Ben and George Plan For the New Year's Gala

 

 

 

I, for One, Blame All the Video Games and Movies and Parents and Society...

Fuck If Anyone Is Going To Read This

Just feel bad about your shortcomings.

Hey, yeah, it ain't all comics of founding fathers around here. No. There are some serious ass things that go on in this brainpan. And you know what? Oh yeah, you guys gotta hear about them because if I don't go to you to relieve the tension then it's all, "bang bang bang; oh God what have I done; I'd best just kill myself" or "time to drink every damn day of the week, instead of just the prolonged weekend schedule that's going on right now" type things. You all know. I'm sure you do.

So, let me fill you in on the backstory here. I've got this atheistic brother and, while he's a troll to be sure, he's generally a likable guy, given that you can stop being so up your own ass all the time and thinking that you're right and let him feel that, regardless of what you think or believe or hold dear or vote or any of that shit that serves to distance ourselves from one another. He's a good guy. Strong willed? Yes. Outspoken? Yes. The kind of guy you hate to have over for the holidays because you know he is going to corner that one conservative brother-in-law of yours and systematically demolish said brother-in-law's position on organized labor, or immigration, or wage inequality and leave everyone at the Thanksgiving gathering looking at their shoes and commenting on the weather? Yes.

Okay, so, recently, Jude got himself un-friended on facebook by two (if not more) of my Catholic relatives because, as is his fashion in the election season, he put the troll drive into maximum overload and went after these relatives' political convictions. The relatives responded in kind with 1) trying to convince him of his perceived thought errors with their dogmatically derived thought system, 2) complaining that he was attacking them solely for their belief structure and 3) defriending him because he was using naughty words in their facebook stream.

Perhaps some authorial intrusion is needed here to let you all know the point of this post and perhaps to distill the clarity of this post for you all without this turning into a full on apologia of Holy Mother Church and all Her teachings. 

I'mma tell you like I tell Felicia: I don't cop to understanding anything [like many of the faithful (and I only say this with the acceptance that these things happen)], but will say this: If you go to Church and stand in the absolute majesty of God and consume His flesh and ask for His forgiveness for your pitiable sins and go away from the Liturgy feeling like anything else than the absolute filth that you are, then you are doing it wrong. To me, it's about feeling awful and not the demarcation of who is right and who is wrong. It's about feeling flawed. It's about feeling that you can always do better. Give more. Care more. Act more. Incorporate outsiders more. Forgive others more. Be forebearing more. Be patient more. Be meek more. Be peaceful more. Petition more. Love more.

The entirety of the Liturgy leaves a body feeling...inadequate. 
 
That might be the convoluted point of my reasoning here. I think.

Thanksgiving Night: If the White House is Rockin'...

George and TJ Discuss a National Holiday Shopping Tradition

  

Ben and TJ Discuss the Latest Apocalyptic Monster That Will Swallow Us All

Ben and George Discuss Election Day Results

 

 

An Exercise in Existing, Part Two

 
At the beach it's windy, the promise of storms both onshore and off that congregate here. Some 400 miles to seaward, out in that great expanse of bluish foam lurks a storm that churns and sends waves, these waves that I see, the ones that surfers desperately paddle toward in order to reach and surmount and ride into the sandy link between ocean and land, that obliterate themselves on the spit without thought or regret.

We come here to exercise our need for diversion and to watch others and the forces that birthed us. Women in bikinis with fat asses jiggling. They squat or lounge or repose and they cover their sunglassed eyes with brown palms as they look up to and speak with impeccably hair cut Marines with paunchy-ish bellies and rounded deltoids from the work of pulling up. They should be the ultimately ripped specimens from recruiter's ads but the reality of swilling beer to avoid the grimness of the Marines' situation necessitates the deposition of brown adipose at their midsections. The women speak. The Marines look down, lustily, on the women's sunburned meat sacks.

A ginger couple clad in matching green jerseys of some team walk, hand in hand, up the planks of the pier. Some odd expression of Ireland chugging toward me while a charbroiled and bearded man stands on the sand and holds aloft his child's kite. The kite is an elaborate thing, in the shape of an airplane, with an airscrew front and a longer one at it's terminus. The thing takes flight. The bearded man moves off and consults a likely warm can of some undecipherable beer. The child watches the kite lift. I watch them and their group and they never know. 

I rise from my observation and walk on, toward the end of the pier and the touching of the open ocean. The planks are smooth, weathered, but not moldy. Garbage of the organic kind litters the pier: nondescript bait, shrimp hulls, the gutted offal of a catch. All the food of human passing seems to be devoured. The pier is lined with fishers, but their fast food wrappers are meticulously deposited into padlocked trashcans that dot the linear expanse of wood. The gulls have little reason to linger here. There is a starling, black bodied and sleek looking, as if it could cut through time, that hops on the pier railing and pecks out the carcasses of shrimp and others that languish in the open sun and wind of the obliquely tilted planes of the upright railings. It eyes me. I open my palms to show deference but it takes flight. I shrug at its passing and walk on.

