There haven't been any sklogs lately or even updates to this ancillary author's notes kind of half-arsed blog because the hagenart staff has been in a kind of mid-life crisis which consists of being overcome with angst about the inevitability of death and the decline of American values. I've also come to recognize that all effort is futile and that all those people that maintain real blogs with all those posts and research and blogosphere concerns are almost certainly mentally ill and should qualify for state assistance. It's just too much work, and seriously, for what? I myself only read comic books now. So I've decided that from this entry on this blog will be dedicated to a serious purpose, not just random nonsense. The serious purpose will either be a daily log of my experiences as a parent or a kind of home fixer upper type journal of my planned renovation/development of my backyard and crawlspace.
Another idea just hit me: the world's longest novel! I'll have to find out what the current record holder is..Since all three ideas are very good ones, I've decided to alternate the entries between the three themes until one wins out by popular vote or if I get tired of the other ideas.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Fish Lake III: End of the Journey
Randall met Kit Prug in the Fish Lake lodge, coming out of the bathroom where he'd accomplished his natural thing despite having the door of his stall kicked and rattled by some rotten little kid with muddy socks and no shoes who's father kept opening the lavatory door and asking him if he'd finished yet, loudly so as make Randall feel bad for using the stall for such an extended period of time. The little kid with muddy socks had kept saying no to his father and knocking on the door of the stall and shaking it and peeking underneath to make sure there was really someone in there, and Randall had enjoyed taking an abnormally long time.
He came out and smiled at the father with the fish lake lodge baseball cap and the weaselly eyes who didn't even look at him and walked through the big empty dining room and wondered if they were still waiting for him on the boat moared secretly in the weeds where the people on the dock couldn't see it because the Cap'n preferred secrecy and not paying fees for anything or if they'd given up and cast off and gone back out on the lake, leaving him to drink in the lodge all alone the rest of the day. As Randall enjoyed this daydream he passed the little store in the lodge and saw the Cap'n purchasing more cheap beer, and he sighed and sat down on a bench cut out of logs like everything else in the lodge so as to give visitors that old-timey camping feel when they came to purchase their candy and bait and beer and post-cards and plastic mounted singing fish, and the other person sitting on the bench was Kit Prug, who turned to Randall and said hello.
"Nice day, isn't it?" Kit Prug said to Randall. "If you like it a little rainy."
"Most people don't," Randall replied, trying to be funny because he felt threatened. He noticed that Kit Prug had a fairly large nose and cheap sherlock holmes-type hat.
"Yes indeed, they don't. Mostly they don't," replied Kit Prug, staring off into space. Randall tried not to keep looking at the sixties-style illustration on Kit Prug's t-shirt, a blonde pinup holding a coca cola. He usually avoided men who wore t-shirts or had tattoos of beautiful women. Did they want other men to look at them? "I have a theory," Kit Prug finally continued, "that people who like rain like it out of dread of outdoor events."
"Like agorophobia," Randall said.
"No," Kit Prug said. "Because they fear having to participate in any kind of sports or social events where they may be tested, and the rain causes postponements."
"I like outdoor events," Randall lied.
"You say that because you like rain?" He suddenly seemed eager, eyes sharp and glinty with excitement. "I thought so. I can read people. It's my gift." He said the word, 'gift', with a shiny far away look in his eyes. Randall's stomach, the seat of his consciousness, roiled with alarm. It looked as if the stranger in the silly hat might continue for some time.
"Looks like my friend is ready to go," Randall said, standing and pointing at the store with an apologetic smile. The Cap'n was examining the singing carp toy with a thoughtful, discerning frown. He appeared to be looking it over for a price tag.
Kit Prug looked back at him without speaking, somewhat sheepishly, as Randall hurried into the store and was immediately confronted by the short but powerfully built woman behind the till.
"Was Kit bothering you?" she asked sharply.
"Oh, no, not at all, I enjoyed our talk," Randall stuttered. She appeared very capable of embarassing confrontation and violence, and Randall feared both and had always found rain to be a blessed relief, especially in the summertime, on school days, and felt the urgent need to do his natural thing again.
On the way out of the lodge with the Cap'n clutching his new carp and cursing the overcast sky, Kit Prug accosted them and handed Randall a business card that would not change his life except for a few awkward social encounters where it provided a slightly amusing story.
He came out and smiled at the father with the fish lake lodge baseball cap and the weaselly eyes who didn't even look at him and walked through the big empty dining room and wondered if they were still waiting for him on the boat moared secretly in the weeds where the people on the dock couldn't see it because the Cap'n preferred secrecy and not paying fees for anything or if they'd given up and cast off and gone back out on the lake, leaving him to drink in the lodge all alone the rest of the day. As Randall enjoyed this daydream he passed the little store in the lodge and saw the Cap'n purchasing more cheap beer, and he sighed and sat down on a bench cut out of logs like everything else in the lodge so as to give visitors that old-timey camping feel when they came to purchase their candy and bait and beer and post-cards and plastic mounted singing fish, and the other person sitting on the bench was Kit Prug, who turned to Randall and said hello.
"Nice day, isn't it?" Kit Prug said to Randall. "If you like it a little rainy."
"Most people don't," Randall replied, trying to be funny because he felt threatened. He noticed that Kit Prug had a fairly large nose and cheap sherlock holmes-type hat.
"Yes indeed, they don't. Mostly they don't," replied Kit Prug, staring off into space. Randall tried not to keep looking at the sixties-style illustration on Kit Prug's t-shirt, a blonde pinup holding a coca cola. He usually avoided men who wore t-shirts or had tattoos of beautiful women. Did they want other men to look at them? "I have a theory," Kit Prug finally continued, "that people who like rain like it out of dread of outdoor events."
"Like agorophobia," Randall said.
"No," Kit Prug said. "Because they fear having to participate in any kind of sports or social events where they may be tested, and the rain causes postponements."
