“Don’t Go Far Off, Not Even for a Day” (by Pablo Neruda)

Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because –
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Amen

“It is apparent that much that is written today by professional historians…is unreadable to all save those determined few fellow professionals who will doggedly make their way through dense prose for the sake of the data. Bad writing, however, is one thing; it is to a degree an American curse, whose origins can be traced to the elementary schools’ curriculum. The problem is that an unreadable style, when combined with a narrowing of historians’ interests [the tendency to emphasize particularity to the point of myopia instead of allowing for generalization], produces a gap of unprecedented dimension between lay and professional audiences. The historian has just about abdicated his role as public educator, having been replaced by amateurs or scriptwriters. Americans are probably learning about their history from everyone except the historian. And it is not a very sound history that they learn.”

–David J. Rothman, “The Uprooted: Thirty Years Later” in Reviews in American History (Sep., 1982)

Bought Lives

The father probably got his tattoos while in the Navy, maybe while stationed somewhere in the Pacific during World War II. It’s standard fare, anchors and such. His skin is tan, the tattoos slightly faded. Surrounded by their children, he and his wife smile. Did they meet before or after his stint in the service? Did she give birth to their first child, a boy, before he shipped out or sometime later?

The year is 1961. This is the first page.

The boy is now a man. His jaw, square and haughty, is a boxer’s jaw. A red sweater hugs his shoulders. His hair is a finely sculpted monument to pomade. He smiles broadly, deviously, and his wife, her flaxen hair teased up into a gravity-defying beehive, stands beside him beaming while the brown dog nuzzles their legs. The man’s parents smile approvingly in the background, the father’s arms folded across his chest, his tattoos on display.

The priest and nun rarely smile with their teeth. They sit at the kitchen table, flanked by the family. Perhaps they are Irish-Catholic, perhaps from Bridgeport. Between communions, confessions, and midnight Christmas masses, did they jeer or cheer King’s open housing marches through Chicago? Did they hurl rocks or offer words of encouragement? Photos from that conflict sit in archives, people baring their teeth, poised on opposite lines of the divide, attempting to shatter or defend a fracture point as trenchant as any border or battlefront.

Two birthdays are documented each year: one for the stolid, unsmiling grandmother and the other for the dog. They are positioned next to cakes, their years pressed into icing and crowned by corner store party favors. 84, 85, 86. 13, 14, 15. Eventually their birthday celebrations vanish, as do they.

The square-jawed son no longer smiles and his hair is unkempt. He looks uncomfortable on the couch. His wife looks tired. The tattooed father looks on in the background, bored or drunk or both. They are beer drinkers. Their dog is dead. The priest and nun do not smile with their teeth. The years are no longer labeled in careful pencil strokes.

They die or divorce, clean their homes or their lives, and the photo album ends up for sale in a thrift store, their memories affixed with a price tag and branded as kitsch, portending the indignity of our demise.

A Crucible of Quotas

Paddy, of Dillinger Four fame, offered this bit of advice to those in the crowd: “Steal as much as you possibly can. Your boss is fucking you, why not fuck him?” He mulled it over for a second and then amended his words. “Well, not my boss. He’s actually a pretty cool guy. But man, bosses past…”

The worst part about working retail is the way it reduces human interaction to dollar signs, the way it synchronizes your mind and movements with the impossible quotas foisted upon you. Morning pep rallies and condescending glares from shoppers. The hellish glow of fluorescent lights leaching your humanity from you. Celebrate, loyal Americans, the specter of mutated Taylorism! Celebrate downcast, defeated eyes!

There are things that can make even a lousy job tolerable: fun coworkers, a living wage, a sense of purpose, or the sacrifice of bringing home the bacon for your spouse and kids. None of these things apply to me. The spasmodic doors of the toy store look like the gnashing jaws of Hell most days, malfunctioning and attempting to grab me in their vice-like grip. If this seems like an exaggeration, it is because everything about my job is exaggerated: my manufactured, syrupy sweet voice and my spastic motions as I throw toys on shelves, those cheap plastic vessels that burrow into a child’s heart for a few days, weeks, months and then end up in a landfill. Do your job. Stick to the script. A little subterfuge here, a phony ingratiation to the boss there. Busy, busy, busy. For the love of God, look busy. It’s like this for most people, most jobs. Part underpaid actor, part uniformed sociopath. It poisons my soul, almost convinces me to start smoking full-time again just to make the poison palpable. On the worst days it makes me want to abscond to the woods and write manifestos on rock walls in deer blood.

