To Washington and Back, Part 1

My diesel truck became known as the "tortuga" for no real reason other than "tortuga" is a fun word to say, especially if you can deliver it with a thick, dramatic spanish accent like something straight out of a telenovela. It took practice, of course, but we had practiced it plenty of times on drives to and from swimming workouts.  

True to its name, the tortuga didn't offer much in the way of acceleration, but it had a huge gas tank and could run forever or damn close to forever, especially after the transmission had been rebuilt. It was the first car I'd ever called my own and I loved the way it couldn't u-turn or fit in parking spaces downtown and how it sounded louder than other diesels for some reason.

But after close to thirty thousand miles together and plenty of repairs and fix-ups during, I knew it was time to part ways. I worried about the truck and if I could even sell it for a while and if I could if I even wanted to and then it all came together in ways that almost felt planned. My general manager needed a car to drive that could double as a vehicle for the bars and decided that he wanted to buy the truck immediately. I of course wanted to sell it. And then Dad had a truck he didn't drive often that he said I could use; a younger, faster gas-powered beauty, which Ryan and I quickly dubbed  the "tortuga negra" not for racial reasons but because the Ford is actually black. So I sold the tortuga and Kristin and I decided, at Dad's suggestions, that we would fly up to Washington DC to get the truck,  then drive back down together to Austin. Burn two bridges with one fire, as Kristin would say; not only take a nice break from real life as we drove across the country, but also dramatically improve my financial and vehicle situations. On second count, that's three burning bridges. 

So Kristin took time off school and I took time off work and we boarded a tiny plane and flew to Chicago and then we boarded a slightly larger plane and flew to Washington DC.  

On one of those flights was a woman whose arms were bigger than Kristin's legs, so I took a photo of her. When Kristin found out that I had secretly taken a photo of this woman, she gave me one of those looks that lets me know she's more than slightly disappointed. I shrugged and showed her the photo, pinching the screen to zoom in on the woman's arm.

We eventually arrived in Reagan airport and after we waited for Kristin's checked bag, Mom came and got us from the airport and took us the scenic way home so Kristin could see the monuments and what real DC looked like. 

We came in the house and dropped our bags and almost instantly a shepard's pie came out of the oven. Artists often leave a tiny signature of sorts in a bottom corner of their paintings to help ensure that they receive credit for their work (among other reasons). Dad butchered that same artistic principle and carved his initials into the center of the mashed potatoes in the hope of taking credit for making the pie itself. It was nice to see that not much had changed since I had last been home, not even my shamelessly oportunistic father. 

Though we have come to realize we are both annoyingly indecisive, Kristin and I decided to stay two nights in Washington, in part so Kristin could have a day walking around the monuments, but also so we could enjoy the dinners which always seems to involve salad and wine, which are things we have both decided we enjoy. 

We picked a perfect day to go sightseeing; warm but pleasant, with one quick burst of rain that didn't last long at all and didn't even really get us wet. We took our time, took a few photos as well, but the highlight for me was the wandering and the chatting and the holding hands.  All the memorials and monuments are within walking distance of one other, so Mom dropped us off by the Washington monument and Kristin and I looked at our photocopied map and made our way to each, stopping at one point to sit beneath a willow tree and look at the ducks at I used to feed as a little boy, though now there are signs that tell you not to feed them. 

 

A part of the World War II memorial is this wall of stars, where each star represents 100 men either killed or missing in action from WWII and in front of the wall/fountain, the words "FREEDOM ISN'T FREE" are carved. I looked at the wall for a while and finally decided that the all the neatly arranged stars missed the point, that somehow a gold star didn't do justice to the men it symbolized, that their lives were much more than a star and some phrase that's been said so often by every single presidential candidate for the last two decade that it doesn't really mean anything anymore or at the very least doesn't mean anything to me.

There is another wall yet to be built, though perhaps instead of stars they'll use flags and I can't help but wonder why we still fight when there is no mystery in how it all ends. And somewhere in all of this I think of those pictures of Lilly smiling at Jack and how much of a shame it is that all those stars and flags were men once and could be men still but they are dead now because freedom isn't free when all along they should have been at home watching their little sons and daughters discover that they could chew on their feet for the first time.

The Texas pillar at the WWII monument. Each state has its own. 

My personal favorite, the Korean Memorial. 

Pretty sure I tried to convince Kristin this was the Jefferson Memorial,
though she wasn't having much of it. 

Not bad for an iPhone photo, I thought. 

