Clockwork

As the post below makes clear, I am sitting in a bar reading. I do that sometimes. I grew up in a house with a lot of kids and a lot of noise and I actually often feel more comfortable reading in a noisy place than I do in a super quiet apartment. 

So I am here having my deep thoughts, but I don't completely tune out and so I will give you a rundown of what's going on in the bar. We will do this clock-style because I always wants to be a fighter pilot because I saw Top Gun when I was too young to know that it is basically the best American soft-core gay porn ever made.

Anyway ...

At my 1 o'clock is a young couple that is t going to last. She is decked out to the nines for a dinner taken in the bar and he is wearing black gym shorts with white stripes which match his sandles. He also has one if those weird cowlick things going on. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that they don't have a future. I'm not saying that they won't get married and have kids and buy a house and get fat together. When I say theyre not going to work out, I just mean that they won't be happy.

At my 3 o'clock is a couple that is either on a terrible first date or who have been together for more time than they had things to talk about. I LITERALLY don't thing they have spoken to each other the whole time I have been here. Makes me think of the lovely and talented Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when she talks about the dead people.

At my 6 is a table full of college kids dressed like hoodrats but hoodrats don't drink here, so they're just kids who didn't have to move home when the semester ended. They're loud but harmless.

At my 8 o'clock are some bros. They look like BMW bros, as opposed to pop-Christian mega church bros (BIG difference, but that's for another time), so basically they're human equivant of annoying insects.

At my 9 o'clock is - surprisingly - a middle aged Indian couple. He looks like my childhood pediatrician Dr. Patel (I'm not being racist here, he actually does look like Dr. Patel, who I have a deep and abiding love for, BTW, and wish I could still to to) and she is wearing one of those "traditional" sari type things.

I would tell you more, but I think they're closing the bar and kicking me ...

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Drowning.

So you know how sometimes, after a long day of hiking, all you want to do is go to your local bar and reread Donald Barthelme's short story "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning"? Because it is one of the most amazing short stories you've ever read but you can't figure out why and it has been haunting you for like six years?

Well that is what I am doing right now and I have got to tell you: I still cannot figure this story out and - not only that! - I still can't figure out why it is so good. But it really really is that good!

At this point I'm a decently educated guy and I'm supposed to understand the mechanics of these things, but I just can not figure out this story.

Let's say I had been trained as an electrical engineer and that this is a blog about electrical engineering and one day I walked into a house and looked at the fusebox and concluded, "I have no fucking idea what is going in here." But the lights are still on.

That is how I feel when I read this story. 

It is seldom that I feel this way. I have been trained to deconstruct the heart and soul out of anything and everything (that may be why I often seem so dead inside to you!), but this story - so far, anyway - really still seems to be made of magic.

Don't worry, I will crack this nut eventually. It may just take awhile.

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Kafka's Cats.

You know, the memoirs of famous writers have been mysteriously silent on how to deal with the fact that a cat is constantly crossing back and forth in front of the writing and waiving its ass in your face while you're trying to come up with both sides of a really  good metaphor.

All writing about writing needs to deal with how to deal with cat asses in one’s face. HASHTAG truism.

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Demystification.

In honor of the Critical Theories of Literature final I took last night, below I am reposting a thing I wrote when I was suffering through Theory as an undergrad.

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Critical Theories Demystified.

Only four or five people alive will find this funny. I hope that the rest of you will indulge me. Or at least forgive me.

Critical Theories Demystified

By James Bezera

Aristotle reads Jorge Luis Borges:

"What the fuck is this?"

Immanuel Kant reads Jorge Luis Borges:

"I have no fucking idea why I like this."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reads Jorge Luis Borges:

"This fucking guy isn’t German, is he?"

Jorge Luis Borges reads Jorge Luis Borges:

"What the fuck do you guys not get?"

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Jay-Z Mystery.

Did something happen recently with Jay-Z and an elevator? I have been so focused on school lately that I’m not as culturally literate as normal, but I keep running across these words: “Jay-Z” and “elevator”. Did he get trapped? And if so, is there video? And if so, did he try to climb out of the elevator?

