Stand Up
Act 8
I don't want to go fishing today.
Why not, I was just putting on pants after you called?!
I changed my mind.
Why?
It's gross out.
Seriously? A little rain?? It's got damn Pittsburgh in Autumn. It's a perfect day.
Nope, its not.
You're from Pittsburgh! What the hell is wrong with you?
You're being unreasonable!
It's beautiful outside!
You're being unreasonable!!
Am I?
Yeah.
Okay.............when are you free next? I'm looking at the ten day forecast right now.
Throwing a rager tonight?
Yeah.
What time?
Sixish.
Nine?
Sixish.
Sixish?
Yes, sixish.
Have you thought about nine?
No. Well, I did. For a while. Then I remembered I had shit to do. Before. After I remembered.
Whatever, you know where I live. Hit me up and we'll combine parties at nine.
Ninish?
We're going to ramble on, because we can, and also why not. The longest set ever.
Cats have short memories. They have learned behaviors, but I think it's fair to say they have short memories. They're beings of routines. That can make you functional. If you have a short memory, but a solid routine, you can definitely get by alright. No harm no foul. What you have to keep in mind is what really defines getting by. Do you want to get by as well as a human being does or as well as a cat does? Granted, cats have it pretty good.
Defining work aside, not to say that it's easy to be a cat. Can you imagine having to sleep so much? Yeah, I need to eat lunch, but first I have to take this three hour siesta in this sun beam because it's really god damn warm right here. Yes, I know your car died on the shoulder of interstate 376 and you cancelled your triple A because there was an order of 30 pounds of catnip you had to get in so that you could ensconce yourself in plant matter on demand for the year, but this sun beam is really really warm and if I get into my car right now I will fall asleep immediately if traffic stops for longer than five minutes and I'm not trying to get stopped by the police with my inspection sticker out of date. I'll see you in a few hours. Yes, I'm in the shower right now. I just ate. I'll be done when I'm done. Whether or not I'll be jerking off for the next hour before I take this nap is frankly none of your business. If you keep talking like an asshole we are definitely brawling when I get there. What's it to you anyway? We're not family. If I could live without a housemate I would! Well, I didn't touch your snack stash, I just ate all of the food you left after you took off after breakfast. Yes, including the things you set aside for lunch. No, I didn't touch your stash or your green. If I did, I would be too busy not answering the damn phone.
It's a little bit alarming though when you look up from repairing a broken laptop or keeping up with email nonsense and see your cat dangling from the side of the fish tank you specifically perched on top of bookshelf because, the last time you checked, cats couldn't climb bookshelves.
From a purely physics standpoint, it shouldn't work. There's a reason cat trees are covered with carpeting instead of smooth faced fake wood. On top of that you've seen them try to climb it before close to forty times. They jump in three shelves up, the earliest possible landing point and watched them look at and sniff at the fourth shelf like a hardcore dungeon crawling RPG player trying to find the secret entrance to the glitch cave. As though, if they looked hard enough and poked around long enough, somehow the bookshelf programming would split apart and instantly teleport them to the next level up if they jabbed the right pixel with their nose.
Yet, there he is. Climbing on top of the fish tank with no lid. I'm scrambling to find my camera and trying to keep one eye on him to make sure he doesn't fall in, because the only thing worse than a cat soaked to the bone in fish poop filled water is washing that cat. And somehow he figures out how to step from edge to edge and not fall in AND terrorize the fish dumb enough to come near the surface with a thing twenty times their size looming overhead and thrusting enormous claws through the surface of the water with the only thing in mind being poking one of those two foot long (by scale if fish were people) talons through their itty bitty eye holes.
How the hell did he get up there? I took him down and watched him attempt it again and again for a good day and a half and he never managed to pull it off again. Which was kind of disappointing. It reminded me of how shitty my own memory was. Not to harp on passwords, but I have made passwords and forgotten them not more than a handful of days later. The security question is what was the make and model of your first car. Two days removed, I'm asking myself "the make and model of the first car I ever drove or the first car I ever crashed?" "The make and model of the first car I can remember riding in or the first car I ever drove myself." "The make and model of the first car I fell in love with or the make and model of the first car I knew I wanted in my dream garage." Ending with "your account is locked, please call customer service at 1-800-555" five five, five five. How are achievements so forgettable?
