Category Archives: True Stories

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Clean Something, Clean Anything

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It was the strangest thing, after I got done writing that last post I read three articles about hating on white people and stuff like that, and then I went inside and started washing dishes. Then I did that cleaning project I wanted to do: take shit from under my bed and dust it off and sweep under there and shit like that. I told…what was my wife’s name again? Molly. I told Molly I would do it sometime soon yesterday. So I did it today. Why not?

Anyway I had no intention of doing that shit when I was sitting out there on the balcony. I figured, fuck it, I’ll just write a bunch of shit down. Fuck this day. Waste it.

It was either the coffee or the writing that gave me the energy to start cleaning shit up. Or it was because I went into the living room and Morgan was there talking on the phone and I was going to say something to him but I figured I might as well do the dishes first while he was on the phone and once I started actually moving my life from disorder to order in that way, I had the strength to move forward onto bigger projects.

After I cleaned under my bed and shit, the apartment felt pretty good, less dusty anwyay. I heated up some quiche and I went back out to the balcony. Morgan and I sat there just staring out into the day. It is really nice outside right now. It’s too much too fast though. I miss the spring. It was spring yesterday, but today it will be summer. Who knows if we’ll ever go back to spring because last week it was pretty much late winter.

But we’re always romanticizing something that probably isn’t real. Like the idyllic part of our childhood before we became self-conscious, and other shit like that.

Now I’m laying on the bed, typing more shit. It’s about time to go to work. I guess I have to get dressed and set up the feeders for the cats. What else? I guess that’s really it, although I should start work on Molly’s website, or else apply for a job, and I really should get back on my exercise program before I lose all the gains I was seeing, at least I should do the sit-ups. 

I don’t know if I’ll do any of that. I might just lay here and fall asleep. Fuck it. I have a weird life. Morgan asked me if I would ever get a tattoo. I said I didn’t know. When I was 16, I wanted flames going up my arms from my wrists like the lead singer of Linkin Park. He said that would have been ok. I said yeah but everyone would know that I had gotten that tattoo in the 90’s. 

I thought about it and I probably wouldn’t get a tattoo because who has the time or the money to do something like that. It would be cool to have a tattoo, but the way I live I probably wouldn’t get around to planning something like that. According to my value system it’s frivolous. I try to only do things that aren’t frivolous, at least that’s what I tell myself. And then I sit around on balconies staring off into nothing.

But some people just go around doing things that they want to do. They go to work and they work and then they come home and just do things. But I can’t even think of things that I want to do when I really think about it. Like Molly asked me yesterday, what do you want to do? And I tried to think of an honest answer because most of the time I would never assert myself about some shit like that because I just go along with whatever she wants to do and I couldn’t think of an answer. Besides have sex. Sex and eating, that’s all I do. I like drinking, too, but I like that less and less as it hurts more the next day or the night of, even, when I drink just enough to feel good but not enough to knock me out. I know there are things I want to do, I think, I never thought it was just going somewhere and eating, but maybe it is.

I mean sure I want to go hang out with the girl I was formerly obsessed with, but I don’t even know what I want to do with her, just go dancing I guess or sit on a bed talking, basically anything that seems like it’s leading to sex. Or eating.

But I also like just sitting and talking with people. I like talking with people, especially the girl I was formerly obsessed with. I like playing basketball, too, and writing down dumb shit. I like learning shit, I think I do. Sometimes I even like cleaning, but I don’t know if it’s just because I feel like if I’m cleaning, I’m safe from my inner critic, the one that tells me whatever I’m doing isn’t right, that it would be better if I did something else entirely. And then I do that and it’s the same thing. It’s always something I can’t even do, really, or won’t do, because I’m scared. I should just go around doing things I’m scared of, I guess, is the lesson. I don’t know.

Fuck it, I think I’ll go to sleep.

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No Hope for the Maldives

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I had a beer and allergies today on the balcony. They were cutting down a tree across the street. They couldn’t do it all at once, they had to tie ropes around the limbs. They fed the pieces into a machine that ground them to dust. The dust settled on cars nearby and a man sprayed the cars with a gas powered leaf blower. The clouds settled in, and I fell asleep to piano music punctuated by the din. 

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Library

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I went up the stairs in the library and the security guard walked up. She said, “Hello?” As if it was obvious that there was nothing for me up there. I went down in the basement and there was a bathroom. She said, “Only the first floor is the library.”

