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Forty Days #3 You shouldn’t do that

Posted by Aaron - 11/03/11 at 08:03:00 pm

I was working late one night and one of the page designers came by my desk to check his mail. This is common. My desk is in the far corner of the newsroom, near the office mailboxes. Every night, the latecomers, the sports writers, the copy editors, the page designers, come into the office and stop, briefly, at the mailboxes to check.

I’m new, still new. I’ve been at the paper a year and a month. And I’m not part of the clique. At least I don’t feel like it. When I was really new, during my first months, my first 10 months, probably, I went to the bars with the rest of the reporters, whole groups of us. The patrons of the bars new us collectively as the CitPat, the paper’s nickname, a name I was trying hard to avoid becoming the paper’s permanent moniker. Not that I like the Citizen Patriot, a product of a century-old merger, if my newspaper history serves me correctly, which it doesn’t, but the CitPat, I felt, was worse, new in that way that things were new in the 1990s and 10 years later everyone realized they were just bad ideas.

Like laser discs.

I go out with the CitPat much less now. It’s because I don’t like most the bars in this city.

This page designer, who stopped to check his mail that one night, he’s a newsroom legend. When someone says “Mark” everyone knows who they are talking about. I assume it’s the same way with “Aaron,” I just haven’t felt it yet.

When most people stop to check their mail, they don’t talk to me. I’ve learned not to look up from what I am doing. I did at the beginning. I looked up, thinking they were coming over to talk to me, and made eye contact. An awkward hello often followed. I learned, quickly, not to make eye contact. It has made for equally awkward silences the few times someone has come over to ask me a question. Usually just Brian, an editor who I work with rarely, and who I think will stand quietly near my desk forever as long as I look busy forever. I have played games, sort of like chicken or staring contests, where I see who breaks first. I knew Brian is there but kept working to see how long he would stay. We’re about even, if anyone is keeping score.

So Mark stopped by that night to check his mail. I was working late that night, and hard, because when I work late it is only because I am working hard. While he checked his mail, I took my glasses off, sighed and went back to work.

Mark wears glasses too.

“You know we’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

“Huh, what?” I was startled.

“Take our glasses off and stare at the screen.”

“Oh. It’s something I do,” I said.

“But has it ever helped? Has it ever made you feel better?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Yeah. We’re not supposed to do it.”

He walked away. I put my glasses back on.

At my first job, for a small newspaper in the middle of the desert of California, taking my glasses off was a cue to the rest of the newsroom. It meant I was stressed and to not bother me unless you were going to make my life easier, which was almost always never the case, or it was really important, which always seemed to be the case, no matter the issue. The technique, I will confess, failed to keep the badgers away.

I take my glasses off much less now, and if I do, I put them back on promptly, realizing that it is something we’re not supposed to do.

Forty Days #2 No Tourists in Munising

Posted by Aaron - 10/03/11 at 11:03:41 pm

When it’s spring and the sun thaws creak start running though the north again enough water to drink and the sun stays our long for a good day’s hike, that’s where I’ll be. When the weather’s turned the corner, and another corner, a straight shot then, north, one long highway that used to dead end into the rippling of lakes, two lakes, Great Lakes Huron and Michigan, now separated by a suspended suspension Mighty Mac Mackinaw Bridge, a border line that crossed the sea a straight shot high above the water until you make a sweeping left, now, in the Upper Peninsula, winding through two shack towns, hunting cafes.

No one is a tourist.

In Munising, there’s a restaurant on the docks on the bay where a man broadcasts a radio show, he could do it all day, from a booth behind the hostess stand. She’ll seat you because you waited because the sign said to, out of courtesy, even though the place is yours.

“The fish fry, on Fridays, is quite the event, get here early,” she tells a couple seated after you. The man might have said “Oh boy” and rubbed his hands together inches from a busting grin. He pledges to come back on Friday.

“Won’t we honey,” he says to his wife, who orders a cinnamon roll.

“Big as the plate,” the waitress says. “Would you like warmed up.” She does.

You’ve ordered eggs and toast and potatoes and have lots of coffee because you slept last night in your car under a street lamp in a rest stop about 30 miles outside of Munising. And sleep is generous because you realized why the other cars, mostly trucks, its mostly trucks 30 miles outside of Munising, why the other sleepy trucks parked far from the street lamps.

You parked near one for safety, you thought, entertaining wild notions of a homicidal mad man raging through the rest area with a taste for human blood, especially 27-year-old blood, disemboweling only those parked far from the street lamps sleeping peacefully in the dark. The street lamp saves you.

And you do not sleep peacefully. If a mad man, if any man, woman or child, for that matter, escaped from of those up north prisons, maybe not a child then, or just a man looking for a quarter, a ride, a pair of socks, a sip of water, a swath of flesh, were to ramble though the half-circle drive off the local highway 30 miles outside of Munising, you’d know right away. You could speed away because of the street lamp, because the street lamp kept you awake with its light and buzzing.

You raided your pack for a few t-shirts to wedge in windows rolled down and then up to catch the hem and hang like curtains, your dirty laundry. How far your car seat reclined surprised you and morning came quick. You washed up over the sink in the Lysol-smelling bathroom.

