Little Boxes

1204A

From the curb, 1204A appeared less like a house to me, and more like a 3D representation of the inverse of love rendered in wood and shingle. It felt like it to me, too, even from the first night I pulled up in front in the 22′ Penske. I tried to detect this same thing in other similar houses throughout the neighborhood whenever I walked past them, but none exuded the unhappiness of my hunched and peeling hovel. Maybe it’s the way that watery, dull green paint job looked by the half-light of the moon; like zombie phlegm, or the color of the filing cabinets left behind in your dead uncle’s garage apartment.

Dreams of Splitsville had sustained us both there for a while. Just getting out of the Southeast was a feat. Then it was retail therapy. My wife and I’d kept little lists of appliances and paint chips and such. (That German-made clothes iron was really going to change things.) Sometimes I’d buy something nice, but then keep it in its box, deciding it was much too fine a thing to be installed amid the leaky ceilings & cracked soffits, and serially clogged drains, and the doorknobs and switch plates hazed in hand grunge, and the fritzy wiring and the broken, fetid grout. I’d unboxed some nice bone china mugs at one point, only to cringe as I watched the neighbor from 1204B (nothing more than an aggrandized potting shed behind our place) literally slobber all over their rims during one of his ritual and protracted self-invites. He was a double PhD, and Japanese, and also a dwarf, and also weirdly passive aggressive, and snoopy, and would do irritating things like press his oily nose up against one of my old guitar amps and smell it before letting out an approving sumo grunt. And yet, for five summers we copied ‘n’ pasted our virtual signatures on the dotted line of the renewal notice, our plans remaining tightly furled on a high-up shelf, our belongings gradually morphing from treasure to encroachments. (There would be several Pompeii moments upon opening long-stowed boxes years later, rediscovering something that had been hastily packed away mid-doing with the clear intent of getting right back to it.)

We’d known that 1204A would be a downgrade from the get go, but had decided to live beneath our means for a while in order to save for a place of our own. Of course, 2008 was not the greatest time to start being a saver. To do so during a global recession felt like something on the order of sedition. After all, every bit of economic policy being drafted was designed to facilitate consumer spending and discourage saving. I’d never before lingered on the subject of economics, let alone the dynamics of the national residential real estate market. Just not my cup; but then the well was poisoned, and for a good long while, finance found its way into almost everything we drank or ate. The thesis of nearly every conversation turned to matters of housing, or speculators-vs-savers, consumerism, inflation/deflation, commodities, rentiers, (not renters misspelled — look it up ((or don’t))), lemon socialism, bailout scandals, Georgism, pump ‘n’ dump schemes, debt-to-income ratios, slumlords, down payments, taxes and how much was too much.

Today, I run from any such discussions. The decimal stuff depresses me, and I honestly, finally, do not care. Instead, I think about which of those early Pasolini films I should see, and which Billy Bean albums I still haven’t heard, and what is the best dry brush ink on the shelf, and whether the lilac bush on that one corner is in bloom yet, and absent friends, and my favorite architects, and mastering a new orchestral chord or two on the guitar, and good sculpture, and Jeffers’ Carmel, and where to find chrome-plated slotted equipment rack screws, and whatever else the hell trips my fancy.

On some of those nights toward the end, 1204A got to me so bad that I’d migrate out to the porch, no matter the weather, just so as not to be physically confined within its walls. Careful to avoid the grease spot where 1204B made his nightly kibble deposits for the strays, I’d park my tired trunk on the top step and proceed to over-think the matter of my own existence, or just play with my beloved feline, Charlotte, for an hour or so (she hated 1204A, too).

There was one night in particular; it stands out as being one of the last of the season perfectly suited to extended porch lamentations. It was late April I think, a moon so bright you could repair a watch by it, and more fireflies than you knew what to do with. A warm breeze hushed through the budding pear tree out front, sending it’s leaves shimmying and glimmering in the moonlight. I guess if a tree could be happy, this one was as giddy as a boy with a new puppy. In the distance, a halyard dinged against a flagpole, keeping time for a chorus of crickets. I probably shouldn’t mention the waves of honeysuckle or the shooting stars (two of them). A truly splendiferous night. Indeed, I suspect there must be only a handful of nights across an entire lifetime as truly Eden-like.

Meanwhile, my wife was inside asleep. She wanted to leave me. She’d told me so earlier that evening. She felt nothing for me anymore. Her words had set up franchises throughout my brain, doing some pretty ugly business with my heart along with the first few floors below before finally stopping at my guts and dwelling there like a 60 cycle hum. Every square inch of my nervous tissue had been tenderized and subsequently suffused in one after another of cheap, double fight-or-flight cocktails. Eighteen years together — since we were kids. Not to do the propagandists at the NAR any favors, but I swear that if we’d been installed in an actual home rather than slumming it in some grubby cubby down in scrubhole Texas, things very much most highly probably would not have gone to hell the way they did.