I want to sit the cat down with translator boxes strapped to our throats so we can understand each other the way it happens in science fiction and go over what exactly went on. Because maybe he just needs some coaching? Maybe he did it once and it was a wild success and he got so caught up in the success that he forgot to make mental notes of how he actually got there and now he's broke and sitting on the floor, looking up at the fish tank angrier than ever, and clueless with how to actually deal with it.
I at least wish he had opposable thumbs and manners enough to ask me to pass him the sugar dish so we could sit down at the kitchen table and talk about our short comings. Or at least sip tea and nod instead of stalking around the apartment in circles mad at things we can't discuss and counter mad at each other for being mad about things we can't talk about and madder that the atmosphere is so hostile when we both have nowhere else to be and nothing else to look at besides our counter counter madness.
So treat yourself. Nothing cures unhappiness like a good nosh on something yummy. It makes the world go pretty swell, when at the end of the day you go over the steps that got you to where you were the month before only to find utter soul crushing DMV line wait times to find you never filled out form H-09 and you can't forge the notary stamp in the bathroom anyway so there's no need to explain that you have explosive diarrhea from the fast food joint you never went to and will be back in a moment.
Get out the cat treats and their having pork sauteed with salmon juices and beans and rice so they poop good, and you have bleu cheese buffalo wing flavored butter crackers with nothing but mayonaise to dip them in (if you want to go so far as to dip them in to something).
There are some things, some foods, that have no business here on this green earth. I don't know how they get passed beyond their developmental stages or who fell asleep at the wheel, but they do enter the realm of otherwise useful, palatable, strange and uncommonly tasty besides the fact, sometimes unassuming, palette expanding digestables. If it's not broke, don't fix it holds true for most foods. Sure, stick a turbo charger on there. Put some bigger rims on there. Maybe some slicker tires. Change the paint scheme and put some tint on the windows. Lower the suspension. Make that vehicle of flavor crystals sexier to my tongue and I won't complain.
Maybe though, it would be a good idea to take the concept sketchers out of the room when you get down to the nitty gritty of actually putting together the deliverable? Maybe, instead of a massive grille with chrome highlights, go with a slight variation and make it a few inches bigger instead of a foot and a half bigger with ten inch wings sticking out of the sides? Consider the Ruffle potato chip. Let's make the ridges bigger, but just by a few millimeters. Sure: instantly better. Let's take the barbecue flavor and make it a little more peppery and a little more salty and a little more savory. Sure: instantly better. Let's take the barbecue flavor and make it a million times sweeter and a thousand times more sour and paint it orange! No.
Part of what makes these x-foods so ridiculously awful is the half commitment. Case in point: parmesan garlic bread flavored anything. That never works out. In every essence lab there's probably some guy or team of people working on distilling the essence of a food that is an experience unto itself. You will never be able to distill the experience of chomping into a piece of properly toasted, well seasoned, garlic bread. Ain't gonna happen. God bless you for trying, and enjoy the pay check in the meantime, but you are trying to get through a brick wall by poking it with a finger tip. Chicken and waffle potato chips? Nope. Gimme the chicken and the waffle and some hot syrup please. In a bag. On a shelf. That I can buy, take home, pull a tab and trigger an exothermic reaction that heats it all up, and then pour it out on a plate with a knife and fork and a little plastic baggie of syrup and a packet of salted butter to bust open on top of it. I'll pay the extra ten dollars for rehydrated deep fried meat, science, and happiness instead of a $3.50 bag of sadness.
It's tiring. I keep falling for it and it's tiring. I imagine the woman at the gas station where these unspeakable abominations of food stuffs keep showing up (am I shopping at one of the test kitchens? I DON'T KNOW, but I wish I did) sees me stumble in at five in the morning looking for something, nay anything, besides what is already in my pantry or my fridge and watches me walk up and down the aisles and sees my eyes light up at the latest new riff on an old classic and waits for my shoulders to fall. Waits for the long sigh of defeat because she knows I'll try anything once because we had a long conversation three days after the first time I tried heroin and she eventually came up to me and asked me if she could help me with something and it scared the living daylights out of me to the point where I literally jumped backward from her because I was convinced I was there alone somehow at the time and my brain was still maladjusted to person to person contact in ways far worse than they are now.
