Living Alone.

Heading into this summer I was lucky enough to pick up a full-time job as a staff member at the college library where I had been working as an assistant. In about two weeks I’ll transition back from grown-up-town to student-assistant-ville again because I’m not allowed to be a student teacher and a state of California CSU staff member at the same time. Lame.

That’s fine, whatever. I entered freely into a system that is designed for 22-year-olds who still live at home.

The summer has been pleasant so far. It is probably the easiest job I have ever had. It is big on monotony and I have a superhuman capacity to tolerate such things at work. You - for instance - would have self-immolated a month ago just so that you could feel alive again, but I don’t freak out that way. It is boring work, but I work to find the interesting in it.

The larger point though is that it is the kind of work that I can do while listening to stuff and one of my projects this summer (in addition to writing a collection of poetry, doing Project 333, and generally being awesome) has been to listen to This American Life. All of it. 

I have been working my way backward from 2015 and right now I am knee deep in 2009. Ira and his team have been on the air since 1995 so obviously I am not going to get through it all. That is just math and would have been obvious if I had thought to do the math when the summer started. But this is one of those things that makes me better for having attempted it.

Today though I felt a little bit assailed. Not intentionally, but assailed nonetheless. If you were interested in thematically titling the This American Life Episodes 391 through 402, you might want to call them, “Even this guy has a girlfriend!”

This blog post is going to be all sour grapes from here on.

That’s not really true though.

I’ve been living - for some time now - a quite contented bachelor life. I really do like my life. I like my mattress on the floor, I like my futon/couch, I like my cat, and my ability to do whatever I want at any given moment. Occasionally I go get the mail without bothering to put pants on and no one yells at me about it. It's kinda great.

Also, I’m not someone who tends to get terribly lonely. I find my own company rather entertaining and I have a lot of easy friends (by which I mean: people I like who I can go get a drink with but whose lives I don’t have to be involved in). There are moments though when I do miss having that someone in my life. I’ve come to discover that “significant other” is one of those politically correct terms which has proved to have some useful existential value.  Just say it a couple of times: significant other, significant other.

It is that other person in your life who is significant. I’m willing to admit that I miss that. I miss being someone’s person. Their go-to. And I miss having a go-to.

That being said, I’m just whining. It’s not like I’m on match.com or speed-dating or anything, so how much do I really miss it? I mean really?

There is a fantastic song by the otherwise forgettable Mr. T Experience called “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend” and that is how This American Life made me feel today because one of the dudes in one of the stories was a landlord-murdering meth addict and you know what? He had a girlfriend.

One guy went to Baja California for no good goddamn reason to hunt down the landlord-murdering meth addict and you know what? That guy had a wife.

One guy hated everyone and was bemoaning how long his social circle had to mourn the death of a friend with cancer and that guy was married.

One guy moved home to sate his childhood daddy issues by rebuilding his father’s rundown house over the course of A YEAR and THAT GUY had a wife.

One guy was on death row for having MURDERED a dude, and THAT GUY had a girlfriend.

One guy experienced amnesia while in India, flew back to the United States, and had a girlfriend when he landed who still loved him and whom he did not remember AT ALL.

AND there was a whole story (from The Moth) about one woman in an abusive relationship who met another woman in an abusive relationship and how they bonded over how fucked up their abusive relationships were and then they both WENT BACK TO THOSE GUYS.

Just kick me in the teeth why don’t you Ira Glass?

Anyway, like I said, this is not a bitchfest, rather it is just a nominal and pragmatic WHAT THE FUCK?! to the universe. An open letter, if you will.

There are things about my life that I treasure, but - at the same time -  I am bothered by the fact that other people seem to be making connections better than I am or more frequently that I do. And to dispel your questions: I’m not bad looking or smelly or naive or particular demanding. But then I guess, neither is that dude on death row who’s just waiting to get executed, while holding hands with his girlfriend.

Oh! And just because it seems thematically contiguous, below is a brilliant song by The Helio Sequence called “Lately”, which I always think is sung by Ryan Adams but which actually is not:

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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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Hitler.

Facebook is a strange, strange thing, especially after you have had a little wine and you start backtracking through your own biography and if you’re single and ultimately you stumble upon people you have personally spent time with and you look at their profiles and wonder to yourself, “THAT motherfucking guy is in a relationship?! Fucking seriously?”

Like, how much of an asshole must I be if that dude who used to lick toads and pull the wings off flies has found someone who loves him?

There is a song by the Mister T Experience called “Even Hitler had a girlfriend” and that kind of sums up the way that I feel. 