I remember that night wandering out past that happy pear tree and ripping out weeds by the fistfuls, like some green-thumbed fiend from a Robert E. Howard pulp. Fuck all these fucking thistles, man… It was probably a little after 1AM. I guess I must’ve given hell to about a good dozen or more when I heard the jingle of a dog collar from somewhere in the street behind me; there, being dragged past my curb by their spazzy whippet was a thoroughly modern couple of the shampoo/sugar/gluten-free persuasion. The kind of kids who have a ping-pong table outside the cube farm at their startup company and think it means they’re working for a really progressive outfit. Thankfully, they were too engrossed in discussing something to do with their new chicken coop to notice the sad weirdo lurking just off-screen, wielding a giant thistle still dripping milk from its taproot. They may have been the vile sort, but I did truly envy their unawares; 1204A meant nothing to them. They’d probably never even noticed it.

Composing myself, I flung the thistles up onto the roof and then crept back inside, silently making plans to drive back over to the old neighborhood once I was finally gone and go for a nice late night walk, just so I could walk right past 1204A.

FOREVER: sell by–2013

“Oh! – these are a-MAZ-ing,” swooned the wizened, hennaed cashier at the Walgreens as she scanned my Kleenex, even sneaking the box a mawkish little hug. According to the packaging, they contained a wonder ingredient — something called Cool Touch, which was supposed to make them seem, of all things, cool-to-the-touch. “Yeah, it’s like they came straight outta the crisper!” I studied the box, envisioning a group of chemical engineers somewhere out there in the vast shadowy lowlands of the territory, brainstorming new & improved means for mitigating the afflictions of the oozing masses; a real hell of a bunch.

“You ever tried ‘em before?” she asked. I told her I hadn’t. “Oh, they’re just the best. Way better than Puffs.” Then, with an exaggerated splutter: “They kill Puffs.” I told her I liked Scott tissue best, but that after awhile, it started to feel more like something woven in the Outer Hebrides against the ol’ mucus membranes, and so we discussed our preferred toilet tissues for a spell. Her name tag said FANNIE, but the obvious humor eluded me at the time. Fanny was something like the headwaiter who’d tried everything on the menu at least once, and I commended her on her supreme authority of the paper products aisle.

Once past the automated door, I let go a long sigh, and then treated myself to another, and another, until I was ventilating exclusively by long warbling sighs. I’d done it; I’d ventured from my blue little corner out into a hyper-lit public space while maintaining a reasonable facsimile of highly random slob. I even mustered some convincing smalltalk, despite not one thing in my life being small. That’s when I first stumbled on the formula — and maybe it’s something that’s obvious to everyone else but me, but essentially, all there really is to being strong is acting in a way that is exactly opposite to your suffering. (Try it out and let me know how it works.)

*********************

   As I navigated the old 240 homeward through the backstreets, my woman’s words sloshed around my brain pan. A torrent of resentments and recriminations that’d apparently gone untagged for years had suddenly been dragged out into the sunlight and flopped at my feet like a pile of dirty transcripts recovered from a house fire. In summary: I’d gotten everything wrong. Apparently, whenever she’d expressed how right and wonderful I was over the years, she was also acting in a way exactly opposite to how she felt.

In one of the more desperate hours, straying ever nearer ankle-clutching-&-begging territory, I began deconstructing and illustrating my love for her, to her. I expounded upon themes of loyalty and patience and caring, describing what exceedingly rare, highly endangered forces of good they each were, and how we both needed to do our small part to keep them from the shadows. I told her how afraid of how natural being alone had always felt to me — like a laziness or a vice to which too many people I’d known had too readily succumbed, all the while telling themselves how their handicap was really a kind of enlightenment. I told her how I needed to have at least one other soul in my life for whom I’d do anything, and with whom I wanted to do everything. Us against them. It came out sounding almost lyrical, and felt like it, too. It was also something like an epiphany for me, for in that moment, the full realization of these things about myself were gelling as I mouthed the words: damn…yeah, I really *do* feel this way.

She asked me whether I didn’t think it was unfair to burden a person with so much devotion. The inference was that I was loving her to death. I sat there for a long time, blanking out on the patterns in the homely blue quilt my mother-in-law made for us in back in the day — days I never would’ve dreamt I’d look back upon as the better of the bunch, for they’d been lean and uncertain. Finally, the question just seemed insane. No, I said; no, I don’t — but it was really more like, no I don’t garnished with a silent fuck you. Up until that point I’d been talking like it might be the last talking I ever did, as you do when you feel like how I was feeling, but no was suddenly the best I had. I was being rendered down to an unedited, binary state of being, all mannerisms, wit and guile skimmed away, leaving only my sloppy heart running down my shirt cuff like a melting clown nose. It does something to a man’s mind and to his body to be so naked. Personally, I’m not sure whether it’s grown me or shrunk me.

