They sure do.

Do you remember how much more reasonable things always seemed in highschool?

Here is me on the phone with a magazine editor, trying to convince him that what his magazine needs for the summer is an 18 year old sending in emails about the progress of his cross country trip:

"I could bring a computer with me and write something about each place I visited." Swivel chairs squeaked in an office on the other end of the line.

"Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next five minutes," the lobby phone in my high school demanded.

With the next quarter, I explained that I had every intention of seeing many major art museums, national parks, and various large balls of twine, but the editor I talked to seemed unconvinced.

"I mean, like, the whole beat generation is in their fifties now, they’re too old to do these things anyway."

That was a much better selling point when I practiced it on my friends at lunch.

Imagine with me how this essay would have turned out.

"The Art Institute of Chicago occupies in a very impressive building and parking on the street is always free after 6 PM. The museum’s friendly and courteous staff are always available, even after hours, to answer many questions…"

Somehow I imagined that I must be the only high school kid to call up a week before graduation and offer a newspaper the chance to fund an On the Road rip-off.

"You know, Brendan, the thing is that we are already locked into another story like yours. There is a woman travelling through all of the cities in Europe looking for love."

We said polite goodbyes and hung up on one another.

Man, that guy totally treated me like I was fourteen, I said as I crumpled my bathroom pass and walked back to Algebra.

Labels: Chicago

The Long Way Home

A long overdue second mini series about leaving the south.

We left the land of Memphis, which I of course love and miss because I have issues. It was a great place to go, but something about the trip lacked from last year. We had been everywhere we went after Myrtle beach (see below for the pain of my life.) As Nick put it, "This year was Woodstock '99, we tried to recreate it and that took something out of it."

I loved every minute of the south, it was like visiting the same friend twice. The first time I got to see his room and he took me to his record store, but this time it's old but exciting hat.

Last Night in Memphis

What’s the worst smell you can imagine? To me it is the smell of human waste smeared and evaporating on the side of a hotel toilet for an entire day. With the windows closed.

That’s what we came home to on our last night in the city that never sleeps with Ben Popik. "Hi, I’m in room 215, and there is human waste smeared on the inside of our toilet, I wonder what you might be able to do about that, because it’s ruining my life….I see…Uh huh….Are you Indian? No way what part?…Oh, you know, I was supposed to study abroad in Hyderabad….That’s so funny…Yeah, I loved the God of Small Things…"

They sent a man up to clean. While the caste system may be a post colonial relic, I know that this man was an untouchable. He couldn’t do anything about the smell or explain why there was human waste smeared on the inside of our toilet and not water in the bowl.

So we got a new room. Actually it was exactly the same room, but this one was "Deluxe" which I guess is Hindi for "with microwave and ironing board."

Kentucky

The line between Kentucky and Memphis is nothing but a parallel. It’s the difference between Montana and Canada. But on highway 51, there is a bridge that goes over a backroad making the trip more dramatic.

And thus begins the second annual pissing off the bridge contest.

This followed the second annual Moshing Across State Lines. The fun part come when a car comes from behind you. When a car comes toward you they can see you and you run a good chance of breaking decency laws. But how often to you go under a bridge and then look behind you.

Last year Nick celebrated an unintentionally punk rock moment as he peed and a Limousine. This year I got the bed of a pickup truck.
Parish Hill Farm

I never really knew anyone famous. In third grade, I sat next to a girl named Melissa Smith, whose father invented the Slap Wrap (by they way, do you have your original slap wrap? Check the label for the insignia: Main Street Toy Company, Simsbury, CT)

The Roaches are my favorite famous family because I can say I knew them before. While at a summer camp for writing nerds, I made friends with a girl I knew only as "Miss Kentucky" She was crazy about UK (that’s a university), and was very proud of her parents who owned a Derby horse breeding farm.

The next year their horse won the Kentucky derby, and although I was too vegan to congratulate them at the time, we’ve stayed friends.