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Wildlife TV = Deep Psychological Problems.

I realized yesterday that since I have been single I have been watching significantly more wildlife and nature shows. And when I say “significantly” I mean about a hundred thousand million percent more. Are these two things connected? Or am I making a false correlation?

Is it:
Being single = watching more wildlife programming

Or is it:
Being single = having more free time = watching more wildlife programming

Or am I looking at it wrong? Maybe it’s this:
Being single + having more free time = watching more wildlife programming

The difference between the last two would be that I have more free time because I am single, whereas the second one says that those two things are true independent of one another.

Or maybe it isn’t about free time at all. Here is the nightmare scenario:
Being single = having to think about dating = fear of having to date = preparing for the vicious dating world by watching wildlife shows

Is my subconscious really so afraid of the prospect of dating – which I have not done very much of in my life – that it is trying to prepare itself this way? No way!

Here is one that’s completely different, but which I would be comfortable with:
Sudden interest in nature & outdoor activities = interest in television programming about nature & outdoor activities = watching more wildlife programming

See, that would be okay and make sense, right?

But wait! What about this:
Being single = sudden interest in nature & outdoor activities = interest in television programming about nature & outdoor activities = watching more wildlife programming

Or worse, this:

Being single = having more free time = sudden interest in nature & outdoor activities = interest in television programming about nature & outdoor activities = watching more wildlife programming

That would be awful! Because it would mean that both my interest in outdoorsy natureness AND my watching of wildlife programming are all derived from my boredom caused by being single! Oh no! I think that would mean that I have lost all capacity to be genuinely interested in anything! My whole life is a lie! This is just shameful and awful! My life is so hard! (Though not as hard as a penguin’s. Man, those poor little bastards have it rough.)

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Paranoid Dating Zoo.

I’m sure that I’m just being paranoid, but on my Pandora (which I listen to every single day at work) ads have started appearing for this zoosk.com dating website. It’s a pretty generic ad that mostly consists of pictures of women and the ad says, “Find a Date on Zoosk”. So it’s a pretty normal ad, right? Well I have noticed that over the last week or so the women in the pictures have been changing and it seems like they are becoming more and more attractive. Well, perhaps “attractive” isn’t the right word. Let’s say that they have been becoming more and more “my type”.

Is it possible that somehow the ad is dialing in my tastes based on the music I’m listening too? That would be crazy, right? But is it?

I mean how hard would it be to look at a person’s music tastes and start to triangulate their other tastes? Not that hard, me thinks. And anyway, isn’t that what marketing is all about in the first place?

Like I said, I’m probably just being paranoid, right? Because otherwise that would be a little crazy. Right?

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Know Your Bars.

Know Your Bars
by james bezerra

Do not underestimate
the difference between a wine bar
and a whine bar.
The distinction isn’t semantic;
one can be quite romantic
and the other can be a place quite tragic
for a first date.
So if your girl likes merlot,
take her to a wine bar that’s mellow.
But if she likes to complain a lot,
well, don’t show up at all and just say you forgot!

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You Like It When I'm Long Windy, Right?

So I know that there are a lot of people in the world who have it a lot worse than I do. If I acknowledge that, is it okay if I bitch and moan for a little while? You don’t have to read this post (and you probably shouldn’t, on account of how long it is. Sorry about that. Normally I am all about the brevity).

So it isn’t even that things are bad, I mean, I have a couch in my apartment now and everything. It is just that today was kinda rough because I had a lot of feelings converge on me from different directions. I won’t bother you with all the details, but I will instead enumerate them as bullet points:

- I am money stressed right now. I make okay money, I suppose (I mean, I could be doing much worse) and I am grateful to have a job BUT this whole year has been one large expenditure after another. Every month it seems that there have been large and mostly unanticipated expenses. I would be just fine money-wise if I had an uneventful month. I would just like to have a month where everything was normal. But that’s just life, right? This happens to everybody and maybe I should not bitch and moan so much? Okay.


- I am still breakup stressed. It has been hard as of late. When I’m at work I keep literally taking my cell phone out of my pocket to text her – we used to text a lot during the day – and then I remember that I can’t text her. Yesterday I went with some friends to The Farmers Market at The Grove (it is basically the food court at a fancy outdoor mall in Hollywood, but it is supposed to look like the kiosks and food stands of a real farmers’ market, I guess) and I started to get overcome by all the memories of being there with her and eating crepes there with her and eating fruit cups with her. It was really hard. Last night my roommate Eggplant (still test driving blog names for her) asked me why I went at all if I knew it would be like that and I told her I didn’t want to be hiding from the world. Though part of me wants to right now. But that’s how it goes, right? Everybody hates breakups? And maybe I shouldn’t bitch and moan so much? Okay.