I imagine her watching that long breath and knowing I'm going to come to the counter with some Island of Dr. Moreaux shit to put in my gut and she'll check me out and wish me the best of luck again and she knows I could just ask, because she's tried it before, but she knows I won't listen. "You could've just called." Instead of waiting to get hammered until two in the morning expecting people to show up and packing an entire evening of inebriation into the three hours before the sun comes up and having to deal with them already completely soused and begging you to slow down because they're already ready for sleep and you're just getting started and they are in no mood to field your thirteen text messages about the things you normally talk about when you party and collaborate and get drunk at the same pace together.
But that's when you know you can die happy. Assuming your death isn't brought about by being fed feet first into a wood chipper while you're still conscious, you can definitely pass quietly and quite happy into death knowing you did call who you were supposed to, when you were supposed to, and remembered the things you were supposed to remember how to do along the way, and didn't fall for things like a taco shell made of doritos that tasted like hot vagina cheese vomit on the way down and nothing like an electro statically cheese powdered tortilla chip casing taco fixings at all, and everything you did or at least some of what you did was what you were supposed to do.
"Hell, I'm two days and six hours late for work" is never a good feeling. When you get that sensation that what you're on to is something you can fade out doing and never wake up from, you know it's something good. Sure, you can get that feeling artificially (see Patton and the suicide drug), but when you've earned your way on to that path toward what you do better than anything else, don't get comfortably confused with doing best because there is very little comfortable about writing or art or whatever keeps the motor spinning when you'd rather have it idle or, better yet, shut down completely, you know you're on to something worth while and pursuing. Perhaps in vain, but like I said before (not really) vanity is a poor man's occupation.
I can't wait to operate out of ego. Vanity is sport. Ego is conquest.The definition of poor being not within the scope of ... being too tired to masturbate.
You really do have to reevaluate your life if you reach a point where you are literally too tired to masturbate. When you cross that line where the prospect of masturbation puts the same look on your face as when you want a nip of a candy bar, but can't decide which brand or make or model or if it should have ground effects on it, or if the candy bar just has speed holes punched in it or a new paint job, but it'll let you down in the end and even the piss amount of money you spent on it will lead to days of regret later when you are one dollar and 33 cents short of getting the one thing you actually needed later on in the month, you know it's time to make some changes.
No one should ever have to suffer being too tired to masturbate. It's natures gift to the animal kingdom and as the king of the kingdom you should be and are entitled to, by the mandate of science and creation itself, masturbate. That's one thing I will never understand about relationships. The person that gets upset about your masturbating is so clearly in the wrong, it's practically insane. In terms of pure practicality, absolutely insane.
I'm not cheating on you. You're not having sex with me. I need to feel sexually fulfilled nightly so I don't kill you and then all of our children and then my coworkers tomorrow morning and then myself. What's the big deal? You're happy, because I did not sexually assault you during the night when my dick got hard and I couldn't sleep for the third night in a row. You're happy because I wake up in a good mood and feel rested and you feel rested and don't have to wash cum off of your ass and out of your cooter or off your dick and thighs. I feel fulfilled because I slept well beside you and you feel good because I slept well beside you and enjoyed breathing in your sleep smells. You feel good because you're not obligated to fuck me and I feel good because you feel good about that. Who cares what I'm actually thinking about? Brain space is brain space. It's no ones property. It's no man's land. So it's okay to think about baseball and dismantling an engine block and nun's elbow fat to keep myself from cumming while we fuck, but it's not okay to think about fucking if we're not fucking? Do you know how ridiculous you sound right now? Can you see why this might not work for me?
If you're too stressed to masturbate you need to reevaluate your life choices.