When I first started working at the toy store, hired as a seasonal grunt to unload trucks and stock shelves during the Christmas rush, the doors were locked by the manager each night at 10 p.m. and not opened again until 7 or 8 a.m., when all our work was done or the store inevitably opened for business. There were of course security reasons for this. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that they may as well have shackled us together, a tangled knot of surly humanity marching from aisle to aisle, prodded by the inspiring words, “No one leaves until all this stuff gets put out. C’mon, guys.” For two weekends the company experimented with keeping its doors open twenty-four hours. Who in their right mind, you ask, would possibly need or want to shop for toys at three or four in the morning? Apparently the public asked themselves the same question because I can count on one hand how many people actually came in. I spent my nights hovering near the cash register and idly chatting with the security guard, a racist ex-cop who was getting paid over three times as much as me to sit in a chair with a gun on his hip, sometimes dozing off, sometimes spilling ice cream on his pants.

They offered to keep me on after Christmas and I was desperate enough to say yes. With a relatively meaningless college diploma and a tanking economy framing my options for the next few months, even the bottom of the barrel began to look good. How else would I make payments on the money that funded my meaningless college diploma? Consider it accommodation for a paltry paycheck, sacrifice in order to salvage the part of myself that never truly clocks in. The nature of work has changed since Christmas, though. No longer is it strictly a mad rush to get stuff on shelves. I still unload trucks each week, arriving at 4 a.m., but merchandising is now paramount. The bosses seem to think stocking shelves requires the attention and care of a diamond appraiser, not the indifference of someone getting paid barely above minimum wage. Since I’m also working daylight hours now, when the store is open, they have me jockeying cash registers and foiling the attempts of honest, abiding customers to return faulty merchandise at the service desk: me, the hired asshole, as thin line between waste and profit, a line I care nothing for but must uphold for the sake of my job. Sorry, it’s company policy. Read the fine print. Amazingly, the computers are even set up in such a way that exceptions generally cannot be made.

The worst part is the quotas, which the bosses innocuously call “goals.” When we unload trucks, a physically demanding task in plenty of ways, we are expected, with a skeleton crew not really big enough for the job, to unload 1,300 to 2,000 boxes in less than two hours. One person climbs aboard the truck and sets up a metal conveyor belt. Boxes slide down the conveyor to awaiting workers who sort them based on tags and then load them onto wooden pallets. Stacking boxes is a precarious matter since they come in all shapes and sizes. Imagine Tetris mixed with Jenga, except it really, really sucks when the stack falls. When enough boxes are piled on any given pallet, someone has to stop what they’re doing, grab a pallet jack, and drag the product out to its section of the floor to await spreading. This excursion to the sales floor deprives the line of a sorely needed person and brings the entire process to a halt, boxes getting jammed and backed up on the conveyor, the boss unreasonably bitching even though all of this could have been avoided if they had scheduled an adequate number of people, something the profit margins of course forbid. When all the product and pallets are taken out, we are given a fifteen minute break. Most workers rush outside to suck down two or three cigarettes, and the rest, myself included, stay inside the break room and stare at bottles of soda, often in absolute silence, already tired and wanting to get the hell out of there.

After the break, we grab boxes off of pallets and throw them into the aisles where they belong, prepping them for unpacking; this is called spreading. When that is done, we are expected to individually unpack and shelve thirty boxes an hour, a complete impossibility, especially when it is taken into consideration that entire sections must often be rearranged, metal hooks retrieved, price tags printed out, etc. We work hard but it is never enough. Normally there are multiple pallets we are unable to get out by the 10 a.m. deadline, so we are forced to backstock them, which creates a huge ordeal since the company’s lack of foresight in scheduling enough people extends not only to truck days but to normal operating days. The result is a logjam of tasks assigned to workers over the coming days, tasks they do not have enough time to complete on top of the other things they are expected to do—help customers, run register, etc. It all builds up and overflows into the next week, when we receive another truck and the cycle begins anew, a cumulative snowball effect that ensures we’re always behind. Each week our bosses castigate us for our inefficiency, our failure charted on a large graph by a big red dot that dives below the unwavering blue line mapping acceptable output. I leave each of these “truck days” sweaty, sore, and trailed by the measured belligerence of the bossman.

Running register is no different. We receive a sheet of quotas telling us what we are supposed to sign people up for at the point-of-purchase. In a five hour shift it is not uncommon to be expected to sell $50 worth of batteries, $35 worth of warranties, and to sign up thirty people for a Rewards Card, three people for a credit card, and ten people for the Birthday Club promotion. All of this, too, is impossible. People generally do not want these things, nor do they want to be asked these questions. They want to buy their stuff and get the hell out the door, and yet there I am, standing between them and the exit, asking them question after question.

“Would you like to save 10% on your purchase by signing up for a credit card?”