Lewis and I on the metro home.  

Eventually we both agreed that we'd seen enough history and memorials and that we really needed was some good scotch and wine so we took the metro back home, which Kristin thought was rather cool. I can't ever ride the metro without thinking of Joe, partly because Joe has all the stops on the red line memorized as well all the stops on a few of the other lines as well. I don't know why anyone would want to memorize those stops -- there are plenty of maps to remind you of all the stops -- but Joe knows them all by heart and if you knew my brother you'd know that it makes perfect sense for him to know something as useless as the order of metro stops of a city he doesn't live in anymore. 

We got back home and had one last dinner -- the barbecue -- and it was wonderful, simply wonderful. 

I had a lump in my throat when I said goodbye to Mom and Dad the next morning because if I had a choice I'd never say goodbye to them again; instead they'd live nearby and we could do this, the barbecues and the dinner conversations, as much as we wanted. 

As we found our way out of the city, I think Kristin could tell where my mind was because she squeezed my hand a few times and smiled but didn't say anything. The miles passed and we left DC behind and soon all that was really left was the music playing over the speakers and in the front seat was the girl who still makes my stomach drop and ahead the road stretched for as far as I could see, though I knew it went further than that. 

Why You Have The Time

“In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do;
it is not really the time but the will that is lacking.” – Sir John Lubbock. 

              What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for? Train and race a marathon? Learn how to play the piano? Write a screenplay? Be a better spouse? Consistently practice yoga? Finally read Crime and Punishment? Go grocery shopping and cook for yourself so you finally eat healthier?

              Take a second and think about what exactly it is you want to do, though my guess is that it won’t take you that long. My guess is you knew it the moment I asked, that you think about it almost daily.  

              All I ask is that you don’t forget it in the next few minutes. I’ll come back to it later.

              First, let’s break a week down. No matter how much time you think you do or do not have, everyone starts their week with 168 hours. Now let’s say you get a good 8 hours sleep every night. That leaves you with 112 unused hours in your week. You work 40 hours? Now you’ve got 72 hours left. An hour commute round-trip, five days a week leaves you with 67 hours. An hour for breakfast, an hour for lunch and another hour for dinner, seven days a week, leaves you with 46 hours.

At this point, you’ve covered the essentials; you’ve slept well, you’ve eaten well, and you’ve worked hard (I know some people work more than 40 hours a week, so feel free to adjust the math accordingly, but also remember you probably don’t allocate an hour for each meal) and after all that – after the work, the meals, the commute, the sleep -- you’ve got 46 hours that are yours.

So where do those 46 hours go? According to the Nielsen “Three Screen Report” from 2009, practically all of it goes in to watching television. The report found that the average American watches 151 hours of tv a month (so if we assume a 4 week month), that’s 37.75 hours spent in front of television a week, or 22% of the entire week. To think of it another way, if you watch that much television, your week effectively gets shortened from seven days to five-and-a-half days.

Now, after those 37.75 hours have been taken away, we’re only left with 8.25 hours in our week, and we haven’t even accounted for things like time spent on the internet or exercise or domestic chores like laundry. It’s easy to see how people who make time for television don’t have much time left for other things.

But maybe you read all that and thought to yourself that you watch tv, but you certainly don’t watch close to five and a half hours a day. Maybe you’re a sports fan, so you just watch two college football games on Saturday and a couple more pro games on Sunday. Given that on television the average football game takes three hours to watch, that’s twelve hours in front of a television right there. This is of course assuming you watch nothing else for the rest of the week besides those games (no endless re-runs of Sportscenter), and those games don’t take longer than expected due to lengthy injuries or overtime. Now spending twelve hours watching football isn’t a bad thing, but keep in mind that twelve hours a week is enough time to train for and eventually race a half-Ironman triathlon. Those same twelve hours could be divided between things like daily exercise, playing with your kids, taking language classes or even writing little articles about how to spend your time.  

It’s pretty clear that for almost all of us, it’s not a question of how much time we have as much as it is a question of how we spend that time. If you love watching television, that’s fine. But understand that it comes at a cost. By choosing to have time to watch things like Jersey Shore and Real Housewives and Glee, you are also choosing to not have time for other areas of your life.

                Remember what you thought of earlier? The thing you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for? If you turned off the television right now and never turned it back on, you would almost certainly have more than enough time for whatever it is that you wanted. You only need an hour a day to start your novel, thirty minutes three days a week to start an exercise program. It really is that simple.

