Currently Idle

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.

I Am Thou

My brother and nephew love these civilization computer games, where you basically get to rule over nations and history. I keep wanting to make a God sim, which I’m sure is out there. But the cool thing would be, when you sit down and open up your laptop to start playing, a multitude of tinny midi voices would cry out, “Why hast Thou forsaken us?!”

Don’t ask my why, but that cracks me up every time.

Anonymizing

Just letting folks know – since some of us are only psuedo-anonymous, you can make yourself an even more anonymous username that even I can’t figure out. Just go to the “Users” tab and add a new user for yourself. You can use anything you like @currentlyidle as the email, and then promote the user a bunch of times so the new username can post. Plus, a few new folks will be joining us soon I hope.

Call me Mr. Fidget

this is certainly not originally mine, but i saw it again and liked it, and i want to share it . . .

Call me Mr. Fidget. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me…

another blogger posted this, and i liked it so much i cut and pasted it here. why not? thanks to him, and to the man from arrowhead.

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.

so i met a killer this morning

so i met this guy this morning. he killed somebody a few years ago, so i asked him about it. he said the guy tried to rob him with a thirteen inch knife, and he had a four inch knife, and well, it ended better for my new friend than it did for the other guy. he stood over the dead body and called the cops and when it all washed out he was charged with being “reckless” in his conduct, but reckless behavior that results in the death of another is worth about three years and some parole.

so i didn’t know what to expect, though by now–banging eight years at this game–i should know. he wasn’t the first killer i’ve met. i should know the bad guys are never as bad as they seem. in fact, the bad men are always the most scared. we got to court and he was crying. i looked back at him and said, listen. i ain’t gonna lie to you. you’re gonna do some prison on this one. (bear in mind. jail may suck, but it’s only jail. misdemeanors and being held for court–the former of which cannot legally exceed a year, and the latter of which can only exceed a year if you’re instructing your attorney to stip out your trial or put in motions–jails are run by counties, and may suck, but they aren’t a real bid; they’re holding pens. prison, on the other hand, are the real deal. over a year, guaranteed. you don’t go to prison for six months, and you don’t go to jail for two years.)

anyway. i look back and he’s got tears in his eyes. he choked up and said, i just don’t want to do life. yay. now i can comfort him. i said, look at me, my man. you are not doin’ life on this. seven to ten, maybe. but it ain’t life. do you hear me? he nodded.

i saw him later in court, and on my way out, i said good luck, john. i wish you the very best. he nodded–may i say it seemed humble?–and thanked me. i won’t likely see him again. he’ll plead guilty, and it’s in the prosecutor’s hands now.

man, i always end up feeling bad for people. according to him, his first suicide attempt was at fourteen after being abused in foster care. multiple suicide attempts followed, including diabetes, a skin condition that causes chunks of skin to fall off his legs, vision problems, and multiple psychiatric problems, including several visits to the mental ward. so after what–several six packs?–the other day he buys a gun and shoots it off on the block.

that doesn’t happen on the block i live on, and if it did, i’d want him to get taken away. and that’s what happened, and then somebody called me, and said you can take him away for even longer than we can, and so i did, and away he goes. bye bye crazy john. i guess the societal hope is that by the time you get out next, you’ll either have learned, figured out, or be too old to buy another gun and shoot up the block.

so i always feel bad for them. it’s rare i meet someone like myself . . . great parents, good high school, great college (cut me, i bleed scarlet), parents paid for all of college out of their salaries, good job, great family, yada yada yada, as they say. but rarely do i meet someone like myself.

my man once told me, i grew up in a house whenever you opened the refrigerator, all there was was an empty milk container on its side. then he asked me how to copywrite something, he’s got a novel he wants to publish, and the cover of the book will be that open fridge, empty milk carton on its side. seems his parents had other things controlling their attention. i always ask about their parents. a boy once told me: “they crackheads.” let’s parse that. what he said, economically, was “my parents are addicted to crack. they don’t hold jobs, or apartments, or have a store of clothing or personal possessions. nor do they manifest any care, concern, or put any effort towards maintaining my well being. instead, they simply stagger from high to high, scoring crack, smoking it in the detritus laden basements of abandoned buildings, colllecting scrap metal to deliver to the junkyard for dollars to be converted to crack, chasing the next high, not eating, not sleeping, but instead crawling through life as hollow eyed zombies with only a fixation on the next blast off the pipe. i have no one who cares for me, about me, or gives a shit that you just caught me with a gun/load of drugs/both/conspiracy/etc.” that is, “they crackheads.” sorry dude. that must really suck, and i mean that. but you, quite frankly, don’t look like me. you are, in the terms of branding culture, “urban.” you are “inner city.” (i don’t think we say “ghetto” any more.) let’s face it, bro, you’re black and scary looking with that tattoo of an AK-47 on your forearm and those braids. it’s easy to see how different we are.

