LAS VEGAS, NV-

The Girls of Bromidrosis

The first night I arrived in Vegas I ate fried-chicken and drank beer. Under normal circumstances this is not a good combination. Hell, it doesn’t even sound good. Fried-chicken and beer. But these weren’t normal circumstances. I had just arrived home after living over three years in the South where nothing - and hardly anyone - made sense to me.

So, I wasn’t looking for harmony. I was looking to gorge myself and get drunk.

(more…)

DENVER, CO-

Rejection letters are always a drag; whether they are negative responses from job opportunities, university admissions boards or literary journals. However, there is nothing quite as spirit-crushing as a rejection letter received after submitting a poem. A short-story rejection slip is depressing, but not devastating. You manufacture a story in your head, create some characters and make them talk. Fine. So you didn’t like my characters. Their dialogue is unrealistic. Their motives are questionable. Fine. They aren’t me. But a rejection letter from a poem is, for me, the equivalent of standing out on a street corner naked and having passers-by hand you terse little notes reading, “Your penis is unconvincing,” or “You call those nipples?” or maybe, “You have an affected buttocks.” And that kind of stuff just breaks my heart. You pour it all into a poem: your skeleton, your bile, your oozing primordial remnant—your private parts. To be told that the fundamental you is not up to snuff—that’s hard murder.

(more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

When I first heard the words “bipolar,” I figured the shrink thought I lived on the North and South Poles. That may sound like bullshit, but I also wonder whether there really is any such thing as bipolar, except in the most obvious cases (you wake up and dress like Hitler, making speeches in town square, which no longer exists).

I just don’t know. Rapid cycling? I don’t ride a bicycle.  Doesn’t everybody have rapid mood changes?  Listenting to grocery story music can send me into a mini-depression during the length of one Elton John song. Sorry has to be the hardest word? No, “You’re a billionaire with the world’s worst wig” is not a word, but it’s much sorrier, and to pare it down to the analogy, I’m sure “wig” would do the trick for you. (more…)

LOS ANGELES-

I went into shock a few weeks ago.

I was getting tattooed. That’s what did it. I’m in the process of tattooing a large blackbird on the left side of my body, over my ribcage and side. Right where that curve happens on a non-anorexic woman’s body.

You Midwesterners know what I’m talking about.

The first session was bad. It was really bad. As I said, I went into shock. I left shivering and confused.

Going into shock has psychological effects.

(more…)

BROOKLYN, NY-

Working in Manhattan can be an exciting, thrilling experience, but it doesn’t have to be. For the first year of my legitimate-office-job-having life, I worked in a building entrenched in a cozy block of 7th Avenue, spitting distance from two of the most impressively banal landmarks in this city: Times Square and Macy’s. Now, things can get pretty hectic in busy digital media what with the constant barrage of emails, IMs, phone calls, and that woman from accounting shrilly dictating lists of numbers into her speaker phone. I soon learned, therefore, how valuable it was for the mental health of any office worker to unwinch one’s shoulders from their hunched slump, peer away from the computer screen, and make one’s way out into the city.

(more…)

A few words on the self-destruction of erstwhile presidential candidate John Edwards. At first glance, yes, it’s just another tired and ugly story, tabloid drivel about deviant sex involving another slick Washington shark. Then, when you stop for a moment and consider the actual human fallout, it becomes a gut-wrenching soap opera with seriously depressing undertones…the sort of story that makes you put down the newspaper and turn away from the television entirely. Elizabeth Edwards, the wife, has terminal cancer. The couple have three children: Cate is in her twenties; Emma Claire and Jack are eleven and nine, respectively. (A fourth child, Wade, was killed in a car accident in 1996.) And Rielle Hunter, the mistress, is now a single mother raising an infant daughter—identity of father as yet unknown.

So yeah. It’s pretty safe to say that the political career of John Edwards now finds itself at a dismal dead end. Maybe temporarily; probably permanently. American implosion at its finest and most telegenically pulverizing. Any hope of a Cabinet position in an Obama administration appears to be a silly pipe-dream. No veepstakes, no attorney general…not even housing and urban development.
(more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

Sometimes I wonder. I wonder a lot. “Why?” is almost always a futile question, with one answer contradicting another, if any knowable possibilities exist. And in this case, I’m not sure they do exist. I used to wonder about the “Why?” of my own failed ambition. Then I realized where publication had gone and how it could only descend into an even worse abyss. “I was addicted to cocaine” must be the first line of a thousand memoirs. (more…)

CLEVELAND, OH - 

I’m standing and painting gravestones as weird red squares, twenty yards from where the coffins of President James A. Garfield and his wife (name?) lie in the gray basement of the Garfield Monument, and I’m thinking about how much I hate my banking job.

I’m thinking about how I kinda love ATMs because they keep customers out of my bank, but at the same time how I hate loading them with cash in the mornings.

(more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

The global economy, like it or not, doesn’t like you. If you’ve acquired a job in a third world country, congratulations: You’re one step shy of a slave. If you’re an American, you can work, live and die at Walmart, which will soon offer funeral services next to the produce department. Are there, you Americans ask, no careers vouchsafed from the global suck? It depends. Do you possess sticktoitiveness and a can-do attitude? Are you a no-getter? Are you willing to take personal responsibility where you have none? Then the answer is, “Yes!.” Jobs await you, some already available, others waiting in the wings of hell. Love it or leave it, except you can’t afford to leave: Trust me, I tried. Here, then, is the future, and your opportunities within it. I have randomly numbered these jobs, for none are better than the others, though some are worse.

(more…)

CHICAGO, IL -

Having a back deck is an amazing thing.

It’s a spot to enjoy the sun, have dinner and drinks, read in your own private breeze, and if you’re up high enough, it’s a spot to spy on all your neighbors without really feeling like a spy.

To be a one-man neighborhood watch, is how I like to think of it.

(more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

The heat in Los Angeles this past weekend was atrocious. Dastardly hot and dry. We don’t have air conditioning. Just a bunch of fans. And the fans were blowing hot air. That’s how hot it was.

Then, last night, the heat broke. Happened right at sundown. The heat broke. Almost instantly, the air temperatures cooled by ten or fifteen degrees. It’s weird how that happens. The heat breaks.

I worked all weekend in the heat, slogging through the next book, hopefully wrapping up a readable draft. Sitting here in the heat. Chugging water. Staring at my computer. A fan blowing hot air on me. My dog at my feet. I kept feeding him ice cubes. (more…)

Los Angeles, CA-

I’m nervous about this post.  I’m worried that because of its subject matter and the nasty habit we all have of interpreting things differently than they were meant, I will come across as being a racist.  I would say I am not, but that seems pretty much pointless, so I will just write what I am going to write and we’ll see where we end up. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

The first and only time I ever found myself star struck, I wasn’t even meeting a celebrity. Well, he was somewhat of a celebrity, but he wasn’t in the movie business and he was about three thousand miles away from Hollywood.

(more…)

PARIS, FRANCE-

I leave humbled.

Humble. It’s a word I never understood as a child. A word I don’t think I ever really understood until very recently. It’s a word, like bitter, that needs to be lived before it can truly be understood. (more…)

CHICAGO, IL -

Lately, when stopping by my girlfriend’s apartment building, I’ve been feeling a lot like Tom Hanks in “The Money Pit.”

The place is falling apart faster than a button-down shirt from H&M, and every new discovery makes me laugh.

Or sigh.

Or pound my fists against the wall.

(more…)