My favorite part about DJ'ing is the connections you can create in people's minds. The other day we had a little dance party in the Chicago apartment we stayed in. It wasn't my iPod, which made it more fun. Two married couples, me and Nikki. Everyone starts dancing with everyone. Great time. I throw on--if memory serves--Ace of Base and the two couples go on about how it reminds them of freshman year in college. I say it reminds me of fifth grade.

Everyone stares at me and then Nikki tells them how old I am. "What's it like dating a 24 year old?"

"Everyone always asks that," Nikki says. "I don't ever notice."

Next day, same married couples, all waiting for a limosine to come take us to see Justin Timberlake. The couple we stayed with entrust me with the tickets and with them ar the receipts. We have front row VIP seats in this roped-off area with its own bar and close enough for your cameraphone. Then I find the receipt. $1350 for the six tickets.

Nikki and I wear what we basically do everyday. The other couple admits that they felt a little foolish walking to the car past their children's playpals in mini-denim skirts and hairspray.

Great show. Really. He is a fantastic pop performer. In the car on the way home the my host and I finish a bottle of Woodford Reserve Bourbon. Delicious shit. And for some reason I throw it from the side of the limo on the highway. Who knows why.

But it sounds so great to shatter glass like that. The limo has a crystal decanter in back filled with some kind of whiskey. The financial guys have me smell it to tell them what it is. It's Dewars. Disgusting, corn-tasting, cheap-ass Dewars. It would have been fine enough to put the decanter back, but I still had my window open.

And I don't know why--other than the love of the sound of shattering glass--but I tossed it out the window.

A few things that may have made this okay:
1. Had this been my own bottle of whiskey.
2. Had this been my limo.
3. Had we been on the highway--as I thought--and not in stopped traffic in a neighborhood...
4. ...in front of a cop car.

They didn't even pull us over. They just hit the lights and the driver got out. Chicago cop says--in that great accent that only Chicago cops seem to have--"Ahhh, sew you think you can leave New York City and come trash our town?"

The next morning we get a call from the limo company. There was another limo behind us that got two flat tires from broken glass in the street. They wrote down the giant phone number on the back of the limo and called the driver at home, screaming at him.

On the way to the airport home, Nikki says: "You know how people are always asking me what it's like dating a twenty-four year old?"

Labels: Chicago, Nikki

Back in Chicago! I made it! I've already been to Bongo room for brunch and The Hideout for a show! Whenever Ben or I go back to Chicago something vaguely magical or terrible happens. I can't wait to see which one I get!

Labels: Chicago

The Rules of Writing Vacation

1) When you have a completed draft you must put it away for six weeks.

2) When you put it away you may do whatever you want during your writing mornings. Ideally this should lead you to improve the draft you have or help you on your next draft. For example, this week I have spent time researching "sleeping it off" in the mornings and "acting like a 24 year old" so that when my characters get drunk they will have convincing mornings-after.

3) To keep youself from getting worried that you're actually just a twenty-four-year-old loser with a dead end job you may research your next novel, plan it out and begin the book shopping trip, which might just be the most fun part. Yesterday I went to the strand and bought all the books about Hawthorn and Melville that I could. My next novel will likely be about the six week writing vacation that Hawthorne had and Melville interrupted when they were neighbors.

4) Order take out I never get to do this and I love take out.

5) Travel without your laptop next week I'm going to Chicago and in my final week I'll be in North Dakota. If I could squeeze in a weekend in Kentucky I would be so happy.

6) Get a new job. Not writing frees up your time for pounding the pavement, training for free, and writing your next manifesto on the job application.

7) Cut your hair. At least once in six weeks.

8) Consider maybe, possibly throwing out your Christmas tree. At least by April.

9) Begin writing again promptly at the end of six weeks. Or you will wake up three weeks later on your 25th birthday and have some kind of life-crisis.

10) Mail out seven copies of the unchecked draft to seven different people who have different interests in literature. If you think you maybe want to read the draft, I insist that you give it back to me within one week (it's only 250 pages or so) with comments and analysis about what works and what needs clarity. I would just email it to everyone I know, but I can't stand when people send me their screenplays and movie treatments because I pretty much just open them and decide on the third page that they're terrible and never wonder about them again. Send me your address and I'll mail you one this week.

Labels: Chicago

In the first pocket notebook I ever had I wrote this as maybe the third entry

There are two kinds of jobs in the world. The ones you have to shower for before and the ones you have to shower from after. If you find one that requires neither, stick with it.

My current job:
Get there: Get up at 7:30 AM, shower. Leave the house at 8:30AM, stand on subway, emerge in midtown by 9:30 AM, cut four pounds of fruit, set up bar, clean glasses, open a thousand bottles of wine. Be real polite. Lots to do, that's why you have to train for six shifts. Break for half hour to herd into a cold room and eat college-like food on plastic plates while everyone calls their baby-mommas/mamis. Sometimes we sneak in a shot or a glass of champagne in a coffee mug. Leave somewhere around 5:00 PM, or maybe stay until midnight when I have to take down the whole bar and restock it for two hours.

My first night at my new sunday night gig
Hang with roommate after work, make dinner, smoke, watch movie. Take my subway one stop. Get there: 9:00 P!M! Say hi, order something delicious off the menu and hang out for an hour. Bar is set up by barback, all fruit is cut. Shift starts at ten and they've already taught me the computer. Manager wants to speak with me. Manager wants to do a shot with me. Owner comes in. The owner wants to do a shot with the new guy. Nikki comes in. The five of us have to do a shot with Nikki, according to the manager. Managing partner comes in. Five bands comes in to play in the back room. Managing partner wants the new guy to go upstairs and sing kareoke in the middle of his shift. Managing partner says I should maybe do a shot with him first. Bartender training me choses "Milkshake Song." When I return, triumphant and securely brought all the boys to the yard, we do a shot. Everyone else is drunk and so I close down the bar in stages. At 4:05 AM we've counted the money, cleaned the place, done another shot together and walk out the front door, pulling down the gates. This is probably really boring to read if you're not a bartender, but exciting to me because sometimes I can't stand my other job.

After almost three years in New York I finally have the job I got on my first day in Chicago. And I still haven't showered.

Labels: Chicago, Nikki

My first DJ gig in New York City happened to become a regular thing on Sunday nights at Williamsburg's only club. The bartender liked that I played 60"s garage and I liked that I was DJ'ing in New York City. My first night DJ'ing in Chicago was also my last. That bar still owes me $40 and the worst part is that I came back six months after I abandoned the city and asked if they still had it. They didn't.

Embarassing.

Pete came to the first night and every night after that. He would begin his ninetofive week after getting on the fucken L train at 3:40 AM.

They used to pay me 10%, which is great because some places only give you on a percentage of the people you bring.

Anyway, every sunday night at 5am the bartender/manager/owner would give me $10 and since I was fucken wasted I would hand it right back to her.

The point is that I'm doing another Sunday night on the Lower East Side tonight and the bar is half full. It's for a friend's birthday and he's here--convinced that because at 9:15 only ten of his friends are here that he's a thirty year old loser now. Personally, I would be happy with the ten bucks.

But where the fuck is Pete?

Labels: Chicago

My brief reflection on the past year.

(Thank you Juan for giving us Blind Melon's Change to listen to while we read this)

A long time ago I gave up on having New Year's Resolutions because I don't like disappointing myself. When I got to college I wanted to be somebody, when I graduated and moved to Chicago I wanted to be somebody else. This year was weird for me because I spent exactly six months of it struggling to be someone that somebody else what me to be and six months being exactly whom I wanted to be.

As a novelist I can make up an exact moment when this happened: one day Ben and I were at my DJ gig and a very nice girl came up and made a perfect song request. But I didn't have the record. I encouraged her to come back with another. She took a while. But then somewhere in the night she came back and made another request. Then another.

She came back the next week right on time and I decided right then that Jackie and I would be actual friends and maybe someday hang out in a place that wasn't a bar.

At the time Annie was working for a notorious poon-hound whose marriage was on the rocks. She was gone from friday to monday. Sometimes even going up thursdays and whooshing into my DJ gig on Tuesdays with her luggage and expect time from me right then. It's a painful but natural thing when people change. But expecting two people to change equally and willfully at the same is a disservice to both.

Jackie and I immediately merged our friends into one group. And these new friends never once asked me when we could move back to chicago or what the hell I was thinking about when I dressed myself like Jim Morrison, PhD that morning. They didn't hassle me about grad school or ask me just what the hell I'm going to do for a career when I finally write that new novel.

And you know what happened then? I started writing again. And I didn't--couldn't--stop. Free from the burden of pretending to be someone else, I could spend to rest of my time creating an honest character.

Annie eventually got fired by the insane poon-hound's crazy wife. Were this a year before I would have gone completely crazy, staying up at nights imagining that she had something to do with it, that maybe Jude Law wasn't the only one with a Mary Poppin's complex. But I didn't.

I spend all of my time creating stories where people who have never changed somehow find the will to do so on their own. That is what every single story in the entire world is about. The Annie that broke up with me in an accidentally hilarious way was not the same Annie I fell madly in love with and moved in with 3 weeks after meeting. It's sad that it had to end. But everything does.

A good friend of mine from high school moved in with me. He had just broken up with his girlfriend in Rome and was living with his parents, saving up to move to New York. Sometimes things happen in life that just feel so perfect at the time. I spent January-July living life like an Elvis Costello song, full of responsibility and honesty. I spent July-September living like an Elvis Presley song--full of emotion but somehow disingenuous, penned by someone else. Nick moved in October 1st and since then we have lived everyday like a Johnny Cash song--full of spirit, whiskey, honesty and trouble.

