Currently Idle

Poetry from a spammer

Got this in my mailbox, from a spam address:

evening want wakeup
right cut eat
awake fit start
eat forget eat
search do allow
do not talk draw
open count know
Or rain go
To shut watch
our sing translate
eat spend buy

Train

The sun sets over the Hudson river and peace settled in for the ride. The soundtrack reaches an earbud delivered crescendo and it goes movie-fuzzed and unreal. God goes walking on the winter bare branches, catching up with the antique iron dragon, then falling back, toying with the too human attempt at speed.

Next to me, the fur coat infected by a human parasite stares at the humming blue screen. On the screen, a serene Indian moves through the postures of a long lost art breathing in and out of impossible form. The fur coat’s finger is firmly on the fast forward button, each pose a stop motion jerk of black and white dinosaur movie.

Inner Peace in half the time. Long languorous stretches for fur coats in a hurry.

A Profane Haiku

Why Am I Writing
A motherfucking Haiku?
’cause I’m fucking bored

I don’t swear enough. I’ve decided I need to swear more.

Thanksgiving

Somewhere in the last 10 years, I lost my ambition. I’m not really complaining.

For years ambition lived with me like a small but very angry dog. It never took over my life, but it had it needed to be fed, walked, and pet now and then.

In college, all this ambition channeled itself mostly into sex. I’d grown up the fat kid in the corner with a book, so when I buffed out a little, got stuck in the dorms surrounded by girls, all I could think about was what (or who) was next. Classwork wasn’t much of an issue, but social dynamics – that was a battlefield worth fighting on.

I was a complete prick. If me now meets me then in a bar, me now kicks the shit out of me then.

In B-school I learned the fine art of humiliation. The schoolwork was harder, but the reward was being able to present a case in class and crush someone with argument and dialectic. I learned how to be negative about ANYTHING. I took a “groups” class – the classic psychological fishbowl experiment – and all I did was try and figure out how to manipulate it.

I was a complete prick. Jesus Christ walks into a bar, sees me in action, invokes the Old Testament God and kicks me in the nuts.

Throughout my 20’s ambition was palpable. I could smell it. Sex had become the new schoolwork, money had become the new Sex. I’d wake up in the morning, and I’d think about how I was going to move that step ahead, who I was going to step over to get somewhere. In the back of my head I kept thinking I’d be dead by the time I was 30, so I needed to get cracking. I drove a ridiculous car. I paid $3,000 a month in rent. At work I was the “wunderkind”. I broke rules. I wore a leather vest at work instead of a coat. I wore white T-shirts instead of a tie. I was NOT the person you wanted in the room during the presentation you’d worked for months on.

I was an complete prick. I blew most of what I made, and I didn’t even have a coke habit. That takes work.

But then somewhere along the way, about 10 years ago, it all started to change. I met a really cool woman who saw through all my bullshit. Wierder still she dug me anyway. I met her father. I realized there had been only two men in my life that really had integrity, and what that meant. Her father, and a friends uncle who – in retrospect – was the best father I ever had.

And God stepped in and smacked me around a little bit. He gave me the floppy chicken – yanking control of my own body away without warning (”Oh you think you’re in CONTROL? Well eat THIS motherfucker..”)

Is it blasphemous to put the word “motherfucker” in the mouth of the hypothetical divine?

I had a kid. That’s a wakeup call.

I drove a good business into the ground despite my best efforts and had to fire a lot of people who trusted me.

And some crazy fuckers took down the two buildings that were the very icon of my ambition. A building I had stood in at the ripe old age of 25 or so, looking out the corner office windows of Alex P. fucking Keaton and thinking “This should be mine. I can kick this shmuck out of this office and do his job, live in his house, fuck his wife, drive his car.”

And the steady erosion of my ambition was complete.

Odds are, in the next year sometime I’ll be looking for work. Because of this story arc, and the destruction of my animal drive, I’ll make about 10% of what I made at the height of my pathetic musings on the 32nd floor of the World Trade Center. I’ll incur the new stress of wondering how to make the mortgage.

But despite being worn down, ground into a kind of reluctant humility, I take solace in one thing more than any other.

I don’t think I’m an complete prick anymore. Arrogant? yeah, I don’t think that goes away. Selfish? Ditto. But I don’t think I’m digging myself into deeper circles of hell with each passing day.

Yes, I’m thankful for my family, my friends, for a blanket of new white snow and sledding.

But not being a complete prick anymore? And that’s what I’m really thankful for.

Out in the cold…

Sometimes I feel like everyone around me is falling apart, getting divorced, losing control.

I look outside and the first snow of the year is coming down. I feel warm inside. It’s cold out there. But I also know that the ground will be covered in white, and all these wayward souls will look out on that new white world.

But I’ll take my warm retreat any day.

It’s cold outside.

Grammarian

On Currently Idle, as we all know, spelling is everything. To this end, look what I found.

Rabbit?

Looking Up

Lately I’ve been somewhat obsessed with looking up. It started one night when it was just getting cold for the year, and it was crystal clear out, no moon at all. I stood there in my driveway and looked up.

Part of me had forgotten that moving to the country was about that. Being able to look up at night and see stars instead of the piss-yellow haze of a midnight urban sky. Part of me had forgotten a lot of the reasons we moved out here into the wilderness. Hah. But I guess compared to the downtowns and suburbs it might as well be. It takes a bear running through the backyard to make you remember – or a stary night.

So then I scammed this telescope from a guy I know, and I’ve gotten, as always, a little too into it. I think I’m making up for lost time. In about two weeks I learned where everything was in the sky – something I never even really knew when I got the merit badge (the first lesson in boy scouts – you can phone ANYTHING in).

And now, every night, I look up. Most of the time, it’s just like looking in the backyard – there are no bears. There’s just the swingset and the rotting woodpile and the toys that got left out. But sometimes, just sometimes, you see a shooting star.

That’s why we moved here. ‘Cause there ain’t no fucking context in the city. The city is all about NOW, and HERE, and WHEN and WHO – faster, better, stronger. Kid tested, mother approved.

The country is all about WHY. And the why is mostly about looking up.

Beginnings

You remember all those times you went to the store and you bought a blank journal? And then you went home and you dilligently made that first entry. Maybe you did a few more. You used a really nice pen. You paid attention. You we’re REALLY juvenille. You wrote bad poems, maybe a sketch or two.

Then, 10 years later, you find it on the shelf, with the first 10 pages filled out and 100 blank, accusatory pages behind them. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done it so many times I can feel the weight of all those unwritten pages. I can hear them whispering “loser” in my ear.

So, let’s engage in this little fantasy. Let’s absorb those 4 extremely expensive words.

This Time it’s Different

I mean, it probably won’t be. But if we can work at this as a group – behind the wall of glass that anonymity can provide, well…

Of course, all a nom de plume ever did for Steven King was let him right total CRAP, but hey, can’t argue with the money.