The card was what really did it. She’d sent it a few years earlier when she’d first started traveling for a new job. Reading it again, I started sobbing in place, my big dumb tears smacking the tiles in our ugly rented kitchen. She’d constructed it herself one afternoon at my suggestion that she’d been working too hard and needed some creative downtime. I remarked how much I liked the finished product, (she’d used my favorite colors). She remembered this, sneaking it out in her luggage a few months later and posting it to me from her hotel room. She’d addressed it to Sweetums. On the inside of the card was her loopy script full of gooey stuff. There was even a line where I could see she’d squeezed in an extra affectionate adverb or two as afterthought. (That’s when you know somebody loves you; when their feelings splash out over the neat margins of their bespoke stationery.) When I showed it to her that night, she reacted as though I’d produced a sneaky bit of evidence.

“I don’t know — I don’t remember how long ago I wrote that,” she muttered, glancing over her missive. I told her I did — that I remembered. I told her I’d counted up the days from the postmark; just over a thousand. Then I said something like — what difference does when make when someone says forever? If anyone can love any person that much, only to turn on a dime and slam their heart shut some 1,000 days later, well, then…what’s the fucking use? Of any of it?

“Probably,” she shrugged, “I just wrote something I thought you wanted to read.” And just like that, I found myself lost in a room without any windows or doors in my own little house of pain.

*********************

   Back home, I sat down on the concrete porch and wept as quietly as I could. I’d be goddamned if I let anyone hear me carrying on, but especially that witch inside. The tears just coughed up and out of me from somewhere very deep. I couldn’t breathe right. I cried for quite some time, by and for myself. I cried because people were so fucking rotten. I wrapped my arms around myself like you do to feel like someone’s holding you when there isn’t anyone. They were the lean, strong arms of the man I’d long ago cultivated to camouflage the too-sensitive kid tucked beneath. I’d been born with a soft heart — something like a boiled pumpkin inside a thin glass box, albeit, glass painted to look like cold rolled steel. The humble wizardry of muscle tissue and manner were my only remaining armor. But I could feel the walls going up even as I sat there; ramparts growing thicker and higher until, finally, there would be no way in or back out again. I might even secretly go around wishing that someone strong enough might one day crash the gates; but I already knew nobody could ever be that strong, nor brazen enough to hazard a go, because, to start with, their own walls wouldn’t allow it. Maybe I’d even grow bold enough to lend someone a hand; but then, dismantling one’s own firewall feels something akin to slow suicide.

Years earlier, I’d helped my woman remove a wall or two, allowing for ready access to all my jelly spots. But now, sitting there in the dark on the steps of our loveless home, sopping up the exit wounds with cool-touch Kleenex, it was impossible to do much else beyond dream up blueprints for better, stronger defense systems; to go back and redraft the schematic for a 2.0 release, utilizing the narrative arc of Lee Hazlewood lyrics and old MANDOM commericals as general templates.

But For My Machine

                                         

 

It’s getting to be that hour when you start dragging out the heavy equipment: meaning; desire; love; hate; good; evil; life; death. Meaning’s a good one. File under The One That Got Away. You silently pine for it like a dead pet. It certainly can’t be found in or anywhere near your guitar playing tonight. Mostly it just feels good to sit and be with your machine; the foreclosed farmer sat alone in his shut harvester with no crop to thresh.

You were after a specific attack character achievable only with the use of a certain super-thin plectrum blasted against some .013 round wounds. You really needed that sound. You scoured the place up, down, and sideways, but still could not find a single pick in any of the usual crannies. It seems like just a week or so ago, you couldn’t get away from the dizzy things. They’d go flying from your pockets into the lawn as you pulled out your house keys, or you’d find them used as bookmarks, or in the clothes dryer, or the silverware drawer. You got annoyed seeing them everywhere, but now you wish you could locate even one. A collar stay could almost work; but no…maybe there’s one in the guitar case, but you look, and there isn’t.

You take your usual spot on the third step from the landing and play with your thumb instead. You strum, thump, pluck, mute, detune, re-tune, and then hobble through a few scales ’til your ass gets tired. There’s the usual pet shapes, maybe a part of something you loftily refer to as a composition that you’ve been working on for a lifetime now (taxonomy-depending, we could be talking several lifetimes). The notes produced are exactly opposite of what you were after — chubby and warm, yet devoid of soul coal. Indeed, at best, there’s a few scant cinders yielding barely enough heat to barre a chord. Even your muscle memories are growing spotty.

Not much doing tonight, is there kid? Not much doing on a lot of nights lately. Thousands, probably. It’s been a real bad spell.

When was the last time you replaced the strings? You sit there, actually trying to pinpoint the exact night you were in that awful music shop, knowing all the while that it’s that other stringed machine that’s fucking you up tonight. Lately, you are more physically aware of this other machine than you have ever before been. It’s been clocking some real hard mileage on some very bad fuel over the last year or so. Blaming your guitar strings for your playing would be like taking an open-wheel racer across the Baja peninsula and then blaming a bad shave for why everything came apart after mile one.