"I like outdoor events," Randall lied.
"You say that because you like rain?" He suddenly seemed eager, eyes sharp and glinty with excitement. "I thought so. I can read people. It's my gift." He said the word, 'gift', with a shiny far away look in his eyes. Randall's stomach, the seat of his consciousness, roiled with alarm. It looked as if the stranger in the silly hat might continue for some time.
"Looks like my friend is ready to go," Randall said, standing and pointing at the store with an apologetic smile. The Cap'n was examining the singing carp toy with a thoughtful, discerning frown. He appeared to be looking it over for a price tag.
Kit Prug looked back at him without speaking, somewhat sheepishly, as Randall hurried into the store and was immediately confronted by the short but powerfully built woman behind the till.
"Was Kit bothering you?" she asked sharply.
"Oh, no, not at all, I enjoyed our talk," Randall stuttered. She appeared very capable of embarassing confrontation and violence, and Randall feared both and had always found rain to be a blessed relief, especially in the summertime, on school days, and felt the urgent need to do his natural thing again.
On the way out of the lodge with the Cap'n clutching his new carp and cursing the overcast sky, Kit Prug accosted them and handed Randall a business card that would not change his life except for a few awkward social encounters where it provided a slightly amusing story.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Fish Lake Strikes Back; Fish Lake Oddysey Part II
Randall decided not to immediately tell the Capn or the others about having to do his natural thing. He knew that eventually he would have to tell them about it, because nature is relentless and the need for the natural thing would only get worse, and the only way he could avoid having to eventually tell them would be if they all suddenly decided to give up on the fishing and tear off back to shore before he was compelled to tell them about it, or perhaps if one of them suddenly felt the need to do their natural thing, and would not be reticent about it, would be a sort of champion of the natural thing for Randall's sake, without ever knowing that they were doing it for Randall's sake, but thinking they were only doing it for their own sake...so that Randall would not have to tell everyone about his need and would also not have to feel beholden to any possible natural thing champion. And of course that would not happen, because it had never happened, in any of the many instances where Randall as a member of a group in a situation where restrooms were inaccessible except by concerted group exertion and unhappiness and where as a result Randall's need for his natural thing had manifested its amazingly inconvenient self like a secret baby that cried and cried to Randall and that he kept trying to shush, and never in all those circumstances had any champion of the natural thing declared themselves and always the baby had cried and cried louder and louder and shrieked and howled and finally Randall had been forced to clear his throat and mention that he would probably have to do his natural thing at some point in time not too distant from the present.
Didn't anyone else ever have to do their natural thing? Was everyone else in the world clanging around with innards of steel? There had to be others in the group, Randall decided, who had their own babies to quiet, their own imperative need to do their natural thing but who maybe had their own reasons to keep quiet. Maybe they were congenitally unable to inconvenience a group of people with their own biological situation, like the famous astronomer who died of ruptured bowels rather than tell the king he had to use the bathroom. Perhaps all this time that he'd been suffering humiliation and guilt for the intrusions of his natural thing, there'd been others in the groups, suffering irreparable internal damage, slowly but quietly, and to whom his announcement of his natural thing had been a blessed miracle, an unbelievable deliverance from unfathomable levels of self-induced mortification and discomfort. Why, they might secretly worship him as their champion of the natural thing, who feared no level of mockery and scoffed at the cruel jibes of the bowelless, willing to go to any level of debasement, to be the butt of a million tasteless jokes, in order that some quiet sufferers might get unearned relief.
Randall felt a burst of glowing pride, tears started in his eyes, the internal weeping grew faint, and he began to rise proudly to his feet. He had a declaration to make.
"Sit down, what are you doing? You're rocking the boat!" said the other Passenger sharply.
"You need another beer?" said the Capn. "Take it easy, I'll get it."
"I have to go to the bathroom," said the First Mate.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Fish Lake Oddyssey; Un Novellette
Whenever Randall thought of Fish Lake, he thought of the trees, lots of them, crowding against the shore as if they were about to jump in, like pilgrims at the banks of the Ganges, or Ganghes, or however it's spelled. But they didn't jump in - they were trees, and were hardly about to start moving around, why did he have such thoughts?
The trees also reminded him of the time that he'd been out on the lake with his father and had to go do his natural thing, and when he told his father his father couldn't believe it, and sighed and looked up at the sky for some kind of sign, maybe for an angel to descend out of the sky and hover over their boat and tell him that it was all right if he wanted to hold his son over the edge of the boat and let him do his natural thing into the lake, nobody was watching... But no angel came down and his father grumped and told his older brother Rick to pull in his line, and his older brother Rick cried "What? Why?" and when he heard why he lunged across the boat to slug Randall in the arm and their father squawked and tried to karate chop Rick's arm and missed and stumbled and hurt his shin on one of the planks they had to sit on and he made a sound like a tire hissing and then he took off his hat to smite Rick and missed and caught his thumb in one of the little hooks in his fisherman's hat just like the TV show dads.
"Ga-Ah-Ah!...Rick!" he hissed between his teeth. "Just pull in the line!"
They pulled in their lines and then their father picked some things up and put them down in other places, and moved his tackle box, and manuevered their fishing poles around and shook his head and grumbled and picked up one of the fishing poles and put it down somewhere else and he told Rick to sit back down and he told Randall to move a little left and Randall looked at him and he told him to move again and Randall moved right and their father told him to move back and he leaned backward and their father made a sound like a tire hissing and told him to just stay where the hell he was and then he told Rick to sit back down and he made Rick move the cooler down below his seat and then he told Randall to hold on and he crouched by the motor and unhooked something and pulled something down lower out a little and then he pulled on the cord and the motor didn't start so he did it a few more times, and his hat fell off and his hair stood up in a manner undignified for a man with receding hair and Randall tried very hard to stifle a laugh and Rick hit him and the motor started for just a second and then it stopped and Rick stood up again and told their father that he had to choke it and their father suggested something else he could choke and told him to sit back down. But he did apparently choke it because then the motor started and he revved it up and checked something and told Rick to sit down and told Randall to hold on and the boat started off with the motor revving and roaring like they were going 100 miles and hour but they were doing about 15 but Randall found it thrilling and enjoyed the spray of water but only too soon their father let the motor die down and they drifted.