 I stop at the railing and watch. Gulls float in the thick beach haze. Trailers and vacation rentals dwell at the lips of a sea, turquoise and grey tinted, that hurls itself against the land in some erosional foreplay. The shore is there and the sea too. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something but one of those that is only apparent to the observer and any attempt to describe it falls flat as the above one does. In the distance, water towers and hotel high rises lift out of the sea. Beyond is the horizon with its murky and unknown and ever shifting reality. I get my fill of the unknowable and walk back to a more beach-ward perch.

I am up here with the old men. Loners sipping coozied beers of indeterminate brand. We are the purveyors of the flesh below. There is a woman who bends at the waist, exposing her ruffles of her bikini'd ass as she wipes the sand from the backs of her thighs with a towel. A few yards on, a sandpiper bathes blithely in the surf. The man with the kite and his group have gone home. I decide to do the same.

An Exercise in Existing, Part One

 

(Note: The following comes from a free Saturday I had courtesy of Felicia and I totally stole this writing technique from Craig Childs who is a much better author than I.)
 

Upon entrance I pass men in khaki shorts and button down tops, bald with sunglasses and brown skin. The place is nice and smells of deep fried sea bounty and cornmeal but high class. I walk through the wood and lacquered floors to my table behind a stick thin blonde hostess in a black button down shirt and shimmery slacks. 

My seat is next to windows and my waitress is a shorter and chunkier, dyed redhead that I ask for recommendations. I order beer, an OBX (i.e., shorthand for Outer Banks, NC) on tap, in homage to the ortgeist of the water, choppy and brown, and the shore. A light-medium wind, up from the barrier islands and open ocean beyond, shoves in toward me, brackish, and even indoors, the smell and breeze relieve the heat of the day. Gulls hold station 20 feet from my window, flapping into the breeze. Chunky waitress informs me that OBX is out and so I get her recommendation, UFO, and I order food. She brings the glass, golden beer bubbling up the sides and smelling of crisp lightness and lemon zest, a feeling, an alive-ness in the heat. The taste does not disappoint.

Brown-skinned delicacies out on the patio late lunch/dine early with wind tousled hair. The motion of their hair somehow makes them more delicious while behind me an unseen gay man raves about crab cakes to his companion. Gay man is a teacher. He says, "It's too hot here to exercise outside," and further complains of his job and how he gets no breaks. It's exhausting. They order an appetizer, the crab cakes, and it comes and they descend on the food. Gay man talks and though I can't see him, I know he's holding his hand over his mouth as he chews and talks. 

The beer is easy to drink, dangerously so. Shrimp boats sit across the water, gulls float, and triangles of water rise and fall amidst the eating noises and the hum of air conditioning. One could be alive here, I think. A new dock or pier is under construction outside my window as the food arrives on my table: pesto with scallops. Four scallops (the two large ones are cooked perfectly but the two smaller ones are chewy with over cooking). The pasta is a little larger in gauge than I prefer and cooked a shade longer than I like but the pesto is this explosion of butter flavor and basil tossed with fresh tomatoes and pine nuts. A simultaneous freshness and heaviness in the palate, a completely accomplished mixture that produces a film of sweat on my forehead and in the small of my back.  I foolishly order a second beer in order to cool off. Throughout the meal, a silver and blue variegated and color shifting pigeon observes me through the window glass with his yellow eyes that are at once accusing and hopeful and stupid. The pigeon lifts off as I finish the plate and doesn't return. 

A man on the water in a small sail powered craft cuts figure eights before a wooded spit of sand mid-stream. The water is technically a river, but waves still wash in as if it is simply an inlet for the ocean's thrusting. Clouds gather and encroach from the north. I pay my tab and leave and something in me calls me out to the beach that lies some miles distant. I get in the van and heed it.

(To be continued.)

The Numeral 8 Being Lazy and Laying Down is the Symbol for Infinity, Right?

Home Improvifying.

When you are married for eight years, you talk about a lot of shit. Especially if you move across the continent twice, live in abject poverty, and decide that one of you is some kind of artiste who needs a bunch of me time to read books and scribble unsubstantial whinings about his horrible existence as a well fed flaneur. Also children. 

There is much dialogue, about almost every subject. You'd think it'd involve all kinds of serious philosophical, religious, personal, passionate give and take about all the things you fear and hope for and wish to accomplish in this once round theater that is your life. You would be wrong.

