Title Tentatively Changed to “Headlights Are Everything.”

We started walking towards Sugarloaf park, a tiny local nature preserve nestled in-between the city’s main thoroughfare and series of dingy, yet charming old houses from the turn of the century that were inhabited primarily by untenured professors waiting to move into some idyllic subdivision away from derelicts like ourselves. It being nighttime and we being the equivalent of two-to-three-pack-a-day smokers—one joint is the equivalent of about 15 cigarettes-worth of lung damage—we only made it halfway up Sugarloaf hill before collapsing on the first bench that gave us wooded cover. Without saying anything, Davis pulled out the bong, pre-packed, and took a long burbling drag from it, the carb being pulled from the water-pipe releasing a sound that seemed to suck all the air out of his lungs. I half expected his chest to cave in and for his body to shrivel up all-dehydrated looking like some guy in an Edvard Munch painting. As he passed the bong to me in accordance with pot etiquette based on the classic Musical Youth song, encouraging one and all to “Pass the dutchie on the left hand side,” Kieran started spouting his usual inanity:

“Hey bra,” he hand taken to nineties surfer slang for some reason over the past summer, “Bra, you know that fine-ass bitty Catelyn?”
“What, the girl on the rugby team who can grow a better mustache than I can?” I took a big hit from the bong and passed it to Kieran.
“Ewww, that’s fucking nasty man. No,” he said, pushing the weed ash down with the butt of his lighter. “That’s Katelyn with a K. I’m talking about Catelyn with a C.”
“Catelyn Morten,” Davis piped up.
“Yeah that Catelyn. I am totally tappin’ that right now.” Kieran ripped a huge bong blow.

I had to be a little skeptical about Kieran’s claim because, after all, it was Kieran, the man who claimed that he was a direct descendant of Albert Einstein and that his father worked for the CIA and constantly was overseas doing covert things in covert places with, wait for it, covert people. For all I know he could be related to Einstein, although it’s highly unlikely, but I know for a fact that his Dad is a self-employed “pest-control technician” at “Dewey Does It Vermin Control.” I saw the van when he came to pick up Kieran over spring break after his license was suspended on account of the DUI he’s picked up (he blew a .2, fourth-best score in Denison History). I have nothing against the pest-control business and think it’s fine, manly work, but it doesn’t pay like a secret agent does, which Kieran’s financial aid status could attest to.

“Kieran, the only thing you’re tapping is the side of your bowl when you ash it.”
“Hey man,” blowing out a gust of smoke, “don’t hate the player…uhhhh…just don’t hate the player”
“The game” Davis said as he took the bong from Kieran.
“What?!”
“He’s finishing your ignorant maxim for you. ‘It’s don’t hate the player, hate the game’.”
“That’s what I said.”

I couldn’t deal with the sheer stupidity of the situation so I picked a joint out of Davis’ backpack and headed up hill to steel myself for future imbecility. There was a spot on the north face of the hill that I liked to think only I knew about, that had two rotting oak chairs which had been embedded in a rather steep portion of the park. When you reclined back you were about 45 degrees below flatness and it felt like you could topple down the hill if you farted too hard. I lit the joint and wondered how it had come to this? My two closest friends had been skimmed from the algae-coated end of the gene pool; one practically mute and the other afflicted with verbal diarrhea that was more repugnant than it’s bodily counterpart. They were drug friends. The only thing we had it common was getting high and that ain’t much. I’d expected college to consist of bohemian coffee house discussions of Camus and Sartre, punctuated by witty banter and a heightened pop culture sensibility. Instead I was with two twenty-year olds who had smoked themselves retarded and had the combined IQ of a slow dolphin.

But then I considered the alternatives: frat-boys chug-a-lugging keystone light by the caseload, chest-bumping and ass-patting their way to totally hetero male comraderie and massive liver damage. Sorority sisters giggling, giggling, giggling all the goddamn time in between casual blow jobs and coke binges. The pathetic inside women who sat back in their dorm room bean bags watching Pride & Prejudice—Mr. Darcy take me away!—sipping on raspberry vodka and fruit juice. The foreign exchange students, mostly from India and Pakistan, who were too eager to please, too earnest to be taken seriously and completely ignorant of the nuances of everyday conversation, even though their English was better than mine. The dark, brooding, emo set whose idea of a pick-up line was, “want to see where I cut myself?” and who wore nothing but black like they expected a casual funeral to break out at any moment. This was my teenage wasteland and I felt like I was sitting atop a giant trash heap of squandered youth. I was the King, led to Pride Rock by Mufasa: Everything the light touches is my kingdom. Sadly, it was nighttime and the only light was the burning ember of my now spent joint.

I trudged back around Sugarloaf to find, much to my chagrin, Kieran and Davis exactly where I had left. I wished I was one of those airheaded mothers that left their babies in the car in the middle of August while they went shopping at Food Lion, Kieran and Davis being my unwanted progeny. Without saying a damn thing Davis handed me an already cherried bowl, which I mutely took and toked.

“I’m hungry,” I said passing the bowl the Kieran.
“Yeah bra, I’m fucking starving.”
Davis nodded his head in assent.
“So, what do you guys want to eat?”
“Let’s go back to my room and order some pizza from Elm’s.”

Not again. No. I refuse. I had eaten delivery pepperoni pizza from Elm’s Pizza Parlor for the past four nights and on average 3 times a week for the past month. OK, I lied. Two nights previously we had ordered pepperoni and sausage to shake things up, but that wasn’t enough. It would’ve be one thing if their pizza was any good, but their sauce was sweeter than a snickers bar, the crusts were always too damn doughy, and I was convinced their cheese was that fake Kraft mozzarella shake in a can.

“There is no way you’re getting me to eat that shit again.”
“C’mon bra,” Kieran implored, “Elm’s is the shit.”
“No, Elm’s is shit. And for the love of God could you stop calling me ‘bra’? I feel like I’m in an deleted scene from Point Break.”
“Well, we could head up to the hill and get some Taco Bell or Pizza Hut.”
“Nixing that. I want my bowels to function for the next week or so.”
“Their quesadillas are the shit, bra.”
“Nothing you say is the shit ever is the shit Kieran. They keep those quesadillas under a freaking heat lamp for about a week before they give it to you.”
“Alright man, what’s your bright idea?”

The thing was, I didn’t have a bright idea. I felt like I had exhausted every option in this culinary Sahara. The food at the student union was drek, the cafeterias were crap and closed by now (was it really 9:00 already?), and everything I already ordered every dish that the sole late-night eatery in “downtown” Granville had to offer. The place, Brews, as the name suggests served up glorified bar food and I was not in a mood to shell out $7.99 for a half-cooked burger. We started walking back towards Stone in silence, I thinking all the while of the food I left back in Cincinnati. Mark Twain might have said that he wanted to be in Cincinnati when the end of the world comes because they were always twenty years behind the times, but that still put me in 1986, which was better than this place that seemed stuck in the ‘50s.

“I could have Indian food if I wanted too in Cincinnati; succulent little Tandoori chickens glistening all pink-red and steaming from the Tandoor oven, the onions and peppers attacking my nostrils. There was Chinese food in Cincinnati. Good Chinese food. Not the crap out here where the chicken tasted like chunks of sponge dipped in General Tso sauce, but real Chinese food. I’d go to the China Gourmet and get the Pan-Seared Rainbow Trout done up with ginger and scallions, bathing in a pool of clarified butter and its own juices.”

My food reverie lasted the entire walk and before I knew it I was back in Kieran’s dorm room, watching him dick around on his computer. I had to think of something else to eat fast or else we’d spend another night in his room, baked, eating Elm’s, and watching Grandma’s Boy, a movie that I’m ashamed to say I enjoy. There’s something very satisfying about watching a movie that revolves around central characters that do nothing but get stoned and watch video games while you’re doing nothing but getting stoned and watching video games.

