I am looking at a picture of you eating

Some of your cleavage is showing and I imagine feeding you
but not with that fork

Your hair looks fake red but I don’t care if it’s a mop
I would still tie it around my waist

This one time in public you were dancing a little bit
and I’m pretty sure you were eying me to see if I was watching
You were wearing something that made your tits look gorgeous
I thought about it a bunch while masturbating
I came up with some great fantasies by the way

I reward myself with excellent fantasies

After a long hard day of work I get to rest and dream up whatever I want
because I live alone and I wear the solitary king’s robe

I am making bacon and eggs again
I bet you would like to eat them
Well too bad they are all mine

Notebook Entries

That Salvidor Dali guy did a bad job of painting clocks and elephant legs.  I hate him.

Why do people still care about flags?

Idea for a movie: A new guy starts working in a large building/corporation/bureaucratic environment and is friendly, easy to like, witty, but also seems to have a dark side.  Hidden.  Rarely shows itself.  People get to know him a little bit, but he is mostly unavailable.  He and a coworker really connect and the coworker gradually finds holes in his story/sees him doing suspicious things when he thinks no one is looking.  Coworker corners him and it is revealed that he doesn’t actually work there.  But then it is revealed that he did work there but was fired for lying about doing work.  This is stupid.  Make this much better…

It’s not fair that people can be funny, not by commenting on, but simply mentioning, popular culture references from the past.

Everything is bigger in Texas
except mens’ penises.

Kellogg’s Douche Loops.

Idea for a call-in radio show: Three Stubborn Friends.  People call in and try to convince three friends to go out somewhere and the friends find numerous reasons, petty and substantial, for not going.

“In my lifetime, I have used my cerebral
cortex to deny the impulses of my
lizard brain, and in doing so, I have
caused myself extreme unhappiness,”
I think to myself as I tear the
steak burrito into bite sized pieces
and muscle them down the mine shaft.
It’s a lonely world
nestled in the coat pocket
of some great ancient communicator.

What a Commuter Sees

Today I saw a very fat woman walking.  In order for her to succeed at walking, she has to pivot and swing her weight on her legs like how you move a giant bookshelf without removing the books.  What a shitty fat lady.

Work Party

Here are some things that happened last night at a party with my coworkers.  I’m writing the things because they are pretty funny and entertaining to me and I want to remember that they happened.  I’m not going to organize these thoughts well, because they are not organized well in my head.  If any of my coworkers read this, I’m exaggerating some things for effect.  If people who are not my coworkers read this, I am exaggerating nothing.

My shy, 40-something boss, who plays keyboards in a country-western/rock cover band, and I walked into a liquor store to buy beer.  We walked down an aisle of 22 oz. craft beers and he was surprised that they existed.  I told him that it’s common and it’s something like the equivalent of wine and that drinking that stuff is actually a good experience.  He bought MGD and I felt like an asshole for having said anything at all about something he had no interest in.  He said he sees a lot of people drinking PBR nowadays.  My brain mandated that I try to explain why.  During my unnecessarily long-winded explanation, the most important words I used were “young people” and “ironically.”  I also talked about advertising and, for the second time within five minutes, I felt like an asshole.

When we arrived at my coworker’s apartment, I shed my coat, gloves, hat, and backpack and put them on the floor, paying no attention to where or why.  He respectfully asked to take my coat.  When I am confronted with etiquette and calculated kindness, I get defensive.  I subconsciously conjure up a video montage of vague memories from the past, which include being uncomfortable in the following venues: wake, funeral, wedding, country club, job interview, school photo shoot, and mass.  He asked us to take off our shoes.  I did so.  I went to the bathroom and looked in all his cabinets within arm’s length while peeing.  Immaculate toiletries.  Arranged with a degree of intentional precision rivaling that of an ice sculptor.  When I came out of the bathroom, my backpack had been moved to a designated baggage area in another room.  The dude whose apartment I was assaulting offered me some bourbon that his ex-girlfriend bought for him.  I had recently spoken with him about this ex-girlfriend as he struggled with their break up.  It was difficult for me to not advise him to simply shout at the girl and move on.  Anyways, she gave the bourbon to him in a special-made glass container with his initials carved into it, and he explained this with sarcasm because he didn’t want me to think that he gave a shit about that sort of thing.  I made fun of him by announcing that he had towels in the bathroom with his initials and face sewn into them.  In a swift attempt at catharsis, he poured all the bourbon into a warm spiced alcoholic drink he was making for his guests, shamelessly multiplying the alcoholic content of the community drink.  I drank it and it was alright.

