The Razor’s Edge

I had always taken it for granted that at some point I would experience some kind of massive sea change that would unalterably inform my future life. When I slipped into vivid somnolence I could see myself vanishing without cause or explanation to go backpacking through rural India or becoming the token gringo in some decrepit Haitian village. On my journey I would come to find my true self’s purpose and would likely commune with a lovable old Yogi. Then, after my year abroad, I would return home the enlightened nomad whose worldliness oozed out in an awesome stream of serenity and understanding. This is how I would transmogrify from a suburban everybody into a Keruoacian sage. This is not how it happened.

Eight and a half months ago I did succeed in quietly dip-setting out of Cincinnati with only my best friend knowing the whys and wherefores of my journey. However, I didn’t scamper off to go build hospitals in Guatemala or trek through the Andes with a Llama caravan. I went to Minnesota…for drug and alcohol treatment (I realize my audience is entirely made of friends and family who already know this, but just play dumb for a little dramatic effect or else those ellipses have been squandered). Oddly enough, one vision of my Razor’s Edge journey that I envisioned did involve a treatment center, which should be a pretty good indicator of my soundness of mind at the time. I was swept up I the great artistic fallacy that drinking enough J&B would turn me into Tennessee Williams or Hunter S. Thompson. Why I would want to be those men in the first place is debatable since these literary giants killed themselves by choking on a barbiturate-dispensing eyedropper and dismantling his skull with a 12-gauge respectively. I always had visions of being incorrigibly contrarian and witty in treatment, unraveling my psychologist’s misguided diagnoses like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. As I was to find out, it is pretty much impossible to say anything clever and scathing while detoxing and shivering like a damp Chihuahua.

My stay at Hazelden had a Gilligan’s Island flair to it as I set off under the impression that I would only be there for 28 days and was soon informed that a month just wasn’t gonna cut it for me and I’d need another three more. If you’ve never been to treatment (or for that matter anyplace of interminable monotony), then it’s had to truly convey the absurd amount of time that you have to self-reflect. Roughly ½ of your waking moments are spent in some sort of therapeutic group dredging up feelings old and new in an effort to find the rich creamy nougat of insecurity and self-loathing inside of them. As if that weren’t enough, the abundance of unstructured down time leaves one with almost no choice but to probe every diseased crevice of the past. While I’m sure that surmounting the north side of Everest is an awesome experience, there’s really nothing quite as frightening as the demented contours of your inner psyche, especially when that psyche has been water-logged with chemicals for over half a decade.

When I graduated from Hazelden (and wasn’t that the day my parents had always dreamed of—rehab graduation), I moved on to Gray Wolf Ranch in Northwest Washington where I finally got a small sampling of panoramic goodness that I had always fantasized about and been too chicken-shit to experience. I realize that Olympic National Park ain’t the Himalayas, but watching blood orange sun slide behind the tumult of the Pacific with nothing between it and Japan can make a man slack-jawed. I’ve already done my best Thoreau impression with my rambling about my sea kayaking trek so I won’t subject you to any more transcendentalist clap-trap, but I will say that if the profundity of nature has made me well aware of the hubristic ignorance behind the idea that we control what goes on in this world.

Coming back to Cincinnati I have been hit with a faint wave of confusion at the world around me. Everything that used to be so familiar seems vaguely foreign and it feels like my home is about 3,000 miles back west. Talking to old friends is an exercise in Déjà vu and I feel like I shouldn’t really even be here. Maybe it’s the preponderance of clichés that I’ve adopted going to all those twelve step meetings, but I feel one coming on: I’ve changed and everything around me has remained the same. Much to my initial chagrin, going to treatment has been the defining moment of my life. As a result, all of the creature comforts and familiarity of my old life feel transparent and false. Suddenly the comfort of the well-worn doesn’t feel so comfortable anymore, like a snake trying to slither into his shed skin.

A Natural Conversion

The outdoors have never really piqued my interest beyond a flickering curiosity that could be sated by a quick jaunt over to a city park or a few hours watching the Discovery Channel. My desire to explore the undeveloped wilderness has always been academic and easily enough put to rest by plopping in a Planet Earth DVD or reading up about an item of interest on Wikipedia. I was more than willing to experience all the majesty that our surroundings had to offer us provided that I could switch over to Sportscenter between commercial breaks. John Muir I am not. As a matter of fact, the one drawback I saw in coming out to Gray Wolf Ranch was their insistence on turning me into some sort of mountain man with these “treks” of theirs; a little chunk of Outward Bound in an otherwise splendid aftercare regimen. At this point I began to damn Teddy Roosevelt’s existence and fantasize of a world where McKinley was never assassinated and William Howard Taft turned all of our national parks into lumberyards, but soon resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to go on trek.

