Century

This is about my first car crash. It isn't important at all. It has had no bearing on my life whatsoever, but it's been on my mind recently for some reason. The only thing I carry with me from it is the opinion that Buicks are the toughest fucking cars ever made, something that has been pounded into my head since birth by my grandfather and uncles. So I guess it's appropriate that the event that affirmed this opinion occurred while my grandfather was behind the wheel. This is probably the most vivid memory I had before turning ten, so here goes:

We were driving on the east side of Columbus, because my grandfather has always owned a lot of property out there and liked taking me on business with him (actually, he still does). We were driving in his station wagon, a late 80s or early 90s model Buick. I think we were in the right lane, along a strip mall. Even at five or six years old, it looked desolate to me. Sun bleached and vast. And then, impact. Out of nowhere, it was the greatest shockwave I had ever felt. I was thrown across the front seat, into my grandfather. And time froze. My head hit him halfway up his upper arm. I felt the weave of his sweater pressed into my face, the sharp scent of his cologne. This could have been a photograph. This is the moment frozen in my head. These are details I will never forget. The car, the lurch to the left, my grandfather's knuckles on the wheel, my trajectory. A sound that is indescribable. A wall of steel and plastic and noise. And everything fell away.

I slumped back to my side, we pulled over and got out. A woman in a pickup truck had t-boned us coming out of a parking lot. She was crying, she thought she had killed me. I guess I was the last thing she saw before our car disappeared into her engine block. I was shaking, and I couldn't figure out why. I wasn't scared. I was confused more than anything. The woman was hugging me and looking at me until my grandfather finally got her attention. People gathered, asked if we needed an ambulance. This is where my memories stop. Everything after this point is fuzzy.

I remember the passenger side door on our car was so fucked it couldn't open, the mirror on it was shattered and dangling. There were creases, dents in the dark blue paint. We had to drive it around the rest of the day, which was okay since it still ran fine. Whenever we parked the entire day, I felt like that car was a badge of honor, a combat wound. Proof that we survived. That was it. I was sad when my grandfather sold the car a few months later. He worked at a dealership, I think it ended up as a refurb. All-in-all, pretty unimportant, but yeah. There's my first car crash. Take from it what you will.

Photographs

I don't know where to begin, describing something so abstract. How do you communicate this? Jealous, but not really. Left out? I'm not sure...when I see old photographs of you, before we knew each other, I can't explain it. You look so happy. I've always loved your smile. Maybe that was it, I'm wishing I could have seen your smile earlier, been part of the chain of events that caused it. These pictures feel like a separation, an ultimately meaningless one, trumped by subsequent events, but a separation nonetheless. I want to be smiling with you sixteen months before we crossed paths. Four years. However far back the photos go. Is that strange? I want to stop you on the street three summers prior to our first meeting and say "God, your happiness is stunning."

History

Fascism is gaining ground in Europe, for the same reasons it did seventy years ago. The lights dim. The world is tumultuous, the economic crisis is looming. You are getting undressed. Last time we were in this situation, it ended with a world war, a nuclear bomb. We are pressed up against one another. The most destructive conflict on the planet, and all the signs are there again. And it doesn't matter at all. Millions may die, we may die, but right now it could be occurring on another planet, in a history book or a novel. Your lips are soft. The buildup is usually the last chance to stop a terrible plan before it can be put into motion. I can feel you breathing. We will probably not have another world war, cooler heads will prevail, but there will always be conflict. And there is that possibility that something terrible and destructive will happen, but not when we are looking into each other's eyes.

The Mayans predicted a paradigm shift in 2012. Our heart rates increase together. I'm not an expert on Mayan mythology, I don't know if this carries any weight, but they were an incredibly intelligent civilization. Your fingers are digging into me. Maybe the modern world, plugged in and distracted and destructive will take notice of the ashes falling from the sky, but will panic before they can see the rainbow arcing across the Pacific Ocean, British Columbia, the European Union, the former Soviet bloc. You fall asleep.

M.O.S.

