A New Path.

Once again, nighttime sounds fill my ears.

Insects, amphibians, all calling out in primal desperation. Mammals prowling in the shadows, eager for a plaything, maybe striving to hone in on potential food, perhaps only seeking an intense, revitalizing piece of ass.

Or perhaps it goes deeper. It could be that they’re hungry for something even deeper. Yearning their other half.

In any case, I won’t judge.

Pleasant numbness fills my veins. My eyes drift up to the sky just in time to spy a shooting star against tonight’s star-spangled backdrop: a brilliant streak, a tear amidst an expanse of faraway suns twinkling at me, blazing away at varying distances, shimmering as they once were at varying periods of time ago.

All three eyes of mine fixed on this, the breathtaking void of once was stretching above, around me. These visual echoes of history, of a past that is far, far gone yet omnipresent.

Spectra forever haunting. Ghosts eternally looming. Cosmic nostalgia caught like insects in amber.

A vibrant graveyard above us in hope and in warning.

The past is always present. Both a prison and gift for your choices now. All forever above you, the cosmic graveyard, where the dead tell tales, if only you listen.

Fight to break out, plow to push forward.

Yesterday need not come to define today.

I can plow a new path.

Arrows Into the Dark.

8/2/24

To make a mole hill out of Olympus Mons: anxiety sucks. Still, I tell myself, take the horror you’ve endured in it’s proper context.

After all, unless Graham Hancock is onto something, for 99% of our history our species existed in small, nomadic, roughly-egalitarian bands that moved about within fixed territories in response to the changing seasons, largely deriving sustenance by means of hunting, fishing, and gathering.

Modern society — a culture that has advanced through our ever-increasing scientific understanding and it’s application, which is to say technology — is but a blink in time with respect to our vast, primal history. Even so, unlike our biology, modern society has developed exponentially.

Not linear evolution, in other words, but increasingly rapid revolutions.

Despite all that, our biological evolution has faithfully kept to it’s natural pace, so we’re still largely governed by the instincts we’ve developed throughout the bulk of our history — despite our new, forever rapidly accelerating cultural context.

After all, as social animals, we’re still prone to tribalism. To follow a leader. We’re still driven by sexual instincts. We still strive to construct or adopt a narrative, however silly, that explains the incredibly strange universe we’re in, our place in it, and the undeniably weird beings we are.

And the collision between our relatively slow-paced biological evolution and our progressively rapid technological culture results in certain, well, “issues,” lets call them, that could, in the end, prove to either lead us to our extinction, set us back, or propel us forward.

How might this collision set us back, you didn’t ask?

One easy, measley example is a constant companion of mine. I used to describe it as “being nervous” — oh, the 1990s — but nowadays the preferred term is clearly “anxiety.”

Now, anxiety has good intentions, I’ve consistently tried to remind myself.

As I’ve heard the scenario laid out before, imagine you’re a member of one of our natural bands back in the day. Imagine it’s your turn to adopt the role of watch as the rest of your group of hunter-gathering compadres catch some shut-eye.

Suddenly, you hear a noise out in the forest. It sounds close. Very close. And shortly thereafter you see a shadow move through the trees.

It’s a windy night, and chances are that the sound you heard was merely a branch snapping, falling due to mother nature’s harsh and violent breath. The moving shadow you saw, it might have the same explanation.

So do you cast arrows into the dark, or do you dismiss it all as the delusions and illusions of your own, paranoid mind?

Really. Consider this.

If you act on reason, you would be compelled to dismiss your paranoid interpretation. You would laugh off the seeming red flags as statistically unlikely to be valid threats.

Yet what if there was the smallest chance you were wrong?

I mean, if you act on your paranoia, at worst you’ll shoot at nothing. Maybe wound or kill a harmless critter. At best you wound or kill a non-human predator or daring member of a rival band, thereby eliminating the immediate threat and perhaps dissuading others from following in their foolhardy or fatal footsteps.

Sad as it may be, evolution favors paranoia. Values instinct over reason.

Best to act on your fears and be wrong than dismiss your fears as paranoia only to find that you had been right all along when it’s all to fucking late.