During my first trek—a ten-day backpacking trip through the Olympic Mountains—I managed to maintain my un-environmental attitude. I chalked up the panoramic snow-speckled vistas I saw as nothing more than glorified Kodak Moment fodder and chose instead to focus my energies on the toe I had sliced to all hell on an uncooperative rock and the myriad inconveniences of prolonged close-quarters living. Sometime during the first few hours we were back in Port Townsend I began amassing my dread for the next trek.

Shortly before our most recent excursion I found my displeasure being subtlety undermined. Instead of simply belching out platitudes about how I was looking forward to communing with nature, I actually felt a twinge of genuine excitement to kayak in the San Juan Islands. As I fell asleep the night before we departed I had a faint hope that the experience might be something approaching enjoyable. The next morning I noticed that my throat felt as if it had been caked in Plaster of Paris in the night. It was just so fitting…the second I begin to foster a positive outlook I get slapped with a sore throat to put me in my place. But, as the morning progressed and we ventured out towards the San Juan’s, a funny thing happened. My mood didn’t devolve into its usual puddle of self-pity, although it made a good show of it.

Even as we were loading the kayaks into the shallows I was fighting back wave after wave of potential discontent. The ocean made me feel like I had just stepped into a drink cooler and I was convinced that one of my housemates would force me to strangle them through some gross misunderstanding of social etiquette. However, as soon as we pushed off of the beach at Anacortes and headed out into the San Juan’s all of my apprehension melted away as I got rapt up in the rhythmic left-right left-right of paddling. Motoring the kayaks about didn’t feel as laborious as hiking had. Out in the Olympics I always felt like I was walking up a down escalator for hours at a time only to collapse at some randomly appointed campsite. With kayaking I found myself in this meditative trance where destination lost its importance and my mind wasn’t focused on when we would reach camp, but instead just wandered off on it’s own, attracted to random ruminations like a cat in a room full of shiny Christmas ornaments. Not once throughout the entire ten-day trek did I regress into my eight-year old self in the captain’s chair of my parent’s minivan and pester my trek leaders about how much further we had to paddle. I was content just living for the moment and watching the sea salt crust in rivulets on my forearms.

That would be a Kodak Moment

On our second afternoon out we set up camp on the Pi-shaped Orcas Island and had a long respite to chill out and recharge our batteries. After taking a nap in the woods and eating a wilder-meal of elbow macaroni and tuna, I walked out to a low-lying rock that was right on top of the ocean and I prayed. This is nowhere near where I expected to find myself seven months after I first entered treatment and at times I questioned whether God knew what the hell he was doing or was just giving me the Job treatment. If I had my druthers I would have been back at university for my final semester as an undergraduate this fall, but God apparently had other plans. He/She/It (insert your preferred pronoun here) wanted me to be watching the sun dip down underneath Blakely Island as the tides swirled beneath my feet. Looking out at the islands encircling me, all I could think about was the grinding tumult of tectonic plates smashing together to bring these Islands in front of me that day. I’ve never been one for predestination, but at that moment I was certain that there was something out there that wanted me in that spot—my higher power has a habit of showing off from time to time.

From that moment on I was imbued with a sense of gratitude that overshadowed any potential grumblings I would normally have latched onto. Instead of focusing all of my energies on how wretched it felt to wake up at 5 a.m. to paddle with the tides, I lingered on how smoky and brooding the ocean looks before sunrise. Rather than piss and moan about how repetitive the dinners of rice and beans were getting, my tent-mates and I came up with absurd combinations of spices and sauces to try and make meals more palatable. On one night I tried to dehydrate some apples we had collected from an apple tree near our campsite by cooking them on a frying pan. Even though my experiment didn’t work as planned (apparently dehydration is a much more complicated process than I’d imagined), I made the best of the situation with some marshmallows and graham crackers, creating an impromptu hors d’ouerve. Even the weather, which in the San Juan’s vacillates between damp and torrential rain, was a blessing as it was almost nothing but sunshine for our first seven days out. Being out on trek felt like a vacation—from what, I don’t know, as life at the ranch isn’t particularly strenuous. I could finally see what would compel people to go on these backwoods excursions of their own free will.