Before he left, he was different. "I'm going to fight for our country. I'm proud to serve." A girl in our class asked him if he was scared. He shrugged. This sums up pre-deployment. He had photos on his cell phone of his recruiter and him hanging out. Before basic, he got to take apart and reassemble a grenade launcher. "That spring can take your hand off", he told me. "I'm going to be a gunner on an M2, an armored fighting vehicle."
Later, I asked him if his M2 would have air conditioning. You know, because he would be in the desert. "No" he said laughing, "it gets really fucking hot. Like, a buck fifty inside."
I thought about this for a few seconds. "150 degrees?"
"Yeah. You've never heard that before? I guess I'm getting used to this."
Then after boot camp, basic training. "I'm going to Afghanistan." I was relieved. Surely Afghanistan wasn't as bad as Iraq? It wasn't on the news as much...
Then we dropped out of communication. And he went to Afghanistan. I talked to him a couple times while he was there. "I should have gone to college" is what he told me.
Then, a second tour, longer than the first. Sometimes he would post photos online. Firefights, shot up cars. Mud brick houses and Blackhawk helicopters, dark against the rocky background. And mortars. He told me they got rocketed on a daily basis, he saved a piece of shrapnel that almost killed him. He saw dead men, Americans and Afghanis. He is different, though it is imperceptible. He told me he just wanted to survive, he didn't care about anything else. He did survive, but he's probably got another tour before he's out. This is a very difficult thing to explain, the emotions that go along with seeing him. Mostly we drink and act like assholes and this is nice. Occasionally, something devastating will be revealed. "We'd hit them with missiles while they were trying to exfil their dead and wounded." The brutal reality. We are silent momentarily, and then we drink a little more.
I try and think about this as it applies to me as I consider the military. I do not care about patriotism. I have a singular goal, a very specific idea of what I hope to obtain. My work would hopefully not involve firefights and IEDs. But I am still scared. I don't want to experience rockets and dead men and weeping Afghani women. But this isn't about me or for me.
He has seen these things, felt these things, and has been changed. And I want to connect with him on a basic level, but I am a civilian, an outsider.
I know nothing of war.

Promise!

Cell phones might cause cancer, that’s not really news. The research is inconclusive, anyway. Still, at the back of my mind, there’s always a risk analysis going on. If cell phones cause cancer, every phone call, text message and voicemail is a potential carcinogen. The voices of the people you love may end up destroying you in the most literal sense. It never used to work this way with letters and poems. Ballads, dirges, epics, none of these emit RF energy, the risk involved in reading them and experiencing them is entirely emotional. So technology has decided to be a dick again and add a physical danger to communication.
I like this development.
Because now we can’t afford to say anything trivial. Talking to each other is actively killing us. And that is the most exciting feeling in the world.
We are willing to take fragments off of our own lives to share them with others. It was totally worth losing a few minutes to tell you that you looked great in that dress. Now that there is a price to pay, the importance becomes intrinsic. Taking calculated risks has always been part of communicating, and as soon as you say “Fuck it, here’s the truth, here is everything I have ever wanted to tell you, here is every note, poem, phone number, and cigarette butt. Here are memories and hopes and strangers I have smiled at and slept with and loved and hated. Here is me”, it can be the most dangerous thing in the world. Now that the emotional and the physical can share this risk, we can rest easy. Whenever you hear “It’s killing me to tell you this”, you know they are not lying.

Cheekbone

We moved out west when I was six. Mom said she'd had it, no more broken heirlooms, projectile keepsakes, no more fires from neglected cigarettes. The living room always had that acrid smell, that yellow-brown film covering the glass coffee table, the burned patch on the carpet, the recliner, the record player, me. Johnny Cash and the tinkling of ice in her drink, 107 degrees during the summer. No air conditioning, just the hot, dry wind blowing up from the Mexican desert, past Juarez and the maquiladoras and the scorpions.
From a shack to an RV, and I'm still not sure if that was an improvement. The RV lets you run away, sure, but you're towing seven tons of trinkets, furniture, bad memories. Cigarette burns. Bruises.
We eventually just stopped driving, just short of California, the promised land we were supposed to dream about. We gave up and stopped in the most desolate stretch of land I had ever seen, and I was okay with that. If you never make your dream tangible, you can never dissect it and discover the intrinsic flaws. My dreams never involved gang shootings, heroin, the adult world. Better to remain in the desert, tainted only by the smell of tobacco. And us. I was always cognizant that we were a blight upon the hot, clean, deathly expanse, breathing where oxygen should not exist.
She tried to school me, made an effort, but she was no teacher. Eventually, I just sat in the shade of the candy-stripe RV canopy, listening to the wind chimes.
I was alone most of the time, in the sense that I didn't interact with people. The desert was an organism, a different kind of friend. Mom worked in town. I had never seen town, only heard it referred to as 'town', and never wanted to go there. If we were germs on the desert landscape, a permanent settlement must be like a tumor. I had no interest in interacting with my home's cancer on any social level.
I found the skull in May, when the sun was starting to really burn. The only evidence that some unfortunate cow had died on this spot, a memorial abandoned in the sand. Completely bleached white, I must have thought it was an eerie pearl, a smiling parody of a priceless jewel. I put the skull on a shelf at the back of the RV, my 'room', kitschy desert decor. I went back the next day and dug up the vertebrae, perfectly crafted like a marble puzzle. These too traveled with me to the RV. By the end of the month, I had a nearly complete cow skeleton, and some smaller acquisitions, predators, maybe coyotes or bobcats. I'd obtained some wire, begun to assemble the bones carefully, according to the anatomical standards I'd devised. What I could recall from my school books.
Every evening, mom's dilapidated Chevy would roll up to the RV, sometimes she'd make dinner and read a story, sometimes she would drink and put me to bed and drink some more. I began to see a correlation, an abstract connection between my mother, the bones, the desert, me. She eventually made me get rid of the skeletons, said they were creepy, so she probably saw the connection too.
I gave up on the skeletons for a few weeks, did more conventional things. Coloring books. Action figures. Retrieving bones was secret, my ceremony. The skulls and ribs and femurs and clavicles, white blemishes on the red-brown earth, just as out of place in the desert as we were, just as scattered, forgotten, and profoundly meaningless.

