The things Truman said

You peel back enough layers of a person, I’m talking the fine hairs and the outer skin and then subcutaneous tissue, muscle to bone, you expose enough of that hollow cavity below the sternum to the atmosphere and you find some ugly truth, some thing that has gone unforgiven or that you can’t reconcile. That’s where we were, me standing with my wallet in hand with one shoe untied waiting for her to say don’t go from the couch. What kind of people were we is what I was thinking to myself, what kind of people need these theatrics to get by?

We stayed that way for a long time, long enough that there’s no point advancing the moment, both of us grown stubborn in the face of our own selfishness, which I guess let’s call that self-preservation. I got the feeling that this is the snapping off point, that whenever time started up again I would do something with some resonance.

In my head I ran through the reasons each of us was to blame. It came out about how I expected. Fruit flies traced lazy arcs around the sink. She said don’t you dare think I’ll chase you with a hard edge, the voice she reserved for talking to the manager. I tensed my hand around my car key, ready for nuclear war.

There's always new art on the overpass

We drove for like ten minutes in silence, both of us expectant for something to happen that would break one or both of our resolves. Our arguments these days were like Morse code with spotlights in a dead dark sea, detached and full of pregnant pauses that did most of the meaning for us. What I’m saying is the words were basically a terse afterthought when neither of us had much desire to mount a rescue.

She said you always go too far with a metaphor, like figures of speech actually are worth saying. I said they’re not, and I said it as a question, and she said good God you really think imagery is the same as honesty don’t you. I told her she could pick up her own dry cleaning in the morning but didn’t much mean it. She looked out her window and I checked my mirrors.

She leaned back and put her feet on the dash, which I know she knew it made me nervous but maybe she just forgot. There’s a part on the freeway where you just suddenly notice you’re downtown, almost like it’s a magic trick of city planning, mirrors everywhere to hide the fifty story buildings until the moment you pass the signs for the zoo and the aquarium and that one lawyer’s billboard, the one who wears the golf cap and hablas espanol. Even though the buildings rose up out of meanness and fulfilled the promise of decades, even though this place once made us feel so small but still alive, even though there were a million things worth noticing in every instant and every foot of pavement, we didn’t.

Take a thing and break it and call it art already

Sometimes you do a thing and later realize just how deadly. Like the old chop-socky kung fu move, I took about a hundred thousand steps after the blow and then my heart exploded, not like into shards like you visualize a heart breaking but expanding outward suddenly and tearing the muscle. Of course it was a metaphor, but it’s also exactly what happened.

So I stood there in the grocery store on that rainy Sunday morning looking at a box of brown sugar instant oatmeal, and it was a full-stop pop that I felt in my whole body like I was nothing but a rubber band and a pair of scissors, which considering how violently I loved and hated the memory of my old life always there just beneath the surface of errand running and paydays it was no surprise that this kind of thing would happen eventually.

I thought how did I get here, one of these shuffling shoppers alone with his list. What was I hoping to accomplish? I’m talking, as always, about her, the one I thought I’d be willing to die for. It turned out, though, as I took my last undignified breaths with a distended heart and dropped that box of oatmeal that what I died for, what I was always going to die for, was my foolish need to be a lonely and unsung tragedy.

After that it rained for years

It was a year of conversation, a year of dragged-out lousy days, afternoon suns and bad coffee. I felt bad all the time, I felt bad about feeling so bad around her, I felt bad like it was the answer to something. I guess it was.

We talked about things that didn’t matter, just to talk I guess, like at what point do you call a thing a tragedy. She wanted the word to have a concrete scope that suggested profound human loss. She said losing a thumb doesn’t count as tragic, for instance, and I said she only thought that because girls didn’t really need thumbs to explore their bodies. She worried the word would lose meaning, and I reminded her that insurance companies had itemized the term awhile ago already. We were complicit in all things, a crime spree of language left in our wake.

Every once in awhile some staggering truth would come out, like what happened to her in that bathroom or the circumstances of why I stopped sleeping at night. We said these things casually, just dropped in real quick when no one was looking. We had grown up great victims, and we found small pleasure in shocking each other here and there, which these things were multi-purposed and nuanced hand grenades of love and trust.