Anxiety, it turns out, has greater survival value. At least back then. In our natural context as a species, in other words, my acute anxiety would serve as a survival advantage.

In the modern context? Well, I’m just a fucking mess.

Driving in a small pick-up truck through the torrential rain viciously pounding down on the machine I’m navigating through the direction of a robotic female voice on my cell phone, blinded by the goddamn LED high-beams of oncoming traffic and the pools of water that, when I hit them, encapsulate the vehicle, entirely obscuring my vision and, for brief moments, making me feel as though I’ve driven off a bridge and into the ocean at light fucking speed?

No doubt. This has no survival value, none at all, not in this context.

No, I’m just a mess.

Yet it summons that ancient, instinctive terror inherited through the human ancestors that came before me. Ghosts that clearly possess me. Deeply-rooted fear I inherited from the dead yet not quite gone: the paranoid humans of the past who survived, who got laid and spawned those who then also spawned, and so on.

Igniting a chain of not-at-all-chill who ultimately led me, let me be, here today.

Just realize, I tell myself, that when you’re battling against this anxiety you’re but a lone, singular entity in the context of a small moment. A relatively light organism embedded in a brief, temporal fart in the wind who is waging an epic war against the awesome weight and unfathomable power of the collective history of your species.

And despite all that, just like so many times before, you didn’t fucking die.

Sure, from a certain perspective you might be weak, pathetic, and utterly ridiculous, but you survived.

Despite the pressure put on you by hundreds of thousands of years, you came out the other side without so much as a light bruise or visible scar.

Cherish that, bitch.

Smoke your stupid smoke, listen to the creatures of the night sing away, and try to spy those breathtaking stars in the breaks of the heavy overcast and just relax, you silly fuck.

You’re okay. You survived another storm.

Just breathe.

A Mixed Bag of Weird.

Jettisoning load after load of liquid bleach all over the base of that gaping, porcelain piss pot, using a scratch pad to aggressively scrub off the piss scum. Chiseling poo-turned-concrete off the fat lip of that toilet. Collecting the depressing amount of litter people dump in the parking lot and in the dining room on a daily basis.

Being the only one unable to screen out the incessant beeping of the various, typically-malfunctioning machines scattered all throughout the restaurant.

Hearing my name being called from a distance, and in that tone that immediately makes me wonder what horrors await me.

How bad is the mess I’ll have to clean up? Do I need gloves, towels, and sanitizer? A mop? A fucking HAZMAT team? Should I contact FEMA?

Going home so coated in grease at the end of a shift that if anyone dared to bear-hug me I’d violently yeet into the heavens above like a wet bar of soap in a moist death-grip, likely achieving escape velocity.

Yes, there are things I won’t miss, but there are other things I surely will, and I’ve made mental note of them my last few shifts.

At some point, I remind myself, there will be the last time she will brush her massive mammary against my forearm as she walks past me during our shifts together, seemingly oblivious to the fact.

There will be the last time he’ll call me Craig several times a shift for reasons that still escape me, and the last time I’ll respond by referring to him as Sugar Tits.

And him, with his typically stoic and difficult-to-read body language, there will be the last time I’ll overhear him provide intriguing political analysis and bitter but on-point critiques on the state of our species in between assembling sandwiches for ungrateful customers.

And there will be the last time his fiance will feel compelled to ask me to drop fries in the fryer or put pies in the oven while I’m in the midst of changing trash.

She really, really loves that shit, and it irritates the hell out of me, but I know a part of me will miss it.

And him? There will be the last time I’ll hear him cough up a lung and hawk tuah an uber-loogie onto the pavement several times a shift, all as he bellows smoke from his dirt-cheap cigarettes, barking at every customer that pulls into the lot to “go home!” with as much force and volume as his raspy whisper of a voice will allow.

There will be the last time he’ll tell me, in the midst of a shift, about a cool science article I might have missed, or randomly give me some food he bought from across the street.

“Having fun yet?”