Theoretical Chicken Soup for the Hypothetical Soul

Pain Reliever. Fever Reducer. Fast Acting. One by one, I return the bottles to their places on the shelf. None of them says anything about curing existential angst. Shouldn’t your questions about the meaninglessness of life be concisely answered beneath the FDA label? Percent daily values of god and the devil? Aren’t people concerned about this? I move along the shelf, examining the varieties of cough syrup. From behind the bottles, a small demon launches itself onto my face.

Okay, I’m probably telling this wrong. Again. The real story is, I start looking at cough syrups because I am absolutely fed up with vodka and a demon jumps onto my face and asks “Hey buddy, want to see the paradox?”

“Sure” I answer. “Which one?”

“The big one” the demon says. His tiny claws cause a prickling sensation. “Just walk into that swirling vortex on the floor there.”

“Where did that come from?”

“This grocery store, it’s everything and nothing, built on the decaying carcass of physically embodied, undiluted chaos.”

“Oh.” I walk into the vortex.

I feel flattened, stretched, compacted. All the while, the demon is still hugging my face. Then we land. Hard. I get up, rubbing my head and for the first time the demon is sitting on my shoulder, stoic. I can feel the little needle pricks where he was attached to my cheeks and forehead. The ceiling above us is a glass dome, with fantastic colors arcing across it, inconceivable shapes hurtling through space. I mean, I think it’s space. I had never seen a six-dimensional sphere before this. Around us are shelves and desks filled with books and papers, all stained with ink.

“Welcome to the Library of Contradictions” the demon said.

“Contradictions?”

“The longest books are the shortest, fact is fiction is fact, the most beautiful poems are the most hideous and terrifying things you will ever convince yourself that you’re seeing. Don’t read those by the way. Which is to say, read them if you know what’s good for you.”

I pick an ancient-looking tome up from a table and flip through it.

“These books don’t have any words.”

“Exactly.” The demon hovers by my head. “You’re on the right track, chief.”

He flitters down to the floor and starts a winding path through the rows of book cases. I follow close behind, almost knocking over a rhombus-like globe, split diagonally by a zigzagging line labeled ‘Equator’. We finally reach a door, watched over by a one-eyed gargoyle.

“This is the Study. The Scribe sits inside. He can answer any question, but he only speaks a language that doesn’t exist.”

“But if he speaks it, it must exis--”

“Shhh.” The demon hops up on my shoulder and puts a finger to my lips. We walk inside.

The Scribe sits at the center of a giant clock, gears whirring, model planets spinning, pendulums and little wooden birds in constant motion. It fills the entire study with its impossible complexity. I momentarily wonder how the Scribe avoids having his absurdly long beard caught in the mechanism. He looks up from the massive book perched on his lap, ink dribbling from the quill pen in his hand.

“Yes?”

“Boss, this guy has some questions” the demon says, leaping to the floor.

The Scribe looks up at me.

“Hey, I can understand you!” I stammer.

He raises an ancient eyebrow.

“I just thought that if you spoke a language that doesn’t exist, I might not be able to--”

“Think harder” the Scribe interrupts.