“May I please have your phone number?”

“Do you have a Rewards Card? Well, would you like to sign up for one?”

“Do you have a son or daughter? Would you like to sign them up for the Birthday Club?”

“If you’re interested, there’s a warranty available for this. $2.99 for fifteen months.”

“Do you need any batteries?”

“Need any gift receipts?”

Many customers can’t take it, rightfully so, and begin to cut me off or yell at me. At the end of my shift, most of my quota categories are big goose eggs. This does not please the bosses.

I’ve always considered myself a reasonably good worker, the type of person who shows up on time and sweats more than need be for the pittance I’m being paid. I’ve never been able to heed the words of Paddy and his ilk, never been able to steal outright from my employer. I worked for two years at Dairy Queen and over five years at Tower Records, never having a problem with management at either job. I aspired to bigger and better things, of course, but I did my job properly, received my paycheck, and they left me alone. It’s different at the toy store. A friend’s sister used to work there, and when she heard that I’d bitten the bullet and agreed to don the douchebag uniform of red polo and black slacks, she said only, “You poor, poor thing.” She knew then what I know now: some companies remain profitable not solely through their business model or market niche but by squeezing as much productivity out of their workers as possible, keeping things understaffed and high-pressure and then looking you over like a puppy who has shit the carpet when your shift’s up. Considering the way things are right now, I should probably feel lucky just to have a job. But that’s a copout. It’s not as simple as that. Take, for example, my coworker Lisa, a thirty-something year old mother who lost her home in a fire and never received the insurance payoff because of a technicality. I work with a lot of people like her—thirty- and forty-somethings trying to support themselves and their kids amid mounting bills. They form a choir of “How the fuck am I supposed to do this? How the fuck am I supposed to do this?” What good is a job if you can’t survive on it?

Mark, an old acquaintance of mine who I haven’t talked to in years, is my all-time retail hero. He got a job at one of the big box stores when he was hard-up for money. Rather than attempt to reconcile his ideals with his shitty environment, he waged a full-scale war of sabotage against the company. While unloading trucks, he would throw entire boxes of perfectly good product into the trash compactor, blow his nose in linens and towels, and smash lamps and dishware for the hell of it. What did any of this amount to? Nothing much, really. But he did manage to cordon off a part of himself that wasn’t for sale. He accepted money from a company whose values disgusted him and in return repaid them with shards of glass and mangled merchandise. He escaped from that crucible of quotas and talk of “team members” with his dignity.

The toy store is not the worst job I’ve ever had, not by a long shot. I was once a telemarketer. Lured by the promise of $12 an hour plus commission, I showed up at an office suite on Route 20 for an interview. The interview consisted of making sure that I was indeed a living, breathing human, and then they showed me to a cubicle and strapped a headset on me. There were no windows at all and I couldn’t see my neighbors over the walls of the cubicle. The boss played really loud techno music. He liked to keep things “high energy.” A script lay in front of me. I would be cold calling people from all over the country and selling magazine subscriptions to them. I heard the words “fuck you” shouted in so many different regional accents that it eventually became a travelogue of malaise—Brooklyn, Midwest, southern California, Southern accents that could’ve been from anywhere. I traveled there in my mind, loosing myself from that basement office suite, curses rammed into my ear like leis being draped around my neck. The only people who bought subscriptions from me were elderly folks, and all they really wanted was someone to talk to. In between hashing out the details of the subscriptions they were being coerced into buying, they’d tell me about sons and daughters who never visited anymore, medical conditions that kept them up nights. I began to feel like a beta fish, boxed in and ready to attack. Give me my reflection and I will butt heads with it; give me a mirror and I will turn my face into rivulets of blood. I sat in that cubicle and contemplated the coming hours, the coming days, the coming weeks, months, years—my life. I got up and left. I was a telemarketer for three hours.

A sacrifice or an accommodation can become a lifetime. A job taken for short-term reasons can become the arena in which the rest of your life plays out. I’m situated at the intersection of downward pull and steady trajectory, the child of a lower-middle/middle-middle class upbringing, warned by my father for as long as I can remember—as far back as 3rd grade—that when I grew up there’d “barely be a middle class anymore.” Everything would be stratified into rich and poor. It may sound like the paranoid ranting of a suburban class warrior, but there’s a nugget of truth to it, and it accounts for my parents’ insistence that I pursue higher education. Become a professional. Become middle-class. Throw yourself into the gears of bureaucracy until they can’t untangle you from the machinery and cast you down with the rest of the dispossessed. Fight your fight so you can fight for others. Cast off the moorings of frivolous things. Become a purposeful, deliberate being. Just as there must be preconditions for a successful revolution, a culture of abundance that does not supplant one form of poverty for another, arguably so too must there be a threshold, a physical and spiritual subsistence from which opportunity flowers, a bare minimum to hinge life’s possibilities on. Could I ever be happy on $10,000 a year? Yes and no, but mostly no, I think. Accumulation, status symbols, planned obsolescence—I want none of it. But give me the means to make a life for myself. Give me shelter, give me health, give me leisure, give me books and paper and pen, give me an allegiance to humanity unencumbered by archaic allegiances to company or state. Give me my demands for a life, my life.