You hurt, and the hurt is so deep as to border on the unreal. It is actually bizarre to hurt so much. Lately, whenever you hear the word heartache in a song or read it someplace, it’s like you’re unfolding a series of hidden wrinkles within the word itself, its true dimensions fanning out like some phantasmagorical blueprint replete with detailed footnotes and exploded views.  All the references you’ve heard over the years become clear after finally sitting down and reading the codex. Don Covay; Roy Orbison; Barry Gibb; Doc Pomus; Charles Aznavour…all of them contributing architects.

If you make it through this, you know you’ll look back at the brink in awe of how close you were. Maybe some humid night several thousand nights from this one, you’ll be slouched in one of those injection-molded Adirondack chairs in some old buddy’s carport, listening to some Capcity sides and glugging some good suds as you compare scars from all your exit wounds. Someone’s flirty half-sister’ll light some fireworks at the end of the drive; cheap thrills will ensue. You’ll remain plopped there, delighting in your own dumbness, staring at the half-sister’s perfect little ass through the sulfur fog banks plaiting around the old street lamps. And it is in that instant, lungs full of mossy midnight air, that you will realize that you feel just about as close to fine as you’ll ever get. You contrive and fixate on various such banal scenes evermore frequently and in evermore detail, as though they might represent the zenith of the human experience. Could be they do.

You put the guitar up and go put the sprinkler out. With this machine, you have better luck.

‘Tis Autumn

RIP Summer 2013. You sure gave me hell.

Just Be Nice To Him…

The kid next door went nuts & murdered his father last week. In fact, one week ago this evening. There’s a certain disquietude following such a thing…the Aftermath wagon’s been parked in the driveway everyday. Yesterday afternoon, in almost the exact spot where I first shook Dan Davis’ hand, there sat a red biohazard bin.

I’d only met Dan once, about a month ago when I was first moving into my new place. He possessed a sun-burnished patina and a smiling, mid-life lassitude that made him instantly likable. You could also tell he was intelligent. You just know, sometimes. And friendly; by the end of our brief encounter, he’d already suggested we get some drinks one night. Dan’d mostly come by that day to make sure his son’s car wasn’t in the way of my moving truck. I recall he was cradling a yap-happy chihuahua in one arm — only one of an increasing number of four-legged surrogates his wife had adopted as more of their children headed off to school. He mentioned having a couple of sons still yet living with them, “pre-University, sleeping ’til 2 PM,” he smiled, “you know the drill.”

“Yeah, I met Lance,” I said. Dan’s eyes widened.

“You met Lance? He talked to you?”

I’d met him three or four nights before I’d met Dan. He’d apparently been investigating my frequent comings-and-goings all throughout that week. (I opted for the word investigating even before reading in the deposition where Lance insisted he was a special agent trained by the CIA.)

I was by late that night dropping off some cargo when I heard a voice pop out from somewhere behind me in the dark: “You movin’ in?” His gruff tone sounded cartoonishly affected to my ears, as though he was trying to disguise his voice or sound meaner than he was for some reason. I turned to discover a rangey, slightly pumpkin-headed figure standing on the stacked stone bank dividing our drives. I said hi and then motioned him to the end of the driveway where we might make proper introductions. There in the dark street we shook hands, or rather, I imposed my hand on his. His movements were jerky and bursty and he spoke in a weirdly truncated syntax. Throughout our brief exchange, Lance kept his left hand placed over his mouth. At the time I thought he was simply trying to obscure the ludicrous mustache I managed to glimpse despite his best efforts (I’ve returned to this curious mannerism several times since the incident). Despite his cautious reticence, he explained how he lived in the house behind his parent’s and I responded about what a nice setup that must be, and that I also had a little outbuilding behind my shack that I planned on fixing up. He seemed uneasy, so I kept things short, telling him we’d be seeing each other around. Turns out, we never bumped into one another again.

I’ve replayed this encounter over a few times in my head, as probably anyone in my boots would; an unusual enough kid, sure — tetchy even — but then, I’m no paragon of mild manners myself, so who am I to judge? Certainly, there was nothing about my encounter with Lance to suggest he might be capable of cold-blooded patricide.

That’s the thing that I keep coming back to every night: the horror of being destroyed by your own creation. It disturbs to imagine how one may conceive of, create and nourish their own executioner. Think about that — a ticking time bomb made from the flesh of your flesh. As a childless artist, the closest equivalent for me might be dying from a violent paper cut or something.

“You met Lance…” Dan repeated to himself in half reverie. Then he gently cautioned me, should I run into him again — just be nice to him, adding: “He’s autistic.” Perhaps the explanation for everything lies in that single postscript. I don’t know enough about Autism to speak to that. All I know is that the man from next door was stabbed to death by his son — the same son he implored me to be nice to — and it’s ushered forth a suite of new, unusual, and heavy feelings in me that just won’t go away.