Then there’s this motherfucker. The Man of a Million Questions, the Dish Boy. All right, I won’t exactly miss this one, but I will miss how my irritation with him fueled some writing. I’ll miss how another coworker and I would keep score, count the number of questions he would ask either of us, and compare our numbers after he left in an effort to transmute our mutual misery into an amusing game.

May he one day find satisfactory answers to all those difficult questions in life, such as how to do that thing he’s already been shown how to do fifty fucking times already.

There will be many things I’ll miss — most of all, the people — after today, my last day on the job. I’ll still see them, but it’s not the same as working beside them day in, day out.

Today, well, today is going to be a mixed bag of weird.

An Uber-Pooch & the Unnecessary Drum-Roll.

7/23/24

Twirling, leaping, putting one leg up in the air, jumping through a hoop: this dog would echo the woman’s moves as perfectly as possible on stage, before the live studio audience, with a few solitary tricks thrown in for good measure. My parents had shown me this, a clip from some show they watched, when I had gone over to see them one day.

It was damn impressive.

Thinking back on that now, I’m utterly amazed that a dog could be trained so well, to execute such a complex series of behaviors, and I can’t get fucking Dish Boy to master the simplest of tasks.

With as much patience as I am capable of conjuring, I explain to him how to do it, as I have during countless other cycles of this agonizingly dizzying time loop I’m evidently trapped within. I’ve done it myself and had him observe. I’ve observed him as he’s done it. Nothing has worked, so this time I even go the extra mile and tell him not only how it’s done, but why.

This goes here and that goes there so the other thing can work and then this can happen. See? See the straightforward logic behind it?

Later on, I check to see if he got it. Unnecessary drumroll: no. This was put upside down. That was put on backwards.

Clearly, the Dishboy Whisperer I am not.

I can’t imagine what his sex ed teacher had to go through. Even on the last day of class, having retained nothing. Questions reflecting his total lack of the most fundamental understanding.

“The left testicle goes in the right ear-hole, right, and then the man boops her on the nose? That’s how babies are made, right?”

Thing is, I don’t tell him the hows and whys in a condescending way, either, despite the fact that even if a drooling, knuckle-dragging, lobotomized space monkey from the crusty bowels of NASA were locked alone with it in a room for the length of an average work shift I’d put money I don’t have on the silly little simian putting it all together on his own.

Meanwhile Dishboy here, even if he had lived amongst the wild monkeys since birth, surely couldn’t put together how to peel a banana or fling a handful of poo.

Cig, Cell, Handgun, & a Rack.

7/25/24

About a ten minute drive away is the county jail.

And just a hop, skip, and a stone-throw down the road from our lovely distribution center for artery-clogging consumables and cavity-causing beverages there’s the county courthouse.

And when their jailbirds are to be set free, the coppers like to drive them here, to the diseased heart of this town, and yeet them like draft beer from out of a frat boy’s tum-tum the morning after a killer fucking party.

These jailbirds, they aren’t the least bit shy about where they’ve just been, either, throwing out the fact in casual conversation with as much ease as they might make a passing comment regarding the weather.

Hell, for some I’ve met here over the years, having a record almost serves as a rite of passage.

“Before this, you were but a boy. But now,” says the imaginary, aging father, face betraying pride, eyes welling with tears he must fight to hold back, “now, my son? Now you’re a man.”

I swear, this fucking town…

Anyway, so I’m not surprised when two guys looking rather lost approach me from around the corner of the building. The one with shoulder-length dreads in a cool-looking hoodie sporting Rick from the show Rick & Morty, he’s the first to break the ice.

Almost immediately, he strikes me as one of those laid-back, “it-is-what-it-is” kind of guys. The type who takes things as they come. For whom troubles and tragedies roll like rain off a duck’s back. I find I like him.

I think he mentions he’s from Cleveland.

He asks for a smoke, but after looking, I tell him I only have three left in the box. This is not a lie. Do I leave out the fact that I have another pack of smokes in the truck? Yes. So is this misleading? Also yes, but it’s still not a lie. Not technically.

Oh, forgive me already.