I could prattle on endlessly about the menagerie of wild animals we encountered on our trip, but I will save you the boredom. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a very low tolerance for people who insist on recounting the majesty of something that can only be appreciated through experience. Telling someone you saw a seal swim alongside you doesn’t begin to convey any of the feeling one gets from being there. What I can convey is that Gray Wolf treks allowed me to commune with nature in a way I never thought possible and didn’t know I wanted. My armchair transcendentalism was flipped on its head by the sheer beauty of my surroundings and I was forced to let nature have her way with me, as she is wont to do. I won’t patronize you by claiming that this trek “changed my life,” but I will say that it had a profound effect on how I view myself in relation to the world around me. Somehow I get the feeling that watching Animal Planet in HD as my outlet for environmental expression just won’t cut it any more.

That Boy’s as Manly as a Copy of Redbook

While it might not strike those of you who know me well as a startling revelation, it has recently been brought to my attention that I’m not the type of man who would be described as “burly.” What’s more, it seems evident to some of those around me that my tastes linger on the more feminine side of the spectrum & that my chromosomal composition might come into question were it not for the prominent bulges in my throat and groin (prominence being a subjective term). Luckily for my ever-dwindling machismo, I’ve been forced to live with a collection of young men whose glandular hyperactivity gives our house the distinct feel of a high school locker room. The world in which I currently live is, depending on the lens through which you view it, a community built on a foundation of fraternal support or a jumbled amassing of homophobic bro-dom. The environment is fairly alien to me and at times makes me feel like a cultural anthropologist who has been dropped into the heart of some remote Amazonian tribe’s village, with the only difference being that instead of trying to assert their dominance through ritual piercing or superb marksmanship they determine merit based on how jacked you are and how adroitly you can metaphorically undress your fellows.

Please don’t misunderstand me—I’m only ragging on this culture of one-upsmanship because its absurdity demands it. I fully realize that it is only through these derogatory rituals can some guys can let their guard down long enough on to speak about things that are more emotionally dense than Helen Keller jokes. It is my great pleasure to slam one of my friends as being a limp-dicked pillow-biter in the spirit of fostering some sense of brotherhood. However, I feel the need to rise in defense of myself after finding on the receiving end of some undue ribbing regarding my tastes and comportment. I will present the facts and you can come to your own conclusion as to whether my less than brawny actions deserve derision.

I don’t know if it was coincidence, providence or design, but my best friend at my primary treatment center turned out to be a follower of Dorothy. Gravitating towards the lone gay guy in a crowd of thirty some-odd guys you’re living with isn’t the most conventionally macho course of action, but I’d argue that it’s actually uber-manly. Being comfortable enough with one’s sexuality to form a meaningful relationship with a child of the rainbow is a more convincing show of masculinity than keeping the queer at arms-length and unleashing a barrage of self-conscious barbs about how much pole he smokes. Then again, I could be compensating for the fact that staff moved him out of my room because his counselor feared that he was developing a schoolgirl crush on me and wouldn’t be able to contain himself, which is an utterly baseless accusation! We only fooled around in the shower just the once and that was more aerobic than it was erotic. Phallic fencing might come with a hefty stigma attached to it, but my God does it tighten up your core.

My taste in literature & film has also been the lambasted much as of late. Recently I bought a copy of Vanity Fair—it was the one with Jackie O. on the cover and the article by Bristol Palin’s ex-fiancee where he bitches about having to lop off his beloved mullet for the Republican National Convention. Apparently this purchase was a major faux pas as, I would suspect, is using the term “faux pas” in everyday speech. My friends were under the impression anything else that the magazine I picked was more akin to Cosmopolitan than anything else and that I was in desperate need of more ways to spice up my sex life. I insisted to them that I bought it for its stellar writing, but they were still skeptical. Perhaps they had a right to be as the last time I used that argument was when my mother found a copy of Playboy under my bed.

