Nonculture

I’ll tell you one thing; sake does not stay hot for long.  That shit is annoying.  I’m tired of reheating the shit, so it’s back to Asbach and coke for the night. 

I think most of the guys I know, myself included, are going through the mid-life crisis.  But there’s a lot of weird shit about that, especially since it hasn’t been redefined since the last 1970’s Corvette ad.  It’s not like that now, and it happens before you are 40.  Acceleration of culture and all that shit.  And yeah, nobody wants a goddamn ‘Vette anymore.  And we aren’t really skirt chasing either.  Sure, we think about young, tight ass, but the allure is fleeting, pleasant; like the thought of a trip to strip club is, or how driving the latest 6 series would be when one passes us would be is.  But a strip club is out of the way, expensive, and somewhat of a pain in the ass, and a 6 series is expensive and impractical – both are hard to justify in daylight.  It’s not a genuine pursuit. 

We’re half dead; we know it, we accept it.  It’s ok.  We’re not trying to fight it off with sports cars or silicone face slaps these days.  But we are trying to accept it with the proper grace.

Ah, but what is the proper grace these days?  That is what we are trying to find out.  We’re bouncing around like pinballs between depression, rounds of golf, trips to Vegas that are disappointing,  hours spent at poker tables winning or losing (doesn’t matter), fishing, fuck – whatever – we’re fucking searching for what drove us when we were young.  The thing we don’t realize is that when we were young it was blind ambition, the world was wide open – it could be a career, rock star, family, lottery, all at the same impossible, improbable time.  Because we were young and naïve, aka stupid.  Now we have some mix and/or one of whatever of those.  And we wonder what might have been.  Even more importantly, it was ok NOT to have ambition and just be – it was ok to just live and see what happened.  I would be lying if I said I never thought about trying that shit – just being – traveling on a shoestring budget and going whichever way the wind blew, but I know where that road goes.  I’d be writing this on a 2 by 3 memo spiral memo pad from a bench at the bus station with the plastic from the tip of my shoelace if I tried that shit now.  And I’d smell like ass, but you know how it is.

Not that I speak for everybody, of course.  There are those who take risks.  I’ can understand the guy who divorces his wife and kicks the kids to the curb and gets a phat crib downtown to nail some hot talent every night. You gotta look good to try that one though.  Keep trim at Metro Muscle.  Wear expensive dark striped shirts and Lucky Jeans from Park Ave and leather sandals.  Your sideburns and smartly spiked hair should only be done by boutiques from within a 5 mile radius of Thornton Park.  Find a good coke dealer.  If you aren’t individually wealthy enough to tan during the day, self tan at an artificial place, but be sure that it looks natural, because people in that scene can tell the difference between a real tan (money) and a fake tan (has to work).  One misstep can cause a crisis in your carefully planned 2^nd adolescence.

You see, crisis comes in all forms, whether you are sitting on a bench at the bus station, or on your Adirondack on your 2 Million studio balcony overlooking Lake Eola.

The difference is definition of crisis.  To the person at the Waverly on their Adirondack, crisis is dropping a precious Chihuahua into the bushes next to a Mercedes AMG, where the Chihuahua might not feel comfortable because he prefers to only ride in Porches.  Whereas, to the person at the bus station, the crisis is the anal raping that could include getting A.I.D.S.  It’s always important to see things from both perspectives, and the lesson here is that from the perspective of near middle aged guys, they have it tough, but not as tough as near middle aged guys in the 70’s, because they all had to buy Corvettes. 

So shut up about that beating and raping, poor bus station person.  We all have our problems.  Jesus.

I dunno, I guess this is the way the day was supposed to wind up.  My girlfriend has been wanting to throw up Japanese food and Chardonnay all over bums at the crosswalk, and I gave my last two smokes away to some couple at Monkey Bar for some god fucking unknown reason.  I probably gave it to them because I just got paid and I feel rich for a day, and they were out, and why the fuck not.  Now, I’m not only wishing I had those two cigarettes, I’m wishing I had the chairs, and was at the bar, and maybe even wasn’t myself right now.

I’m at that corner of Central and whatever that godforsaken street Casey’s bar meets Central Avenue is.  Most natives know that sinkhole.  There is a bus stop there; usually filled by cabs, bums, drunks, people you don’t want to see at any given hour.  I am in this sinkhole now, having crawled here after slithering out of the elevator of Monkey bar, through Slingapour’s outside bar, and across bum park.

