was sleeping, or perhaps when I was one of the aforementioned people stuck in traffic, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel and imagining the cackling train conductor, shoveling coal into the furnace and giving people the finger as the train went past.  If it wasn’t either of those times, it was definitely this morning, while I stood bitterly in the cold and the dark, watching the train go by, and actually considering how dangerous it would be to try and jump on to one of the metal car connectors and then off on the other side.  Like I said – I want my fucking coffee when I wake up.

The rest of the morning, post-coffee, was great.  I walked home and woke Marissa up and sat on the couch and watched television.  This is, ideally, what I’d like to do for a living – very little.  If there is a company out there on the internet blog-surfing right now, searching desperately for someone to get up and drink coffee and mumble snarky comments to himself about daytime programming, listen, I think you may have found your guy.  I don’t think I’d be remiss in describing myself when it comes to watching television as half-Muhammad Ali, half-missible, and half-Jesus.  I sit on the couch and slurp my coffee in the styrofoam cup and mutter things like, “I must be the greatest,” and the “The champ is – ah, fuck it.”

I saw Marissa off (she actually goes to work – sucker), and then made myself breakfast.  Normally I’m a peanut butter and jelly for breakfast sort of guy.  I don’t know if this is normal, and I’m going to go ahead and suspect that most people eat things like cereal or fruit or oatmeal or what have you, but it’s always made a lot of sense to me.  This is at least partially because half of me is still a child when it comes to food – I’ve gotten better, but even when I’m convinced to eat whole wheat and fruit and salads and that sort of shit, there’s a voice inside of me crying out for hot dogs and grilled cheese and french fries and jelly rolls.  I survived on that shit when I was a kid, and it still speaks to me.  But this morning, despite my habits, felt special – it was my day off! – and I cooked myself bacon and eggs and made it into a sandwich with cheese and fuck me rotten, it was delicious.

While I was cooking, I couldn’t help being enraptured and, admittedly, a little turned on by the smell of greasy bacon in the pan.  I thought to a book I just finished, last night, actually – The Ruins, by Scott Smith.  It’s fantastic, and I’d highly recommend it to anybody and everybody.  I usually read shit that’s hovering on the insufferable border between readable and self-consciously literary, but this was, for the first time in a long time, the sort of thing that actually deserves the moniker page-turner.  It’s a suspense-y, horror-y sort of thing, but whatever it is, it’s great and I’d advise you to look into it.  In any case, if you’re planning on reading the book and want to be surprised, stop reading.  I’m about to take a big, hearty, spoiler-y dump on you.

In The Ruins, there’re these kids, and they’re on vacation, and, from the very beginning, if you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you can tell that they are idiots and that they’re going to die.  And really, the only pleasure to be derived from the book, since it’s not really self-consciously literary and it’s not some linguistic or allegorical exercise or what have you, is in trying to figure out ahead of time how the douchebags are going to fuck up and thus meet their respective, grisly ends.  This is true in horror movies, too – you just want to stick around long enough to see precisely where the axe is going to land.  Only, in this case, the axe in question is a giant, writhing mass of sentient, super-powerful and super-intelligent man-eating vines.

Okay, yeah, I know, this sounds retarded.  I’d apologize on behalf of the book and the author – if it wasn’t so damned good.

There’s something to be said for clear, non-showy, propulsive writing.  It’s not a thing I encounter often (probably my fault more than the authorial community as a whole’s fault, but fuck them!), but it’s a thing that I wish I saw more often.  I don’t understand in a construction sense exactly how to do it, but there’s a way to tell a story that gives just enough information about the characters, the depth of their circumstances, and how the events of the narrative unfold – it’s  particular way to write that is, to me, hard to identify in a hypothetical sense.  It’s a “know it when you see it” sort of thing.  I’m thinking of it in the same sense as watching the hour hand of a clock – you know that it’s moving forward, even if you can’t see or truly sense the exact moment the machinations are taking place.  There’s a way that Scott Smith, the author, pushes forward without the reader even realizing it, and let me tell you, it’s stunning.

Enough gushing.  The point here is that there’s this giant fucking angry plant, and the giant angry plant lives on a big hill, and the big hill, once you step on it, is guarded by a bunch of Mayans with bows and arrows and guns and blank stares.  They’re not going to let you leave, you see, because either they’ve worked out some system with the vine, some truce, or they consider it a God and you’re being sacrificed.  Either way, you’re staying there, and the big angry vine is very interested in fucking with your head for a while, wearing you down, and then taking advantage of your mistakes and slurping you up like a smoothie.  Again, I realize I’m talking about a fucking plant.  Just trust me – it works.  And one of the ways in which it works is by various animal-like behaviors.  The vine can move, it can echo and imitate sounds and human voices (even, it’s implied, as a kind of communication), and it can project smells.  This brings me back to my breakfast.

