three a.m.

Some of you know I went to Texas and
Mexico over Spring Break with cohorts: Morris, Jane, Stephanie.
There are rumors about what happened.  The truth, however, is
like the ocean — big and complicated.  And salty.

We left State College Friday, March 3rd at Midnight to drive to
Baltimore.  Looked for Denny’s.  Couldn’t find Denny’s.
Looked for anything.  Couldn’t find it either.  Nothing
open at 5 am except convenient store with Middle Eastern Man who
wouldn’t tell me how to get to a Denny’s — he tried to sell me a
soggy sub.  I wasn’t buying.  I wanted pancakes.  More
importantly, Jane wanted pancakes.  Jane always wants pancakes,
for the record.

Went to airport.  Parked and waited for
shuttle with drunken Jersey frat boys who were en route to Acapulco.
Stephanie looked uncomfortable.  Perhaps because a frat boy had
his penis in her ear.  It was so cold outside, and I didn’t have
a jacket.  I made Morris stand up so that I could lick the metal
bench where he was sitting, so I could absorb some of the leftover
warmth from where his butt had been.  Morris has a skinny ass,
though, so my tongue froze to the bench.  Luckily, a frat boy
was there to piss on my tongue and unfreeze me.  I guess he was
drunk, because even after I was unstuck, he kept peeing on
me.

Inside the airport, a muffin cost 3 dollars.  I ate
Jane’s crackers instead.  My mouth still tasted like pee, so I
broke down and bought a muffin.  It made my mouth taste like
lemon. 

Jane has an endless supply of little packages of
crackers, for the record. 

On the airplane, Morris took
some pills that said "Eat me to grow small."  He got
smaller, and stretched out on his seat.  It’s like flying first
class, he said.

When we landed in Austin, we realized
Stephanie was no longer with us.  Turns out, she flew to Houston
with the Frat boy who had his penis in her ear.  Why’d you do
that?  we asked.  That guy was a jerk.
She said yeah,
but he was so tall.

We waited all day for Stephanie.
While we were waiting, Morris produced a large bottle of Nicaraguan
rum from a tiny pocket.  Don’t ask how I did that, he said, or
the rum will disappear.

You want to try this? Morris asked
Jane.  Jane took the bottle of rum. 

Can I have
some? I asked.

No, pissmouth! they cried.

For the
record, don’t ever loan Jane a bottle of Nicaraguan Rum.  She
gets nasty.

Stephanie showed up at ten pm.  We drove
drunk to San Antonio.  I ran over something small, maybe an
armadillo or a cat.  Whatever it was, it yelled at us in Spanish
when I slowed down.

In San Antonio, we stayed in a scary
motel with people smoking crack outside.  There were also hookers
there.  There were stains on the sheets shaped like little Elvis’s.
There were also stains that looked like exactly what they were.
Morris licked them all for 25 cents.  Then we fell immediately
asleep. 

Except I wasn’t really asleep.  I was
just pretending.  When everyone else was asleep, I went and fell into
the arms of a fat hooker named Lucia.  She let me do coke off her
ass.  Then I went back to the room wide awake and pretended to sleep.
A few minutes later, Morris snuck out to see a hooker.  Then
Stephanie.  Then Jane.  Then Morris again.  I pretended to snore all
night long.

The next day, we went to the Alamo,
where we took off our hats and looked at all the flags.  Nobody from
Delaware fought in the Alamo.  Jane was visibly upset.  She had been
drinking Nicaraugan rum all morning.  She yelled, Forget the Alamo!
It never happened – it was all a hoax! 

We had to drive as fast as we could to
Mexico, a citizen’s cavalry hot on our tails.  Jane kept taunting
them over her shoulder: Davy Crockett was a New York Jew!

For the record, you could fit
approximately 108 Delawares in Texas.  Is it any wonder people from
Delaware don’t get along from Texans?

We tried to get Jane to eat some
crackers and sober up.  She said, No.  I want pancakes.

We crossed the border into Nuevo Laredo
and bought some tortillas.  These are Mexican pancakes, Morris
explained. 

Jane eyed him dubiously, be she ate
them all the same.

I’m going to buy the biggest sombrero
in Mexico, Stephanie said. 

For the record, I did not see one
Mexican napping in a hammock with a sombrero tipped over his face.  I
felt so cheated.

We walked around all day looking at
sombreros.  We all bought one, but Stephanie’s was definitely the
biggest.

A little kid in the street approached
us with valium and viagra and xanax for sale.  Morris and I bought
some valiums.

