Still Life with Action Figures

Or, To Be an Only Child

Review: KFC Doubles Down, Betting on the Destruction of America

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Writing is  therapy. This is a fact. No matter what kind of writer you’re dealing with, no matter whether they’re writing about a mystical netherworld or their own childhoods, vast novels or modest little pop culture reviews,  you can always count on one thing: they are, in one way or another, writing about what troubles them. They are writing about the things that gnaw away at their subconscious, lingering mercilessly in the back corners of their minds at all hours of the day.

For some, the only way to confront their demons is to write about them. And in that way, writing is no longer just a vocation, but a means of survival.

Not to seem overdramatic or anything, but today this feels very applicable. Today I’m writing about an experience I had several months back that, against all odds, continues to haunt me, continues to fill my mind at all hours of the night. Today I’m writing about something I would like to forget, but, well, I just fucking can‘t. Today I write about the KFC Double Down.

The question that first arises, obviously, is why. Why would I subject myself to this? Why would I actually open my wallet and pull out money that I’ve earned and exchange it for this, for something that from its’ inception defined the very worst of America? I guess the answer is curiosity. Sick, morbid curiosity. This drives many of our most profitable industries, so it might as well drive me straight to the unhallowed halls of KFC.

Let me say straight away, I was expecting something bad. I was expecting something that I would regret. But if you’re concerned about my critical objectivism, don’t be. Because the horrible reality of the Double Down proved far worse than anything I had imagined. I can say without reservation that this “sandwich” was one of the worst meals I have ever had, and it may just be the worst fast food option I’ve ever seen, a disgusting cacophony of unpleasant sensations that began with the traumatic first bite and continued long after I had finished the meal, my body’s interior waging war with the beast every bit as much as my taste buds had.

I still finished it because, well, I’m young and I’m dead broke and I’m at a place in my life where if I pay for food, goddamnit, I’m going to finish it. And, let’s not lie here, because I wanted to go all the way. I wanted to know the full experience, to understand exactly what this thing is, what it does to the human body. The Double Down is a product that has risen straight from the depths of Hell, and when you find yourself staring Lucifer square in the eyes, well, you don’t want to be the first to blink. I did not blink. I suffered the consequences. And now I’m ready to tell my story.

First, a few thoughts on how this sandwich came to be, at least from my vantage point. In the last few years, the fast food industry, like many other American business models, has been steadily veering away from the middle. Looking at all the major fast food outlets in this country, it seems like they have all gone one of two ways: either they try and pass their junk off as healthful (which KFC did attempt years back with the introduction of a grilled option, something that remains on their menu to this day, even though I’ve never heard of anyone ever ordering it), or they go in the opposite direction and make their food more extreme: more fat, more salt, more proud disregard for anything resembling nutrition. In the biz this is known as targeting ‘experienced eaters’, one of those politically correct, marketing buzzwords that, in this case, is subbing in for ‘Fat People.’ The Double Down, suffice to say, represents a definitive step in the extreme direction. It is KFC announcing exactly what it is, what it intends to be. But what this means, I’m sad to say, is that KFC represents something far darker than anyone could have guessed.

The first thing you notice about the Double Down is how small it is. The chicken breasts that sub in for bread in the sandwich were clearly pulled from A-Cup birds, and the whole thing is significantly more petite than most fast food sandwich options. But what the sandwich lacks in size, it makes up for in density. As small as it may seem, once I had finished my meal I felt deeply, uncomfortably full. It sat in my stomach like a wet rock for the rest of the afternoon. As I digested the Double Down, I couldn’t help but feel as though it was pulling my entire intestinal track down with it.

But wait, before we get into that, let’s talk about flavor.

The Double Down is, more than anything else, a study in salt. The chicken patties are both extremely salty, as is KFC’s custom. But take that and add two slices of salty bacon, a thick gob of extra-salty, mayo-based “Colonel’s Sauce”, and cheese. The cheese is the only aspect of the assemblage that isn’t overwhelmed by sodium , but that’s because this is one of those over-processed fast food cheeses that doesn’t taste like it come from this Earth, but rather like a chemical reconstruction of what cheese is supposed to be, the product of late, joyless nights in a cold and lonely laboratory.

There is nothing, I repeat, nothing pleasurable about the Double Down experience. The hours of discomfort that I suffered after finishing it were expected, to a degree. But I had gone in presuming that the actual act of consuming the sandwich would give me some degree of enjoyment. That’s how it’s supposed to go with junk food, right? I think about the other extreme foodstuffs that I’ve indulged in over the years- Burger King’s Spicy Tendercrisp, the Jack-in-the-Box Jumbo Jack, anything from Taco Bell – and however sick and regretful I felt in the respective aftermaths, I was at least happy while I was eating them. Good fast food is like that, a short-lived burst of tasty indulgence, hedonism in bite-size form. But the Double Down is not good fast food. It doesn’t earn its calories. It doesn’t earn the near-guaranteed late-afternoon stomach ache. It doesn’t earn anything simply because it doesn’t taste good. It is shoddily assembled and lazily designed, without even the most basic consideration for finding a proper balance of flavors. It is our nation at its absolute worst, wasteful and destructive and downright ugly. And as for the ‘experienced eaters’ that KFC is targeting with such gusto, if there is any justice in the marketplace (and, by extension, the world), they will reject this nauseating little number along with the rest of us. Quality has to still matter, even here, even now, even when two fried chicken patties sandwiching bacon and mayonnaise exists in reality and is not some feverish, dystopian daydream.

I will note that KFC has always done sides well. In particular, I’d take their potato wedges over just about any competing chain’s french fries. If I do venture back to a KFC for lunch, I may just get an assortment of sides. It’d be cheap, and could make up a pretty satisfying meal. But I won’t be going back there anytime soon. Not after the Double Down, not after this Frankenstein monster of a meal that tells me, beyond a doubt, that the KFC corporate brass believes if something is marketed aggressively, people will buy it, no matter how little care goes into insignificant things like presentation and taste, . That right there is an insult to their customers, and I won’t be anxious to return to a place that treats me and everyone else that walks through their doors with such blatant, dead-eyed contempt.

These Interests We’ve Fabricated Must be Given Face

My very dear friend Matt is visiting New York this week. It’s his first time here, and of course I want to show him a good time. As with anytime a friend visits from out of town, the past weekend was a combination of fun-filled activities (lots more than I would normally do), as well as a creeping, ever-present anxiety over whether or not he’s really having fun. But that’s just my own issues- I’ve known Matt for about as long as I’ve known anyone, so there’s a good deal comfort there. Plus he’s a super nice guy, so even if we were showing him a shit time he would never admit it.

That being said, I have found that, whilst vacationing, Matt has no shame in openly and flamboyantly embodying the role of a “Tourist.” In fact, he seems to think that there’s nothing shameful about it. He’s intent on doing a lot of very touristy things (Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, etc), trying to hit every major New York landmark in order to cross it off his list. He also has a very heavy hand with his camera, taking many, many pictures, often of very, very boring things. I can’t help but get a little irritated at Matt’s antics, and a bit self-conscious when I pose with him in front of, say, some park bench in Central Park. I can’t help but wonder what all the passerbys must think of me. Maybe this is because, even after living here less than a year, I’ve already had it drilled into my subconscious that tourists are the enemy. That honestly seems to be the only thing that every single person in NYC agrees upon. Tourists, going slower than everyone on the street, taking pictures of every bodega awning, overcrowding midtown, staring up as they walk, seeing New York as a bright and blaring carnival ride rather than the fascinating, layered city that it is. This isn’t the kind of thing that I’ve ever heard explicitly spoken by anyone here, but the feeling is always there, hanging in the air, released every few seconds by the sinister glares of every lifelong New Yorker as another tour bus passes by holding a group of fat Midwesterner’s who gawk and snap photos like they’re on safari.

Yet at the same time, New York is a very intense place, and there’s a pretty steep learning curve. It’s funny how easy it is for me to be judgemental and forget about all that, when just a few months ago I was having all the same issues. Living in this city just has a way of making you feel jaded. Another reason I’m not so sure that this is the best place for me to live right now, but that’s a subject for another day.

