Oh, Okay, No, That's Fine, That's Just Fine.

Here's some more shit. I did this after the children went to bed and it is a small read that you will make you wonder, "What the fuck is wrong with this idiot?" The idiot is me. Also, it had very little editing so I am not sure how I feel about that.

I stood facing the rack, no, the wall, of purses. There were so many and I looked at them globally first and individually second. I picked up the purses and inspected their quality. They were very well made and the stitching was impeccable, but I didn’t know anything about that so I guessed that it was impeccable. The purse colors waned from vibrant to mundane, some of them were purple and had raised surfaces and others were plain, the drab eggshell of old ladies. One tag described the purse as mustard. I picked that one up and opened the latch and looked into it. There was a small wad of tissue paper inside and I took it out and held it up to look at it in the overhead fluorescent lights. The paper had been deliberate. Someone, somewhere, made the paper, then crumpled that paper into the ball that I was holding. The paper had a purpose and I put it back and snapped the mustard purse closed again. The tag on the purse declared that it was “Made in China” and it cost 12 dollars.

I left the purse section and walked the tiles of the store. My mind took up the fight and thought about the purses as I walked. The fluorescent light was too bright and I walked the main circuit of the store with my cart. I picked up other items that I thought had merit. There were candles, toys, cards, everything. They were all made in China; I checked all of the tags. I put the items back and surmised that the Target that I stood in, that very one, was solely responsible for the trade deficit between China and the United States. I should have been outraged, but I just made another circuit of the tiles and lights.

I passed a small Oriental woman who worked there. She wore a red, long sleeved shirt and khaki pants and her name tag said, “Pang.” I thought that sounded okay and then I thought about Pang’s day. I couldn’t imagine her correctly as an Asian woman, living in my town, and then, inadvertently, I thought about the purses again. I thought that Pang might have relatives in China, that she might know the purse makers, that she could send them letters on holidays, and she knew the vagaries of the purse production industry. I walked on and my mind ran away with itself, grasping tangentially at things that I couldn’t, that no one could, possibly know.

I couldn’t help myself and I imagined the factories, sitting in some ink washed valley somewhere in China. There were legions of workers filing into the factory's courtyard and the workers gathered there and did calisthenics en masse. Maybe that was Japan, but the image was so strong, I believed that I knew that the factory I saw was the one where the store’s purses were made. Those workers were the ones who stitched the purses, those hands crumpled the paper. One of those people put the wad of paper into the mustard purse. I felt warm all over with the knowledge and I stopped to look at some outdoor Christmas lights.

I picked up the box of lights and looked it over. This box didn’t say where its contents originated, but touted an 80% reduction in the energy used. There was an energy savings of 80%. A little boy came up next to me and I looked at him.

“Can you believe this,” I asked him, “These lights have an energy savings of 80%. Do you realize the hypocrisy in this statement?”

His small eyes misunderstood the words and he said emphatically, “Yeah!” Then he ran back to the cart where his mother stood, boredly surveying merchandise. I put the lights back on the shelf and walked on with my cart. My mind was shaken with the little boy and his mother, but it gradually tended back to the Chinese factory workers. Again I couldn’t help myself and my mind worked up the image of the individual worker, the one, the absolute one who had stitched the mustard purse, the one who crumpled the paper and closed the latch. I saw her clearly in the noise of the factory, she was an island of calm, a Zen nun, and she radiated elegance. Her name was Darla.

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t really her name and that the name was from some long dead aunt, but I had decided. I created her past, complete with her unorthodox parents who were shunned by their village when they named their daughter “Darla”. Why didn’t they choose a traditional name, like Pang? What was their problem? Didn’t they know that Darla was picked on at school because of her name? Still, they encouraged her to excel at school and hoped she’d branch out into mathematics, science, and engineering, maybe all of them. She didn’t, though. She hung around the village, did usual things, and got older. She graduated and her parents insisted that she get a job with her cousin at the new purse factory that opened in the city below the village. Darla worked alongside her cousin in the factory and they traded little jokes about their profession. Darla and her cousin got a studio apartment, or whatever passed for a studio apartment in China, and they spent their days working and their nights walking the town. Darla met a man, a nice Chinese man. His family was nice and he would lunch with her in the factory break-room and enjoy a bowl of noodles together. Darla liked him. They moved in together and she worked at the factory and he drove trucks for the city.