So the next time somebody tells you they’re chasing a dream of theirs, don’t cheapen it by saying that “you’d love to do something like that, but you just don’t have the time.” We are all working with the same 168 hours. It’s just that some people turn off the tv and make time, while others leave it on and make excuses. Which one are you?

In Bed While It Rains

Kristin and I listened to the rain last night until we fell asleep. The rain began gently, so gentle that you wondered if it was actually raining at all or if that was some other sound, but soon enough the rain picked up and you knew that it was rain against the window and not the wind or somebody taking a shower in the house or anything else other than that sound water makes when it hits the roof and the house and the windows. It is always a beautiful thing to be in bed when it rains, even better to be holding hands and warm. I was all three.


We did not say much because the rain was enough. The sound of it filled the room, even more so when the thunder rumbled. My thoughts drifted as the rain fell and I found myself thinking about the last week at work and how much it had taken out of me and how tired I'd been some nights -- so tired one night that I nearly fell of my bike as I rode home. The week had pushed me, but earlier in the day I deposited almost the exact same amount that I'd owed to the bank a year ago, and I thought that the rain sounds different when you're in love and out of debt. I thought about how I'd walked through the rain last year hoping to find something, and how I still haven't found it all but I've found enough to want to stay inside when it rains. I thought about all the places I could go, all the ways I could play it. The same thoughts as before, though under very different circumstances.


When I awoke, Kristin had left for class and it had stopped raining. I stayed in bed a little longer, hoping that it would start again because it really is a beautiful thing to be in bed when it rains.

Part of Chapter 1

I have been writing something for a while now. Here are the first 9 pages of it:

Mr. Cruxton’s suit was doing its best to keep him from expanding. It appeared that for the moment a truce, albeit a tenuous one, had been reached between suit and skin and so the leather belt and ivory buttons had nothing to worry about. The suit itself was a nice single-breast, professional charcoal gray, tailored and obviously expensive, but you could guess that it had looked better on a mannequin or a fashion magazine or wherever Cruxton had first seen it and decided that it would look that good on him as well. Fat and skin spilled out from Cruxton’s starched collar, folding over itself again and again, much like the way little boys and girls draw curly hair on stick figures.

Once Shred took his eyes off of Cruxton’s chins they soon went to Cruxton’s stomach, which gave Cruxton the strange appearance of being pregnant, though Shred highly doubted, and actually hoped, this wasn’t the case. He really wasn’t a pleasant man to look at.

Mr. Cruxton had introduced himself as Mr. Cruxton to Shred, which seemed a bit odd since Shred had never met anyone named Mister, but Shred had taken it well and shaken Cruxton’s hand and looked him square in the eyes and not the chins or the baby-belly and called him Mr. Cruxton and said how much of pleasure it was to be here and how excited he was about the opportunity and then he sat down in the leather chair across from Cruxton, whose first name he didn’t know and never would.

It was closing in on 105 degrees outside. Inside Cruxton’s office, the temperature dropped to somewhere close to 50 thanks to the ceiling fan, two a/c units on full blast and one surprisingly quiet miniature desk fan. All the sweat that Shred had accumulated on his walk from the parking lot to the entrance was now freezing to his body, making it difficult for him to focus on anything other than trying to not shiver uncontrollably. As he tried to hide the seizure his body so desperately wanted to have, Shred wasn’t quite sure why all the leaders of business hadn’t gotten together somewhere and agreed that suits didn’t fool anybody anymore and they were no longer needed because then they could hold a big fundraiser and auction off their thousand-dollar ties and gold cuff-links and donate all the proceeds to cancer research and maybe that donation would be the break-through and hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved. It was a bit of a reach, Shred realized, to imply that by unofficially pressuring its employees to dress formally the business world was partially responsible for deaths caused by cancer. But he was cold and more than willing to make that reach.

-“I bet you hear you look exactly like your old man all the time, don’t you?” Cruxton asked.

You’re the first to point that out, actually. Only fuckwits who don’t have much to say but desperately want to say something would point out that I bear a striking resemblance to the man whose DNA created me, and you sir, especially given how well you’re dressed, can’t be a fuckwit. No way. You wouldn’t watch a football game and say something like “well, there’s still a lot of football left to be played,” after the first quarter ended, as if everyone else watching had no idea that the game didn’t end after the first fifteen minutes. I used to sit next to this girl in lecture, Cassie; her tits were about as big as yours. Anyways, one time after lecture was over Cassie and I were hanging outside of class and one of Cassie’s friends came over and asked Cassie if she knew anything about pregnancy and Cassie said she knew a little bit and then her friend asked, “do you know if your baby can get pregnant if you like, have sex while you are like pregnant?” It’s an amazing question, partly because Cassie’s friend seemed so damn genuine and didn’t even look pregnant herself. Your question made me think of that. Does that answer your question?