Back to Matt. Now, he has told me that by taking these pictures he’s ensuring that he’ll remember the details of his trip more clearly, and that in turn he’ll be able to relive it much more vividly. Matt, it should be noted, is an incredibly thorough documentarian of his own life. He has an immaculately maintained blog that chronicles just about his every waking moment (www.livejournal.com/users/simpsnsfan), and he recently started a podcast that allows him to record and archive the sort of loose conversations with friends that normally dissipate into nothingness upon their conclusion (www.therewillbespoilers.wordpress.com). The guy loves to chronicle his own life, so I shouldn’t be surprised that when he’s on vacation this propensity goes into hyperdrive. As you can probably tell by how often I update this blog, I am not at all the same way. More often than not, I find that writing about my day-to-day life is either boring or mentally vexing- if nothing is going wrong then there’s nothing interesting to write about, and if things are going badly for me, then writing explicitly about them almost always just makes me feel worse. It’s like deciding to take a bath in a tub of filthy water, rather than just letting it drain away. Writing can certainly be therapeutic for me (I doubt any self-serious writer will say otherwise), but I generally prefer filtering my own experience into a fictional context. That’s both more creatively fulfilling for me, and, paradoxically, it helps me understand my own issues in a way that simply writing them down never does. Of course, this approach has its own set of problems, as the passage of time that comes with longer writing projects tends to blur the lines of reality. I recently had a reading of a new play that is heavily based on my personal experiences since graduating college, and while listening to it, even I began to get confused about what was real and what was imagined. Fictional characters just have a way of taking on a life of their own, which in turn renders the real lives that they’re based on vague and uninteresting by comparison. The other night, when one of my roommates was telling a story about a crackhead that he saw biting into a big pineapple slice on the street, I truly believed that I had been there too. It was only later that I realized that I wasn’t there when this happened, wasn’t even in New York yet. I had just heard the story told so many times and had such a clear view of the events, I subconsciously inserted myself into the proceedings. Same sort of thing.

Still, Matt (who, away from a computer, has been diligently recording every moment of his New York trip in a handheld journal) tells me that being able to go back and read about every major event in his life over the last few years is a very enriching experience. I can’t help but wonder if I would feel the same way. I’ll admit that looking back over my life, particularly over the last year or so, I often find individual nights and memories difficult to differentiate. This is a bigger issue now than it was during school. Back in college I had both enough structure to my life and enough excitement to be able to easily frame most of my experiences. There were always clear external circumstances – a certain class, a show, a project – that I could remember and use
to contextualize everything else. But out here in the drab, muddy, days-and-weeks-of-quiet-desperate-monotony-bleeding-into-one-another-until-almost-a-year-has-passed-and-you-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-happened Real World, it becomes a lot more difficult to remember specifics. I’ve had plenty of great times in New York, I know I have, but while I clearly remember a handful of eventful days and nights, most of the past nine months feel less like clearly defined sequence of event and more like a shapeless dribble.

To state the obvious: If I spent more time taking pictures, or writing about my own life, then it would certainly be easier to go back and remember specifics. And part of me thinks that would be pretty damn nice. I’m positive that there are plenty of moments in my life that at the time felt very important and powerful when they occured, yet that I couldn’t recall today if you put a gun to my head. Of course, you could argue that if I don’t remember the events that must mean they weren’t all that important, that selective memory is itself the deciding factor, and that if something happens that truly is a defining experience your mind will choose to recall it. That kind of seems like bullshit to me, as I often feel like I have very little say in what I actually remember- there are countless little moments of joy from the past year that I’ve forgotten, yet I could tell you every detail of the nightmarish day at my last job where I spent over four hours trying to learn how to take apart and clean a frozen yogurt machine. There are lots of times where I’ve remembered things I wish I didn’t. This isn’t necessarily just bad memories, but anything that you’d rather not think about- when things end with a girl and I’m desperate to forget about her, of course my mind invariably goes back to all of our best moments together. Memory has a way of deceiving you.

But then, don’t photographs and the like do the exact same thing? Capture the very best moments of a given day/week/trip and, thus, allow you to easily romanticize and fetishize the entire thing? Or is that the whole point? Or is the point to capture life, as it is, without any of the cumbersome layers of manmade artifice that you find in every other form? Photographs may not lie explicitly, what they show you is actually there. But the ways that photos are able to play against and remold the reality of human experience, and the fact that they can do this while ostensibly showing you pure truth, to my mind that makes them as devious as all. Perhaps part of this comes from the impression I get that while people’s reactions to paintings and writing are always inextricably linked to the artist, photographs are defined far more by their subjects than by the person behind the camera. Looking at a photograph, it’s very easy to forget that there was even someone there at all, framing the shot, pushing the button, deciding what it is they want you to see.

These ramblings about Art are actually a pretty good seagueway, because I think they show the difference between me and Matt in nutshell. Matt is a writer (a good one too), and he writes screenplays as well as his personal narratives, but I get the feeling that he doesn’t really see the writing in his blog as art. At this point, he sees the chronicling as just a part of his life, one aspect that serves to enrich the rest (of course I could be completely wrong about this, and, as Matt is one of the very few frequent contributors to my comments page, I’m sure he’ll correct me if that’s the case). This isn’t a bad way to think about things at all, and it makes the act of writing seem very easy and unintimidating. But fact is, I’m just too pretentious for that. I’m still young, and I still want to be a professional artist, and that’s what drives me every day. I go through sprees where I take a lot of photographs, but that’s always when I’m playing around with different camera settings, lighting, angles, etc. The photograph itself, how it looks, that’s what’s important to me. The subject of the photo, the event from my life that’s being documented, that’s all secondary. In fact, when I’m taking a lot of pictures, I always feel like it alienates me from everyone else there. If there are people in my photos, they hopefully have no idea they’re getting their picture taken (smiley posed photos are one of my very least favorite things).

On the same accord, when I try to write anything, what matters to me is the quality of the writing, the storytelling. This is why I find personal experience stuff so difficult: I just don’t find my own life all that exciting, and I don’t find myself a particularly compelling protagonist. Why would I ever want to waste my time just writing about my boring old week when I could take whatever I’ve been feeling and filter it into a life that’s imagined, a life where I get to decide everything that happens? It just seems so much more likely that the latter will be compelling.

But then what do you do when the characters in your stories, the worlds inside your mind, begin to overwhelm the world around you? What do you do when reality itself loses all contextual meaning, and the only way you can frame your own life is by the events in your head? What then?

Doctor

Trying something a little different today: this a new short story. I’d like to start submitting it around to different lit magazines and contests and stuff, but I thought I’d post it here first. Read it if you like, leave comments, be honest.

Tell Me You Need Me

For those who don’t know, my current day job (as it were) is working in marketing and PR for an upscale umbrella company. The website is www.davekny.com. It’s a good job. My boss is cool, and the vast majority of my time is spent writing promotional copy; at this point in my life, getting paid to write anything is a huge blessing. So I’m not complaining. But that being said, when you spend week after week writing minor variations of the same damn thing about the same damn umbrellas in order to be ignored by the same damn magazine editors, well, it does something to you.

Here is an example of a fairly standard piece of copy that I’ve written for this job:

It’s almost April, and that means April Showers. Now, are you ready to spend another rainy season with a cheap, flimsy umbrella that gets torn apart by a few gusts of wind, or is it time to invest in something a little different? Here at Davek New York, our line of upscale umbrellas are specially engineered for strength and durability.  Whereas the appeal of certain umbrellas is primarily aesthetic, we are in the business of manufacturing powerful, reliable tools, designed to combat extreme weather conditions and last through the years. Our umbrellas are so well-made, in fact, that we back them up with an Unconditional Lifetime Guarantee.

Our mission at Davek is to utterly redefine what an umbrella can be, transforming a seemingly disposable product into a beautiful, worthwhile accessory. If you have any upcoming stories about April showers, raingear, or springtime accessories, I believe our product would be a unique and exciting addition. For any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you!

Boring, right? Well, here’s something I wrote today:

Look up. See the smoldering graying smoke stacks in the sky, see the darkness as it slowly engulfs the thin slits of blue light. There’s a storm coming, you see, another day another storm, that’s what they say isn’t it? Somewhere in some far-reached godforsaken corner of the earth they say something like that, savages, heathens, the dark souls who will embrace the apocalypse with open arms and breathe in the burning flames like oxygen. Those are the types who see the storm coming, those are the types who speak it into being.

On some days you wouldn’t mind a rainstorm. On some days, you’d be downright giddy over one. Sit in the cozy comforts of your home, hot chocolate, blankets, a book from your childhood. You’d listen to the melodic pitter-patter of the drops on window panes as you snuggle up and think pityingly on the poor souls below, drowning upright as they trudge through the endless walls of ice.

But today, such comforts are out of your grasp. Today you have things to do, places to be, scheduled events that simply cannot be ignored. Today you must be a functioning member of adult society, and in doing so, you must step outside and brave the storm. On days like today, an umbrella is truly your best friend, your greatest protector, the one thing that stands between you and all the dank, squishy un-pleasantries of a storm-drenched walk.