A man with a shotgun saw us and yelled:
Hey Gringos, I like your style. Then he blew the sombrero off of
Stephanie’s head.  He laughed heartily. 

Stephanie said, I can’t hear anything
out of my left ear.

We didn’t tell her that she didn’t have
a left ear anymore.

The next day, we went to Padre island.
A long, flat flat flat drive.  It was boring, so we got drunk in the
car. 

Let’s sing a song! Jane said.

What? Stephanie said.

We sang The Yellow Rose of Texas. 

None of us knew the song, so we just
made stuff up about Texas and sang it to the tune of “Home on the
Range.”  When that got old, we made up songs about all the animals
I ran over with the car.

We got to Padre Island and ordered Pina
Coladas on the beach.  We were supposed to watch the sun go down over
the ocean, but you can’t watch the sun set over the ocean in Texas.
You can only do that on the West Coast.

We were really beat that night, so
Morris and I went back to the hotel and took a bunch of valium.

After thirty minutes, it became
apparent that the kid had not sold us valium.  He had sold us viagra,
to our growing dissatisfaction.  We became fidgety, uncomfortable. 

What a conundrum, Morris said.  Where
are the girls?

We could not find the girls.  We would
later learn that they had been tied up to the beds in the room next
door by a guy named Murph, who was having his way with them.  But
Morris and I did not know this at the time.  How could we have known?
We had our own problems to worry about.

For the record, Morris and I no longer
look each other in the eye.

The next day, Jane and Stephanie caught
Tuberculosis from a drunk vet named Rodney who played the spoons on
the table in front of the swimming pool at our hotel.  They caught
Tuberculosis because they drank after him when he passed his bottle
of Nicaraguan rum around the table, while Morris and I just faked it.

I said to them: Rodney told us he had
TB – why did you drink after him?

It was good rum! Jane said.

What? Stephanie said.

Jane proceeded to do cartwheels on the
beach.  Then she coughed up some blood.  Then she did some more
cartwheels.

Whooooweee!  I am drunk, she said.
Where’s Murph?

The next day, we drove to Austin, to this stupid writing conference.  We
challenged the writers from Emerson to a Duel.  They’ve got Texas dirt on their heads now.

The End.

I read an essay today on Salmagundi, The Price of Irony, which is more or less a polemic against the tyrannous reign of irony in our day and age (particularly in theater and literature) and now I’m angry with myself because I thought about writing this essay last year, though mine probably wouldn’t have been as good.  I’m sure there are a dozen more floating around out there anyways.  Here’s a few sentences from the second paragraph:

"Irony is the postmodern form of conspicuous self-consciousness and suits
our era’s puerility – its fey aestheticism and political
cynicism — to a tee. It is complacency’s rationalization,
              disengagement’s excuse, the alienated spectator’s self-justification.
The ironic bystander (the phrase is redundant) is the citizen’s
jeering nemesis and the poet’s wily shadow trying to make
      sure that truth and beauty and goodness, those stalwarts of the world before it was disenchanted, do not re-infect the post-modern’s cool voice with hot earnestness. Or make us think too hard or feel
too keenly."

It goes on to discuss (and trash) McDonaugh’s play Pillowman as an example of of what he’s talking about (a comedy invovling child molestation and torture — actually, I’ve been wanting to read it). 

I like that kind of stuff as much as the next guy, probably more, but really I’m sick to death of it.  I’m starving for some more voices that least flirt with sincerity, stories with something at their core.  (Irony probably too big a term to throw around like the author of the above essay does, but I’m talking about the flippant, aloof, and often vicious sort of stuff that creates distance between the reader and the world — basically, the chickenshit posturing of people that are clever but don’t really have anything to say)

Of course, irony is sometimes hard to resist, as pockets of mainstream culture are completely without a sense of it.  We don’t even have to get into politics and news media — just witness the rise of reality television or check the lyrics to the top forty songs.  I recently had the misfortune of catching a video of a song called Rock-N-Roll Queen (by Subways):

You are the sun,

You are the only one,

My heart is blue,

My heart is blue for you

You are the sun,

You are the only one,

You are so cool,

You are so rock & roll

To be fair, there’s a lot better stuff out there, even on MTV, but there’s a lot more just like that, daily proof that God has abandoned us (otherwise he’d be casting some f’ing lightning on those dudes, turning their guitars into cobras, working some miracles to cleanse the world).  I saw this video on MTV while shooting pool, but then the VJ came on, and he was wearing a sweatshirt with a couple of eighteen-wheelers and American flags raising in the background, like something you’d find in a truckstop in Kansas.  So as MTV tries to cash in on irony, they do it in such a unsubtle way that its hard to see it as anything but mean-spirited (does this whole ironic trucker pose amount to anything more than a bunch of spoiled upper-middle class kids making fun of the working class?).  Anyways, I do hold out hope that, if nothing else, more writers will tire of the type of irony I’ve been complaining about: intellectually vapid, emotionally cold, morally bankrupt.

