Midweek Musings

I'm so sick of work and all the B.S. I'm actually Emailing Resumes, faxing requests, phoning follow-ups right from my desk. Internet filters be damned. Screw you I.T.

I was planning not to write on this blog in any format other than a story, however I have to get all social network on ya'll to ask what the hell I should do here for the mid week? Updates? Reviews? The life and times of the Los Angeles Local? Mid Week Haiku?

Mid Week Haiku has a nice sound to it.

Sing It If You Know It

Come on feel the noise
Girls rock your boys

In 1987 I'm 5 years old. I'm in the back yard running as fast as I can. I'm wearing my red and blue striped shirt. I'm holding in my right hand my Snoopy Kite (a gift from my Grandpa Hector) and if I can catch the wind at the right time I might be able to launch onto our swing set.

We'll get wild wild wild
Wild wild wild

I would put my G.I. Joe toy down to avoid further wind resistance but he and I just evaded Skeletor's army around the corner from the back of the house where I dug a trench large enough to hide my Tom n Jerry themed race car. I can't just leave Joe behind and allow him to be taken hostage again. The last time that happened he lost one of his hands. Life is a motherfucker when you only have half of your Kung Fu Grip ability. I know it, because Joe has never let me live it down.

So you think I got an evil mind
I'll tell you honey
And I don't know why
And I don't know why

I can picture myself with my big head and the wind in my poorly cut black hair. I'm pretty sure I look as rad as Lion-O does when he and the rest of the Thundercats are racing into battle. In order to launch myself into the ether I reach with my left hand onto one of our monkey bars. Its a 24 inch wide piece of metal with chain at each end. The chains are connected to the swing set so that one can use this bar to dangle from, or in my case, launch myself victorious.

So you think my singing's out of time
it makes me money

I forgot about my pal Joe however. I'm holding him in my left paw and I don't have a firm grip. When I grab the bar at full speed I launch my body back, lose my grip, continue into the air, and see the sky above me, no ground below. I can see that the kite has left my hand and is flying gracefully through the air.

And I don't know why
And I don't know why anymore
Oh no!

This is the first time I have ever had the wind knocked out of me, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to die. Fuck you G.I. Joe.

So come on feel the noise
Girls rock your boys

Ninjas! I'm surrounded by them. I'm fighting them off one by one. I've collected Squeeze It bottles. Enough for an arsenal of Squeeze It bombs packed with boiling hot acid (read:water). Unfortunately the Ninja's are too fast for me, and my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are no where to be found. I would have enlisted Voltron for this fight, but he's been taken away from me for yesterday's "Dive from the top of the dryer and into the clean clothes" fiasco.

We'll get wild wild wild
Wild wild wild

In order to fight off the Ninja's I grabbed a stick from our big tree that holds the tire swing. I'm only one kid, and I can only do so many back flips. I whip around in circles, a frenzy of guttural sounds and war cries. I miss one lucky Ninja and nail the side of the house with the brittle stick.

So come on feel the noise
Girls rock your boys

The stick breaks, it snaps right in two. I don't know how I got so close to the house. Was it the fog of war that came over me? It doesn't matter now because a large chunk of wood from my weapon of divine justice has broken off and shot itself right into my left eye. I've never lost an eye before, this is one of life's big milestones. I'll never see the world the same again. I'll never be able to drive. I'll never have all of my peripheral vision. An eye patch would be pretty cool though, kinda like One Eyed Willy.

We'll get wild wild wild
Until dawn

I hope my mother doesn't notice. What is she gonna say when I tell her that not only have the Ninja's managed to evade me, but now her son is a fucking cyclops? I walk into the house using only my good eye.

"Mom, is my eye okay?"

"Yes honey its beautiful" She kisses my eye.

"Is it still there?"

"Of course it is William why whats wrong?"

"Nothing!" I run off. It was a clever ruse to escape my fury, and it worked. Next time Ninja's. Next time.

So you think I got a funny face, I got no worries
And I don't know why
And I don't know why

After the divorce I'm in our new condo, which is in a large condo complex for low income families. I don't have time to be bummed out about it, because I just received an "I'm sorry" gift from my father. Its a water-gun with a standard pistol handle, but the gun itself is fashioned after the Batplane from the 1989 Tim Burton Masterpiece, Batman.