The thing about a conversation that lasts all year is that it’s dangerous, like how sometimes you start thinking about your breathing and then you have to keep thinking about your breathing until you become sufficiently distracted by a television set or another semi-autonomous process. What I’m saying is it becomes the focus of your existence, and then one day it’s gone, leaving you oxygen-deprived and wondering. The whole thing is a tragedy.

Mise en place

What I did was I chopped up an onion, some garlic, tomatoes. I went out to the porch and grabbed some fresh basil, tore it into little pieces while I chewed on the inside of my cheek and thought about what it would mean if heaven was just a synapse in your brain that fired off when you died. I guessed no one would really care either way before long. It would just be another test of faith or whatever.

The best part was the smells but I didn’t take notice. I said a little incantation over the pot, the kind of thing a body does that’s made for being alone. I cracked a knuckle against the side of my face, which I guess that’s an odd way to do it but it was my way and my other hand had a spoon in it.

Doing a thing yourself is better than doing it fast or particularly well, or at least that was my new thing since I’d tossed out all the jars in the cupboard and replaced them with a seminal kitchen full of vital raw materials. I got a beer from the fridge and opened it with my shirt while the water made headway on a boil.

What if eternity was just the last second of your life? I thought this was a good question for asking, and when she got home I would, no matter that it was one of those questions that might spotlight how unlike each other we were and make my homemade pasta bitter in our mouths. You have to do a thing if it’s worth doing.

An announcement made during a brief lull in the waves

Hey everyone.  Allow me to drop the blog posture for a second and make an announcement: I will be going on a west coast book tour for Apathy and Paying Rent from Oct 13th to Oct 20th with the always fantastic Joey Comeau and the always terrifyingly blackout drunk Mike Lecky of Loose Teeth Press.  We'll be stopping in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco (where we will be attending the Alternative Press Expo, probably sitting with the Topatoco people), and Los Angeles.  We will read from our respective books and then we will hang out with you and have awkward conversations.  Tell everyone you know.

www.looseteeth.ca/seattle
www.looseteeth.ca/portland
www.looseteeth.ca/sanfrancisco
www.looseteeth.ca/losangeles

This one takes some years off

I saw her again today. I was sitting in that same coffee shop, just kind of hung over and jobless making love to the free refill policy. This one barista thought I was shit, but most of them were friendly and I had headphones anyway for when he came around sweeping under my feet, which really who’s shit in this equation when I just want to be left alone with my bad day.

There was a guy outside smoking, one of those guys who wears glasses on purpose, you know? A turtleneck wearer. Anyway, he’s outside smoking like he’s waiting on someone, and then she’s there, just kind of appeared between sips or when I was staring at the oily surface of my coffee.

She smiled for him and they talked for a minute. The sun came in through the window like it might get violent, you know how it’s blinding at this time of the afternoon. It felt like a camera trick, one of those shots film students go on about.

They made to go inside and when he reached for the door, getting it open an inch or two, she pushed it shut in his face and tiptoed herself a kiss, which knocked his glasses off. She smiled up at him and he got all flustered and the sun came in all over the room and that asshole barista came by with a wet rag to wipe down the table I was still using, and that was that for whatever I felt about sunlight.

The astronaut's angry smile

Some things you’ve got to get some distance on, which I guess that’s what I told myself as I put books on shelves, filling holes, squeezing together the spaces where her art books would go or how there used to be two copies of Franny and Zooey, both worn out like old sweaters but one treated like a thing to hold on to.

I made coffee with the kitchen light off, which it was late already. I just stood there in the dark watching the orange light under the switch, gurgling sounds and me fighting this nervous feeling of now what. It was a stupid thing to do, now done, a hard-fought right to be left alone, and look at me so damn smart in the dark.

I’m sure someone once said that things that aren’t permanent are still worth doing, or that without change we wouldn’t be able to whatever, but that guy is probably full of shit. I stood in front of my books holding a dollar-store coffee mug in my hands saying out loud I’m gonna be an alphabetizer now, make some sense out of all this fiction. My hammer, my nails, my shelf. Everything in its proper place but me.

Wayfaring is just kidding ourselves

We took roads west like it was a thing, like there was some solution in the sore backs and truck stop coffee. We bought maps when we got there, slipping into those states that were cut into squares like brownies. New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, whichever ones came our way. If we liked the name of the town we went. That’s how we saw Ruidoso and Tuba City and Shipwreck and Zuzax, which some weren’t worth the trouble.