My Heroes Have Always Been Princesses

When I was a little kid, Thriller was my favorite LP. I’d put it on and spin around in my parents’ living room until I felt like I was going to puke. I haven’t learned a single new dance move since then. (Circle pits used to sometimes make me feel like I was going to puke, too.) Now Michael Jackson is dead, and I couldn’t care less.

My indifference has nothing to do with his behavior or the accusations of abuse leveled against him. I’m more weirded out by the cultural tendency to get a massive postmortem boner for dead celebrities. It makes sense to feel some semblance of grief if you truly were or are a huge fan, or if the person’s presence on this earth had innately positive repercussions, both of which I guess might apply to Jackson, since he has millions upon millions of fans and left an indelible mark on pop music. I, too, have felt saddened by the death of celebrities—Joe Strummer and Kurt Vonnegut come to mind. Still, every time a celebrity croaks the public outpouring just seems bizarre and imbued with vacuity, a manufactured grief that speaks to some profound emptiness I can’t quite put my finger on. When Heath Ledger died, I was absolutely stunned by the public’s response and by the response of my friends, very few of whom had ever mentioned a fondness for him. What was the big deal? I made a joke: “Do you think people will be weeping and lighting candles when Gilbert Gottfried dies?”

Like I say, I’m not completely condemning an individual’s feeling of connectedness to celebrities or public personas. It’s unavoidable. There are musicians and writers whose absence will sadden me when their time comes to get shoved down in the dirt. But in the meantime, I’ll continue to be weirded out by the fairweather Jacksonian tidal wave. It’s like when the hometown team makes it to the playoffs and all the people who usually disavow sports are suddenly wearing the colors with pride and talking the loudest at the bar.

Trepan Nation, a good punk band from Sycamore, Illinois, penned a song that I think is particularly resonant. It was written in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, and it’s called “My Heroes Have Always Been Princesses.” It goes like this:

“Today, a nation mourns. Another media figure’s slipped away in the same fashion as a thousand others everyday. No network news, no motorcade to mark their passing, no one will eulogize them in Time Magazine. No one will ever call them a hero for their pioneering work in flying through a windshield, falling off a horse, or getting shot down like a dog in the street. Maybe I’m just missing something, but what the fuck’s so noble about fucking dying? It’s not like they bought it with a puppy in one arm and an old lady in the other, leaping through a wall of flames to safety. They were famous. Now they’re dead. My adulation is too precious a commodity to waste on them.”

An Accident on the Interstate

We’d been driving non-stop for sixteen hours, leaving the previous night at 9 p.m. after Greg got off work. We were running ragged. My brother and Greg took naps in the backseat in between driving shifts. I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep in the car, couldn’t sleep in transit in general. I’d tried and failed before on buses and planes and in cars. I can’t sleep until I reach my destination or until I lie in bed, soothingly horizontal, my achy legs unfurled.

We were on our way to Las Vegas, where Greg had booked a room at the Tropicana for thirty bucks. I’d been to Vegas once before with my girlfriend and two of her friends, all three of whom had either grown up or at least attended high school there. We avoided the Strip and instead drank in the old downtown and the Fruit Loop, called so because it’s comprised of gay bars. One bar hosted a weekly Bear Contest. Its winners, burly, hairy, and bound in leather, grinned from photos on the wall. We spent two nights there. When we left, I’d only lost ten bucks at the casinos, smoking with wrinkled retirees at the nickel slots. Vegas epitomizes excess, celebrates the vacuity of glitz and greed; it’s a nightmare city of neon lights and dirty money baking away in 118 degree heat. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t care if I ever returned. But Greg and my brother wanted to go. They’d planned the trip and I’d only been invited along because their friend backed out at the last second.

The plan had initially been to stop briefly in Denver, continue on to the Grand Canyon, circle back toward Vegas, then Los Angeles, and finish by driving thirty hours straight from Los Angeles to Chicago. By the time we left Denver, however, we were tired enough to rent a motel room. I napped for an hour and woke up feeling antsy. Before my brother and Greg bedded down, I made a proposal: “I’ll drive us through the night to the Grand Canyon while you guys sleep, and then you guys can take over.”