- I am work stressed. As I said above, I am grateful to have a job, but lately (since I graduated and went back to a normal 9 to 5 schedule [actually it is 8 – 4.30]) my work has been expanding beyond the bounds of that which I can reasonably handle. Quite a lot is being asked of me lately by quite a lot of people, all of whom believe that they are my number one priority. I know that it is like that at every job (or at least every job that I have ever had) but the thing is that my primary job function is to figure out how much to pay people and then to pay them, so when I screw up or get behind or have to wait for someone else to get their shit together, then people don’t get money. The other day I was talking to one of these guys and he was stranded in Arizona and his wife in Nevada couldn’t buy milk because they were dead broke and he was begging me to find him a way to get his wife some money. Part of me is all like, “That’s your fucking fault dumbshit” (because it was), but then the bleeding-heart-liberal in me was all like, “Okay, I will find a way to help you out, you dumbshit.” (I was able to get his wife some money, BTW, because I am humanist, and awesome). But my point is that when I get behind, real people’s real lives get fucked up. But that’s how it goes, right? Everybody has shitty times at work? And maybe I shouldn’t bitch and moan so much? Okay.

- I am cat stressed. I used to have two cats, I sort of still do. One of them has been with me since San Diego and she is pitifully stupid, but very sweet. The other one I love dearly but she is ornery and kind of a little shit. My mother calls her “The Devil Cat”. Well, my Ex said that she would take her but hasn’t yet and The Devil Cat seems to enjoy antagonizing my roommate Eggplant and I feel really bad about it but I’m not sure what I can do. I would feel awful getting rid of her because we raised her from a kitten and I think that she wouldn’t understand being around other people who don’t indulge her insanity. I think that she would be all sad the rest of her life. But that’s normal, right? I should stop anthropomorphizing my pets, right? And maybe stop bitching and moaning about them so much? Okay.


- I am nostalgia stressed. Back in 2006 I went to England and France with my then-wife. It was an amazing trip and I’m now one of those people who constantly drops the fact that I have been overseas. Like, if you say, “I love French fries!” I would say, “I love the way that the French have different names for different types of restaurants, based largely on the type of food and the quantity of it that you can get there. Like a ‘café’ is different from a ‘bistro’, that sort of thing. I learned about that when I was in Paris.” And then you would say, “Fuck I had no idea that you were such an obnoxious douche bag, you obnoxious douche bag.” Or if you were all like, “Man, English is a confusing language.” Then I would be all like, “You know people don’t realize it but there are almost no freeways across the English countryside. It is mostly two-lane – or even one lane – roads that are lined with hedgerows, so you can’t even see what you’re driving past. When we rented a Vauxhall and drove to Stonehenge on our way to Bath, it took me days to adjust to the hedgerow thing.” And then you would say, “Listen you asshole, I was just making an offhand linguistic observation, I was not inviting you to give me some dissertation on Anglophilia.” . . . . . . Wait, I have forgotten what the fuck I was writing about. Hold on, I need to go read the beginning of this paragraph. Man, I am a terrible blogger. Just hang out for a second . . . . . . . Right! So the point was that I went on this awesome trip. Well, I thought that I had lost all of the photos from that trip when my external hard drive fried. Well the other day I found a bunch of them on a random memory card. As I clicked through them I was struck by how different my life is now then it was then. I’m not saying that I was regretting anything; it was just one of those sad moments of reflecting on how strange life is. Had I stayed in San Diego and in that marriage I would probably have a mortgage and kids by now. That’s strange, right? It makes one reflect quite a lot on one’s life and it made me realize how thoroughly unaccomplished and unsuccessful I am. But a lot of people feel this way, right? We all have to deal with the harsh reality of life, right? And maybe I shouldn’t bitch and moan about it so much? Okay.