-“Once or twice,” Shred said. “Better him than my mother, right?”

      The line got the desired laugh from Cruxton, whose neck reverberated with each chortle. All Shred could think about was a bowl of Jell-O in unsteady hands.  

-“I remember when your father looked like you do now. Us dinosaurs were both your age once, believe it or not. Long time ago that was, of course. Long time. It’s funny. Just the other day my oldest grandkid, he comes up to me and he said “grandpa, how big were iPods when you were young?” What do you say to that?”

      Shred laughed, then smiled for what he guessed was an appropriate amount of time. Then there was a silence and Shred wasn’t sure exactly he was supposed to fill it with, so he didn’t. Maybe Cruxton was forming a solution in his head of how to stop babies from becoming pregnant.

The silence lasted long enough that it became audible. Cruxton suddenly looked at Shred’s résumé much like you would a new dinner menu, his eyes up and down, up and down, moving too fast to actually be reading anything but moving nonetheless to give the appearance of close scrutiny and in the hopes of finding something worth latching on to.   

-“Business major, huh? What made you choose that?”

Call it the lesser of twenty evils. I didn’t want to be a male nurse for obvious reasons, and I didn’t want to be involved in anything that required more school after all the school I’d already taken. I didn’t want to teach because I didn’t want to become like any of my teachers. And the rest just didn’t sound interesting. Even business didn’t sound interesting, it just sounded the most impressive, and when I told everyone that’s what I wanted to study they all seemed impressed, or at least impressed enough to nod and not ask me why I was majoring in business. As it turned out, the only thing that made studying business mildly worthwhile was Cassie, and that’s because she had a phenomenal rack and wore colorful tank-tops to class. 

-“Well, I’ve always had a passion for business. As you know, that’s the route my Dad chose, and uh, growing up and watching him in his work and having discussions about it around the dinner table, it’s just something I’ve known that I wanted to be involved with, something I’ve had a passion for, something I know I could be great at.”

      The recital had officially begun, though officially, the recital was an interview. Cruxton nodded at all of this approvingly.  

-“And so Shred, tell me a little bit about what you’re doing now.”

You mean besides sitting in this fucking icebox, gradually acquiring frostbite? I’m a bartender, just like it says on my résumé, but you’re asking because you just want to hear me say it out loud so you can feel like you’re doing me a favor by sitting here and talking to me and offering me a life-line to the real world; hearing me say it makes you feel better that you’ve never been a bartender and will never have to be one and your son who’s my age is a banker and not a bartender and neither is your wife or your other son, who oddly enough, looks like you too. Has anyone ever told you that?

-“Well, I’m uh, currently a bartender and manager at a place down on fifth called The Alamo. It’s uh--”

-“The Alamo? Like the real one down in San Antone?”

That’s my favorite thing about you, Mr. Cruxton. You’re always good for an incisive comment or two. Yes. The bar I work at is exactly like the Alamo in “San Antone.” In fact, we exhumed a few of the bodies from the “real one down in San Antone” and have them displayed on the walls in glass cases so people can feast their eyes on a few corpses as they drink and we even have a sign out front that says “No Mexicans Allowed” – our funny little way of combining tragic history with a little bit of humor. And in the back we sell t-shirts that say “I got so drunk last night I didn’t remember the Alamo” and then after everyone’s clocked out and the bar’s cleaned and locked, we all go outside to our cars and drive down the “real one in San Antone” and piss on the graves of the men we haven’t dug up yet just to finish the job.  

-“No, not really. Just the same name I guess. Owner’s born and raised here. Just a big fan of Texas apparently, or at least the Texas spirit.”

-“Do you like it? The job, I mean?” Cruxton asked.

-“It’s not a dream job, by any means. But it’s a way to pay the bills. The silver lining, you could say, is that it constantly reminds of what I don’t want to be doing.”

-“Right,” Cruxton said as he gave Shred’s résumé another once over. “So what exactly do you want to be doing?”