I do think I am becoming a bit asexual. It's getting close to the point where it is impossible to meet a good shag without the baggage. I don't want to know your life story. I'll listen. I'll talk. I won't ask, but if you ask I'll tell. I think it comes with moving up the age bracket and getting to that point where everyone begins pairing off and eggs start to get few and far between and people either start to go more and more insane or more and more stable and there is less and less gray area between the extremes because it really does take a good portion of your life just to figure out who and what you are and what the hell you are projecting and how the hell it's actually being perceived.
That moment in middle school at the graduation dance when the dance floor cleared out and the chaperons were busy talking about futures and "oh my gawd, my son..." and "I know, my daughter..."s and other bullshit parents talk about to stay sane around other parents and not sound weird or give any indication that their little bastards backwards tendencies have anything to do with what goes on after he/she gets home from school, and everyone is in a circle talking to someone or listening to someone and you realize you're looking up at the lights in the ceiling and listening to everyone listening and talking to each other and you're happy there, happens all over again when you get older. Except this time around you're fully aware of it.
And that's when you realize you should stop suggesting things to do with other people because they're flat not interested, no matter how enthusiastic about it you try to come across. Maybe there was an inkling of interest when the topic first came up, but by the fourth phone call and the tenth text message over the course of a month with no success it's time to face facts: they don't want to hang out with you the same way you want to hang out with them and it's only going to get more pronounced as they continue to grow and you continue to grow and you're not growing apart, by no means. You're just not roll dogs the way you used to be.
Eventually it's going to get creepy and they're going to cut you off entirely so simmer down. That's hard to do though. Especially when you get pity-vited to hang out. That's always the worst. A pity-vite followed by endless pursuit leads to call off after call off after call off, because, let's be honest, they're trying to let you down easy and if you think about it a little bit, had you met them outside of the circumstances in which you actually met, you never would have known they existed in the first place. Your blip is over. The good thing is though, if you do relax the pursuit a little bit, you might get to have a fun pop in/pop up later when you've had enough time away to have something interesting to relay to them and that's nothing to sneeze at. Unless you sneeze when someone turns on the light. Then it is something to sneeze at. Something to sneeze at and explain while you run for some toilet paper and your clothes because finding people that fuck with the lights on is almost as hard as not forcing the issue.
It's kind of like coveralls. You either understand their value or you don't. There's a large age divide in understanding the coverall. There's a large age divide and a large occupation divide too. When it comes to occupations the idea of the coverall is pretty obvious. You either have to stay really really clean or you have to get really really dirty. Either way, any sort of regular clothing is not going to cut it, but whatever job you are doing at either end of the spectrum is absolutely essential to the furthering of civilization. You're either working at the very top end of technology and physiology or you're working at the machine level where the rubber meets the road. Either way, if you show up in regular clothes or a suit and tie someone is going to say "what the fuck were you thinking" and/or "go home and change or don't come back at all."
The other area is a little more finicky. The other area is weather related. If it's just that damn cold outside it makes sense to wear coveralls. Plain and simple. The children in snow suits will nod and nearly high five you up until you hit the tweens and teens and young adults. That's when you run into the girl still wearing heels in an inch of snow and the guy in all leather skinny jeans and bubble jacket vest with the flat brimmed sports hat that still has its sticker on it. That's when you have to share the sidewalk with the guy with the vintage belt buckle and man purse shivering at a bus stop and the mom in enormous sunglasses faux studded with diamonds with a stroller. That is, however, also when you run into the gal in her early thirties who stops you and asks you where you bought those coveralls because waiting at the bus stop at 7 A.M. with a windchill of -5 has had the presence of mind to understand a skirt and leggings with knee high leather boots was a bad idea.
The logic gap from age 13 to 23 is a strange one. Everything is very obvious after, I dunno, say 26. After 26 it's just a matter of execution and can do, will do, won't do, can't do, on the books and ready to go, or still thinking it over indefinitely postponed. It does make me laugh sometimes walking home from work in nice thick coveralls perfectly fine, the wind breaking in front of me and not feeling a thing knowing that I score a 0 on style points and 100% on no regrets or thoughts about "if I lived here, I'd be home already" because I know in coveralls I can walk for days. Hell, I could curl up and take a nap, but we know how that usually ends (flashlights in the face and "where do you live"s and "this is a public park, you can't sleep here"s, but those days are behind us).