This has been the greatest year of my life and I wouldn't bother changing a minute of it, because I already have another year starting now.

Labels: Chicago, Novel

House music once a-fucking-gain made my stupid jerk list.

We all know that there are various great exceptions and one amazing Chicago musician excused from the Buddy Holly-caust I so often feel like having for the genre. Is this some kind of joke?

MP3: The Rapture - W.A.Y.U.H (Claude VonStroke Pantydropper Vocal Mix)

If so that's hilarious. Does writing techno just give you license to let you write a mediocre dance track without any of the lyrical genius of the original track? Take out the music and the vocals and keep the name? Great. Is the point to change the time signature just enough so that no DJ can even use them together? Great. You should hear my new remix of The Rolling Stone's Satisfaction.

I'd like to say that I'm kidding about being mad. But I'm going to be 20 mins late for work just because I had to get that out.

Labels: Chicago

Today I made a deal with myself that I could sleep in a little if I promised that writing would be the first thing I do all day. This slightly goes against the promise I made with myself earlier, when I set the alarm for 8:30. It goes even further against the deal I made with a friend to call me every morning at 7:30 when she wakes up so that I won't forget to write.

Years ago in Chicago I had this nice girl from Texas call me everymorning and tell me to get writing. What ever happened to her?

Long story short I got up at almost three in the afternoon and I have little more than an hour and a half before the sun sets, at which time I will be drinking and DJ'ing.

Right now Liam (main character) is stuck in the same Doctor's office that I put him in almost three weeks ago. The only way I think that I can wrap up this scene and get him to progress with the other characters is if Liam has a seizure right now. But Ben isn't picking up his phone and when we were in high school, Ben almost had a stroke at a blood drive.

That's what it's like being my friend. I'll remind you about all the terrible things that happened to you, and then I'll bother you at work for the details.

Labels: Chicago

This never happens in New York

I walked into my old local in Chicago to take photobooth pictures. As I walked in some guy I've never seen before swore that we went to college together. He seemed legit. As I was in the photobooth some guy handed me the cigarette that I didn't even know I wanted. As I waited for the photos I smoked the cigarette and college guy decided not to leave and walked over with two beers. One for me.

This may have happened in a dream I would likely have, but when I woke up this morning I had photobooth pictures on my nightstand.

Labels: Chicago

Maybe someday I'll grow up to be a big strong man who never gets chilly and always remembers a sweater. New York will not be hearty enough for me and I will force Annie to move back to Chicago in the dead of winter so that I can relate better to Herman Melville's stories as we come to port in the frosty winds of January. I'll also be such a big strong man that I can force Annie to move here. I love Chicago so much, but I love it more from April-October. And I'm too young to spend my summers in Florida.

Labels: Chicago

Tonight in Chicago I'm going to see the best ever Guy With A Guitar Group--The Mountain Goats. And I can only hope that they will play:

The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton- The Mountain Goats

which I first heard in a thrift store and begged the loser behind the counter to play it again.

Labels: Chicago

This Weekend I am going to Chicago. If, for example, you are an ex-roommate of mine and I owe you a large amount of money, this would be the time to collect it. To make sure that we can work something out, why don't you just pick me up from the airport?

Labels: Chicago

When I was sixteen I went to a weeklong program in Ohio for young writers. It was named after someone we were told was a very important writer, but who turned out to be the author of Kindergarten Cop. I flew in as a troublesome kid with a small ability to make jokes and tell stories whose ends referred directly back to the beginning.

It was the first time I went to an art museum, first time I read a poem that didn't rhyme, first time I took a photo that wasn't a portrait. It was where I first heard about how much depends upon a little red wheelbarrow, glistening with rain water beside the white chickens.

One of the professors in the program told me that she liked how I wrote / hated what I wrote, but that beneath everything I had to say was a strong undercurrent that she could only pin to the sing-song black humor of Irish writing, which she attributed to my last name. It is the reason that I didn't join the navy.

While I was there I met a girl who may as well have been Thai or Ethiopian, but in fact she was a cornfed-cowfed girl from a horse farm in Kentucky. Her voice, her diction, her expressions and her poetry were like nothing I ever heard. I couldn't believe it was considered English.

We kept in touch over the years and shared our writing. I was then too embarassed to show anyone what I had done, but she would call me long distance, laughing out loud at the things I had said. I came to see her on my way back from Graceland after I graduated high school. We spent twelve hours together on the farm in the cabin before my travel partner told me we had to get home for financial reasons.

I came back the next summer and she wasn't there. I came back the one after that and she still wasn't here. One time in college I called her at nine o'clock on a saturday night from a toyota full of six students on the Kentucky boarder. She called her sister and had us stay there. I met up with her family once at a horserace and took her sister out for wine in Italy just last year.

When I moved to Chicago I got a note from her cousin saying, "My cousin seems to think we should be friends. I can't imagine that I would ever be friends with someone my cousin would be longtime friends with. So I have to meet you." The cousin and I were inseparable until I met Annie.

We have missed eachother by mere days so many times over the years. And I have spent infinitely more hours with her sister and parents than with she. It had been too long. I booked a flight knowing full well that she was maybe one big horserace away from getting engaged to some banker. Her cousin told me all about him and his Italian loafers and his showtunes.

You get to a certain age and your friends start to become the husbands and wives of someone you don't know. And sometimes it takes alcohol and long walks and cigarette breaks while they better half is passed out to find your old friend again.

Even if I could see her for one day and chat I knew I could be at home in the cabin and get some great writing done (more on that to follow).

At one in the morning on the night before I had to get on my flight to Lexington I got a text from her. "My boyfriend just broke up with me. So you're stuck with me for the weekend."

According to the professor, my bleak, sustaining heritage of black humor is all that could support us at that moment. That moment where I couldn't have been happier to hear it.

Labels: Chicago

Dear Ben,

As you may recall, two summers ago you gave yourself the motivation to publish more weblog posts by staging a contest. This was before any of us were smart enough to change the dates on posts. I lost horribly, but I did one day get to meet the actual winner when I ran out on our lease in Chicago and went to visit you at Bard.

It was a fun way to spend the summer as we watched our relationships fade away and tried, semi-unsuccessfully, to have a meaningful summer fling with the Slovakian waitress whose visa would run out before I could.

It would be a real joy to invite everyone who still has a blog, and even people like Adam who never fucking update theirs, to try and write one meaningful thought/story per day.

I can't remember whose idea it was to resurrect the Yo La Tengo Summer Weblog Contest, because your fucking comment system is broken again.

We, the undersigned, would love to see this happen.

-Brendan

p.s. did you read The Autobiography of Big Foot? funny shit.

Labels: Chicago

Two years ago I packed up all the furniture that people through out at the end of college, boxed up my three hundred books and bought a futon for eleven dollars so that I could move to Chicago with Ben, Dave, Farsheed, and Drew.

It was so much fun.

Labels: Chicago

HELP!

Holy shit! My laptop battery just exploded in my crotch! The PAIN IS UNBEARABLE! AGHH! God, it hurts so bad! I knew I should have done the recall! The plastic battery pack exploded through the metal casing and the shrapnel is sticking into my legs, melting inside of me! Please! Someone IM 911!

Also, I'm about to send this new beginning (I call it the Hardy Boys beginning) and first ten pages to a new agent. Help! *Tell me if anything is unclear, misspelled, wrong or hard to believe/understand.* I want whoever reads this to come directly to my house with a burlap bag of money.

Idaho.
We almost burned down the drive-in last night. Not like anyone cared. No one in Idaho had been there since a movie called “SOUL CR_SH” lit up the marquee years ago. It was a good enough campsite for the night, even if the screen stayed blank. First time this whole trip where we could find any firewood--all thanks to some asshole in a truck who came long before us and mowed down fifty speaker posts. Probably trying to spell his name in a cursive of tire ruts and fallen timber on the mossy gravel lot. The remaining few stood with mouths gaping where there should have been woofers blaring something about the hard life of a Soul Cr_sh.

I left Scott Hampshire back there to sleep. Actually, I left him there forever but he doesn’t know that yet. We’re supposed to be on our way to a summer job at his older sister’s camp in Oregon. But I’m so fed up with him by now that I can’t handle working with him all summer and then driving him back home to Connecticut. My Dad and brother are going to be mad when they find out I didn’t show up for the job. These two think about work the way Mom used to think about church. Before she left us we went every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. Don’t get me started. Christian Science church services are about as much fun as nursing home parties, only there’s no break to take your medicines. Lonely old people go on and on about their intestines and lungs and kidneys. My brother called it the “organ recital.”

I should tell Dad and Conor that I’m not going to this job. They’re both at work right now, so if I leave a message then I won’t have to sit on the phone and get yelled at from someone three years older than me on the other side of the country. I stop at the first gas station I find.

