Sunday, May 8, 2011
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Apartment 3-G
Today's victim: Apartment 3-G.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Easily Arranged
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Line Up
It’s 3 A.M. here in Cleveland, Ohio, and I’m waiting for the train to New York. I’ve been here since about 11:30 last night—I walked here from the Greyhound Terminal downtown. I don’t have anywhere else to go: I’m too cheap for a hotel room and too bashful to try and couch surf. Instead, I’m homeless for a night in Cleveland, fulfilling an obscure Kerouac-esque fantasy in the seventh most violent city in the United States.
Here at the train station, Amtrak has an intriguing system-wide policy: uniformed military gets to skip to the head of the ticket line. For some reason, at three in the morning, this is the most bizarrely unfair policy I have yet heard. I respect and support our troops as much as any red-blooded American might. Joining the military is an act to be respected, certainly, but it is far from pure selflessness. There is danger, certainly, and hardship. Still, the military, as we know it in this country today, is an organization one voluntarily commits oneself to—a job, as it were.
A couple hours ago, in Columbus, I bought a bag of Fritos for a man who said he was going to West Virginia. He cornered me outside the bus station. A black man with a crop of graying hair, he smiled and assured me that he wouldn’t shoot. He was a practiced panhandler, opening soft and finishing hard, asking me about what was going on around town—he’d seen crowds, congregating outside hotels and in front of bars. I told him that there was a Lil’ Wayne concert tonight at an arena somewhere. His eyes lit up and he smiled a little bit.
“Where you going? You just wandering around?”
Clearly, I was from out of town. Maybe he was too, but he was the sort of guy who was good at hiding his origins for the benefit of soliciting charity.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” I told him. This was a mistake. It opened the door to all sorts of begging. Without missing a beat, he seized the opportunity and made it clear he was asking for food, not money. He didn’t need any money—just a bag of chips or something small like that, just enough to get hold him over until he got himself to West Virginia.
“Will you be here when I get back?” I asked.
“Well, I mean, I’ll try…” he told me. “I could just get something here, you know?”
He gestured vaguely at the little restaurant inside the Greyhound Station. I didn’t have any cash to give him and I didn’t feel like taking him out for dinner.
Instead, I went to a CVS down the street and bought food. Lots of food, enough for my bus ride and train ride, enough to last me the thousand miles to New York. I bought chips and Oreo cookies and Powerade and pudding and pretzels filled with peanut butter and macaroni I could microwave—if I encountered a microwave between Columbus and New York. I bought a bag of Fritos, for 99 cents.
Back at the station, I handed over the bag of chips and didn’t ask for his name. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to know where he was going exactly or why—I didn’t want to hear his stories or be pressed into giving more. He smiled and thanked me and I told him to have a nice day. And that was it, that was all we wanted from each other—a neat, clean transaction. He wanted a free snack and I wanted to pay the price for being the rich boy in a bus station full of poor people. In Columbus, that price is set just shy of a dollar. Affordable, certainly.
Up the road a bit, in Cleveland, uniformed military skips to the front of the line. I imagine myself in uniform, and try to picture myself skipping the line. Would the lady at the ticket window with the scratchy deep voice facilitate this, or would I have to initiate the process myself? Would other patrons usher me to front?
About a decade ago, after 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, we decided to canonize our military. In so doing, we laid ourselves prone. The more we uphold our military, from the generals down, as infallible paragons moral rectitude, the more we open ourselves up to abuse. Whenever our right to ask questions is made a societal taboo, shit hits the fan.
I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t support our military—we absolutely should. But our support must be respect always and worship never. Soldiers and sailors and airmen—like firefighters and police officers—have achieved something remarkable, an achievement of will and fortitude which provides for our safety and betters our fortunes. But their achievement is foremost a personal accomplishment, to be respected but not made holy. To worship the military is to declare ourselves unworthy of walking amongst them, to transfer, unwittingly, a little bit of their accomplishment over to our shoulders as we struggle to measure up. We steal a difficultly forged identity from hardworking Americans and subsequently allow another sort of people—our military leaders, no less—to be made superior to us—the very definition of an anti-American sentiment. Patriotism is not a yellow ribbon on our bumper or a box of goodies mailed to anonymous soldiers overseas. These acts are acts of compassion inspired by a love and respect for those among us who do the things we ourselves cannot. Patriotism, on the other hand, is something else, something more vexingly complicated, something not so easily scaled to fit a bumper sticker.
I don’t know if my friend from the bus station ever knew military service. Perhaps he did, serving in some forgotten corner of the world, discharged without notice and set out upon the streets in the crudest of fashions. It is more likely, however, he did not serve. Instead, I am quicker to picture him living a useless and destitute life, drifting between bus stations and bars and little apartments he can barely afford, scamming food from guilty white people, scraping together enough money from odd jobs to get himself to his brother’s house in West Virginia where a job is waiting for him—maybe.
Regardless, my bus station friend deserves to be neither a patron of our national compassion nor an example of our modern collective patriotism. He is rather an example of what we have all become. His eyes reflected to me a uniquely American sort of hunger and desperation, a potpourri of fear and wanting and paper-thin confidence. He was, in short, the living embodiment of our new culture—a culture designed to mitigate our guilt. We feel guilty that he might be hungry, that he might be discriminated against, that we might go without doing something we could easily have done. We pity him and buy him corn chips with the same sort of guilty vigor that inspires us slap yellow ribbons on our fenders without stopping to ask why. If I’d done it again, I’d buy him corn chips, certainly. But I’d make him earn it. I’d make him convince me he deserved it, I’d make him tell me his name and his story and what was waiting for him in West Virginia.
Patriotism is like this, asking questions of ourselves to validate our confidence, not our guilt. Had I gotten to known my bus station friend, had I taken the time to hear his story, I would’ve become just a little bit more American. I would’ve known more about who we both were, about where we were going and about why any of it really mattered anyway.