Randall could see the trees of the East shore only twenty yards away, slowly drifting closer and closer. Their father had a paddle out and was sweating and huffing and splashing and the boat moved very slowly toward the trees.
As they approached the trees and the shore, Rick let fly a remark suggesting the possibility that there might be bears in the trees, and suggested Randall carry a couple rocks in with him.
"There's no bears," their father said, gasping and panting. The approaching trees took on a looming, darkening aspect as Randall considered the possibility of the bears. They were a few yards from the shore when Randall suggested that he'd rather go use the bathrooms in the lodge. Their father responded by swatting Rick with his own baseball hat, an impressive maneuver that caught both boys by surprise by its misdirection.
"There's no bears," their father said, gasping and panting. The approaching trees took on a looming, darkening aspect as Randall considered the possibility of the bears. They were a few yards from the shore when Randall suggested that he'd rather go use the bathrooms in the lodge. Their father responded by swatting Rick with his own baseball hat, an impressive maneuver that caught both boys by surprise by its misdirection.
"Rick! Go with him!"
Their father clambered up to the front of the boat and hopped into the shallow water and held the boat by a rope and told Rick to climb onto a nearby rock and Rick clambered onto the rock and Randall asked if he could move the boat around the rock so that he could hop onto the shore and his father assured him that they couldn't and told him to climb out and Rick shouted for Randall to hurry and Randall asked if they could move around to the other side and his voice took on a higher pitch that signified panic and his father spoke soothingly and held out his free hand to give him a boost and Randall ended up clambering onto his father's back and putting a shoe into his kidney and scrabbled onto the rock and up the slope to where Rick had already turned and started into the bushes and told Randall to go over to the other bushes and no he couldn't use the same bush and Randall found a bush and began to do his natural thing and looked up and could see another fishing boat clearly through a gap in the trees about twenty yards away.
Now adult, Randall smiled and sighed at the memory and shook his head when Captain Lance asked him what was so funny and tugged on his pole a little and looked out over the lake and dug on the natural beauty all around him and reflected on the bittersweetness of memory and the past and time and smiled at the First Mate and the other Passenger tossed back another big gulp of his Cold One and realized that now all of the sudden he had to do his natural thing.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Dream 1: Mickey Mouse is Real (from Hagenart's Five Favorite Dreams)
This dream occurred during a family party at my parents' home. I believe I was living at home at the time, in 1991. I had to use the bathroom, and went downstairs to use the restroom in the basement. My nephews were watching TV and trying to pull the arms off a stuffed gorilla which I'd given to my mother for Christmas a few years previously. I went into the bathroom, and discovered that whichever nephew had previously used it had not flushed the toilet. Sharply annoyed, I flushed the toilet and imagined dropping the nephew head-first into the bowl. As I used the bathroom, a plastic sword emerged from under the bathroom door.
"Who's that?" I said. Then I heard a thud like someone's forehead hitting the door, and the sword slid free, a foot or so forward from the door. A moment later, a tiny hand reached under the door jamb, trying to reach the sword, unsuccessfully. I flushed the toilet and grabbed the sword, gently poking at the tiny hand with its tip. The hand retracted with a squawk.
When I emerged from the bathroom with the sword in hand, no nephew was in sight. I walked down the hall to the family room, where all three nephews were watching TV. "Whose sword is this?" I asked. None of them replied. I put the sword on the table at the end of the room and walked back down the hall to my bedroom. It occurred to me as I walked down the hall that the sword belonged to Mickey Mouse. I laid down on my bed and realized that it had been a long time since I had taken a moment to sit or lay down and do nothing. It had been days, maybe weeks, maybe months. It felt good to lay on the bed and do nothing and not think about what I should be doing. At that moment it occurred to me that Mickey Mouse had given the sword to me. It was getting dark outside, but I did not turn out the light. The room became dim, and at that moment I realized that Mickey Mouse was as real as I myself was. I realized that all the characters in all the cartoons were real. I felt that I myself was a cartoon. This realization gave me profound peace.
I eventually walked back down the hall and saw the nephews running up the stairs. My sister was calling for them get in the car. I looked for the sword on the table but someone had taken it. I assumed one of my nephews had grabbed it, but when I went upstairs and asked my sister about the plastic sword she furrowed her brow and looked confused. "I don't think so," she said. "I don't know."
That night I dreamt that had an enormously long right leg and that my right foot had giant wheels like a tractor and I skated everywhere on it. The tall witch on the tricycle could not prevail upon me and everything I touched turned to plastic.
Interpretation:
The nephews symbolize family fertility, nature, and also filth and bugs. The plastic sword represents the sterile beauty of commercialism. I claimed the sword as a mission to protect the world from all monsters that can be killed or scared off by dull-edged weapons. The bathroom indicates my tower, my refuge of strength and security. The toilet was not flushed because nature is unreliable and has terrible manners. Mickey Mouse is real. My intense vision-like moment of crystal realization symbolizes what a great idea might feel like to a genius like Einstein or Archimedes. The plastic sword's disappearance indicates that I have sneaky nephews. The giant right foot in my dream symbolizes cool ideas that may someday be possible with advances in prosthetic technology.
"Who's that?" I said. Then I heard a thud like someone's forehead hitting the door, and the sword slid free, a foot or so forward from the door. A moment later, a tiny hand reached under the door jamb, trying to reach the sword, unsuccessfully. I flushed the toilet and grabbed the sword, gently poking at the tiny hand with its tip. The hand retracted with a squawk.