I’ve visited her farm five separate times, and each time I’ve stayed with her family. Only once has she been there.

It’s a gone with the wind house with many places that were once servant’s quarters. Cook, maid, undocumented workers.

The living room wallpaper is made of elephant skin. All of the lights in ever room have been converted from gas flame to electric.

We stayed in a cabin that was built in 1824. The walls are adorned with all manner of creature: elk, moose, goat. The floor has a zebra skin rug and over the door is a mounted deer head with mounted deer hoofs pointing upward in a "wassamaddaforyou?" fashion.

We saw my big fat greek wedding in an old colonial theater and I lost my shit more than once.

For dinner we made fresh spaghetti sauce, corn from the garden, Steak from the cows in the back yard, and a portabello mushroomgarlicveggieburger topper.

When the pictures come back I want to memorialize JD like this. The picture is priceless. JD sits at a 15 foot oak table, in a room that has more Silver in it than a Synagogue Member Directory. Cups ranging from the average two person punch bowl for best breed to a hundred or so mint julip glasses for best at show, second place, or whathaveyou. Then centered in the photo is JD: roll of paper towels on the table next to a bottle of ketchup. That’s my guy.

Rudy Called During dinner, and we decided to leave early the next morning and see him in Washington, DC. Now that was a good time.

The ride out was new, fun. We didn’t know where we were going of exactly how to get there. We stopped off along the way for donuts or icecream or a swim off a boat dock. Great time with the boys. It’s the kind of day you think about as you brace yourself to step out into the cold on winter days.

Nick slept almost the whole way. John turned down the radio more than once to quote Nick: "You know what I love? Driving during the day and really seeing the country---snnghkkkkkk"

Then we got to have our first day off college.

Half the place wasn’t even there yet, but it was great because everyone just wants to talk all the time. Everywhere we went you could just sit down with someone: "Hi! Wanna talk about me? Great, so my name is Dom…"

I had more fake names that night than George Bush’s cabinet. We had no where too sleep except Rudy’s floor. A girl down the hall gave us blankets and pillows.

Rudy, I should add, looked good for himself. He had a great summer outside play with kids and running around. He was deeply tanned and buff which made us all look bad. Except of course when Nick mentioned it in front of the girls down the hall, then Rudy looked like some eighties movie where the kid works all summer to get rid of that Jack White look from high school.

But there comes a time to go home.

John’s brother was going to leave the next day for the peace corp and in order to see him at all for the next 2 and a half years we had to get home.

The jeep got smaller and smaller as we went on the trip. And it was never quite as small as the last night as we all tried to sleep among the crap we bought on the trip.

At about 4 we stopped at a diner tired and slap happy. Most of us had to be woken up.

I really want to remember this diner. It was mostly chrome on the outside. Inside I had a nice big orange juice and a piece of Baklava. I did the math and realized that somewhere in Turkey Amanda could be having the same thing for lunch right then.

As we all woke up we came to realize how much fun we were having. The waitress brought John more and more coffee and we found ways to make jokes.

The narcoleptic-nick-joke: "Boy guys, I really love getting out and seeing diners like thi----ssnnnnghghghgnkkkk." "Oh boy, panca-----ssnnhghhghgkkk." "Well since my baby left m---snkkghghghkkk."

If I ever become a comedian, I want to play shows at 4 am diners, because there was really nothing funnier right then than drinking water, staring at someone, and pouring it down your lap.

We paid the check and I looked back at our table. A sticky plate of my backlava. The rest of JD’s scorned "Chalklate" cake. Nick’s dinner meal, with only the carbohydrates left. Johns toast that was covered in water that came from both of our mouths in a joke that we swore was hilarious.

John got a to go cup for his fifth glass of coffee and we left for home.

Muhammed Ali had a weird job: beating people up. But during vietnam the government said he couldn't work. They wanted him to have a different job. They didn't want him to beat people up, they wanted him to kill people.

