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In the early years of the new millennium, as a fresh-faced middle school kid with a crew of similarly inclined counterparts and a lot of time to kill, I spent so many afternoons of my transition to semi-adulthood with the mall as my oyster…
Go to bars and get trapped into having a conversation with someone about their stupid job and their stupid hair and their stupid diet. Wonder if these things are actually coming out of their mouth. Their words are like bombs and they’re hitting you in the face.
One too many movies have one of the romantic leads gazing lovingly at the sleeping partner. And so many advertisements have mothers gazing lovingly and sleeplessly at their offspring. But in my case, it’s chronic and rampant. I love sleeping people. If I were the Prince in the Sleeping Beauty, that bitch would never be waking up. I’d be fluffing her pillow and helping her count sheep.
Here was my dream man. It was all too much. I had signed up for therapy expecting a certain type of therapist. A mother figure swaddled in scarves, with an office stocked with tissues, homey furniture, and chocolate. All things girl. But here he was. All things man. Breathe, I told myself. Just give him an hour session. Then you can switch therapists.
While I have plenty of friends now, I would love to add a shiny new face to the collection. I can promise you that friendship with me will enrich and give meaning to your life in ways you never considered possible, and I am a firm proponent of nights spent watching/making fun of Real Sex and Cathouse and eating Pringles. Get at me.
Sometimes I feel like a giant living in a playpen, which not only fulfills some sort of weird childhood Tommy Pickles fantasy but also serves as a wonderful contrast to the sobering “bills/responsibilities/loneliness” aspects of living by oneself.
When I walk down to the ugly grey beach of my hometown, I smell a mingling of the rotting of hamburgers with the cloying aroma of a hundred different brands of incense intermingling. I come back and try to go to sleep, but can’t as yet another drunkard stumbles down the alleyway, howling “to hell with it all!”
Few bands playing this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival seem to inspire the same level of personal prose as The Dismemberment Plan. Saturday marks what appears to be the final show by the D.C. post-punk band, which recently reunited and played a handful of shows behind the reissue of their classic 1999 album, Emergency & I.
Sure there were embarrassing moments, like getting caught having cybersex in the chartroom (I never did live that one down, and don’t you judge me, I was like 16 and a 16 year-old erection isn’t too picky), or explaining to my parents IRL that this site and these people were perfectly safe and would not attempt to abduct me and sell me into the international sex trade while they watched over my shoulder as I surfed the message board.
You might not know how to let go of things of yet. You avoid certain streets, restaurants and bars because they remind you of something good that you lost. You wonder how anyone could ever forget and move on from something so wonderful. How do people let things die?
While they have common characteristics—a lone, often single humanoid in the company of a couple (and sometimes a really super cute, tiny little puppy the couple just added to the fold) with whom they are not sexually or romantically involved—third wheels come in many shapes and sizes, and often serve quite a functional purpose for said couple.
Some of the people you went to high school with never did drugs or drank. They ate French fries dipped in milkshakes, threw rolls of toilet papers over trees, believed in Jesus, and dated someone named Cynthia or Erin or Jack or Jordan.
At first blush, Sublime may seem like an innocuous if somewhat juvenile stoner band. Listening now, one must confront scatological jokes, casual misogyny, and some of the worst turntable scratching ever recorded, but their eclectic (if poorly executed) mix of genres was unique for its time, and predated other turntable rock like Linkin Park and Incubus by years.
Only one letter separates them, but they could not be more different. We offer bachelors who may be thinking of getting a wife, or the recently engaged, a sobering view on marital domesticity.
The Sun Unexpectedly Beginning To Rise After A Night Out – Accompanied By The Sound Of Birds – May Cause Unexplainable Feelings Of Doom, The Feeling That One’s Life Is Not Okay At All And Will Never, Ever Be Okay, And Intense Feelings That What One Has Done During His/Her Night Out Was “Bad.”
If a Blogger is the scum that coats the walls of a fish tank, a Troll is the Pleco fish that devours the algae, ravenously and without remorse. The two cohabitate in the blogosphere, yet their motives and means of survival are far from uniform.