I said, “Well it’s written on the whole building: library. I didn’t realize.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” said I.

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Dark Part 3

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Click here to start at Part 1. 

Why couldn’t I leave my wife and do whatever I wanted? I wasn’t strong enough, that’s why. I had never really broken up with anyone, and I had also never really had a confrontation with anyone, thanks to my uncanny diplomatic abilities.

And so that meant I had to make it seem like I was a good husband. I had to do everything I could to make her happy, and besides that I had to avoid having a fight with her. I couldn’t stand to fight with her, and besides, I had nothing to say to her in a fight. I had no will of my own. Why should I have an opinion when nothing can be proven or disproven.

So we had no fights, except the ones over my drinking, which was out of control. I would drink and not text her because I didn’t want to have to fight about it and I knew if I texted her I was drinking she would say something snarky and then if I got drunk enough I would drunk text her a long nicely worded ‘fuck you.’

But those were our only fights and we didn’t delve too deep into why I was drinking like that.

So with no fights our relationship didn’t really grow much from when we had started. I was a different person than the guy who started dating her years earlier, but I acted the same towards her, only now I drank.

Since I was too weak to break up with her, I had to maintain some kind of normalcy, even though I had these self destructive urges. I had to keep them in check. So I resented her for that, but even then I knew she was kind of keeping me alive.

Now, looking back, it’s crazy how my whole life seems to have revolved around women. I guess that’s not very original, but I didn’t see it coming.

Anyway, I guess that’s what I’ve got to say about that. I am ready to have real fights and really get to know her now, and hopefully one day I will be strong enough to tell her everything that I ever hid from her. As for now, I’ll just do my best not to create new things to hide from her. 

The girl with whom I was formerly obsessed and I still hang out and talk. It’s possible I made up her reciprocation of my feelings for her, but even if I didn’t I haven’t given her a reason to feel heartbroken if I never make a move or tell her how I feel about her. She is smart enough not to trust married men, I’m sure.

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Dark Part 2

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You can read part 1 here.

I guess, like many children who were raised as Christians, I’ve always had a problem with sex. I didn’t even have actual sex with my girlfriend of three years from the age of 16 to 19 because it was one of the hard lines of Christian morality that I would not cross. All I did as a teenager was think about sex, but I knew I mustn’t act on the thoughts. I even felt super guilty when I masturbated.

When I met the woman who became my wife, she was so beautiful that I couldn’t resist her. I didn’t tell her until months in that I was deeply religious and had felt that all the sex we were having was a sin. She thought that was weird and kind of hurtful. Immediately after that conversation, we had the best sex we had ever had up to that point.

Two years into our relationship, I stopped believing in God. I derided any kind of belief in anything, even that the color of a t-shirt could be known, and prided myself on not being delusional. I began to internalize that life was a cruel joke.

Sometimes after that, my wife would want to have sex, but I wouldn’t feel like it. I would be too busy thinking about how I’m going to get myself out of this hell. I thought the answer was make more money so that everyone could leave me alone, so that I could stay home and brood and not have to do shit.

One of the few things I still enjoyed (with the other things being eating and doing drugs, mostly alcohol), was courtship: the parts leading up to sex that you were technically allowed to do as an evangelical. I assumed it was too late to court my wife, so I would court girls at work. Mostly they were girls I didn’t find attractive, so there was no danger of me getting caught up. Sometimes they were girls I found attractive, but who were used to the game and would play along with no interest in going any further.

But on two occasions, it seemed that I had found a soulmate.

The first girl did a lot of drugs, so we were able to forget about our problems and just live in the moment. Before anything happened sexually, she had some kind of breakdown and disappeared for a few days. In the time it took for her to re-establish connection, I seriously contemplated suicide one day and got fired from my job for blacking out at work and being creepy the next.

The second girl, this recent one, doesn’t drink, so instead of just checking out, we have long talks in which she challenges everything that I believe.

I had to ask myself, did I make a mistake getting married? At first I thought the answer was yes. Slowly, very slowly, I realized that I didn’t really love this girl. I loved the idea I had of her, and what my life could be like if I wasn’t bound by the only thing that kept me in the world of the living: my wife.

Why hadn’t I broken up with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, when I decided that life was meaningless and cruel? If nothing mattered, why couldn’t I just leave her and do drugs and listen to music and fuck the world?

Click here to go to part 3.

