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surprise announcement

It was just before Christmas, and the entire family had gathered at their annual Christmas dinner - uncles, aunts, and cousins coming from all over the country to share their adventures over the past year and the Christmas spirit. As for K., she hadn't seen her parents for the better part of the year, losing touch, and indeed, interest as she took her first tender footsteps into the world of independence and the American Dream. The thing about the American Dream is, it is a jealous dream. It must be your only dream, your all-consuming thought, or else it will never share its fruits with you. It requires a supportive family, but it requires a patient family, one who is not expecting any recognition or return for their love and indulgence. Luckily, K. had just such a group of people waiting for her every time she chose to return home, as she did around the holidays.

K., this time, had introduced her parents to Rodney, who was now sitting beside her at the table, a new and unexpected guest to add to the usual assemblage. Fortunately, the proceedings of the traditional scene at this family's house were stable and robust after so many years to the point where not even the inclusion of the Third Reich into the home could in any way effect the agenda, or even the atmosphere of the gathering. Just after the whole family, 24 people in all, with K. sitting just to the right of Father and to the left of Rodney, sat down to enjoy the food and the providence of another successful year, K. stood up and cleared her throat.

"I have an announcement to make, about Rodney and me," she said confidently. Mother smiled in reflection upon what a strong-willed and assertive youngster she had managed to raise. "Rodney and I love each other very much, and we were married in September, in St. Louis."

The room quickly fell silent, and an air of dejection settled in. Mother's smile inverted into a frown, and she began to aimlessly twist at her escarole with her fork. There was a slight commotion at the far end of the table as Aunt Josephine swooned and collapsed into the arms of her loving husband. K. had already sat down again by this point, but when she noticed the change in mood brought on by her announcement, she turned her head slightly towards Rodney with a look of bewilderment.

I can't do it. I can't list my top six albums so at least I'm going to be honest about it. Sometimes, I just hate writing about music. Sometimes I think I'm just making a list to be cool. Here it is, for no reason at all:

5. Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton - Knives Don't Have Your Back
4. The Craters - Thriller
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
2. TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain
1. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House.

I don't really want to write about it. I realize that the Red Hot Chili Peppers may not be the coolest band and that Stadium Arcadium wasn't everyone's favorite but it really did it for me so it goes up here. No indie cred. TV On The Radio was amazing, somehow disappointing, and yet still worthy of a spot on the list. Emily Haines was pretty good. I don't know. I sampled a lot of current new music this year but I guess I didn't love as much of it as I thought. The Grizzly Bear album was the only really KILLER album through and through that I've heard. It's been a recent thing to, I saw them in September with Spencer opening for none other than TV on the Radio and they've sorta outshone TVOTR since then, in my world.

I guess I just did it. But I didn't enjoy it.

11.

The R. Bros. Official Catalogue of Wares & Household Goods.
Volume 1. Read and Revised, Mar. The First.

Item No. 20471: Crafts And Arts, Visual Support & Economic Decline.
"New and Exciting!" says the Local Tribune.

Item No. 20472: Glass Blowers Union w/ Benefits. Benefits.

Item No. 20472-b: Drawers (& Chest). Good for All Sortes of Storage.
"Storage like No Other!" says the Local Tribune.

Item No. 20473: CURE ALL! For Depression &/or Melanoma, w/ Benefits.

Be sure to Have a Pleasant day, Loyal Customer.

1. alarm, hallway, insects

The alarm-clock clanging, I stepped out of bed and pounded the button, taking in the spectacle as my closed fist threatened to send gears and cogs flying everywhere under the excessive force. I stretched my arms high for a moment, and eyed the plastic bin sitting in my closet that carried my toothbrush, among other bathroom effects. It was rank with mold and mildew, as it was not a basket proper, but a plastic bin, without any holes to allow water to flow out. This is a design that, as you know, is prone to fill up with water every time it is brought into the shower, and that water of course festers as it is wont to do when it is ignored and allowed to sit for spans of time stretching into minutes, as in my case. I didn’t have much time, for my cloud appreciation class was to start in just under 45 milliseconds, and I had already been warned about my intemperate lateness this semester. With this in mind I quickly slipped a towel around my waist and stepped out into the hallway.

My sandaled foot found its place on the metal grating just outside my door. My room in the dormitory is rather modestly sized and equipped with the standard furnishings you’d expect for an undergraduate student. That’s why I always experience a wave of vertigo when I step out into the hallway, as I have for the past several years. Although it is called a hallway, it is actually a metal-grate footbridge traversing a cavernous room. There is only one flimsy hand-rail, which can be disconcerting because at this time every morning (when the students are getting ready for classes), the bridge is suspended about .83 kilometers in the air joining all of the rooms on the 240th floor, which is the students’ living quarters.