Pluhoooo—
“Hello?” Conor answers our home phone at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning.
“Conor? Why aren’t you at work? It’s—”
“No. My brother is not here right now.” Conor talks right over me and then whispers the word “Reporter.”
“What? No, Conor. Can you hear me a’right?”
Conor keeps talking right into the phone but he’s not saying anything to me. “My brother is in Oregon right now. Or he’s on his way. And I’ll tell you what I told everyone else. I haven’t heard from him since Missouri, and he’s probably camping somewhere out in the Rockies. Obviously I can’t get in touch with him there.”
“Conor? Hello? Anybody home?”
“He is scheduled to be there today. I would love to answer any of your questions, but the police are here and they have a few of their own for me. I’m real sorry.”
“Police? What police?”
“I just want you to know—Sorry, what newspaper did you say you work for?”
“What? Conor. It’s me, Liam. What the f—”
“I just want you to know. There’s. No. Way. My brother. Had anything. To do. With the death. Of Stanley Trout. Okay?”
“Who thinks I killed Trout?”
“One second, officer.” His rough hand scrapes over the holes in the mouthpart. “And there is no way he could have left that message at Trout’s office. My brother is not the type to make Death Threats. Like I said, he’s on a camping trip. To Oregon. I’m sorry, but I have to go right now. And I would appreciate it if you would not call us back today. You can imagine this is hard on all of us.”
My organs finish their recital. Bladder, intestines, kidneys, liver, stomach, lungs, throat, tongue. I land back on Earth. “Are you fucking with me?”
“No. No, I don’t know when Trout’s funeral is planned for. And I think that the best way for my family to respect the memory of that great man would be to let his family have their ceremonies and not worry about us. Okay? Thank you very much, but I will have to—”
Another voice hops on the line. An authority voice. A real one. “Who is this?”
“This is, uh…”
“Speak up! Dammit. Where are you, Liam?” The sound of my own name hits me in the chest and stalls my heart.
I hold the phone with my hand and try to fake like I’m an old man. But with a stalled heart it just comes out all high and girly. I go with it anyway. “Sir. Where I come from a lady is not spoken to in such a may-nor.”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?” I give it a breathy, phone sex lilt.
“This is Officer Fitzpatrick.”
“This is,” I check the papers on the rack by the phone.
“This is Marsha McKinley cawlin’ from The…Spokesman Review.”
“The what?”
"Our sources tell us that death threats w’made to Mistah Trout from a neahby county in Eye-daho.”
“What sources? How do you know that?”
“Now now, Mistah Fitzpatrick. A lady never tells.”
“Look, Ma’am, I’m sorry. I cannot reveal any information at this time.”
“Well, do you have a motive? It’s the fifth dubya you know? Whh-eye, Mistah Fitzpatrick, why?”
“We dunno. Something about soup.”
“Soup?”
“Ma’am. I’m sorry. We may know more when we find the Jew—the other boy. He’s off with his band somewhere. And he can’t be reached at all. It’s part of their—look, ma’am. We’re very busy. I’m sorry I—”
“No, I undahstand. Kindly catch that killah for me, will ya? Then maybe I’ll have a story to write. About you.” As my heart sputters back into gear I start to lose my phone sex voice.
“I’ll do my best, ma’am. Thank you.”
“No, no, thank you.” I slam the phone down and hide across the street at a donut shop, sweating. Did anyone see me? Can they trace calls? I run into the bathroom and wash my hands for ten minutes.


Connecticut
Chapter 2.
You might as well know that I never had any reason to talk to Scott Hampshire until nine months ago, when I overheard him trying to talk my friend Carl into working with him at some summer camp out in Oregon. We sat at the counter of a diner near the bomb factory in town while Hampshire scooted around the whole place getting the second shift workers their ten PM lunch break. Carl’s parents had bought him a brand new car for his birthday or for what seemed to be a second bar mitzvah for some of the new kids in town. He was used to getting indescent ride proposals. I had a car too but you wouldn’t want a ride. My brother brought it back from the dead for me as a birthday present. And like my brother the car was three years older than me, greasy, and unreliable.
Hampshire didn’t like the other factory kids very much. And we sure didn’t like him. His Dad moved up and up at the factory over the years and now he’s designing some kind of bomb that can explode without fire or something. His mom works for this creepy guy named Stanley Trout. She’s one of his real estate sluts, always smiling into the phone and being really, really enthusiastic. They put Hampshire’s two sisters through college out west and they never came back. Wonder why.
Carl’s parents bought one of these palaces from Hampshire’s mom on the other side of town. It didn’t used to be the other side of town. It used to be woods and fields out there, but now behind the old barns the farmers have learned to grow houses where corn and cattle once bloomed. The developers hurry to clear the trees got in the way of the bigger hurry to grow them again. And the trunks of pines stand chopped on one side, exhausted from the hope of growing back their arms. Now young maple trees stand awkward, shivering alone in the middle of acre-wide lawns with their branches chained to the ground as if they might otherwise escape.
Stanley Trout’s company put up the new houses and the new super market and a newer super store with super savings. And I can’t be the first one to notice how super our lives had become out here without getting any better.
Hampshire is one of those kids with a third eye inside his mouth. Whenever he had to think hard or listen to someone you could almost see it. Slowly his jaw goes slack so that his third eye could peek out, take it all in, and explain it to the rest of him. To focus all three eyes he has to keep his mouth and eyelids half open. He worked the counter over at the only diner in town. People always thought he must be stupid to stare at you like his jaw needed a tune up.
Until right then I don’t think I had ever thought of Oregon. Washington yes; California of course. But never the middle child. I knew where it was, what it was and how to find it. And most importantly I knew that getting there would take long enough for me to stop in on some of Mom’s relatives. Dad and Conor—but mostly Conor—never let me go very far from home since Mom left us.
“So here’s what I’m thinking, Carl” Hampshire finished drawing an outline of the country on a placemat. “I could get you a job at my sister’s summer camp and we could take your car, right? We can leave from my house at four in the morning.”
“Strawberry-Rhubarb?” Carl squinted at the short menu and ignored Hampshire’s lame lame attempt to catch a ride to the Pacific. “That can’t be good. Is that good? Tell me it’s not good.”
“You want a piece of pie? I can give you a piece of pie,” Hampshire said. “I got a lot of pie here.”
“If we can grow strawberries all year in California, we can grow rhubarb all year in California. So if I’ve never heard of it, it can’t be that great.”
“Not to interrupt,” I said. “But hat’s what you said about Maple Sugar Candy and Chocolate Chip Pancakes when you moved here.”
“That’s what I was trying to think of,” he turns to the counter. “Forget the pie. Gimme those pancakes I got last time.”
“If I hear one word about your sugar hangover tomorrow, I’m cutting you off for good. Fucken pancakoholic,” I said to Carl.
“Right, cause I’m addicted to pancakohol?” Carl smirked into his glass of water and looked down at some papers.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“School Newspaper.”
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” I said.
“I do. But I want to get into a good college. So I’m on the paper. You should come sometime,” Carl put down his water glass. “Everyone else on staff is really boring.”
“Weleavefrommyhouseatfourinthemorning,” Hampshire slammed the crude map over Carl’s placemat. “We pack the car that day and drive to Rhode Island. Find a boat launch where there aren’t any fisherman and back the car in so that the rear tires soak up some of the Atlantic before we blast off. Straight for highway eighty, straight to California.”
He makes everything sound so organized and important. I like the idea of the early hours and the urgency. Back the tires in—Dip! Dip!—and take off—Zoom! Zoom!
“We pull all nighters for two days,” he said. “We live on coke and crackers and sleep in shifts like…like truckers carrying really important medicine,” my eyes widened.
“And we’ll get to Cali around sunset on the second day.” California, deargodyes, California. I’ll sit on the beach. Maybe get a peach and take a nap in the cool sand. I didn’t want to see movie stars. I didn’t want to see LA. I don’t want to see cars and driveways. I just wanted to face west and know that I couldn’t get farther away from here unless I had a passport and a warm jacket. I just want to swim with dolphins and camp on the beach. “Find another boat launch and dip the tires in, Carl.” Dip! Dip! “Then we could visit your old friends for a few days. We don’t have to get to the camp until the fourth of July. Maybe you could introduce me to a few California girls and we’ll…y’know…chill.”
“California,” I just liked saying it. Californnnnia. Califfffffornia. Who named that? The Spanish? Dios Mio. I love those names. In New England they stole the names from the people they stole the land from. Awkward, unspellable syllables taken from bad translations. But out west. Sannn Diego. Pal-o Alt-o. Sannn Franciiiisgo. Portland.
Hampshire ran over to a table of second shift workers on their ten o’clock lunchbreak. The fuse guys always fill about an ashtray a piece. You can imagine they have a zero-tolerance policy for smoking in the fuse wing. He came back with our plates.
“This always happens,” Carl sneered at his plate so that he didn’t have to tell Hampshire no. Carl’s parents could probably buy him this diner if he wanted it. But like any seventeen year old, he would love to get the food for free. “Now I wish I got pie.”
“You want pie?” Hampshire smiled. “I can get you pie.”
“They got dolphins in California?” I asked Carl.
“Not anymore,” Carl drowned his stack in syrup. “Unless you get some shitty tuna.”
“What’s your problem? I’m giving you one instant fantastic summer here. I’ll get you a job and set it all up and you can even see your friends. I’ll even get you a piece of pie if you want it.”
“First of all, maybe I know a few things you do not,” Carl said. “Do you know how long it takes to fly to California? Nine hours. And that’s just from New York. The moving van took a week to get here.”
Hampshire strapped on his mother’s face of fake concern. “I sure hope you family wasn’t over charged, Carl.”
“A plane travels at three hundred miles per hour,” Carl grabbed the ketchup bottle and squirted a line from one corner to the other on Hampshire’s map. “So even if you do sixty, all the way, averaging in all of your stops for gas, pissing, and doing whatever it’ll take you…” his eyes danced around the top of his head, checking the math on an imaginary blackboard. “Forty-five hours, which means…you’ll get there at three in the morning in your perfect schedule, which is eleven at night in California.”
“Okay, so say we get there at eleven and wake up the next morning at one of your friends’ houses and finish out the trip. Won’t that be fun? You see your friends, I see my sister. We make some money and come back in time to go to college.”
“That’s assuming we somehow build a highway that is a perfectly straight line from New York to San Francisco, and that we can get on to it somewhere in Rhode Island.” Carl went back to his pancakes. Hampshire put the pie away.
“I can drive you,” I said. “Us.”
“You have a car?” Hampshire said.
“I have a great car. And my brother’s a mechanic so we don’t have to worry about breaking down or getting stuck anywhere. He taught me tons of ways to fix it. Plus I got cousins we can stay with along the way if you want. Chicago, Seattle, Missouri. Maybe we can go to California on the way home if you want.” I said.
I didn’t care about this camp whatsoever. But my Mom’s waiting out there for me somewhere. I really have no idea where, but she’s got family all over. Family we don’t talk to much. Family that has a fold out couch and photo albums just waiting for me. Hampshire’s sister’s camp is somewhere near Portland in Oregon, which means I can call Mom’s brother in Missouri on the way and her cousins all over the west. And my gay Uncle in Seattle. He got disowned, but I bet he still gets her Christmas cards.
Hampshire’s third eye stared at no one in particular as the wheels in his head cranked out the stops he could make along the way. All the places we could go. “I never been much of anywhere,” I added. “So I don’t mind if we stop a bunch on the way out there.”
“I don’t know,” Hampshire squeezed his third eye shut. “It sounds like fun, but that’s a lot for one summer.” Scott Hampshire may be the one guy my age whose eyes didn’t sparkle when you talk about highways and no rules and girls and timezones.
Just then Chuck Micks hooted out for Hampshire from a table down by the fuse guys. “Hampster!” Micks smiled in perfect proportion to the growing frown on Hampshire’s face as he said that dreaded nickname. “Hey Hampster, yer a smart guy—help me out here. My girlfriend sent away and got a star named after us. Do you know how I can find it? I mean, like you know where the stars are?”
“There is an infinite amount,” Hampshire said. “But we can only see a few thousand of them from here. In fact, the one she got you may only be the light from a star that burned out millions of years ago. And it’s just now getting to us.”
“You mean they just burn out?” Micks asked.
“A few do. But most of them just go into a supernova and explode.”
Everyones eyes got wider over at Micks’ table. “So if AlphaJennyLovesMicks exploded right now would we be able to hear it even if we couldn’t see it?”
“Actually, no.” Hampshire said. “For many reasons, no. But no matter what we wouldn’t be able to hear it because there is no sound in space. Space is a vacuum.” Hampshire went back to working on Carl. “Think about it, okay?”
“A vacuum?” Micks shouted. “Like a vacuum cleaner? But isn’t that loud?”
Hampshire couldn’t even start to finish his sentence again. We just sat there, before he turned to me and said, for the first time, something we both realized at birth. “If you have a car, I have a job and that’s good enough. We gotta get out of this place.”