(names were changed, etc., etc.)

Nighttime is the Right Time

Alone with camera, one moonlit midsummer midnight, wandering the deserted lanes of my soon-to-be-former stomping grounds…

I’ve always been a walker, and Crestview has been a not-bad hamlet for said — particularly those long, circuitous late-nighters when your heart is so heavy you start envying the dumb and the dead, and find the only thing that makes you feel even a little better is to move your legs. Conveyance purely for the sake of being kinetic is like a secret weapon against the bad stuff. Patsy was righter than I bet even she realized.

I know I’m not the only one who adheres to this ages-old spiritual liniment. On one of my last walks through Crestview, I heard in the near distance what sounded like a woman seized with either intense panic or epic orgasm (surprisingly hard to discern). It was enough to make me stop in my tracks and start scanning the nearby hedges. That’s when I saw her — a young cyclist tearing ass down the avenue ahead of me, gasping for air as she leaned into it like a two-wheeled Ichabod Crane; only no-one was in pursuit of her, nor was she outfitted in a fancy helmet or designer skinsuit which might connote bike nerd. I fancied her instead to be something like myself — another haunted kid trying to outrun her demons after midnight on an old Schwinn Collegiate.

Crestview started out as a blue-collar neighborhood in North Austin, Texas with small, affordable lots for returning WWII vets. Many of the modest blockhouses built on on those lots still remain, (2 bed/1 bath), though most have been retrofitted with some kind of contemporary razzle dazzle to entice young, readily credulous renters to cough up $1500-$2000 a month for an 800 sq ft hovel with leaky carport and dying agave out front.

Talk to the veteran cabbies, and they’ll tell you how Crestview used to be THE place to score back in the day; heroin, mostly. These days, you might could score a Dr. Pepper (you’ll pay boutique prices for it, too).

Years ago, whilst on a similar late-night stroll, I encountered a distraught pregnant kid plopped and sobbing on the curb, her distress due in part to having been tossed from a car by her beau just moments before. With some wariness, she approached me for help and cigs, though I could only oblige her the former. She was clad in a too-tight black bathing suit and flip flops and liked to swear a lot. With my humidified lick of forelock plastered across my forehead and my Murray’s Space Shoes, I’m certain I made an impression as well. Taking in both me and her surroundings, the first thing she asked was, “…this a rough part a town?”

Throughout the following years, I’d get hit with that same question by several newcomers and passers-through. I wondered myself upon first arriving. Despite the bike lanes and the churches on every corner, it’s still kinda got that look, especially after dark; like a scrappy kid with a brand new pair of laces in his boots.

Crestview looks considerably less dicey during the day, and by the day. You’ve got the pretentious cubist McMansions, with their shed roofs here and there, looking like misfiled coffee table books jammed in next to all the drab chainlink’d tracts. Then across from the ancient IGA you have the delicatessen where the DINKS go to enjoy eight dollar sandwiches with their designer breeds hitched to the benches out front. The reality is that you can walk around Crestview after midnight on any Saturday of the year in your bikini – male or female – completely unmolested (but be prepared for rape by your landlord or in the checkout lane).

Not a terrible place to collect your mail, Crestview. I’ll miss my lonely late night walks (the loneliest of which were not the solo outings).

All (un-retouched) photos by g. edward weitl 2013

Chico Hamilton Quintet — Blue Sands

More majesty from the youtubes…

Among other sensations, I’m simply humbled by such flights of beauty and imagination. I’ve long loved the recorded version of this composition on Pacific Jazz (w/ Jim Hall on guitar), but to discover this live performance with John Pisano in 1958 is really a thrill.

I love the audience shots, too; a real class bunch. Man, Americans really used to have it. 

Thank you Mr. Hamilton (and a happy early birthday).

FROM THE BUCOLIC TO THE SHAMBOLIC — PART THREE: THE FINAL LEG HAS A FOOT OF CLAY

It was important to me that a brutal hangover not define the second leg of our visit. After eight or nine hours of deep convalescing and gagging back bottles of whole fruit puree and several cans of something called Kofola, followed by a triumphant-if-wobbly set of fifty pushups, I felt sufficiently resuscitated for exploration. Once out of doors, the crisp November chill was its own medicine, helping to further refortify my wilted zeal.

My immediate impression of Old Town Prague: a pewter-colored paradise, both beautifully grim and palpably affluent. My people came from this part of the world over a hundred years ago. It certainly felt like a place I might have some roots in.

