Heineken: Dutch for Poetry (and recalling shutting down governments)

Last night I drank the 1 pint 8 oz. keg of Heineken pictured above. The coconut monkey, a gift my dad bought for me when he was in Hawaii during the late 1980’s, is a sentimental keepsake and friend, and he’s also one of my best drinking buddies in the whole wide world. He is my Wilson on the stormy seas of life, and I will take him with me wherever I shall go (although he doesn’t have a name, how ironic is that?).

So anyway, I drank this mini keg and I became rather discursive, and in order to let the mental diarrhea seep out I made some refrigerator magnet poetry in the style of Shakespeare. No, I didn’t construct my refrigerator poem in iambic pentameter, but I stayed true to the immortal bard’s bawdiness, and if this poem doesn’t seem too abstract and you think you have some clue about what I’m trying to convey in it, then it may just increase blood flow and cause a tingling sensation in that special area of your anatomy.

Check it out:

Refrigerator magnet poetry and prose is a lifesaver at parties when you feel weird and uninteresting standing around and people keep walking around you and the beer confidence is doing very little to help your reticence. What is one to do in a situation like this? What you do is you walk over to the refrigerator and start moving little magnets with words and suffixes on them around and you begin placing them in a certain syntactical order. You begin conceptualizing a story or a poem which proves to party attendees that you are not in fact stupid but, provided the right medium, you can be smart, interesting, talented, funny, lustful and a whole lot of other things. This word ordering will be the perfect ice breaker to catapult you out of your 5th wheel status to temporary life of the party status. People will gather around you and marvel at what you are doing, and they will no doubt share any relevant related stories – e.g., how much they loved or hated reading Shakespeare in college, or how their friend has refrigerator magnets in German and Spanish. But probably the sweetest part is that you will leave graffiti on somebody’s refrigerator that will last long after the party has ended, thus leaving a lasting reminder of what a hit you were that night. And who knows - somebody may bump into you later on and remember you as the “refrigerator poem guy.”

I bought these Shakespearean refrigerator magnets when I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. five years ago with a group from my college. My Shakespeare professor organized the trip and he was very excited about being in the nation’s capital and seeing as much as he could see in the 1 1/2 days we spent there. He would point out things like the Smithsonian museum and announce what a shame it was that we didn’t have enough time to take a tour of it. He reverently led us through the Vietnam memorial, America’s wailing wall, past all the crying veterans who make the pilgrimage to DC just so they can touch the engraved names of lost friends or loved ones in order to commune with a part of their ghosts. It was my first trip to DC, and I admit that it was a lot to take in. What I will never forget is walking in front of the White House and marvelling at how it physically differed from my lifelong mental conception of it which was based on stock footage I had seen countless times on the news. Cameras give an added dimension to things making them look bigger, and I guess I was taken aback by how much “smaller” the White House actually was than I had previously thought.

But this is not what is most memorable about my DC trip, it is what happened next that will be a conversational font for years to come. As I was walking around, I took my shoulder bag off and placed it on a bench just yards from the entrance to the White House where George “Dubya” Bush was probably inside having a meeting with important leaders. It was very hot even though it was April, and I took off my long sleeve shirt and tied it around my waist. In order to do this I had to set my bag and headphones on the bench, and when I was done I picked up my headphones but carelessly forgot my shoulder bag. I started walking back to the hotel where my group was staying – we were supposed to be leaving in less than an hour – when it occurred to me that my bag was not secured to my shoulder. All of a sudden I had that frightening feeling that occurs only when you realize that, sometime and somewhere within the last couple of hours, you have lost either your wallet or your child. It is a terrifying feeling to say the least, and even though my bag was not as important as either of these things, I ascribed a lot of value to it because it contained all of the mementos I had purchased on my very first DC trip (like a “Anybody But Bush” button and tee-shirt from the Folger Library with a quote from II Henry IV which read, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”). I stopped in mid gait and stiffened as an icy chill shot through my body. I looked down at my side – no bag. I looked at my other side – no bag. I tried to retrace my steps. I remember just having it, where could I have left it? I ran back to a vendor who I bought a pretzel from just a minute ago. He didn’t see my bag. Oh crap! I kept running back in the direction I came from. Suddenly, up ahead, I could see sirens flashing, a lane of traffic was shut down, and sleek black official-looking cars were parked in the middle of the closed part of the street. Men with suits climbed out of the cars. One held a dog on a leash and another flourished a device that looked like an electronic wand. A helicopter circled overhead.