That’s when it happened:

“Let’s go to Steak ‘N Shake.”

This statement was monumental both in the fact that it was the first complete sentence I had heard Davis utter in almost a week and in that it sounded fabulous: Steak ‘N Shake. They were famous for steakburgers; not hamburgers, but steakburgers; big meaty, manly hunks of cow bleeding all over the bun and melting in my mouth.

“We are going to Steak ‘N Shake.”

I didn’t care that it was a stoner cliché and that it was a little too Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. That just made it a meta-experience for me. It was another life-imitating-art-imitating-life situation like when I had stared at the giant Seurat in the Chicago Museum of Art like in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, staring at the tiny little pointillist pinpricks until the painting didn’t look like a painting anymore.

“I don’t know bra. Steak ‘N Shake is a long way away.” Kieran was not enthused.”
“But that’s the whole point, man. It’s a journey, an experience, an epic quest. We are Odysseus sailing home to Penelope. We are the Jason and the Argonauts seeking the Golden Fleece. We are Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters driving in Nowhere to find our karmic destiny. We are—“
“I get it bra. You’re an English major. Just shut up and let me think about this.”
“There’s no thinking about this, is there Davis?”
“No thinking.”
“You heard the man. So grow a pair and lets get gone.”
“Nah, I think I’m just going to chill here for a little bit.”
“Suit yourself man. Hey, Davis, you wanna smoke a bowl in the car before we head out?”
“Sounds good.”
“Alright then. We are out. Enjoy Elm’s you sad little man.”

And with that we were off; off on our historic trip to Steak ‘N Shake. Walking to the parking lot I felt like Magellan, walking towards his ship to circumnavigate the globe. I failed to grasp at the time that only Magellan’s boat and not Magellan himself completed the trip around the world. Magellan got butchered by a bunch of Filipinos with swords and spears. But, that historical tidbit was clear out of my mind because we were two men on a mission and would not be stopped. When we got to the car I decided to drive off to a no outlet street on the outskirts of town to smoke so as not to arouse the suspicion of Denison security. The street was on an incline and after pulling a u-turn I put the car in park, yanked on the E-brake and stared down this tame road in a quaint hamlet unused to my kind or my deeds. I kept the car running because I wanted to listen to music and because it was colder than frozen hell outside, but made sure to turn off my headlights so as not to arouse suspicion. I was clandestine, cautious, and surreptitious. I felt like I could have run a special op for the SAS if they asked me to.

The 12:30 to Rehab

Smoking a Black & Mild and expecting a pleasurable experience is like asking a woman to kick you in the nuts in the hope of an orgasm. The packaging boasts that it both tastes and smells great, with neither of these claims being at all grounded in reality. A Middleton Black & Mild fills my mouth with the feeling that only piss-poor pipe tobacco from the bottom of the barrel can give, and is not so much mild as it is incendiary. With every puff my cheeks bulge out like they had just been swabbed with a Q-tip soaked in Tabasco and exhalation is the only pleasurable part of the process. But even then you are left with a wretched aftertaste of charred paper and cancer. A man can almost feel the lesions forming inside his mouth with each drag. As for the olfactory portion of the program, their smell is overpowering and spreads like nuclear fallout; the syrupy maple-coated chemical clouds billow out and envelop anything it comes in contact with. It’s as if someone took your face and slammed it into a steaming bowl of Maple Syrup & Brown Sugar Quaker Oatmeal.

So, why then am I smoking this repugnant stick? Well, in this one-horse-that-should’ve-been-turned-into-glue-years-ago-town there is only one place within walking distance to buy cigarettes, which is the Granville CVS Pharmacy. It used to be a soda fountain and druggist, but apparently all things quaint must go, even in a town like Granville, whose sole export is small town charm. This particular CVS has an impressively destitute cigarette selection and very rarely carries my brand, Marlboro Menthol Lights. Quite often I am forced to buy Salem’s or on this particular day, Newports, a cigarette so harsh that it frequently makes its user cough up blood, your humble narrator included. This CVS also doesn’t carry any rolling papers of any kind, so the only way to smoke herb if you don’t have a piece of some kind is to buy what is classified as a “cigarillo,” the group to which the Middleton Black & Mild belongs.
In an effort not to claw my throat apart before nightfall with my Newport’s I decided to try and smoke a Black & Mild because it was advertised as being “soothing.” Then again, cigarette ads used to come with doctor’s recommendations and bull about T-Zones (“Your T-Zone: T for taste…T for throat…”), so putting faith in any claim made by a tobacco manufacturer is just plain ig’nant. I was also smoking the Black & Mild because it was time-consuming and I couldn’t spend any more time in my janitor’s closet of a dorm room waiting for evening to come. It was an unofficial rule among my friends at Denison University that no serious partying or “pre-gaming” start before 6:00 at night. If you did anything before then it was just a joint here or a beer there to keep you level, but I didn’t have any joints or beers so I was stuck smoking a crappy midget cigar and waiting for six o’ clock to come.

It was only 5:00 when I gave up on the Black & Mild and went back inside to see if my friend Josh had anything to drink. Normally, whenever you knocked on the door to his massive six-man dorm room there were at least two people sunk into the couch playing Guitar Hero or watching Lost re-runs. But today there was nobody inside when I knocked on the door, letting myself in to make sure someone wasn’t on their laptop in the bedroom. When it was fairly clear that no one was in I went over to the fridge, grabbed two Pabst Blue Ribbon’s, and left a couple dollars in the UNICEF box on top of their dresser into which they put all of their booze money. I walked upstairs with the beers blatantly tucked underneath my turtleneck sweater and slid into my room. My dorm was so small that the only place to put my TV was in the dead center of the room so that I had to gingerly step over it to reach the reclining chair beside my bed. I popped the tab on the first PBR and started watching Cool Hand Luke, trying to make myself feel more like Paul Newman. I too could eat fifty eggs, that is, if I liked eggs.

After downing my first beer I undressed myself and hid the second one underneath my bath towel so that I could drink it in the communal shower. I could think of nothing better than drinking an ice-cold beer while hot water cascaded over my shoulders and steam rose up my nose. I made sure to take the corner shower stall because it was the only one with an intact shower curtain and I didn’t want my resident advisor to catch me drinking in the bathroom. When I was cleansed and buzzed I crushed the empty can and walked back to my room to get ready for my night out. I was not dressing for style, but for utility as there were no safe places to smoke weed inside on campus and because the temperature was dipping down to about 45º that night. I put on my ratty grey pajama pants on over my boxers and under my jeans in lieu of long johns and wore two sweaters underneath my charcoal, full-length Brooks Brothers coat that was a hand-me-down from one of my two obscenely tall cousins. I was ready to be both toasty and toasted.

The campus of Denison was designed to try and transpose the elegance and history of a established New England university into the flatness of central Ohio. I can just see some architect visiting William & Mary or Mt. Holyoake, scribbling down dimensions and thematic flourishes to bring back to his bosses in the Midwest. I lived on the west side of campus in a dormitory that sat atop of one of the university’s two cafeterias. One evening, blitzed out of our skulls, my best friend Alec and wandered our way down a seemingly dead-end dorm room staircase only to find the door to the cafeteria kitchen unlocked. Having found the drunkards equivalent of Wonkaland, we rummaged through the pantries and walk in freezer until we had found what we craved, which turned out to be a 3 pound jar of Peter Pan peanut Butter and a 48 count box of Honey Wheat bagels. Don’t even ask me if I feel guilty about taking the food because the university was already screwing us over by making us pay about four thousand bucks a year for canned drek from Sysco Food Sevices. I would’ve taken more, but my mini-fridge could barely hold forty-some-odd bagels as it was and anything beyond that would have been wasteful. Now, I know what you’re thinking and, yes, I did eat every last one of those freakin’ bagels, even after they had gone so stale that I had to gnaw on them like a teething ring. The concept of “waste not, want not” takes on a new meaning when you’re dining on pilfered goods.