But your umbrella is cheap. You bought it while in line at the drug store, a last-minute acquisition, piled on top of toilet paper, and mouthwash and acne cream. Only ten bucks, you thought to yourself. What a deal! But now, with this flimsy, lime-green canopy as your only weapon against the elements, now you begin to regret such a rash decision. After all, you’ve walked the city streets after a thunderstorm before. You’ve seen the aftermath: mangled sunshade corpses, twisted and contorted beyond recognition, spread out along the sidewalks and streets, overflowing from trash cans, ragged fabric flailing in the wind. Passerby’s avert their eyes, zig-zag their steps, anything to avoid a direct confrontation with the fallen. Forget Normandy, forget Afghanistan, if you want to see the true, brutish hells of War, all you have to do is take a tour through New York City right after a rainfall.

Here at Davek Accessories, we make a different kind of umbrella. They are not disposable. They are not flimsy. Our umbrellas are engineered for strength and durability, and when you send one into a fight against the elements, it will prevail. We’re so confident in our umbrellas, in fact, that we back them up with an Unconditional Lifetime Guarantee. Our mission is to utterly redefine what an umbrella can be, to transform a throwaway item into a cherished accessory that will last through the years.

Go ahead, step outside. Embrace the storm. With a Davek Umbrella by your side, what do you have to fear?

What do we think? Should I show it to my boss?

I’m Trying to Reconstruct the Air and All That Brings

The story of my vacation. Sort of. In four parts.

THE AIRPORT

The airport is the closest thing we have to purgatory on Earth. Think about it. You are cleansed of all inessential possessions, stripped down to your barest self, and forced into a strange area that is wholly separate from your day-to-day reality. And then, once you’re there, all you do is wait around, wait to be taken somewhere new- maybe a better place than the one you just came from, maybe not. And on top of that, there’s the atmosphere of the airport itself: the drab florescent lights, the huge computer screens, the constant hum of indistinct noise. An airport is hardly the worst place to spend a few hours, but it’s also far from the best. It is, as any purgatory worth its salt ought to be, inoffensive and drab and completely and totally average. Every perk the airport offers (and there are many) is bound to have a jagged edge to it: there is food and drink readily available, yet it’s frequently lousy and always overpriced. There are vast seas of empty chairs, but they’re ugly and uncomfortable. There is the opportunity for precious solitude, yet you’re never actually alone. And, most important of all, any amount of peace and satisfaction that one can derive from time spent in an airport is almost entirely negated by the harsh, utilitarian purpose that is at hand: to get on your plane and get to your chosen destination, to do so in the shortest possible timeframe, and to arrive with all your worldly possessions intact. In other words, to get the hell out of this strange netherworld and return to your regularily scheduled life.That is the goal. The airport is an obstacle. This is how we perceive our world.

Airports are on my mind lately due to some recent experiences. Two weeks ago on a Thursday, New York City, the place I quietly and tentatively call home, was just starting to recover from a truly brutal snowstorm; the sidewalks were caked in ice, there were eight foot piles on every corner, and the heavens, having vomited a thick stream of white powder for the past three days, was still coughing up an occasional flurry. On this same day I was scheduled to fly out to Chicago, the first stop of a 10-day vacation. This vacation, it should be noted, had been planned for months and was meant to fulfill two self-imposed requirements: the all-important return to my old college campus (timed with the big Mee-Ow show) and a long-delayed trip home (my first since mid-July, as this year’s holiday season was spent selling overpriced gourmet doughnuts to ungrateful hipsters as the behest of a deeply abusive boss). Also, the whole thing was meant to be an escape from the daily hustle and bustle, a retreat to the new and the old, a cleansing of the mind. In case you can’t tell, I had been looking forward to this trip for a long time, and this was the whole problem. Anticipation is a very dangerous thing. It leaves you vulnerable.

THE BEST VACATION OF MY LIFE

The problem with anticipation is simple: it means you’re trying to ascribe a narrative to events in your life that haven’t happened yet.

We all create narratives of our lives. The famous first line of Joan Didion’s most famous essay is “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”*. That, I think, is where all of the other stuff that I can’t quite believe in – fate, destiny, religion– starts to makes sense to me; when you think of it all as just another form of storytelling. Life as we actually live it does not feature any kind of clear narrative arc: there aren’t clearly delineated heroes and villains, we don’t experience singular moments of revelation that send us on our fated journeys. Life is not like that at all, it’s more like a malformed blob of experience.  Filtering these abstract moments into something with a clean, comprehensible trajectory is, I think, the only way that any of us can make any sense of the world.

But this only works when you are crafting a story out of events that have already happened- rearranging a year, a relationship, one crazy night into a tidy little beginning, middle, and end. When you attempt to tell the story of what is going to happen it is, almost without exception, a bad idea. Sometimes I wish that I knew what was going to happen- if I knew that when I turned 45 I would be a best-selling novelist with my own talk show and a beautiful family, then I wouldn’t stress as much about where my life is going right now. But for now, that brand of storytelling just serves to needlessly complicate my life. This kind of shit happens to me all the time: rather than just relax and enjoy things as they come, I am constantly distracted by the dual narrative running through my mind, the story as I’ve already written it and the story that is evolving all around me. And they are never, ever, ever the same thing.

Still, it was difficult for me not to place a lot of importance on this trip. I wasn’t able to go home at all during the holidays, a misfortune that placed me in a party of one amongst my friends, and that put a real damper on my psyche for much of the winter (I was also either working at a heinously miserable job or unemployed during that period, so that didn’t help). These days I’m doing better: I have a decent-to-good job, the fog of winter is slowly lifting, but it was still the perfect time for this double-decker trip, this two-pronged rite-of-passage, the part of the story where the Hero (that’s me) rises from his battered state and sets forth on the path towards redemption.

Hell, I’d even considered this trip’s role in the more large-scale narrative of my life, labeling it as a sort of intermission during my first post-collegiate year. With a solid turning point, I can decisively shut the book on these first six months in New York, and, upon returning, relaxed and refreshed, jump forward into the more exciting second act. Obviously these labels are all artificial, and in actuality there’s nothing that really separates one day from another. But then, by thinking this way, maybe I’m convincing myself that a sudden and palpable change can occur. And since my entire life is filtered though my own perception of it, this sort of gratuitous self-mythologizing could actually be the best, healthiest thing I can do. Right? Right??

*I’m on a big Joan Didion kick right now, and I’m sure that I’m subconsciously trying to ape her style in this entry, though now that I admitted it I suppose the style homage has become a conscious choice, which in turn makes me very nervous about how I’m nowhere near as good a writer as her, so I should probably just stop talking about it right now and end this stupid footnote, which is a device that I’ve never been all that comfortable with anyway.

FATE, IN THE ROLE OF THE ASSHOLE

Let’s get back to last Thursday. My flight was cancelled, the snow was still falling, and I had a flash of the snowstorm continuing all weekend long, of my entire itinerary falling apart.  And there were certainly moments on that sad, smelly busride back to Harlem where I couldn’t help but think to myself WHY.

WHY did this record-setting snowstorm have to happen right now,and

WHY on top of that my phone had to stop working the fucking day before, and

WHY when everyone else I know is getting the day off from work and playing in the snow, I had to be the one poor sap to suffer these harsh consequences.

Needless to say, it was a rough ride. Lots of paranoia, lots of anger; about halfway through I really started to feel like there might be someone or something trying to get me out there out there, a dark creature hiding in the shadows of space and time, waiting for the chance to bum rush me. Of course, as soon as I got back to my apartment and took a few seconds to breath I realized, as I always do, that there is no point to that kind of thinking. It was just bad luck, that’s all, just an example of circumstance facing-off with my preconceived expectations and, as per usual, circumstance delivering a rock solid beatdown.

Here’s the thing, though. Right then, that turn of events seemed like bad news, but how could I know for sure? There have been innumerable instances in my life when something happened that seemed at the time to be completely and utterly 100% shitty, only to eat my thoughts a week or two later when, through a shifty sequence of cause and effect, the original event somehow ends up benefitting me. This could be something as simple as a lousy night at a bar leading me to write some killer stand up material, or it can be far more elaborate, with a legitimately great turn of luck befalling me as a clear (if indirect and scattered and complex) result of my previous misfortune.