Then, this past weekend, I decided to go see the new Jane Campion film “Bright Star” down at our quaint little arthouse cinema. My choice in films was met with equal parts confusion and revulsion as it was inconceivable to my housemates why anyone would see a “chick flick” (their words, not mine) if the prospect of pussy didn’t loom on the horizon. Where they got this whole chick flick notion is beyond me. There are few things more masculine in this world than a biopic about John Keats. After all, Keats wrote poems about incredibly manly things like nightingales and Grecian urns. I guess the prospect of hearing “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” recited by a man lying next to a woman on a windswept Hampstead Heath was too intimidating for them.

I suppose if you were trying to salvage some semblance of a message from this cock-up of an article, it would be that I am at my very core an androgynous personality. If seven months of close quarters living with thirty-plus men with the intention of fostering male bonding doesn’t turn me into some sort of lumberjack, then I doubt anything will. The only thing I can think of is the Marine Corps, which would in all likelihood be a bust because I would spastically wet myself & have a nervous breakdown before any camaraderie could take shape. I can only take solace in the fact that I’m entirely comfortable with my tastes and passions. Always reminding myself that if some douchebag sees me as a fop, a dandy or a nancy it’s more a reflection of their own little hang-ups than it is a statement abut me. When a biopic of Lord Byron comes out I’m sure at least one of the guys I live with will have stepped out of the cultural closet to join me.

Waiting For What Comes Next

One of the nuggets of parental wisdom that has proved most true for me as I slink into adulthood is the notion that the joys gleaned from anticipation are usually greater than any pleasure any one event could ever yield. The fondest memories I have of my childhood Christmas mornings don’t involve messing about with any particular long-desired gift, but concern the gnawing desire to know what lay under the reindeer-print wrapping paper as I jiggled my footie-pajama clad feet on the stairs waiting for my parents to make what seemed to me to be the longest brewing cup of coffee in modern history. So rarely do things ever meet, much less exceed, our expectations of them that most often it’s far more satisfying to revel in our deluded imaginings of what the future holds than to remember the event itself. But, these rules only apply to the anticipation of the pleasant while the opposite normally holds true for the dread we experience concerning looming pain or loss. Right now, it is that far-fetched fear of the uncomfortable that sags as I sit here, watching my imagined misfortune worsen by the second.

When I was seventeen I was diagnosed by my impressively droll psychiatrist as having bi-polar disorder and was placed on a low-level of lithium in an attempt to curb my flights of manic fancy. The diagnosis was the result of a rash decision I had made to embark on a clandestine journey to Chicago one weekend to live out my greatest Ferris Bueller’s Day Off fantasies and to have my undoubtedly brilliant writing published by Random House. I was told that the urge to enjoy a pleasant weekend in the Windy City was not abnormal, but that the conviction that setting off at 7 ‘o clock on a Friday night by myself with the intent of spending my nights in the back seat of my Volvo within the bowels of a parking garage until I could cash in the check from my publishing contract was a bit out of the ordinary and should be seen as cause for alarm. I was informed that the swell of ambition and adventure that I had been riding was the result of a manic episode, the hyperactive half of the bi-polar cycle that allowed me to operate under the false pretense that I was the reincarnation of Truman Capote minus the same-sex tendencies. This, coupled with the numbing depression that I had felt for the week following my foiled excursion (I was picked up by my parents in the wee hours of the morning in a Inn just outside of, and mercifully not in the heart of, Gary, Indiana) indicated that I was probably the proud owner of a chemical imbalance that would have to be medicated toot-sweet.

I was prescribed the Lithium with a minimum of soul-searching from my psychiatrist as the medication was pretty devoid of side effects and I proceeded to routinely ingest it as a twice-daily pharmacological afterthought for the next six years. However, this past spring I was told that my bi-polar diagnosis was probably made in haste as a knee-jerk reaction to my adolescent spontaneity. I was inclined to believe him as misdiagnoses among teenagers with bi-polar are a common occurrence owing to the fact that mood disorders are notoriously difficult to identify before the brain has fully finished developing. In an effort to make a dent in the ever-increasing mound of medication that I was taking I decided that it would be best to drop the lithium whenever the opportune moment arose.

That moment surfaced last week and I began my trial separation from the drug in an attempt to let my brain do a little self-maintenance. Initially I couldn’t notice any difference off the drug and came to the immediate conclusion that the Lithium had indeed been superfluous and my bi-polar label premature. Then, when my family came out to the Pacific Northwest to visit me I began to feel inappropriately glum. All of the sudden I was blindsided by a wave of depression that turned me into a muted malcontent, sitting through meals without uttering a word and tolerating my family’s conviviality like it was a pointed attack on my sensibilities. It became terribly exhausting just existing while being forced to erect this front of enjoyment that was half-assed at best and totally ineffectual. What should have been the highlight of my of my summer became an irritation and an annoyance. The switch was flipped.