Looking down, you can see doors lining the metallic walls on every floor, and in the center of the room, the green-tinted fog gradually becomes so dense that you can’t really see more than 100 or so stories down. In some places elaborate machinery protrudes through the mist with an unsettling boldness, and even though it is actually about 300 meters away, the general consensus of the students is that it blankets the entire dormitory with a perpetual air of intrusion.

My dormitory was about halfway down the hall to the bathroom, so I lumbered over with as much resolve as I could muster having just woken up, sandals noisily clanging on the metal with each belaboured step. I passed several people on the way there, also going about their daily routines as enthusiastically as possible, although the faceless footbridge traffic seemed unusually light for a weekday morning. No matter; partially because of the clear path I made it to the bathroom door in just about 8 milliseconds, which I figured gave me enough time maybe to even shave before class for a change.

The sticky moist atmosphere allowed the bathroom to serve as the primary breeding ground for a certain species of small black gnat with huge circular wings that bore no slight semblance to Mickey Mouse. I felt a sudden urge to skip out on class and curl up with some graham crackers and old Steamboat Willie cartoons. “Living, breathing Disney advertisements”, I thought to myself, smirking inwardly at the aptness of my metaphor, and made a mental note to include that description when I wrote about the strange creatures in my blog that night. Then the thought occurred to me that I had never actually considered whether, or if so, by what facilities, insects actually breathe.

3b.

Thomas sat alone, gripping a tall glass of orange juice with vodka between his two hands. He stared down at an angle towards the floor behind the bar, and his lips moved, mouthing a certain phrase that I couldn't hear. I was sitting four seats away from Thomas, and I held my head up with my right hand, my elbow resting on the bar, staring directly at his face. There was one woman sitting in one of the seats between me and Thomas, who occasionally glanced nervously in my direction, assuming possibly that I was staring at her.

But forget about that for a moment; there was something else that, as I thought to myself, I should mention before I got into the details. Not long before Thomas began his muttering, he and I had been talking amicably. The woman, whom I just mentioned, was rehearsing lines for a play, sitting at the bar with a script in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, making wild gestures that sent small spouts of liquid shooting from the mouth of the bottle. She was intoxicated, I could tell, and I ignored her while Thomas and I raised our voices over the issue of filmmakers.

'Kurosawa,' I had said, before slamming my heel with swift force onto the tops of his toes. Thomas had shrieked, of course, before shouting 'you fucker! You only watch that bullshit because you're fucking a Japanese guy' to which I had replied 'well fuck you, and fuck Fellini too,' before stomping on his foot for a second time and downing a glass of rocks with Jack Daniels and seltzer.

The woman in question, the one who was busying herself with the silver stage, had shambled in not fifteeen minutes before Thomas had hurt his feet. At the time, of course, I was sitting right next to my friend and doing my best to recite the words to a famous poem about a black bough. He was competing with me in volume, his melodic voice tracing out the libretto to Pierrot Lunaire, even though his German was clearly not up to snuff. The woman, in her own way, had taken a series of footsteps, none of which looked like they logically followed the step that had come before, on her way to the seat directly adjacent to mine. She had then perched there for a few moments, getting her bearings, before reaching into her lavish and exaggeratedly oversized red wool coat and presenting a copy of the script to something or other by Arthur Miller. "It's for a class," she had said, before we had even had the chance to ask, or in fact before we had even stopped our shouting to gaze in her direction. Upon her exclamation, however, we had stopped for a moment, examined the script with decided disinterest, and then begun our conversation about film directors, a bad idea because I knew from experience that Thomas is a man who is not only very defensive of his tastes (a fixation on romanticism), but also oblivious of his propensity towards offensive behavior.

The fact is, I was fucking a Japanese guy at the time. But I was offended more by his brevity than by the truth or untruth of his statement. (The fact is, when he said it, he did not even know for sure, other than hearsay based on snippets of phone conversation he had heard through the walls, whom I was fucking or how.)

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for a little while, losing myself in thoughts like "are those really my eyes? Is that really my face?" before returning to the bar and deciding, against my better judgement, to sit four seats away from my friend. The woman in question had begun reading aloud at this point. From the sound of it, she played the part of a man in the play, and a very down-and-out one, at that. It was while she was reading, competing with James Brown, who was playing over the bar's speakers, and with the fifteen or so other people who were walking aimlessly about on this Tuesday night, filling up the space behind my head in what I imagined resembled a room full of balloons slowly drifting and bouncing about, that Thomas began to mutter a phrase to himself. And the more I examined his face, (ignoring, mind-you, the woman sitting between us, as many times as she glanced nervously in my direction,) the more certain I became that he was, in fact, repeating one phrase again and again. Again and again.

'Thomas,' I called out, and he looked up from the floor and stared me in the eye, all the while continuing to mutter this certain phrase again and again, and thus we sat, the woman rattling off one-sided dialogue, for close to a minute, before I raised my glass of rocks and seltzer and Jack Daniels and he raised his glass of orange juice and vodka, and we each tilted our heads back and drank them.