Solving and Resolving

We're getting on to the end of another year, and tonight I decided on a new New Year's resolution. Usually all I want to do is learn to stop talking so much, or maybe just stop talking so much without even having to learn anything. That is still number one this year, as it seems like a good goal in that it's completely unattainable for me, so I can always have it.

Number Two this year is Stop Eating In My Car. It's tough for someone who drives 80 miles a day and tends to head home anywhere between 6:00 and 11:00, but the other night I was eating a Whopper Jr. (the 6th one of the week) and I got mayonnaise on my radio while I was shifting gears. Then a mess of ketchup and mayo came out of the sandwich onto the right leg of my new pants, and the pants were so dark that I couldn't see the globs. I was using all the napkins but it had come out in more of a spray than a drop, and pretty soon it was on the steering wheel and the gearshift, and then both hands and one ear. I ran out of napkins and I'm driving along the 10 thinking "Goddamn, when did I become such a fucking slob?" So I guess I'll just have to do a little more grocery shopping for things to keep at work, but I think it's doable. It might also take care of this little fast food indulgence I've been permitting myself, which is destroying my gut and making me feel more like a pinata than a person. It used to be that I'd put on ten pounds every November, like clockwork, and I always wrote it off to an evolutionary byproduct and didn't mind too much on account of the days where it would be sunny and beautiful and never got above thirty degrees. But I don't live there anymore, and while sixty can be occasionally chilly it's no reason to stock up on blubber. But mainly I don't want to end up sticking pickles in the cd player.

The Sunset Also Rises

Three or five nights ago I was headed home, east, and it was one of those evenings when a lot of low clouds made the sunset really colorful. It was only about a quarter visible, and very pink, and I hit the grade into Calimesa which is pretty long. Traffic was good and I was knocking along at 70 or so. It's kind of steep and ten seconds in I noticed, in the rear-view mirror, that the sun was rising again. I could see almost the entire thing. It reminded me of the time I started at the fire station as the sun set, on my bike, and then rode as fast as I could up to the boneyard. I raced up the rock that I liked to hang out on, and the sun had not quite started to set there. So I watched it. When it got below the horizon, I took off again for the gravel pit up the road. I didn't quite make it, so I kept going up the road and took the trail that goes to the rock where the windsock is. I climbed up that and watched the sun start to set, again. There was nowhere higher to get to in a reasonable amount of time, so I watched the rest of it from there. Then when I was 16 and I had to work while the rest of the family went on vacation, I got up to go to the heliport and watch the sun rise. That might be the first time that the Earth's rotation really sunk in (in a practical setting, at least) and I realized that if you traveled west at just over a thousand miles an hour, sunset would last forever. So in a Concorde you could watch the sun set slowly for hours. Or in a fighter jet you could watch the sun hover in the sky for a while, maybe 45 minutes or so, because I don't think they carry enough fuel to maintain that speed for very long.

Tonight I heard a twentysomething complaining to his friends that he was unable to impregnate. "I'm shooting blanks, dude. If I had a shotgun, and I was in World War One or World War Two, I'd get killed because I'm shooting blanks, dude."

It sounded goofy at first, but then I realized how often I talk about things like "spinning my wheels" and "grinding my gears." It would all be metaphorical if I weren't a Transformer.

A Sunday Poem

I sat at the bar, lungs full of tar
From the smoke that enveloped the place
And gazed at the girl, her hair all atwirl
As I tried to remember her face.

She acknowledged my glance and her eyes did a dance
And yet I was drawing a blank
She started to stand, saw the pen in my hand
And back on her barstool she sank.

Puzzled, I sat, while chewing the fat
That sat in my beer-addled brain
When through the door came another young dame
And I questioned my memory again.

Instead of a stare she cast but a glare
And I wondered what crime I'd committed
The frosty looks from the ladies, I took
To mean rudeness my mind had omitted.

A bit after nine, again feeling fine
An old man sauntered up to the table
His mottled gray beard with ketchup was smeared
And his legs not entirely stable.

As he coolly appaised me I started to see
A fine story these characters could make
I bent to my paper, my pen as my rapier
To cut out the parts I could take.

And then around ten, the women again
Were brandishing swords of their own
Protruding from eyes which had narrowed in size
And were threat'ning to turn me to stone.

I finally quiesced and put on my best
Smile, which I fancied sincere
And ventured around to the enemy ground
Their reasons intending to hear.

"What, may I query, has got you so leery
of me, just a simple observer?"
She drew herself nigh and suddenly I
Was accosted with adm'rable fervor.

"Last week we all were watching you scrawl
In your notebook while you said not a word.
When you got up to pee, we read it, you see,
And your thoughts about us were absurd!"

"So now, sir, your writing, while sickly exciting,
has singled you out as a liar.
Here's what we think of your judgmental stink-"
And she set my poor notebook on fire.

The Waiting

I knew when I started this thing that the title was going to have some relevance. Or maybe I just hoped. And now I realize that if I had been saving money for the last two years, I'd be putting a down payment on a house right now, or maybe moving into a nice apartment. But between having the time of my life and being depressed out of my mind (a daily and costly transaction) I haven't got two dimes. I decided to move last week and realized the only thing I had to liquidate was my truck, so I scraped the stickers off the window and took it to the car wash, where the guy promptly broke off a valve stem and I had to race down the street with a deflating tire to get it fixed. A sign? No. It turns out that the place that gave me such a great deal on tires a few years ago just didn't change the stems, so every one of them was a whisper away from snapping off and leaving me in a bind somewhere in Garner Valley, which is about the only place that truck gets to go these days. And besides, without a raise or a better job, selling that thing is only going to get me through about 6 months.