So I'm a scruff bag well it's no disgrace
I'm in no hurry
And I don't know why
I don't know why anymore
Oh no

I've been busy chasing The Joker all over the new condo. Its two stories with three bedrooms. Needless to say, its an adventure. There are no back yards here, there are no tire swings, there are gangs outside the door and security gates in the complex. My mother has been in the hospital due to a major tumor that is just below her neck, right between her shoulder blades. Its not cancerous, but if it attaches to her spine it will make its way up to her brain and kill her. My father, is out teaching my 13 year old sister how to drive our VW Bug so that she can go out and shop for groceries while mom recovers. None of that matters however, even though at this young age I am aware of it. If I don't catch The Joker soon he'll proceed to use laughing gas on an innocent group of Pound Puppies.

So you think we are the lazy type
you should know better
And I don't know why
I don't know why

I can't find The Joker anywhere, and my little sister is mad at me because I threw one of her toys. Our grandmother is watching us, but I have managed to roll away into the shadows (Batman Style) and I see that I have to chase The Joker up the side of the wall, to where the stairs wrap around. I tighten my cape (a pink towel) and jam by weapon (Batplane Watergun) into my pants like John Mclain (I know who John Mclain is, because when my father leaves me at home alone to go to AA Meatings he rents me the Die Hard on VHS). I'm scaling the side of the wall.

And you say I got a dirty mind
I'm a mean go getter

My cape has gotten stuck under my feet. As I try to regain my footing I lose grip on the metal bar that keeps one from falling off of the last half of the flight of stairs that take you up to the second floor where The Joker taunts me from my bedroom. As long as I remain calm no one will catch me.

And I don't know why

"William what are you doing!?" My grandmother is yelling, someone tipped her off. Leslie is behind her at 5 years old, wide eyed and quiet looking at her older brother like he is the strangest person in her little world. My Batplane fell, and I am forced to jump down. Shamed. I make my way down to the front room to finish building a castle out of Legos for the local green army man militia. They are a mercenary troop of former hardened criminals (I've seen the Dirty Dozen recently) that were brought in to replace G.I. Joe who was lost in the move. I was too late. Those poor pound puppies never had a chance.

And I don't know why anymore
Oh no!

One day at my grandmother's house in Boyle Heights in the midst of an excavation. I had just finished escaping The Temple of Doom with Short Round for the 3rd time and I was exhausted. About to take off in my space ship (a gift from the Senator of the Galactic Empire) I realized I had no launching pad. I dug around my fathers drawers to fine a little wooden Compact Cassette holder.

Suddenly I forgot what I was doing. I forgot that Jack Burton needed me to help him defeat David Lo Pan, or that we would eventually need to get rid of that monster hiding out in the gas tank of The Pork Chop Express.

I was side tracked by cover art from The Thompson Twins, Bob Marley, Tears for Fears, Quiet Riot, and Oingo Boingo. Apparently my father listened to all sorts of random shit, and you can still find the Led Zeppelin paintings under the back house that he did when he was in high school. I took the tapes, and played them. Some of it I liked, others I hated. I was too young to form any real opinions, I just knew that this was different.

To this point I had coped with life like any other kid. I played. I lost myself in stories of my own making, and mixed them with cartoons and movies that I had seen. Never before this moment had my life had a soundtrack, but in 1990 I discovered that there was music in the background of all of my parents failures. There was the radio or a tape in the car or in the kitchen. I can to this day hear a song and apply it to a memory that I have. I hear songs and remember arguments and car rides. I remember moving from house to house. Playing in the back yard, or in the street while mom cleaned.

We pick and choose the memories we're going to hold on to. We favor the music that reflects who we are, or what we like. Sure I listen to lots of depressing music now that I'm older, but just because life is sad or hard doesn't mean the soundtrack we use to remember things has to be the same way.

Besides; a pack of Gremlins is trying to tear down my bedroom door. My samurai sword is at the end of the back yard (zombies attacked just after lunch) and my only option is to shimmy out of the window to where my Big Foot Power Wheels truck is recharging for the night. Whats gonna keep me going? I'm six years old again and I've got precious little time to throw on my football helmet for protection, yank my cleats on and handle some evil Gremlin ass. I might as well listen to something rad.