Lately, I've had some kind of mysterious rash that has founded a colony and written a treatise on Manifest Destiny and set about pacifying the great expanse of my skin. I don't know from whence this plague has come, but I've narrowed it down to: poison ivy, grass allergies, some weird reaction to herbicides, eczema, too much fabric softener, or West Nile virus. It's itchy. I wake up clawing at my arm. I slather the affected area in isopropyl alcohol for relief. I contemplate heating irons in the blue gas light of our stove so that I might cauterize the nerve endings of my skin and thereby annul the itching. It sucks.

The Rash has assumed primacy in our discussions. "When are you going to get rid of that shit?" "I think it's getting better." "You should go to the doctor." "It's probably from the new detergent." "Holy shit, this is getting bad." "Stop scratching already." "Maybe it's not so bad." "I might need to go to the doctor about this." "How are we going to fuck with you all rashy?"

For two weeks.

The point is, you live with someone and you become them and all the things that you could discuss or ponder or argue about become this thing that consumes everything and it all happens before you know it, as it's happening, and the only thing that matters is that you're there in the moment with the dialogue and all the other shit recedes and you end up standing in your kitchen making dinner and talking about each others' work for the day and you realize, as you stir the ground beef for that night's tacos and look across the steam at your spouse, that you're right where you need to be.

I love the fuck out of that woman.

Weapons in the Form of Words

Got a lot of those things all percolating in my brain stuffs and when I try to express it via words it all comes out like, "HATE HATE HATE BITTER BITTER MASCULINITY APPEAL TO AUTHORITY MISANTHROPY ETC ETC ETC"

Let me just start by telling you guys a story. True. Last night, I'm sitting in my shambling house (which insurance adjustors have inspected and taken pictures of and shaken our hands and told us their stories and promised us they would get back to us) and I'm feeling pretty shitty about the onerous burden of fatherhood. 

Check it, it goes like this (and I'm talking specifically to all my seed bearing bros, especially to those of the male variety): You have to be hard, right? I can't be the only one who extrapolates that future where you're in a restaurant with your boy and he's being a total shit to you (he's, like, older than adolescent but not yet a man) and you sit there and take the abuse (or lack of engagement) and at the end when your boy gets up and you pay the tab and he leaves and you notice some stranger sitting some tables thence and the stranger shakes his head. Is that not the most stark indictment of your lack of hardness?

 I had to discipline the shit out of the kids. Yeah, they fear me. I'm not proud of this. In fact it's something that causes me grief to the max because it's not the socially acceptable thing of our times to be the hard ass motherfucker who, with a look, can impart all the hells he is going to impose on the frail physical forms of his progeny. The progeny then shrink from their wrongdoing. Such is the dream.

The issue (incident) in question was that last night as I was slung between the armrests of our secondhand suede loveseat/sofa contraption reading Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, I hear from the back, "The goddamn fucking gum!" as Gavin was running into the living room. Both the boys had been playing in Gavin's room and both had been chewing gum. Their voices are pretty indistinguishable (outside the high pitched ranges brought on by pain) and it was inconclusive which voice uttered the saying.

I rose. I held my finger in the place I had been reading. Gavin saw me and fled to the supposed safety of his room (where Kiernan was). The children cowered. Once in the room I commenced to slap skulls with said book. They cried. 

I seethed (much in the vein of my departed mother), "You will not take the name of Our Lord in vain". 

They cried more. They rubbed heads and pointed fingers at the other. They stood sheepishly and cast accusing eyes at me as if I was the monster and the outsider and the one to be vilified (although their minds couldn't form the vocabulary necessary their glances said the words). I cast threatening looks about the room and brandished the book. They were fearful and I left.

Later, after they went to bed I felt guilty. After a bit (when it was quite likely that Gavin would be asleep) I asked Felicia, "Do you think Gavin's asleep?"

"Probably."

I went back instead to find my boy half in sleep. I knew he needed to get up early and it was late (for him). I felt selfish and stood in the doorway with the illumination of my phone. He groaned and I went to his bedside and sat. I put my hand through the coarse hair of his head. He turned and I talked to him about it (the incident). I tried to explain to him the rationale behind the exhortations and gesticulations of his father (a wild man, to be sure). I did so to assuage my guilt. I did so to explain the terrors of fatherhood. I did so to try to illuminate the nuances of being a man. I did so in an attempt to distill the wisdom, thus bequeathed to me, from my father. 

I tried all those things and I failed. 

At the end of it my boy rolled toward my position on the corner of his bed, my hand on his coarse hair, and he said, "You're the best Daddy ever."

I said, "It feels like I'm the worst. You'll see. One day."

I kissed his cheek and all sins were forgiven.

