Warning: I Bite When Startled
It’s been a long time since I’ve written last, due to life rocketing along with all the speed and stability of an X-1 rocket controlled by someone with brain damage and palsy. ‘Pilgrimage’ is finished and sent to HKD’s agent/manager out in LA. I’ve been writing an average of three articles a week and two daily news stories for Propaganda Today, plus WebMD stuff, the book stuff, the other screenplay stuff, the stretching-myself-too-thin stuff. Kate emails me Snoop Dogg songs in which he sings, ‘You’re doing too much’ as the chorus. The personal life is the usual roller coaster. It’s enough to set anyone to drink, which is exactly what H. and I ended up doing the other night, in Bar Pilar around the corner from my apartment.
There was an impressive stack of OnTap magazines on the windowsill beside us, and H. took one and started flipping through it while I was at the bar ordering drinks. She starts giggling as I walk back with pints in hand, and then tilts the page to reveal a small headshot of me looking like the sort of psychopathic Russian hitman who could set someone on fire while whistling Happy Birthday, next to the 20-point title ‘The Cheapskate.’ My restaurant mini-column: I hadn’t been aware of Monica’s choice for the title. I definitely hadn’t been aware of the photo, which was snapped in a record-breaking 10 seconds before both me and the photographer had to scamper back across two Metro stops to our respective offices. I nearly die on the spot.
‘I think it’s cute,’ H. says.
‘That title, and that photo, I’ll be surprised if women just don’t preemptively pepper-spray me every time I head down the street.’ I take a sip of whatever hipster-friendly import the bartender suggested I try, and put my head in my hands.
‘It’s cute in a very Stalinist sort of way,’ she says. ‘By the way, what’s with the umpire shirt? Seriously, I every time I look at you, I get this strange urge to walk into the nearest Foot Locker.’
I am wearing a blue-stripped shirt with dense lines. I think it looks distinctive.
‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘What else is new?’
I almost died on Tuesday. Or at least I thought so, for a moment. My boss had set his toast on fire in our office kitchenette and, after people started to bitch and complain about the smell and the smoke, ran around spraying the air with a bottle of pine air freshener. My eyes started to water; I retched, coughed, fell to my knees. Within two seconds I was doing my best impersonation of taking the Auschwitz spa treatment. On the upside, my annual performance review was right afterwards, and I think my whole surviving-a-chemical-attack thing bought me sympathy points on the proverbial carpet. I want the title bump, the salary bump, if I can’t escape from here posthaste.
I am going through, to paraphrase Thoreau, the life of quiet desperation, trying not to go to the grave with the song still in me. Some people deal with it by drinking copious amounts of beer; others buy the 200-gross “My Daddy Didn’t Love Me” condom box and head down to the local yuppie-hole for humiliating bathroom sex; others commit some sort of A-for-Effort suicide involving string, just for the attention. I go running. I head out while the sun’s still rising and power past the other gasping joggers, down through the Monuments and across the bridge into Virginia. You’re doing too much. I come home and write – I churn through the book that might not work, the next script that might never be bought, the articles that either pay 10 cents a word or else end up translated into Arabic and used as jihadist toilet paper in some Baghdadi crossfire hurricane. I practice my Chinese along with the podcasts on my iPod, yelling Homeric-scale profanities at imaginary Shanghai cab drivers and Beijing businessman. You’re doing too much. I eat takeout tofu and my blood sings with caffeine and alcohol. In the shower in the early morning, the alternating hot and cool of steam and water and air from the open window, I feel the most fundamental need for the house in the hills, the thatched hut on the island, the boat heading for the ends of the earth.
There was an impressive stack of OnTap magazines on the windowsill beside us, and H. took one and started flipping through it while I was at the bar ordering drinks. She starts giggling as I walk back with pints in hand, and then tilts the page to reveal a small headshot of me looking like the sort of psychopathic Russian hitman who could set someone on fire while whistling Happy Birthday, next to the 20-point title ‘The Cheapskate.’ My restaurant mini-column: I hadn’t been aware of Monica’s choice for the title. I definitely hadn’t been aware of the photo, which was snapped in a record-breaking 10 seconds before both me and the photographer had to scamper back across two Metro stops to our respective offices. I nearly die on the spot.
‘I think it’s cute,’ H. says.
‘That title, and that photo, I’ll be surprised if women just don’t preemptively pepper-spray me every time I head down the street.’ I take a sip of whatever hipster-friendly import the bartender suggested I try, and put my head in my hands.
‘It’s cute in a very Stalinist sort of way,’ she says. ‘By the way, what’s with the umpire shirt? Seriously, I every time I look at you, I get this strange urge to walk into the nearest Foot Locker.’
I am wearing a blue-stripped shirt with dense lines. I think it looks distinctive.
‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘What else is new?’
I almost died on Tuesday. Or at least I thought so, for a moment. My boss had set his toast on fire in our office kitchenette and, after people started to bitch and complain about the smell and the smoke, ran around spraying the air with a bottle of pine air freshener. My eyes started to water; I retched, coughed, fell to my knees. Within two seconds I was doing my best impersonation of taking the Auschwitz spa treatment. On the upside, my annual performance review was right afterwards, and I think my whole surviving-a-chemical-attack thing bought me sympathy points on the proverbial carpet. I want the title bump, the salary bump, if I can’t escape from here posthaste.
I am going through, to paraphrase Thoreau, the life of quiet desperation, trying not to go to the grave with the song still in me. Some people deal with it by drinking copious amounts of beer; others buy the 200-gross “My Daddy Didn’t Love Me” condom box and head down to the local yuppie-hole for humiliating bathroom sex; others commit some sort of A-for-Effort suicide involving string, just for the attention. I go running. I head out while the sun’s still rising and power past the other gasping joggers, down through the Monuments and across the bridge into Virginia. You’re doing too much. I come home and write – I churn through the book that might not work, the next script that might never be bought, the articles that either pay 10 cents a word or else end up translated into Arabic and used as jihadist toilet paper in some Baghdadi crossfire hurricane. I practice my Chinese along with the podcasts on my iPod, yelling Homeric-scale profanities at imaginary Shanghai cab drivers and Beijing businessman. You’re doing too much. I eat takeout tofu and my blood sings with caffeine and alcohol. In the shower in the early morning, the alternating hot and cool of steam and water and air from the open window, I feel the most fundamental need for the house in the hills, the thatched hut on the island, the boat heading for the ends of the earth.
posted by NiK @ 4:19 PM
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