“Are you sure you’re not too tired?” my brother asked.

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

We checked out of the motel, which we’d only stayed at for three hours, just long enough to soak in the hot tub, the blisters on my hands and feet opening and disappearing into water jets and grease-laced froth. We got in the car and I lined up my CDs. Three hours into the drive, swerving through treacherous downhill mountain passes while trucks raced around us, I’d had enough. My vision and nerves were shot. At one point I’d flipped off the high beams and accidentally turned off the headlights entirely in the process. We ghosted through the mountains invisible to other drivers and didn’t notice for nearly an hour. It was a miracle we hadn’t been rear ended, possibly killed.

I drove us across the Utah border and gave up. Checking my reflection in a gas station mirror, I saw only tangled webs of red constricting my eyes. My brother took over and drove us through winding gauntlets and out into the steady loll of the flatlands, but the fact of the matter was that none of us had enough energy to make it to the Grand Canyon that night. We needed to pull over and sleep.

“Maybe we can just skip Los Angeles,” Greg said. “We’ll drive to Vegas tomorrow and then to the Grand Canyon the next morning.”

“If you guys are skipping Los Angeles,” I said, “I’ll catch a Greyhound there out of Vegas and find my way back home some other way.”

Eventually we struck a compromise: crash at a motel for a few hours, wake up and drive to Vegas, then to Los Angeles the next day, and stop at the Hoover Dam on the way home. No Grand Canyon.

We got a motel room in Utah, our second in a six hour span, said our goodnights, and then my brother filled the room with his hellish snoring, keeping me up for another two hours.

The next morning, after a few hours of uneasy sleep, we got back on the road. The Utah landscape is beautiful, its canyons and rock faces sometimes revealing hints of purple in the beaming sunlight, its sparse grass poking through the rocky earth like an afterthought. Antelope crossing signs dot the roadside but we never saw one, seeing instead only a pair of disembodied antlers and a red stain.

About a hundred miles from the Arizona border we spotted a cop car parked haphazardly on the shoulder of the road, and, further up, a sign reading ACCIDENT AHEAD, EXPECT DELAYS. Traffic slowed to a standstill. After twenty minutes of immobility, I said, “Want to get out and start walking like in that R.E.M. video?” Indeed, some motorists did exactly that, stretching their legs, walking their dogs, throwing footballs, standing by the lane divider and trying to peer around the bend up ahead and figure out what the hell the hold up was. ACCIDENT AHEAD is vivid and innocuous all at once. Metal met metal, crashing together and likely rendering each car dead and bound for the junkyard. But we imagined no faces, no bodies. I didn’t at least. I only grew irritated. I was in no rush to make it to Vegas, but after a day of driving 80 mph and watching the miles click away, I couldn’t feel comfortable at a standstill. I needed to move, needed to see a blur outside my window and watch my brother struggle in vain to capture state signs in the viewfinder of his camera as we whizzed past. My mind grew venomous: They were probably driving like assholes. Fuck ‘em. Get their cars off the road and let’s get outta here.

Traffic slowly began to move after forty-five minutes. People rushed back to their vehicles, dogs and footballs in tow. After passing the bend in the road, we saw sirens and a MERGE RIGHT sign. An ambulance screamed past on the other side of the road. Then we saw the accident site. The guardrail was smashed completely flat, some of it disappearing into the huge drop off the side of the cliff. A semi-truck foundered on our left, gutted. Its top was partially shorn off. Cops leaned over the side of the cliff taking pictures. Did someone fly over the edge? Did people die? A friend once told me about an interstate accident she saw in Illinois during winter. The snow was stained red, soiled by blood and glistening organs. She felt sick to her stomach thinking of those poor people. She later found out it had been a truck from a slaughterhouse that had capsized, spilling its macabre cargo. No one had died.

“I hope everyone’s okay,” I said, wondering if those people would ever walk out of the hospital, or if they’d even make it there alive in the first place. Seeing the crash site—the violence of velocity made plain by sirens and shorn metal—left a bad taste in my mouth. We carry the entirety of our universe inside fragile armor. Worlds collide, worlds die. Passing the wreckage, I remembered driving with my mother when I was young and encountering a smashed car at an intersection—the same color, make and model as my father’s—and watching her go into hysterics until she read the license plate and realized my father was safe. (But who was in that car? Who among that person’s loved ones received the call from the hospital?) I regretted the hostility I’d felt only minutes earlier. People would have cursed me too if our lightless car had been maimed on the Colorado interstate and held up traffic, I know. But would they have sighed and repented or cast an angry glare in my direction as I lay dying in the back of a speeding ambulance?