I want to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this. Maybe start off somewhere in the south of France, Toulouse sounds nice but then again so does Montpellier, and then perhaps gradually drift down across the Pyrenees into Barcelona and stay somewhere quiet along the coast and disappear for a few years and learn Spanish just to see what may come. Dublin also comes to mind and I’m not exactly sure why. I’ve always imagined it cold and green, which both sound appealing. But the truth is I don’t know what I want, no matter how many people ask me. I have an idea – different sounds and pictures and sensations, really – but it’s still murky, and so the best answer I can give is that I just want to go somewhere nice and be still enough to let everything settle.

-“Professionally, I’d like to start a career. I want to be challenged. I want to have room for growth. I want to learn. I want to gain experience--”

      On Cruxton’s desk was a black phone that was the same phone you’d find in every office in the city. It had plenty of LED lights and gray buttons and it was all plastic and it fit perfectly with the rest of the office because the rest of the office was full of everything you expected to see in an office and absolutely nothing you wouldn’t. The wall was a smattering of diplomas and certificates and newspaper clippings and a few photos of Cruxton with important looking people but strangely not one photo of his family, unless his family was comprised of old men in suits who liked to shake hands.

Anyways, the black phone started to ring and Cruxton answered it, but didn’t say much other than uh-huh and of-course. You could tell he wanted to say more, but each time he was about to he’d look up at Shred and remember that he wasn’t alone and so he’d pause and swallow whatever he had been about to say.  

There’s only so much one can uh-huh and of-course at and soon Cruxton hung up the phone and squinted at Shred, trying to remember if he’d said anything revealing or anything he wasn’t supposed to, but evidently felt satisfied because soon his eyes un-squinted and settled back on the sheet of paper that told the story of Shred’s life with important words like generated and customer-service representative.

From the front pocket on his dress-shirt, Cruxton produced a pen and uncapped it and scribbled something down. What exactly, Shred couldn’t tell, because Cruxton guarded it like a student who doesn’t let others cheat off of him. When he was done writing, Cruxton took the paper and put in one of the drawers of his desk and then put the pen back in the same pocket.

-“Sorry about that,” Cruxton said.

No you’re not.

­-“I told Jessica to hold all my calls but that was, uh--.” Cruxton stopped himself. “Anyways. Where were we, again?”

We were wading through this thing, one predictable question at a time, though we hadn’t yet reached the proverbial deep-end where you ask me how I see myself fitting in and what I think I could bring to the table here.

-“I was telling you about what I want to do.”

-“Yes, yes. Of course. I remember, now. Experience, right?”

-“Right.”

-“Experience,” Cruxton said again, as if the word meant something different this time around, but then he couldn’t find anything to follow it up with and the office became so quiet you could hear the air-conditioning unit.

      As Cruxton thought about what to say next, Shred thought about what he actually wanted to do. The bar had given and taken plenty in the little more than a year he’d been there. There would always be reasons to leave -- the weird hours, the shifts where he hadn’t made enough to pay for a tank of gas, the demeaning feeling somewhere in his core when he cleaned glasses or poured drinks for certain people -– but then there were the nights where he’d make $700 and the stress and the repetition and the backwards hours and the stasis and the shame and the non-tippers were all worth it and he’d almost feel guilty about how much money he’d made in one night. Almost. Last Friday had been one of those $700 nights, a little more actually, but Shred was still here, still wearing the suit he hadn’t put on since graduation, answering fake questions with fake answers. He looked around the office but more so at Cruxton who was still lost and wondered if this really was progress or something else.

      Perhaps making way for what he’d just thought of, Cruxton cleared his throat.

-“Shred. I’m not going to waste any of our time, here. There’s an opening and even though you’re not as uh, qualified as some of the other applicants, I know the type of man your father raised you to be, and I know the asset you’d be here. And while I can’t put this on paper, I can almost assure you that if you do what you’re supposed to around here, if you work hard I’d guarantee that by the time you’re thirty, thirty-five, you’d be an account manager, and you’d never have to worry about money again. How does that sound?” 

91.25

This is our mailbox:

This is our mailbox after a typical delivery of "mail":

The mail, when taken out of the mailbox and brought inside, is full of gems like these:

And these:

And funny stuff like this:

All of which make me want to do this.