- I am height stressed. On the internet website Facebook, a girl I knew in high school randomly posted a picture that I am in. In the picture I am at my ten year high school reunion (that’s right, I am that old. Deal with it.). Well, it isn’t a posed picture or anything. It is just me and a couple of people standing around talking and none of us knew that there was a picture being taken and (honestly) I don’t even look very good in it at all. BUT! I do look extremely short in it. In the picture I am standing next to a lovely and elegant (and extremely hot) friend from high school who was wearing GIANT heels. Additionally it doesn’t help that in the picture you can’t SEE that she is wearing GIANT heels. (Funny story: the elegant and graceful friend I am standing next to is still totally awesome and I totally had a GIANT crush on her in high school and I told her so at the reunion and she has not talked to me since. I don’t blame her at all though, she got married a couple of years ago to a guy who is – by all accounts – awesome. But it was yet another moment in my life during which I should have just kept my god damn mouth shut for the sake of propriety. [Even funnier story: every couple of months I have this dream wherein she is teaching me to bowl. One time we totally beat all of the other bowling teams and we won a whale!]). So I look very short in this picture. And – listen – I know that I am, in fact, short. I have been short my whole life and I’m not generally sensitive about it (because I rock shortness as hard as anybody really can), but it just brought the point home to me at a time when I’m already feeling fairly lame and just generally short/fat/bald/old/generally undesirable/unaccomplished. But do not fret, I will not be buying lifts or a pinky ring. I will not start driving a sports car or wearing a military dress saber. I will not be doing any of those things that men do to make themselves feel less short. I will simply wait out this bout of lameness and eventually I will remember that I am awesome and that will be that. So maybe I should not bitch and moan so much about the things I don’t like about my body? Okay.

- I am stressed. A few nights ago I was out at a strange little bar in the San Fernando Valley. The bar was called The Tender Glow, which – though it was a perfectly nice dive – it was not. It did not glow at all, if you must know. The thing that you have to know about the entire San Fernando Valley is that it is where the strip mall was perfected, so it is filled with strip malls and asphalt in the way that the Yosemite Valley is filled with trees and beauty, or the way that the San Joaquin Valley is filled with dirt and disappointment. Since it is all strip malls, you can never tell what kind of place a place is until you place your foot inside the door. This place was a very cool dive. It was narrow, but had faux-leather red booths of the sort that I like in a bar. Well I met up with some school friends there (it was exactly the sort of sudden and random getting together of people that I enjoy) and a lovely friend of mine (who does not yet have a blog name) jokingly (and sadly, platonically) rubbed my shoulders and was taken aback by the fact that they feel basically like granite. I carry my stress around in my shoulders and back, but doesn’t everybody? My friend seemed curious in the way that little boys are curious when they come across a dying bird, so she worked her way down my spine and found the kind of knots usually reserved for gnarly old willow trees. She accused me of having Scoliosis. I tried to explain that I just haven’t relaxed – really relaxed - in four or five years, but I realized that that sounded kind of crazy, so I just gave up. There is some truth to the fact that I over-stress. There probably are people who could live my life and not be as stressed out as I am, but the thing is that I wanted so much more from life (this goes back to the whole ‘unaccomplished thing) that I stress about everything. I stress because I am in a constant and life-long competition with an imaginary man in my head who is taller than me and smarter than me and funnier than me and better looking than me and cooler than me. He makes more money than I do and he fucks better than I do and he writes better than I do and he’s happier than I am. This is why I am not a particularly competitive person. I have no interest in competing against real people, I have the son of a bitch in my head to deal with. And he is winning. But everybody is stressed out right? Everybody is competing against their own hopes and dreams, right? So maybe I should not bitch and moan about it so much? Okay.


So I feel kinda bad if you read this entire blog post in the hopes that you would be entertained or something. But let’s face it, you’re not reading this right now. I lost you back somewhere around the French fries thing.


Anyway. I feel better now than I did when I started writing this. I hate that this blogging thing is like therapy for me. The truth is that I’m more honest here while I am typing than I ever really am when I TALK to people. The irony being that the only people who read this blog are people I know in real life. It is hard to play it cool and unflappable in life when everybody has access to this back door into my brain. But whatever, you’re not reading this right now anyway.


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Some Bullshit You Should Skip.

I am not ashamed to say that I am feeling a little bit weird right now. If I actually know you in real life, or if you have read this blog lately or if you’re my mom (hi Mom!), you know that I have recently gone through a breakup and that it has not the easiest breakup in history (though I’m sure it wasn’t the hardest either. I mean, neither of us was Sid Vicious or anything).

And so I’m feeling weird because I had a relatively smooth day at work today and so I just worked and worked and worked and then it was time to go home. And I came home, but there was no one here. I mean, the cats were here, but my roommate Dandelion (I’m still test-driving blog names for her) was at work and I didn’t have any plans for the night and I didn’t really feel like calling anyone up, so I have just been unpacking boxes and working on my sexy vampire robots and otherwise sitting in front of the computer and reading news and such and sending unsolicited blog entries out onto the unappreciative Internets.