It took less than ten seconds to realize that my worst fears had come true - my unattended bag had posed a clear and present danger for the United States government and the citizens of Washington, D.C. Oh shit! I thought, I have just put the government on high alert! The previous day while visiting the Lincoln Memorial, we were all evacuated by police and security guards because a suspicious looking package was left in a corner behind the monolithic statue of our 16th president. The hundreds of people who had been enjoying the view from the steps of Lincoln’s perch all grunted and groaned as they lazily floated away like a congregation of vagrants forced to find somewhere else to camp. The suspicious package, we would soon learn, turned out to be a box abandoned by a homeless person. But if the War on Terror has taught me anything, it is that there are “soft” targets and there are more premium targets. The Lincoln Memorial is what would be considered a soft target because it is simply a famous landmark, it serves no governing or other vital function that might render its destruction a crippling blow to the nation’s important systems. But I had left my bag only a few yards from the rear entrance to the White House, the home of president George W. Bush and the ruling seat of one of world’s leading super powers! This is the most premium target a terrorist could ever hope to strike if he had the temerity to get close enough, and seeing what a stir the abandoned box had caused the day before at the Lincoln Memorial, I knew I was standing in a deep pile of shit when I saw the helicopters and dogs and important guys in suits.  

As I approached the intersection where all the commotion was unfolding, I found a bike cop and quickly confessed my culpability. Surprisingly, he didn’t tackle me or pull out his gun and tell me to put my hands up. He took my name, license and social security number and radioed that information to someone who was probably sitting before a bank of the highest tech computer and video monitors in the world. That guy read the information back to the cop saying, “echo, T-I-M -F-R-E…” Meanwhile the helicopter circled overhead, its roaring blades disturbing the mid-day touristic peace just like a Lawn Boy disturbing the quiet calm of a suburban Saturday morning. I was shaking and nervous, envisioning Guantanamo Bay bedlam in my near future, and I was afraid to touch any of the buttons on the Walkman secured to my belt lest the sniper with the long range rifle who I couldn’t see blew my head off. It was a tense couple of minutes made all the more nerve-racking by the rudely impatient throngs of tourists who were overly eager to go on their White House tour. Not only had I gone and possibly shut down one of the most powerful governments on the planet with my forgetful carelessness, but I had also ruined the vacations of countless suburban moms and dads and their kids who I would most likely never see again (since I would die in a Cuban jail cell). So now, added to my fearful nervousness of being imminently and secretly tortured as an enemy combatant, was an embarrassment like no other. “Look at that idiot who shut down the government and spoiled our vacation,” people’s eyes appeared to say as they shook their heads and angrily stared at me, the fool who couldn’t even remember to keep his bag attached to his shoulder.

But luckily the cop had a lot of experience with these sorts of things. He was fairly understanding and I think he appreciated my honesty and cooperation. You see, the protectors of Washington, D.C. go on heightened alert every day – no, every half hour – or at least they did 5 years ago in the post 9/11 terrorist paranoia frenzy. Whenever a homeless person would leave a bag full of stuff at a landmark, or a government worker forgot his expensive briefcase in a subway terminal, or a stupid tourist like myself would accidentally leave their shoulder or shopping bags next to big important buildings, the capital’s police and secret service went into red alert and herded people away, cordoned off the area and sent in the dogs and guys with bomb detecting magic wands. And just like all of these routine bomb scares, my ordeal was over in a matter of minutes. Just as quickly as life in the nation’s capital had gone from calmly normal to imminently dire, everything reverted back to normal again. Traffic resumed, the tours commenced and the noisy helicopter flew away. I was a free man, completely forgiven and even felt sorry for by some people. As I walked away, a person in the crowd told me not to sweat it as these things are a daily occurence in D.C. It was a relief for me to learn that I would not be put on trial in a secret military court and labeled as a terrorist. Furthermore, I was glad that I didn’t cause anybody to miss out on their once-in-a-lifetime tour of the White House. I was even happier, however, that my little mishap didn’t interrupt the pundits on cable channels like MSNBC and CNN in the form of one of those live and late breaking aerial footage stories. I couldn’t stand the thought of my newly retired mom, an avid political junky who always keeps her TV tuned to the 24-hour news channels, watching my embarrassing horror unfold at her house hundreds of miles away in real time.