My thought process:

a) I have no fucking clue who Gold Cat is and why I keep getting their mail. 

b) Is Gold Cat even a real name? Or is it a pseudonym? 

c) Who the fuck uses a pseudonym for their mail?

d) Who the fuck uses "Gold Cat" as a pseudonym? Why not something cool, like John S. Bladestaff? Or something corny like Ivana PoopNow? And those were just off the top of my head. Imagine if you had a few days. Just imagine what you could come up with.

e) I bet the mailman, if given a month, wouldn't come up with anything clever. His propensity for creativity [or lack thereof] is painfully clear because each day he brings the exact same shit and drops it into the exact same place. I would have a lot more respect for him if he hid the mail sometimes, or slipped in something that wasn't supposed to be there, like a live chicken, just to keep me on my toes and see if I'd say anything.

f) Would the mailman want to come home to a mailbox full of the same shit every day, especially if it was all addressed to people he'd never met or heard of?  Of course he wouldn't. 

g) Just how stingy does this fucking mailman think I am? Does he think I care about a dollar that much? 

h) News flash, asshole: I'm not going to comb through shitty magazine after shitty magazine and the odd newsletter to try and get 25 cents off my next purchase of iceberg lettuce because guess what? I don't buy iceberg lettuce. I don't buy any lettuce. Just like I don't buy new credit cards or leggings or all the other shit you perpetually bombard me with. Stop trying to guess what I want. If I need it, I'll buy it on amazon, or if I feel like supporting local business, I'll go to my neighborhood Target.  

So why, after close to six months of living here, does this still persist? Because every time I try and do something about it, my roommate Ryan undermines me. 

Attempt #1 - I took all the junk mail we received and threw it on the ground beneath our mailbox. I was diligent with this and the trash piled up quite nicely. The goal was to show the mailman just how much trash he was putting into our mailbox each week, and the implied message was that if he continued to do so, the environment would suffer as a result and he would be indirectly responsible for it all. If he stopped delivering junk, there wouldn't be any junk to litter. Unfortunately, Ryan didn't like coming home to a place where the front porch was covered with coupons and the paper-spam, so he would pick up the trash and throw it away. I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn't hear it. So the problem persisted.

Attempt #2 - Instead of throwing it on the ground, I decided to leave all the mail in the mailbox. Our box has a limited area, like all mailboxes do, and eventually I knew it would be impossible for our one-track minded mailman to fit any more junk in there. And so I waited for the event horizon. Not only would this accomplish what I was trying to do with my first attempt [show the mailman how much shit he delivered on a daily basis] but it would also inconvenience him; as each day passed, I knew it would be more challenging to stuff all the papers and magazines into an already crowded box. After a week, I could it was like playing on a high level of Tetris, where they give you shitty blocks and the blocks move fast and you don't really have time to stack them all that well. That's what it was like. To continue the Tetris metaphor just a bit further, I knew it would only be a matter of days before the mailman would "hit the pause button" and "quit the game." But yet again, Ryan cracked and took all of our piled up mail inside. His reason was that they would "stop delivering the mail" if our mailbox got too full. I protested, argued passionately that we should call the mailman's bluff and see if he had the balls to stop bringing our mail. And if in fact he did have the balls to do it, at least then we could respect our mailman even if we disagreed with the job he did. Again, my pleas fell on deaf ears. 

Attempt #3 - I wanted to write a passionately worded letter, arguing for a bit of common sense and judgement when delivering the mail. This was shot down by both Joe and Ryan, who said that that the mailman's not "legally" allowed to use his discretion as to which mail he does and does not deliver. I then made a rather clever and apt comparison to the guards at concentration camps, who were all just doing what was "legal" when they were sending millions of Jews to their graves. It was bit too intellectual for both of them, I could tell, and I didn't end up putting the letter out because I had a feeling that snake Ryan would take it down before the mailman could see it, thereby wasting my time, of which I already have precious little to waste. 

So where does this leave me? 

Stuck with a mailbox full of shit I don't care about or ever want to care about, but which I have to deal with all the same and throw away on a daily basis. 

The root of all this suppressed and poisonous anger? The amount of life that gets wasted collecting and throwing away this garbage. Let's be generous and say it only takes me fifteen seconds a day to collect the junk mail, open the door, walk inside, and put it in the trash [this is very generous, because not only does this cause the trash-can inside to pile up faster and therefore cause me to make more trips out to the driveway carrying trash-bags full of "once-in-a-lifetime offers", but also because I have to sort the mail, to make sure I don't throw out the one useful letter buried in a sea of shit]. So a generous fifteen seconds a day, right, (which is probably closer to thirty)? Well, that's a minute every four days. So in a year, I have to spend 91.25 minutes dealing with this shit. That's an action-movie. That's a half-marathon. It's a nice dinner with somebody you love. It's a nice dinner with somebody you say you love so they'll sleep with you. Or it's a nice dinner with somebody you don't love but just want to sleep with. Or it's a nice dinner with family, who you love but don't want to sleep with. Or it's a walk around town lake, or two forty-five minute sessions in a tanning bed. It could be anything, really. 

