Our days and nights are duly decked
with celebrity deaths. We pause, reflect,
and grieve again the common loss.
(We’re all Time’s bitch, the final boss
embodied by, of course, a clock.
To whom does this come as a shock?)
And who will mourn the day we die?
And who remain to tell our tale
when memory’s cloth fades past the pale?
While we’re still here to laugh and cry,
let’s share some coffee, you and I.
— Brenner
This review of two fancy hotels in Austin, Texas, one of my last big articles for The Austin Chronicle, may provide enlightenment.
1. Stand in your kitchen and rub an ice cube against your scalp until that ice cube is gone.
2. Let the resultant water trickle down your neck and into your shirt.
3. Shout “I am baptized anew by my own cold hand! I am baptized anew by my own cold hand! I am baptized anew by my own cold hand!”
4. Forgive yourself for any mistakes you’ve made in the past six months.
5. Forgive yourself completely for those mistakes, no matter how big or small they might have been, and remember that you are worthy, that you have always been worthy, that you will always be worthy, of love.
Feed the machine, feed the machine.
Observe the machine as it's fed. Listen closely to the faint sounds of pleasure it makes.
Tell the machine that you understand its processes. Describe the machine to itself; do not merely praise or insult, but be discriminating.
At certain times during its cycles, the machine will anoint a selection of its feeders with a special oil. This oil is sweet and smells of home.
The smell of home is sometimes overwhelming within the machine.
The smell of home is sometimes overwhelming.
Your new construct of me came over for a few drinks last night.
It removed its cheap mask, took a seat on the couch in the living room.
It was pretty familiar – just a bit less ugly and a little smarter than I’d expected, and I thank you for that – but there was also something missing, something definitely in absentia about the thing, and after a while it started to seem … well, it seemed completely hollowed out, you know?
I didn’t cut it too badly.
There should still be some blood left.
The resurgence of the vinyl is another dead-cat bounce. The masses make the metrics rise & fall. Volume, volume, volume’s all that ever really counts. And everybody heeds the profit’s call.
Buy the sky & sell the ground, the record spins & the world goes round,
the world goes round & we feel it in our skins,
and there’s no hope for salvation if you don’t have any sins.
Buy the ground & sell the sky, the record spins & the world goes by, the world goes by & the human record spins.
There’s an end to all our history & here’s where it begins.
[drum solo]
And Karl works all the Engels. And Freddie gets bad Marx. And the proles they keep a-chummin’ hard for all the bourgeois sharks.
I painted this thing – three-feet-by-five-feet, tempera on black burlap – as part of a series of ten, about ten years ago.
There’s always something that gets in the way, that keeps him from doing the things he needs to do.
Right now, for instance, he should be mowing the lawn in front of the house he lives in with his girlfriend. The house is the first place they’ve rented together, both of them on the lease, and the front lawn is a fraying rectangle of green beyond the big living room window; the grass is taller than his ankles, is just about mid-shin, so he should definitely be out there with the gas-powered Toro his brother has permanently loaned him.
But it’s raining, so what can he do?
He looks out the window, watching fat drops batter the yard and explode against the asphalt street defining the lawn’s far edge.
“Sounds like it’s coming down pretty hard,” says his girlfriend in the kitchen. She’s slicing onions on a wooden board, her chef’s knife moving swiftly and precisely as the bulbs divide. Next, she’ll place the onion pieces in a pan with some olive oil, cook them until the sugars have caramelized and the onion bits, limp and translucently amber, can be layered atop the pork chops she’s got in the oven.
“It’s a fucking slaughterhouse out there,” he says. He exhales a patch of steam onto the window’s pane, uses an index finger to make the two dots and wide arch of a sad face.
“No mowing for you today,” she says, scraping onion into the pan.
“Yeah,” he says, “definitely.”
The curved slices sizzle as they hit the oil. “You should’ve done it this morning.”
“Who knew it would rain?” he says, and instantly regrets it. His girlfriend had checked the weather report as she did each morning, part of her waking-up routine along with the yoga and the cold shower, and she’d made a point of telling him that there was a greater than 80 percent chance of rain that afternoon.
“I told you,” she says now, stirring onions.
“Yeah,” he says, watching the downpour. “Yeah, you did.”
Why had he said that, who-knew-it-would-rain?
Because he wanted her to humor him, he realizes. He wanted her to pretend that she’d never mentioned the forecast. He wanted her to lie to him — to lie to herself, even, if that’s what it took — to revise reality in order to validate his question and thus, by extension, his current lack of lawnmowing. To cut him a little slack, for fuck’s sake. Isn’t that what love was supposed to be about, after all? Denying yourself for someone else? Didn’t she love him anymore? Didn’t she love him enough to —
“Aw, no worries,” she says, lowering the flame below the onion-filled pan. “Another day won’t make that much difference. The jungle can wait, right? Fuck it.”
“Yeah,” he says, “fuck the jungle. The jungle can fucking wait.”
“Fuck that fucking jungle,” she says.
“And the photosynthesis it rode in on,” he says, stepping away from the window.
She smiles, shakes her head. Tends to the onions.
The rain continues falling.
Puddles form a network across the drowning lawn.
The oven timer goes off, signaling the pork chops’ completion.
I work with some good people, tell you what.
At my day job, I mean: Good people, and maybe just a little strange.
Especially this guy.
All the men with freckles.
All the men with long silken beards.
All the men who died much too young.
All the men who read literary fiction in bed.
All the men who have some kind of skull tattoo.
All the men who have a big nasty scar somewhere.
All the men who have never kissed another man on the lips.
All the men who spend more money than they earn.
All the men who are kind to strangers in need.
All the men who wear blue jeans to weddings.
All the men who usually drink too much beer.
All the men with a new idea for a start-up.
All the men who wash dishes for a living.
All the men who enjoy growing violets.
All the men with too much work to do.
All the men with lower back pain.
All the men with vaginas.
All the men with guns.
All the men.