Just finished watching Gus Van Sant’s Last Days — which kind of sucks, by the way — and have been thinking about Kurt Cobain.  I always thought it was pretty lame that he shot himself in the head.  I guess it would have been worse if he’d OD’d (cliche), and he’s certainly better off dead than playing the super bowl half-time show, but still — I never really got that tortured artist thing, where guys who have enough money and fame to do anything in the world (they don’t have to keep making shitty music or anything else) whine about their pain.  Somebody set me straight if I’m out of line here, but don’t you think people like that –who are in a position to make a difference — have some sort of responsibility to the world — not like live up to their potential responsbility, but like give something back responsibility; feed the hungry, clothe the children, fight for justice and peace.  Something.  Maybe that’s the pressure that gets to them, but more likely it’s the booze and the drugs. 

Anyways, I like the part where he wanders around his castle wearing a dress and carrying a shotgun (spoilers ahead). Maybe if I had a big estate like that, I’d go a little nuts.  The movie is pretty boring, though what really bothered me was that it was unnecessarily fragmented, full of long shots of bushes and windows with stuff happening behind them that you can barely see, along with that annoying trick where you see a scene two or three times from different perspectives, so you never know how much time is supposed to have passed.  Then after he finally does the deed, the rockstar’s naked ghost rises from his corpse and climbs and invisible ladder and fades out at the top of the screen (stairway to heaven, anyone?).  Like something from "How to Make Art Movies for Dummies."  Probably I’m a bit critical because I was a Nirvana fan and I’ve liked most of Van Sant’s stuff — even Elephant. 

Finally saw Brokeback Mountain the other night and was pleased to find it as good as everyone seems to think it is.  Yeah, I’ll throw in my vote for Heath Ledger for the Oscar, and maybe even a Best Picture, though I’ll admit I squirmed a bit during the man-love scene.  And let’s face it — that scene was kind of forced anyways.  Perhaps there’s no such thing as a graceful cowboy hookup.

Speaking of starving artists — this whole graduation thing looms larger every day.  How’s the world out there?

Sorry, haven’t been out in the world lately, just holing up in my apartment, which is good on days like today, when it’s colder than a welldigger’s ass outside.  I read WIlliam Gay’s Provinces of Night.  He’s probably the best stylist I’ve read since Martin Amis.  Here’s the first two paragraphs:

Just at twilight Boyd came up the gravelled walk, the chain with its plowpoint weight drawing the gate closed behind him, before him the shanty black and depthless as a stageprop against the failing light.  On the porch the old man in the rocking chair sat staring burnt-eyed at him like some revenant out of his past.
Which he was, but Boyd went on anyway.  Behind the shack the horizon went left and right as straight as a chalked line and as far as the eye could see, the furrowed earth tending away toward a hammered sky that looked like turbulent waters at land’s end.  The old man just watched him come, sepia felthatted old man like a curling Walker Evans photograph, brittle and fragile as memory.

Still, the best part of the book is the author photo.

Aside from that, most of my excitement lately has come from grinding my own coffee beans.  woohoo.  Am possibly going to Nuevo Laredo next month when I go to Austin for AWP — if so, I’ll come back with a story for you guys.

Oh yeah–
Who’s not too old for Bonnaroo?

So usually we’re shitting icicles about this time of year, but I’ve been going out without a coat the past few days, even at night.  It’s been very nice, walking around and looking at the stars and not hurrying to get somewhere warm, but somewhere in the back of my mind, or maybe in the front, I’m thinking global warming, melting ice sheets, mass extinctions, Manhattan underwater.  Not too cheery, I know.  Another hottest year on record. 

Here’s a question: If you knew the apocalypse was going to be tomorrow, what would you do tonight?  Rent a movie, get some Thai food, call up every girl I know and tell her I’m in love with her, that would be pretty fun.    Maybe go get a massage somewhere.  No, not one of those massages — a real massage, shoulders, feet, hands, head.