Labels: Chicago

1) During the transit strike yesterday I rode my scooter from downtown Brooklyn to 53rd st in some of the densest traffic ever. the highway department loves scooters because of a technicality they invented that makes it possible for you to ride around cars. Everytime two miles of traffic backed up, I could skip to the front of the line. It was awesome. And that's the only word for it because I didn't feel like a competent adult who would be one of the few to make it into my place of business that day.

I felt like I was playing some secret level of Grand Theft Auto. Halfway to work I stopped a cop thinking that she would probably automatically come over and blow me.

On the final block before work I jammed on the brakes as some pedestrian stepped out in front of me and I started to slide. I couldn't stop. Ice? No. It turns out as I narrowly avoided him. I was skidding on the intestines of a dead rat.

2) Annie and I have a rat problem upstairs. This is the polite way that we refer to the angelic, blond, early-risining three-year-old girl above us who has just learned to gallop. Like children in a divorce, she is a mere pawn, an extension of her embattled parents (our landlords).

I would like to say something to them, especially since my occupation requires that I stay up late, but I don't want to scar the child. When I had smaller feet my parents were always complaining about me clomping around. It gave me such a complex about it that I moved to Chicago when I graduated. Even now when people discuss loose floorboards or nazi duck walking, someone in my immediate family always adds: "Oh don't get me started, when Brendan was six he..."

Even when confronted with the dents my heals made in the soft pinewood floors of our first home I remember thinking, "Gaawwd leave men alonnne, okay? I've only had these ankles for five years I'm still getting used to them."

Most of parenting scares me if only because it exists in a world without logic and is usually best served by old fashioned shame.

Labels: Chicago

This is something I wrote for one of my freelance jobs. I never know if it will come out so I am including it here.

Back Handed Book Reviews
By Brendan Sullivan
When you’re an English major, you spend your whole life searching for meaning. What is the author trying to say? What is this pop song actually about? What does this eviction notice really mean?

The holidays are no different. Your loved ones get you some well-meaning gift and your there, pondering it like a Richard Kelly film. What is my dear mother trying to say with this copy of “Land That Job!”?

What you end up saying with most gifts is, of course, “To my family member, I’ve known you my entire life but I still have no clue who you are.” Books are an excellent gift to give, if only because they can be easily exchanged for DVDs now at most chain bookstores. But if you’re looking to maybe impress your cousins this year with books that are new and new in paperback, then check out the list below and see if you’re reminded of anyone.

NON FICTION
“Everything Bad is Good for You” by Stephen Johnson (Riverhead, 234 pp.) Remember when the bad guy was just the bad guy? Johnson makes a very convincing argument that today’s pop culture—from video games to films to TV shows like 24, The Sopranos and The Simpsons—are much more complex than we give them credit for and may be making us smarter and safer. Good gift for: your father who wouldn’t let you watch “Full House” because the children were sassy, but who now can’t tear his ass away from his “Sopranos” boxset long enough to carve the ham.

“Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show” Get it if you think John Wayne is a pussy. Cody rode the pony express, fought in the civil war, fought Indians, and was a dime store novel hero all by the age of 23. At 26 he starred as himself in a traveling road show about the his life which, it turns out, may not have been so exciting. Good gift for: Your cousin in Maine who wear cowboy boots and quotes Cool Hand Luke to excess.

“Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” by Stephen Greenblatt (390 pp.) How did a glovemaker’s son from the boondocks, who already had children of his own managed to change the London theater world forever? This book talks in depth about Shakespeare the social climber, the wannabe gentleman, who did things like pay off the College of Heralds to pretend that they had “discovered” the age old Shakespeare coat of arms with the motto that translates to “Not without right.” His rival, Ben Johnson, lampooned this in a satire of a rustic buffoon who who pays 30 pounds for a coat of arms. A friend mockingly proposes the motto “Not without mustard.” Get it for: your drama queen cousin who unironically wears black turtlenecks.

“The Secret Man” by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, $23). Remember a time, long, long ago when we had a thuggishly inept republican president at war who spent his second term dodging a scandal that mired everyone around him? Remember when we had half as many reporters on the ground, but twice as many who were doing their job? Me neither, that’s why I loved reading the true story behind Watergate, Deep Throat, and Mark Felt. Also, according to Woodward The Hartford Courant was the newspaper that actually outed Mark Felt as Deep Throat. Get it for: anyone you know who votes or watches “West Wing.”

“Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson (Vintage, $14.95). This is the story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, a story of rebuilding a great city that had just burned down, the story of the thousands who flocked to the city to see the show. It is the story of Buffalo Bill, Houdini, Edison and a young Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson. And some guy named Mark Twain who came all the way to Chicago and spent 11 days sick in his hotel room. It is also about H. H. Holmes, an American Jack the Ripper who lured untold numbers of office girls into his home, tortured, murdered, and often sold their corpses to science for money or filed to claim their life insurance. Get it for: anyone who would rather be watching “24.”

“Are Men Necessary?” by Maureen Dowd. Two opposing things: 1) Give this book to someone for the surprise on their face and the jokes that will ensue. But don’t expect to change their life. In every chapter, Dowd produces choppy, sloganeering paragraphs. She quotes Oscar Wilde so much that you might think she is searching hippie stores of the world for a bumper sticker quoting her. (“These days, the scarlet letter morphs into the dollar sign.”)2) Dowd never pretends to have all the answers. This is the first book to seriously catalogue the shift in gender culture of the past five years where we now find both men and women with careers and mortgages shopping for shoes while at work and gossiping about their dating failures. Get it for: any former bra-burner who now needs a girdle or anyone who misses "Ally McBeal."

FICTION
“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith (Penguin, $25.95). There is no real reason to read Zadie Smith books--but you still should. Even the bad ones. In this, her third--and possibly her best, London-born Smith follows the lives of two suburban Boston university families whose lives are tangled together by chance. Get it for: empty nesters who have children in college.

“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage, $15.28). If Jake Glylenhal’s “Brokeback Mountain”--a non-gay romance between two cowboys--is any indicator, we are in for a serious pop-appraisal of man-love. In “Fortress” we follow young Dylan, the only white kid for miles in his Brooklyn neighborhood as he grows up in an era of funk music, the birth of hip-hop and the abortion of punk. Dylan has a strong bond with his neighbor, Mingus Rude. Get it for: anyone.

“Indecision” by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House, $21.95). Like far too many novels of this era, it should be titled “The Day I Banged that Girl, Finally.” It has received glowing reviews in every paper for its clever premise (a pill that supposedly cures indecisiveness) and its main character (a 28-year-old dullard who, by virtue of his Manhattan address, privileged background, education and lack of direction in his life, garners unfair comparisons to Holden Caulfield). The story is funny at times (after getting canned, the narrator tells his girlfriend: “I was just now fired. From Pfizer. Wow. Pfired! So I’m pfucked!") and not too taxing on the brain. Fantastic gift for: Your sister who finally dumped that New York nancy boy who should have proposed three years ago.

“Mission to America” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday, $23.95). Somewhere in the hills of Montana a semi-new age cult is in trouble. After years of insular life the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles’ gene pool has gotten a little shallow. When one of their own makes it big in something called a “reality TV show,” he sends young Mason Laverne out in the world to find a wife with money to help the group survive. Laverne all at once confronts the world of television, fast-food, and teeth whitening with a naif’s eye. This hilarious tale is spun by the author of “Thumbsucker.” Get it for: your brother, the reality-TV addict.