But he said, now that's where I draw the line.

Perhaps the worst reading of my life monday night. I bought out a piece about Walden Pond that I thought could be a refreshing little belly-roll for the attendees at the Fire and Water cafe in Northampton.

Instead I gave a full hearted and animated reading to a bunch of sleeping 45 year old men who were waiting their turn to play their street folk songs.

Actual opening line:

I see a girl in a bar,

I see her, from my car.

Tonight Ben and I are going back. The plan: if the audience doesn't like us, the joke's on them this time. Plan A: while Smith freshwomen go up on stage one at a time and ryhme their hearts out, ben and I will go up intermittently with a single peice of paper. On the paper (or napkin, receipt, etc) will be the first line of an unwritten poem.

Our job is to make the audience beleive that what we read is real, from the heart, and enjoyable.

Question: which is more fun? Convincing them that we have created a perfect forgery? Completely fucking it up so that it's obvious that we haven't done anything? Or three: turning this into an improv game so that we can regain the shallow respect and admiration from total strangers that we crave?

For a good time, stop by at 8 in Northampton.

"The lesson is best illustrated in a story involving Jack Lemmon, whose best work was in comedy. He visited the British actor Edmund Gwenn, suffering in a hospital. Gwenn is said to have lifted the flap on the oxygen tent and said, "It's really tough to die." And Lemmon responded, "It's not as tough as doing comedy." "-New York Times (from Sunday's Week in Review)

Do you know that first warm week in March when you can finally leave the house without a jacket? I think there is probably a week or two which precedes it wherein you go out wearing a jacket and come home carrying one.

Well, anyway, you know how you feel when you leave a restaurant during that week? You always get up and sort of look on the seat and then check the floor for your coat.

"Did I wear a jacket?" you ask yourself. "Oh no, that's right I didn't bring on today, it's not jacket weather anymore."

You forget about it, pay your check and walk out. But then as soon as your body touches the outside you think, "whoops, I forgot my jacket."

You want to turn around and go get your jacket, but then you remember how dumb you felt before when you explained to yourself the reason that there was no jacket on the seat.

The same scenario plays out when you give up anything.

Fuck, my wallet! Oh that's right, I'm a wad man now.

Shit, I lost my phone. Oh, I ran out of battery in South Carolina anyway.

Crap, dry land! What? Forty nights too?

So that's where I am now. Everyday I wake up and forget that it's not jacket weather anymore. Alright this metaphor sucks: I miss Amanda. For a year and a half she was a continental fixture and we were never outside of the US tax system together. But now, I couldn't even read the signs at the airport I would have to fly to to see her.

And that makes me wish it were jacket weather again.

The Male of Two Cities
A Mini-Series on Frat Boys, Black People, Acceptance, Being Cool, and Most Imporantly: Me

M Y R T L E B E A C H

If there’s one thing I hate more than lame ass big guys and their sexist, fratboy ways, it’s being among them. Because not only are they perpetuating the patriarchy, driving down women’s salaries, ruining the quality of comedy movies, and dwarfing girls’ self esteem to the point of niche market sex appeal, but they take away attention from me.

Now that is a crime.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way at the Freaky Tiki Club in Myrtle beach. Nick looked forward to a place like this the most and it became the kind of thing that we decided, hey, why not? Even though we probably wouldn’t have come up with the plan on our own without him.

Here’s all I have to say: the waitresses wore bikini tops to get tips. Tonight was Ladies’ night, but the only male employed there for the evening was the man who emceed the “booty shake contest.”

Girls don’t look at me, however, every guy I pass looked me up and down from red shiny shoes to non-heterosexual shirt.

This is of course divine justice for all of those times in junior high and highschool when I would play the “wacky” card at dances, so that instead of feeling awkward in front of girls-- possessing no rhythm and having never danced with anyone, not even my mom—I was the guy in the Indian headdress second in the congo line leading everyone in the YMCA.