Aside from bagels, the statue of Liberty and Sarah Jessica Parker’s foot face (have you ever stopped to consider just how much her face looks like a foot? I mean, seriously?) the street cry is one of the most ubiquitous symbols of New York City.
The Traveler just so happens to always be visiting that day and is in dire need of meeting up because he’s lonely or needs someone to show him the city, (sidenote: lonely is another code word for “lets get naked.”)
Apparently there’s this part of my brain, lodged uncomfortably somewhere between the temporal lobe and the cerebellum, that drives me against my will to start aimless conversations while drunk. No matter how unengaged the interlocutor, how uncomfortable the scenario, how forced the interaction–I’ll do it.
To help you in your endeavors to get rejected properly, I’m providing the “rejection query letter” I used to (pretend) to send out to agencies. Use it as a guide, or copy it nearly word for word, and I assure you that your mailbox and/or inbox will soon be full of “thank you, but no” notifications from some of the most important people in the publishing world.
I forget sometimes. I forget that I’m not playing a role. I forget that, if I’d stabbed someone, I’d be in therapy right now trying to forget. I’d be afraid to come home alone. I’d hold a steak knife in my hand and feel different about it.
Brandon had skated through middle school and half of 9th grade with the rock-bottom level of “achievement.” No one had stopped to ask why. Brandon had spent his formative years keeping classroom chairs warm and occasionally getting past question 3 on a test. He had fallen through the cracks, and it seemed like no one had noticed.
As a legal of-age male in his early twenties who’s part Korean, part Japanese, part Pacific Islander and part Some Other White Stuff, let me share with you a unique cultural problem I face quite literally with my face.
There’s no Buddhist detachment or serenity in this monastery. The carved dragons have a madness in their eyes, and they laugh with a kind of insane abandon from every column and bit of tile. They clutch little envelopes with Chinese characters in their claws, and if they could move it seems all but certain they would tear your face off and flee laughing into the clouds.
Jenkem first came to public attention thanks to several news investigations into the living conditions of Zambian street children. They found that the children enjoyed in order from most popular to least: cannabis, glue, and that most scrumptious of confections, jenkem—with jenkem scraping out just ahead of gasoline…
I hate two things in life: small yappy dogs, and thrash metal; although I wasn’t aware that “thrash metal” was a term for a thing that I hated until about ten minutes ago, when I saw this video.
Most supermarkets promote from within, same as restaurants, and while they may not be working in the original stores they started in, the Human Resources Manager used to be the cart boy, my manager has been working the bakery for twelve years, and everyone in customer service has worked the floor.
You spend three weeks texting and G-chatting and video chatting constantly with someone and then it just stops. The person falls off of the earth or maybe you do because things have just become too belabored. You wonder what the point of all this correspondence is and decide to sign offline for good.
I wonder what they must be thinking; I marvel at how well each one of them carries himself, all appropriate masculinity and restrained self-importance. They each carry a look on their faces that says, in a subtle prep-school lilt, that they are businessmen.
Ah, here she is. Hey! Nice to see you! You look great, that’s a nice summer dress, where did you get it? Wow, don’t look at the cleavage, damn, just looked at the cleavage, don’t do it again, no, I haven’t been waiting long, just about five minutes. Do you want to sit here, or on the patio? Sure, I’m good with the patio. Here, let’s sit here, under the shade.
Maybe I should’ve wanted to be a hair stylist. Does it get any better than charging $150 a day to fish-braid a model’s hair, then stand around at the photo shoot waiting to tuck fly-aways in place, while eating catered gourmet food? Oh wait, I guess it does – waiting to undress models isn’t so bad either.
Every time they show up to a social gathering, a giant hush falls over the room and they just can’t seem to understand why. They just give a look back to the crowd that seems to say, “Y IS IT SO QUIET? OH MY GOD, HI GUYS! BEST FRIENDS! MY PARTNERS IN CRIME! I LOVE YOU!”
A “writer” is a novelist, a freelancer, a copywriter, a technical writer, a poet, a journalist, a blogger. A writer wrote the small print on the back of your Colgate and got paid an annual salary of $75,000 a year doing just that, and he’s been doing it for 20 years…
The Cab Driver Who Wants to Chat. You always get into this guy’s cab when you’re on the verge of tears, or homicidal, or just plain tired. He peers back at you in his rearview mirror and decides that, while there’s an 80% chance that you want to go to sleep and never wake up again, he’d like to know what you’ve been up to these past 20+ years.