Do you know someone who actually reads literature for pleasure? Some of the most important titles to come out lately are works that debuted decades ago. Gone is the age of stilted, Victorian renderings of masterworks. In each of the following, a present day scholar has set the original story to a fluid, readable modern tongue. In every case it helped bring out the original joy and humor of the works. “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman (Harper Perennial, $16.95; “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, ed. by Lydia Davis (Penguin, $20), and “The Odyssey” by Homer, translated by R. L. Eickhoff. Get it for: anyone in your family who does not own a TV.

Labels: Chicago

Annie's iPod was stolen from our apartment the other day. She had put it by the door so that she would remember to take it to Italy and when the building guy and his partner finished installing some smoke detectors it was gone.

You may also know that my hard drive committed suicide a few weeks ago and I lost all of my music, songs, pictures and the short stories that I thought might go somewhere. The only songs left were the twenty playlists I made for Annie starting with our first date. We are both very fickle about music and we got through phases which means that for a month we listened only to The Thrills and Bright Eyes and Kinds of Convenience. I labelled that list "5- First night in Brooklyville" for when I ran out on my life in Chicago and moved in with her in New York. "14- Puerto Rico!", "20- Moving to Fort Green."

I bet I haven't heard any Bright Eyes song once since last winter. When I play them I remember being a cold, unemployed loser on hold with the credit card company and staring at the screen of my potentially repossed laptop--hoping that a novel would fall out of it. I hide almost all of my memories in music.

Annie did what any normal person would do and she looked around the house to see if anything else had been stolen. She found a big shit in the toilet and a missing bag of croissants*. She called me at work and I relayed her her that I had taken the breaded treat to work, but that her iPod was still stolen.

When I say landlords, I mean the people whose basement we live in. They pay an unlicensed, untrained, unskilled man (who lives with his mother) $500 a week to stick around and fix things. He's a great guy whom I trust and respect because he installs dishwashers, does drywall, turns on our heat, hooked up our washer, and he also thinks our landlord is an asshole. When we moved in, he brought in a twenty foot ladder so we could hang our vintage "Submarine Voyage--of Tomorrowland!" poster.

It's his assistant that we're concerned about. What this man will ever do with a pink iPod mini full of Le Tigre and our other hollaback girls, I will never know. The landlords said nothing for two weeks until I left a note on the door with my phone number. They called while I was Dj'ing.

"I don't know what to tell you, Brendan. We called him when it happened and he searched his assistant and I find it hard to believe that he got out of there with your iPod and ate a whole bag of croissants."

"Annie told you two weeks ago that the croissants were not stolen. I took those to work," (I also will freely admit that I have problems with authority which is why I added:) "I mean, I don't know if your wife has ever been robbed while you weren't at home, but I bet the second thing she'd do is find out what else is missing.**"

"You, uh..." I should also add that both of our landlords are librarians, which I originally thought was going to be fantastic. In their apartment they have one book: The Book of Mormon. Turns out they are Law Librarians.

"Look, I'm at work right now. I don't mind if you call me at work tomorrow. Will that be okay?"

"Sure." He hangs up with me and calls Annie immediately. He brings up the goddam croissants again. He speaks condescendingly about the missing mixes. And he agrees to pay for half the iPod. ("We can't be responsible for everything that goes on in that apartment.")

David Sedaris has a great essay about cleaning peoples apartments. He always said that they got paid fifteen an hour but that his company kept five of it, which he was more than happy to do just incase there was a problem with anything being stolen.

If my landlords were using a licensed company of some kind I could just go to them. And I would because damn the man.

They said they will only pay half because we can't prove anything. I can't stand it when people make statements on flawed logic: If we could prove that he stole it, we could get it back and then they wouldn't have to pay anything.

Moments ago I took a break from writing this to close a window in the living room. When I did the glass plate fell out of the poorly installed, unlicensed window and cracked me on the forehead. I'm bleeding now. And it's six times colder than it was before. If you see me tomorrow: I don't want to hear about how flat my fucking man bangs are.

I want to keep fighting because I've worked up all of these great lines. (Emotional: "If he had stolen a picture frame do you think I would care more about the frame or the picture in it?" Mind trap: "Are you paying half out of principle or are you just being cheap? If he stole our newspaper would you insist on only paying us a quarter?" Pure personal satisfaction "Yeah he took her iPod. He also took a shit in our toilet: you want in on half of that too?")

Do I:

1) Continue arguing until I get him to cave into buying a new iPod (even if this means making things tense with them?)

2) Tell him he has to pay half of a new nano, plus $990 to buy 1000 songs on the iTunes music store that will possibly replace the ones that are gone?

3) Forget about the iPod and just go after them about the blood coming out of my forehead?

*I wish that the object in question had been Wonderbread. It's just as hard to get sympathy about your missing croissants as it would be about you missing your manicure appointment.
**If you ever need to be a condescending dick: use phrases like "the second thing you should do.." because people always make the first thing they do personal and embarassing. Or better yet they get distracted by wondering.

Labels: Chicago

Some Thoughts on Receiving "suggested edits" from an Agent

1) My novel needs to go to fat camp. Kurt Vonnegut once told an actual fisherman the "Old Man and the Sea" story (which I now realize I have never read*). The old man in question catches a giant marlin, lashes it to his boat and heads home. But since the fish is so big and bloody it attracts sharks who eat away at it. When he gets back to port he has only a skeleton left. Vonnegut's fisherman replied "Why didn't he just hack off the big parts and leave the rest out there?"

That's where I am with this 409 page project. The meat of the novel I want to sell is in there, but I will never get it to market if I can't carry it.**

There are dozens of scenes that I will have to feed to the sharks. So it goes.

2) Writing novels is still like dating. Right now I would love to call up one of these agents and find out what they're actually thinking. But I can't. It would scare them away.

On the night that I got my first good news in the agent world I threw myself a party. Literally. I emailed everyone I knew and I got very, very intoxicated at the bar where I DJ. But I didn't say anything to the agent. I haven't even told her that I like what she has to say. Here's my reply:

Thank you for your email. I don't have the time it deserves right now, but I will tell you what I have been thinking about for the past few weeks:

On the night I went all over trying to steal the goddam bible, I went into the Parker Meridian, which is a hotel that tries to be too "New York." The signs on the doorknobs don't say, "Do Not Disturb" they say "Fuggetaboutit."

I winced, because I know they are trying to say a word that sounds like that. It sound exactly like that. But it comes off sounding so fake.

Thank you for reading.
-B

Annie really disagrees with me here. She thinks that you have to be more up front with people. We met while I was at waiting on her table. I was a loser in Chicago with a dude apartment, no dress pants and a novel that looked like a creative writing project***. But I couldn't let her know that.

I didn't ask for her number. I didn't ask her out because I really, really liked her and I wanted her to like me. How was she supposed to be able to remember me from all the other slobbering guys who talked to her for three minutes and then ask for her number? I knew that then, as now, that my desperation would stink like a rotting marlin.

Fishing is a sport now that it's on ESPN. And I hate sports metaphors. However: Hemingway's old man caught the giant fish but it pulled him out to sea. He knew that if he tied the line to the boat that the taught string would snap. So he had to hold on--give a little--reel it in--let it out, wait.

I'm not very good at playing it cool, so instead I just have to wait for the fish to get tired.

3) The Agent Who Gets Me also missed a giant part of the story. It may be that she gets me so much that by the third chapter she already knew that she wanted to be a part of this project. The notes I'm reading may be born of exuberance after being snagged by one of the tasty lures I've left out there****.

The Agent Who Gets Me may be under the impression that this is a novel about upper-middle-class vs. lower-middle-class. But really it is more about what Freud calls "the narcissism of minor difference." The upper characters are weary of the lowers, of course. But the real tension in here is in between. Liam's girlfriend's parents don't hate him because they own too many diamonds. They hate him because they were once young and poor like him and they don't want that for their daughter.

It's my fault that this didnt' come across. But I worry--slightly--that if I tell this to The Agent Who Gets Me that she will spit out the bait and lose interest.

DISCLOSURES
*"TOMATS" is Saddam Husein's favorite story. No joke.
**Hemingway's fishing boat/office is on display in a giant rods and lures store in Florida. You can tour it and then buy a mug in the shape of a fish head. His writing desk and typewriter are below decks. I went there once but I was too afraid and superstitious to sit in his chair. I feared that if I sat down I would never be able to finish a novel and I would spend the rest of my life towing rotting marlins. I know this is silly. But just in case I asked my nemesis to sit in the chair so I could take her picture. She also dreamed of writing novels and I sincerely hope she gets eaten by actual sharks in the near future. This is what I mean when I say I'm not such a nice guy anymore.
***With good and obvious reasons.
****It may be that the real reason I hate dating and sports metaphors is just because I'm really, really bad at both.

Labels: Chicago

I Always Though Books Worked Like This

This intro really requires Terry Gross' voice speaking to closely to the microphoneSomehow--please don't ask--I did not bring Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with me to start my new life in Chicago. And thus it was never stolen along with the others. I found it at my parents house last week. When I opened it last night, I experienced a forgotten joy of being a book-whore.

In the title page I had scrawled, "Seattle Barnes and Noble 7-11-2000." I had bought it while on an aimless, cross country road trip for the summer before I went off to college. In those days it took me a really, really long time to read an entire book. I was in San Diego, sitting on a beach, hungry out of my mind, almost broke, and sad about having to go back home when I did finish.