Before I left for my bacchanalian evening, I stopped by the back entrance of the cafeteria to smoke a cigarette with the cafeteria ladies and gentlemen who were getting their eight minutes of satisfaction, sitting on overturned milk crates on a tiny concrete platform overlooking the town. I smoked with the cafeteria workers because, for reasons unbeknownst to me, not a single person in my hundred-person dorm was a smoker. I’m telling you, America’s youth has gone downhill. All of these “Truth” ads and Surgeon General’s warnings and bans on smoking indoors have brainwashed them against the simple fact that there is nothing cooler and more American than smoking cigarettes. Whatever happened to peer pressure or wanting to be like James Dean? Well, I guess that’s the problem right there. Kids today wouldn’t know Rebel Without a Cause if they were forced to watch it like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, with eyes wrenched open and subliminal messaging barraging them from all sides. You can’t even find Lucky Strikes any more. No more L.S.M.F.T. No more “It’s Toasted.” No more Marlboro man or Joe Camel. Hell, they won’t even let cigarette companies advertise their carcinogenous products on the hoods of NASCAR cars anymore. That’s the problem with this damned country: They’ll let Crown Royal, Jack Daniels and Budweiser on the side of a supercharged Ford Fusion, but they won’t let Winston or Doral come on board. Alcohol can bring a family or a man asunder, but I ain’t ever heard of a man hitting rock bottom because he was a pack a day smoker. All cigarettes do is stop you from spending the last ten years of your life languishing in a nursing home sucking Salisbury steak through a tube and watching the soaps everyday.

Once I had finished my cigarette I began my trek over to the southeast end of campus, following the orange brick pathway across bridges and past Swasey Chapel, making sure to step on the large concrete Denison seal in the center of the walkway to discourage superstition. I figure that stepping on the seal, which is supposed to curse you and cause to flame out or flunk out of Denison, couldn’t harm my karma now since I had urinated on it the week prior, an act which I don’t really see as vandalism. All of the ammonia in my piss might’ve washed off all of the snow-salt and mud caking the seal, probably doing it a bit of good. After Swasey is the main academic quad, which is dark and silent on an early Friday evening, the sounds of pretentious professors and pretensions of academic enrichment squashed for the weekend. I galumphed down the crumbling staircase from the top of the hill towards the dorms at the south, taking the steps two by two and leading with my crotch for leisure.
The doors of all the dorms on campus require specific sliding key cards to get into, but the side entrance to Stone Hall is in such disrepair that all you need to do is give the handle a hearty pull and it’ll open on its own. I met up with Kieran and Davis by the pool table in the rec room of the dorm. Kieran was a pompous little misogynist prick that was all the more full of himself after spending the past summer in Amsterdam. He would flip back his grungy blond hair away from his acne-filled face to regale us with tales of life on the continent; how everything was so civilized in Amsterdam and how you could buy weed brownies and smoke bowls at hash bars there and how America would be like that “any day now.” He was under the misapprehension that going to Europe had made him cultured, but all it had really done was prove that he was a creature of habit whose only discernable talent was an ability to do copious amounts of drugs. Kieran also insisted that Amsterdam women were looser than the puritanical bitches (his words, not mine) in the states and that he had spent the summer wallowing a series of well perfumed bosoms. I don’t care how sexually liberated Dutch women are, there’s no way that any of them, much less a veritable harem as he described, would bed a scrawny potser who would only look statuesque standing next to Danny Devito.

Davis didn’t talk much, which in this circle of friends was a tremendous plus for me. His pale skin from years of British inbreeding was almost translucent and the veins on his spindly arms looked like a sliver of a page from a Rand McNally Atlas. Davis sported the spiked and frosted tip hairstyle so popular in the late nineties and this, along with his baggy jeans that hung around the bottom rim of his butt gave off the impression that he hadn’t changed his look since middle school. He was sporting a gigantic backpack filled with weed, shrooms, three pipes, a bong, and an anatomy and physiology textbook for conventions sake.

The Formula for Oscar

After about an hour of lying in my fold-out bed last night, positively fuming, I came to the conclusion that I have been giving the Oscar’s far more credit than they were ever due. Granted, they aren’t nearly as embarrassing a spectacle as the Grammy’s (no Oscar winner has ever been as comparatively horrendous as “My Humps” or Milli Vanilli), but that’s like saying you’re the not the least stable person at Betty Ford. I consider it to be not opinion, but irrefutable fact, that Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler and Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of Kym in Rachel Getting Married were the two best turns in a film this year. I still believe this to be so, even though Sean Pean won for his role as Harvey Milk in Milk and Kate Winslet won for some Nazi woman in The Reader (nobody saw the damn film so I don’t feel I need to IMDB her character name because I doubt anyone gives a shit). The reason for this misappropriation of little gold men is the very same reason why the Oscar’s are absolute shit and those reasons are two-fold, as I will now demonstrate:

- Reason #1: Biopic Fever.
The academy has always had a ridiculous jones for any film depicting a historical figure, regardless of said film’s merits, which I will say are normally quite good. However, there is no rationalizing the fact that 10 of the 18 best actor/actress awards meted out this decade have gone to actors portraying real-life personages. For the purposes of posterity I will list them here in chronological order: Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash, Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, and this year with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk.

This trend is almost more unnerving than the Academy’s predilection towards rewarding any actor willing to play a character with a serious mental or physical handicap. Can’t you just imagine academy voters sitting in their little home theaters, prattling on like women in line at a retirement home dining hall? “I met June Carter Cash back in 1968 at the Grand Ole Opry and it’s like looking in a mirror!” “Well, I was at a book signing for Breakfast At Tiffany’s and Truman spoke just like that young man in the picture is speaking. It’s uncanny!” “I met Idi Amin at the Ritz-Carlton in ’82 and he acted just the way that Forest man plays him.”

The Academy acts as though there is no greater achievement than resurrecting someone from the dead, but in fact, playing a historical figure is much easier than a truly original character. Starring in a Biopic is like writing a research paper. You have thousands of pages of biographies documenting their lives, videos and recordings telling you exactly how they moved and spoke, not to mention the fact that all of the inner motivation for your character has already been spelled out for you by scholars who have devoted their lives to the person in question. Playing a completely fictional role requires the actor to find their own driving force for the character and to develop their own mannerisms and idiosyncrasies to bring the person to life. At a certain point BioPics just become exercises in advanced mimicry.

Shiva the Destroyer, harbinger of doom on Oscar night

-Reason #2: The Property of Accumulated Nominations.
I’m not going out on a limb here by saying that based on their bodies of work, Kate Winslet is a far better actress than Anne Hathaway. One was in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the other was in The Princess Diaries. The former starred in Little Children while the latter foisted The Devil Wears Prada upon the world. Before last night, Kate Winslet had been nominated for three Best Actress Oscars and one for Best Supporting Actress, winning none of them. The reason why Kate Winslet won for The Reader is much the same as why Russell Crowe won for Gladiator instead of A Beautiful Mind or The Insider and Denzel Washington won for Training Day rather than The Hurricane. Both men were snubbed in previous years and proceeded to win the award for their less remarkable performances.

Winslet’s win this year is in the same vein as the Academy didn’t want to give such a talented actress the shaft for the 5th straight time and decided to give her the award based more on her consistently brilliant work rather than on individual performance. As proof positive of this, it was a matter of much debate amongst critics as to whether the academy nominated the right Kate Winslet film this year, many citing her portrayal of April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road as the superior performance. This is a testament to her chops as a thespian, but it doesn’t mean she was this year’s best actress. I have a feeling that when people look back on 2008, far more will remember Anne Hathaway’s tormented addict causing her family’s dysfunction than Kate Winslet having an affair with a young boy in 1940’s Germany.