Most of the dudes I work with are not sociable and, like me, are scared of women, but their fear manifests as silence, whereas mine often manifests as being loud and clownish to gain continual temporary approval.  The dude who was hosting the party brought a new girl he was interested in.  I was thinking about asking him questions like “have you fucked her?” or “are you going to fuck her?” or “when are you going to fuck her?” but I decided that it would be rude.  I also decided I would try to be the appropriate wing man or whatever it’s called and avoid talking to her, and also be rude to her if she said anything to me, the goal of which was to make her think that I am a piece of shit and that the host of the party, who would likely be the other socially active male, was a much superior catch.  I don’t know anything about dating.

The group of roughly 12 people played a game where one person asks a question, everyone writes their answer, and then each person takes turns trying to guess whose answer was whose.  Games like this make me nervous because I never want to participate but I am peer pressured into doing it anyway and then I want so badly to be in control of every detail.  My behavioral solution, as is typical with these types of get-to-know-the-people-you-are-stuck-with games, is to painstakingly try to confound every possible variable of the rules and cause every participant to get confused, because I think it’s funny.  The best part about it is that it frees most people from taking the game too seriously, but those who do not wish to relinquish control end up hating my behavior with fire-like animosity, especially because I am laughing.  I lost every round of the game.

The Man at the Laundromat

I accidentally scraped my knuckle on the inside wall of a washing machine.  A lone silent seated man watched me do it.  Earlier, he had watched the change machine refuse my dollar bill nine times and now he watched me wheel my monotonous shirts and pants and towels across the room in a wiry metal caged cart.  The knuckle didn’t stop bleeding.  My skin was dry and my heart rate high.  I caught the man glancing over at me numerous times with a blank face.  Maybe he was an old guitar teacher or a friend of a family member or someone I distantly used to know, but when he looked at me it felt like he knew every pathetic nook of my existence.  He saw my small plain underwear and my trembling hands.  He saw my cubicle clothes.  He saw the sweat in my eyebrows and my tongue fidgeting at the backs of my teeth.  He saw the blood dripping from my knuckle and knew it would be a long time before it would clot.

Mundane Ape

Don’t tell me about the interesting bar you went to.

Don’t tell me about ingredients in restaurant dishes.

Do not explain tame living.

Zoo animals scratch themselves and eat
on the same surfaces they sleep and shit on.
They look and then look away.

 

Column B

It’s a good thing the title of that video said it was a “sex fuck” because otherwise I wouldn’t have known what kind of fuck it was.

A dude with a web of tattooed knife blades on his back asks “Do you like that” and then the cute asian says “Fuck yeah I do.”  Does she have a mouth clit?

She gives birth to a lot of demands that would be more appropriately revved out of an old genderless biker’s mouth.  I guess I’ll go brush my teeth.

Work

I push through several heavy doors and walk up into a giant marble lobby.  Every morning it looks like a meager parade of drones mopped and polished every surface through the night.  Some men are dressed like traditional businessmen.  Other men, typically younger, are dressed like the pristine children of traditional businessmen.  Women are dressed however they are dressed (it always seems like there are no rules, other than don’t be naked, for them).  I see a man with a golf bag strapped to his upper body.  Everything about him looks new and clean and unused.  Fresh straight-lined haircut, recently tightened and polished facial skin, suit and tie like ink stamps.  He is the only man in the lobby with golf clubs.  He is confident, but not too showy, with his golf clubs.  He is not talking about golf and no one is asking him about golf.  I am wondering if my imagination created the golf clubs.  He starts walking and I hear the sound of the clubs clacking together.  They are real.  I start walking faster.

Office talk and Russell Edson

Often when they talk, people who work in offices or who ride trains every day, talk inconsequentially.  Examples.  How was your weekend?  Not long enough.  How are you today?  It’s Monday.  Good morning.  I am tired.  I am stressed.  Have a good night.  I need to take a break.  I need to go for a walk.  I need a fresh pair of eyes.  It’s Wednesday, we’re almost there.  It’s Thursday, we’re almost there.  Are you excited for the weekend?  Oh yeah it’s gonna be great.

As isolated events, banter of this sort seems like one uttering of nothing after another.  But as a sum total, it speaks of the boredom and restlessness one endures sitting alone in a cave.  The slow existence.  People become measures of patience.  Everyone hidden from each other, everyone desiring to say something.  So a worker is walking to the bathroom and a coworker is walking the other way, and there is too much to say in only a moment’s time, so the first worker says, “How are you,” and the other says, “Okay how are you,” and the first says “good,” and that’s the end of it.

Here are two poems by Russell Edson.  I read them today and they were memorable and I read them while I was one of the very inconsequential characters mentioned above.  One ghost in a greater fog of ghosts.  Each of us one by one nodding off at hilarious angles.

 

Nature

 

A father and mother were taking their child for a walk in a wood to look at nature.