I’ve been thinking — am I cut out for a PhD?  Do I have what it takes to stay in academia?  I’m not sure.  I think I’d do okay in business, if I didn’t get bored and quit, which I would.  Is the world really anyone’s oyster?  What does that even mean?

Here’s some good stuff I’m currently into:

Book: White Teeth, Zadie Smith.  British novel, if you’re into that kind of thing.  I didn’t think I’d like it, but so far I do.  I think Courtney told me to read this book about two years ago.  See, I do get around to doing things people recommend. 

Music: Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News.  I know, I know, they sold out.  But really, it’s pretty awesome.  I particularly like Ocean Breathes Salty, Black Cadillacs, The Good Times Are Killing Me.

Movie: Seven Beauties. Lina Wertmuller, 1975.  One of the best films I’ve seen.  Say, top 20. But then I love Italian movies.  I thought of all of you when I was watching.  Particularly Luke and Joel.  It’s about a small-time crook who ends up in a concentration camp. 

I’ve noticed a lot of pics on other peoples profiles lately, so I thought I’d post some,
but all my Christmas pictures are either people sleeping or the
standard shot of train tracks receding into the distance.  So here’s
the train tracks by my house.  This is what Arkansas looks like in
December, sometimes.  And here’s what happens to signs out off the
street.  And does anyone know what kind of tree this is?

So it’s been a rough day.  I had my cable turned off, which is no big deal since I only watch about two hours of TV a month outside of football season, but I did feel a tinge of sadness when I saw the staticky channel.  I thought, I could be watching The Daily Show if I had cable.  Or I could see what was playing on the Speed Channel, which plays a lot of racing and motorcycle movies.  Luke and I watched "Then Came Bronson", about a free-spirited motorcycle dude who picks up a haughty, good-looking gal from San Francisco, and then he says things to her like, "You don’t work, you don’t eat."   It’s pretty classic in the set-up, except they don’t even do it in the end.  Turns out it was the two-hour pilot episode for a one season TV show, which is maybe why Luke and i had never heard of it.  So that’s what I’m missing out on.

Also, I packed up my xbox tonight, put it to rest until the thesis is finished.  Yeah, that hurt.  I’m afraid for future generations, the future of literacy, b/c if I had had an Xbox when I was younger, I don’t think I would have ever picked up a book.  It’s a pretty obvious choice for a nine-year-old, right?   I know, I know, they’ll be more media literate or whatever.  That’s not going to help me get paid, though.

It’s my favorite week of the year: no more faking holiday cheer, just plain old sitting around entertaining false hopes of becoming a better person next year.  Me, I’m going to eat healthier, write more, bathe regularly.  Self-discipline like a ninja.   But not for two more days.

Here’s what I think: people don’t know each other at all.  The proof?  Your Christmas gifts.  Me, I got a battery-operated radio-lantern.  It’s like a hanging flashlight that gets fm.  I don’t know if that’s the best or worst gift I’ve gotten this year.  It’s like this tee-shirt I got in high school, a bright red one that said "Gone Fishin’" and had a big green fish puffing out of the fabric.  Looking back, I should have worn it at least once. 

On the other hand, I got a razor blade made specifically for shaving a head.  It’s called a head blade.  Even if it doesn’t work, that’s pretty awesome.  Actually, I got lots of great stuff this year, which was nearly enough to make this Christmas charade worthwhile.  To be fair, even the lantern/radio came with a gift card. 

But I still want to know what the lamest/weirdest gift you got was, which was kind of the point of all this.

What I’ve been up to: sitting in the waffle house with my family, drinking coffee and working puzzles.  (Are people doing these sudoku things?)  For those of you who don’t get south of the mason-dixon line too often, the waffle house is a 24 hour greasy grill where old men, stoned teenagers, bored millionaires, crackheads, and drunk pregnant girls hang out.  It’s a good place to sit.  A couple of nights before Christmas, I was in there with Mom and Dad when a group of 10 or so high school kids came in and sang carols, accompanied by a trombone and a violin.  Even the waitresses were singing along. 

A good movie I’ve seen in the last month: You and Me and Everyone We Know (or something like that)
Current Music: Recommend me something
Currently reading: The Secret Goldfish, David Means.
Place I’d like to be: Skellar, w/Guinness

In fact, I’ll be going there Monday Night, when I get back in town, assuming I can scrounge up some company…

There’s something nice about an empty town.  It put me in a good mood, made me clean my apartment.  Went for a walk and the streets were cold and empty.  Came home and took a bath and began reading Coetzee’s Boyhood, which is better than I always thought it would be, or maybe I’m just in the mood.  When I got out of the bath, I noticed that a clean sheet of snow had covered the roof of the building across the street.  If you were here right now, you’d see a purple sky, and snow swirling under the streetlights.  It’s a great night to be here alone.