By the time we made it to Vegas, I was glad to be off the road, glad to be at a standstill.

Everything is Beautiful from Up Here

Before trash bags full of her possessions mingled with pigeons on my back porch, before a cop cruiser stopped us while walking the drug corridor on Milwaukee Avenue, before she moved back to Washington, I waited for Kaylene at the intersection of Fullerton and Clark for what felt like a first date. She was late and I was reading A Short Introduction to the Russian Revolution because I didn’t have the patience to dig through thousand page tomes. I sang the familiar lament of the dewy-eyed: Oh, Russia, how could so much hope and possibility have resulted in such a mess? Where did you go wrong? Into the furnace of doctrine and control you flung yourself, murderers and mothers, prison guards and poets, those who masqueraded as saints while spilling blood and those who spoke for humanity and lost their lives because of it, all reduced to ash and confined to pages that could never do justice to the conflagrations and silent suffering of those lives. I traced epochs of grief while waiting for Kaylene, my brain fumbling with pronunciations like a pair of clumsy hands attempting to wrangle fish from a stream.

Emerging from an alleyway off of Clark where she shared a studio apartment with a friend, she approached the bench I was sitting on, clad in combat boots and a homemade Descendents t-shirt. Her hair was shaved down to a quarter-inch and bug-eyed sunglasses shrouded half her face. She was high, though I didn’t know that at the time.

“Where to?” she asked.

I stood and shrugged, and we instinctively began walking toward the lake. Once there, we walked toward Navy Pier, swapping stories en route. The lakefront teemed with bicyclists, rollerbladers, and joggers. Boats skidded across the water in the distance, sails swelling with the wind. She told me about growing up in Wenatchee, Washington and her time spent living in Hawaii the year prior, drinking in train tunnels in Washington and skulking through the sketchy night in Hawaii while crackheads leered at her.

At Navy Pier an overzealous clown terrified a crowd of children, sending them into crying fits with his lilting voice and spastic dance moves. We retreated to the railing and watched seaborne birds dive headlong into murky waves and emerge clutching fish in their beaks. Back in fourth grade, our class chartered a boat and took a field trip on the lake. I vividly remember dead fish floating everywhere, accompanied by a rank smell. Lake Michigan’s charms are few, but I liked the view from that railing.

Looking into the distance, Kaylene asked, “Want to ride the Ferris wheel?” She was partly serious, partly teasing.

She’d asked me all about myself one night after work, the two of us drinking in the downstairs bar, wading through the minutiae: I have three siblings; I don’t know what I want to do with my life; I think the first Stiff Little Fingers album is perfect except for the last song; I don’t drink hard liquor straight; I haven’t smoked a cigarette in almost two years; I don’t dance; I’m a dog person.

“What are your fears?” she asked.

“Dying,” I said. ”Getting sick and being in pain and then dying more so. Elevators, too. Any closed in, crowded space, really.” “And heights,” I added.

“So what about roller coasters and stuff like that?” she asked.

“No, no way. I’d rather just eat cotton candy and ride the carousel.”

In the years since then, Kaylene has been skydiving. I’ve seen the photos. She has a parachute strapped to her back and a smile on her face. The plane is in the background. She doesn’t look nervous whatsoever.

We walked down the promenade past vendors selling cotton candy and popcorn, the Ferris wheel looming. Beside the Ferris wheel was a ride with metal cables attached to boards that people laid belly down on, the cables whirring through the night, riders dipping and soaring like Superman. “Maybe we should just go on that instead,” said Kaylene. I shook my head no.

Confronting and overcoming a fear is something usually made possible only through grit and perseverance, focusing single-mindedly on pushing yourself to your limits, either through a gradual process or by taking the leap outright: allowing the tarantula to crawl up your arm, flinging yourself into the ocean, greeting the plane’s takeoff with a stoic sigh. It helps when the possibility of a kiss is dangled out there, as was the case for me. It was Kaylene’s lips, not bravery, that lured me into that line. I stood waiting, my mind rioting, stomach ablaze.

The first Ferris wheel was built in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Some believed the cars would come crashing down in wails of grinding steel, their occupants crushed to death, sullying the White City with blood. As luck would have it, Ferris’s design was sound and the steel behemoth and its riders were spared from catastrophe. Instead it was a serial killer by the name of H.H. Holmes who left a crimson mark on the Exposition, extinguishing the lives of fairgoers unlucky enough to lodge in his hotel, a sepulchral structure of trap doors and soundproof rooms, its basement equipped with fire pits and vats of lye. Though the madness of bloodlust and the madness of human ingenuity are not mutually exclusive, knives and gas-filled rooms scream death while a creaking Ferris wheel merely whispers it, issuing forth a languid exhalation for the paranoid and high strung to hang their fears on. But that offered little consolation as the wheel spun us up into the night sky and some dead crooner sang over the loudspeakers about Chicago. Behold the lake, the lights, the lives of millions stretching toward the horizon. Behold me, one of the millions, quaking, nauseous, and ruefully drifting skyward.