Now, in the book, once the kids run out of food and start realizing just how fucked they are, the vine starts doing the smell thing – projecting smells to torture these people and weaken their minds, trick them into making a mistake.  And the smells (I’m paraphrasing from memory) progress like this: freshly baked bread, and then meat (cheeseburgers, steaks, hot dogs), and finally, apple pie with whipped cream.  I feel like I would’ve been totally fine with the aforementioned smells, but man, if that fucking vine had started apeing the smell of bacon frying in a pan, I would’ve been diving headfirst into oblivion, tongue out, so fast that my compatriots wouldn’t even have had time to wonder if it was turkey bacon or low-sodium or what.  It would’ve been like this – smell hits the nostrils and you look over and there’s a cloud of hovering Looney Toones smoke where Ken was a second ago, and oh, look, there are his shoes sticking out of the murder plant.  Shucks.

Which brings me to my title question – what’s your favorite smell?

I haven’t written anything for bloggy-land here in quite some time, and I’m mostly comfortable with that.  What I do miss is coming occasionally to my blog, clicking on the stats menu, and soaking up the amount of times that people had viewed my posts.  It’s not often in terms of things that I write that I can see, statistically speaking, the amount of attention that I’m getting broken down in a black-and-white way like that.  Before bloggyland, I was forced to assume that no one was paying attention to me; now I knew for sure and had figures to back it up.

So, knowing how little anyone way giving a shit, I drifted away, got bored, pretended to start other things and summarily abandoned them, too.  Time passed.  The world turned.  I forgot about this place, about my own little slice of blog.

I happened to open it today, just for kicks.  Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the stats page and saw that I had ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN VIEWS THIS PAST FRIDAY.  What the fuck?  This Friday I was sitting in my cubicle, marinating in a puddle of sweat and misery, just like usual.  What the Hell happened on my blog so that now, suddenly, people want to read it?

I looked through the stats.  Clicked through to see what post had gotten all the attention.  Saw that virtually everyone had gone to a post called “Dogtown,” which I wrote several months ago, and is about dogs, and dogs in movies, and dogs in danger, and dogs fighting and…oh.  Michael Vick.  It’s also about Michael Vick.  Michael Vick was recently released from prison, signed with the Eagles, is back in the headlines.

Goddammit.

What this means, obviously, is that no one’s interested in me, really – they’re interested in random blog-surfing for controversial key words.  There are people hanging out at their houses, in their offices – when it comes down to it, I’m just thinking of Ryan – who are clicking on the “Michael Vick” underlined keyword and hoping that blogger or wordpress brings them to something zany.  And I’m another stop on their constant, never-ending pilgrimage to the holy tower of zany.

What this also means is that now I’m going to start using bullshit tags on my own posts just to try and drive more traffic here to see what happens.  All of my posts from now on are going to be bookended by the following:

Sarah Palin

Michael Vick

gay marriage

infant slaughter

Lady Gaga

Kenny Chesney

Barack Obama socialist secret terrorist jewish bankers that control the world moon landing hoax

Jon and Kate Plus 8

Oh yes, internet, you will be mine.  You will be mine.

1) I remember the first day I was in 15 Maple. Not the first time I saw it – that was a different thing, in which Ryan, Collin and I drove from Durham to Dover and went up to the apartment to talk to Dan, our friend who lived there already, and Jim, the landlord. That time, we sat around awkwardly in the living room, with its one, rotting, old couch and collection of folding TV trays, and made jokes about living together while Jim grumpily explained the terms of the lease and ignored us.

No, the first time I was really there, alone, getting a feel for the place, I had driven over to drop some things off in order to get a head start on moving. Dan was at work and the other roommates were off at class or otherwise occupied, so I was by myself in the empty apartment. I went into what was to be my bedroom, and I put my things down and exhaled and sat in a wooden chair that had been left behind by the last occupant. I sat there in the silence. I felt at that moment like I was at the beginning of something important, at least in so far as it related to the arc of my life experience. This was my first real apartment, my first time living, really and truly, on my own, my first shot at making my way in the world. This was adult life. This was it.

I looked at the empty white walls, and out the bay windows, and tried to imagine scenarios, the myriad ways that things might work out over the course of the next year. Would the four roommates become closer friends? Would we grow apart? What trials and tribulations would we be forced to endure? Would we become in some way newly recognizable as adults by the end? Arriving at no real answers on my own, I tried to internally engineer a thought or a feeling fitting for the moment, something that, although false, I’d at least be able to fondly remember thinking later on, when I had moved on and had perspective on the whole experience. I concentrated as hard as I could, gritting my teeth, furrowing my brow, but what I produced was not a life-defining epiphany as much as it was a situation in which I nearly pooped my pants from misdirected effort. I went to the bathroom.