This has happened to me many, many times. It has happened in my personal life, in my professional life, and I must admit, there have been times when I’ve sat back and marveled at how perfectly everything worked out. Times when I’ve admitted that I really have no idea how the world works, and times where the thought cross my mind that maybe there is more to this life than dumb chance, that the way all these pieces fit together was just too perfect and too ironic for it to be a total coincidence, that maybe, just maybe, there is someone or something out there that’s watching over me. Is that so hard to believe? And yes, indeed, the times that I’ve considered this have invariably left my smiling, feeling blessed and comforted and (most importantly) absolved of any and all responsibility in my own destiny. It must be nice to be devoutly religious- you would feel that blameless all the time. You aren’t writing your own story, it’s being written for you! I can definitely see the appeal.

The thing is, though, if I believe in this, then I sort of have to believe in the reverse. I have to believe that when things don’t go my way – either in a single moment or in a grand sequence of connected events – it’s not dumb luck but rather the hand of fate choosing to slap me across the face. And I never think like that, really- if the thought enters my mind that vast, conspiratorial forces are out to destroy me, as it briefly last Thursday morning during that cursed bus-ride from the airport, it only takes a few seconds for every logical and rational part of me to shut that down. We’re talking here about the exact same thing, yet in one instance I find it so much easier to believe than in the other. And I’m not even that optimistic, generally speaking.

THE ACTUAL TRIP

Whew. After all this talk, it seems like any description of the actual vacation is going to a major anticlimax, but let’s try it anyway.

I ended up catching a plane out on Friday morning and arrived in Evanston at 2 in the afternoon. And I have to say that the next day in the airport was one of the most pleasant travel experiences of my life. I do think this is mostly based on my own perception: as I said before, usually when traveling the only thing on your mind is the eventual destination. However, on Saturday I wasn’t even sure if I would get out of NYC at all, and thus, the airport became the whole thing. I didn’t wake up in the morning groggy and depressed, but I jumped out of bed, anxious to go, knowing full well that the sooner I arrived at the airport, the better a chance I would have at catching an earlier flight. I had a newfound singularity of purpose, and, as such, my experience at the airport was heightened in my own mind. And it was a success!

Basically, it’s all perception. Storytelling is a form of perception, but that’s only half of what I’m talking about. There are certain events we experience that are objectively good or bad, certainly; a wedding is good, a funeral is bad, etc. But the vast majority of our human experience is defined, I believe, by what is happening inside our minds. If I’m running late for an important appointment and I’m forced to sprint through the streets, I find the experience absolutely miserable. If I’m running at the gym after a stressful day, hip-hop music blasting in my ears, then the exact same physical actions adopt an entirely new meaning. I grimace spending money on overpriced drinks one night, but once I arrived in O’Hare last Saturday I was more than happy to spend the same amount on a cab to Evanston, the prospect of recapturing my lost weekend dancing through my mind. But then, if all those drinks I buy end up getting me laid, I’m far more likely to look back on that night as money well spent. But let’s not talk about what happens in the future affecting what happens in the present, we already covered that, sort of. At this point, I’m trying to just talk about life, moment-by-moment, ignoring those pesky issues of causation and storytelling (though of course I am actively storytelling as I write this, but let’s not get into that, I’m on the verge of a headache as it is).

I ended up arriving at old Ridge and Davis around 2:00 PM, feeling as I stepped out of that cab a wave of unadulterated joy – the trip was back on! The perfect narrative was salvaged! This would end up being the purest happiness I would feel during the whole visit. That isn’t to say that I didn’t have a good time in Evanston (I most definitely did), but with a two-day long visit reduced to a meager fifteen hours, the entire thing was so fast and frenetic it was impossible to ever really sit back and feel, well, anything. There was just this constant forward-driving momentum, going from this place to that, seeing this person then that person, actively trying to cram as much fun and nostalgia into every second of the visit. This was also, I remind, my first time back to Northwestern since I graduated, so the emotional/psychological stakes were already pretty high before the whole thing was forced into hyperdrive.

Here’s what I can piece together. From the moment I arrived until I left, I was constantly in a state of doing something, and I was almost always in a heightened emotional state. I also spent about half of the trip really, really drunk. Thus, the overall story of my visit is a little muddled. All I can really remember are moments. I remember the feeling I got walking down Church street, sitting on the storied blue couches in my old living room, walking into the Louis Room and being greeted with pumping music and dancing drunks and a cut-out of that big ol’ Mee-Ow cat staring down at me. A hundred tiny memories flooded back into my mind and then disappeared just as quickly. I remember hugging so many people I became desensitized to the experience, saying five words to someone whom I hadn’t seen for ten months and will probably never see again (the latter occurred countless times, particularly at the show). I remember watching the final Mee-Ow show of the year with a big, goofy grin on my face, feeling the energy of the room flowing all around me, before being yanked out of the whole experience with the sudden sharp realization that I may never, ever perform in front of this kind of audience again in my lifetime.

You can’t go home again. It’s a clichéd phrase, but, as is the case with almost every cliché, it’s true. What that phrasing doesn’t really show you is that you almost never comprehend what “home” is until it’s gone (but then, that’s a whole different cliché thrown into the mix). It was fun to be back at school, but the feeling that hit me more powerfully than anything else was that things just plain weren’t the same. Walking around Evanston, watching a show, partying at my old apartment, all these things that I’ve done a thousand times over the last four years just felt drastically, inexplicably different. And being there for the last Mee-Ow show of the year, seeing some of my closest friends undergo that familiar realization that the party is almost over, well, the whole trip was pretty bittersweet. Over the last six months there were more than a few times that I dreamed of going back to college, that I thought of my times there in a foggy romanticized light and wished to return. But this trip showed me, conclusively, beyond a doubt, that I can never return. That even when I do return, I’m not really back. And, you know, I was surprisingly okay with that.

But then I went home to California for a week and felt the exact same parental dynamics instantly resurface, saw old friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year and felt like it hadn’t been a week, and felt, oddly, unexpectedly, just a little bit like I was back home. Which is funny, because I remember having these same melancholy thoughts back during freshman year, when college was the big, scary thing, and I longed to return to an Oak Park that no longer existed.

You can never go home again. The problem with that statement, really, is how vague it is. What does home mean? What has it ever meant?

Maybe it just means people.

I Guess It Was Beautiful

For the past week, my life has more or less revolved around trips to the gym. This is not because I have undergone a radical personality shift and become a thick, veiny musclehead. It’s much more a case of external factors. You see, last October it was my birthday, and I received a very exciting and creative gift: a weeklong pass to Equinox, a very elite, fancy, expensive New York health clubs. Now, months later, I’ve finally gotten around to using it. With only a scant week to explore this bizarre Heaven on Earth, I made it my mission to go every day.

I can’t even count the differences between this gym and the local, 30-bucks-a-month, overheated one-room joint right up the street (my whole apartment patronizes this place, and it has a certain rough charm all it’s own, but even the happiest pauper dreams of a day as King). Just to compare: the neighborhood gym doesn’t have any free hand towels. Equinox has a mini-fridge of chilled, Eucalyptus-scented towels next to the treadmills, solely to refresh yourself directly after your run. Other Equinox perks include the most intense steam room I’e ever encountered, and two studios with all kinds of crazy classes (during my week I managed to take a class called “gentle healing yoga” that made me feel generally more tense, and something called Feldenkrais that involved lying flat on the ground for an hour and very slowly rotating my pelvis). It’s also spacious and well-ventilated, both of which I now consider a luxury in my gym-going life.

But really, the difference is something much deeper, a sort of gut feeling that’s difficult to translate. Walking around this grand club, feeling every bit like I own the whole damn place (as I’m sure every single other member feels, subconsciously or otherwise), it becomes an escape, a sort of concrete oasis. During this past week, an uber-honeymoon period if there ever was one,I never really felt like I was going to this gym to work out (an activity I normally despise). I was going there to be a member of the elite, to take an invigorating tour of my proudest possession and then relax with a long steam, basking in the thick, wet lap of luxury, dehydration and discomfort a footnote in the foreground.

The one uncouth thing about these week-long gym trials (and let me tell you, this is not my first) is that they always require a preliminary meeting with some membership person. During these meetings I have to act as though I am actively considering joining the gym. My actual plans, of course, are to never set foot in each place again, and to steal as many towels as I can in the process. When I pulled a similar con at the brightly-colored, granola-scented CRUNCH earlier this year, I had no real qualms lying through my teeth to the guy there, an aggressive fella with one of those smiles that look like it’s being held tight with a system of pulleys. But, in a piece of bitter irony, my Equinox advisor was a very charming. I felt bad lying to her, letting her show me around the gym when I knew that it was all in vain. Still, I did it.

It’s very easy to lie nowadays. Granted, I’ve never lived in any other time period (as far as I know), but this strikes me as a moment in history where casual lying has been fully embraced by the mainstream. Honestly, can you think of a time when lying was so accepted, so easy, and occupied such a moral gray area (rather than the more severe black area that lying finds itself in every now and then).