Besides the Kafka and Mozart connections, I remembered Prague as being a popular gap year spot for all those spotty-faced philosophy and anthropology majors back in the nineties. For all I know, it may still be a going concern for that crowd. It was a little difficult for me to really get in to the place for the throngs of tourists; the place is just lousy with them. For contrast, there are the local commuters, recognizable by how they haul ass everywhere (scurrying for the sake of scurry, if you ask me). You cannot stroll through town without feeling conspicuously casual whilst in their harried midst. Meanwhile, the tourists were all day and night gawping and snapping pictures with their smartphones, as well as their I-Pads (which looks excessively dumb). Other than a few snaps of the ol’ lady up against some of the carved granite scenery, I didn’t take a single photograph; I wasn’t trying not to, I simply didn’t feel compelled. My sense was that Prague had already had all the mystique snapped out of it thousands of times over and counting. Other than proof positive that — Hey, lookit me in Prague that one time! — what was really the point? That’s all I witnessed around me: tourists collecting some Facebook fodder. Watching all the people strike their contrived smiles with a canned candidness induced in me a tectonic groan or two. I think, if you could stand the cold, the best time to see the clock and the square and the bridge and all that stuff would probably be around four in the morning on a Tuesday in mid-February, (or anytime during the next flood).

I’LL HAVE THE SAME

One thing that struck me about my first experience abroad, starting from Madrid and ending at Heathrow, was the near absolute homogeneity of all peoples everywhere, though particularly in their manner of dress. Everyone from rebel fighters in Syria to child molesters in Daytona Beach seem to agree: distressed jeans represent the sartorial zenith in bottom apparel, even if one or two un-evolved curmudgeons like myself think they make the double-knit lapel-a-thons of the seventies seem downright natty and individual in retrospect. I’m sorry, but I will never understand the idea of wearing what are meant to be utilitarian trousers with bizarre wear patterns blasted into them that both weaken the fabric and defy all physiological explanation. Maybe I’m just annoyed because I quite often find myself absentmindedly wondering what the wearer of said dungarees would have had to be doing for the last several years in order to have giant, perfectly rectilinear fade spots on the backs of their thighs, when I could instead be wondering about…other…more…Godly pursuits…

I’m not about to suggest that this quotidian creep doesn’t extend throughout Bohemia as well, but their brand of sameness was effectively mitigated by looking so collectively sharp. Seamlessly book-matched to the Gothic spires and up-lit edifices shrouded in cold fog were knee-high leather boots, scarves and dramatic wool coats. I mostly credit this to the frigid temperatures while I was there, but I fantasize about some broader, stylistic underpinnings. Even our cab driver was dapperer than the original Dan.

I hadn’t packed enough season-appropriate duds myself, so after day two, the urge to hide in the hotel room and eat free food was great — a temptation upset by all the mirrors placed throughout my quarters. A lot of hotels really like to jazz up their guest rooms by installing mirrors on every vertical surface without a window or door, making a person uncommonly aware of themselves from every angle. I don’t care how much of an Adonis you fancy yourself, (I do not), it really gets old. So, I recycled my one pair of long underwear and sallied forth to buy some coffees and Budweisers, both of which are entirely different beasts in the CR. Not unlike the Euros I pissed away in Portugal, I found it dangerously easy to part with the candy-colored Kronas, depicting hirsute men with impressively delineated eyebrow musculature. The money is downright psychedelic-looking in contrast to the grim granitescape in which I pissed it away, where the sun starts to go down at half-past three and where I saw almost nobody smile, laugh or flirt.

Alongside everything being dark and chubby and blocky and Gothic, (like a lot of the chicks you knew in high school!), the absence of foliage in and around the square really added to the post-apocalyptic gloom of the town. On my first trip to the astronomical clock, there was a crazy bagpipe/tablas/bass guitar trio performing drone-y minor key ragas in druid robes and long hair. They matched perfectly the mood of the place, much more so than the weird dixieland jazz & 80’s MOR I heard pouring out of everyplace else. It was actually some pretty good din for being in the heart of such a touristy area, and I kinda regret not buying their disc they had available for purchase.

And that wraps up my flea-bitten, rambling insights on Eastern and Western Europe. This will likely be as close to a travelogue as I’ll ever dare veer. I still don’t understand how people like Bill ‘n’ Ted travel in what amounts to perpetuity. I can honestly say I will never have passport envy, and I suspect even more than before that for a lot of people, world travel is more about the status than experience or personal edification; doing something exotic to say they did something exotic. Of course, there are still parts of this fantastic planet I need to investigate: the Outer Hebrides, the forested foothills of Mount Fuji, and maybe even a quick romp through Antarctica. Still, on the heels of this last adventure, I’m not in anything like what I’d call a hurry.