So of course he then asks for a lighter. As he digs it out of his pocket after what I presume to be a characteristically casual yet determined quest, he explains how he has a partial cigarette, which as he pulls it out I see is basically a butt with maybe four salvageable hits.

This guy, fucked up on drugs, presumably meth, that he and his friend were in jail with: he was the one who had given it to him, it soon becomes clear. This guy, the same guy who had evidently promised them a ride and then vanished as if by mysterious meth magick.

This cigarette is reportedly horrible. And yes, he’s surprised.

The other guy, his friend, is visibly and rather audibly pissed that the cops had just dropped them off here. Assuming it won’t serve to make him feel the least bit better, I don’t enlighten him to the fact that this is standard procedure.

This guy, I come to learn, he’s from Pittsburg.

He’s not like Dreadlock Rick over here. Quite the opposite, in fact. Frantic, frustrated, leg bouncing as if to the tempo of a thrash metal song when he later leans against the wall beside me. He’s at war against the world.

Getting off his phone, he approaches me while asking if I myself have a phone.

Well, shit. Can’t get out of this without blatantly lying.

Before I can answer, he’s already trying to quell the assumption he assumes I’m making that he’s going to steal it. He tried to make a call through our free Wifi, he says, but it’s not working — which given my own experience I find it easy to believe.

I can hold his phone as he uses mine, he says. I can stand right here. He’s not going to run away with it, he says. I finally hold up my hands, gesturing for him to relax, to take a breath.

What he fails to understand is that what I really fear are the consequences. Namely that the people he would be calling and who would not immediately answer would inevitably call him back on my phone after he’s gone. It’s annoying, and it always happens.

In fact, it did happen. Half an hour after they leave, I get a missed call. After I get home from work, a text message.

“Who’s this?”

With confidence, I called it. Yet I let him call them just the same, because I’m a softie. A fucking mark.

A stranger calls with urgency, I pick up with empathic dumbassery.

Opening up the keypad, I then hand it to him in defeat, and in the time it took me to finish my cigarette he calls three people. One, I haven’t the fucking foggiest clue who it is. The other is his sister, who doesn’t have her license, “and I know that’s going to be her first excuse why she can’t pick me up.”

“I mean, dude, that’s a pretty legitimate excuse,” I don’t say, because I’m not that much of a dumbass.

Then he calls his girlfriend, at one point changing his voice so it sounded like he was going to cry, that he was fighting with himself so as not to break down while on the phone with her.

Baby, I need you, he says. I’m in a bad place right now, he says.

Baby, you’re all I’ve got.

All an act, needless to say. Grade-A horse shit. Merely an attempt at manipulation. You know, just like how the motherfucker got me to give him my phone in the fucking first place.

In between the calls, he’s talking to Dreadlock Rick, telling him how he feels uncomfortable here, like people are looking at him weird. How he feels out of place.

Inside, I laugh. He doesn’t know how effectively he’s just articulated how I’ve felt my entire goddamn life.

He then goes on to reference how he was charged with murder, how he was supposed to get life. How if only this one girl they were talking about would just pick him up so he could get the hell out of here, “dude, I’ll give her a handgun and a rack.”

Wait, what? A rack?

Like, a gun rack? A bike rack? Or, like, tits? Is he really saying he would provide new tits for her? That he would not only gift her a firearm but go so far as to fund breast implants if only she would be willing to play taxi for a day?

So strange, what passes for currency these days.

I swear, not a day passes that I don’t hear someone younger than me use lingo that makes me feel like some out-of-touch, left-behind, ever-aging fossil of a fuck.

And not to just pass it by without mentioning it: yeah, there was also that murder thing he mentioned.

For the record, yes, it made me wonder if he was always so open and honest when speaking around total strangers — or if he perhaps only openly confessed to being suspected of homicide after they lent him their phone.

Again, it’s so strange what passes for currency these days.

Really, though: what a fucking town I’ll be leaving.

Just the Stars, the Horny Insects, and I.

I should sleep.

Still, I sit on a plastic storage bin, staring out of the open doors of my shed, eyes meandering far above the trailer and Tacoma in my view and up, up, up and out into the beautiful, starry night sky above, slowly taking drags off my cigarette as the insects and other creatures of the night sing their calming, polyrhymic chorus.