Also, I tried to buy an apple pie tonight, but the town is empty and the grocery store closed early.  I know, it’s the season for pumpkin, and pumpkin is my favorite, but lately I’ve been craving apple.  Maybe because I’ve been on an x-box binge, playing this rpg where you get energy by eating apple pie and red meat.  It’s called fable, and it’s pretty fun.  My character looks kind of like this except his hair is longer and whiter, and I don’t have those nasty blue veins.     ( It’s one of those games where you choose your haircut and tattoos and
all that.  I had mutton chops for a while, but the other characters
kept making fun of me.) Got the tattoos and the sheriff mustache, though, which make me more attractive, or so say the guys who made the rules for this game.  You can almost imagine them all staying up late eating doritoes and drinking 3-liters of soda, having passionate arguments about whether or not an obsidian axe with flame augmentation would inflict more damage than a steel greathammer.

Thanks for all who sent responses to the Zombie stripper call-out.  I got messages from people I didn’t even know.  Maybe we unwittingly have touched on a new literary moment?  I’ll post the stuff you sent soon.

I’m in favor of everyone making up a pen name for themselves, even people who don’t write.  I’m about to start reading a book that Morris loaned me by a guy named Breece D’J Pancake.  (Yeah, it’s D’J.  I don’t know how that’s pronounced either.)  The backstory is that he’s from West Virginia, and he shot himself in the head when he was 26 and in an MFA program.  Just like me!, except I’m from Arkansas, and my stories aren’t good enough for me to commit suicide yet, mostly because I don’t have a pen name.  How about Clive J’R Omelette?  LeRoy DePonze?  Jimmy Biscuit?  Juice McCullough?  B.K. One?

So in celebration of Halloween, I spent the morning writing zombie stripper poems.  This seems like the kind of thing I probably shouldn’t admit in a public forum, but I’m on a mission.  You poets have a writing assignment.  I’m trying to get zombie-stripper poems from other writers, to fill out the series of zombie stripper poems, which go from 1-?  So far, I’ve got #1, #17, and #67.  The format for the title is like: Zombie Stripper Poem #1: Midnight Picnic.  Zombie Stripper Poem #17: Dance of the Undead.  And so forth.  If you send me one, I’ll remove your name and post it in a place where it will get seen.  (Not a billboard; more like a cinderblock wall somewhere in my office).  Of course, there are no stylistic restrictions.  It doesn’t even have to be good.  It just has to be vaguely topical.  If you like, you can even post it as a comment in this blog, along with your pen name.

If you’re wondering what Zack thinks you should be reading, it’s Aimee Bender’s latest collection of short stories: Willful Creatures.  There’s a story about a man born with keys for nine of his fingers, so he spends his life looking for the right doors.  There’s another story about a man who buys a little man at the pet store, takes him home, and torments him.  My personal favorite so far is called Debbieland, which is written in the collective voice (as in, "WE don’t like Debbie…" is there a name for that?) 

I recently finished a draft of a story about a guy who shoots a lion in rural Arkansas.  I felt   compelled, if only because a similar event really happened and to my knowledge nobody has written about how weird that is.  I don’t think that came across in my story either — maybe the next draft.  I couldn’t resist the urge to make it kind of silly.  I like Hemingway as much as the next guy, but…then I found this funny graphic on the web.  (I was trying to find photos of lion shit — you know, for descriptive purposes?)  You can actually get T-shirts with that logo for about 7 bucks. 

Then I read the new George Saunders novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, an allegory about war and human nature, played out by characters whose bodies are composed of tuna cans, sliding brains, multiple mustaches, etc. People are comparing it to 1984, I guess because they don’t know what else to compare it to.   It has nice illustrations, but I think Saunders outweirded himself.  It reads like a parody of Saunders best work (of which I’m a fan).   It made me want to write something realistic, or at least something harder to ignore than a story about alcoholics and lions.  (Although alcoholics and lions are much more difficult to ignore in the flesh!)  Anyways, that Saunders guy has been on a roll for too long, so I guess it’s a little satisfying to see him put out a clunker. 

All right — I’m going to take Joel’s advice and finish Moby Dick.  Good, serious, whale-slaughtering literature.  I just saw on Amazon where a reader claims that Melville most resembles Shakespeare.  I better think about something else, or this is going to turn into a bad day.