That is my rationale for why the Oscars once again sloughed off the best performances of the year and you can disagree with them if you like. My point is not to denigrate the superb performances of Mr. Penn and Ms. Winslet, but rather to point out the tragically formulaic approach that the Oscar’s have been reduced to. If I could find a historically relevant retarded man with a limp to play, even I might have a shot at being nominated for an Oscar. However, the academy did get Slumdog Millionaire right and that’ll have to do for now. After all, they’re not quite the Grammy’s yet.

In Front and Behind Me

Normally I have an aversion to poetry and would never subject anyone to it, but for some reason I had an uncontrollable urge.

In Front and Behind Me

I saw myself today,
Transposed, transported, transgressed upon and trampled.
Lying in my own sick I smoke and smile,
The projection of past life playing and lifting before me.
A cuckold, mute and blankly staring at my simulacrum.
The echo of repetition, repetition, repetition;
Sweet smells, sweet saliva, sweet O’Keefe flowers masking a humorous rot.
Frigid and turgid,
Ice nine spread through her veins;
Dead like roadside Bambis’,
Lone life in maggots glutting in a sea of pea green.

Enter neon orange electric doors,
Get yourself a ball of twine.
Find the mast and over, under, over, under, over, under,
Squeeze ‘til wrists pulsate and hands limpen.
Stirrups may buckle and your mast may wooden,
But better that than to blanche,
A seashell fossil in a crag,
Wet with saline and sanguinary stains.

Shaving With Pimples Part Trois

Shaving With Pimples Installment 3:

We walked back to my house where I apparently tried to give Nikki a piggyback ride and ended up sending us both for a Fosberry Flop. I showed the girls to some couches and proceeded to pass out. I woke up an hour or so later with the munchies and went rummaging through my kitchen for something to eat. I was clumsy enough to wake up Kim from her slumber, where she found me pacing around the marble island of our kitchen.”
“Drew, what the hell are you doing?”
“Barbeque sauce.”
“What?”
“Lean Cuisines taste like shit without barbeque sauce!”
For some reason I had come under the misapprehension that Lean Cuisine Santa Fe Chicken would be more palatable if it was smothered in KC Masterpiece BBQ sauce. However, my coordination was such that I couldn’t complete the seemingly easy task of getting the barbeque sauce out of the bottle and into the plastic tray containing my dinner. Even worse was my capacity for getting the barbeque-laiden chicken from the tray and into my mouth. Whether or not I had the foresight to use a fork is debatable, but regardless, I fell back asleep with my hands and face caked in barbeque sauce. When Nikki tried to leave for work the next morning she set off the house alarm, which through some act of my subconscious I had remembered to arm the night before. For a moment she was horrified because it looked like I’d gotten into a fight with a wood chipper after she went to bed, but upon further inspection and the hickory smoked goodness eminating from my “wounds,” Nikki realized I wasn’t critically injured and she left me for the first time.

By that Sunday she began the slow migration of her shit into my apartment. It seemed like every other day there was another load of clothes or shoes being carted in. By the end of the month about two-thirds of the stuff in the place belonged to her. It was like she was Neil Armstrong claiming the apartment in the name of sundresses and tampons. The first two nights went on without incident. She slept on the futon in my TV room while I slept in my bed and we kept our distance. By the third night animal urges and alkipops had all but eliminated that distance.

When she moved in I had no designs on Nikki and I’m almost positive she was indifferent to me as well. We were roommates that just happened to have opposing sets of genitalia. We were more than capable of living with each other without jumping each other like dogs in heat. But then alcohol entered the picture and laid waste to our little arrangement.

Now, I’m not blaming booze or using it as an excuse for what we did. I’m simply trying to explain why things went down the way they did and that is nigh impossible if you discount alcohol. On the third night that Nikki stayed with me I bought a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages from Bigg’s because it was cheap and it was French, which would make me seem like quite the sophisticate. When I got home I popped the bottle and poured us each a generous glass to christen our new living situation. As the evening progressed I started getting the lovey-dovey-fuzzy drunk that makes you feel like you just took a quarter tab of ecstasy. I spent the rest of the night inching ever closer to Nikki, trying to graze her elbow or lean my forearm against hers.

My prowess when it comes to wooing women is lackluster at best, which would explain why I was a 21-year old virgin at the time. I wasn’t smooth or charming or filled with that supreme confidence that women seem to think so highly of. However, what I did have was an uncanny knack to peg people down in an instant. I don’t know if it’s my writer’s sensibility or the fact that my lack of stunning features has always forced me to actually listen to what women say, but my batting average when it comes to properly picking people’s brains is higher than Teddy Ballgame’s.

So my effort to court Nikki involved probing her inner psyche, an exercise aided in large part by her lack of inhibition due to the vino, and just listening. Occasionally I would throw in a seemingly perceptive remark about this or that event in her life and acted like I was far more sage than I actually was to get her to tell me things she thought I already knew. The things she told me that night aren’t mine to retell, suffice it to say they were of people and problems that she had never discussed with anybody save maybe her sister. I set up the futon so that she could go to sleep and then lay down next to her. She turned over on her side to face me and wriggled her legs in anticipation of what she was about to say.
“I’ve only been living with you for three days and you already know more about me than my boyfriend.”
It was then that I really looked at her for the first time. I mean I took a fine-tooth comb to her. And it suddenly hit me that this woman was beautiful. How I had missed it before baffled me. There are no physical traits that I can really use to describe why I suddenly became enamored with her. I always knew she had a terrific little dancer’s body, but I had never really looked at her face before. I mean, it’s not like she had the world’s most fantastic nose, or ears that would make Michaelangelo drop to his knees so that he could sculpt a bust of her head. Aesthetically speaking, she simply had a conventionally pretty face. But it was the way she looked at you, the way you knew she saw you through her eyes that gave her grace. When she looked at me like she did that night I felt like I was the only thing on God’s green earth that meant a damn. Her gaze was reassuring like the lambskin blanket I had when I was a kid. It was a look that cared.

I would be hard pressed to say who kissed whom first. Our faces were playing a game of chicken: in, out, in, out. Neither one of us ready to commit to something that ethically and biblically wrong. Finally we fell into each other and God was it bliss. All that awkward, drunken groping and tonguing and lips missing lips. It was by no means pretty and it wasn’t impressive either. We didn’t fuck or anything. Nothing that happened that night would’ve been out of place in the back room of a middle school winter formal, but it still felt special. She was the forbidden fruit that men have been trying to suck the pulp out of for millennia. It was wrong and I liked it.

I never saw myself as being a “bad guy.” As a matter fact I was a painfully nice guy who always finished last as the proverb goes. I was always too sweet to get the girl, too gun shy to pull the trigger. I was the friend, the confidant, and the crying shoulder. Above all I never saw myself as the type of guy who would ever fool around with a woman who was spoken for. It was simply taboo. I never did shit like that because I had a moral compass. It was other twatters who called women bitches and put rufies in girl’s appletinis that did amoral crap like that. But theory and practice are two very different things and with wine coursing through my brains and her Lolita-lips pouting at me I caved in. I’m not much of a religious man, but I can tell you with absolute certainly that you would’ve eaten the apple too. Eve never had a chance.

The next morning we acted like nothing had happened. I think one of us brought it up but quickly laid the matter to rest. We just waited until nightfall came again and we could drink again and make love on the futon until we passed out. I don’t think I learned a single thing in any of my courses over those few weeks. Every waking second was devoted to the singular thought of sucking on her neck when we were good and smashed in the evening.

Every night we would get pissed, maybe watch a movie, and fool around in almost every way not involving genitalia. It was as if we thought that if we stayed away from the mother of all erogenous zones, then what we were doing wasn’t that wrong. That plan never really worked. Every morning we would still wake up rapt with guilt, trying to forget how we had spent the previous evening coveting our neighbor’s ass…or his wife, whatever biblical allusion fits. Even when she started sleeping in bed with me at night the feelings didn’t go away. I was like a triple-bypass survivor at a Golden Corral buffet. I just couldn’t help myself.