My ears, my eyes, soak it all up.

Still, the summation of all layers of the simultaneous musical tracks of my fellow dark-dwellers, however soothing they are to the ear, I realize, can easily be broken down in translation to: “wanna fuck? Wanna get it on?”

Ah, nature.

The melodious long-distance booty calling of my night-rising brethren. The cat-calling cacophony of the nocturnal creatures of our blessed earth.

Ah, the boner-inspired serenades of the Web of Primal Night-Life.

All serving as this insomniac’s makeshift lullaby, I might add. Serving as a somehow suitable soundtrack to the stars. A playlist to the planets, too. All of whom are playing cosmic peek-a-boo tonight as the clouds slowly serve to obscure and then reveal their ineffable, shimmering beauty, their awesome mystery, through the lubrication of Gaia’s wobbly aura.

Yeah, I should sleep. Yet I resist.

The trailer is almost in order. This transition, it’s almost complete. The page has nearly turned. My world-line is curving at long fucking last. A new chapter is on the cusp, and this?

This evening is the brief twilight in the seeming segue.

And while it’s not complete, not yet stabilized, and I’m not so naive to think this bliss will last, for the moment I find myself lapping from the lethe, intoxicated on these rejuvenating nighttime waters, this sacred conflux that produces a long-sought-after state approximating peace.

The stars are so beautiful. The creatures’ songs, so hypnotic.

The past is not present, nor is the future, but me? I am present, at least for now.

In this very moment? Just the stars, the horny insects, and I.

This? This my fucking zeptosecond. Forgive me if I take this micro-moment to saturate.

Still, I should probably sleep.

The Essence of Orientation (The First Sentence of a New Chapter).

7/26/24

Around these dirt-brown irises, the surrounding sclera is plagued with mud cracks like a dreadfully dry desert floor. Only here the once-bleached desert has gone pink, broken by winding networks of veiny, itchy, aching red. Behind them both — the broken deserts of pink and the dirty moats — and deep within those black hole pupils, my consciousness feels uncomfortably altered and unstable as I desperately try to focus.

To power through this eight-hour, wayward orientation before a goddamn computer terminal where I’m watching videos, reading things, taking quizzes, increasingly uncertain I’m even doing what I’ve been all-too-vaguely charged with doing.

The guy that interviewed me the other day, the one I naively assumed would be supervising me throughout my shift or at the very fucking least provide for me a rigid structure and clearly-defined goal? Well, he seems to telepathically pick up on my assumptions and elect to stubbornly embody the antithesis, all just to spite me.

Some people, they just like to see the world within others burn.

And during the interview, he seems like such a nice guy.

Today, though, he basically just tells me to sit here and do this. To make sure and take my two fifteen minute breaks and my hour lunch. And then he disappears, poot, poof, like a phantom fart swiftly carried upwind, never to be seen or smelt again.

I try to relax, try not to care. Try to ignore the fact that the real issue isn’t the absence of a game plan but my anxiety, which is just one of several issues I’m forced to deal with due to the fact that I didn’t sleep last night.

Not. A fucking. Wink.

I’ve always been a night owl, an insomniac, even as a Li’l Ben, sure, but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to rely on sleep aides to provide some vague semblance of a schedule.

Some vague semblance of sanity.

I need this job, though, even if it’s just the first foothold to a better job, and I got off work at my present job last night at eleven in the evening and had to be here, at what will be my new job soon enough, which is an hour away, at ten in the morning. And, well, I fear if I take a sleep aid I’ll sleep in. Fuck this opportunity up — hardcore, DP-style — before I even clock in for my first official day.

No way can I let that happen. No, no, I have to be responsible. So I decide to try to pursue sleep via what has undoubtedly become a foreign avenue for me. A road I have not traveled in some time.

I go the way of au naturel.

I don’t stay up till five in the fucking morning, pursuing my passions or engaging in catharsis.

No.