When I emerged from the bathroom with the sword in hand, no nephew was in sight. I walked down the hall to the family room, where all three nephews were watching TV. "Whose sword is this?" I asked. None of them replied. I put the sword on the table at the end of the room and walked back down the hall to my bedroom. It occurred to me as I walked down the hall that the sword belonged to Mickey Mouse. I laid down on my bed and realized that it had been a long time since I had taken a moment to sit or lay down and do nothing. It had been days, maybe weeks, maybe months. It felt good to lay on the bed and do nothing and not think about what I should be doing. At that moment it occurred to me that Mickey Mouse had given the sword to me. It was getting dark outside, but I did not turn out the light. The room became dim, and at that moment I realized that Mickey Mouse was as real as I myself was. I realized that all the characters in all the cartoons were real. I felt that I myself was a cartoon. This realization gave me profound peace.
I eventually walked back down the hall and saw the nephews running up the stairs. My sister was calling for them get in the car. I looked for the sword on the table but someone had taken it. I assumed one of my nephews had grabbed it, but when I went upstairs and asked my sister about the plastic sword she furrowed her brow and looked confused. "I don't think so," she said. "I don't know."
That night I dreamt that had an enormously long right leg and that my right foot had giant wheels like a tractor and I skated everywhere on it. The tall witch on the tricycle could not prevail upon me and everything I touched turned to plastic.
Interpretation:
The nephews symbolize family fertility, nature, and also filth and bugs. The plastic sword represents the sterile beauty of commercialism. I claimed the sword as a mission to protect the world from all monsters that can be killed or scared off by dull-edged weapons. The bathroom indicates my tower, my refuge of strength and security. The toilet was not flushed because nature is unreliable and has terrible manners. Mickey Mouse is real. My intense vision-like moment of crystal realization symbolizes what a great idea might feel like to a genius like Einstein or Archimedes. The plastic sword's disappearance indicates that I have sneaky nephews. The giant right foot in my dream symbolizes cool ideas that may someday be possible with advances in prosthetic technology.
Monday, June 23, 2008
The Foothill Dark Wooden Box (From 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)
Eventually I moved into a horrible dark wooden box on Foothill, near a gas station and the liquor store and walking distance from a supermarket. The dark wooden box had fake dark wood interior panelling with such an extraordinarily unpleasant texture that I couldn't bear to touch it or even come within two feet of the walls, the decorating of which I left to the spiders.
While living in the box and working at an architect's office I experienced a brief spasm of relatively lucid thought and decided to quit my job and pursue my dreams of becoming an artist for as long as I could live off my credit line. I pursued those dreams by long morning walks, feverish hours of artistic composition, and occasional trips to the liquor store. I sustained those dreams with regular trips to the gas station's ATM for hits to the old Available Cash Credit Line.
The long morning walks became longer and longer, extending into the early afternoons; the feverish hours of artistic composition became desultory evenings, and the occasional trips became middling to frequent to some cherished friendships with the staff and other regular customers of liquor store #51.
The regular trips to the ATM and the artistic dreams and the walks and everything else ended all at once on one afternoon when I discovered that credit card companies can change their mind about your credit line whenever they feel like it - unlike a savings account, which they can only change their mind about once. So I had to go back to work.
My landlord at the dark box on Foothill was an incredibly vigorous and healthy man fifty years my senior named Chuck (name changed, I don't know why, I'll never see him again and he'll never read this). Chuck originally lived one floor above me and was always running up and down the stairs on his way to the gym where he vigorously pumped iron and told people how happy he was to be divorced. He was especialy happy to talk about the joy of his divorce with the fifteen or so college-aged young women who lived directly above my dark box and across the hallway from Chuck. He made fast friends with all of them and dragged his telescope over to their apartment and helped them with various furniture moving and handyman type projects. He eventually became the apartment manager by complaining to everyone about how badly run and organized the complex was and blaming it all on the previous apartment manager until she'd left and he'd been chosen by whatever mysterious process stupid rich people have to choose their underlings and flunkies.
The fifteen or twenty or so young women who lived above me made an incredible amount of noise all the time by synchronizing their television, stereo system, vaccum cleaner, and mindless screams of youthful abandon to reach maximum volume at unpredictable intervals throughout the course of the day or night in order to fully establish their presence in the ears and minds of all the apartment dwellers in the complex and the surrounding neighborhoods, all in the hopes of someday being discovered by some big shot in the Noise business who would hear them and appreciate their decibelic potential and pay them money to keep people awake all the time.
But they didn't bank on having a creepy unemployed neighbor downstairs who always wore bathrobes and never shaved and sometimes staggered upstairs to knock on their door and smile apologetically and creep them out and after a few visits from el creepo they gave up on the noise business. But they schemed revenge, and eventually managed to insinuate to Chuck that the peeping tom that some of the tenants had complained about might be the creepy unemployed guy in the bathrobe who lived below them.
So one day as I returned from my daily walk, sweating and tired and wondering how it could be that I could walk myself half to death every day and still be gaining weight, I ran into Chuck, who just happened to be coming out of the apartment complex and poking around the front lawn and making as if to be examining the grass or something like any normal apartment manager would pretend to be doing so as to arrange a chance meeting with a tenant that they had some kind of vague problem with.
"How you doing, Andy?" Chuck asked me. I replied something or other, I liked Chuck all right and actually kind of welcomed having any human to talk to as my life was somewhat hermit-like at the time, but I had no interest in anything he said and couldn't think of a single thing that we could really ever say to each other because I thought he was a moron. We talked for a bit and then he told me that some of the female tenants had complained about a peeping tom. He shook his head angrily. "Boy, I'd like to catch the guy doing it," he said. "I'd hit him. I'd punch him right in the face." He made a significant look to me, as if he'd said something that only I in the whole world would find meaningful. He also told me the peeping tom had been seen in a baseball cap. He went on for a while and then left me to go prowl around the lawn again.