I sat on the toilet with my pants around my ankles and continued thinking, trying to at least imagine something meaningful that I could later claim that I had thought at that moment. It was then that I heard the door slam.

I looked at the door to the bathroom. The knob was smooth, gray metal. No lock. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. I only know one person with strides that long and that heavy. I instinctively grabbed for the door knob, perhaps crying out softly, just as the door was ripped violently open, the force so great that it was nearly taken off its hinges.

Ryan Kelly, clad in a black hoodie and jeans, a messenger bag over his shoulder. His eyes were crazed and wide, like gleaming silver dollars. His mouth fell open and twisted into a nightmare carnival grin.

“HEY, FAGGOT! FUCKING FIFTEEN MAPLE, BITCHES! SUCK IIIITTTTTT!”

“Hey, Ry.”

“SUCK MY DIIIIIIICCCKKKKKK!”

He slammed the door shut and the wind from its momentum nearly knocked me backwards off the toilet seat. I grabbed a fistful of toilet paper for my ass and, as I deposited that shit-covered wad, the epiphany I had been seeking fell, figuratively, into my lap.

I was home.

-

2) I would like to say that there were no low points, but there were. Peaks and valleys, I suppose, like anywhere else. I’d say the difference between your standard valley and a 15 Maple valley, however, is in regards to the sheer alcohol consumption. To put it in a more flowery, literary way: even in the darkest night, at 15 Maple, you could always pick out the glimmer of tiny, alcoholic stars in the distance.

I’m referring to the Great Seacoast Ice Storm of 2008-2009 here; I can’t remember what month in particular it happened in, because winters (and especially ones as spiritually crushing as this year) blend together in my recollection. But for the sake of reminiscence, let’s say that the Ice Storm hit in the bleakest depths of a New Hampshire January – that time of year in which you’re suddenly no longer sure if winter is a season or just the way things are.

The Ice Storm hit, and within a day or two, the near-constant precipitation covered the power lines and the roads equally. Travel was a nightmare, and power went out, essentially, in every town in the region. Now, I think everyone’s had power outages from time to time, regardless of where they’re from, but it’s rare to find anybody who’s really prepared, emotionally and intellectually, for a power outage that lasts for days at a time during the coldest, most treacherous part of winter. Everything that we’re used to, every modern convenience, goes away.

It gets cold. It gets dark. There is nothing to do. Laptops and cellphones run out of battery within a few hours. The seemingly endless well of conversational topics runs dry much quicker than you’d think. The refrigerator warms, food goes bad and has to be thrown out. You shower by candle light.

I remember being particularly down in the dumps at this point; we lost power at 15 Maple for somewhere around two days. In retrospect, this doesn’t sound especially bad, but at the time it felt like the single-worst ordeal of my life. My car was in the shop, so I was riding the bus to and from work, and Marissa’s leg and arm were broken, so she was hobbling around and unable to do a whole lot of things for herself. And it was cold, and it was dark, and we had to sit around and deal with it.

In other situations, I imagine, people might’ve gone insane. People might’ve watched themselves helplessly slip into abject misery. What did we do at 15 Maple? We all sat in one room, pooled body heat, and got fucking wasted. Great success!

I arrived somewhere around mid-morning, transported by Ryan Gray in his Escalade on 22′s, with the aforementioned broken Marissa in tow. We walked into the living room and found the following:

1) Drunk Carney

2) Drunk Ryan

3) Drunk Lipka

4) Star Wars Trivial Pursuit

It smelled bad, even by that early point in the day – as if someone had gone and tested an air freshener scented with stale High Life and ass. All of our food had gone bad. Nothing worked. But you know what? Everyone was happy. It was maybe the most miserable time in my recent adult life, and yet, I remember spending most of the day not cold and sad and stationary, but laughing my ass off at Carney trying to string together coherent sentences like his lower jaw hadn’t gone numb.

I would be remiss if I didn’t transcribe my mental picture of the most memorable part of that night, when more people arrived, and here it is – we have a lantern perched on the ceiling fan, and it’s lighting the room in this weird, florescent gray glow, so that everyone looks somehow half-real, like film from a camera that hasn’t been fully developed. We look like the old negatives of ourselves. And there are people crammed on the couch, and the recliner, on folding wooden chairs dragged in from other rooms. There are dozens of empty bottles and cardboard beer boxes and crushed beer cans littered around the room. And on the loveseat, flanked by two women I have never seen before, lording over the proceedings like some inebriated tribal warlord, is Mr. Josh Lipka, naked as the day he was born.

“Well, well, well,” he says to me. “What do we have here?”