I’d like to think that we all accomplish something in the course of life, even if that one thing which we do accomplish has no ultimate effect on the world. Nobody goes to the Greyhound Station solely for the purpose of going to West Virginia—something is waiting for us at the end of line, otherwise we wouldn’t bother riding. We’re all out to make a change, however slight, on the fabric of the world.
At the moment, I go to college in New York, where I pay a lot of money to sit in a room with an aging absurdist playwright and learn the craft of writing screenplays. On the scale of useless pursuits, my expensive private school education ranks near the top of the spectrum. But I do what I do because I love doing it—and because a part of me believes that somehow, if I write enough and make enough movies, the world will change and be a little bit different when my time comes to leave it all behind. This is my little bit of change, my little struggle to be a patriotic American.
Someday, a sign will inform patrons of the Cleveland Amtrak that screenwriters are welcome to step to the front of the line. An adjacent sign will ask that hustlers with free corn chips be allowed to pass to the head of the same line. Indeed, an infinite multitude of signs will crowd the wall, one on top of the other, each one calling for a different strata of the national collective to step forward and claim their rightful place of respect at the front of the ticket line. It’ll be a mess, for sure, everybody jostling and arguing for their right to be at the front of the line. But it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay because, for the very first time, we’ll each know—and have a little bit of respect for—just what we’re good for: whatever the hell we want.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
More Love Advice From Feudal Lord
My girlfriend recently told me she thinks we should take a break and start seeing other people. We had something great going—where did this come from? I just don’t understand why she’s doing this.
How do I get her to reconsider? She’s coming over this weekend—she says she wants her Tupperware back.
Help!
—Big Problems in Big Horn, WY
##
Dear Lord Big Horn—
Lo! What a quandary! What vexing tribulation yonder!
Disavow yourself, say I, from this maid. She seems daffy in the cerebellum, if you must have my opinion, a most disagreeable sounding wench indeed. The fact that she has not heeded your wishes to continue in union is cause enough for abandoning her in favor of a more agreeable female. Time to move on to that little vixen of mistress you have been entertaining on the side!
Our Father Almighty gave unto thee testicles, dear Lord Big Horn. Use them!
Salutations and Godspeed,
—Feudal Lord
Where To Woo Women Like A Gentleman
Cooper Union Library – The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is many things—a world renowned art school, a highly selective architecture and engineering institution with a reputation for turning out some of the most talented artists and designers of our generation—a living testament to the very best artists this country has yet produced. What Cooper is not, however, is a conservatory for the socially well-adjusted. Simple social graces—opening doors for ladies, saying thank you—are lost on many an awkward engineering prodigy. If you happen to be lucky enough to be a member of one of the fine educational institutions represented by the Research Library Association of South Manhattan, Cooper is the place to be.
Dog Runs – Many Manhattan parks have ‘dog runs’—that is, runs for the dog. In other words, a patch of dirt where dogs can run around and poop. Be careful to avoid coming off as a creep, however—do your best to appear legitimate. Make sure that your dog really does belong to you and that he really does have to poop. Nothing is more off-putting to a dog-owning sex goddess than a guy with a bored looking stolen dog. Remember, you’ve got to love the dog more than her. Otherwise you’re just an asshole.
Staten Island Ferry – Classy, damn classy.
Burning buildings – Men who rush into burning buildings are, simply put, sex magnets. What’s more, Manhattan has an above-average concentration of flammable buildings. The key? Getting there before the fire department. As soon as those FDNY guys show up, all bets are off. For one thing, they’ve got a big shiny red truck and you don’t. (Also, studies have shown that the average FDNY firefighter has a larger penis than you do.)
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Stranded On A Desert Island With A Cell Phone
A: yo, you there?
B: wassup?
A: i’m on an island.
B: wtf man, where are you? you need to be here right now.
A: i’m on an island.
B: no, seriously.
A: i am serious. the plane crashed.
B: dude, you need to be here right NOW. TWINS.
A: baseball? this isn’t the time for that.
B: haha. not minn twins, idiot. i’m at amanda’s party and her roommate has her sister over and theyre TWINS.
A: that’s cool, I’m stranded on a fucking island.
B: i call the blonde one. her tits are AH-MAZING.
A: hey, could you shutup for a second and call my mom and tell her where I am?? she isn’t picking up her phone…
B: ahahah. yeah, sure, if i knew where u were…
A: i’m on an island.
B: like a metaphorical island? i told you to stop reading kierkegaard.
A: no, like an actual motherfucking island.
B: kewl.
A: shutup, i’m serious. I need helpppp!!!
B: you know whats gonna suck for you?
A: what?
B: when you run out of battery. i mean, seriously, that will SUCK.
A: funny, find my mom.
B: wait… if you run out of battery, i’m not going to be able to tell you about banging amanda’s roommates twin sister. shit.
A: i wouldn’t want to hear about that even if I wasn’t stranded on an island.
B: yeah, because your so devoted to Stephanie....
A: screw you.
B: she broke up with you, time to fuck other bitches.
A: we’re taking a break, it’s not breaking up.
B: taking a break, breaking up, same dif.
A: no, its not the same. so just shutup and call my mother.
B: steph basically told Amanda she’s sleeping with kyle.
A: who’s kyle?
B: he’s a senior. financial accounting. lol.
A: that asshole? fuckkk.
B: ANYWAY… you could be banging a TWIN right now. fyi.
A: but instead i’m on an island… FML
B: fml indeed, my friend.
A: hey, how do you eat a coconut?
B: crack it open with a machete.
A: i dont have a machete.
B: i guess ur fucked then.
A: i guess so…
B: so seriously, where are you? lol.