When the “booty shake” begins, a wire somehow gets strung around the room separating me from J.D., John, and Nick.

I look over for a way out and a large man from the other side of the line smacks me in the chest and screams over the beats: “Hey, why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?”

It may have been too warm for a whitehat, but believe me, he has one. His pectoral size was 45b, and we’ll leave his biceps out of this.

Of couse, I leaned in and asked him to repeat what he followed his slap with.

“I said, why don’t you get the fuck out of here, faggot?”

There is, of course, a limit to what I can take. In most situations, I have grown to rely on my friends to protect me from my big mouth, but I didn’t know where they were at the time. So I poked him between the cups and said:

“You know something? You are a complete piece of shit.”

He twitched and was probably about to whip out some clever rotort like “What did you say?” But I walked away.

He forgot about me immediately, and instead devoted all of his attention to hooting, raising his plastic beer cup in the air, and giving stage directions to the girls who were participating in the booty shake.

All four groups started out by dancing, and moved immediately to turning their back to the crowd, putting their hands on their knees like outfielders and shaking their spread legs.

I waited for a farmer to walk out in flannel and overalls and say, “Yep, she’s a beaut antche?” while he patted her ass and noted what kind of meat cuts would make the best sausage.

M E M P H I S

Memphis is far away from Myrtle Beach. Even if you left the beach at, say, 11 in the AM and drive straight to the Mississippi, you still might not be there until 11 that night, as we did. This time around we are in hotel owned by a group of Indians from Hyderabad, they even have an untouchable who cleans all the rooms and toilets.
But more importantly, Memphis is no where near Myrtle Beach. I enjoyed myself in South Carolina, a lot. I had some good somosas, had a great time with my boys, and it really made me realize that having Amanda gone is not the end of the world. I miss her everyday and I wish I could call her all the time, or drive to her house late at night after it’s time to go home, but I can’t.
However. Having that said, my experience at the Freaky Tiki was just another one of those nights that I’ve had too many of in my life. Another public service to remind me that I’m not rich enough, not cool enough, not buff enough, not homophobic enough.
Enter Beale Street in Memphis.
From the window of a full bar called the flying saucer, I look in. Here I am wearing the same shirt and everything that caused me touble in MB. I stood there on the sidewalk prepared for a repeat. I can already feel the scorn of the drunk guys and imagine the girls saying “oh god, I hope he doesn’t ask me to dance,” as I’m on my way to the bathroom. In the open air bar, they’ve raised the garage door windows so that the counter around the outside opens up onto the street. On stage The Dempseys play a mean show.
Through the crowd the upright bassplayer looks outside onto the street and smiles, wider. He motions to Brad, the guitar player, who skips a beat to send us an ecstatic wave and motion us in.
He already told the guy at the door that his friends from Connecticut would be coming in that night and that they might be underage, but not to charge us the cover.
The ID’s become a problem, which we abate by standing outside for a while, and hopping the bar later.
Did I mention that Myrtle Beach is far from Memphis.

Inside we collect hellos and how’ve-you-beens from people we haven’t seen since last elvis week, or ever.
I like to think that I’m a pretty deep guy, but when the guitar players wife said how much she liked my shirt, I felt really ok.
“My girlfriend picked it out for me.” Was the best I could do. Although none of my close friends are married. The Dempsey’s (the band) played a phenomenal show, augmented by guest appearances from a young elvis performer (he doesn’t like the word “impersonator.” A woman asked John to dance, Nick took to the floor with a women near us. I danced with Brad’s wife the way I suppose you dance with your friends wife. It was a very chaste, and campy waltz with a lot of catching up conversation and a dip at the end of the song.
The band took a break and came over to talk to us. When we came in, we were worried that they might have forgotten us. “Now you guys saw us play at Elvis’ last year, right? You sat right down front, and then here too, only you sat over there.”
Maybe I’m stuck in Middle school, but at least I was one of the cool kids this time.