When I opened the pages last night, a receipt fluttered out from a Taco Bell in Coos Bay, OR. (In those days I considered a full meal to be "7LAYER---NO SOUR-NO CHZ.") When I reached the end, the hidden sand of San Diego had fallen out of its hiding places in the pages and collected in my sheets.

All I really remembered was the chapter where Hemingway tells F. Scott Fitzgeral that if Zelda thinks he has a small penis, then he should check out the statue at Louvre. I thought that someday maybe I would go to Paris and have something to write a novel about. Hemingway's story about giving up the lucrative and promising field of journalism to try writing fiction meant nothing to me. Nor did I shutter--or even remember it--when he talked about how his wife wanted to surpise him on vacation by bringing every copy of his short stories with her in a suitcase that was later stolen.

Instead I became haunted by the thoughts of an seventeen year old boy who takes a trip cross-country in the summer before he goes off to college only to find himself in San Diego hungry and almost out of money.

Labels: Chicago

1) One time when I was twenty-two I had a job and an apartment and a life in a major American city. Then I met a girl and I followed her to another major American city several thousand miles away.

When it happened, I remember feeling like I was in the middle of a grand romantic gesture. But underneath that I felt like if I heard of someone else doing this, I might find it somewhat pathetic. What? You'll never be able to meet another girl in Chicago?

Last night I went to a going away party for a friend in Connecticut. He met a girl in Rome and is moving into her parents house until he can get trained to teach English and find a job doing so. And--for reasons I don't want to spell out--I am very relieved to see how great of an idea everyon thinks this is.

2) At the going away party I had this warm feeling. Not just from being with friends. But I felt like I was getting alot or work done. I later realized that this was because the people at the party were the people I wrote a novel about. I didn't mean it to turn out this way, but people would say things and I woudl feel like they were quoting the story. Turns out it was the other way around.

Labels: Chicago

Today I feel like...*

1) James Joyce. My eyesight is failing. I thought for a few weeks that my glasses might just be dirty. But I am having trouble reading printed words. I can't afford new glasses and the ones I have are broken anyway. I wore them taped for three weeks before I could get the money together to buy some super glue. Joyce's eyesight went south in his later years because he drank too much. It is never known how much of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake he was actually able to read.

If you are one of the fabulous people who have agreed to read my manuscript this week, keep this in mind. When you see that the entire premise of my novel is full of holes, remember that everytime I pick up the manuscript I think to myself, Ah shit, someone smeared grey ink all over that reem of paper I just bought.

2) Murphy Brown. Remember Elton, the painter? My roommate doesn't work outside of the house much. At first I didn't notice, but every day since I moved in he's been building something, cutting holes in the walls, or looking around his huge mess for a missing drillbit. He can afford to do this because he has three roommates who pay the rent for him. It would bother me if I had never seen what kind of closet-like, windowless shitholes everyone else lives in in this neighborhood.

New York City real estate is a disgusting phenomenon that captivates almost everyone. I know fry-cooks who wish they had bought their house in Bed-Stuy when they had the chance in the eighties because they could sell it today for two million. My roommate has lived in Williamsburg for ten years--when Pavement was still recording in their loft and before TV on the Radio was evicted for doing the same thing. He has us locked into a rent that is half what the rest of the building pays. He is worth it.

Having that said, tomorrow he can't hang out with me because the land lord is coming in to brick over the windows so that a building can be added on next door.

3) Mark Twain In 1893, Twain travelled from Hartford to Chicago to see the World's Fair. He got sick and spent eleven days in his hotel room before returning back without ever stepping inside. This is a fair--I've learned after finally finishing Devil in the White City--where the inventor of the Braille typewriter was hugged by Hellen Keller. Where a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson took his wife, where Susan B. Anthony watched Wild Bill ride and Thomas Edison showed Houdini his lightbulb.

The magic of the fair was felt by everyone for miles around and on the dedication of the final day they pursuaded congress to commemorate the American event by having all the children in all of the school in the country say a pledge of allegiance

Moments ago I stepped out of a cab I couldn't afford and ran into the Knitting Factory where I was supposed to meet Peter to see Gravy Train. The room was filled with the tepid humdity of dancing bodies and the legions of girls in vintage t-shirts glowed from their collective euphoria. Something wonderful had just happened to everyone in the room.

The woman at the desk looked at me through a pair of sad eyes behind a pair of cats-eyes as she told me the show just ended.

I really, really, really wish I had a job that would let me enjoy rock music on occassion.


*This is a regular installment of posts wherein I compare my minor troubles to the minor troubles of greater people in order to make myself believe, by transitive property, that my minor troubles make me a greater person.

Labels: Chicago

1) Whenever Annie and I go anywhere, we usually end up telling them that it's our Honeymoon. We did it as a joke at first, but last night we really wanted some champagne glasses sent up to our room. They brought them up and then ten minutes later another woman came to our door with a bottle of merlot, two more glasses, a cheese plate and a card signed by the entire staff. "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, HAPPY HONEYMOON!"

2) Annie grew up just a few blocks from a pair of thirty-foot-tall, cast-iron Puerto Rican flags in Chicago. I had one Puerto Rican friend in high school and she may have been the only Latina in my hometown. This means that one of us can converse fluently and with a pitch-perfect accent that can convey mood, temperment and humor, and the other one of us spends most of his time going, "Que?"

3) One of us is also what you might call attractive. She's also a redhead so even in Ireland she is exotic. It's really conventient. Last night we wanted a cigarette at the bar. She mentioned it to one guy--who immediately produced a pack of menthols--and before she could ask for a light, four more packs came out from the various muchachos in the area, and we had our choice.

Labels: Chicago

Here's what got me chain smoking on the way to work on friday:

I was somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half late to a job I love. But we had no customers. I keep my head down and want to cry at my good fortune. I got a job an hour before. A new job. A real serving job for a respectable outfit on the corner of central park. I am months away from health insurance, paid metro cards and vacations. But when the fuck did I ever want that?

My manager asks me how the job hunt went. I told him I would work for him forever if I could make $600/week.

During my break I work out a budget. A living budget that will include pretty much everything but alcohol, beautiful clothing, and extravagent vacations. Rent, bills, phone, internet, groceries, metro card, etc. No insurance, no loan payments, no train tickets to visit my niece. It adds up to something like $60/day. I flip back in my notebook where I went over my expenses in Chicago. I had great foodstamps, a cheap aparment, no travel cost, and I wasn't in debt. It was $14/day.

My manager sits me down after the shift and buys me alot of drinks. I tell him that I am leaving because I'm a money-grubbing loser, even though I ended up making $600 that week. He says if I could stick around for a few weeks it might bet better when they open the sidewalk cafe. Then he says that--since he is the coolest guy in the world--that he's leaving New York to go traveling for a year through every paradise from Bali to the Mediterranean, and that he wants me to manage the place when he leaves.

I write this from a coffee shop in Brooklyn that was once staffed entirely by the band TV on the Radio. They lived off the shitty tips that people like me give them. And then they wrote one of the best records that came out last year. I would know because now I call myself a rock-critic.

But there's one thing I have to be realistic about: just because I can do something, doesn't mean I will. In Chicago I spent my nights tanning my liver and blew my days in search of the best french toast. I editted a manuscript while taking the train to one of my shitty jobs. Somedays I would fall asleep while dicking around on the job--just to let you know how much time I had on my hands.

When I started my last new job I made so much money that I was uncomfortable hiding it. Next week I'm flying to Puerto Rico, for example. Last week I took some friends to a club openning in a cab. They wanted to walk and I think I used the phrase, "Made of money" to explain why they shouldn't worry. And when we got to the wrong address, we got in another cab.*

*In defense of my credibility: this was a free open bar party and we had to get there fast.

Labels: Chicago

Message One: Hey this is your manager calling from work. We're actually slow today at lunch so you don't have to come in. Just come back early and meet with the manager...uh...before your shift." I was at the front door of the restaurant when I got the job, but I wanted to just go home and swim around in the pile of money I'd already made. So I left.

Message Two: Good news. He moved out this morning. You can finally move into your room. I'll help you clean it out when I get home."

Interlude:There was one day last winter when I was imagining myself as an adult. And when I say an adult, I mean someone who has his own apartmnt. I thought of how I would be surrounded by books. So many books that I wouldn't even bother painting the walls.

This was winter while on the long drive back to Kenyon. I was sleepy and trying to listen to the most jarring music to keep me awake. It was then that I realized that most of my heros were losers. You always read about how ill-tempered Hemingway and Jimi Hendrix and Elvis and Hunter S. Thompson were.

Okay, I'll admit that I was probably listening to each Eminem album in sequence. And I thought, Man, I may never make it as any kind of artist because I run on such an even keel. I've never been fired from a job. Never been in much trouble. I rarely leave a room screaming--unless there's a band playing. I have good credit, low cholesterhol and zero cavities.

When I get to work they make me wait forever. First while they fire someone else. Then while the manager "puts in his contacts." At this point I will do anything they want. I hate this job. But I love ever second of my life when I'm not there.

The manager reads alloud from a letter sent into the home office. Remind me never to write about this otherwise. Again, I brought the wrong bottle of wine to a table (you may remember this as the excuse I used to move out of Chicago). This time our menu said 2000 and all we had was a 2001. The man I served it to was rude to me, loud, and red faced. I told the manager I was uncomfortable serving him any more liquor. He writes a letter to the home office detailing how he's never been more embarassed.

And for the twenty-third time since graduation: I'm looking for a job. I call up a place I quit weeks ago. They need me that night. I worked there last night as well and still made less in two nights than in one "shitty night" at the steakhouse.

I turn off my phone. I mop the floor in my new apartment. I fall asleep on the mattress left behind and try to be happy that I'm not back on the boxspring. For thirty five seconds I wallow. I promise myself that as soon as I get out of bed I'm going to forget about feeling sorry for myself and get going on the rest of my life.