While I was sitting in my parent’s hotel room, a converted whorehouse boudoir formally occupied by the house madam Marie, I suddenly felt very sardonic and witty. As a matter of fact I made a point of commenting aloud that, “Dear God, I feel terribly sardonic and witty.” I had been lifted from the depths of my depression and was now convinced that I was the cleverest man who had ever lived and that every sentence that passed from my lips was so marvelously constructed that it belonged in a long lost Evelyn Waugh novel. As we went out to dinner and I ordered my disappointingly bland entrée I felt like a less dapper and un-mustachioed Clark Gable and had the urge to rush back to my hotel room and write the great American novel. I was giddy and almost incapable of expressing myself without drowning out my sentiments with the giggles. A lovely heat began emanating from my limbs and I was ready to make a pass at our waitress when I became disappointingly self-aware.

“I am having a manic episode.” The realization crossed my mind and I immediately entered into a bizarre out-of-body experience where I was both cognizant of and under the control of my own insanity. However harmful I objectively acknowledged mania could be, I couldn’t help but bask in the high it gave me. It was at least as good as any drug I’d ever taken and in fact made me feel like I had just snorted about 100mg of Adderall. If I could distill this sensation into some sort of powder I and sell it I would become filthily rich. My sister also pointed out that this distillation would be about the same as cocaine and why didn’t I save myself the trouble and cop some of that instead, which I had to acknowledge was probably true. Being in active recovery from alcohol and drug addiction and living in a halfway house, I couldn’t help but feel guilty about relishing the high that I was feeling, but quickly dismissed this guilt after realizing that I was in no way responsible for the gross misfiring of serotonin in my noggin and that I was paying for this momentary glee with an inordinate amount of depression. I made up my mind to milk my mania for all it was worth.

My mini psychotic episode was disappointingly short and ended after the dessert menu had been passed around, leaving me oddly balanced and calm. On the plus side, I am now quite certain that I would benefit from a regiment of Lithium, which should take some time to reestablish because of the excessive bureaucracy of psychiatry. A part of me is in no rush to hop back on the meds in the hopes of experiencing another ego-inflating bout of mania, all the accompanying depression be damned. So, I sit here and write out this little screed while waiting for the roller coaster to let gravity have its way and leave me an indentured servant to my psyche. Hopefully I’m not possessed by the uncontrollable urge to shag ass to Chicago again because this time around I’m about 2,000 miles farther away and would probably run out of steam before I got out of Montana.

The Smacks Frog Wants My Soul

Faustian deals with the devil centering around the exchange of one’s soul for the promise of some unattainable desire have been an integral part of our culture’s popular mythology for centuries. Myths about men like Delta Blues pioneer and forefather of rock ‘n roll Robert Johnson, who supposedly sold his soul to Satan in exchange for otherworldly mastery of the guitar, pervade the folklore of our nation. This protestant perversion of the ancient Arabian Nights genie tale has an uncanny ability to capture our collective imagination because of the seductive qualities of the moral problem that the myth examines. Most of us, if we were being truly candid, would fess up to a playfully devious urge to slough off our souls in favor of Casanovan sex appeal or Jordanesque ball skills. But, what happens to this fantasy if the trade in question is pathetically lopsided? What happens if the mortal soul in question is bartered for an everyday convenience like a six-pack of Dr. Pepper or plate of dynamite shrimp at P.F. Chang’s? I can only hope that the devil has some remnant of compassion left in him for the simpleton who makes such an ill-advised exchange, as I am one of their number and would very much like to avoid an eternity of sulphuric agony.