I don’t research. Don’t write. Don’t produce artwork. Don’t engage in any of that soul food and spiritual bloodletting at all, no, I just climb into bed and put that chaotic gourd of mine that never shuts the bloody fuck up on a pillow and wrap myself in blankets like a human burrito.

This? This should end well. No doubt.

I’m an idiot.

I try to just witness the thoughts, view them as a detached observer as I focus on the breath, but I’m out of practice when it comes to mindfulness meditation due to being, like, a lazy, stupid asshole.

I analyze the day before. Contemplate plaguing questions. Delve deep, deep, deep into the psychology of those I know. Revisit memories from childhood. Feel the gut-punch of guilt for stupid decisions, fearing what consequences ill-advised actions in my history may, or at least should, deliver to me in the future.

In short, my weak ass becomes a slave to those compulsive, emotionally-charged avenues of thought — fighting them as I trapeze on that tightrope in the twilight betwixt the dream and the waking, though never to fall into soft, numb slumber of the Other Side.

Then I make coffee, have breakfast, take a shower, get dressed, and drive an hour to orientation, delirious from insufficient shut-eye — and here I am.

Though intermittently, at best.

No. Keep your eyes open. Absorb the data on the computer monitor. Pretend all is well. Fake it till you make it. Everything is a-oh-fucking-kay.

Nope. It is not.

Honestly, this experience brings me back to high school. Getting by on, at best, three hours a night, chugging Pepsi and coffee to defeat the enemy of sleep, the horrifying vulnerability that came with slumber, and disturbingly often enough coming out the other side, triumphant and exhausted but still pushing through into the warmth, comfort, and security that came with dawn’s light.

My agonizing experience, right now: that had been my goal. How could I have been so bloody mad? How had I done this — hell, accomplished this through intense effort, met this as a fucking goal post through mere will and caffeine — for so, so bloody fucking long back in my teens and twenties?

Then I remember.

I recall in clarity all of the weird things in my life that fueled that sleeplessness, horrors of which I shall not speak lest you come to consider me even more insane than you think I am, and then it all makes sense.

It’s not like that weird shit has abated, either, but you can adapt to even the strangest of the strange over the years, let me tell you.

“We grow up to give up,” he sang.

Despite that, or perhaps as a consequence of it, you clearly lose your admirable tolerance for the delirium of insomnia, too.

I mean, fuck, the pull to collapse like a dying star under the weight of my own gravity is utterly indescribable. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I now realize, got the pecking order of desires all wrong. I mean, the urge for sex? Even for food and water? It all pales in comparison.

All else loses the value it once held in a more rested state of mind. Everything falls away. The chain of command collapses until there are only two.

Awake. Or asleep.

Oh, how I want to submit to my bed like a weak little bitch. Lick my pillow like a boot. Be swaddled by blankets and sheets in the midst of restless sleep like an ignorant, pathetic, vulnerable fucking infant. Serve as a gimp for the goddess of dreams, let that luscious, insatiable, morbidly seductive and undeniably divine leather-clad dominatrix lead me by her hypnotic, tranquilizing leash unto that blessed land of rejuvenating sleep.

Even so, I strive to overcome the overwhelming draw of her magnetic enchantment.

“Hold on until your second wind comes along.”

Sing it, Billy Joel.

The shift is over. He’s not in his office. He’s nowhere to be found. Did I do it right? Am I a good boy?

For the lack of god, I fucking hate myself.

I clock out, still feeling so surreal, and leave. Still blind to where I am, where I’m going, what I might mean, I’m satisfied enough that I made it to the end. That I pushed past the initial stages of this new beginning.

The first sentence of a new chapter.

Of a Goth Girl Caught in a Tractor Beam.

He’s leaning on, partly over the front counter, openly and easily expressing himself to some cute goth chick in the dining room who’s just quietly and patiently waiting for her food.

Without stuttering. Without losing his voice. Without having an acute anxiety attack. Not while red in the face, not in the midst of gasping for air.

Not a bead of sweat on his porcelain forehead, which stretches all the way to the back of his fucking neck.

No. Calm as midmorning waters.

Son of a bitch.