But sadly, for me, those 91.25 minutes are just wasted time, wasted life. 

On a brighter note, I was making a rare trip to Freebirds the other day and saw this on the car parked in front of me: 

I was so impressed I stopped and took a picture and seriously thought about waiting by the car so I could high-five the person who did this. It's a perfect middle-finger to parking attendants, forcing them to look at each little piece of paper to see if any of them are in fact valid. I'm sure there's a new bylaw soon to be passed [if there isn't one already], that will make "having more than one visible ticket on a windshield" illegal and ticket-able, but still, I stand and applaud you, whoever you are. It is the sign of true genius to be able to inconvenience those who make a life out of inconveniencing others. 

Fuck parking attendants and their lame-ass khaki shorts. Fuck cops who write jay-walking and speeding tickets "to keep us safe" when there are thousands of unsolved rapes and murders and therefore thousands of rapists and murderers roaming the streets. And fuck mailmen who "just do their job", much like the SS did. Keep your junk mail and your love handles and give me back my 91.25. 

Valentine's Day

Not many people know that Valentine's Day was first celebrated in the 5th century at the behest of some Pope I'd never heard of, as a day to honor Christian martyrs; it turns out that many early Christian martyrs were named Valentinus [not much mystery in how that name died out, eh?]


It wasn't until the 14th Century that the day had any romantic connotations, and when it did, it was in large part due to Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, where he famously wrote: "For this was Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate." Chaucer actually was talking about birds, but the image had more of an impact than he could imagine [love-birds, anyone?] and subsequent authors including Shakespeare, John Donne and Charles d'Orleans also wrote about the day and its powerful romantic qualities. In a period obsessed with courting and platonic love, the concept not only held, but spread, and the day began to take on a new meaning.


You know the rest, or at least know it as well as I do, because you see what Valentine's Day is today, or at least what it has become.


From what I have seen, it has become a day where people in relationships go out and buy flowers and nice cards and expensive dinners to show their love for one another. It has become a special day [special enough to even have a terrible movie made about it] so it only makes sense to go out and do special things, things that you normally wouldn't do -- like buy and drink champagne, or go out to a nice restaurant or give her a necklace or write her a card and tell her you love her, and then everyone goes home and posts photos on Facebook of their flowers and their nice meals and the beautiful things they're doing and you feel sorry for the people that don't have anything to post or share.


The problem is that champagne and chocolates taste just as good on January 14th as they do on February 14th. Nice restaurants and flower-shops are open year-round, and you almost always have a free half hour to sit down and write out something nice.


The obvious point is that anything you can do on Valentine's Day can be done on any other day of the year. [Except go to basketball or hockey games scheduled to be played on February 14th, or anything scheduled to take place on February 14th, 2012. Those, I guess, can only be experienced on the day itself. I'm sure a point as stimulating as this one would have been raised if I'd tried having this conversation with my brother, which thankfully, I haven't been forced to have yet.]


This obvious point leads to [but certainly does not beg] questions as obvious as these:


-why do people feel obligated to do something special on days like today [a day, as we've discovered, which was essentially created by dead Popes and poets], but feel little to no obligation to perform these special acts on the days/weeks/months that follow?
-who decided nice things [like dinners, etc] should also be rare things, usually reserved for the days of obligation?
-why is there so much love on Valentine's Day, but so little love on all the rest?


Let me be clear: I'm not joining the chorus of Valentine's Day haters. I think the world is a better place when there is more love in it, when people are good to each other, and that obviously takes place on Valentine's Day. And I'm not being corny and trying to argue that every day should be Valentine's Day, because that would be awful too. All I'm saying is that so much thought is directed to this one day and much of it seems to dissipate on the morning of the 15th and I don't know why that is.


I don't claim to be the perfect boyfriend [though Kristin would likely argue otherwise], but it seems that the challenge isn't to make someone feel special one or three or seven days out of a year. It's about the other days, all of them.