We ran up the mountains to be close to the sky. We ran down them again, rushing into valleys and canyons. We ran from the city, and the further from it we were the more lost and alone we felt. We didn’t say it to each other. I didn’t even know what she thought, really, I just liked thinking that I could speak for us this way, like we had some shared poetry in our hearts.

We drove through new suburbs raised out of the scrub, houses like the ones back east, unacceptable to nature for not being worn out and beaten by the wind. We drove through the self-imposed mockery of Native America. We drove through national parks. We drove through all these places while the shadows played like children on the hills.

What does your breakfast cereal say about you?

The coffee tasted like garbage here, but the room was mostly blank space, a disaffected gray tone of light jazz and chairs selected from a corporate catalog. And that's what I wanted anyway. It's part of the allure of a place like this, just how nothing can you be.

I wanted to be part of the problem now, which maybe that wasn't true but I'm saying it is. I wanted to be all the things she couldn't stand. Self portraits in the bathroom mirror, holding the camera off to the side like this. Lying to the customer service rep to get a well-deserved late fee waived. Black and Mild cigarettes. Mousy french girls playing ukelele on the internet and the people who love them. Corporate coffee. These were my new religion.

Because who knows better than the zeitgeist how I need to be loved? What were we doing anyway hiding out from the things like that, the ones we liked or the ones we were told to like so we liked. I could listen to vinyl if I wanted, buy a fixed gear bike. I could buy my vintage clothes new. That wouldn't be any more false than eating strawberries in the park while the wind blew leaves to the ground.

You strip away enough layers and all you've got left is peer pressure and cross-referenced marketing graphs, but still there's a security in making sure we're all paying attention to each other up and down the line. I couldn't say the same about the way my hand felt on the small of her back, since what's the value in a thing that's gone. I looked down at the table where somebody had scratched the words comforts are just denial, which I don't remember writing that but it was probably me.

She got what was coming for not going

I had a mouth full of mistakes that I was going to drop over our conversation like a sad and reckless payload, landing wherever they may. Maybe it was a mark of who I am or maybe it was just gender patterns that I thought in war metaphors a lot of the time, but at any rate it didn’t much help me being drunk and more than a little bitter.

I thought the central problem of the human condition is everybody gets raised all fucking wrong, one way or another. I thought it while I sat on the bathroom tile leaning against the tub with her standing over me, I thought we’re all miserable, we all hurt and hurt and hurt, which I meant that as transitive and intransitive both. It was a goddamn reflex for me to say what I was about to say, and then all the things that eventually came after, like what was I but one of those sea anemones, if those are the ones that just react to the current all the time and jerk their tendrils in at the sign of danger. I’m no zoologist.

But let’s watch this how it played out through the way my brain saw everything as growing constantly like an optical illusion and my words slurred a little and I stopped mid-sentence to consider if I was or was not saying something I wanted to say. I didn’t look at her face was all, I was brave enough to say the stupid thing but not enough to see what it did. I didn’t see the way her concern for me that had held fast all the way home from the party, through the half-conscious singing of songs that weren’t on the radio and pulling her hair by mistake, I didn’t see that become a deep and shriveling pain when I said the only reason anybody would talk about your paintings is because you look like a go-to-the-back-bedroom-and-give-a-blowjob kind of girl, so don’t expect that guy to actually call his gallery friend. And then I was in the bathroom alone, head lolled back on a loose neck thinking about what it would feel like to throw up my whole vocabulary and never speak again.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

I wrote I saw your face in the wood grain of my kitchen table, and then I crossed it out. The sentence I mean. I wanted to hit on something common but compelling, and I thought pareidolia was a good start, but there on the page it came off as a contrived and quotidian lie, which I wanted to seem artful and smart and maybe a little mysterious I guess. All week I'd been making a list of words that sounded impressive.

I was seeing her everywhere anyway. She was my barista, then she was at the grocery store buying ice cream while I did my weekly trip, then she was riding her bike past the the laundromat, plus it's true about the kitchen table. It was like suddenly she'd metastasized into the gaping commonplace wounds of my little life, or else she was always heading there in a peristaltic motion that brought us together slowly like heart beats. Serendipity.