Inside we collect hellos and how’ve-you-beens from people we haven’t seen since last elvis week, or ever.
I like to think that I’m a pretty deep guy, but when the guitar players wife said how much she liked my shirt, I felt really ok.
“My girlfriend picked it out for me.” Was the best I could do. Although none of my close friends are married. The Dempsey’s (the band) played a phenomenal show, augmented by guest appearances from a young elvis performer (he doesn’t like the word “impersonator.” A woman asked John to dance, Nick took to the floor with a women near us. I danced with Brad’s wife the way I suppose you dance with your friends wife. It was a very chaste, and campy waltz with a lot of catching up conversation and a dip at the end of the song.
The band took a break and came over to talk to us. When we came in, we were worried that they might have forgotten us. “Now you guys saw us play at Elvis’ last year, right? You sat right down front, and then here too, only you sat over there.”
Maybe I’m stuck in Middle school, but at least I was one of the cool kids this time.

Can we talk about me for a minute? In Memphis I don’t feel the evil eye when I walk anywhere. No one is scared that I’ll ask them to dance, no one would like me to get the fuck out of here. Here it’s:
“Yo, creaky couch apolstry suit dude!”
Ok, so I brought the green suit out of retirement. It’s one thing to go a place with your friends and be accepted, it’s another to be an attraction. In Memphis, I posed for well over 100 photographs.
In the south, we’ve all come to learn that the people here are slow, and if we come up with a witty comment within minutes, we are fucking Aaron Burr-quick on the draw. They love this shit. And knowing that makes us funnier.
The “creaky couch” crew spend the whole night on the same spot on the street and everytime we passed them I had to have a new couch joke for them. Theirs was lame at best. “Yo, you look corfortable, do you recline?” Throughout the course of the night I would pass them, and just to make sure they weren’t laughing at me, I would throw them a joke.
“Look guys, if you need a couple bucks why don’t you check under my cushions for change?”
At the end of the night: “Hey guys, why don’t you fold me out so your friends can sleep on me.”
As you can tell, my jokes are poorly worded and ultimately not funny. However, to a street full of southerners who have been sharing a “Fuck it Bucket” of Bourbon, we are the soul of wit.
We're not old enough to get into any of the bars, and we're too cheap to pay the covers anyway. So we walk. Up and down Beale Street. I'll pull a hand out of my pocket as I walk by and punctuate my worst lines with an index finger. ("Hey, did you guys lose the remote?")
If I were a better PR machine, I would have brought stories with the website address, but then I'd be that fat kid who runs the website BigEfromshows.com

Among my favorite things about the south is the closeness of black and white people. While they may openly express predispositions, they at least hang out on the same streets. “This man is a pimp,” a man named Jamal smiles to me, “I wanna get my picture with this pimp!” I can’t believe he’s not making fun of me. We cross the street after the photo of him, his three friends, and their dates. “Hey, where you pimpin’ at tonight, brother?”
“Whoadudes, watch the p-word around all the cops alright?”
This passes for a punchline and we’ve got them and the rest of the block to giggle, laugh, and raise a beer glass.
I know I sound like that asshole who tells you all the funny things he said to the flight attendants on his trip to florida (“So I said, ‘hey, don’t forget the coffee!”) But after leaving the love of my life at the airport, not accomplishing anything for my book, and regaining a lost sense of pariah-dom among my generation, it’s great to earn shallow respect from total strangers whom I will never see again.