Between you and me, every time I’m in an elevator I am hoping it gets stuck so that I finally have an excuse to climb out through that top hatch and wriggle up the cables and pry the doors open and bellow, “I’m John McClane motherfuckers!”

This seems like a good place to mention stuff that I know: the 1958 French New Wave film “Elevator to the Gallows” invented the whole escape-from-an-elevator thing, but apparently in France the escape hatch is on the BOTTOM of the elevator, which makes the whole thing that much more terrifying and also begs the question: what the fuck is up with the French?

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No-Take-Down.

So, the post below is something of a doozey. The editors here at standardkink have a fairly strict no-take-down policy when it comes to drunken blogging. They feel that it keeps me honest. So there it is, for you to enjoy, my thoughts on dating and arson, in case you were curious. Read it and then pause for a moment to reflect on how well-written it is, despite the size of the metonymic logic gaps. You try tossing back a couple drinks and then see how good your blog posts are.

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G.C., my lovely.

Okay, so you know how one of your favorite things is when I post on here after having a couple of drinks? Well then tonight is going to be the bee’s knees for you. Let’s be clear and delimit our conversation right now:

This is a rumination on (subjects which will be addressed but will be specifically sideswiped):

1) Singlehood

2) George Clooney

3) Trailers

Okay, so here’s the deal, in summation. A few years ago I went through a breakup that left me raw and ragged. Just torn up. Broken. The kind of breakup that is the personal version of active plate tectonics. I had some good friends who nursed me through it. My then-roommate Eggplant  was a little bit of a revelation in that she reminded me to do things other than sulk (sulking, it turns out, is my default position). I had a weird, intermittent, brief-ish relationship with a charming and delightful girl who I adored immensely, but it turns out that the things which attract me to women are also the things which make it impossible to have healthy, functional relationships with them. Such is life. Since then I have been bone-starved single (NOT a euphemism, though I realize that by pausing here, I am basically creating a euphemism.), with the occasionally ill-advised, morally ambiguous dalliance thrown in here or there. So ...

Q): Why do I mention this?

A) Well, honestly, because I have a blog to write and that demands content. You try writing a blog and see how far you get without fumbling into this kinda territory.

Q): Yeah, but why really?

A) Okay, fine. I went to a reading tonight with a friend of mine whose company I enjoy greatly. She is happily in a relationship, which is fine with me, but it was the first time in a while now that I have shown up to an event not-stag. I have been showing up to things alone for so long now that I had to take stock of the room in a way that I had forgotten about having to do. See, when you show up with somebody it makes everything so much more massively complicated. If I was in a relationship right now, I would explicate it, but I’m not so I won’t. The point is that - after having spent the majority of my adult life in relationships - I am still - somehow still - weirded out by being just an individual. And it has been a couple of years now!

To be clear though: I am not on the market. I don’t have a Plenty of Fish account or a Match.com acount or even a Fetlife account. I am not looking, I am not hoping. Right now I am in grad school and I want to be good at it. I know me, I know me & relationships, and I kinda feel right now that I would not be a very good partner. I did my undergrad while working 40+ hours a week and I realize now that I probably shouldn’t have. So, in lieu of making the same mistakes. I am opting to make only strange new mistakes.

All this life-reflection has a point.

The point is that I live in my apartment. Next to my apartment is a construction site where they have been building a 5 or 6 story apartment complex for nearly a year. Well, because people like me exist - and I can’t walk past it without wanting to hurl a Molotov Cocktail into it, you know, on general principles - they have a security guard who lives out of a very small trailer.

As a fan of the small-house movement, I was initially very interested in this trailer (from a design standpoint) so I paid attention to it. In paying attention, what I discovered was that the young graveyard shift security guard who lived in it was having kind of the best life ever!

Or at least the best life one can have when one is a graveyard shift security guard.

He is a young and objectively attractive African-American man and he has a daisy-chain of young women running in and out of his trailer, which smells massively of a pot field set ablaze.