Now I don’t want you to form some picture of me in your head as sad and lonely, because while I may be both sad and lonely, I don’t feel pitiful and I don’t want you to think that of me. There is a part of me that enjoys sitting here and typing these words on the dirty little plastic keys of my laptop. There is a part of me that is beginning to relax. I feel like it has been like five or six years since I was really relaxed. That seems like too long, right?

But I’m sitting here and I’m realizing that I basically feel like I’m on summer vacation, like this isn’t exactly my life, though it is not necessarily a bad one. The thing is that I have spent almost my entire adult life in one of two relationships. If you added it all up I have probably only been single for less than two years since I was seventeen. Unlike other bouts of singlehood in my past, I have the impression that this one might stick for a while. So I am trying very hard to rejigger my brain to the understanding that this is how lots and lots of people go through life. It is very strange. And it makes me want to ask all of you single people, what the hell have you been doing with your time? I mean, sure right now I’m just a guy yammering away on his blog, but I just went through a break up. Give me a few months and I will be knee deep in a novel (oh yeah! I want desperately to be writing a novel, my head just isn’t quite right yet).

Anyway, I guess the point is that this is weird. It is strange to sit here alone and listen to my Pandora (she has been like my babysitter lately) and to know that my girlfriend isn’t going to be walking in anytime soon. That she isn’t going to tell me about her day and that we aren’t going to make some small dinner together and then whisper to each other in bed later. It is very strange.

There is a part of me that realizes my life is completely off the rails right now and therefore anything is possible. I have yet to decide if that is exciting or horrifying. But I am trying to figure it out. No doubt you will have to read a lot more about it as I work on figuring it out.

And if the tone and tenor of this particular entry is not to your taste (because I sound sad) then just take some solace in the fact that I have already decided that July is going to be a super awesome month. I want to take advantage of July and try to sink my teeth into a little bit of life. I don’t really know what that means yet, but I want to suck the marrow from some bones. If you’re lucky I will find my camera soon so that you can see that when it happens.


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Welcome Back to Standard Kink.

So this is my triumphant return to blogging.

“Return?” you ask, “Where did you go? Why did you leave us?”

Well, the truth is that I just went in circles, mostly. You see, Violet and I broke up. It is very sad and I am sad about it and I had actually been so sad that I couldn’t quite muster the whimsy that you have probably grown accustomed to. Here at Standard Kink the editorial staff works very hard to provide you with the finest off-kilter whimsy that you can find anywhere online.

In addition to whimsy we also like to be your go-to resource for zest, zeal, zip, vigor and verve.

And that just hasn’t been possible lately. Probably because I have been crying too much.

So – you are wondering now – what the fuck? Exactly?

Well, I will tell you.

I have moved across town to the high-density Mexican area called Newhall. I only mention that it is high-density Mexican because a lot of people think that this is a bad area, but – in fact – it is not. In fact! It is mostly families and I like to think that I am – in fact - the bad influence in the neighborhood. Also, I have a roommate, she is a friend from school and she has told me that she would like a fake blog name and thus far I have suggested “Starburst” and “Rainbow Fairy” but she has rejected both of those out-of-hand. She (along with me) graduated last month and she was also an English major, though she is a poet and therefore slightly inferior (I’m just saying). If you have any suggestions for her fake blog name, feel free to post them.

As soon as I find my camera (I think it is still in a box) I will post some pictures of the new place. It is just what I like: it is an older apartment complex (which means bigger rooms!) but it was recently remodeled (which means pretty!). It has hardwood floors the color of straw and one of the strangest coat closets that I have ever seen. It has a small dining room that fits my table like a glove (that’s where I am sitting right now!). I have a big bedroom and a lot of floor space and lots of room for books, but I have almost no book shelves, so the books are just stacked along the walls. It creates a wonderful ring-around-the-tub-but-with-books effect and part of me just wants to leave it this way. You can all come over and lay on my floor and touch all of my books with your fingers.

Otherwise, I have been writing just a little bit lately and you will find all of that stuff below. Lots of bad poems, a regrettably bad short story, a Lady Gaga video, some thoughts about accountancy and also Kevin Costner. Some other stuff too.

As far as the future is concerned, you should be prepared for exponential growth in the number of incomprehensible and scatological posts. I fear that it was Violet who encouraged me to be comprehendible, so maybe while visiting this blog you will get to witness my implosion into Burroughs-esque flights of masturbatory-ly imagistic abstraction (I fear you are witnessing such a thing right now) or, who knows, maybe I will just become even more cloying and lame. Let us hope not. I think that life is going to get strange and lonely and also kind of interesting.

Anyway, welcome to Standard Kink, I am glad to be back and I am glad that you are here.

Now please enjoy some regrettably bad writing.


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