Only later did I realize that he might have suspected me of being the peeping tom, and that he might have been trying to scare me into making some kind of admission, or into guilty sweating or something. By the time I'd realized that he'd caught the actual peeping tom, or thought he had, and confronted him in front of the complex so loudly that I and several others came out of our apartments to see him shaking his fist at a much taller and younger man, threatening over and over again to "knock you right on your back." I was glad for Chuck to have found the villain, but the possibility of violence unnerved me enough that I crept back into my dark box.
Eventually after having to get a job and actually look at my finances I decided that I couldn't afford to live in the dark box anymore. Chuck told me to make sure and clean behind the oven and fridge and described the complicated and physically stressful process whereby these appliances might be moved away from the wall so that the black disgusting substances that tended to accumulate behind heavy appliances could be cleaned out with various chemicals and abrasive devices. He told me that if I cleaned behind these appliances that I would surely get my full $300 deposit back except for the $25 fee which was not refundable.
The friends who'd agreed to help me clean the dark box ended up watching a Karl Malone movie on old channel 20 and didn't come by until it was dark and I'd exhausted myself by looking through some of my personal papers and giving myself philosophical vertigo over the vanity of existence. They came way too late to help with the cleaning so we vacuumed a little and tried not to disturb the spiders on the fake wood walls and then we decided to go get some dinner and we got in my car and pulled away and saw a little boy carrying a gas can.
My friend Brian said we should stop and help him and I said something about Nature's Way and kept driving because I was still bitter about them coming over so late. We didn't clean any after dinner either and we drove to my new home which was Brian's couch.
Chuck probably still felt bad about suspecting me of being the peeping tom, so he only deducted $30 from my deposit and must have cleaned the back of the oven himself.
While living in the box and working at an architect's office I experienced a brief spasm of relatively lucid thought and decided to quit my job and pursue my dreams of becoming an artist for as long as I could live off my credit line. I pursued those dreams by long morning walks, feverish hours of artistic composition, and occasional trips to the liquor store. I sustained those dreams with regular trips to the gas station's ATM for hits to the old Available Cash Credit Line.
The long morning walks became longer and longer, extending into the early afternoons; the feverish hours of artistic composition became desultory evenings, and the occasional trips became middling to frequent to some cherished friendships with the staff and other regular customers of liquor store #51.
The regular trips to the ATM and the artistic dreams and the walks and everything else ended all at once on one afternoon when I discovered that credit card companies can change their mind about your credit line whenever they feel like it - unlike a savings account, which they can only change their mind about once. So I had to go back to work.
My landlord at the dark box on Foothill was an incredibly vigorous and healthy man fifty years my senior named Chuck (name changed, I don't know why, I'll never see him again and he'll never read this). Chuck originally lived one floor above me and was always running up and down the stairs on his way to the gym where he vigorously pumped iron and told people how happy he was to be divorced. He was especialy happy to talk about the joy of his divorce with the fifteen or so college-aged young women who lived directly above my dark box and across the hallway from Chuck. He made fast friends with all of them and dragged his telescope over to their apartment and helped them with various furniture moving and handyman type projects. He eventually became the apartment manager by complaining to everyone about how badly run and organized the complex was and blaming it all on the previous apartment manager until she'd left and he'd been chosen by whatever mysterious process stupid rich people have to choose their underlings and flunkies.
The fifteen or twenty or so young women who lived above me made an incredible amount of noise all the time by synchronizing their television, stereo system, vaccum cleaner, and mindless screams of youthful abandon to reach maximum volume at unpredictable intervals throughout the course of the day or night in order to fully establish their presence in the ears and minds of all the apartment dwellers in the complex and the surrounding neighborhoods, all in the hopes of someday being discovered by some big shot in the Noise business who would hear them and appreciate their decibelic potential and pay them money to keep people awake all the time.
But they didn't bank on having a creepy unemployed neighbor downstairs who always wore bathrobes and never shaved and sometimes staggered upstairs to knock on their door and smile apologetically and creep them out and after a few visits from el creepo they gave up on the noise business. But they schemed revenge, and eventually managed to insinuate to Chuck that the peeping tom that some of the tenants had complained about might be the creepy unemployed guy in the bathrobe who lived below them.
So one day as I returned from my daily walk, sweating and tired and wondering how it could be that I could walk myself half to death every day and still be gaining weight, I ran into Chuck, who just happened to be coming out of the apartment complex and poking around the front lawn and making as if to be examining the grass or something like any normal apartment manager would pretend to be doing so as to arrange a chance meeting with a tenant that they had some kind of vague problem with.
"How you doing, Andy?" Chuck asked me. I replied something or other, I liked Chuck all right and actually kind of welcomed having any human to talk to as my life was somewhat hermit-like at the time, but I had no interest in anything he said and couldn't think of a single thing that we could really ever say to each other because I thought he was a moron. We talked for a bit and then he told me that some of the female tenants had complained about a peeping tom. He shook his head angrily. "Boy, I'd like to catch the guy doing it," he said. "I'd hit him. I'd punch him right in the face." He made a significant look to me, as if he'd said something that only I in the whole world would find meaningful. He also told me the peeping tom had been seen in a baseball cap. He went on for a while and then left me to go prowl around the lawn again.
Only later did I realize that he might have suspected me of being the peeping tom, and that he might have been trying to scare me into making some kind of admission, or into guilty sweating or something. By the time I'd realized that he'd caught the actual peeping tom, or thought he had, and confronted him in front of the complex so loudly that I and several others came out of our apartments to see him shaking his fist at a much taller and younger man, threatening over and over again to "knock you right on your back." I was glad for Chuck to have found the villain, but the possibility of violence unnerved me enough that I crept back into my dark box.