I walked back to the purse wall and stood again, looking at the mass of non-leather material and color palette. I picked up the mustard one again and took it to the register to pay. I wondered then, if Darla knew I would find this. I wondered if she hated me for holding it now and not fully appreciating the craft of her stitches and paper crumpling. I imagined her, one last time, telling her partner and cousin about the selfish, middle aged woman who would hold her purse in America and not appreciate the stitches. Darla’s voice elevated from the gentle sounds of words that I’d never understand into a shrill barking at my ignorance. I paid for the purse and took it over to the exit and dropped it into the big trash can there.

Literary Criticism is the Highest Form of Fellatio, like Meta-Dicksucking or Something

I was going to write a story today and post it, but I went out to dinner with Felicia instead. Then, I came back and watched the first half of Star Wars Episode 3 with the children, so I didn't get around to it. What I'm going to do instead is post a bunch of the shit I've been reading and talk about it, albeit in a non-canonically educated type of way. Deal.


We all know that Haters are wont to hate, and certainly the internet that I frequent has very strong opinions on Mr. Lin, but I thought that this book was good. I think Lin tried and succeeded in giving an accurate representation of how shitty and hyperbolic relationships can be through a digital medium. I also thought that it was pretty great that he wrote, convincingly, from his own experience and conveyed scenes realistically while abstaining from preachiness about the greatness of his talent, generation, profession, etc.



This was good, but a bit, dated. It was slow paced, but not necessarily in a bad way. It had its powerful moments, but I think it would have been better as three acts and not five, however I tend toward brevity. I will say that he did a masterful job of portraying the individual citizens' reactions to their own mortality. Also, I should have, but didn't see the end coming. How foolish of me.



It's writers like Mr. McCarthy that make you want to curl up and kill yourself after you write anything because you know you'll never be as sparsely beautiful as he is. This was a goddamn stroll down the boardwalk of brutality. He is a master at painting just enough detail into a scene to keep you transfixed with the motherfucker, days and weeks after you read it. You will feel small, like an insignificant, bottom-dwelling, filter feeder after you read this book and realize that you'll never be good. Not fucking ever.


This is the first book I've read by Miranda July and I can say, authoritatively, that she is awesome. Do you know how hard it is to find a woman author who can realistically portray male characters in their writing? DO YOU? It is goddamn near impossible. She rules. I have the feeling that if I knew her in real life, she would be this overarching genius and she would say things that I couldn't immediately place into context and so I'd be quiet and just listen and then, later on when I'd had time to digest her words, I would feel silly that I was so stupid and that she was so smart. BUY THE MOTHERFUCKING BOOK. IF ANYONE NEEDS YOUR MONEY IT IS MIRANDA JULY.



Full disclosure: I only read No Exit, and I only read it because I knew it contained the famous line, "Hell is other people."

I thought the play was good. It was short but Sartre managed to detail the terrible nature of all of us in a small, one act play. Also, I don't like plays, so for me to acknowledge its goodness means it was double good. Doubleplusgood. Oh shut up.

Volunteerism is the Weapon that Liberal Academics are Using to Annihilate America

Here is a terrible story that I cranked out. It is 1000 words of pure awful, here you go.

The three men shuffled into the VFW as soon as the doors opened at noon. I waited for them behind the bar and they took their seats like they always did. I had been there for an hour already and they had been sitting in their cars in the parking lot when I showed up to work. I rubbed down the bar as they sat.

Morning!

Hell it’s afternoon now. Jerry laughed at the joke and slapped at the damp surface of the bar.

Usuals?

Do you know who I am, son?

I poured Jack Daniels into a glass with ice. The liquor clouded up in the melting cubes and I slid the drink toward Jerry. I opened his tab and turned on the television for the old men. Roger ordered beer and John called for one too. I served the men and set the cold bottles on coasters. I opened tabs for them too and they clinked their bottles together. The television was muted and the men watched the sports highlights that hadn’t changed from yesterday. The men sipped at their drinks and loosened into the wood backs of their chairs. Roger and John discussed the sports show and Jerry smoked silently. I wiped down the bar again and the smoke inked up into the ventilation system. They were old and their faces showed their campaigns and the men told their stories solemnly.

Jerry wore a flannel shirt with ribbons on the left breast pocket. His hat was olive drab and his bulbous nose jutted out of his ruined face like an errant mountain. He came in every day and, after his first joke, didn’t say much until the third whiskey, when the afternoon was well underway. He always told the same story: he was young, enlisted, shot a little Vietnamese man in the back. Then, after the Army, he had lived on the street and did some things he didn’t like to think about. He always looked past me when he got to that part of the story. Once, he showed me a picture he had taken from the little man’s pocket. I liked to imagine the family that Jerry had de-fathered and what bars they went to now.