While signing “Avoid the Clap—Jimmy Dougan” onto a grown man’s baseball (per request) two girls come up to us for a suit picture.
“Where’d you get it?”
“At a place near my girlfriends’s house.” I rarely use the possessive form when talking about Amanda, but in a meat market, it’s nice to slip into the conversation that I have no ulterior goals.
We introduce eachother to our friends and they get talking. John and Nick hit it off very well with two girls named Jennifer and Ashley. When I finish explaining how I bought the suit with my first paycheck from the newspaper, Ashley tells us about her shirt. At this point, Jennifer has a confession to make.
“You know Ashley has her nipples pierced.”
She peeks them out and the whole time I look around the street, not at the rings. A homeless man in back looks on as if everyone is having trouble opening a jar that he might be able to crack.
We get a phone call from JD who was supposed to meet us 4 hours ago for dinner. I go north to meet him and get thrown out when I ask a bartender for quarters so I can buy a newspaper while I wait.
What a town when you can get thrown out of the street.
I meet JD and Tommy, but when we come back, Nick walks up the street without John, who is in the middle of walking Ashley to her car.
We later run into two men, one of which is celebrating his 32nd birthday. The digital camera in his hands excites him very much and he can’t wait to show us all the pictures he took that night of women’s breasts. Most of them covered, several not.
He is so happy and it makes me so sad.
I make a promise to myself never to develop a roll of film like that on my 32nd birthday.

JD’s Elvis Concert (the one I decided not to go to)
When the intermission goes 20 minutes longer than scheduled, the tension builds. What’s going on?
The point of the concert is to have shitty seats. On stage they’ve arrange the TCB band, that is Elvis’ back up singers, guitar players, drummers, etc. On the screens above in the stadium, Elvis croons to the hits as recorded from his various live performances anywhere from ‘57 Ed Sullivan to ’73 “Aloha from Hawaii” (a television event with more watchers than the moon landing).
The result is that you feel like you are at a concert with shitty seats where you can only make out that there is a band, but can’t see who’s who.
So it’s 45 minutes over and they begin to play the them from “2001: A Space Odysy” The crowd is gittery with anticipation.
The lights fade to black and from the zamboni shed a man emerges. The another, then another. On the screen the diehards recognize them as Elvis’ best friends and his later Paul Bearers. What’s going on? JD reported feeling a little bit short of breath with a racing heart.
Then a black limo slowly pulls out. What the--?
Everyone says the same thing.
No, no, it can’t be. He’s dead. But ohmygod, what if he really wasn’t and tonight would be the night? Could it be? The limo emerges and the bearers walk it in. The audience collectively peeks into the windows and checks one another to make sure it’s OK to think that maybe tonight would be the night.
Then, nothing happens, but JD finds Tommy, who is with the rest of our friends from Memphis. As it turns out, they just so happen to have an extra VIP pass.
Within minutes, JD is backstage, and escorted to the party upstairs where he is one of maybe a dozen people who is not either in a band who a band members’ mother.
When Pricilla Presley shakes JD’s hand, she smiles and thanks him for thanking her “for keeping all of this going.” JD and Tommy walk away.
“Oh man, that is the woman Elvis married.” JD tries to convince himself.
“No, JD,” our 49 year old banker friend tells him, “she fucked elvis.”