FROM THE BUCOLIC TO THE SHAMBOLIC — PART TWO: FLAMING PERFUMERS / ABSINTHE INTERLUDE

As far as drinking goes, I don’t — or only rarely do. I half entertain notions of an autumn awash in Glenlivet, if for no other reason than to help attenuate those inevitable demons of hindsight I’ll be battling by that time. I sometimes think it’s for this last gasp that I’m keeping the kidneys pink. In the meantime, I can take alcohol or leave it. Maybe I was born without the juicer gene in the same way that some are born without wisdom teeth or earlobes,  but I’ve just never thought it improved anyone or anything, and have never understood them what romance habitual substance abuse. Instead, I’ve worked to foster healthier habits, including actively avoiding the kinds of people and situations where I might feel tempted to abuse alcohol as an asthesic buffer or social unguent in the first place.

However, on those increasingly rare occasions when I do drink, (as in DRINK), I’m extremely careful in my selection and meter. Bourbon treats me right, whereas just whiffing a glass of Bordeaux gets me tight. Whenever I do misstep — and once every ten years or so, I do — it’s usually a gloriously shambolic affair ending in soft S’s, body aches and certain disgrace.

With absinthe, it was quite different. I never felt drunk. I even carefully flossed all 32 teeth before bedding down early that morning in Lisbon on my perfectly firm melba-like mattress in the Hotel Mondial. None of the indications were present: no sweats, no centrifugal phantoms, not much in the way of weaving or staggering; I wasn’t speaking in my Cookie Monster voice, (a ridiculous coping mechanism for whenever I’m bombed), and neither was I trying to seem extra-sober (another such mechanism). Neither upon rising six hours later did I feel like my life was about to shred apart around me, one terrifically undersized vomit bag at a time. That’s how absinthe works, that dirty, gummy-haired whore; instead of barreling roughshod across your blood-brain barrier like any proper spirit, she slips in slowly & furtively, and once installed, gets busy with her big green strap-on, fucking your brain into two messy halves, and then messy quarters with all the violent momentum of a dozen baby grands hurled from the tip of Mycerinus.

I first crossed paths with this appropriately-colored toxin after making contact with Bill ‘n’ Ted (no, not really) on our last two nights in Lisbon. Bill’s a former colleague of my wife’s, which is how I first met him. On the surface, Bill’s a former jock with an uncommon yen for hair gel, easy money, and AM radio talking points; beneath the surface lurked more of the same. It’s Bill’s street smarts that make him takeable. He’s got a little of the hustler in him, which is always likable. Ted was Bill’s coworker, who I’d never met before. Ted seemed cut from much the same bolt as Bill, albeit with slightly duller shears. A jaded slob who casually referred to his mother as a boozing slut and insisted more than once how he didn’t want to live past the age of 55, I could tell Ted had serious demons — which, good or bad, is better than no texture at all (which is most people). It was on the second evening we all met up, and our last in Lisbon, that we repaired to a little Japanese restaurant, having burnt-out on shellfish, baccalau, and other standard Lisboan fare.

Unlike myself, Bill and Ted were incredibly well-traveled for their age, both of them working in IT for a major cruise line. Despite their chubbed-out Passports, however, they remained unmistakably and unapologetically a couple of South Florida crackers. The table wine that evening served as a kind of grape-flavored paint stripper, and before long, both Bill and Ted’s already impoverished sense of decorum was sloughing off in chunks. The conversation turned to references of bitches, and how many firearms they each owned. Decency was the next layer to dissolve, as they started flinging the word nigger around in a casual manner that seemed meant to suggest how outrageously irreverent and real they both were, but which in reality, was just depressing. Also, as with numerous other alpha squares I’ve met, they both openly reviled the Beatles with a curious vehemence, (meanwhile, Apple Bottom Jeans rates as the stuff of battle cries and epitaphs).

Following our feast of uncooked sea life, everyone (but me) decided to cap things off with a celebratory club crawl through Lisbon. I don’t do clubs. To me, the world is like a veritable rock garden full of beautiful stones unturned, whereas nightclubs are the swamp-end of that; moist little dens of anti-mystery where the arrested and incurious can go to noisily experiment in unhygienia together. Surrounding myself with Marley-loving frat boys swilling from Solos and middle-aged I-REALLY-LIKE-MYSELF! type divorcees breaching the tensile strength of their compression undergarments as they try to dance away their fears of dying alone and unnoticed to alleged music — aka, a series of prefab loops downloaded and mixed on a smartphone earlier that day by some underemployed gimper with experimental facial hair whilst hogging the WiFi at his local cafe’ — just isn’t my thing.

And yet, I relented…

Maybe it was the cosmic nature of bumping into someone we knew on the other side of the planet, combined with the irritating rebukes from the Missus about how cloistered I was becoming that compelled me to act so goddamn agreeable. That, and the fact that Bill paid the bill. Whatever it was, I was in Good Sport mode. (Don’t ever let anyone guilt you into good sport mode.)

We trekked the mile or so of cobblestone to Lisbon’s main drag through an incipient rainstorm, hitting two ratty little clubs in all. I drew the line at two, refusing the extra-absurd rockabilly club out of hand; doog-clickity-doog slap bass and slimy black pompadours in Portugal? Fuck that!