“Everything is beautiful from up here,” Kaylene said, smiling.

New Day Rising

July and August tend to be times of transition for the young and youngish. They move to new apartments, some prepare for the next semester or for what lies ahead after graduation, and vacations beckon those who can afford them. So it goes with me. An apartment in Bridgeport will be my new home by mid-August, a teaching assistantship and eventual Ph.D. await at UIC, I might have lucked into an impromptu trip to Washington D.C. and New York City next week, and I’ll likely spend next summer in Guatemala studying Spanish. It is enormously satisfying to have an idea of what sort of career and life I’d like to carve for myself after so many years of fumbling through community college and lousy jobs. Other paths could have been just as promising, I’m sure. But this is where I find myself, and I think I will be happy.

That said, I’m not the type of person who weighs happiness in terms of personal achievement—career, scholastics, the myriad ambitions that take root and sometimes evolve into something worthwhile. That’s all part of one’s happiness, of course, but for me it is the people I surround myself with who define my life. I’d rather drink beer and shoot the shit with friends than receive a raise at work, rather kiss a woman I like or wake up with my arms wrapped around a woman I love than receive the accolades of academia. What’s the point of anything if you can’t share it with the people you care about? Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe I’m just not as driven, not as goaded by success as others, which would go a long way toward explaining why I’ve never unlocked the mysteries of making money and clawing my way to the top of the heap, scratching the faces of the dregs on my way up. When I speak of success, I don’t mean success in a general way, which I do in fact strive for in anything that interests me. Rather, I’m speaking of material concerns. I’m not attempting to imbue myself with saintliness. Being meek and passive in matters of money has its drawbacks. I have felt the sting of an empty bank account and all that that entails.

The past year has been the longest of my life. Nothing makes palpable the wrong turns your life has taken quite like moving in with your parents at age twenty-seven. Sure, you can delude yourself with the assurance that it is often normal in other cultures to live with one’s parents until a relatively old age, even in some of the European countries celebrated for culture, refinement, and romance; and, hell, being a twenty-seven-year-old with parents supportive enough to sanction a year of rent free lodging is a blessing many can’t count on when they’re down and out. But it’s all cold comfort when you’re mired in Suburbia, U.S.A without a car or a decent job, friends scattered far and wide. The sprawl and strip malls begin to feel like the décor of some cruel exile: worlds away from the gulags, but dreary enough to inspire late night escape plans. Now, thankfully, I stand at the precipice of something new and exciting, a proverbial new day rising.

I never even bothered to unpack my boxes when I moved in, never fretted over staying employed or finding rootedness in my childhood home. I’ve lived frugally and cobbled together money by selling things, found a woefully terrible job when it was absolutely necessary and quit when my sanity and principles teetered. (Being able to quit on a whim is a luxury most can’t afford, I know.) I received rejection letters from schools I thought I’d get into, traveled west on a whirlwind road trip, and forged an inexplicably close bond with my dog, a bond borne of ennui and confinement. There were some high points and many low points this year. At times I was terribly depressed, maybe more depressed than I’ve ever been in my life. And the boredom, oh, the boredom. “Being bored makes you boring,” a friend used to say. I’m luckily moving on before it becomes endemic.

I’ll never understand people who celebrate suffering, cherishing and hoarding their secret hurts like a squirrel stockpiling nuts for the winter. People like that often fancy themselves artists of some sort. They think the only path to revelation is depression and pain. How wrong they are, how wrong they are. Bad times are inevitable, so why willingly become a connoisseur of the maudlin, an interpreter of invective? A life without frustration, failure, and heartbreak is likely a life of dullness and stagnation, a life lived without taking risks. But why dwell on failure and heartbreak instead of learning from them and moving on? Give me potential and hope and love and humor. I have no use in keeping caches of sorrow.

A Quote

“Although we struggle lifelong to dwell in the flesh without rancor, without division between act and desire, we succeed only for moments at a time. We treasure whatever brings us those moments, whether it be playing cello or playing pool, making love or making baskets, kneading bread or nursing a baby or kicking a ball. Whoever teaches us an art or skill, whoever shows us a path to momentary wholeness, deserves our love.”