So come on feel the noise
Girls rock your boys
We get wild wild wild
Wild wild wild

Ah December...

The funny thing about growing up miserable is that you don't know that you're miserable. Its the same as any other form of sweet young ignorance. Rich kids don't understand what it is to be poor. Poor kids don't understand what its like to never have to eat the same left overs for 3 days in a row out of necessity (as opposed to frugality).

Look I know it sounds pathetic and all, but to me its funny to see the look on my girlfriends face when I tell her a story about how lame my childhood was. But if I were to talk about it like it bummed me out, it wouldn't get me anywhere would it? I can tell you a number of tiny slice-of-life stories from my upbringing (such as it was) that now I laugh at.

1. My mother sits us down the week before January and has a talk with all 3 of us about how we will be eating a lot of potatoes and eggs this month because money is tight. She doesn't want to hear us complain about it "Don't tell me that you don't want to eat what I make you. This is just another trial that The Lord will see us through". This is funny to be because this is not the first time this has happened, but my mother presents it as if its a huge shock. I look at my little sister and kind of roll my eyes. I look back on this often, because the irony of it is that I was in 4th grade, which means she was in 2nd. These two young children are so tired of this speech we are rolling our eyes at it like a couple of precocious assholes.

2. One December we lost our car, lost more money, and our home. We were given Christmas presents by a local church. The wrapping was so lame that I spotted a basketball right away. Its wrapped. I showed it to my little sister "Hey Leslie look at this!" and I dribbled the giant wrapped object around the house. It was hilarious. It was made even more hilarious by the fact that my little sister and I really didn't care at all, nor did we really want the presents. We were happy to get them of course, and thanked our lucky stars and all but the best part is I didn't realize until after high school "Oh shit, you know those poor families that have to receive donations to get by? That was us!"

3. My mother has moved us into another roach infested shit pile apartment building. We weren't going to move in, but my mother says "How did you get to be the manager's here?" to which the manager replied "Oh, that was the Lord".

Fuck.

That is all you had to tell my mother. Being a devout born again Christian she says "Oh you're saved how wonderful!"

2 weeks later she is crying because the roaches keep popping up, the bathroom doesn't work, and the neighbors blast music all night and day. There is a crazy old man who rented both apartments next to him and keeps them empty so no one bothers him. No really. You can't make this stuff up.

It gets better! My mother found a place across the street (Atlantic Blvd just south of Alhambra Rd. in the City of Alhambra). We didn't have any money (except for some cash I saved, as I managed to get a work permit that summer before high school) to give to anyone to help us move, or to get a truck, so exactly 3 weeks after moving in we found ourselves running across the street with a fridge, a sofa, mattresses and box springs. "Okay son there aren't any cars GO!" (Please note that I have done this many a time, and I am only 14 when this is happening. Lifting furniture and finding new ways to get it into spaces that are too small contributed to a major back pain issue now that I am older).

We would stay at our new digs for some time before another December we find out that this place we are now living in is being sold so that condos can be built on top of it.

Now that I can see the big Three Zero on the Horizon with my own kids I try to make them see that little things are more than what they seem, and big things aren't a big deal. I try to look back and ignore the nagging feeling in the back of my mind "December again, Christmas is around the corner, and you should be really sad right now."

There are some things that are really hard to unlearn. Some things maybe shouldn't be unlearned. Maybe some of that should be passed on in the form of appreciation for the things I have to my kids. Maybe I should teach them something new to make them better people.

Or fuck that, I'll just make another Joke and watch Glenda's reaction.

We are in the Toy's R Us looking for gifts for our little "deal breakers".

"Oh babe look its KerPlunk have you ever played it?

I say "Uh, no"

Glenda proceeds to tell me, with her big beautiful smile lighting up what is probably the most beautiful face I've ever seen. "You take turns removing a straw from the cylinder here (she points) and here (more pointing) while trying to keep too many marbles from falling through the tube and into your tray. You win when you have less marbles than the other person".

I would be an jerk to ruin this moment, as I can see in her eyes that she is remembering all the times she and her sister played and laughed at this game. She wants to get this game for our kids so they can enjoy it the same way. So they can grow up and remember this game for their children one day, or maybe just to show us how fun it is on their own.