Roger was the most ancient of the group. His belly eased into the bar and he wore a leather cowboy hat with some long extinct unit’s insignia. He had been the best and most decorated supply clerk in the entire history of the Marine Corps. It was a real man’s Corps back then. They didn’t fuck around. They beat the fuck out of you if you looked at them wrong. The officers were men you could respect, not like the faggots and pussies of today. Can you believe the kind of shit they let into his Corps today? One time, he went on liberty and came back with Chlamydia and the doc put a q-tip in the end of his dick. Burned like a son of a bitch. He said Semper Fidelis and tipped the bottle in a salute to his brothers with the beginning of each beer.

John never told me stories but I suspected that he had some ripe ones. When Roger and Jerry told their stories, John nodded silently and took confirming sips of his bottle. John was a thin, lanky man and it was hard to think of him as a young man, holding a rifle and thrusting the bayoneted tip into a dummy. John’s face was the worst of the group and I never looked at him directly, but peeked at it in the big, fish-eye mirror that hung at the end of the bar. He never said what service he was in, but Roger and Jerry didn’t ask and neither did I.

The afternoon doled out into the bar and the drinks and smokes came and went. The television repeated the highlights again and again while I rubbed the bar and served more and helped the men angle into their stupors. The men became more animated and sometimes made racist jokes about the sports players. I laughed when I was supposed to and didn’t say much about anything. They announced when they were going home and got up, slowly, after one last drink. Their hands each gripped the bar in their characteristic ways as they settled themselves again.

Well, Gents, ‘til tomorrow then! John said as they stood completely.

They put on their coats and Jerry adjusted his ribbons, Roger his hat, and John paid for the last round of the three. I helped them calculate their tabs and closed out the register. They left good tips for old men. They shuffled out into the coming night and I wiped the bar, washed the glasses, trashed out the big can under the bar, and killed the television. The bar smelled of smoke and I ran the fans after the men left while I closed down the building. I locked the door and walked out to my car, but I stopped under the parking lot’s lights and watched a thin bead of water drip from an icicle that hung from the car’s license plate. I stood there for a long time and watched the drops fall onto the cold, sanded asphalt.

I drove to the apartment and entered into its dark silence. I turned on the television and sat on the sofa for a while in the dim blue of it. I made my dinner and took it into the living room with the television. I watched some serial dramas and ate with the sound turned down on the set, but turned it up again when I took my dishes to the sink. I watched television for a long time, but started to yawn and so I laid on my side on the sofa. I turned the sound lower but not off and closed my eyes. I sighed and told myself, aloud, that there is no way I’d end up like those old bastards.

The internet is not only killing journalism, it is raping the corpse of literary fiction at the same time.

Repeal Obamacare Now

Apparently, Obamacare will strip all the meat from your bones, shrink your skeleton, and affix it to a tea-bagger's protest poster. Please, think of your skeletons.

Well, election time came and went and now, a bunch of people think that the new members of Congress will affect some kind of change in earmarks, or Obamacare, or fiscal responsibility, or Medicare, or Social Security, or something. I'm pretty sure none of that is going to happen but that won't stop everyone from being all butthurt about it for the next two years and then they'll vote some new stooges into office and the cycle will repeat itself. I swear, these people act like they've never had a government class, or lived in a democratic country before.

Anyway, I don't have anything other than that, but if nothing else, I have been enjoying trolling online newspaper comment forums. It's just too easy.

Also, Joe Miller can go share a box of dicks with Sarah Palin.

Stupid Stupid Terrible Self-Loathing

We all want to be her.

A long time ago in a terrible, underfunded, South Mississippi high school, I read some books. I had some teachers who were pretty great, despite their station, and who truly believed in what they were doing. They were great and I owe them a lot. They showed me a panorama of shit that was so far out of my depth and was so unfathomable to a ridiculously poor child. I didn't know shit, didn't have horizons for shit, and, if not for them, was destined to be in shit, a cop, a day laborer, a goddamn, beer swilling, no idea having motherfucking loser.

I owe them a lot.

I wrote a novel that I'm sure is pretty shitty, but at least I wrote it.

Self-Indulgent Asshattery

Fucking beggars

It's snowy as fuck, so that means haiku:

Wet snow falls gently
Inside I waste fossil fuels
As iTunes shuffle

Pyramidal leaves
Framing frosted window glass
I drink hot coffee

Waiting for nothing
Doubt arises unbidden
Xanax quells my fears

Kids play at hockey
Eyes wander across mothers
Sighing to myself