–Scott Russell Sanders

All I Need

Recently three friends and I went to a movie. We brought half-pints of liquor and bottles of beer. When we arrived, our coterie was waiting for us and we took up an entire aisle. It had been a long time since I’d snuck booze into a movie, the last time being when I went with Shital, a medical student, to a theater in the suburbs. I felt like a scumbag, like I was tarnishing her in some way. She’d gone from the top of her class to the back row of that movie theater, her purse brimming with beer, both of us tipping bottles and getting hazy about the plot. We got so drunk that we had to walk around for over an hour afterwards before she was sober enough to drive. Soon she stopped calling.

This time it felt more fun than seedy. Two of my friends, a couple, polished off their half-pint before the previews were even over. When we moved onto the beer, we realized that we’d forgotten to bring a bottle opener and had to improvise by pressing the caps against arm rests and smacking them off. Soon empty bottles surrounded us and our aisle became louder than the rest of the theater. An usher made his rounds, attempting to be as conspicuous as possible in order to shut us up and make us put our drinks away. After he walked past us, one of my friends knocked over a bottle and it slid all the way to the front row, tinkling against the concrete while we cringed. It took an eternity for it to roll to a stop. Then silence. Dead silence. The usher made another round and bent down to pick up the damning bottle, pointing a flashlight toward us. Soon the manager came in and whispered in my friend’s ear, “If you or any of your friends have any more beer on you, I’m calling the cops.” Half-full bottles lined the floor beneath our seats. It was terrifying at the time but funny once we’d scrambled through the parking lot and into the car, not a cop in sight.

I sometimes need those moments of childish abandon to feel alive. Bottle rockets and smashed bottles can be a reaffirmation of everything that puts a smile on my face. But I’m bothered by an ever growing feeling that I’m too old for all that. I’m twenty-seven and shouldn’t be hurling empty forties off of rooftops or asking friends to give me black eyes.

A few years back, Al Burian, the author of Burn Collector, gave a reading at Quimby’s bookstore in Chicago. His story, a working draft for his monthly Punk Planet column, began with him listening to “Nervous Breakdown” by Black Flag and punching a hole in the wall of his apartment. At over thirty years of age, he wondered whether it was healthy to be engaging in the same destructive behavior as when he was thirteen years old. “Is this normal?” he asked. His story ended abruptly, discordantly. It didn’t have an ending, really. He was grasping desperately, both with his writing and with his life. “So, why are we here?” he asked. “What keeps us doing this?” He wasn’t asking rhetorically, he really wanted to know. He was in crisis mode. A girl with dreadlocks gave a cheery, longwinded answer about how alive she felt while careening through traffic on her bike. Some other people responded, and I liked what they said, and then I spoke too. “Maybe we don’t know anything else,” I said. I’d arrived drunk on tall cans of Steel Reserve and couldn’t really offer an elucidation, only a shrug and beer breath. This is all I know.

I need revelation in my life. I need insights sparked by others and by myself. I need the seams to rip apart and to stumble upon the extraordinary, to fall in love with this world over and over again. Those jolts are necessary to stave off cynicism and to keep the couch and TV and bottle at bay. “If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want,” writes Randall Jarrell. I feel the same. I want to surprise myself, and for others to surprise me, and to never be able to name beauty until I hold it in my gaze or my grasp.

One night I walked through the woods with a couple friends. Streetlights fell away and our eyes adjusted to the dark. We talked and joked. Venturing farther in, we came to a clearing and, in one brilliant instant, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny lights began blinking in staccato rhythm, illuminating the trees and flowers and even us. We stared in awe, silent. When I was a kid I used to chase and catch fireflies. Until that night in the woods, I hadn’t given them much thought.

I was drawn to those same woods last week. I found a nice hidden place tucked away near a stream, where the water was shallow enough that fishermen wouldn’t intrude. Giant rocks laid midstream and the water rippled. A family of ducks passed by and I waved hello. It would’ve been a nice place to take someone and drink some beers together and shoot the shit, I thought. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I wouldn’t even want to take someone there who’d agree to crouch on those muddy banks with me blurring our minds with brown bags. I’d want someone who would call me stupid for wanting to drop an alcoholic veil over an otherwise perfect day, an otherwise perfect place to go and look and talk. There are times and places better suited for bringing a bottle to your lips and surrendering yourself to warmth and haze and soon to be forgotten conversation. It made sense to drink in the movie theater and let our laughter unfurl while glares rained down, but in the woods, by that stream, I wanted only to sit and look and think and wait for something I have no name for.

Mosquitoes came in droves and I fended them off as best I could. On the path, within feet of each other, were a dead mouse and a pair of bright blue panties hanging from a tree branch. I walked and tried to search for something as illuminating as those fireflies, but emerged instead with my face and neck swollen red by mosquito bites.