The second and last club is where things went from ok to wretched, starting with my almost losing a shoe to the tacky floor surrounding the bar area. The staff and patrons were decently friendly, including a short, moon-faced Dane who struck up a conversation with me while we both waited for the WC. She asked me what I was doing there. I thought by this she was referring to how such a fetid shit-pit was so easily beneath a man of my perceptible stock, until she cheerily clarified that what she’d actually meant was, what was I doing in Lisbon?…

I was there at the invite of my wife, on a small guided tour of coastal Portugal. The general mission of the tour was supposed to be sensory in nature, but with a particular emphasis on scent. Having grown up with a blind parent, maximizing all five senses has always been a personal injunction, and since olfaction is the one sense that’d remained mostly neglected throughout my exploits, I was at least intrigued by the premise. Still, I had my misgivings, especially as the prevalent demographic of the group was somewhere between 50 and 70, affluent, overweight and under-fucked. Not exactly my tribe.

The second afternoon in Lisbon was hosted by a preeminent perfumer from London, a slithery queen who treated us to high tea and spoke with an affected lilt that was one part TE Lawrence and two parts Bond villain. He was clearly something of a rock star in the world of haute fragrance, as evidenced by the Eucharistic reception from the rest of the group. As an outsider, the fawning left me feeling both bemused and a tad queasy. Nevertheless, I actually learned some very interesting things about agarwood and vetiver, and his presentation was perfectly entertaining. Most of all, I admired his jingoist-tinged Olde World sensibilities when it came to the packaging of his perfumes. “The box alone is hand-assembled, in England, by the English, each one requiring at least 40 minutes to construct,” he hissssed, furling and unfurling his hands all about the box. Dwayne, the industrialist visiting with his wife from Houston, openly spluttered, counting up the beans in his head and making exaggerated fart faces over such ephemeral concerns.

Dwayne was a classic study of the kind of man who’d misspent his life trying to learn what to do in order to be more like people who were better than him. His heart, what little there was, just wasn’t in it. I’d’ve loved to have seen Dwayne after two or three glasses of Absinthe…

Speaking of — I only indulged because Ted, who purchased both rounds, seemed increasingly like a soul alone in the wilderness, his face melting with quiet despair like some hangdog motherless child. In the shitty half-light of the club, Ted looked increasingly to me like a cross between an out-of-shape Mickey Spillane and a poor man’s Jackie Gleason. I’ve a weakness for tortured souls, and in that moment, the absinthe seemed to serve as some kind of cheap bonding agent. What can I say — I’m as soft-headed as I am softhearted: if I sense someone likes me and they express it with any kind of gesture, it’s just real hard for me to turn it down. If you liked me, and you expressed it by placing a dried turd in my pocket, or by gifting me a Best of Foreigner album, I’d accept either token most graciously. As such, I agreed to the first round. Ted was instantly elated, frantically plying me about how this was the real shit — “not that cartoon version you get back in the States!” I briefly inspected the green-tinged syrup before gulping it back with ombibulous caprice. Wincing, I exhaled the fumes and feigned some kind of gratitude; Gack! Fuck your mother!

I wanted nothing to do with round two, and when it appeared before me a few minutes later, I let my irritation be known by animatedly deferring, trying to fob it off on Bill or my wife who both looked upon it like a glass of barium. Ted’s face started melting again…okay okay, fine. I did the math, considering my body weight and adding up the not-quite-three Super Bocks over a three hour period, and decided, most unwisely, I could take it.

ʰᵉʸ, ᶫᵉᵗ’ˢ ᵈʳᶦᶰᵏ ᴬᵇˢᶦᶰᵗʰᵉ ᵃᶰᵈ ᵈᵃᶰᶜᵉ ᶫᶦᵏᵉ ᵃˢˢʰᵒᶫᵉˢ ᵃᶰᵈ ˢᵗᵘᶠᶠ⋅⋅⋅

I even reasoned to my fool-ass-self that self-medication in that moment probably wasn’t such a terrible idea. After all, sitting there watching Mickey Spillane and the other two fling their limbs randomly about to Miami bass at brain-scrambling volumes was making me feel vaguely unwell. If you’re a sensitive person, as I am, sobriety in that kind of environment can seem more like a liability to your health than swanning down a drum of Everclear on an empty stomach.

And so it was, that I arrived in the Czech Republic, rumpled and dissipated with my expensive dinner from the evening prior scattered across two paper sacks. I’m still undecided if it was the straight absinthe, or a combination of absinthe and the slosh-gut induced by chugging down five glasses of Lisboan tap water in a bid to rehydrate that morning. I know enough to avoid drinking tap water in unfamiliar cities, but after waking up with absinthe mouth — a kind of intense oral carpet burn — I couldn’t get enough of the shit. My friendly and sincerest advice to anyone who isn’t me: don’t do what I did. You’ll be alright.

With great luck, that won’t end up my epitaph.