but then again, once in a while, they do look a little like me. and that’s scary, too. saw a man in the dock today. white boy, thirty five, forty. bank robbery. here’s the scoop: he went to law school. he actually had a job related to the prosecutor’s office. he has a heroin habit. total mess. one thing leads to another. bank robbery. just passing notes, no gun. got caught, of course. and you look at that, and say, there but for the grace of god go i.

oh, you’re smug. “but i would never do heroin.” no shit, sherlock. he said that once, too. but maybe. maybe you would. and the point is this, smartass: you are not immune. have you ever slipped on the ice? and BANG, you’re on your fucking ass. you say, damn, how’d that happen? well, it happens. you slip. you don’t catch yourself. you hit the deck. and maybe you end up passing a note to a bank teller and the next thing you know you’re going through withdrawals sitting in the dock in court, looking like shit, looking at a long time in prison. what would it take for you to slip? think it can’t happen? arrogant bastard.

you know what keeps me humble? i know it can happen. anyone can slip and fall.

Caulking

I love caulking. I mean, it’s a pain and it takes up half a day that I’d rather spend doing other things. But the actual experience of putting it in the windows is very pleasurable.

It unrolls cleanly. If you’re careful, you can pull off one string of caulk long enough to do the whole side, without breaking it. The caulk is just a tiny bit sticky – enough to stay in the crack between the frame and the window, but not enough to stick to your fingers.

Best of all, as you press it into the gap, you can feel the draft stop. That’s the draft that made you shiver every time you walked by the window without your warm clothes on. Suddenly it’s gone. The house feels secure again. You can undress without pain. You can dream about the money you’ll save on heating oil now that you’ve caulked.

The whole thing with the plastic and the hair-dryer, on the other hand – that, I hate.

Finally, here I am

so i’ve never blogged before. this is the first time that i’m writing something with the express intent and awareness that it will be published, read, and possibly commented on, in a venue more or less exclusively devoted to my writing and that of a few select anonymous peers. i’ve posted about two dozen times to an interest-specific discussion board, but that was a space populated by hundreds of regular posters and readers. so this is a bit new.

this is a venue to say what i want to the world. it’s a fairly anonymous venue, knowing as i do that a few people will know who i am writing this, and scant few more will read it, if any more at all. so i have many options. i can say what’s currently rocking my world: the television show the office, this iron and wine album on my i-tunes, my child’s palpable excitement at an upcoming weekend the two of us alone will be sharing, looking forward to a long holiday weekend with lots of time spent with good friends, good food, and good beer.

i can also talk about what’s going on elsewhere in my life. i’m working on a literary project that has ballooned to nearly one hundred and fifty pages and isn’t nearly done. it represents the biggest part of a fifteen year dedication/obsession/desire/interest/passion/failure of mine to be a working artist, so it’s a pretty fraught issue. i should be working on it now. but for some reason i’m blogging instead. we’ll see where this goes. elsewhere elsewhere in the collection of doings that constitute “my life”? let’s see. i’m working with my therapist to unpack some anger issues regarding my parents and to review where i’ve been and where i’m going and how i’ve gotten from there to here. he pointed out that regret gets in the way of progress. i have to keep reminding myself that. the world outside my world? i suspect i could blog righteous indignation, anger, horror, and outrage at our government, and their machinations of torture, war, lies, deception, obfuscation, corruption, fear, violence, death, dismemberment, blood, gore, tragedy, oil, money . . . but i can’t imagine regularly going somewhere just to catalog the horrors and violence of the imperial greed machine, and i don’t feel the need for a primal scream blog session to work through my anger. but now and then i have some thoughts and ideas and observations, about myself and others, that might be interesting.

tomorrow morning i’ll meet a man who killed someone in the nineties and was charged with murder but pled to manslaughter and got only a few years. i’ll drive him around in my car and talk to him and then deliver him to court. something about walking up and down the street with a loaded gun, shooting it in the air. his name on the street is crazy john john. i met a boy this morning, delivered him to court. he was surprised to see me. he got caught with a .45 and a lot of crack in his house. i don’t know exactly how long he’ll go to prison–many years–like, ten or fifteen. he’s twenty five years old and looking down the barrel of not being unshackled until he’s in his late thirties or so. have you ever seen fear? have you ever looked in a man’s eyes and seen the nausea roiling behind them? he said to me, it’s gonna be a long time, isn’t it? i said, brother i can’t lie to you. that was a lot of crack. i asked him a question and he said, i don’t wanna be a asshole, but i don’t really want to talk anymore. i said i hear you, man. i hear you.