Father had put a hat on the father’s head.  So had Mother put a hat on the mother’s head.  Also had the child a hat on the child’s head.

We are wearing hats, said Father.

Because people wear hats, said Mother.

Then it is not unusual to have concaves of felt or wool or even straw on one’s head, said Father.

It is fairly usual, said Mother.

We are fairly usual, said Father.

We might be anyone walking in a wood, said Mother.

We are not really we, we are anyone who might be walking in a wood, said Father.

No one is really anyone, anyone might be anyone, said Mother.

No one is who he is, he is anyone who is easily someone else, said Father.

There is no originality, said Mother.

There is no reason to be original, said Father.

Nor reason not to be, said Mother.

Yet no proper reason for being original, said Father.

Proper reasons often eliminate originality, said Mother.

And so it was that I put a hat on my head, simply because I had a hat and a head.  The result was fairly usual, a man wearing a rather usual hat on a rather usual head.  Did I do wrong, given the option? said Father.

Certainly not.  And so it goes, my hat a woman’s hat.  Your hat a man’s hat.  And the child’s hat a child’s hat, said Mother . . .

Will you stop now, two birds are doing coitus in a tree, cried Father . . .

 

One Man’s Story

 

His parents met.  His father had sperm and his mother an egg.  This is how he got started.  Nine months later he was on the outside.  After the usual stations of childhood he finally achieved the adult form of his species . . .

And then he met a woman who said, With your sperm and my eggs we could make children.

Oh, no, he said, My father does that.  He’s the expert in that field.

Then what do you do? she said.

I tend to grow inside my mother after Dad has had to do with her.  Nine months later I’m on the outside and start to mess on myself.  Please forgive me, at the time I don’t know any better.  But I do finally achieve the imago moment of my species.  Wingless, I enter my middle years, and begin the process of becoming a piece of biological trash.  Finally released from biochemistry I come to the place where I was before Dad had to do with Mom.  And never again to be found in all the coincidences of the universe . . .

Some SUVs and a romance novel

An hour before the sun rose this morning, I was driving to work and thinking about warm bed and all of a sudden the cars in front of me were moving at least 50 mph under the speed limit.  I got up extra early to put in some overtime at work.  (I want to make more money so I can buy exceptional possessions.  I want to buy awesome stuff and have my friends over and we can comment on the stuff and maybe touch the stuff.)  Fifteen minutes went by and I was still close to home.  Every car in front of me was changing lanes at every opportunity and every opportunity resulted in the same standstill.  I stayed in the same lane and looked at the clock once in a while and I listened to the music my mp3 player’s software shuffled.  I remember it played David Bazan and Thelonious Monk and Sigur Ros and Al Green and nothing made sequential sense — not only the music, but the view through the windshield.  Three lanes of loitering, coffee-drunk strangers slamming the gas in ten feet of space, and a tiny golf cart-sized car caked in dirt to my right.  I could hardly read the dirty car’s license plate or see through its windows.  I saw police lights and my car crept by three recently mishaped SUVs.  A group of tall guys walking around the wreck.  No one talking.  Nameless shapes of plastic and glass on the highway.  I looked at them stuck there and I looked away and then the open road ahead was sudden and vast.  I missed my train and screamed very loud alone in my car while the sun was rising (there was nothing magical about this, these are only facts in slightly colored language)

I found a romance novel buried in my desk at work.  A former employee must have left it there.  The cover is a little bit sticky and the title is Allegheny Ecstasy.  It is by Caroline Bourne.  Here is the ending of the novel:

Making sweet, wicked love beneath the fall was a new and exciting experience for both.  Moments later, they dropped into a thick, lush patch of spring-green clover, content to lie together in the aftermath of their love.  Very few words were spoken; they were too happy just enjoying each other.

Dianna sighed deeply.  Beyond all the tomorrows, there were still questions needing answers.  What did the future hold for the child born of their love?  How would the sons of the Seminole renegade, Oclala, affect Drew’s life?  Would Webster’s fate ever be learned?

Perhaps one day the questions would be answered.

Perhaps in Drew’s time.

Perhaps Caroline Bourne is a woman with unfulfilled desires.

Here is a list of 15 books written by Caroline Bourne, the oldest of which (On Rapture’s Wing) was written the year I was born.  Caroline Bourne wrote all of those books in the span of 12 years.  That means every year she wrote one book and one fourth of another book.  That’s some decent productivity.

On the inside of the back cover, there is a black and white photograph of Caroline Bourne.  Her hair cut suggests the picture was taken in the 50s.  The information says she “is the mother of two daughters and grandmother of one.”  Based on this evidence, I am concluding that Caroline Bourne is now dead.