I think a big part of this is the sheer amount of control people are able to exert over their own image. Whether we like it or not (and trust me, I don’t like it), a great deal of social interaction nowadays happens online. And with the sheer prevalence of venues – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, blogs, Myspace or Friendster for the coolest guys in the room – people are able to manipulate and mold their online entity to their liking, crafting an unreal, idealized version of themselves. It’s almost like everyone I know is constantly performing a live, improvisatory solo show about their day-to-day lives, as they live them. In case it’s not obvious, I don’t exclude myself from all this. I mean, for God’s sake, I’m at this very instant writing a blog (I don’t like that word) that I will present for public consumption on the internet (and, given the brand new location, I will likely advertise this re-launch all over my other online identities).

And of course, the unspoken truth in these public forums is just how easy it is to lie. As we move into the future, I believe firmly that it will become easier and easier for everyone on the planet to communicate and interact with one another, and I believe just as firmly that, as this happens, our capabilities as human beings to really know one another will slowly dissipate into thin air. Obviously this is a pretty vast, dystopian generalization, and there will always be certain people, close friends and family, that know each other deeply. But for the vast majority, those swarms of thumbnails smiling at me several times a day, do I really know any of them? By sitting there, reading these words, do you really know me?

But that’s just my little rant about social networking as the downfall of humanity. I do think that the issue of lying in the modern world is very muddled by any definition, and that there has been some sort of seismic shift in public perception. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I’m getting older. Back when I was in High School writing up my resume for college applications, I had it drilled into my head that if I exaggerated about a single thing, if I miswrote a single test score, the powerful nameless authorities would figure it out and make it their mission to destroy each and every one of my dreams. Then last summer, when I was once putting together my resume(s) for the job hunt, I can’t count the number of times I heard people talk about the process and say that “everybody lies.” I don’t have any blatant lies on my resume, but I certainly make one or two things I’ve done sound a bit more exciting or dynamic than they were. I’ve certainly called myself proficient in Microsoft Office applications that I barely understand. And I’ve certainly taken a moment to collect my thoughts during an interview, and then proceeded to lean forward in my chair and talk about a Great Life Experience that may or may not have ever happened. Does any of this surprise any of you?

Back when I was first moving out here I had an idea that if I couldn’t find a decent job I would create an almost entirely fictional resume filled with cooking experience, and then try and get a gig as a line cook at some restaurant. It would be a whole show: I wasn’t going to invent any kind of fake education (a theatre and writing degree seems as auspicious a start to a cooking career as any), but I would make up restaurant names, make up stories to tell at the interview, ask a friend if I could put him as a reference and tell him to pretend he’s a classically trained Executive Chef when they call. I considered this plan a couple of times (and if I lose my current job, who knows, maybe I’ll consider it again), but I never followed through. But what always stopped me was the lingering fear that my Food Network-trained slophouse cooking wouldn’t cut it in a real kitchen, and if I actually managed to get hired it would be an exhausting humiliation.  It was always fear that stopped me. The moral issue never even crossed my mind.

Lies also strike me as much more accepted. I can’t say by who, exactly, but it exists in a sort of generalized, mainstream, difficult-to-pin-down-but-definitely-real kind of way. Jobs like lawyers and politicians, the kind of illustrious careers that parents dream about for their kids, have been portrayed in entertainment and the media as deceitful and backstabbing so many times by now they’ve become worn clichés. A friend of mine who works for a surveying company recently told me that his entire job is about rewording and manipulating questions in order to find the results they want. The truth isn’t even an issue, it’s all about perception.

Thinking about myself, personally, it just strikes me as much too easy to lie about very significant things. One of the biggest events that has happened to me since I moved to New York was a production of my crazy serial killer play at a real, live NYC theater. But what’s to stop me from just telling someone that I had another production, in addition to that one? To take all the hard work and sweat that went into that show, and then multiply it in retrospect, free of charge? Audience members don’t come in to testify that they saw some show four months ago. When I visit home in a few weeks, I could easily tell people I meet that I’ve had several major productions in New York, that I do stand up comedy on the weekends at all the major clubs, that I have a new girlfriend from South America who’s a Yoga instructor. And hell, if I meet someone brand new, then all bets are off. Maybe I’m an investment banker. Maybe I’m going to med school at Columbia. Maybe my father was a close associate of John D. Rockefeller and I spend my days asleep and my nights at the hottest clubs in the city. And twenty years from now, looking back on this, how much will any of that matter? How many of the details will I even remember? It’d be very easy for me to lie about when I was six years old; I can barely remember any of it.

Again, this whole rant, it could all just be me. It could all be a feeble attempt to justify my own crumbling code of ethics (I’ve also been stealing alot lately, but it’s only ever books, so I consider that more a weird personality quirk than criminal activity).  But I dunno. I just feel like there’s something more at work.

The title of this entry, by the way, is a direct quote from a 65-year-old Dominican man whom I spoke with for awhile a couple weeks ago. We met on a Saturday night, something like 2 A.M., in a tiny, punk-rock themed dive bar in the East Village. It was a strange conversation; he was most definitely hitting on me, which I didn’t want to encourage, yet the guy was so interesting I also wanted to keep on talking with him. When he told me that he had lived in New York since the early sixties, I asked him what the city was like back then. I remember this question, because it was one of the few moments in our conversation where he took a pause and seemed to really consider what to say. “I guess it was beautiful,” he finally said, closing his eyes and thinking back to some granular moment in time that nobody else will ever know. Then, after a few seconds, he looked at me and smiled. “But who can remember?”

Eyes Wide, Mouth Low

I like to read. In the last year I’ve read over thirty books, and started a great deal more. Because books requires so much more of a time commitment than any other form of entertainment, it’s very easy for me to jump ship. Just a couple weeks ago I started reading Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, absolutely loved it at the beginning, read 290 pages in (that’s about four fifths done), and thought it got so stupid that I just stopped reading, and I’m not sure when I’ll pick it up again. So just to finish a book is a testament to it’s quality. Now I present my top five favorite books from the last year (note: this are just books that I read in 2009, not necessarily books that came out in 2009; there is one 2009 release on my list, and it’s actually in the number one slot, but the other selections run the gamut.

In case anyone is curious about my movie pics, I didn’t feel compelled to make a list because there were so many releases I didn’t see, but my favorites of the year were The Hurt Locker and Fantastic Mr. Fox, two vastly different releases that both provoked very strong, visceral reactions in me. I can’t think of any other movies that kept me so completely engaged, physically as well as mentally- watching the Hurt Locker I was shifting in my seat, sweating, gasping… for most of the movie, I had half of my own shirt in my mouth. Mr. Fox, meanwhile, slapped a permanent, goofy grin on my face. When it comes down to it, all of my favorite movies are the ones that cause these kind of uncontrollable physical reactions. Any other considerations come after that.

Looking over my final list, it’s an interesting assortment. The selections run pretty dark, as does my taste, but they’re also pretty dense. Several of the choices are among the most difficult reads I’ve had all year. It could just be because the harder reads left me with more to think/write about (there are several books that could just as easily secured the number five spot, but I read Blood Meridian recently, so it was fresh in my mind and I wanted to write about it). Maybe I’m just getting to be more of a prick in my older years, and I find that if a book isn’t a tough nut to crack, then it isn’t worth reading.

Without any further ado’s, here are my five favorite books I read in 2009:

5. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work” – Judge Holden

I find it funny that Cormac McCarthy, a notoriously private, seventy-something novelist who writes uncompromisingly dense books about mankind’s capacity for unspeakable evil, has suddenly become the “It” Author in America. This new level of fame began with No Country for Old Men (more due to the uber-faithful adaptation by the Coen Bros than the book itself, which is generally regarded as a minor work), but then went into hyperdrive when he released The Road, a short, incredibly sad novel about a father and son traveling through the apocalypse that deservedly won the Pulitizer Prize, and has since been endorsed by Oprah, made into a pretty good movie, and become the most translated book since The Bible. I read The Road last year, and it’s incredible. If you’ve never read a Cormac McCarthy book, start there. It’s a fairly easy read, it’s short, and the horrors (of which there are plenty) are counterbalanced with lots of moments of sweetness and compassion and genuine beauty. It’s a hard book not to like.