how old do you feel? i sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror–or sometimes, i see myself as others must–the checkout boy at the grocery, the girl at the video store–and i wonder, or rather, imagine what they see. how must i look on the surface? married, early thirties. kids. sensible car, if a bit run down. stable career, going on a decade. responsible. a man. a provider. a homeowner. a mortgage payer. a 401(k) contributor.

but that’s not what i see, or feel. i’m an impostor; or an actor; or perhaps the world’s most responsible twenty one year old. i feel like a man-child, holding it all together, getting paid, paying the bills. i sometimes think that i haven’t changed or grown since i was a fairly grungy, partying-all-the-time, up-all-night, listening-to-weird-music, wannabe writer in college circa 1994 or so . . . i just happen to have a job and a wife and children and i hold it all down pretty well.

i feel that there’s an alternate mr. fidget, my doppleganger, and he lives in the east village. he parties a lot and drinks more than i do, which my wife or others might think is saying something, but if you know drinking culture like i do, and have the friends in the city that i do, and know what you would do if left to your own devices as i do–suffice it to say doppleganger fidget drinks more than i do. he works in a media related industry. he has frequent sex with fairly hot women. i suspect he surfs casual sex sites on the internet and has had several fulfilling encounters that way. he eats out a lot, but cooks to impress women. he has dreams of making it big, and that dream is always around the corner, just up the next block. i don’t imagine him to be too successful, because then i might be tempted to seek him out; but come to think of it, he might be successful; he might have had a collection of short stories published, or a film accepted to a prestigious festival. i don’t like to consider that he might be successful. that fucker.

my wife says, don’t you think you’re a success? a success at what? i’m a decent man. i do my job, which is providing for her and the kids, and taking care of them. i’m good at it. really good, and i know that; i’m a great father, and a really good husband. but since when did they start giving prizes for being decent?

i don’t see a success in the mirror. i see a kid in a man’s body, holding it all together, striving mightily, chasing a dream down the street that keeps making it to the next block a little quicker each year. i can’t believe how old i am, and i can’t believe the responsibility i have. isn’t there an age when your psyche stops getting older, and it’s just your body that starts to get older? i sometimes feel that’s been happening since shortly after kurt cobain died. i acquired the wife and kids and a fair amount of patience and even developed/evolved/grew a fairly grown up way of dealing with various things (like money and emotions) but a core chunk of me is still that pie eyed twenty one year old dreamer thinking that i was gonna make it big some day.

i still think i’ll make it big some day. but if a decade of trying and dreaming and scheming and failing and wishing and not doing enough teaches you anything, it is this: you must work harder, and wait a little longer.

“every moment that you’re not training, someone somewhere else is. and when you meet him, he will beat you.” that legend adorned many a wrestling sweatshirt in my youth, and it was true then as it is now.

i’ll likely blog again, though rarely; i have to concentrate on my writing project, and work harder at it, because somewhere, my dopplefidget is working hard too, and when i meet him, i must beat him.

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.

Sleet

The baby gets picked up whenever she wants. That’s probably exactly what the problem is. Once they get in that habit, they pretty much expect it to be that way for the rest of their lives.

Anyhow I was sitting at breakfast with the baby on my lap, with her eating more of my bagel than I was; and my four-year-old suddenly got very whiny and forgot how to speak in full sentences. And Rivvy pointed out that she had put her to bed last night, and I had worked through the weekend, and she had not seen very much of her father recently. So I said to Older-Daughter-Of-Xingu, “would you like to have lunch with me this afternoon?”

And she said, “sure.”

The rain was just turning to sleet as I pulled up. She was waiting in her rain boots, jeans, and a pink sweater under a raincoat. “Puddle day,” she declared, but nonetheless decided to be pushed to Carol’s in the fluorescent green all-weather stroller that looks like a moon lander, which Rivvy found on Craig’s List.

It was nice and warm inside. We had no trouble finding a seat. There were only three other people in the restaurant. We peeled off all our wet outerclothes and sat in a booth (booths are special) and watched the sleet turn into snow outside, and listened to trucks swooshing by, and corny old songs on the radio.

Carol had given her kids the day off. She was cooking and her mom took our orders.

Xingu had a tuna melt and Older-Daughter-Of-Xingu had pancakes with syrup on a Teletubbies plate. We read some of the remaindered children’s books Carol keeps on a bookshelf in the corner. Older-Daughter-Of-Xingu had seconds on her pancakes. Xingu, who is trying to give up coffee, drank some coffee.

By that time the stroller, which had been left outside uncovered, had filled up with slush and ice water. So we pushed it home, stomping through all the puddles in our rain boots.

And that’s all.