Or else, and this is just too much for my self-concept and how much I'll trust my brain ever again, she was always there at the grocery store and the laundromat and the coffeehouse that always smelled acrid and burnt, which that drove away the youth groups at any rate. She was always there and I was blind to the knowledge until I'd lost my headphones and felt forced to make eye contact. That's the kind of thing that can make a man wonder what all he's never paid attention to. How to make it up to a girl like her. I thought she'd understand if I just knew what to call it.

Survival never goes out of style

I felt made from old plaster most days, some depressing building rubble poured into a wrinkled suit. I scrawled the words to songs in the margins of inter-office memos, sometimes on ones that weren’t mine. I came across her indignant in front of the coffeemaker, which it must have been her passive-aggressive note that I put the Jawbreaker lyric on.

She said things like what kind of an asshole would and who the hell do I work with that doesn’t and other things about coffee pot politics. She was talking like to her self, mostly, too fast for me to answer anyways, looking at her note taped to the cabinet. I poured myself a cup, the last of it, and walked off.

She followed me, which I was thinking what a fluorescent gray day I was having anyways, so when she started in on me not brewing more I almost had to smile. Her face was so intense, and it was just Maxwell House, you know? She was seething, blood turned her cheeks and throat red, and I thought that here’s one of those moments.

We walked together back into my office, me turned to look at her with her straight ahead and her voice all hard words. I sat down at my desk and took a sip of coffee, which tasted really good right then. She petered out and stood there, dazed, for like four seconds. When I didn’t say anything back she turned and stormed out, slamming the door, and I watched her angry hair flip-flop down the hall through my window, wondering what could have made her so bitter and lovely.

Mother's maiden name, high school mascot, first pet

I was sitting at my usual table chewing dumbly on the space between my left thumb and forefinger when she came in and started poking around in the different whole coffee beans they had for sale in these troughs that worked like automatic dog food bowls, which maybe me seeing them that way was a thesis statement but I doubt it. I spent every day getting my light and heat from ugly buzzing fluorescence instead of the sun, from the time that the morning was thick and black like an old television screen until the sun was being swallowed up by the shadows of the buildings downtown, so if I liked to come out here on my day off and sit by the window drinking black coffee and writing down things I wished I could afford to do with myself while a man played checkers in the corner with his grandson then the least she could do was never exist again ever.

Maybe God had done me that favor or maybe he just liked to watch my hands shake, which I can’t blame him. I wrote down see Tibet and find something like zen while she browsed. Our eyes didn’t exactly meet but I knew she saw me when she turned around because there was this flutter step of I don’t know.

What do you do? I wrote down take a lot more photographs with a nice camera while she placed her drink order. The backs of her arms and legs were a darker brown than I had ever known them to be, a rich and natural tan, and I wrote down fire a nuclear warhead at the sun. It was petty to feel betrayed by the employee who made her drink, but traitors come as they come.

I knew she wasn’t looking on purpose, and she either faked or made a phone call on her way out the door. That’s what the years and all that love and pain were worth to her. All that sharing of what we were, how we were experts on each other, the top minds in our field. She didn’t turn and look back but I waved out the window anyway, half-hearted and partway dead but a greeting for whatever that means.

Poor Richard pretended to be important

My job when we met and for a little bit after was I wrote maxims that were printed on the side of paper cups, which what more honest thing was there than decorating future garbage with empty wit. I took ironic pleasure in it, had pictures of Franklin and Rochefoucauld on my desk, thumbed through almanacks looking for a saying worth modernizing.

Like what, she said, an email in the inbox is worth two on the server? This while she cut up onions in my dank and cluttered downtown apartment with me making rice. Normally I would make fun of my work too, but on a fourth date cooking dinner together I didn’t much want to feel ridiculous about my worthless job and how I took such pride in it in secret. She said I’m sorry that was pretty bitchy wasn’t it, and I said no, I know I’m superfluous, a cheap appropriator.

She said she liked little touches in the day, the way it made a brain seem worth having. She sniffled from the onions and I pushed the button on the rice cooker, and then we were turned around and kissing, which the kitchen was small enough that we didn’t have to step towards each other to do it.

We kissed like that for a minute, her breath a little sour and mine probably too. I wondered what she was thinking there with her eyes closed and her tongue playful, whether she was thinking how she meant what she said or of how else she would have to patronize me or if she was even not thinking at all, like what if she was able to enjoy a thing for what it was, what if when she kissed she just thought about the kiss. I didn’t know what to do with someone like that.