Eventually after having to get a job and actually look at my finances I decided that I couldn't afford to live in the dark box anymore. Chuck told me to make sure and clean behind the oven and fridge and described the complicated and physically stressful process whereby these appliances might be moved away from the wall so that the black disgusting substances that tended to accumulate behind heavy appliances could be cleaned out with various chemicals and abrasive devices. He told me that if I cleaned behind these appliances that I would surely get my full $300 deposit back except for the $25 fee which was not refundable.
The friends who'd agreed to help me clean the dark box ended up watching a Karl Malone movie on old channel 20 and didn't come by until it was dark and I'd exhausted myself by looking through some of my personal papers and giving myself philosophical vertigo over the vanity of existence. They came way too late to help with the cleaning so we vacuumed a little and tried not to disturb the spiders on the fake wood walls and then we decided to go get some dinner and we got in my car and pulled away and saw a little boy carrying a gas can.
My friend Brian said we should stop and help him and I said something about Nature's Way and kept driving because I was still bitter about them coming over so late. We didn't clean any after dinner either and we drove to my new home which was Brian's couch.
Chuck probably still felt bad about suspecting me of being the peeping tom, so he only deducted $30 from my deposit and must have cleaned the back of the oven himself.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Relocation 5: South Temple (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)
At some point my friend Amir talked me into moving in with him and another roommate in their house on South Temple. "You can't live with your parents forever," he told me.
"Well of course not," I agreed. "Eventually, I will die."
Amir took me to see the house even though I remember that I'd already decided, or I should say my girlfriend at the time had already decided, that I would move in with them.
It was one of those classy old style pioneer type houses with an ornate wooden railing on the stairs and a very convenient toilet in the laundry room. An indescribable smell permeated the house, a kind of grand old house moldy-wood type smell mixed with spilled beer mixed with garbage. It reminded me of places I'd visited as a child that I'd been glad that I didn't live in. The smell did, not the house. Well, the house did too, but since I was never able to experience the house without the smell, except on the very last day after we'd cleaned it for the first time, it's difficult to judge fairly, except to try and imagine how the house looked in my mind while standing in an open field far away from it.
I don't remember much about visiting the house with Amir when he was trying to talk me into moving in even though I was already going to, except that we went upstairs and took a look at the bedroom where I would be moving in and I met the guy who was moving out. I don't remember him at all, but I remember he had all these comic book style illustrations on the walls that I thought were really cool - mostly elfin people with swords - they were copied from Japanese comics. For some reason those illustrations and the guy's furniture made me view the room as hip and an adventurous place to live.
But he took all his illustrations and hip drawing tables and I moved in and filled the room with my banker boxes of books and papers and junk and baskets of clothes. And the bunk bed, the only furniture left in the room when I moved in because it belonged to the landlord, and the previous tenant had told me it was cool to sleep in it because his girlfriend liked to sleep in the top bunk. I thought he was referring to some kind of hip sexy stuff but I didn't get it.
I hated sleeping in the bunk bed because I didn't want to sleep on top because I am afraid of heights and I didn't want to sleep on the bottom because I couldn't see the top and I produced several horror movies in my mind that featured demonic little ghost kids lowering their evil little heads over the side of the top bunk and grinning at me like the little kid my brother and I met when I was young and church-going and my brother dragged me to do his home-teaching with him and the family we visited was a prominent family in the ward and they had three sons and the youngest would jabber to us in a satanic tongue and run around the room in a pcp-related state of agitation and he swatted his older brother's head with a ruler and the older brother glared at him for half the lesson before he took an entire fisher price parking garage and brought it down on his little brother's head and my brother and I were speechless with shock and also with half expectation half dread for some kind of supernaturally evil reaction from that little brother but he only screamed and cried and the father looked sadly at the older brother as if he'd said something mildly out of line.
Another anxiety was the window of my bedroom which they told me not to open but I did because I like the fresh air and I suffered an invasion of box elder bugs from the tree that grew against the house, and I shut the window and breathed the rancid stale air of the house but during their mating season they kept coming in through the cracks between the molecules of the window and they kept coming and dying on the window sill and then the floor around the window and I bought raid and I sprayed the window and the floor and the room stunk and I thought maybe I would sustain brain damage from the fumes and I took to sleeping on the couch which smelled like beer but the dining room at the end of the couch had a giant painting by the landlady of two frogs kissing over a fiery red background which I did not sleep well under. So I went back upstairs to sleep.
The kitchen gave me anxiety because it stunk and I could not eat from my roommates' plates because I suspected them of being bad dishwashers and leaving their plates crawling with germs, and when I discovered in the course of my first week that the kitchen had no microwave but had a nice stove (which Kevin [name changed] demonstrated for me by lighting the pilot light and at the moment he crouched down with the match in his teeth I knew I would never be using the stove) and then also I knew that 75% of all the meals I liked to prepare for myself I would not be able to prepare because they required food irradiated by microwaves. So I ate mostly peanut butter sandwiches and beer, which helped with my anxiety quite a lot.
And at another point Amir achieved a girlfriend, an amazing coup for a man who'd come to this country from Malaysia to study engineering and ended up sleeping mostly under his desk in the engineering building at the U or on the couch at the band house, an incredibly filthy house lived in by the members of two local rock bands and the least particular of their girlfriends whom I happened to know because one of their girlfriends who was too particular to live there also happened to be dating myself at the time along with several other people, which is how I met Amir.
Who in any case finally met a girlfriend of his own, who moved in with him/us and ignored Kevin (name changed - no actually that might have been his name after all) and I until Amir went on a trip for a couple weeks and she began wearing exciting clothes and talking to us more and two-timing Amir with a creepy guy in a cowboy hat. She told me about Detroit and her brother who would only sleep with virgins, which mathematically tended to keep his relationships to a short overall average duration. She told me that Detroit was segregated and her family lived in the white part but she wasn't like that because of Amir, who her perverted brother didn't like and spoke of with racial epithets.