Such innocence, such ignorance, such confidence. How liberating it must be to be so goddamn simple. For a moment I almost envy his clear lack of self awareness.

Then I snap out of it and proceed to condemn myself for my simultaneously patronizing and self-loathing thoughts and emotions. Really, I’m such a double-edged sword of a dick.

Finally, I observe the pretty goth girl herself, sip from her vibrant vibe. Feel how awkward he’s making her feel, see it reflected in her body language. And finally I feel slightly better about being an anxious, hypersensitive introvert.

Me? I’m surely the better loser. Right?

Neither of us are getting laid, but at least I’m not making pretty women want to collapse into themselves like a dying star just so they can dissociate away from my incessant barrage of bullshit.

Am I?

In any case, my condolences. I truly sympathize, my dark dear. I don’t know what questions he’s asking you, but please believe me: you are by no means alone in being subjected to this relentless, agonizing horror…

Dish Boy & Politics.

Last time Dish Boy brought up politics with me I got him so pissed off he didn’t ask me a single question for over an hour.

So naturally, as he does it again, the temptation to deliver words that would serve as the verbal equivalent of throwing a gallon of gasoline on this conversation and striking a match as I calmly walk away from the explosion like the cool guys in the movies is bloody overwhelming.

“Did you hear they assassinated the president?” Dish Boy asks. “They caught the guy the day after, though.”

Just as it was the previous occasion, he speaks about it now with so much conviction it irritates me, but I remind myself that his memory is like an Etch-a-Sketch suffering from a perpetual Grand Mal seizure, so the fact that he retained even a garbled rendition of the truth should probably be applauded.

Deep breaths, Tim. Deep breaths.

Calmly, I explain to Dish Boy that it was technically an attempted assassination, as the guy only managed to Van Gough our former (and, it increasingly seems certain, future) but-not-present president, and they shot the Bullet-Riddler on the Roof dead that very day.

You know, shortly after that Secret Service group-hug with the spray-tan raisin in the middle known as The Donald who, once acquiring his lost loafers, defiantly fisted the heavens before a roaring audience, leading to what will undoubtedly be an iconic photograph.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”

Please don’t bring up the suspicious aspects of the incident, I think at him, as I’d hate to agree with you and you’re the last guy I’d want to leap down a rabbit hole with.

Thankfully, he does not.

No, then he tells me about Trump’s pick for vice president, that he’s a “good guy,” and I want to ask him why, but these aren’t really his thoughts, I realize. He’s adopted what little he could pick up from what his parents have said, I’m guessing, so that conversation would just be awkward for him. And, yeah, me.

I just say that Vance’s values and ideals don’t align with my own and hope that’s enough, but Dish Boy insists, “no, no, his values are good,” as if this was just a simple, honest misunderstanding of mine.

As if these weren’t subjective judgements but objective actualities.

As if I’d clearly just not gotten the memo about which values were the holy, singular, right ones. As if I must have simply missed that meeting where I was informed of what values I’m supposed to adopt.

Didn’t you attend the brain-washing seminar?

I hold my tongue between my not-so-pearly whites and just take out the trash, knowing that by the time he sees me next, in roughly ten minutes, he’ll likely default to his usual, stupid questions.

He does.

And relatively-speaking, it’s fucking euphoric.

Journey Down the Grayscale.

Years ago, you’re at a party, sitting on a couch, when you lean down to pick your beer up off the floor. Just then, someone innocently snaps a photo, and upon looking at it on social media the following day you can clearly see the big, bold crop circle at the crown of your head.

That’s how it starts. So you shave your head and go back to wearing a hat.

As the hairline continues to recede, however, the remainder starts to go white and gray. Then the facial hair turns salt-and-pepper, with ever-increasing sprinkles of salt added. Next, the occasional snowy sprout from the mown fro from below. Ghostly white follicles begin blossoming at the center of your chest like your Old Man chakra is gradually opening.

Then one day you look into the mirror only to find two white hairs in one of your fucking eyebrows.

That day is today.

You’re gradually becoming a black-and-white photograph, boy.

This?

This is your slo-mo slide into monochrome.