In every episode of the Family Guy, my favorite jokes comes about half way through the episode. The gist of it is: “Hey, leading protagonist: Euphemism-for-something-offensive!” The leading protagonist begins to get offended before the camera switches to a scene that explains the scenario.
“Hey, Peter, nice set of melons your wife’s got!”
“Whoa, buddy you—“
“Peter?” his wife Louis says. “I’m holding watermelons.”
So last night, while cruising the large and expansive strip mall architecture of Myrtle Beach, a mini van pulled up next to us. A girl, who relies very heavily on good lighting to get by in life, pulled up next to us and rolled down her window. She had the kind of skin tone and hair color that can only be mishaps from a tanning salon.
Finely brass skins that holds no accord with her corncob yellow and blonde hair.
Though the tinted glass I could see another set of hair just like hers and two more bodies.
“Hi boys, where’re y’all going tonight?”
We were on our way to mini golf before we tried out a dance club, but we omitted the latter.
She wasn’t dressed the way you go out to dinner or to a meat market dance club. She looked as though she were a mantelpiece in a wedding ceremony, or her own prom.
But again, let me stress that this had everything to do with the lighting of the Kings Highway Turnpike along Business Route 17 in Myrtle Beach, SC.
The backdoor slid open and from behind the tinted glass, her twin bridesmaid or possible her date, waved.
The sight of them both hurt my eyes and I had to look away. I could almost smell their disgusting purses. Although these have probably never seen Ohio, I know these girls from serving them at the Red Door Café in Gambier, OH. The come in weekly, their faces already beginning to wrinkle. They’re not hairy, or gross, but the makeup sticks to the peachfuzz on their cheeks, making them look like cancerous lung cilia.
When they talk, their faces bunch up like a partially deflated balloons. I almost want to put their drinks on the house so that they will stop routing through their smelly, smelly purses.
They looked over at the boys in the back and smiled at them.
“We’re going to go play mini-golf now.”
She said something about her destination, I think, but there was a lot of discussion inside of the car as other cars passed between and around the eight of us. I looked over at her new, white mini van.
“Oh, yeah, what is your mom driving you?” I leaned back and prepared to bask in the glory of my hilarious, single-lined, automotive-aimed zinger.
“Yeah,” she leaned back and a forty five year old woman with gray tones in her corn and brass face leaned into the steering wheel. In back, the bridesmaid’s maid leaned forward and the third generation leaned forward. “My gramma’s here to.”

Call me Ray Charles. When I got these prescription sunglasses, I hated myself everytime I walked into a gas station or bookstore wearing them. Like most things I hate, this comes out of dealing with these primadonnas at my various crappy jobs.
But now, I am the person I hate.
Just after the Walt Whitman Rest Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, I leaned out the window to empty a bottle of something I’d rather not keep in the drinkholder. Mesmerized by the way the fluid sprayed and vaporized at 65 miles an hour, I didn’t notice that my glasses fell off of my face.
That was, until they bounced off the window, hit the next lane and went under nine of the eighteen wheels of the ensuing Peterbilt semi.
So now I’m Ray Charles. Eating in diners at 12:30 at night staring at menus like one of the blues brothers.
I tried first pretending that I was completely blind so that people would try not to stare at me. Instead, it is the only thing people want to talk about.
In Bruce Willis’ home town in Jersey at the Golden Pigeon diner, we met ourselves had we not gotten out of Simbury. “We hang out here everynight,” said Mark through very few teeth.
I hate myself.

There really is no good way to express how much I miss Amanda. Of course I'm ok, and I can live, but how can I explain this? I'll work on it.

On a very Rodney Dangerfieldesque kind of day the phone rings. The phone call is just one more reason that I hate being the young guy on the paper. No respect. After my Cusack for president story ran, the managing editor called my boss asking her why it wasn't run on A1, and several other papers took it off the wire and ran in it their publications with all the prominence and graphics that they felt it deserved.

"Hi Brendan, this is Diana from Fox 61."

Sheesh, not this again. I hate when our great big happy corporate family makes us hand over our hard work and reporting to the news. There's no money in it for us, we have to come inearly look pretty and lose half a morning doing their stupid newscast.

"Yeah, we're doing the Cusack story..." The more she goes on the sooner I realize that she is not looking for me to do her newscast. Instead she wants me to do her reporting. She isn't doing a story, she's doing my story. Same angle. Same people interviewed. Same opening joke.

"I'm having trouble tracking down a few people. Like that girl from Pennsylvania who goes to Yale, is she local?"

"Did you just answer your own question?"

"So she's not living in New Haven?"

"No, she lives in the town in Pennsylvania that I listed in the story."

"Well how did you find her?"

"She was the only Koslulinkski in the phonebook."

"No, I mean how did you find her."

"I got her from the Cusack people. You did call the Cusack people, didn't you?"

"Uhm, I uh, I couldn't find their phone number." She switches from awkward to live at five: "Do you have it in front of you? Could you give it to me?"