Growing up is a shame but necessary. I got my first gray hair a few weeks ago. Right in the middle of my chin. A friend of mine said "you're going to be one of those creepy 40 year olds with gray hair all over," I told him it's not true. The preferred term is silver fox. It's a badge of honor. I honestly didn't think I'd live long enough to see a gray hair on my head so it's actually a badge I am happy to wear. I can run with it. Chicks dig salt and pepper fellas right? Even though I don't particularly dig chicks. It's still nice to be prized a little bit. Let's you know you're not a complete dumpster fire. If you're not a shock jock, I'm pretty sure not being branded a dumpster fire is a good thing.
Unlike most people, I've been waiting for gray hair for a very long time. It's welcome. My hair will finally start catching up to the miles I've put on my brain. If someone took me home they'd be calling up lawyers about lemon laws and scam artists even though there is still a heart beating 10 years old inside of me. Flipping through channels you'd be well advised to skip cartoon network because I will start jumping up and down and shouting that we have to stop to watch All Dogs Go to Heaven and Up coming on right after and we can't miss Courage the Cowardly Dog marathon after; Law and Order and the NBA game be damned!
With the kid does come soap dodging. I still don't shower enough. Then again, as you get older, the value of washing tends to increase. Aside from my own OCD showering because... well... because! If you shower six times in one day you've either done way too much coke, done something really bad, are absolutely breaking down mentally and can't stop touching your own skin to save your life (if someone pointed a gun at you and sad the next time you rub your forearm I am going to put a bullet inside your fucking brain and you actually had to think long and hard about whether or not that itch right at the crook of your elbow was worth investigating because technically it's not your forearm and besides you really really have gone way too long without checking to make sure you were still inside the skin wrapped around your muscles, veins, arteries, and bones), or you just really like showering.
If I could live in my shower I probably would, Seinfeld style. It breaks my heart sometimes, making references to things kids have never seen. By kids, I mean early 20 somethings. I can live with it. It still grates my nerves though.
I did realize I was soap dodging the other day. After I realized my shower fetish was getting out of control I decided to shower as little as possible and went to visit a friend. I sat down right beside their fan boosted space heater. Terrible idea, I know, but there was nowhere else to sit. Let's just say, I got comfortable sitting on the floor beside it and spread my legs a little bit to sit cross legged. The temperature wasn't particularly high or particularly low, but the fan was boosting airflow continuously and, yeah, it felt great blowing through my paints and airing out my junk because I'd been at work all day and it's nice to get a breeze going when your sack is stuck to your thigh.
I thought I smelled alright. Ten minutes in, the girl sitting next to me asks me if I want to turn the heater off. The heater is in passive mode so my answer is no. The temperature is fine. Ten minutes later she asks me again and this time we make eye contact and her eyes have that "something is not going well" slit to them. So I put two and two together and made four. Whatever funk I thought was contained has been let loose like the dogs of war all up on her face. It was the nicest way anyone has told me I reeked in a long time.
I respected that, switched to a kneeling pose to pin down the crotch sweat dragon, and turned off the blower. It's one of those simple things you can do to help other people feel more comfortable without other people being too shame faced. It's kind of like masturbating in that way. If you ever masturbate to a particular person, they don't want to hear about so don't say anything about it. The sentiment will be appreciated, but there's no reason to go as far as treading on graces and enjoying company. Be easy, be tactful, and they'll respect you for it. The thing is you won't know they respect you because you'll never bring it up, but understand that given the alternative to not knowing... yeah, they'll respect you for it and take the complement. Play it out in your head. Run the dialogues and the dialog trees and superimpose their characteristics on those dialogs to guide the decision forks and you'll always end up at the same conclusion: take more showers, take more time, die happy, and in the meantime don't eat shitty food and keep memories in tow better than a cat can.
over the next 5 - 7 days i hope to give you access to my fiction, because i love you, thats why. i would be not telling the truth if i said i didnt care if you liked it or not. but i would also be not not telling the truth if i said ... what would i say there ... i thought i had a contrast going. apparently not.