This went on for about a month until the date in question with Nikki’s birthday and the sweaty ponytail guy I was talking about earlier. The night before I had taken her out for a birthday dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, where I gave her my birthday present of an olive green sweater from Forever XXI with one of those little tie-ribbons around the waist. I like those little tie ribbons. They accentuate the tits and isolate the stems. What guy doesn’t want that?

But I was the primary boyfriend as far as I was concerned and as our gift-giving ability demonstrated. I gave her a nice sweater that she would wear on at least a semi-regular basis for the next year or so. Casey came down from his dorm at Ohio State carrying a bunch of useless crap from Goodwill, excepting a terrifically retro Cosby sweater. I was the guy living with her and he was the one 200 miles away doing fuck all and not giving her the time of day. And suddenly he’s going to come back into town and steal my thunder. Here comes the true boyfriend? Make way for fucking Casanova and shit. I was pissed.

At the gym every rep was punctuated with an expletive. Doing incline presses it was:

“one…faggot…two…fucking faggot…three…I’m gonna rip off his scrotum and make him gargle his own balls…four…that fucker’s dead,” and so on.

In retrospect I had absolutely no reason to have any animosity towards Casey. As a matter of fact he was the one who should’ve been pissed. Technically Nikki was still his girl and I was playing the part of the home-wrecker. But it didn’t matter because he was standing in the way between me and my girl. As far as I was concerned Nikki was my property and this fucker was trespassing and needed to get a Springfield rifle pointed at his comely mug ‘til he pissed himself and ran away like a little bitch. But, as it turns out, I’m a bit of a pussy myself and didn’t want to confront the man, even though I was certain I could take him if it came down to fisticuffs. It’s just that I knew I was the one in the wrong and if I gave him a shiner for just being Nikki’s boyfriend I’d never be able to live with myself. On the plus side, I’ve never had such a satisfying workout.

Shaving With Pimples Part Deux

– Just as a general note, I haven’t changed any of the names of the people involved because I figured, if you know them, then you’d be able to see through a pseudonym, and if you don’t know them, then creating a false name is purposeless. If anyone has issue with this, tell me and I’ll change it.

Shaving With Pimples (2nd Installment)

And then there was Nikki, who at the time looked like the pseudo-bohemian love child of Kirsten Dunst and Amy Poehler, all 95 lbs of her flailing about in a flurry of elbows and energy. Her hair was long then. It was also brown. Now it’s cropped into a bob and is dyed auburn. She’s also eschewed the Boho-Chic look for one of runway glamour, wearing highfalutin fashions that she nicked from the Taiwanese princess across the street who started selling haute-couture on a whim and closed her store with the same caprice.

But back then she was still wearing her old duds. That night she was wearing…well, how the hell can I be expected to remember what she was wearing? It was over a year and a half ago and on the night in question I was still hopped up on enough pills to make Gary Busey seem lucid. So let’s go through her fashionista rolodex and come up with an outfit she might have been wearing. Since this is my story, I get to choose what she was wearing, unless she reads this and actually does remember what she was wearing, in which case I suppose I’d be obligated to change it. She was wearing her maroon tank top that hugged her body in such a manner that her breasts seemed unfairly imprisoned and a call to Amnesty International might be appropriate. Her jeans were well worn and adorned on the back pocket with white embroidery that couldn’t help but draw your attention to her wee little ass.

At the time I didn’t notice any of this. Contrary to what I told her during our 15 months together I hardly noticed her that summer at Lookout Joe’s. She was just another skinny little waif, an employee, a java jezebel who fed my caffeine fix. Before I could walk in the door, Kim blew a puff of her Camel Wide at me:
- “You look like hell. What the hell happened to you?”
I just wanted a little coffee first. Help wake me up from my Van Winkle-esque slumber.
- “Nice to see you too. I’m gonna…I need some coffee.”
I went into the shop and grabbed a paper cup, which I filled with the Guatemalan and two packets of Sweet ‘N Low as is my custom. I walked back outside and lit up Marlboro Menthol Light, which I smoke in part because my high school drama teacher did and because it keeps people from bumming off me. I call it the Halls defense.
“Uh Kim, what do you know about Amitryptiline?”
Kim worked as a pharm tech at CVS and possesed a wealth of pharmaceutical knowledge.
“We give it to people who have chronic migraines and to kids who have piss the bed at night. Why?”
“Does anyone ever use it recreationally?”
“Why the hell would anyone take Amitryptaline recreationally? It would just make you pass out for a day and a half.”
“Well, that’s for damn sure.”
“You didn’t?”
“I’m afraid to say I did, very much so.”
“Are you insane?! Who the hell takes Amitryptiline to get high?”
“This guy.”
“Well, that guy is the biggest cock I’ve ever met. God, I could understand if you took Oxycontin or Vicodin or Valium, but Amitryptaline; we give that stuff to bed-wetters. You abused a drug for incontinent kids!”
They might as well put that on my tombstone: Abused a drug for incontinent kids. A fine epitaph. Kim gave me a look of disdain and with the flick of a switch turned it into one of pleading.
“Drew, could we drink at your place tonight?”
My place was actually my parent’s place. They have a house in Cincinnati and one in Traverse City, Michigan (plus a trailer in a farm in bufu Northern Michigan). They spend their summers up in Michigan, leaving the house all to myself and my prodigal ways. I really had no desire to get drunk, but I also lacked the impetus to say no.
“I don’t see why not.”
————————————————————————————————————
And so we made the 10 block hike up to my house on Hardisty and christened a bottle of Rain vodka, which Kim swore by but I had never heard of. I was going to mix it with some orange soda anyway so it didn’t matter what shit brand of vodka was in it. Oddly enough, orange soda and vodka was the drink of choice for Dick Hickock, one of the two men involved with the Clutter murders chronicled in In Cold Blood. For some reason, drinking the same drink as the man who butchered the Clutter family was vaguely appealing to me. I wonder what Chuck Manson drank? Probably paint thinner with a chaser of wood varnish.

When we were sitting out on my back patio smoking, I was pissing and moaning about how I couldn’t bear living at the apartment my parents had rented for me. While I am a solitary individual, there’s something terribly depressing about living in a 4-room/1-bedroom apartment all by your lonesome. Especially when the only furniture you own is a cherry walnut futon and Queen size bed. You might as well be living in the Napoleon suite on the Isle of Elba.

As it was, I rarely stayed at the apartment and spent the majority of my nights at home, watching Jeopardy and doing crossword puzzles with my parents before going upstairs to sleep in my old room. While I was bitching about this fact, Nikki mentioned that she was looking for a place to live so that she could get the bloody hell away from her mother, a point that I would all too soon commiserate with her on. While a well-meaning woman, Nikki’s mother had the temperament of a kid who had forgotten to take his Ritalin and a voice set at so high a pitch that it could destroy glass and sanity.
So I asked her: “Well why don’t you come on and move in with me?”
This may very well be the defining sentence of my young life and if I was ever asked whether or not I would take it back, I’d say that I wouldn’t, but I’d add in the caveat that I’m a terrific masochist.
“I don’t think your roommate would like that very much.”
“I don’t have a roommate.”
“Well then I guess that means we’ll be roomies.” She was obviously joking.
“Alright then.” I was too drunk to realize she was joking.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m totally serious. My apartment gives me cabin fever and you need a place to stay. Why not?”
“Sounds good roomie. When should I move in?”
“How does tomorrow sound?”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“I shit you not.”
“You know you might end up regretting this.” I wouldn’t.
I knew all too well that Nikki had a boyfriend at the time. Some mathematically inclined social invalid named Casey. Whenever I saw him he was busy playing chess or debating the merits of string theory or some such truck. He had this hideous flecked blonde hair that shot out around his ears like a bunch of broom bristles. His hair was almost always covered by this trite little beige fedora that made him look like a hipster reject. And he smelled. It wasn’t as if he reeked or anything. It’s just that he had the air of a man who hadn’t seen the inside of a shower for far too long. Towards the end of their relationship he came down with some kind of cancer…lymphoma or something. I imagine that extended their relationship by a couple of months because it’s a bitch of a thing to leave a man like that. I mean, how much of a heartless bastard do you have to be to dump someone who’s going through Chemo? So they remained in couples’ limbo as she waited for some serendipitous opportunity to fall in lust with someone else.