My usually reliable mental case of a cab driver hasn’t shown up, and Faith has slid down to her ass on a traffic light pole, wanting to spew all over passers by.  I’m left with her goddamn Prada purse that I bought her on sale in my hand while her eyes glaze at the passing rims, and I have a half broken cigarette in my mouth that I’ve pulled from my pocket that I’m desperate to light.  I’ve got plenty from my paycheck in my pocket, but at this moment, it doesn’t help me fix my cigarette, light it, get the cab here, fill my drink, help my girl throw up…fuck, I don’t know what the sequence is.  I don’t know what I want the sequence to be.  I guess I’m old now; part of me wants to be home too.  The magic mental midget cabbie carpet should be here already to whisk us home, where the girl will fall asleep in her panties on top of the covers and I’ll stay up writing, drunk, to try to say something interesting about something.

So, here I am, in about that situation. My usually reliable mental case of a cab driver and I got in a shouting match in the driveway because she didn’t like the puking in the cab.  But my girlfriend, it turns out, is very handy with a plastic bag and puke.  The cabbie couldn’t argue with no spillage, so she decided to argue with the possibility of spillage.  Which is a pretty thin argument, but as I mentioned, all of her marbles arent’ there.  So we went round and round, arguing in the driveway about the possibility of my girlfriend having puked on something in her precious cab.  I like those arguments.  Because I win them.  Even with slightly challenged people.  Maybe especially with.  Maybe only with.  I dunno.  I don’t count.

I don’t know what I want the sequence to be.  That’s honest.  Just let me be the DJ.  Let me hold the mouse to the iTunes forward button while it is on random.  Sometimes it has fits, and those fits are unbearable.  Sometimes it chooses exactly what you want, but exactly what you want ­isn’t exactly what you want halfway through.  We’ve all been there.  That song that’s great that turns bad.  That song that has great memories that turns into something else, that turns into regrets, into streams of things that could have been, could have been paths of totally  – whoa, this is getting off on fifty tangents here.  Alright, enough left field for one post. This should come with a disclaimer but, shit.

The hell of another on call is over.  For those of you looking to get in to the IT field, let me assure you, when they say you’ll be working stupid hours, they aren’t fucking around.  Burnout is a word used a lot, and many times I think I”m close.  Sometimes I want to do an American Beauty and roll up on a fast food joint and tell them to give me the job with the least amount of responsibility.  But that would mean no more cigars, switching to generic rum, and if you want a woman worth a shit, they also usually give a damn if you can play the game.  At least in the American culture.  So I plod on, fixing shit that shouldn’t break to begin with, and not giving a rats ass about computers in general, except for what they can do for me. I put the time in early on; I ate and shat computers to get my foot in the door.  Now I’m kicking back whenever possible and wondering how a salary that would have been astronomical to me 8 years ago is barely enough to support my borderline childish, bachelor lifestyle.  I can’t do Vegas every month, but if I wanted, I could do the gambling boats.

 I only got drunk once while on-call.  I make it a rule not to drink while on it, but this on call was extended to two weeks.  I almost made it.  Friday I got blasted and fired off a pissed off email to my boss about how fucked up the system was.  For those of you with a hankering for the drink and looking to get into corporate culture, here’s a bit of advice:  If you don’t have the proper supplies around, don’t go on a binge.  Mixing rum, then white wine, then an entire bottle of shitty, uber-sweet champagne that just happens to be lurking in the back of the fridge isn’t a good idea.

But, fuck it, I still have a job, and I still manage to write every now and then.  It’s the old stereotype-that-is-completely-true:  work sucks the creativity right out of you.  Those great ideas you have about what you will write/paint/compose during work all turn into faint shadows by the time you take off the shoes, yank on some jeans, and pop a beer.  TV or the internet or a game or porn are just too convenient as distractions.  There’s something to be said for those who cut off their outside stimulus for the sake of their art. 

Who wouldn’t like some shack with a typewriter/easel, no distractions, maybe a cute little foreign girl who doesn’t speak your language so that you can nail her without having to talk to her, who also brings you groceries (aka liquor) every now and then and cleans the place up for you for peanuts a month?  Though I suppose to make that a monetary reality your sabbatical shack would need to be in Borat land, or something. 

Only eight or so full edits to go on the existing ones, and only nineteen or so more to be written for the next self-pub project, a short story collection.  Fuck.  Where’s that shack?  Where’s the drive thru?  Why haven’t I found that stress-free, self sustaining artsy lifestyle?

Because, like everyone, I play the game for safety and security.  I don’t forsake my TV and internet for my art.  And that is why you will never see my name on the top of the bestseller list.  And don’t leave a comment about how Stephen King wrote is early stuff while teaching; teaching doesn’t count, because it’s not doing.  Teachers only work like, 100 days a year or something.