That would be the equivalent of her catching a glimpse of me drunk and stoned at a party constructing refrigerator magnet poetry and laughing with my friends and my coconut monkey which my dad bought for me when I was 11. I could just see her shaking her head and ruefully asking, “What did you do now?”

incubus

Suddenly Dr. Lau entered clutching a cup of coffee in each hand. Dr. Lau was a tall, slender man with broad shoulders and a square head. He kicked the door shut behind him and traversed the room in two giant steps. He handed Bill a brimming mug and went over to his desk to retrieve Bill’s file. Dr. Lau may have had the distinction of being a formidable man, but behind his desk he looked like a chubby little boy. His enormous oak desk was out of proportion with the rest of the room in much the same way a whale would be out of proportion in a swimming pool. The doctor slouched down in his chair becoming even smaller as he reached for Bill’s file in one of the cavernous lower drawers.

“I had it again, only this time it was different,” Bill said.

Dr. Lau momentarily ceased his flipping through the manila folder containing montages of Bill’s life. He selected a turquoise pen from a lavish pen holder that sat like a trophy in the middle of his desk. “Oh, you mean the dream,” he said with a frown, not bothering to look up as he skimmed through his scribbled notes of their last appointment.

Where is My Mind?

I have been avoiding the blog for a while, not because I want to, but because my mind has been a huge blank this summer. Seriously, I think I might have brain damage. Backtracking, I’m not exactly sure when everything started to go wrong for me. But it’s safe to say that when I was laid-off from my job in June, the evaporation of any kind of formal structure system mixed with the very non-intellectual pursuit of trying to find work, has caused a huge swath of nothingness to open up in my life. Let me clarify that I am normally not one for exhibiting vast amounts of spontaneity, at least not consistently. Consequently, the ridiculous amount of fee time on my hands these past two months has been the bane of my intellect. Late nights have been spent watching B (and sometimes C) science-fiction flicks on cable and endless hours have disappeared into the black hole Internet realm of discussion forums, Facebook and other multimedia sites. Meanwhile, the job search always keeps chugging along unsuccessfully. The only thing tempering this ennui is a stack of books beside my bed, which I have been reluctantly trudging my way through like a fat Indiana Jones trying to pull himself out of quicksand. Thank God for my weekly unemployment benefits or I would be dining at the local dumpster behind my apartment instead of throwing boxes of pizza crust into it.

But more than just being lazy, or unfocused, or mired in a slump (as I like to describe my situation to my psychiatrist), I think I’ve also been hit with an invariable bout of Writer’s Block. I say invariable because these things are bound to happen sooner or later to  most aspiring writers. If the daunting challenge looming over our heads us doesn’t get us down, the realization that maybe we just don’t have what it takes to be a professional writer is sure to hinder our creative motivation. Like a lot of people who have been in my shoes, I am having a problem with the F word. I am finally experiencing what it feels like to cower before that dreaded and towering conception of Failure, a notion that prevents many a person from progressing in life and threatens countless dreamers not to dream big dreams. But – fuck! - more than this, I have been plagued by a syntactical problem which has messed with my ability to construct meaningful thoughts using sophisticated words and sentences. This latter condition is no doubt the result of subjecting my brain to excessive amounts of lowbrow entertainment and drivel during my down time (which I have a lot of). If I’m not ogling free online porn, I’m chatting with White Supremacists in the virtual equivalent of a prison cafeteria. It’s safe to say that I’ve developed some bad habits of late, and rather than try my hand at the writing to steer me back onto the right path, I’ve let the fear of producing something embarrassingly awful keep me away from the keyboard.