However, the night was far from young and we decided to head down to Mt. Lookout Square and get a couple of beers. I bought some Killian’s from the UDF and we sat on the most uncomfortable benches on God’s green earth outside the coffee shop, sipping our Irish hops and trying to figure out what to do next. It was then that I, quite inebriated, landed on the idea of sneaking the girls into a local bar called The Stand.

“Come on. I can totally get you guys in. You just let me lead the way and you’ll be in like Flint before you know it.”

Kim objected. “Drew do realize how pissed you are? There’s no way you can get yourself into the bar, much less get us in.”

“Kim, you seem to have underestimated my cunning and my unrelenting charm. I’ll bet you ten bucks I get you into that bar. Now you just wait here and I’ll be back for you in no time at all.”

What happened next is almost entirely blotted from my memory as I seem to have blacked out at some point between the coffee shop and The Stand. However, I do have these basic facts. I did go to The Stand and failed miserably in my attempt to get the girls into the bar. I then went over to Muz’s?, a bar with a questionable name and even more questionable patrons, where I ordered a double of Maker’s Mark before heading back to the coffee shop to inform the girls of their ill-fortune. How I managed this without them seeing me is a mystery to me as the coffee shop lies directly in-between The Stand and Muz’s ?, needless to say the girls had no idea where I had been and why it took me so damn long to get turned away from the bar. In fact, it had taken me so long that they had finished off the rest of the Killian’s, which was our cue to head out.

still more to come…

Shaving With Pimples

Here is the start o a piece of literary non-fiction I’m writing. It’ll be serialized as I go along and I hope you enjoy it:

Shaving With Pimples

I have a feeling that everyone in this gym thinks this song is about them. The egotism in this place is revolting. Well, the egotism and the B.O. hot-boxing the room into one sickly sweet pit stain. Membership-only Sports Clubs are one of the few places in the world where full-length mirrors on every wall are considered a necessity. Everyone’s just pumping and pulling and thrusting and lunging and the entire time they’re just staring agog at the mirror like they’re fucking Charles Atlas. Like that guy over there flexing in his skintight black under-armor shirt and bike shorts, examining the bulge of his bicep like it holds the cure for cancer. He probably thinks if he gets just one more rep in he’ll get some pussy tonight, ignoring the fact that the reason women repel from him like water on turtle wax is because he’s sporting a flaming red ponytail and looks all puffed up like a eunuch.

However, the sad fact of the matter is that I am one of these people. I know you probably think it hypocritical of me to ream on a subset of folks of which I am a part, but I feel I’m entitled to do so. The key difference is that, unlike Big Red or the forty-something WASPy blonde (dyed) climbing the Stairmaster as if St. Peter was waiting at the top, I do not pretend. I do not flatter myself that I’m exercising for my health or because of some sort of “runner’s high,” which I suppose is the ecstasy one feels when they can stop running for no Goddamn reason. I am in this Godforsaken gym lifting 35-pound dumbbells and wasting my life away doing stomach crunches because I want to look good naked. I want to look good naked because I want to get fucked and I want to get fucked by someone else who looks good naked.

I engage in the same self-absorbed twaddle as everyone else in this place. I wear an old white t-shirt of mine with sleeves that are too small for me so I can show off my arms and see my pecs pushing against the cotton. When I’m in the men’s locker room I make a point of getting a locker in front of the mirror and away from the scale so that I have an excuse to watch myself walking across the room naked when I weigh myself. Everyone has these moments of vanity, but few people have the stones to admit it. It’s like watching a guy trying to get his boxers out of his ass-crack by doing a variation on the Chuck Berry duck walk.

That afternoon I was working out with extra vim, but a normal level of vigor, because my girlfriend’s boyfriend was coming into town for her birthday. Why two boyfriends? Well, because I wasn’t officially her boyfriend. People suspected that we were fooling around, but, following in the great legal tradition of our fair nation, we had yet to be proven guilty and therefore no one said a damn thing
————————————————————————————————————
Three weeks ago I was all set to go up to see a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Denison University. Denison is essentially a gated community for college students in the middle of bumblefuck Ohio. Its’ scenic location atop a hill overlooking the quaint little hamlet of Granville makes it a putrid little bubble of prolonged adolescence. Not that there’s any reason to visit the townies beneath you because at the junction of Granville’s Main St. and Broadway are four churches, one on each corner of the intersection. You can imagine the beehive of activity that a holy place like that engenders on a Friday night. As a matter of fact, living in Granville for a year has led me to be a fervent advocate against any town with a population under 50K being able to disingenuously name their main drag “Broadway.” I also support relocating at least 20% of the country’s thoroughfares named after the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the inner city and into the suburbs. The man did mention something about black kids and white kids playing together so the very least we can do is put his name on signs in a couple of white flight outposts.

It bears noting that I am no longer a student at Denison, due in large part to the prudish and puritanical views of the University and the state of Ohio on the recreational use of cannabis. Within a month of arriving at Denison I had already received an OVI, which, for the uninitiated, stands for Operating a Vehicle under the Influence. They no longer call it a DUI because apparently intoxicated drivers are not the only vehicular menace to society. By changing the verbiage the po-po can now arrest folks for riding a bike drunk, skateboarding stoned, or riding a horse while hopped up on Crystal Meth. I was caught in more conventional manner with my Volvo smelling like the back of Willie Nelson’s tour bus when I was pulled over.

I won’t go into too much detail about the night in question suffice it to say that my attempt to drive to Steak ‘N Shake attracted six members of Granville’s finest and four squad cars. Obviously I was the most threatening person within a 10-mile radius on that particular evening. That, or Granville cops are all ex-high school football stars who never went to college and get their jollies from busting the rich bitches who lord their higher education over them by their mere presence. But, then again, I could be mistaken. For all of my civil disobedience I was given a $500 fine, suspension of my driver’s license for six months, a year of disciplinary probation at Denison, and a 90-day jail sentence that was cut down to three days, which was then exchanged for stay in 72-hour DUI rehabilitation clinic. I would go into the wonder that was DUI camp, but it would take ages and I’m already off-topic as is.

Another incident involving marijuana and a campus security guard with a nose like a bloodhound landed me on double disciplinary probation, which in fact didn’t exist. As a result I had to strike a deal with the dean of the university to let me finish the semester out under the condition that I never sully their University’s august reputation by remaining a member of their student body. So, I finished out the semester and moved back to my home in Cincinnati became a student at the Jesuit hellhole known as Xavier University, a disgustingly morally presumptuous place where I am still enrolled at present.

I had planned to go back to Denison three weeks ago to visit the few friends I had there, friends who would eventually transform into mere acquaintances who I don’t know and who don’t know me. My apathy towards the trip combined with my impatience in rush hour traffic led me to take the metaphoric right turn at Albuquerque after a half hour and head back to Cincinnati. However, the predictability of life at tiny liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere allows me to give you a very accurate description of what would have happened had I gone.