Today was just another day for Kristin and me. We didn't get to spend much time together, but I saw her briefly and got to give her a hug and annoy her a little bit, which are two of the more enjoyable things I can do on a Tuesday, or any day for that matter. We'll see each other plenty later in the week [though, much like a heroin addict can never have enough smack, Kristin has mentioned a few times that she physically craves my presence after prolonged absences, so we'll see if the time spent together is enough for her].


Our plans for the rest of the week are beautifully vague -- a few dinners, maybe go see a movie, but mostly just be together, because that seems to be the key ingredient, not the appetizers or the atmosphere of a place but instead just being able to look across at the person who made your stomach drop the first time you saw them and who still makes it drop when they look at you as they did then.


I decided that it was wonderful that today was just another day, because that's all it is, all it really ever has been.


But there was a moment tonight where I was standing behind the bar and I thought of Kristin and how she scrunches her face sometimes when she smiles and a little while afterwards I looked at the clock in the office and it wasn't Valentine's Day anymore -- the 15th less than an hour old -- and that somehow made it all the more fitting, because I adored this girl yesterday and today, and if she doesn't ever discover how much of a moron I truly am, then tomorrow as well.


May it never change, no matter what the Popes and poets say.

Thinking of You, Dad

There is a man in Austin whose name I do not know and in fact I've come to realize that the only thing I actually do know about him is that I've seen him a dozen or so times, and each time he's been pedaling a single-speed beach cruiser along some sidewalk wearing nothing but a skimpy thong and a pair of flip-flop sandals. He does this quite frequently, apparently, because it seems like everybody who's lived in this city has seen him at one point or another on his bike and when you tell someone that you saw him, the response is always something like: "Oh yeah. That guy!"

He's not in great shape, which is surprising considering how much time I figure he spends on a bike, though he is leathery and tan, which isn't surprising considering how much time he spends on a bike almost entirely naked. 


A few days ago, I was driving home and saw him off to my left -- he was coasting -- and I didn't want to look but couldn't really look away because it's just one of those things -- much like a car-wreck -- that you stare at even though you know you shouldn't. That's why I know how he tans. And that his back jiggles over the rough parts of the sidewalk.


Strangely enough, when I saw him, I thought of my Dad -- but not for reasons that suggest a criminal upbringing. Not once have I ever seen my Dad in a thong. Not even during my 8th birthday party. 


But here's the why:


- Dad often deliberately derails conversations by mentioning thongs and/or chafing -- both of which popped into my mind the instant I saw The Thong Man on his beach cruiser a few days ago. 


- I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Mom called and told me Dad had bought a beach cruiser and was doing the same thing around the streets of Washington DC. Ok. I would be surprised. But not as much as most sons. Let me explain. 


The most obvious place to begin here is that my Dad loves bikes, though usually ones a little more sophisticated and manly than beach cruisers. He has said it before -- many times before -- that something about him just resonates with being on a bike, on the road, just the wind in his face and the burn starting to creep in the legs. When people love a sport and commit to it, often it is likened to a religion. But I wouldn't say a bike or the sport of cycling itself is a religion to Dad as much as it is a chance to hurt and reveal. There aren't any places to hide on a bike -- no matter what it's made of, no matter what the brand is. The sport is simple and honest and so it was only natural that a simple and honest man like my Father was drawn to it over three decades ago and has remained so to this day.


But the real reason I thought of my Dad is that he's always enjoyed giving a middle finger to what people expect. You're not supposed to put four kids through college and have everyone come out debt-free -- because that means you couldn't own a house or take family vacations, and those are things every family needs. You're supposed to teach your kids financial responsibility by starting them off with tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt. You're not supposed to retire at 55 either, or to still be married and happy after 33 years. You're not supposed to do so many Ironmans that even your kids have to stop and count and usually just arrive at "a number well over 10". 


And, you guessed it, you're not supposed to ride a bike in a thong. 


One day maybe, just maybe, that old tan guy will be my Dad. Except he'd have an m-dot on his shoulder and would lean forward in the aero position as he descended not only to go a little faster but also so the people behind would see what a thong does when you lean forward. He wouldn't ride it so people would look or honk, though people would do both. I think he'd ride it around downtown Austin during a lunch break when everyone who works in an office gets their hour of sunlight a day, and he'd go by and they'd look and wonder what was wrong with him and he'd look back and smile and wonder the exact same thing, except at least he'd be wondering on a bike, with the wind in his face and the burn starting to creep in his legs, and maybe, just maybe, the burn creeping into other places that should never burn.