David Foster Wallace said that, “Anything that is a failure is always a victory.” Coming from a guy who’s battle with depression ended when he took his own life, these words mean a lot. Speaking at a panel in Italy in 2006 two years before his death, the author of Infinite Jest said, “In some ways what I try to do with myself is just avoid the success and failure thing, because there is so much about writing that is out of the writer’s control – not the action of doing it, but whether is comes alive or not – that if I begin to think in terms of failure, what happens is I get really depressed and the game is over, because I’ve already decided.”

In some ways what I’ve been waiting for is the automatic motivation, that ticket to ride the train of words that flows through the eternal ether. I have lost my Muse so to speak, and the ability to channel my thoughts and feelings into coherent sentences and paragraphs. To be linguistically deprived feels castrating in a way, because I consider my writing talent to be one of my biggest assets. If my ability to express myself and communicate effectively becomes limited, I feel doomed. After all, I don’t have washboard abs and a chisled face to fall back on, or better yet a bloated trust fund. What seems like even more of an affront is that I have all the time in the world to hone my language skills by reading, listening to NPR, or associating with other people who I consider to be smarter than myself. Instead, I watch videos of cats humping on You Tube, I chat with other unemployed people across the globe about meaningless minutiae (like the size and consistency of our bowel movements), and I find the desire to watch straight-to-DVD movies like Hell Raptor III at 1 am too tempting to pass up.

I swear, it feels like some stranger has usurped my brain and body and is using it for his own sick pleasure. Whatever the reason for my recent childish behavior, I don’t think I can go on living this life for very long before something changes. I hope that by taking David Foster Wallace’s words to heart I can overcome the initial urge to play it safe and avoid failure when it comes to writing. And hopefully the fact that I’ve just written about my Writer’s Block means that I’ve already taken the first step in confronting this obstacle.

Liar Liar Pants on Fire!!!

The Gingrich that stole Christmas

If this is how politicians spend our tax money I’m wondering if all the recent anti-government sentiments floating around aren’t misplaced?

This is driving in D.C. by the way.

Hiatus

I’ve been on hiatus for a while. This summer is the closest thing I’ve ever had to an out of body experience. My life is like a room without gravity, everything whirling around and colliding. My mind is errant somewhere in all the flying debris, weaving in and out of plans that were never bolted down and ricocheting off of forgotten dreams.

Everything is silent in the vacuum. Light is swallowed up. Muscles atrophy. The body swims in place like a bug in a pond.

Life beckons like a new season. Old things die like galaxies colliding. Summer’s intentions fall to the floor.

Nocturbia

 I have been nocturnal lately. Sleeping from the early morning hours until mid-afternoon and staying up all night. This schedule is unbearable. If only one knew how lonely life is at 3am. The same spectrum of infomercials, pompadoured ministers expounding on god and recycled get-rich-quick gimmicks. I tune in to the sci-fi movies only to feel myself fully become one of the insomniac herd, jobless lowlives in pajama pants feeding their vampiric blood lust.

This is not true. I have a job. Or, rather, my main job is on hiatus. I work a part-time job in the evenings and do some freelancing on the side. Still I am lonely and going half-mad. I feel like my brain and body are atrophying. My skin is suffering from lack of exposure to sunlight. My apartment is starting to feel like a claustrophobic prison cell. One can’t as easily walk down to the nearest store at 2 in the morning as they can at 2 in the afternoon because A.) Most places are closed, and B.) they run the risk of getting shot.

I’ve tried to correct this crazy sleep schedule but I think my circadian rhythm has been reset. A few mornings I allowed myself only a few hours of sleep and then dragged myself through a tired, caffeine-fueled day. This was so I could crash at 10pm and wake refreshed the next morning. When I tried this it would work for a day, but the next night (after being awake all day) I would be up and wouldn’t fall asleep until sunrise. My body has become accustomed to being up all night and it can’t just snap out of it that easily.

I have to do something about this problem, however. In a little less than two weeks my regular job will resume and I will have no choice but to wake up early (even if I didn’t sleep a wink the night before). I made a plan to fall asleep one hour earlier each night but that didn’t work. Despite all my efforts I started falling asleep an hour later instead. Maybe I should just do what somebody told me to do and stay up all day instead of going to bed at sunrise. After all, it’s not like I’m going to die if I do that.

Vampires and skunks have their own way of life. Human beings, however, are diurnal creatures.