The same can not be said for Blood Meridian, Cormac’s breakthrough novel from 1985, and a different beast altogether. While his elevated writing style remains consistent throughout his career, whereas The Road is a perfect introductory look at McCarthy, this is the hard-hitting advanced course. Blood Meridian tells the nightmarish story of a group of Scalphunters heading West in the early 1800’s. That is, people who’s occupation consists of murdering Indians, scalping them, and selling those scalps to the local government. The writing in the book is often breathtakingly beautiful, even as each scene is more unbelievably violent than the one before. It is about a group of men who’s entire life, day-in and day-out, consists of murder, a constant, unrelenting stream of violence that has twisted them into something truly inhuman. The leader of the bloodthirsty army, an outsized presence named Judge Holden, has been described by the literary critic Harold Bloom as “the most frightening figure in all of American literature.” That’s a very heavy claim, and it’s hard to gauge how frightening a character is, as fear is such a subjective and deeply personal sensation. I would, however, go as far as to say that the Judge is one of the most fully-imagined and absolutely compelling villains I have ever encountered, in any medium. I don’t want to say anything more, as the character’s nature is very slowly and meticulously revealed over the course of the book. But needless to say, we are talking about a very, very, very bad man.

The violence in this book is truly horrifying; the only book I can think of that operates on the same level is American Psycho, but the violence in that (also brilliant) novel comes in short, concentrated, incredibly disturbing bursts. In Blood Meridian brutality is a constant. Which of the two is more unsettling is a topic for debate (a very upsetting debate, but debate nonetheless).

This is not a book for everyone. It starts off pretty slow (most of the main characters, besides the protagonist, don’t even show up until about a hundred pages in), there isn’t much in the way of a traditional plot, and I can think of a number of friends who would be instantly put off by the book, either the graphic violence or the purple prose. And it does take a good deal of concentration to read (much moreso than The Road, which holds McCarthy’s same lofty style but is composed entirely of really short paragraphs and reads more like a long prose poem than a novel proper). But if you’re up for the gauntlet and don’t mind delving into some murky waters, give this book a shot. I honestly can’t stop thinking about it. And I also can’t name many other books where you can literally open to any page (any page) and read a turn of phrase that knocks the wind right out of you. McCarthy is truly a master of wrenching poetry out of the hideous. Which, in all honesty, I find a lot more interesting than someone finding poetry in flowers or sunsets or any of that sappy shit.

4. Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.”

In general, I’m not a huge fan of nonfiction. I appreciate it, and know how difficult it is to making it compelling (just look at this blog, if you aren’t already fast asleep), but I’ve always found it much, much harder to get hooked into a nonfiction book. Fiction has always felt more fun to me; nonfiction is more formal, staunch, a representative of education and homework and Reading for Information rather than Reading for Pleasure. Maybe part of the problem is my own psychological mindset. In any case, when a nonfiction book really compels me, then it must be something special. This year I found two books that I think, in their separate ways, represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in journalistic writing. One of them is We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (see Honorable Mentions), an absolutely shattering account of the early-90’s genocide in Rwanda. It’s a brilliant book, and what makes it work is Gourevitch’s voice, which manages to be deeply empathetic and relatable, while at the same time incredibly informed and eloquent. Basically, he sounds like a good guy – nice, funny– who also happens to be incredibly intelligent and perceptive about the world around him. It’s a tough book to read, but it’s absolutely worth it.

But that’s neither here nor there. That book didn’t make this list. What did was Consider the Lobster, a bravura collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. I’d dabbled in DFW’s work before and always liked it, but he also always seemed a little dense and intimidating to me (much like Cormac McCarthy, oddly enough). Then this year I read an incredible profile of him that ran in Rolling Stone right after his suicide, and I resolved myself to read more of his work. I’ve now completed both of his nonfiction collections (the first, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, contains a couple of his best and funniest essays, but overall I think Consider the Lobster is stronger). In this collection Wallace writes about a vast range of topics, but his real subject all along is what it is like to be alive today, in this batshit crazy world we live in. There are lots of things I could say about Foster’s writing, but nothing can do it justice. The man can literally make any topic compelling. The one thing I really discovered about him this year, though, is how funny he is. Yes, his style is extremely dense, and yes, he is prone to go off on lots of hyper-intellectual tangents and he layers footnotes on top of footnotes until the font is so small you practially need a microscope to read it, but you go along with him the whole way because the guy is so unbelievably fucking funny.

When he’s writing about an ostensibly funny topic (one of the essays deals with his trip to Las Vegas to attend the Adult Video Awards) the humor comes in effortless waves, but it’s the times when it emerges unexpectedly that really got me. Get this: While reading this book I laughed out loud – let me repeat, that’s me laughing out loud while reading a book – at an essay about linguistics. Let me repeat that: linguistics. Yes, this man can make a fifty page essay on the history and nature of word usage not only compelling, but bend-over, laugh-until-you’re-red hysterical. I know, you probably don’t believe me. Neither would I if I’d never read this work. Truly one of the greatest minds of the last hundred years. Next up: Infinite Jest.

3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

“As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I have a fuku story too. I wish I could say it was the best of the lot – fuku number one – but I can’t. Mine ain’t the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that’s got it’s fingers around my throat.”

I’m going to start grouping this book with Confederacy of Dunces (one of my all time favorites) under the moniker of Great Literature About Grotesquely Overweight Nerds. The central character of this kaleidoscopic book is Oscar De Leon, a Dominican Male who subverts every single masculine/virile archetype of his heritage. Oscar is fat, nervous, and socially awkward in the most horrible, pervasive, life-crippling definition of the word. His greatest passion is Genre and Fantasy, because it allows his imagination to escape from the barren realities of his world.

The book isn’t just about Oscar though, not by a long shot. It tells the multi-generational story of his entire family. There are sections about his mother growing up in the Dominican Republic under the almost unbelievably awful dictatorship of Trujillo. There are sections about his sister, trying to fuse her own identity. The narrator, writing in a baroque, massively entertaining Spanglish, even becomes a character in the story later on. Still, the central axis around which the rest of the narrative spins has to be Oscar himself, who could be the “loser” character in any number of goofball Frathouse comedies, yet who also manages to be a deeply tragic, almost Shakespearean figure. This is the only book on my list that I would recommend unequivocally to absolutely anyone. It’s so fun to read, yet has enough thematic heft to please any level of pretension. It has violence and grit, yet it’s also deeply romantic. And if the only thing you ever read is cheesy sci-fi, well, it’s got plenty for you too!

There are so many different levels to this book, it really is astonishing how perfectly they all fit together, how it tells ten different stories at once yet it effortlessly meshes into a singular, complete work. It’s both deeply tragic and full of slapdash, low-brow humor. It quotes from The Fantastic Four and Derek Walcott. In terms of a shifting, complex plot, you really can’t beat my number two choice, but this book is certainly the most thematically adventurous on my list, walking an incredible tight rope throughout and jumping from one character to another, from one time period to another, from one thing to another until, somehow, it becomes about everything.

2. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

“She was right. The Master of the Universe was cheap, and he was rotten, and he was a liar.”

A classic, epochal book from the 80’s about an unassuming investment banker and the vast, hierarchal forces that destroy him. I will say up front that Wolfe, as a prose stylist, is not the most elegant guy in the shop. This is a big, fat book, one that aspires from it’s opening pages to greatness, and Wolfe lays it on pretty thick: lots of excitable words, lots of exclamation points. But you don’t read Tom Wolfe for the poetry. This book features about twenty characters on all different levels of social and economic hierarchies, and it’s incredibly elaborate, perfectly calibrated plot shows how all these different people affect one another, how power dynamics subvert themselves, and how insignificant issues of vanity and jealousy can lead to cataclysmic, destructive effects.

I would go as far as to say that this book, thematically, is the closest thing I’ve read to The Wire, the greatest television show ever made and my personal lord and savior. But where The Wire is deathly serious, Bonfire is a crazed, rollicking satire, full of elaborate comic set pieces and outrageous characters. More than anything, this book is just an absolute blast to read: it’s about eight hundred pages and I tore through it in less than a week. Every time I got on the subway I was literally itching to pull it out and read. It’s not that often that I find myself so unstoppably addicted to a book, and it’s always a great pleasure when it happens. Also, the book is all about New York City, which is certainly an added perk at this time in my life.

Also, extra points for one of my favorite titles ever.

1. Say You’re One of Them – Uwem Akpan

” “Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids.”

Here we go again. Now, after getting Oprah’s sanctified seal of approval, this book and it’s unassuming author (a Jesuit Priest from Nigeria who does a little writing on the side) have become media darlings, deeply embedded in the popular culture of the moment, and placing it at the top of the list seems about as original as some wannabe intellectual saying that they loved reading Salinger and Fitzgerald in High School, but always found Hemingway a bit dull.