I say...

"Oh I remember that game! Only we used plastic cups and rocks and sticks. We didn't call it KerPlunk though, we called it "Mom's working late again.."

Glenda's smile goes away "Asshole".


Zombie

Office Zombi

Clack clack clack at the keyboard.

Tap tap tap at the keys.

Jam the space bar, bang on the backspace, mash the shift key like it insulted my girlfriend.

Work is a wonderful thing. It takes all of my will to not flip out, and the whole time I can send out follow up Emails, shell out reports, double check cross references and train others on our new programs but it gets me nowhere at all.

When did life become a dead end job? How did the smart people turn their lives into hobbies? Why do perfectly good relationships become TPS reports? How is it that some parents behave like moron executives with too much time and money and allow their children to be ignorant, petulant, sales reps?

If life had Quotas, they would be mistakes. If life had reports, they would be the pie charts of all our failures.

"You see the small chunk of purple right here is the success with our firm. The green is the amount of time procrastinated, and the yellow are your fuck ups. Please note the correlation between fucking up and the amount of time wasted procrastinating. We have a separate chart created for your stupidity, and you can use that as a key to figure out the procrastination chart, and coincidentally how many people you tricked into sleeping with you. It should come as no surprise that their charts aren't much different than yours."

"Please also note we have two programs (your parents) that we purchased without beta testing. Now that you have been with us long enough we need you to administer them. I'm sorry to say that the programs didn't work correctly in the first place, and now they are not compatible at all because your mother is an older version of what is required to work efficiently and your father is a moron."

"We have a file cabinet here for your reference. Your ex lovers have created a log you need to sort out before you leave here today. Its a record of how many i's you didn't dot, and t's you didn't cross. Please PLEASE be sure not to make any mistakes on these, because the person you are currently banging will use these to sum up your time card. Speaking of which you've got a lot of shit to sift through before you clock out for good."

"Oh before I forget. I'm screwing your mother. Welcome to the family Son."




--
-J

Cycles

Everything happens in cycles. Fashions, Trends, Celebrity Deaths, you name it.

My life happens in cliché. If there is an answer you’ve heard a million times and its starting to get on your nerves, than it’s probably the most logical explanation of what I might be dealing with. At least, that is how I tend to see it. No, I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. There’s naught I can do.

So I fail in cycles, and get fucked over in patterns, I succeed at a minimal rate but usually know how and why it took so long. This is funny because you would think that I might have learned my lesson by now. No such luck.

Relationships too, now that I have had a chance to look at them long enough. They start off hot and heavy. They hit their stride and hopefully they don’t hit the fan. If they do, it doesn’t mean it’s over yet. Why? Because for every major relationship there tends to be a good solid period of “I love you, you love me, and let’s fuck each other up really bad so the next person is miserable.” I’m hoping that doesn’t happen to me again, but like I said…

Cycles.

Why do people sabotage themselves? I really am trying to avoid falling into old habits but it’s gonna happen eventually. I wish it weren’t like that but self preservation dictates that when push comes to shove, when you’re in a corner, what do you do? Push. Shove. Corner. Fight. Hurt.

Hobbies are like that aren’t they? I have a vast collection of video games that I have no interest in because that cycle has ended. They are collecting dust next to my Pet Rock collection, Used Condom Satues, Model Air Plane Shelf, and Pokemon cards.

Now, I can take the route of the philosopher and try my best to analyze why all this happens but let’s face it. I’m in my late 20s, not my late teens. So analyzing the way the world turns no longer works for me. I’m no longer that wide eyed kid with a band T-Shirt and ideals walking up the steps of the finest community college my lazy feet could carry me too, smoking cigarettes and arguing the difference between Hardcore and Post Hardcore, and what coffee tastes better in the winter.

No thank you.

I’m too tired. I’m sore. I want to roll over and fall asleep. I’d rather read a novel, or watch a movie, in my boxers, so please leave me alone. I wonder if this too is Cyclical. I start to think. I start to analyze. My youthful dreams and aspirations come into play and mess with my slightly older and experienced cynicism and begin something new.

Then I remember something I read on a forum once.

"You know what else is Cyclical? These nuts in your mouth."