 

Lipstick on Your Arm

I haven't been doing any of this shit lately. And you know why? Fuck you, that's why. I've been busy.

Here's a little glimpse into what all I've been into lately (which you know because you are all here from facebook):

1) I'm writing this novel (a sentence that if it is uttered in conversation is one of the biggest dialogue killers ever, to be sure). No, I'm not going to talk about it or post parts of it here or really go into more detail at all about it save to say that it's really a fucking drain. On everything. And yet it's one of those things that must be endured and accomplished and ground out because without it you feel like you've wasted whatever God-issued talent floats in your blood. Or maybe not. It's awful and going no where and no one will ever think to publish it ever. It's probably going to be the reason that I make that van trip that I talked about a few posts ago.

2) Well I had all those fucking tests to tell me that I wasn't dying of cancer yet and I've still had some sort of weird abdominal issues and who knows fuck all what it's caused by. 

3) I had a birthday and turned 31.

4) I went to my MFA's residency where I drank way too much and had all these kinds of deep-ass, late night, ethanol fueled conversations about art and shit and climbed around in a construction site where some assholes had bulldozed a forest to put in a sports complex and I still made it to every morning talk/required function. Fuck yeah for showing up.

5) Got some kind of a weird rash. Not that you wanted to know, but I just thought it emphasized the fragile nature of bodies (on top of all the unseen gastro-probs that seem never ending) and how shitty and temporary life is but you can't do fuck all about that either because what else are you going to do? Not a motherfucking thing, that's what.

6) Apparently I'm going back to work and that's good, at least until I show up on the first day and someone says, "I've got some bad news."

7) The dog died.

Fuck this self-pitying bullshit. I'm going to go kill the rest of that Pabst.

TJ and Ben Discuss An Individual's Liberties

It's been a while since we've seen our Founding Bros. Here's some panels, not of the Death variety.

Bradford Pear Trees and Despair

So I'm unemployed. Again. I suppose it doesn't really matter that much and all the people I worked with are convinced that I'm going to be re-hired in the fall and that I'll see all of them again. I also suppose that vibes of such good caliber are encouraging. But then you go home and have to deal with yourself in the interminable interim (wherein your life is a fucking shambles found in the nether regions of a "hoarder's" storage shed) and look in the fucking mirror and see that face floating there and all those awful questions arise like so much hot and stinging bile in your rapidly closing throat and you just have to try to take it and internalize it and NOT drink a shit-ton of wine and get into an argument with your wife about the transcendent love of Christ and the Church's teachings and patriarchy and the myriad apparatus of thinking and the novelty of "better" methods of dissecting/correcting the abuses of the human mind.

Might have failed a bit on that last one.

And I suppose all that's okay too, but fuck if it all isn't a thing that requires constant attention and effort to not find yourself flying down the suburban roads you inhabit and picking out the telephone pole into which you will pilot your vehicle, unseatbelted and at a very rapid speed, when you finally get sick of all of it. 

In Which a Reticence is Shattered

The inherent capitalist in all of us.

My boy turned seven this past May and it's been an insanely stupid and timorous emotional ride as I've watched him through his larval stage. He's at the point where the descriptor 'boy' seems fitting and I see him running about and going on his mind's adventures and kicking soccer balls and hefting sticks and finding out the true nature of his physical form and it all just fills me up with the most intense longing and pride and joy and despair. He's free in a way that I'll never be again and was too puerile to recognize when it was I who was at that critical juncture of my life. It makes a body sad to comprehend the nature of your life and the long, slow slide into senescence. 

I've taken up running again, as is my custom in the summer when the vanity of the beach calls one to parade sans shirt. In the mornings, I haul myself from the rack and stumble, sleep-eyed through the house's dawn gloaming and spill myself out into the new day's chill. It sucks. I'm stiff. I'm tired. My lungs aren't open and my hamstrings scream as I reach down toward my toes, only reaching them after some effort and I realize with ever sharpening clarity that I'm shackled to a body that's dying.

It's a hell of a thing.

Lifestyle Changes?

When the only option is suicide, how is it that we get shows like "My 600 Pound Life"? Fuck it, here's a picture.

It's an alligator, motherfuckers. All 200 million years of him.

I recently had to go to the doctor to talk to him about possible problems with my poop making machinery. He ordered some tests that should put to rest any burgeoning fears of my immediate (5 years and less) demise. 

Then, I made the colossal mistake of viewing the Wikipedia page related to colorectal cancer. Now, I am a raft of hopelessness in a sea of uncaring and brutal organismic life.

Fuck it, bros, bring on the vino. 

Ben and George Discuss Censorship

Here's two of our national treasures that we haven't seen in a while. Let's have a look at what's chapping the mythical asses of our founding fathers today.