But let me explain: I read this book on a friend’s reccomendation last summer, before any of that jazz. I read it over the course of four days, and when I put it down at the end, shaken and exhausted and ready for a stiff drink, I thought to myself that this will be the best book I read all year. Six months later, it’s still true, and I certainly won’t bend because of my desperate desire to seem edgy. This exact same thing happened with me with The Corrections, Johnathan Franzen’s demented family saga that I tore through a few years ago and then watched as it was also anointed by our lady Oprah, and also became a temporary media sensation. This isn’t to say that a book being chosen for her book club means it’s bad (quite the contrary, if these two serve as our examples), but it does attach a certain stigma among young, hipness-minded literari who wear vests over their t-shirts. I’ve had a hard time convincing at least one friend to read Say You’re One of Them because of her. Johnathan Franzen also understands this unfortunate trend, as he came out in opposition to The Corrections being placed in Oprah’s clubhouse / jail and was (I’d argue unfairly) ripped to shreds by the media (On the other hand, I’ve read and seen some interviews with Franzen that make him seem like a bit of a prick. But then, on the other, third hand, he’s a genius so who the hell cares? I feel like I already wrote about this…)

But we’re getting off-topic. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing I really want to say about this book. It’s so brilliantly written, so unique, so completely and utterly devastating, that nothing I write will come close to approximating the experience of reading it. Here’s the basics: it’s three short stories and two novella’s. Each is written about a different region of Africa, and all but one center around children. It has the unmistakable power of actuality, which comes from the author’s intensely personal familiarity with his subjects. The dialogue, a mixture of English and Africana, is poetic and gritty and is like nothing you’ve ever read. The characters captivate and shock you. The prose is written like a dream. I think at core the reason any of us read any books (or really, watch any movies or TV shows, listen to any music, play any videogames…) is the desire to be transported to a new place, to inhabit somewhere wholly different from our reality. This book took me to a place I’ve never been before with an incredible, all-consuming clarity. Read this. It’s magic.

Where She Glows Like a Grain on the Flickering Pane

Here’s a story:

Friday, November 20 – 3:00 A.M.

Through various circumstances, I find myself alone, riding uptown on the subway, positively drunk as a skunk. I’m feeling woozy, sleepy, leaning against the shaky door as we slowly climb towards 137^th street. I’m thinking about the past evening, one of those very long, winding, multi-tiered nights with several cleanly deviated chapters (bound together only be the residual alcohol in my blood from one location to the next).

There is a young lady standing next to me. This is not to say that I noticed her while I was riding- I was too consumed with my own thoughts, as well as the ebb and flow of the train itself. However, at a certain point, she initiates a conversation. I don’t remember too much about it, but I believe she was from The Dominican Republic (with an accent to prove it), hoping to attend Columbia to get her masters in something (don’t ask me what), and lives up around 171^st and Broadway, a few stops past me. I do recall that her age was a bit of a mystery, even then. She could have been twenty-five or she could have been thirty-five, it was hard to tell. In any case, we talked on the train for awhile (for the most part, I believe, she talked; I nodded and tried my best to stay awake and disguise my slovenly state). Then, at the very end of the train ride, right as we were pulling into my station, I asked for her phone number. This ranks as just about the ballsiest thing I have ever done, and as I stumbled home I was exceedingly proud of myself.

I should try and clarify why this was such a momentous event for me. In all my life, every girl that I’ve ever dated (that vast, untold sum) has been someone who I knew, previously, as a friend. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I would say that this applies to not just any girl I’ve ever dated, but any girl that I’ve ever done anything with (besides, you know, sit next to on a couch and talk about Wes Anderson movies). For a time I was under the impression that this was just the way of the world, that a gestation period was a necessary component for me when it came to any kind of seduction (if seduction is the right term for this arduous process, defined more by perseverance and gamesmanship than anything resembling charm).

Lately I’ve started to reconsider this stance. This idea that I can’t be considered romantically until I’ve been accepted platonically is born out of the kind of crippling low self-esteem that plagued me for years. When I was younger, the idea that any girl would ever consider me attractive was completely absurd. I approached even the most meager gestures (walking side-by-side to the lunch tables, asking for a dance, etc) as though I was waging war against insurmountable odds. The idea that a girl I liked could feel the same way about me, could look at me and see any semblance of the same thing that I saw when I looked at her, was completely out of my frame of reference, as wholly unbelievable as any fairy tale. I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

Needless to say, this was not a particularly healthy way to live. I knew it then, and I certainly know it now. In recent years I’ve been making a concerted effort to obliterate every trace of this twisted self-image. I’d hardly call myself the most confident guy in town, but I’ve made a lot of progress.

I’m funny. I’m smart. I make a good first impression. Why can’t I just meet a girl and sweep her off her feet, straight away? And here we have the genuine article, a perfect New York moment, a meeting of like spirits on that soothing underground love boat, the Number 1 Train! Plus, I was a drunken mess, exhausted, rambling, coated with the sweat and grime of my night. If I can successfully seduce a woman then, perhaps even one that’s ten years older than me, then the sky is the limit!

So, that is why I was so excited about receiving this number. Here’s what happened next.

The Weekend

What I didn’t count on during that blissful, mildly nauseous stumble home was the next task at hand. I had to actually make the phone call.

Calling for a date in any capacity is always a nerve-wracking proposition for me. In this day and age of hypercommunication, a phone call remains the most daunting option. None of the reassurance and comfort that comes with being face-to-face, but none of the organized strategizing that’s afforded in front of a computer screen. It’s just you and that other voice, present yet obscured, suspended in the air.

On top of that, this call had several other uneasy factors at work. Our meeting on the subway had been so bizarre. Will she even remember giving me the number? Did she give it to me as a joke? Was she anywhere near as drunk as me? And beyond that, I knew absolutely nothing about her. Every aspect of our subway conversation, from her looks to her age to whatever the hell it was we talked about for twenty minutes, was pretty much lost in the haze. The image of her in my mind became stretched and contorted beyond recognition, to the point that I started to wonder if I would be able to identify her at a restaurant.

Maybe this wasn’t me. Maybe obtaining the number was the whole thin. In this case, the number was the goal. There was no point pushing my luck any further.

But no! That would be the same thing, the same cowardly behavior that traces back to those days on the Middle School playground. The times when every time a girl locked eyes with me my stomach started churning. I should call her! Take a risk! Be that guy! You know the kind I’m talking about. Those guys. The golden boys who can talk to anyone and anything, who spent their teenage years with a surplus of girlfriends and pool parties and riding in the backseat of jeeps with iced beers in their hands, rock music pouring out the open windows, feeling the wind against their face as they screamed to the sky in exultant cries of youth, beauty, freedom.

Monday night, I decided to call her.

Monday, November 23 – 7:30 P.M.

After pacing around my room for about twenty minutes, an experience horribly reminiscent of High School, I dialed the number.

It rang. Maybe it’ll go to voicemail, I thought. Rang again. If it went to voicemail, I could leave a message. Ring. Or even better, I could hang up and then text her! Ring. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Texting right off the bat seemed like the wrong move, especially if she’s older, but if I’ve already made a conscious attempt to call her and it goes to voicemail, then it would be completely appropriate for me to text! Ring. Oh man, that would be great, I wouldn’t have to pronounce her name!!

I heard the familiar click of a phone going to voicemail, and instantly felt waves of relief wash over me. Yes, I was feeling mighty good, for a whole two or three seconds. Then the actual voicemail came on. It was a man. A man with a very thick accent. I could barely understand what he was saying, but he sounded older. Definitely older. Certainly old enough to kick my ass, probably even old enough to kill me

I hang up. My heart is still beating pretty hard, and I’m confused and disappointed and relieved and, perhaps more than anything else, desperate to tell someone. Mike is home, so I let him know what happened. He asks, reasonably, what the message said. I tell him that I didn’t really pay attention. I ascertained that it was a male voice, and then hung up. But maybe this was a mistake. Mike assures me that it was definitely a mistake. Who knows what the voicemail actually said? It could have been anything!

Hi, this is Tony, you might not recognize my voice, but that’s because I’ve been through some sort of really awful tragedy and lost everything that matters to me, and now my really generous sister has allowed me to live with her and use her phone. She is also available and extremely attractive, even in the sober light of day. Leave a message.

After a very short deliberation, I decide to call again, this time putting it on speakerphone. That way, Mike and I can both listen to the message (after all, four ears and two brains are better than two and one, especially if the latter combination belongs to me). I call again. Put it on speakerphone. It rings a few times.

Then she answers.