 

 

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What Happened Since Thursday

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A subway train and an iPhone 7 billboard

It’s Sunday. Somehow we got here again. Halfway through the week I didn’t think I would make it. Somewhere around Thursday I thought that was it for me. The girl I am obsessed with wouldn’t text me back fast enough. My wife wouldn’t text me back. I couldn’t focus on my job. Time was going so fast and weird.
Some cranes in New York CityI reached out to my nihilist friend who moved to France last year. He understood what I was going through, as best as anyone can over text messages. He sent me a video and a podcast and we talked about how annoying everything was.

I didn’t have time to listen to the podcast or watch the video. I went back into dinner service not sure how I was going to make it. I told a sympathetic coworker, who has been in a bad relationship for years, about my wife and I getting ready to have kids and how I thought I might be trapped working in restaurants forever.

I didn’t know how I was going to make it through dinner service. I ate some Altoids.

I decided to get a haircut the next day. My hair was crazy and I hadn’t slept much, so I figured that was probably the problem.

On the way home, the girl called me and we talked about nothing because her phone was broken and I couldn’t hear anything she was saying. She said she was going to get a flip phone. I said cool yeah that’s badass smartphones are for tools. She said something I couldn’t understand. I texted my friend who’s a barber now and made the appointment.

On the bus ride, I watched the video and my mind was blown. The guy basically taught a class why thinking people are nihilists these days and how that’s not much different than mental illness but it is just a little different. And a whole bunch of other stuff too. And that’s when I remembered that life really was suffering, which is such a relief to remember because when things aren’t going right I always think what did I do wrong? Of course, there are plenty of things that I’ve done wrong and continue to do wrong.

At the barbershop, we gossiped about people we both knew and how we couldn’t understand the things they did, and we laughed about that. We talked about how awesome we were, and my friend said I looked like Don Draper now that I’ve been working on this hair style for three months.

When I got home I decided to focus on bringing sexy back so I made my wife cookies and I pulled out my chest hairs one by one and I shaved and trimmed and did some pushups. Then I went to work and I didn’t text anyone and then I went home and went to sleep.

In the morning, I fucked my wife for the first time since she went off birth control. Then I walked to work and treated my customers like apparitions.

On my break, I told the girl I am obsessed with to meet me at a bar when she got finished working. She said she would so I sat in the bar drinking beer and listening to the podcast that my nihilist friend had sent me. The podcast was amazing, but as time went on, she didn’t appear, and I got sad.

Then I walked back to work and to my locker and there she was, getting ready to leave. She hadn’t come because she hadn’t gotten off work yet. I asked if she was eating at the restaurant before she left. She said yes. I said good.A tall streetlight in Brooklyn

I put my plate at one table and she put her plate on the table right next to it, instead of across from my plate so we ate together diagonally, so not really what I had in mind. She asked if anyone had made a will and my bar manager said she didn’t need a will since she had nothing of value, no family, and no partner. I said oh well there you go, easy. Then she seemed like she was about to cry. I said she had friends, but I didn’t know what else to say. I should have told her to remember that life is suffering.

When the girl that I’m obsessed with left, she texted me that she hadn’t seen me on the way out but that she hoped I had a good night.

I told her to have a good one, too, and then my bar manager handed me a pint of beer to chug because she had made a mistake and poured the wrong kind.

Later she gave me four ounces of vodka and people asked me where I was from. They said I had an accent.

Then it was midnight and it was time to go and I polished glasses while the chefs and cooks drank Modelos that a customer had bought them from the pharmacy across the street.

On my way out the door I checked out with the manager and she told me to get a pint container. She filled it with Jameson and told me to come out with them to the bar. A chef asked me three times if I was coming out. He told me that he had wished his ex-girlfriend happy birthday last night and they ended up fucking. He asked if I thought he had a problem. I said no I texted her happy birthday, too, what’s the big deal?

The other chef handed me a Modelo and I chugged it and went home. Last night I got home around 1:30 and chugged a quart of water, hoping that today could still be a productive day.

I woke up at 1:30 PM and went outside. It was too warm for the clothes I was wearing and I bought an iced coffee. Tonight I’m going out to eat with my wife, her sister, and my in-laws.A subway train and an iPhone 7 billboard

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My Landlord

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Hey ya’ll thanks for the comments and likes while I’ve been away from the computer. I’ve been walking around feeling at turns depressed and rejuvenated and then depressed again, as is my wont (or whatever that phrase is) and I’ve been reading a lot. I will respond appropriately to your generous and always welcomed comments probably on Monday, as I’ve got a big Saturday with GF coming and then Sunday I’m going to the aquarium and some other crazy shit.