She eventually broke up with Amir and he eventually gave up looking for jobs in America because his student visa expired after he'd made friends and slept on couches and under desks and received a Master's in Engineering and given up his religion for booze and loose women, and after all that he cursed America and moved back to Kuala Lumpur to live the good life.
But this is all getting ahead of myself, because the landlady who refused to put in a sprinkler system and watered her lawn the "natural way" with a hose in one hand and a cigarette in her other hand and who enraged her South Temple neighbors with their BMWs and million dollar houses by never fixing up her house and renting it out to loser college guys finally decided that enough was enough and she gave us until the end of the month to move out, which coincided with Amir getting on the plane for Malaysia - almost. Actually he wouldn't be getting on the plane until a week after we were kicked out. So he planned to go stay with his ex-girlfriend for a week, in Detroit, and then take the plane back to Salt Lake in order to take the plane to Malaysia.
"Will you have time to hang out in Salt Lake before you get on the plane to Malaysia?" I asked him.
"Why would I do that?" he asked me, honestly puzzled.
So we had a party on the last night before we cleaned the house and moved out the next day, and Kevin (I guess that was his name) and Amir and I bought tequila, and we discovered that the liquor store sold margarita mixes that were 17% alcohol, because the tequila was already mixed in, which we purchased to mix with more tequila. We also bought juice and fruit and vodka and other cheap liquors and mixed jungle juice, which I'd never tasted but an hour or so before the party started and at least two hours before any guests arrived, I tried some of the jungle juice and was surprised at how delicious it was, so I poured myself a tall glass of it, and Kevin and Amir also poured themselves a tall glass. It was like punch.
We had a few more tall glasses, and then eventually guests started arriving, and about 15 minutes into the party I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life, and about 30 minutes into the party I made offensive remarks to a woman at the party that I'd worked with at the time, and about 45 minutes into the party I felt sick enough to stagger upstairs and try to take a nap. And by about an hour after the party had begun I'd crawled out of my room and barricaded myself in the upstairs bathroom, where I spent the next six or seven hours hyperventilating over the toilet in a desperate effort not to throw up, and ignoring the repeated pounding on the bathroom door from party-goers who'd not been able to find the laundry room, or didn't know the laundry room had a toilet, or who'd tried to get into the laundry room and found someone else using it. Eventually the pounding grew more faint, as people began to give up on the upstairs bathroom or began to leave the party.
Amir got so drunk and sick that he began to pack for his trip in the middle of the party, dragging luggage from his bedroom downstairs, through the mass of people and out to Kevin's car. I later heard, from Kevin, that he'd been sick the first time in the middle of the dancing, then on the stairs, then in the laundry room, then his garbage can, and all over his sheets. He'd slept on a bare mattress that night. Thinking about my time in the upstairs bathroom, and reflecting on the number of people who must have been going through the laundry room, I couldn't help but feel a little guilty as Kevin told me this story, all the while he staggered around the house helping me clean the next morning, still terribly pale.
"I'd take Amir to the airport, if his stuff would fit in my car," I told him.
He told me he'd already taken Amir in. Amir had wanted to leave an hour early, and they hadn't been able to wake me up even though they'd knocked on my bedroom door. "You must have been passed out," Kevin said.
"Oh yeah," I said, or something like that, remembering how weak I'd felt that morning and how it hadn't been too difficult to keep my eyes closed and ignore the knocking, even when Amir had opened the door a crack and said my name. But it was difficult to meet Kevin's glassy, bloodshot eyes, and I was relieved when he turned away to lift his side of the couch.
"Well of course not," I agreed. "Eventually, I will die."
Amir took me to see the house even though I remember that I'd already decided, or I should say my girlfriend at the time had already decided, that I would move in with them.
It was one of those classy old style pioneer type houses with an ornate wooden railing on the stairs and a very convenient toilet in the laundry room. An indescribable smell permeated the house, a kind of grand old house moldy-wood type smell mixed with spilled beer mixed with garbage. It reminded me of places I'd visited as a child that I'd been glad that I didn't live in. The smell did, not the house. Well, the house did too, but since I was never able to experience the house without the smell, except on the very last day after we'd cleaned it for the first time, it's difficult to judge fairly, except to try and imagine how the house looked in my mind while standing in an open field far away from it.
I don't remember much about visiting the house with Amir when he was trying to talk me into moving in even though I was already going to, except that we went upstairs and took a look at the bedroom where I would be moving in and I met the guy who was moving out. I don't remember him at all, but I remember he had all these comic book style illustrations on the walls that I thought were really cool - mostly elfin people with swords - they were copied from Japanese comics. For some reason those illustrations and the guy's furniture made me view the room as hip and an adventurous place to live.
But he took all his illustrations and hip drawing tables and I moved in and filled the room with my banker boxes of books and papers and junk and baskets of clothes. And the bunk bed, the only furniture left in the room when I moved in because it belonged to the landlord, and the previous tenant had told me it was cool to sleep in it because his girlfriend liked to sleep in the top bunk. I thought he was referring to some kind of hip sexy stuff but I didn't get it.
I hated sleeping in the bunk bed because I didn't want to sleep on top because I am afraid of heights and I didn't want to sleep on the bottom because I couldn't see the top and I produced several horror movies in my mind that featured demonic little ghost kids lowering their evil little heads over the side of the top bunk and grinning at me like the little kid my brother and I met when I was young and church-going and my brother dragged me to do his home-teaching with him and the family we visited was a prominent family in the ward and they had three sons and the youngest would jabber to us in a satanic tongue and run around the room in a pcp-related state of agitation and he swatted his older brother's head with a ruler and the older brother glared at him for half the lesson before he took an entire fisher price parking garage and brought it down on his little brother's head and my brother and I were speechless with shock and also with half expectation half dread for some kind of supernaturally evil reaction from that little brother but he only screamed and cried and the father looked sadly at the older brother as if he'd said something mildly out of line.