"Listen, I'm working down here and I can't just hand you a story, have you been to the Cusack website? The phone number is in the media relations section at the top of the press releases. You know how on press releases there is always a phone number at the top?" She wasn't responding. "Ok, listen, I've got to get back to work here, but can you do me a favor? Do you have business cards? Ok, why don't your whiteout the word "reporter" on each one of them and write "complete moron"? Ok?"

She actually hung up minutes before, but when you stand up and really stick it to TV news when you're at your desk, well you know, you don't feel so Dangerfield around the water cooler.

A Few Things I've been Meaning to Mention

Very little makes my stomach digest itself like the reflection of cruiser lights in my rear-view. Sometimes a car behind me will flash its lights and I will pull my car into the shoulder, and get my licence ready.

Another notch on the seatbelt.

"Listen, I didn't even clock you, but you flew past me on mainstreet doing like 50."

This may be the first time I have been pulled over in a while without any hard evidence.

"License and registration." Amanda searched the glovebox infront of her for the latter, and pulled out a trifold, leatherbound volvo folder. I did my usual hand him the license and when asked for insurance, I hand him the next card in my wallet.

"This is your proof of health insurance," he says slowly, as if I need to look up what he just said in a phrasebook. "I need to see your car insurance."

Amanda flips opens the trifold on her lap and asks him to repeat what he asked for.

"I need to see your registration," he says as he peeks in. He shines his maglight on the folders, which takes up the majority of lap space. "Well, I see you've got your flightplan ready."

It was only funny because he it came from a cop. No one expects a joke from an officer who pulls you over because he's pretty sure you were breaking the law.

We laugh somewhat nervously and he joins us.

"Man you were flying like a bat out of hell through downtown." For an explaination of "downtown" see post below. This was the kind of downtown where even locals make the "don't blink" joke.

We laugh again, not at downtown, but at this rural Massachusetts cop who has no reason to be nice to us.

"Well, thanks for laughing at my jokes," he smiles as he walks back to the brighly lit cruiser.

This is notch number 19. One more and it will make an average of 5 per year, which doesn't feel so bad, unless you remember that I didn't own a car until I was 17 and I also don't drive for about 9 months out of the last two years.

He came back with an out of state written warning, and a this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you look on his face. "Listen, I'm sorry that I've got to give you a warning. But thanks for laughing at my jokes. Have a good night."

With the exception of several masterbatory "look what I did!" posts, I have been impolitely absent from the Breakfast table for quite a while.

Tomorrow I take Amanda to the JFK airport for her flight to Turkey. Unless I get my act together and go back to work so I can afford a London-Istanbul plane ticket, I will not see her again until December. This is another one of those things in life that I prefer to approach on a fictional level. Emotionally, I am in the middle of a sad themed movie with soft-indie oriented music at all times (think third quarter of the Royal Tenenbaums).

This is a really shitty movie, I think, because it makes people more uncomfortable than the beginning of "Meet the Parents." I am unbeleivably sad to see her go, and even writing about it like this is hard because I just don't know what to say. In 24 hours I will be inside of an airport in New York saying goodbye to the person I have seen almost everyday for the last year.

But after the airport, I am off to memphis. Like the fictional approach I take to my life, Memphis will help me get away for a while and not stagnate at home.

A month into the summer before seventh grade my best friend Dennis moved to new Jersey. I was 12, too young to work, too young to drive. I pretty much spent the rest of my summer at home alone in all of the places what Dennis and I would play together. I'd sneak of for cigarrettes or ride my bike downtown (peddling with my already full grown feet in my still 10 year-old body) for a mountain dew, but without Dennis to fight with and hide from our mothers with, it just wasn't any fun.

Memphis will be an amazing time and should keep me from the depressing stagnancy that comes from being 12 years old and playing video games alone in your basement. But with the impending trip to the airport, it is impossible to look forward to.

Like Junior high, only this time my feet are a normal size.