Now to be clear, I am not envious. I do not want to change places with this person in some sort of Ryan Reynolds/Jason Bateman change-up. I do however imagine that for a young man such as this, there is a situation in which the following statement will actually work: “You wanta come back to my trailer? I have some pot.”

From beginning to end, I have been genuinely lucky enough to only have amazing women in my life, so I have never even contemplated lines like these. But these lines must happen in the world, right? I have too many bartender friends to believe that nothing but love is happening out there on a nightly basis. As someone who has no idea how the come-back-to-my-trainer world works, I am fascinated. I am constantly fascinated by the world and this happens to be what fascinated me tonight. If I was a night shift security guard, would I be able to lure women back to my honey trap trailer so efficiently? Most likely not! I hate hate hate making small talk - though I am a winner of the Dale Carnegie Sales Talk Challenge - but small talk is probably the manner in which to engage. As opposed to what I do which - because I’m passive aggressive - is basically just a series of unhappy facial expressions.

What is weirding me out about all of this, I suppose, is nothing new. If you want to graph my 20s on - you know - a graph, it would be pretty silly looking. I’m a little bit of a reprobate in that way. I guess my problem is that we do not get a membership card and so the young man living in a trailer outside my apartment has no idea that I am on his side. I am happy if he is getting pot-laid in his trailer (Though I have always felt that was lazy).

I am not trying to get pot-laid in a trailer. In fact, I’m not entirely certain I would enjoy getting pot-laid in a trailer (though I am from a very small town and so who the fuck knows?)

But George Clooney got engaged. I think we all kind of knew that would happen one day. A confirmed bachelor is just a man who has not met the right woman yet. That’s my entirely true platitude, BTW.

Anyway, I hope that GC and that amazing woman he’s marrying have a very happy life together. The  rest of us though are likely to continue to commiserate quietly. Quiet commiseration is better that Plenty of Fish.

Also - in case it was unclear - I am desperate to avoid having to go on a date, but I am not G.C.

  

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Dumb.

My neighbors are having a friday night party and for me this is a particular kind of horror. I have talked about this on here before, but you know how I kind of think I’m the coolest person I have ever met (owing to some very specific and probably easily diagnosable kind of narcissism) well it always bothers me to know that other people are having fun without me. This is not because other people are having fun without me. No no, that would be too clean. It is because other people are not having nearly as much fun without me as they could be having with me.

Judging by the noise level, I think that they are about to leap from their balcony into the pool. I admire that kind of verve, but I have been on my own balcony enough to ponder the physics involved and I’m pretty sure that if they do make the jump it will end with compound fractures. I will keep you posted on my neighbor’s progress toward their own destruction.

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Bad Blogger.

I have been a terrible blogger lately but I promise you it is because I have been very very busy. It turns out that pursuing a graduate degree really involves a whole lot of work. Someone really should have made this clear to me previously.

It isn’t so much the work I mind. I honestly feel that in the last year I have not only figured out how to write a paper, but also why the hell we write papers in the first place. …….

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Boo.

My neighbors are having a friday night party and for me this is a particular kind of horror. I have talked about this on here before, but you know how I kind of think I’m the coolest person I have ever met (owing to some very specific and probably easily diagnosable kind of narcissism) well it always bothers me to know that other people are having fun without me. This is not because other people are having fun without me. No no, that would be too clean. It is because other people are not having nearly as much fun without me as they could be having with me.

Judging by the noise level, I think that they are about to leap from their balcony into the pool. I admire that kind of verve, but I have been on my own balcony enough to ponder the physics involved and I’m pretty sure that if they do make the jump it will end with compound fractures. I will keep you posted on my neighbor’s progress toward their own destruction.

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Sad Collection of Words.

I read this statement in a lot of thesis projects I see at work and it always strikes me as such a sad collection of words:

 

Results indicated that there was no significant difference between the pre- and posttest findings

 

It is kind of like saying, “This idea I had for my thesis project – and which I spent a year or more of my life researching, testing, and writing about - turned out to not actually be a thing.”

Thank god I'm a writer and therefore free of the tyranny of having to prove that anything I say is correct.

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