There would have been an agonizingly dull road trip down I-71 filled with downed cups of Pilot coffee, chain smoking and the occasional roadside attraction: A giant billboard proclaiming “Hell Is Real!” with the H in the devil’s red; a giant megachurch with the misleading name of Solid Rock, sporting a thousand gallon reflection pool with a 50 foot concrete Jesus holding his arms in the air like Joe Montana after a touchdown; Flea markets and flea markets and The Lion’s Den erotic bookstore and then more flea markets. Ramshackle barns with Confederate flags painted on the roofs to spite the Mason-Dixon line and history; Miles and miles of waist-high grass; in short, the splendor that is rural Ohio.

I would’ve pulled into Granville and bee lined for Sugarloaf Park where I would smoke spliff on a bench facing a giant stone sculpture of an egg known colloquially as Chuck Norris’ left nut. Ambling back to campus I would go down to the theater and sit through a community theater quality production of Midsummer and watch a flaming queen blow glitter all over some slumbering sophomore’s face. There would be an after-cast party which I would inevitably crash, where I’d be forced to latch onto one of the cast members like a leech, telling her how I’d never seen a better Hermia just so that I could get access to the liquor cabinet and make myself a G & T in lieu of the shit jungle juice flowing around the place. There probably would’ve been some of that good old Beat tea, which we would need to climb onto the roof of the building to smoke so that the abstainers wouldn’t pitch a hissyfit.

If I got lucky, I’d find some tart who was just drunk enough to be incapable of seeing that sleeping with me was not in her best interest. I’d take her back to her room like Cary Grant and once we were inside throw off my formal pretensions and start sucking face. Eventually I’d do something to get me kicked out of the room pre-coitus like vomiting on her laptop or taking a piss in her trashcan. Then I’d fall asleep in the hallway of her dorm and drive off in the morning unsatisfied and nursing a Advil-proof hangover.
————————————————————————————————————
All hypotheticals aside, what I actually did that night when I got off the freeway was head down to United Dairy Farmers and get a 6-pack of Rolling Rock and some Teriyaki Beef Jerky. Upon returning home I came to the sad realization that I had smoked the last of my pot, rendering my Rolling Rock useless. Six beers can get me properly messed up if they’re accompanied by some herbal refreshment, but by themselves it’s like I’m just drinking Ale 8.

I started scouring the apartment for some drug short of Nyquil that would put an end to my lucidity. I took out my parent’s wicker pill basket and started weeding through our pharmacological cornucopia. Adderall? No, I don’t want to be wired out of my skull for 36 hours looking like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man because of my newly acquired anal-retentive tendencies. Lipitor? While the ancillary benefits of having lower blood pressure might be nice, it won’t exactly get me high. Cialis? Having a raging hard on for 4 hours does have it’s possibilities, but what if it went over the four hours and I had to call a doctor like the ad tells you to? “Ummm, Doc I was recreationally using some Cialis and now my cock’s been stiff for about a day and half. Could you recommend any creams or ointments?” Too much trouble. Amitryptaline? My sister’s migraine medicine. If it’s for migraines then it has to deal with my head and if I’m lucky, scramble it. I did some preliminary research on Wikipedia, take about 150 milligrams of the stuff and plop back on the couch. I only make it to my third beer before I pass out. The last thing I remember is that I was watching this terrible chick flick where Mark Ruffalo sublets an apartment that is haunted by the ghost of Reese Witherspoon who was hit by a bus or something. I realized at the time how pathetic it was, but I didn’t care because I had no premonition that I’d be chronicling the event two years later.

When I woke up I felt like my brain was operating on a bad broadband connection. Everything had a five second lag and I thought that I might crash at any moment with the devil’s electric blue “computer error” screen flashing over my pupils. The oven clock said it was 5:00, but it was light out. The amatryptiline had knocked me out for a solid 20 hours and the drug was still making me feel like I had just come out of a coma. Thus incapacitated, I ambled down Hardisty Ave. towards Lookout Joe’s coffee shop, a place that would become my second home and would house my incestuous bed.

When I got down to the coffee shop I saw Nikki and Kim smoking out on the patio. I knew Kim from a few years back. I took her out for dinner once about two years prior at a bar/restaurant with the ingenious moniker of The Pub. I was nineteen and by the will of some celestial power I was given alcohol when I asked the waitress. Why she gave it to me can only be chalked up to pity or apathy because at my current age of twenty-two I look like I’m nineteen, and when I was actually nineteen I looked like I had a curfew to meet. I ordered Amstel Lights because I thought it was a classy choice (imported is classy, right?) and took her back to my parent’s house in an attempt to woo her. I played the I Am Sam soundtrack which features some fantastic Beatles’ covers and I poured us a couple of rum & cokes as a socio-sexual lubricant and I sat down on the couch, inching towards her at the pace of a retarded snail, trying to get a little contact between my thigh and hers. Needless to say it didn’t work out, which turned out to be in my favor as she is a far better friend than girlfriend. A self-avowed maneater, she would have destroyed my self-esteem and my bollocks within a week. She once asked a boyfriend of hers “what good are you?” when he couldn’t get it up in bed. If a woman ever said that to me I would curl up in a ball and pitch a tent under the covers, lubricating my cock with tears.

More to come…

We Used to be a Contender

In spite of the promise that comes with the inauguration of our nation’s first African-American President this coming Tuesday, I can’t shake the feeling that we are all experiencing the twilight of American empire and the death rattle of that manufactured fallacy known as the American dream. I say this not in any way to demean the accomplishments of President-Elect Obama, but instead to keep folks wise to the reality of the American condition amidst the pomp and jubilation of Tuesday night. I’ve always believed that art, that reflection of life, is always a better barometer of a time and a place than any historical work or piece of journalism. With that being said, two of the year’s best films, The Wrestler and Gran Torino, offer a sobering picture of our nation as a washed-up nobody, frantically grasping for the pedestal on which it once stood and now merely gazing up at in freefall.

The struggles of the Big Three U.S. automakers are common knowledge to anyone who has turned on CNN or picked up a copy of The New York Times over the past two months. It was a decline decades in the making, the result of a lethargy, stasis, ignorance and the idea that people would buy American even if the product made the Edsel look like a Mercedes. Now, what better symbol of this relic of an industry is there than Clint Eastwood, at 78 years young, sitting on a rocking chair with a decimated 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon lying next to him and a glob of Red Man seeping through his cheek?

Eastwood’s portrayal of the curmudgeonly old bigot and ex-Ford assembly line worker Walt Kowalski is beautiful for it’s encapsulation of a greatest generation long gone and now unwanted. He practically growls his way through the entire film, not lamenting, but plain pissed off that his country has gone down the shitter. His once middle-class Detroit neighborhood is now a glorified slum, its all-white population scared off to Grosse Point and replaced by a polyglot hodgepodge of immigrants. While the film is ultimately about the transcendence of the human condition over racism and the quelling of one’s inner demons through good works, it is not lost on the audience that Walt Kowalski is a 21st century Custer. He and the generation he represents are dwindling and aging, succumbing to the rule of a soft-paunched baby boomer class that eschews their hard-nosed work ethic for a crass materialism that contradicts the counter-culture that first disgusted the Walt’s of the world. Walt Kowalski’s end is a noble one, but it is all for naught, as his children would never have followed his example.

Randy, “The Ram,” Robinson could’ve been one of Walt Kowalski’s kids, but by the time we see him in The Wrestler he looks even more beat-up than the man thirty years his senior. Randy, expertly played by Mickey Rourke, has been through the meat-grinder that is the world of professional wrestling and comes out looking like he had been run through a leather-tanning factory. Rourke’s superb acting is aided by the fact that his face, decimated from years of boxing, plastic surgery and drug use, looks like pockmarked piece of burnt meat. Randy was once a star who filled up 100,000 seat arenas, a man on par with Hulk Hogan or Andre the Giant, but now that his fame has passed him by he’s forced to wrestle at community centers and American Legion buildings while keeping a part time job at a supermarket.

Some falls are harder than the one from the top rope.