Munising was 30 miles away and the morning djs on the morning show on the morning radio station joked about the weather as the sun peaked east in the early September sky.

Forty Days #1 Bob Dylan fail

Posted by Aaron - 09/03/11 at 11:03:08 pm

In college, I started a tradition that did not catch on at all.

I’m not Catholic and never was good at giving things up, if even only for 40 days during Lent. Plus, all my friends who tried, and in college, it was friends who tried to give up drinking for 40 days, spent the usually three or four days of abstinence complaining and whining. It was, in part, to show off “Look at me, I’m not drinking for 40 days and you know how hard that is” and, in part, suffering, which is the point isn’t it.

Well, instead of giving up something for Lent, I added something. This, like I said, did not catch on, and I think the first thing I added that first Lent had lots to do with it. For that first Lent, I added to my life that when ever anyone mentioned spring break, I had to yell “Spring Break 200(whatever). Woohooo! Show us your titties.” After my friends learned this, spring break (Spring Break 200(whatever). Woohoo! Show us your titties.) became a frequent topic of conversation. Until it became annoying. And sadly, my resolution to add something to Lent lasted only about as long as those who gave up something for Lent.

But the suffering, the suffering under my yells of Spring Break!, it was universal. So, I won.

Now I’m bringing back the Lent addition tradition. For the next 40 days, I am going to write. And what I write, I’ll publish here.

Round 1 … Bob Dylan fail

For a moment I think of all that I’ve failed to become and that is Bob Dylan because Bob Dylan never sat in a carpeted studio apartment with matching furniture and a tiny bed. Bob Dylan had a big bed and that was his only furniture because that was the only furniture Bob Dylan needed because Bob Dylan fucked a lot. Nothing matched.

And Bob Dylan wouldn’t have a guitar with rusty strings, one broken, cased up in the corner like I do. Bob Dylan’s guitar would be out, lying across his coffee table or couch or bed, because that’s the only furniture he really needs, and he would tell his girl to mind the guitar while they fucked. He’d have extra strings too.

He had no use for carpet, or sweatpants, which he might not have even known about because why would Bob Dylan need to know about sweatpants. His bed had rumpled blankets, probably white, and red sheets. None of the bottles in Bob Dylan’s apartment had labels, because, well, fuck labels, and fuck sweatpants, because maybe he knew about sweatpants because it’s fucking Bob Dylan and who knows.

So, with sweatpants on, in a tiny bed, carpet floor with a guitar forever in its case and bottles with labels and no fucking, I’ve failed at being Bob Dylan. I had my bottles with labels lined neatly in my kitchen where clean dishes dried in the dish machine, and the recycling was divided into glass, plastic, aluminum, paper. Maybe I’ll start a garden in the spring.

I love recycling. Going to the long slugs of recycling dumpsters at the fire station near my apartment is like taking a walk in the woods, coming back fresh and refreshed with a new, superior even, glow. I know a secret — recycling — a secret to simple bliss.

******

“What’s the word for Bob Dylan?” she asks, the next night, looking up from the carpet in front of the coffee table where she fumbles with her phone.

“Musician?” the girl sitting next to me on the couch says. Always the basics, the most trusted answer, the simple and the correct, she is rarely wrong.

“Does fucking awesome count?” I say. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t consider Bob Dylan fucking awesome. Top 10, for sure, but not in the fucking awesome stratosphere. I probably say it because the night before, I wrote this stuff in my journal about how I failed at being Bob Dylan and all the ways Bob Dylan was not me or I was not him. How he would not be in my apartment with my things, ever. So maybe, to vindicate myself, the fucking awesome response was more that it is fucking awesome that we’re talking about Bob Dylan because I just wrote about him and now the reality in which I write is merging with the reality in which I live and then … BOOM … I’m a writer.

“No,” she on the carpet says. She’s drunk, has already thrown up in the bathroom. She comes back and continues to drink more. “It’s like wasting beer,” I say, as the other boys, her friends from college, on spring break, feed her more PBR. She is the intern. It’s a Monday night and her friends are down from a college and it’s spring break and I’m there.

I feel old. I am old. Twenty seven. I’m the oldest one there and the soberest and the best at quarters.

“No,” she says. “What’s that word for someone who you don’t know if they are a man or a woman?”

“Androgynous?” I say, hoping she doesn’t ask me how to spell it and hoping that’s not what she was asking in the first place.

“Yeah.”

“Androgynous is the word for Bob Dylan?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“No. You think Bob Dylan’s androgynous? He’s a guy.”

“Nope. He’s androgynous. Cate Blanchett played him in that movie.”

“And she was awesome,” chirps one of her college friends.

“She did. What was that movie called?” I ask.

“I’m Not Here,” one of them says. “It was awesome.”

“I didn’t like it,” I say. I really didn’t. I’m not just trying to be difficult. “But Blanchett was good. Sort of a reverse Shakespeare.”

I don’t know where this conversation went. The girl on the carpet never expounded on the androgyny of Bob Dylan. Maybe to her, and her friends, and people her age, Cate Blanchett’s performance makes Bob Dylan androgynous. Maybe that’s too bad.

But I don’t, then, feel too bad about failing at being Bob Dylan.

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