Labels: Chicago

1) I'm still sleeping on a boxspring total stranger's living room. I would like to thank my subletters who sold all of my books and clothes and DVDs in Chicago: it took me about twenty minutes to move.

2) Next week I'll begin writing again after my six-week break. This page will probably then be filled with my general despair, depression, and a series of posts where I will probably be laughing at my own jokes.

Labels: Chicago

If I could write a music column for a respected magazine, I would call it "Records We Should Have Reviewed." Because here's what happens in music: a great band comes out of no where. They put out a record and all of their friends buy it. Their friends play it in their cars on the way to the mall and then eventually one of the right people hears it. Maybe someone planning a tour, maybe someone at a magazine on the internet. But they make no mark when it comes out. Journalism is only concerned with dates, which is worthless in music.

By the time this band's second album comes out, there's a buzz about them, Bright Eyes has their first record on the floor of his Honda, they've mailed free copies to all the college radio station, and maybe they have a song on The O.C.* I spend more time reading music magazines than a grown man should, but every fucking one of them gave a huge shout out of the new Hot Hot Heat.

If they had my column in there six months before, they could do that obnoxious music-nerd pose and note that they knew the band before they put out their disappointing sophomore release and how they have always beleived in the band and they look forward to the next single.

I remember when The Killers came out last summer in Chicago. My friends and I were all very excited, but mostly because I think everyone at that point had some friends in a band called "The Killers." They barely sold enough records to keep it together for the summer but then things picked up and music magazines had to invent reasons to stop ignoring them. They appeared on everyones "Best of 2004" list, complete non-events of the band became music magazine cover stories. This is, in my opinion, the reason that most bands still put out singles. Hey, remember when you didn't cover this song from our last CD? Well here's a whole CD of just this song!


*On last week's episode there's a house party scene that opens with Daft Punk's "Technologic" but then the next song melts into "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" a Soulwax remix of LCD Soundsystem. I don't know why it upset me to hear two songs I like on television. But it did.

Labels: Chicago

1) I got a job at the steak house across from the largest fiction publisher in New York!

My interviewer was very enthusiastic about my experience and also my tie. "That's another nice tie you have on there. Where did you get it?"

"My girlfriend got it for me in Chicago."

"Oh, do you remember where?"

"I think it's uh..." Shit. What's the name of a designer? What good is watching The OC every week if you cannot remember any designers? "Marc Jacobs."

"Really?" he says, flipping through my police record. "I didn't know Marc Jacobs made ties."

Fuck.

"I think he's starting to. You know. Just in Chicago for now."

2) My scooter started!

3) I interviewed someone mildly famous! This was convenient because I was already wearing my tie. But when I got there to interview him, I was sat at my table by the manager who interviewed as a server there. Thank god I made no impression before.

I had nine dollars. Four of which I spent on a single cup of coffee at the bar. Mr. Mildly Famous ordered a sandwich. My rent check went through that morning and left my bank account empty. So I realized that--while we were wrapped up in a discussion of the role of the audience in the theater and what is in his netflix cue--that I would have to skip out on the check.

He kept diving for his sandwich whenever I would speak, so when I got to the end of my questions I said. "Here, I'll shut this off," (I recorded the interview with the internal mic of my laptop. I cannot believe that worked.) "Give you a chance to eat."

We talked about bands and records we liked. He also has four moles on his face which I always thought were make up. I'm pretty sure I kept staring at them.

"So how long have you been writing for this paper?"

"Gee...maybe five years. On and off. I've worked for the same editor since then."

"That's great that you can do that. I was temping for ten years until my first movie came out."

"Great. Well. This is coming out in next thursdays section. I've got to get back and file this now. Thank you very much." I put five dollars on the table even though I already paid for my coffee. As I walk to the subway feeling like a broke loser, I realize the futility of my last five dollars. When the check comes, it's going to be for eight dollars. Maybe ten. And he's going to pick it up and say, "Great, well that oughta cover the tip. What an ass. And what is he thinking with that tie?" When you're a reviewer everyone tries to buy you, but when you're an interviewer you're expected to buy them things.

4) I just listened to that recording of the interview. Do I really have a lisp?

Labels: Chicago

Chicago Day

We were awesome at blowing off entire days in Chicago. It's really something I just don't do anymore. When I got up this morning, I tried to figure out how best to avoid writing the ending--the actual ending--of my novel project.

Long ago I had told Annie that I would be done by December. She doesn't know whether to believe anything I say anymore. I keep repeating to myself, Truman Capote took three months off before writing the ending to In Cold Blood. Which has proven nothing to me except that Truman Capote wasn't dating my girlfriend.

Today I learned that I could get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts just by applying for it. So I spent most of my morning filling out application and lovingly gutting scenes from my project. Then they want proof of publication. Most people should say something like, Come on. Who would lie about that? But I definately paused for a few seconds thinking, Okay, even a big magazine like Tin House only has 10,000 subscribers. Maybe they wouldn't check...

The problem is, and I promise to stop talking about this eventually, the only other publication I have to my credit is in an anthology of mine that was sold out of spike. The editor lives in New York, so I checked the bookstores. Nothing. I even went to Manhattan. No Chance. Which is kind of a new low. Most people apply for these no-name anthologies so they can check Yes, I have been published. But now even that's not good enough.

So anyway, having 'worked' all morning, I sat in the back of an internet cafe, pretending to be one of the many designers and filmmakers twidling away on their laptops. Only I was watching The Manchurian Candidate so I could return it on time. Then I started reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk which is the first rock history book I've ever read that wasn't written for morons who can't pay attention to liner notes.

I just want to get this all down on paper so I'll remember what life was like when I start a new job this week.

Labels: Chicago

This hasn't been editted at all. In fact, before I even re-typed it, I knew I was going to cut it from the final draft. There's probably alot of characters that come out of no where and probably go no where. And in about six weeks I'm going to have to start editting again--maybe I'll even get a big red marker--and I'll hack out all the parts like this. But they're fun. They entertain me when I get bored of writing or when I think I should quit.

I wrote this in Chicago and probably threw away a week of my life working on it. If I weren't writing this, I would have been asleep, dreaming of a job with actual customers.

The First Church of the Little Wave, San Diego meets at Rutherford B. Hayes Junior High School every Sunday at one o’clock. It looks like Noah brought surfers on the Ark, two by two. Everyone sits around in shorts and surfing company shirts. Even the pastor. Everyone files in, some with their waists girded in the damp towels of righteousness. A brick walk led up to the part where the busses must pull in. Some of Ellen’s friends waved, some surfing types stood in little circles. A couple of first timers tried to lose themselves in the crowd and pretend to be too busy searching through their purses to talk to anyone. Weird. Just like junior high. Some one important walk over to a picnic bench and stands up. “I still don’t get it,” I whisper to Hampshire. “What does post-modern mean?”

“Shh…no one knows, and I think that’s the point.” The pastor starts talking. He’s got a few years on Ellen, but he acts just as laid-back as everyone. Something about him, though. He seems tanner, his hair more sun bleached, his face more muscular.

“Good morning.”
“Goo..m..nring…” we echo.
“I said, GOOOOD MORNING!”
“GOOD MORNING!” we reply.

“Man, it was hard to get outta bed this morning. Am I right?” Chuckles and soft high-fives travel through the crowd. “Plenty of new faces here at the Church of the Little Wave. Recognize some of y’all from the beach this morning. Some of y’all from the bar last night. I’m glad that this guy’s decided to pray to more than just the porceline god this weekend,” some guy in the front row melts into a red-faced giggle. “In case we haven’t met, I’m Pastor P. And I’m glad y’all came out this morning. Before the house band starts, I invite you to grab a cup of coffee in the lobby, maybe get yourself a bagel and come right back.”

Everyone herds into the lobby. Again I feel like Junior High. I wonder if anyone would notice if I pack a few bagels into my pockets. I think that my stomach shrank, though. Ellen keeps taking us out to get these big meals and I always have to take half of them home. After my second glass of grape juice, I go back for another and almost break the goddam plastic knife tryna put cream cheese on my second bagel. “Oh, man,” I hold my cup and rub my belly. “I love San Diego.”

“See, what I tell ya?”

“Oh fuck off—” Jesus’ pained eyes glare at me from the cross. He’s hanging on a poster that says, And you think your parents expect a lot of you. “I mean, forget it.”

“Forget what?”

“All right everybody!” Pastor P. takes the stage. The band goes into a tune up/drum roll. “Now let’s get ready to hummmmbllllle ourselves to the Lord! All God’s people get on your feet and give a big Little Wave welcome to Jacob and The Sheperd’s Herd!” The band starts up with some Kareoke version of a song my parents prolly danced to when they met.

“Thank you, thank you for that warm welcome. I’m Jacob and you know, I went to this here junior high school fifteen years ago and they could never get this many people in the auditorium.” Everyone cheers. “Maybe it’s the bagels. But here at the Church of the Little Wave, we know how to surf. Yesterday Pastor P. caught one of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen. Eight, ten-footer. It was totally outta this world. But you know something” That wave started out as just a ripple in the pacific, but what starts as just a little wave, becomes something totally awesome by the time it hits California.”

“WOO!”

“Come on everybody, sing with me now.” The lyrics come up on the screen. It keeps everyone’s eyes out of hymnals, I guess. They sing up to each other. Pastor P. hops up on the bongos for a drum solo. Everyone started to get so loud that you couldn’t hear who couldn’t sing or who you wouldn’t want to. Like gospel for white people.