Rourke represents the decadence and excess of the eighties, which history might mark as the tipping point for our nation, when we let our bread and circuses drive us towards oblivion. Rourke’s portrayal of “The Ram” presents a tragically myopic figure who can live only in the present and knows nothing of foresight. His fame gone and his bridges with family and friends scorched, he is left to sleep in the back of his van surrounded by posters exhibiting his former glory. But, in spite of all of his character flaws, you can’t help but love the guy for all his charisma and resiliency. Despite his heart attack and the pleas of an over-the-hill stripper (Marissa Tomei) to come back to the real world, he can’t because wrestling is all he knows and he’ll do it even if he dies mid-suplex.

Both of these men are dinosaurs. They were built to live in a world that no longer exists and they would rather get shot in the heart than change who they are. They represent America, a land that is so used to being a superpower that the idea of just being another world power is unthinkable. We won’t adapt to the new paradigm of the 21st century, but will stubbornly linger in the 20th, reminiscing about The Battle of the Bulge and Apollo 11. There’s a telling scene in The Wrestler where Randy invites a neighborhood kid into his trailer to play a Nintendo wrestling game that has Randy “The Ram” as a character in all of his 8-bit glory. While they’re playing the kid is pissing and moaning about how boring these old games are and about how cool the new Call of Duty IV game is for the XBOX 360. “The Ram” can’t understand why the kid would want to play anything other than this Nintendo wrestling game and the kid can’t understand how Randy can play this ancient video game. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which one is America and which is the rest of the world.

She Don’t Lie, Cocaine

“It seems probable, in the light of reports which I shall refer to later, that coca, if used protractedly but in moderation, is not detrimental to the body.” – Sigmund Freud on the effects of Cocaine in his 1884 paper, Uber Coca.

“I know lots of people that take cocaine three nights a week and get up and go to work everyday, no problem at all.” – Lily Allen

Brit-Pop ne’er-do-well Lily Allen has taken a great deal of flack from the British Press for her devil-may-care attitude towards drug use in a rather candid interview with Word magazine. Among the many un-PC gems proffered by Ms. Allen were her contention that, “The only story is that drugs are bad and they will kill you – you will become a prostitute, a rapist or a dealer. But that’s not true” Allen also voiced her discontentment with the fact that record labels no longer provide their artists with complimentary snow at the Kraft service table, lamenting that, “Twenty years ago, I’d have been booked in at the Ritz with five grams of cocaine on my table.“

In response to these comments David Raynes, a member of the UK National Drug Prevention Alliance, chastised Allen, saying, “When someone like Lily Allen makes these remarks she is only harming young people who will at some point in their lives have to make a decision about taking drugs.” All of the public uproar surrounding her comments has led Allen to make a statement clarifying that she doesn’t condone drug use of any kind, a gesture that is most likely as hollow as a rolled up twenty pound note.

However, it seems to me that everyone who is all in a tizzy about Allen’s comments has missed the boat entirely. At no point in her interview, or at least in the portions of it that have thus far been leaked, does she condone snorting coke like a proper junkie. She simply doesn’t channel the spirit of Nancy Reagan and plead with the youth of Britain to “Just say no.” On “Alfie” from her debut record Alright, Still she belittles the stoner culture of slack singing, “Ooooo Alfie get up it’s a brand new day/ I just can’t sit back and watch you waste your life away/ You need to get a job because the bills need to get paid.” Allen’s point, in the song and in the interview, is that drug use isn’t a black and white matter, but like most things, must be viewed in grayscale. If you can use cocaine or weed with restraint like one would with a glass of Bordeaux with dinner, she seems to be saying, then more power to you.

Hey, Lily could be a lot worse off.

Now, if this line of reasoning still strikes you as being, well, unreasonable, then let me go to that old standby: juxtaposition. Lily Allen is not a strung-out crackhead desperately in need of in-patient rehab and a bath. That would be Amy Winehouse. Lily Allen hasn’t gotten knocked up twice and exhibited such abhorrent parenting skills as to lose primary custody to a white trash back-up dancer. That would be Britney Spears. Lily Allen hasn’t allegedly subsisted on a diet comprised solely of red peppers, cocaine, and milk. That was David Bowie during his Thin White Duke phase. Pop Music and copious drug use go together like Rob Blagojevich and bribery. To pick a fight with a musician for not calling cocaine the devil’s powder is just self-serving ego stroking by those who claim to be of sound moral character. When Lily Allen treating coke like it’s Sweet ‘N Low and begins popping Valium like they’re Pez, then you can get indignant and I’ll listen.

A Hollywood Wedding that should be Annulled

Bride Wars is the type of movie that makes me mourn the death of contemporary American film as we know it. Granted, I have yet to see Bride Wars, but I have seen the trailer for it, and surely that is enough. The idea of two lifelong bosom buddies having their dream weddings double booked on the same day is just hackneyed enough for me to pine for another Saw film. Now, you may be thinking that this is the opinion of someone whose perspective is skewed a set of external genitalia, but I am in actuality a romantic comedy junkie. I own When Harry Met Sally, always watch Sleepless in Seattle when it makes its fortnightly appearance on TBS, and even went so far as to buy tickets to The Prince & Me (a terribly mediocre film in its own right) with my mother in tow. I am unabashed in my un-hetero love for chick flicks. However, Bride Wars looks so unoriginal that I feel the need to warn the general public. So, for the wellbeing of my fellow moviegoers, let me tell you what’s going to happen during the droning ninety-some-odd minutes of Bride Wars and spare you $8.25 during these tough economic times.

The film will open with panoramic views of New York City and Madison Avenue in all of its boutique-laden glory. This will inevitably be followed by some sort of sappy dialogue between Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway in which they outline their perfect wedding (an outlandish gala at The Plaza Hotel) and mention how they each think their respective beau is going to be “the one.” They will then to proceed to rag on one of their lesser friend’s nuptial gathering and then, in a truly original portent of doom, they will both catch the bouquet.

All of this will be followed by their two terribly two-dimensional significant others proposing to them at the same time. What are the odds? Then enter Candice Bergen stage left, who will proceed to phone in her performance as their wedding planner (and who could blame her?), playing a benevolent version of the Miss America runner-up she portrayed in Miss Congeniality. The director will then subject the audience to a shopping spree montage wherein Hudson and Hathaway try on wedding dresses, pick out flower arrangements and buy lots of new clothes for no apparent reason.

At the very least they're standing in front of a poster for a good movie.

Once the two women discover that only one of them can have their wedding at The Plaza in June, there will be the required section of the film devoted to backstabbing shenanigans. The trailer already shows Hathaway being locked in a tanning booth until her pigment is that of Mojave Desert dirt, while Hudson has her hair dyed blue and finds that her wedding dress has been bedazzled. The women will then take out their frustration on their fiancées, who, in turn, will talk to each other in bro-speak. I would venture to guess a ratio of one “dude” or “man” for every line of dialogue uttered.

Bride Wars will reach its climax when Kate Hudson has her wedding at The Plaza and Anne Hathaway crashes it by tackling her as she walks down the aisle. There will be a prolonged catfight in which hair is pulled, dresses are ripped, the pastor looks revolted and the women barrel into something large and ornate, most likely the wedding cake. Then, whilst covered in wedding cake, the two women will realize the absurdity of the situation, laugh manically for a minute or so, and then have a joint wedding. Candace Bergen will provide some nauseatingly cliché epilogue and the film will end, probably with a shot of Hathaway and Hudson giggling.

Now that I’ve given you the Cliff Notes version of this wretched film, I implore you not to go see when it comes out January 9th. People who make movies like this should not be rewarded with big box office numbers, but should be banned from Hollywood and forced to do dinner theater in rural Wisconsin. The only reason drek like this gets the green light is because studios think that women will line up like mindless drones to see any film that involves A-list actresses and a white veil. If you’re jonesing for a wedding movie in the worst way, then just stay at home and watch Four Weddings and a Funeral again. Just trust me.