Another anxiety was the window of my bedroom which they told me not to open but I did because I like the fresh air and I suffered an invasion of box elder bugs from the tree that grew against the house, and I shut the window and breathed the rancid stale air of the house but during their mating season they kept coming in through the cracks between the molecules of the window and they kept coming and dying on the window sill and then the floor around the window and I bought raid and I sprayed the window and the floor and the room stunk and I thought maybe I would sustain brain damage from the fumes and I took to sleeping on the couch which smelled like beer but the dining room at the end of the couch had a giant painting by the landlady of two frogs kissing over a fiery red background which I did not sleep well under. So I went back upstairs to sleep.
The kitchen gave me anxiety because it stunk and I could not eat from my roommates' plates because I suspected them of being bad dishwashers and leaving their plates crawling with germs, and when I discovered in the course of my first week that the kitchen had no microwave but had a nice stove (which Kevin [name changed] demonstrated for me by lighting the pilot light and at the moment he crouched down with the match in his teeth I knew I would never be using the stove) and then also I knew that 75% of all the meals I liked to prepare for myself I would not be able to prepare because they required food irradiated by microwaves. So I ate mostly peanut butter sandwiches and beer, which helped with my anxiety quite a lot.
And at another point Amir achieved a girlfriend, an amazing coup for a man who'd come to this country from Malaysia to study engineering and ended up sleeping mostly under his desk in the engineering building at the U or on the couch at the band house, an incredibly filthy house lived in by the members of two local rock bands and the least particular of their girlfriends whom I happened to know because one of their girlfriends who was too particular to live there also happened to be dating myself at the time along with several other people, which is how I met Amir.
Who in any case finally met a girlfriend of his own, who moved in with him/us and ignored Kevin (name changed - no actually that might have been his name after all) and I until Amir went on a trip for a couple weeks and she began wearing exciting clothes and talking to us more and two-timing Amir with a creepy guy in a cowboy hat. She told me about Detroit and her brother who would only sleep with virgins, which mathematically tended to keep his relationships to a short overall average duration. She told me that Detroit was segregated and her family lived in the white part but she wasn't like that because of Amir, who her perverted brother didn't like and spoke of with racial epithets.
She eventually broke up with Amir and he eventually gave up looking for jobs in America because his student visa expired after he'd made friends and slept on couches and under desks and received a Master's in Engineering and given up his religion for booze and loose women, and after all that he cursed America and moved back to Kuala Lumpur to live the good life.
But this is all getting ahead of myself, because the landlady who refused to put in a sprinkler system and watered her lawn the "natural way" with a hose in one hand and a cigarette in her other hand and who enraged her South Temple neighbors with their BMWs and million dollar houses by never fixing up her house and renting it out to loser college guys finally decided that enough was enough and she gave us until the end of the month to move out, which coincided with Amir getting on the plane for Malaysia - almost. Actually he wouldn't be getting on the plane until a week after we were kicked out. So he planned to go stay with his ex-girlfriend for a week, in Detroit, and then take the plane back to Salt Lake in order to take the plane to Malaysia.
"Will you have time to hang out in Salt Lake before you get on the plane to Malaysia?" I asked him.
"Why would I do that?" he asked me, honestly puzzled.
So we had a party on the last night before we cleaned the house and moved out the next day, and Kevin (I guess that was his name) and Amir and I bought tequila, and we discovered that the liquor store sold margarita mixes that were 17% alcohol, because the tequila was already mixed in, which we purchased to mix with more tequila. We also bought juice and fruit and vodka and other cheap liquors and mixed jungle juice, which I'd never tasted but an hour or so before the party started and at least two hours before any guests arrived, I tried some of the jungle juice and was surprised at how delicious it was, so I poured myself a tall glass of it, and Kevin and Amir also poured themselves a tall glass. It was like punch.
We had a few more tall glasses, and then eventually guests started arriving, and about 15 minutes into the party I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life, and about 30 minutes into the party I made offensive remarks to a woman at the party that I'd worked with at the time, and about 45 minutes into the party I felt sick enough to stagger upstairs and try to take a nap. And by about an hour after the party had begun I'd crawled out of my room and barricaded myself in the upstairs bathroom, where I spent the next six or seven hours hyperventilating over the toilet in a desperate effort not to throw up, and ignoring the repeated pounding on the bathroom door from party-goers who'd not been able to find the laundry room, or didn't know the laundry room had a toilet, or who'd tried to get into the laundry room and found someone else using it. Eventually the pounding grew more faint, as people began to give up on the upstairs bathroom or began to leave the party.
Amir got so drunk and sick that he began to pack for his trip in the middle of the party, dragging luggage from his bedroom downstairs, through the mass of people and out to Kevin's car. I later heard, from Kevin, that he'd been sick the first time in the middle of the dancing, then on the stairs, then in the laundry room, then his garbage can, and all over his sheets. He'd slept on a bare mattress that night. Thinking about my time in the upstairs bathroom, and reflecting on the number of people who must have been going through the laundry room, I couldn't help but feel a little guilty as Kevin told me this story, all the while he staggered around the house helping me clean the next morning, still terribly pale.
"I'd take Amir to the airport, if his stuff would fit in my car," I told him.
He told me he'd already taken Amir in. Amir had wanted to leave an hour early, and they hadn't been able to wake me up even though they'd knocked on my bedroom door. "You must have been passed out," Kevin said.
"Oh yeah," I said, or something like that, remembering how weak I'd felt that morning and how it hadn't been too difficult to keep my eyes closed and ignore the knocking, even when Amir had opened the door a crack and said my name. But it was difficult to meet Kevin's glassy, bloodshot eyes, and I was relieved when he turned away to lift his side of the couch.
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