“Can I get a Little Wave?” He points to the left side of the crowd. Everyone raises up their coffee cups and bagel napkins. Splashes of coffee and white hands spurt outta the crowd and then when it hits the right side it goes back and everyone puts up two hands. White cups reach higher. Jacob starts running across the stage to follow it. When it hits the left wall again everyone puts breakfast down and throws their tan hands up higher, higher. The Shepherd’s Herd goes into this big finale and everyone starts cheering and clapping again.

“Thank you, thank you to The Herd. And thank you to all of you who decided to get outta bed this afternoon and come down here. Today we need to talk about something important to all of us. And if it’s not important to you now, well get ready. Because it will be. It’s something we all could learn to work on. And that is:”

“EGAIRRAM,” the screen says.

“I know some of you are probably thinking you are too young to think about…” he keeps the microphone to his face and looks up at the screen. “Sorry, that’s not supposed to be a word puzzle. Jacob? Could you…thank you. Okay. Much better. Where was I? Right, now I know that some of you are probably thinking you are too young to think about marriage. But when you get to be my age, you’ll wish you had thought about it a lot more. And it’s important to God too. That’s why God mad two of the ten commandments about marriage. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. Two out of ten. That’s two out of ten. Now, back when I was just a poor divinity school dropout waiting tables in Big Sur, I thought twenty percent was a good tip.” Yuk, yuk, chuckle McChuckles. “And the way I see it, God is giving us all a good time by telling us how important marriage is. Because marriage prepares you for a relationship with God.” He takes a big swig off water from an expensive bottle. “And I can tell who’s married in the audience because your eyes just bugged out. What? Heaven is harder than marriage?” He doesn’t use the authority voice, or really anything in particular. He sounds like someone who’s tryna impersonate their dog.

“Before I left fifth Methodist of Newport Beach, I wanted my whole congragation to know something, but they weren’t ready to hear it in church. There people go to church so that their neighbors can take attendence. They don’t want to lead a better life. They want everyone to see what they put in the college plate, multiply it by ten, and know how much money they made that week. Now. I do not want to knock our brother’s and sister’s in Christ. But I will tell you one thing. Attendence is always higher on Christmas and Easter, but the only two Sundays that could top them in Newport beach are the ones that follow memorial day and labor day.” He sits there on a stool like my ole history teachers, knowing he has a secret to tell us.

A pocket secret. One we can hold on to. One he’ll give us if we promise to pay attention. “And do you know why they all flock to church right after Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day and Labor Day?”

A big question mark pops up on the screen. Then Jacob adds the holidays.

“Actually, let me see if you can guess. Is it A) Because they don’t want to go to hell?” A picture of a building burning hops up on the screen. “B) Because they still get to sleep in one more day that week?” The flames come off and there’s a cartoon of someone snoring in an armchair with the newspaper on this stomach. “C) Because they love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ extra on those weeks?” The man gets replaced by that Jesus poster they had up in the lobby.

“BEEEEEE!”
“SEEEEEEEEE!”
“AY!”
“Beeee!” Hampshire yells.

“Now please hold on a second. Let me finish. Let me finish. You have four choices. A) B) C) or…” Jesus goes away and Jacob puts up a picture of a woman in four panels, each in a different season, each in a different dress. “D) To show off their new outfits.”

“If you said C)” one corner of the crowd cheers. “You’re just trying to suck up. No! Just kidding! I had you there for a second, though…” Pastor P. looks down at Jacob and he puts up a faded Xerox of a newspaper article. “This chart comes from the fall Fashion preview of USA Tomorrow. As you can see in the first part, most of the high end designers already have two seasons of designs ready. They just crank them out at the proper time. But according to this graph,” he tries to point to it with his shadow. Little stacks of shopping bags represent some big number of dollars spent on clothes. “The four biggest shopping weeks are right before we have the most people hearing the Lord’s word.”

Shock and outrage team up and bounce through the crowd.

“And I don’t know if that blows you away like it blows me away. But that says something about the people who follow our Lord and Savior. The big J.C. But everytime I see my friends out, and they see I’ve got on a new shirt, or notice someone not wearing sandals anymore or white or when I see my wife has a new purse, I know I am going to get a call from my brothers in Christ at Fifth Methodist of Newport Beach. And they say, Hey Pastor Pablo, I’ve been praying for you.” He puts on this real peach-pie voice, all sweet and fruity. “They always say that, like I owe them something. Like, Hey Pastor Pablo, I prayed for you when your brother lost his job and how he’s got one. I wanna say, Look, thanks, just send me the bill. But they call me, and they try and butter me up. Well, Easter is just around the corner.” He’s prolly one of those guys who watches the late comedy shows and then wakes his wife up to repeat the jokes. He loves this moment, standing there while the whole crowd waits for him to finish a goddam sentence. “Like I don’t know that.” Guts burst. “Like I don’t have a calendar or—or five dishes of jelly beans my house. Like I don’t know when Easter is. But I know. I can feel it coming like I can feel Memorial Day coming. I just know I’m going to get this call, Well, Easter is just around the corner. And we always have a few extra souls in the pews. So I was wondering if maybe you could find someone to fill in for you at…at uh..The First Church of Junior High… And we would love it if you could come down and help with communion.” Outrage and shock continue their game of Marco Polo.

Ellen pulls out her checkbook and scrawls something out, then she hands her brother fifty buck and gives me twenty. We talk in church eyes: Are you sure? She widens her soft eyes back at me, Of course. “But they do not understand why I left. I have told them dozens of times. I have shown them these graphs. And they do not believe me when I say that Pastor P. will always stick with the Church of the Little Wave, where we seeks to glorify Jesus Christ, not Thom Marcus!” The cheers built up while he spoke. By the end he had to yell louder and louder as the cheers stirred guts of the auditorium. Even me, a little bit. And I never heard a sermon before. Mom’s church doesn’t have pastors. People just get up toward the end of the service and talk about time they got sick and what Bible passages they read until they felt better. Mostly old people stand up. The feeble kind who look like they could use an extra cane. My son made me go to the doctor and they said the cancer would take over my entire stomach in six months. Dad used to call it an Organ Recital.

“And that is a roundabout way of telling you something that the people at Fifth Methodist may never be ready to hear,” he signals to someone in the back with a head nod. “Sorry. Before we go any further. This is a friendly reminder that DJ Adam Acolyte will be spinnin’ the collection plate in a few minutes. So get your checks ready. Please make them out to Cash.” Someone changes the slide to a big picture of a piggy bank. “And what they may never be ready to hear in church is this—getting back to marriage now. My wife and I have seriously great sex.”

Hampshire’s eyes widen. I don’t know if I believe what I just heard.

“Isn’t that right honey?”

“Oh yes, baby,” she hollers from the front row.

“That’s right,” his face lights up with another one of his joke farts that he can’t hold in. “That’s what she was screaming last night.” He walks back over to the water bottle and takes a sip, waiting for everyone to stop laughing. The puritan museum in our town has an old stick with one metal end and one end with a feather poking out. If girls fell asleep in church, they tickle them awake. If men snored they knocked ‘em upside the head. Pastor P. does both instead.
“I mean it. Every day, pretty much. Sometimes we hold what she like to call the Midnight Mass, which is a killer if we’re gonna have a little Sunrise Service. If we could get this auditorium space later in the day I would. Because the only place I would rather be on Sunday mornings is in bed with that woman right there. We have been married for five years and it is still getting better. I hope I did not make anyone uncomfortable. In fact, I know I did. But I think sex is like prayer. Most of us do it in private and we need it to keep our lives happy. But we never talk about the joy if it.” Two rows up I see five surfer guys writing down everything he says, checking with each other for exact quotes. “The more we love each other, the more we love loving each other. But you know how it is not always going to be perfect. In fact, at our wedding, my uncle pulled me aside and said, Enjoy it while it lasts, kid. He’s been married three times, so he thinks he’s some kind of expert. But he said, Enjoy it while it lasts before you start fighting about every little thing. And I did not know what he meant by that. But then we were about half way to Monterey for our honeymoon and we had our first fight. I am sure it was about something stupid, but I just wanted to turn around right there and drive back to Fifth Methodist before they filed out papers. I did. I really did. But before we got to our bed and breakfast, she pulled over and said to me, Baby, we need to start off right. If we’re going to lay together, we have to pray together. And we asked God for guidance. And we talked about our problems. In the end it was a misunderstanding. They always are, and we made up. And that’s how God works. Sometimes I find myself with all of these bills to pay and a junior high to fill and I wonder, My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? Why didn’t you send me to Law School? Why didn’t you give me rich parents so I could give my kids a good home? Send them to nice schools? But learning to understand each other is essential to your marriage and vital to your relationship to God. I see a lot of you with notepads our right now, and if you take away one thing from today, go ahead and write this down.”
The screen interrupts him and says, “PASTOR P.’S GUIDE TO GREAT SEX AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD.”
“Thank you, Jacob. Number one.”

“1) Pray”
“When you pray you ask for God’s forgiveness, you unload your concerns, and you affirm for both of you, how deep and profound your love is. If you did this with your spouse every morning and night, you will have a hard time staying out of your bedroom when you get home. Put it this way, if you listen to me today, you’ll be spending a lot of time on your knees. Number two!”

“2) Remain Faithful.”
“If you think you can pray to God and Lucifer without hurting anyone, including yourself, then by all means stare at everyone else’s butts on the beach and fool around with whomever you want. But if you desire to wise up, you will devote yourself entirely. Number three!”

“3) Reconcile”
“Admit when you’re wrong, and be ready to give out forgiveness. Our Shepherd would leave his flock of ninety-nine if only to save one of us. And if you have got ninety-nine problems in a day and you drop them all to make up and come together again, both God and your spouse will understand, acknowledge, and appreciate it. Remember this: making up almost makes the fight worth it. Al