Hello? I turn to Mike with a look of sheer horror. Hello? Answer it, Mike mouths to me, his arms in the air. Hello? I look to the phone as though it’s a ticking bomb, then back to Mike. His eyes are big and white and he looks ready to burst. Hello?

Hi, is this Katarina? I turn off speakerphone and yank the device to my ear. I throw out one possible pronunciation of her name, caution already in the wind. Hi this is Joel, we met the other night on the subway. It sounds so trite when I say it. But at the same time, my breathing has suddenly steadied itself. I’m talking calmly, confidently. Something has changed. In the old days, I would be shaking like a goose in preparation for calling a girl, but then it was the actual phone call that really tortured me. Pacing around the room, sweating, regretting everything I said the moment after I said it. I had been nervous as hell right before making the call, nervous in a way that really felt like High School, but now I was doing fine, hell, better than fine!

Oh Joel yes how are you? She laughs as she says it, clearly surprised that I called. Her accent is also a lot thicker than I remembered it. No wonder the details of our conversation on Friday night had been so foggy. She’s hard enough to understand without any alcohol. Images of us our dinner flood into my mind; every sentence she utters punctuated by a sharp “WHAT?” from me as I lean forward, cup my ear, and perform every other stupid perfunctory gesture to try and make it seem like the issue at hand is volume and not, in reality…

Well Katarina, I don’t usually do this, but I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with me sometime? Not bad, not bad. I shouldn’t have said “I don’t usually do this.” That’s such a cliché, makes me seem unsure and weak. But other than that, I kept my voice steady, I didn’t garble any words or stutter or go up into a creaky falsetto on accident. I said it, the band aid was off.

Ok! She says. Why not?

There it is. Why not. She says this, and I pump my fist, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in these kinds of situations. But in reality, inside, I don’t feel especially happy. I feel uneasy. All that nervous energy and anxiety I had right before the phone call starts to come back. I still won’t be able to recognize her, I think to myself. And now I know for a fact I won’t be able to understand her. And there was a man at the end of her voicemail. And for God’s sake, she’s probably forty-five years old and married with a big family!

We talk for another thirty-forty seconds. She tells me that she’s at a bar with friends from the Dominican Republic, information that I didn’t ask for, so for a moment I’m terrified that she’s inviting me to meet her there. I try to set a night for the date (because at this point I am committed, the sweat caked my forehead notwithstanding). She says she’ll call me tomorrow. I hang up the phone. That’s that.

The Rest

I wish I could tell you that this story goes on and culminates, as it would if my life had any kind of solid dramatic construction, with the actual date. But this mysterious young- slash-old lady did not call me the next day, or the day after. And say what you will, but at this point I wasn’t going to reach out again.

I’m surprised that I wrung this much out of what, really, doesn’t amount to much of a story. Thinking back on it, though, it was definitely a memorable experience for me, at least psychologically speaking. I guess this is the closest thing to time travel that we have today, feeling like yourself eight years ago and yourself in an idyllic future and yourself today all in the span of a weekend. Sort of. Don’t think about that analogy too much, it starts to fall apart almost instantly.

What can I say? Maybe a good conclusion was just too much to hope for.

The Job Will Not Save You

I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving. I did this because I’m just about to start a new job, and I thought that I would have too much to do this week. Going home, it seemed to me, would complicate things needlessly. In retrospect, I could have gotten my work done very early in the week and easily gone home. In fact, it would have been a pretty ideal time. And if I had really wanted to find a way to go, if I had made any kind of concerted effort, then this would have been clear. But I never did. In this time in my life, when so many disparate bits are rotating around and I’m trying so hard to piece them together into something solid, finding a time to return to the nest registered at the very bottom of my list of priorities. I definitely understand why. Back in school, I never cared much about going home for thanksgiving- I did it every year, sure, but it always felt like an inconvenience more than anything else, a forced removal from Northwestern right in the midst of finals (and, often, a show) when in just another two weeks I would be home for a real vacation.

In case you can’t tell, I wish I had gone home. My time in New York City is reaching a breaking point, the moment when all the excitement of living here temporarily dissipates and I find myself feeling homesick and tired and wishing for nothing else but an escape. New York is an impossible place to get sick of, because for everything you see there are a hundred things you haven’t, but it’s certainly possible to get sick of my day-to-day life here.

I’ve always had a tough time adjusting to change. This is one of the few constants of my life. When my family moved across the country in eighth grade, I spent months and months in the same miserable routine: I would wake up, cry, go to school, hate my life, leave school, cry, and then spend the rest of my afternoon watching Food Network, often crying. During my first year at Northwestern, I considered transferring to another school about five thousand times. The primary reason I never pursued this option was sheer laziness (after applying to about sixteen schools during my senior year of High School, going through that heinous process again was truly a final, do-or-die scenario). And now here I am, somewhere new once again. The adjustment has not been nearly as painful as those in the past, but it’s still new, and it’s still scary, and lord knows it’s still exhausting. Going home would have been a good thing for me. I wish I had realized this earlier.

But then, maybe I’m just being sentimental. I think about an alternate reality, one where I spent the last week back in sunny Oak Park, CA, and (as alternate realities are prone to be), it is incredible. I see a bunch of old friends from High School, and they are so taken by my new sociability and confidence that they barely even recognize me (I’ve lost a bit of weight since High School as well). I passionately reconnect with everyone I’ve ever known, and all the different versions of myself, the current and the past, somehow come together in a magical confluence. I, for perhaps the first time in my life, know exactly who I am, and my destiny appears before me in perfect, startling clarity.

Maybe, in my wildest dreams, I would find a romantic connection with one of those miscellaneous pretty girls from my High School. Some girl who considered me only in vague, platonic terms (if she even considered me at all), but who, when confronted with this new, vibrant manifestation of myself, wouldn’t be able to control herself. We would spend every night of break ravaging each other, staining all my old hangouts with new, charged memories, and I would leave Oak Park with a freshly formed legend trailing in my wake. At the same time, I would have a fantastic weekend with my parents, their pure, unadulterated love reaffirming everything I’ve ever loved about myself. All of the doubts that have plagued me the last few months would be wiped away, disappearing like smoke in the wind, and I would return to New York re-energized, brimming with passion, seeing this great, sprawling city as if for the very first time.

And, on top of all this, I would have a great big thanksgiving dinner as well as several other good meals. I would also go shopping with my parents one day and have lots of things purchased for me, including several new pairs of pants, which would be greatly appreciated.

It’s a nice thought. But in reality, none of that would happen (except the pants). It would have been a pleasant, uneventful trip, just like pretty much every other Thanksgiving for the past four years. None of these grandiose ideas about would have even crossed my mind. It’s the fact that I didn’t go, the deviation from the norm, that has made the whole “Thanksgiving at Home” register in my mind as such a hallowed, rejuvenating tradition, and has, in turn, made me feel these waves of self-pity about missing it.

In any case, whatever the circumstance, whatever the ratio of reality to fantasy, intuition to imagination, I’ve been pretty depressed the last few days. Which is too bad, really, because I was on a pretty good streak for awhile there, last weekend being an especially pleasant combination of productivity and fun. There’s just a sort of emptiness I feel inside. Not all the time, certainly, but often enough that it merits attention. Of course I think about all the things that would help, that could fill this void- a trip home is the flavor of the moment, but just as often I think that I would feel better if I did more stand up, or if I exercised all the time, or if I had a clear schedule each day, or if I had a girl to wake up next to, or, barring that, a girl to call after the sun sets and smile through a conversation But the reality is, none of those things can change me. They all of these things pass through my mind, and then they all disappear. And I’m left, as always, with myself.

I don’t know what I want. Sometimes I think I just want to be back in school, to have some sort of structure grounding my life, some clear goals to work towards. Then I think I want to drop everything and do something crazy, live in Korea, ride a bike across America, something where I have absolutely nothing holding me to the earth. But see, even that life, with its complete lack of definition, is more clearly defined than the one I’m in now. Maybe that’s why I wanted to go home. Not because of some half-baked romantic ideas about carousing through Oak Park in the backseat of a Jeep with the guys I took AP Euro with or sitting down to dinner with my family and feeling warm inside, but because it would give my life, at least briefly, some real definition. Visiting my hometown feels nothing like it used to, but when I’m there at least I have a clear picture of who I am, where I am, what I’m doing. In that context, it makes sense. When I look at myself here, in New York, does it make any sense? But then, what am I even talking about? How can I make sense in one place and not make sense in another? Why do I always feel like I need to attach these labels, these fucking definitions to everything I do? That the only way I can ever be satisfied within is if I’m able to step back and cleanly analyze my life from afar?

Happy Thanksgiving, friends. I’ll feel better in a day or two. I always do.