Monetarily speaking, I'm not big on delaying gratification. When I think of all the things I would have missed over the last couple of years if I had been paying rent, I really don't see the point. I'd have $37.50 per week to eat and drink. No dentist, no shooting, no trips, no internet. I'd have finished all my books in the first year, and after that it would've been slitwrist city. Times like these I look at all the shit I own and wish I could give it back for full purchase price. Mostly it would be DVDs. I mean, I had every intention of watching The King and I, Oklahoma and The Sound of Music, but I haven't yet and now that Rodgers and Hammerstein collection is looking like a waste of twenty bucks. But I can't very well go back in time and unbuy it, I mean, what kind of trouble might I have got into if I hadn't spent that entire weekend watching the second season of King of the Hill? I might've gone out for a drive at just the right time to be in front of a semi-truck driver who wasn't paying attention. Again. I am alive and all my limbs are attached and working, who am I to regret even the smallest cog in the wheel that brought me here? I think cogs are all supposed to be the same size though - maybe that's my problem.

Well, one of my problems.

I don't want to spend another summer here, either. This place is like a burrito full of suck and hot sauce until November.

The Time, It's Relative

Remember, while back, when time used to pass at such different speeds? I look around as May comes to an end, feel the heat coming down, and remember how slow the days would go waiting for school to get out. Every day drags like a wagon with two busted wheels. And then suddenly you're signing yearbooks and you're on the bus, the last bus ride until September, which is about a hundred years away. And the nice thing is that time keeps moving slow. Calvin and Hobbes slow. In fact, thinking about Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson nailed it so completely that there suddenly isn't much left to say. A day in late June spent with nobody around but your imagination has some truly mystical properties, the way it can pass so slowly and be gone in the blink of an eye. School doesn't do that, not the mandatory years anyway, not for me. A day spent in a succession of windowless classrooms was like a goddamned eternity, I don't know how my hair didn't go white.

So now those days are gone, and time is really picking up the pace. I don't even sweat the work week now. Two years ago, the weekend went so fast while the week dragged on, and now it all goes fast. Mondays don't bother me. I know that it'll be Friday afternoon as soon as I snap my fingers, and you know what, it is. I mean, life is starting to roll like the credits of a movie in the theatre, where you can't look away for too long if you don't want to miss who the gaffer was or something like that. Soon, I think, it's going to be going like the credits of a movie you just watched on tv, where it's going so fucking fast you realize you've just got to let it. So I guess the lesson is don't watch movies on tv. Not a good lesson, I know. I'm no sage.

I think I understand why we tend to get up earlier when we get older (aside from urinary problems and children, neither of which I have to worry about but those that do, you have my respect because I frankly don't know how you do it, the children part anyway, the rest of you, take cranberry) and that's because at a certain point, you get up at 11:30 and by the time you've had your coffee the day is half over.

Wow, another one right off the tracks. No idea where I was going with this. My attention span suffers worse than I thought. Think I'll take a drive.

Doin' It With My Boots On

I've typed four different beginnings to this entry and realized that I need to visit bars all across the country on St. Patrick's Day if I want to get data to back up my theories. So where do I start next year?

Oooh, I just realized that I've been whistling the wrong lyrics to "You're So Vain" for about a decade now. How did "Go by" suddenly become "gavotte?" And "Halfway cocked" become "apricot?" Funny when things you know become things you never knew.

I guess this is the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me... you oughtta know.

Ah, Madalena, you overstimate
Your charms, for your arms are not
As tempting as you thought
In the city of never settling for what you want

Come with me to the bench on the hill
Where the fog rolls in and the cars on the freeway
Disappear and still you hear the screams of the dreams
Being born, which sound like the screams of the dreams
That were doomed from the start

The nightmares are so quiet you’d think they’d gone
And they had until now but they’ve won
And you won’t let them go so easily this time
They’re gonna hold on this time

Go to sleep Madalena, they ride
For you, they died for you
Close your pretty eyes and let them in
Let’s not play your game again

Wake up, Madalena, they ride
From here, I died right here
You fought them off
I couldn’t fight them off

Friday night

Uno, dos, tres, quatro.

I just wanted to write that here before I forgot. On a music video. IN SPANISH.

Some Kind of Mess

It seems like I get all my best ideas for little things to write about while I'm driving. I never did figure out how to play back everything I recorded on my digital voice recorder a few months back, so last week I tried using the video function of my phone. It's easy enough to play back, but it turns out that most of the things I think about don't end up nearly as clever as I thought they were when I thought them.

What I came here to say, though, is that I made a little bit of progress in that thing I was writing about earlier, you know, the one where I keep my stupid mouth shut more often. So a couple of days ago I was at the bar and some people started playing beer pong, which is a new thing for this bar. They were playing in a really boring way, switching off, and everybody standing back from the table and not talking when someone was throwing, like some weird game of golf, or maybe horseshoes. Having lost a number of games of beer pong recently, I was pretty familiar with the basic rules as well as lots of the options and house rules and such, so I was going to go over and tell them, then I pictured myself through their eyes: some douchebag they don't know walks up to them and tells them they're doing it wrong and introduces all these rules, which they will invariably discard after deciding they like their way better. I know - it's the same way I felt when I started learning the rules to ping pong after I had been playing for months. "I have to serve it where? I have to hold the ball how?" Eventually I was glad to learn how to play, but at first I thought they were just making things up so they would win. I digress. I didn't go say anything to them. I don't think they even finished their game, but at least I wasn't being a know-it-all. It's kind of lame to be proud of not being a chump, but you know, you do what you can. And, since I hadn't backed up my computer for six months when my hard drive bit the dust a couple of weeks ago, I don't have any new poems or pictures or anything to put up. So this is what you get. Also, I was starting to get kind of tired, physically, and I'm broke anyway, so I think I'll take it easy for a while.

Then Again

You realize that no one wants you for who you are.