“Well…obviously if we’re communicating, there must be some parado--oh. Neither of us is really speaking. So no matter what answer you give me, it’s not really an answer. It’s another question, because I’m the one supplying it.”

“Yeah, pretty much” the Scribe reclines. “You want a beer before you go?”

“Won’t the beer be something else?”

“No, beer is beer in every dimension. The universal truth is that there is no truth.”

“Another paradox.”

“Don’t think too hard about it, trust me. Remember Sartre? Yeah, he does my laundry.”

“Gotcha.” I take a sip of the beer. It’s delicious, but the brand appears to be a mathematical equation.

“See you around.” The Scribe waves as the Study fades to black. And I’m staring at the cough syrup again, beer in hand. I pick a cheap bottle of the generic brand to drink later, slip it in my pocket, and walk out the door. The guard doesn’t suspect a thing.

i.

Black Eye

The first thing you should know is that it’s way too easy to look like you’re doing something important. Just because people don’t “get it” suddenly means you’re making a statement or something. Maybe it’s just a coping mechanism. Maybe I called her too many times. Maybe she had a project. Maybe she was fucking someone else. I don’t know. Obviously, I haven’t talked to her in a while. Maybe I just wanted to feel alive again, to get that same rush. Running as fast as I could into a brick wall feels about as intense as holding the person you care about. So instead of whispering “I love you” and feeling them breathing against you, you fall on the ground and laugh as hard as you can as tears well up in your eyes and you feel the blood coming out of your nose and mouth. And it feels absolutely fantastic and liberating, and the strangers around you, they don’t get it so they ask if you’re okay. So when you stand up, wipe the blood and spit and tears off on the sleeve of your $200 dress shirt and exclaim “I’ve never been better!”, for some reason they get confused. Well, I’m not here to be a goddamn tour guide anyway. Until they forget their jobs and their families and everything they thought they knew about happiness, they’re not going to get it. Until they throw away the preconceived notions and the caution, until they fuck around in the bathroom with that boy at work and punch the mirror afterwards and say “It’s okay that we see each other as one-dimensional” then bleed all over their progress reports before turning them in, they’re not going to really understand. This is therapy. This is healing.

Dear God, Why Am I So Well-Adjusted???

"You want what?" The therapist folded his hands and stared at me intently.

"I want a disorder" I said. "People will listen to me if they think there's something wrong. Can you just diagnose me with something?"

"That's not really how it works."

"Look. I'm fucked up. I can prove it! Sometimes I pay to see one movie at the theater, then when it ends, I sneak into another one. Without paying!"

"See, that's not a disorder. It's just slightly immoral."

"So you're saying I have a morality disorder? My conscience is in need of treatment?"

"I'm sorry, no. You're just kind of a jerk. I can't really fix that."

"Isn't wanting to have a disorder so badly kind of a disorder in itself?"

"It could be, but once I diagnose you, you will have been fulfilled and will no longer have the disorder."

"So I'd be in recovery and I would need--"

"No, no, you'd be fully recovered. There's no recovery period for a disorder based around the desire for a disorder."

"What about social anxiety?"

"I highly doubt that. I saw you hitting on that woman in the waiting room."

I put my head down. "It's only 'cause I'm so lonely."

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"I cut myself sometimes!"

"Do you really?"

"Yeah!" I held up a bandaged finger. "Last night I was chopping carrots for a stew and--"

"Please, just stop. I have people with legitimate problems to see."

"But I'm imperfect! I'm broken!" Security guards entered the room. "I have a fear of authority figures!" They dragged me out in the hallway, pausing to remove my fingers from the door frame. "Look at me! Look how far gone I am! Stop denying me treatment!" The receptionist and all the patients in the waiting room stared incredulously. "I'm a filthy exhibitionist!" I yelled as I started to unbutton my pants. "Also!" I turned to the receptionist as the guards regained their hold: "You're a beautiful girl and I would like to get to know you better!" I was being dragged towards the hall again. "Ask Dr. Whiting, he has my number! Maybe we could get din--"

And the door slammed shut. And security threw me out the front door. And I think I bruised my tail bone. And I began to wonder what humans would be like if they still had tails. I quickly ran to the side of the building, to Dr. Whiting's open window. "Sometimes I fantasize about having a tail! Isn't that the weirdest thing?" I could see the good doctor shaking his head and pulling the window shut. I began to wonder when the receptionist was working next. I planned to check my messages once I got home. Maybe if I'm crestfallen enough, I can at least fake depression. It's so goddamn difficult being happy.