After a few years at work, you find yourself having to deal with the increasing dissatisfaction of how things are, and with your own incompetency. You quit your job, convinced that you need further education. You take on another degree—be it the Masters, the MBA or the PhD. You have a need to constantly improve yourself, and to be the best at what you do. Your pursuit of perfection and excellence drives you insane at times.
Social media is terrible for the following people: neurotics, Virgos, paranoids, the self-loathing.
A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before. A writer understands the capacity for words to embolden, to eviscerate, to cut a man in half.
When I was growing up, my wonderful yiayia had a tight routine for keeping us kids healthy and rosy cheeked. Imported from the village where she herself grew up, she bestowed certain wisdoms upon us with the enigmatic knowing of an ancient apothecary. Not only did I thrive in health throughout my childhood, I continue into adulthood with the habits my yiayia engrained in me from my earliest youth.
Dayton, Ohio is a place where the sun likes to play and taunt and she shines her pretty face for just a moment and then hides away behind rainy clouds that never stay around. It’s oh so humid and the sky is a sweet white that lulls the senses but slightly enhances cortex activity. Hair disarrayed, the mustached boy smacks his lips together and licks the zigzag.
Every jam-packed music festival inevitably winds up with a schedule that pits a couple formidable acts against one another in the same time slot. Sometimes, there’s a short window of opportunity—15, 20, 30 minutes or so—that allows for the adventurous and non-fatigued attendees to catch at least part of each act’s set.
Behind every great man, there is a great lady. In this case, it’s Charli Baltimore—a woman willing to do hard jail time for Ja’s indiscretions (but it’s OK because he totally pimps out her cell and makes sure she has cigarettes, drugs, hair dye and protection while she’s in there, proving that on the flipside, every lady needs a thug).
Owner of the skate shoe brand Etnies, Pierre-André Senizergues, is kind of old by now, and he’s also kind of rich, so he’s going to use his money to build a house for himself in Malibu that’s fully-skateboardable, for the most part.
If I have a crush on you, I will ignore you. This is stupid and I hate it but it’s what I do. I will look at you and be like, “OMG, you’re funny and cute and smart. Now, get the hell away from me!” This is a quality I have that drives me actually crazy.
The night was still; completely silent. The dim light of downtown Tulsa cast only a slight glow over the living room, but what illuminated the darkness most was the moon. In the absolute peace of the moment, I was restless—it was almost impossible to sleep in the stifling, soundless hours of the early morning.
Some of us actively loathe riding the subway with a vitriol seldom seen outside of silent movie villainy. Service can be sadistically flaky at times and getting stuck in the Hot and/or Smelly Car is always excruciating, but one of the main reasons why people have such strong feelings about these underground torpedoes is “other people.”
She recalls an evening in Las Vegas, dressing alone in her hotel room, getting ready to go out to dinner with Rick yet again. Looking in the mirror, she sees the black lace top and the too-tight pants and wonders if this is what her 25-year-old life is turning into: pseudo-dates with a married coworker on a Friday night.
So I know there’s a song called “Rollercoaster of Love” but to me, love is less of a Magic Mountain thrill ride and more of a sweet happy (and occasionally exciting/terrifying) ride at Disneyland.
There is an alternating need in their writing to both assert their gender equality and to clasp their hands in solid sisterhood with every other female on the planet–a tight-knit circle of ovaries that goes around and around, reaffirming its own awesomeness.
Sometimes you’ll be at a party or some situation created for the purpose of facilitating social interaction and friendship, minding your own business, really; maybe laughing with a friend or interfacing calmly with a coworker, sipping a fine whiskey, perhaps, when some thoughtless ruffian materializes out of the festive haze and demands: “Why are you so quiet?”
Among other things, I wrote a story about a female centaur-Pegasus type creature with very large breasts that were described in minute detail; a whole “book” about Jesse Owens which I illustrated, laminated and bound myself and some short crime fiction, including a story about a girl whose little brother disappeared behind a bush when they were playing in the yard, before she found him bloodily and mysteriously murdered.