When I was ten years old I, like most other children, possessed both a gross underestimation of the importance of my incorporeal being and an insatiable hunger for sweets. While playing Sega Genesis with my best friend one afternoon, I noticed and immediately began to covet the fun size package of Now & Laters that he had with him. With nothing of value on me at the time, I decided it would be wise to search within myself for something that I could use to coax him into parting with his candy. As you have no doubt guessed by now thanks to my unparalleled ability to foreshadow, what I opted to offer him was my freshly minted soul and before long we sealed the deal in writing in a post-it-note. Even as a ten year old I should have realized that this was a shit deal as Now & Laters are an absolutely dreadful candy manufactured to be perpetually stale and to be of a consistency so that the bulk of the candy get stuck in the grooves of your molars as opposed to sliding down your gullet. On top of that, the flavor that my friend had that day was grape, and like almost all artificially flavored grape candies it was designed to taste like congealed Robutussin. The one bit of solace I can glean from this ordeal is the fact that while my friend can be a devious little bastard at times, he is most certainly not the Prince of Darkness and thus incapable of damning me to hell. However, he does now posses a surplus soul with which he can barter with the devil at his leisure, leaving me up the river Styx without a paddle.

While I doubt that my soul is currently in the devil’s possession I feel as though there has been some karmic retribution for my actions. A very common occurrence among individuals who are in recovery from alcohol or drug addiction is a phenomenon known as cross-addiction wherein the ex-junkie in question shifts his unhealthy behaviors from revolving around his drug of choice to a different drug, recreation or object To wit, a disproportionally large number of alcoholics and addicts become obsessed with triathlons and ultra-marathon runners as it is a fairly seamless transition from fixating on getting your next fix from a substance to getting a comparable rush from over exercising. Cross-addictions can run the gamut from gambling to overeating to becoming a workaholic. In my case, the potential cross-addiction has appeared in the form of an insatiable craving for a specific type of hyper-sugary carbohydrate, cereal.

You try telling me that the Trix Rabbit isn't a junkie

I totally acknowledge the fact that becoming consumed with a desire for a breakfast food is absurd, but that doesn’t stop it from being any less true. I’ve always had an abiding love for cereal, or at least as constant a love as one can have for a simple carbohydrate. Most nights I could be found hovering around my kitchen in the dark, greedily shoving handfuls of Kellogg’s Smart Start down my windpipe and chugging skim milk from the carton like a dog inhaling his dinner for fear of his master snatching it away before he had a chance to finish. However. In recent months my passion for cereal has expanded into an all-day affair, sometimes spanning all three meals. A great deal of this spike in cereal consumption has to do with my surroundings.

The kitchen in the house where I currently live is downright palatial. It has a restaurant style industrial refrigerator and a walk-in pantry that’s almost the size of my freshman dorm room. Of course, to go with such mammoth storage space, the kitchen has been stocked with a plethora of various foodstuffs, including the cereal that has come to hold dominion over my culinary existence. Now, there aren’t simply boxes of cereal lined up in the cupboard, but in their stead stand five large plastic containers filled with a rotating assortment of grainy goodness that seems to replenish itself by magic. And these containers aren’t full of flaxtastic, bran-based, organic cardboard cereals, but is chock full of the sugary favorites that threaten to further spike our nation’s levels of type II Diabetes. Everything from Frosted Flakes to Captain Crunch to Lucky Charms, all brimming with glucose and absolutely devoid of nutritional value aside from the 25% daily-recommended intake of Riboflavin that is prominently advertised on the cereal box to provide the illusion of wholesomeness. The variety is truly a thing of beauty and I have taken to trying out every conceivable mix-n-match combo that is possible like a kid mixing Mountain Dew and Pepsi at a soda fountain in search of the ultimate soda (so far the best arrangement I’ve found is a solid foundation of raisin bran, covered with a middle layer of Honey Bunches of Oats and topped with Captain Crunch).

Making matters worse is the construction of the cereal containers, which were made with a little plastic lever that you push down on like a lab rat seeking some Pavlovian treat. It’s like getting one of those little bouncy superballs out of the gumball machines at the front entrance of restaurants, only I don’t have to pay fifty cents to get it. Many a time have I been caught by one of my peers in the pantry with a handful of Honey Nut Cheerios, earnestly munching away in a cycle of gluttonous indulgence.

All in all, my lust for cereal isn’t the most destructive vice I could have acquired, especially after the ones that I had previously clung to which has attempted to render me a malicious wretch who wandered aimlessly in a zombified stupor. The worst cereal can do to me is turn my midriff into a ring of cottage cheese, but I figure my relatively youthful metabolism should be able to keep any unsightly physical changes at bay. Plus, who the hell ever heard of someone joining Weight Watchers on account of Fruit Pebbles? So I continue on, trying to fill the void where my soul had been with an onslaught of gluten, praying that they have Honey Comb in Hell.

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.

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.