That said, I’ve got only a few minutes before the bus shows up (my bike is fucked for the moment) and I wanted to write some shit down that just happened.

I’ve been sitting inside reading some Richard Wolff interviews, he’s an economist, or at least the one I’ve been reading is, there are probably twelve prominent Richard Wolffs around, and dreading paying my rent today. Not that I don’t have the money for it, but it’s just that I go to pay my rent to my Italian landlord’s house and he usually asks me if I want to stay but I’m not sure if he’s just being polite or what I would do if I did stay and anyway I’m usually going somewhere, I mean people just don’t randomly pop up at each other’s houses and visit like they apparently used to do, or like I do with my grandmother whenever I’m in my hometown.

So I’ve been dreading it like I do with most social interactions even though I usually end up enjoying them. And so I finally decided to go over, leaving myself enough time before the bus to actually sit down and “visit” if he offered, much scared though I was by this prospect.

And his daughter answered the door, he was at his table with his wife and his granddaughters, it’s 2 PM and I guess they are eating lunch, or early dinner, if old people’s eating times are anything like my grandmother’s.

And his screen door was locked and the actual door was opened so I could see them in there and his daughter comes to the door and obviously checks out the envelope I’m holding with the rent check in it. I mean she looks at it like, oh that’s why you’re here, good, even though we’ve met before and it was friendly and probably like six people have already been to the door with the same kind of envelope. Or because of that. I don’t know but the bus is coming and I want to get to my observation.

And she opened the door and I thought she would invite me in but she did not, so I felt kind of like a vampire in True Blood, and I waved to Rudy far in the inside and yelled hello! And he yelled are you off to make a lot of money? Because I have my work uniform on. And I yelled what? And his daughter answered impatiently, like she was explaining the mumblings of an adolescent child of hers, he said are you going to make a lot of money? I answered that I was going to make a lot so I could pay him again next month haha blah blah well she said have a nice weekend in a very final way and that was that.

And it occured to me that even though he never talks to women, only to men, which maybe I’ll explain later, the women around him, in fact the people around him, because I have to include his realtor, seem to protect him from outsiders like myself, as if he were some pure innocent who could easily be taken advantage of.

Now I understand that they were having a family moment and I was intruding, but this kind of thing happened before. And the thing about it is that Rudy is a virulent (I don’t know what that means but it sounds right) man, an abrasive, passionate man, an irrascible motherfucker in the literal sense, who doesn’t take shit from anyone, why then is he being protected by these women? And that one man who is his realtor. And why does he accept their protection while also degrading and belittling them? Well, I haven’t the time to explain it all, but it was a very strange thing indeed to be pushed out like that and to look back over the experiences I’ve had with this man and his protectors.

The first time I was introduced to him I was told by the female introducer that he was a chauvenist, sexist, perverted man but at least he got things done when you asked him to. Her basis for these claims seemed to be legitamized throughout that meeting, as he made sexual jokes throughout, waved off any talk he didn’t agree with, and pretty much only talked to me, as opposed to the three women in the room.

At the same time, he seemed to have a good heart, even if he did believe that women and men aren’t equal or whatever an Italian man of his stature is predisposed by his culture to believe. Hm shit I don’t know. I know you don’t talk shit about an Italian man’s mother, that’s for sure, so as a culture they have a lot of respect for women I think. But then they do like raunchy jokes. Ah but fuck it I’m not trying to make a statement on Italian culture and women, or even my landlord’s attitude towards women, but really I’m wondering why the people in his life seem to need to protect him.

Everything is happy go lucky when it’s just me and him in the room, but if his daughter shows up or his shark realtor, well then shit gets real and these gatekeepers seek to shelter the innocent, naive, foolish man from those that would seek to take advantage of him. He’s a mason for Chrissake, could rip out your testicles with a flick of his wrist, he owns twelve properties in this neighborhood alone, he’s like an ancient rock that doesn’t bow to the wind, he’s passionate and loud and commanding. But I guess his downfall, the reason he needs to be guarded, is that he is a nice person.

Hm. Shit I don’t know. Time to go to work.

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The Scrapers Part III

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The scrapers are out again. The sidewalks are clear and with temperatures going up to forty or so today the streets will run with the blood of the snow.

But the old lady is out there scraping scraping scraping.

She looked up as I passed.

“Hello,” I said. She said as much and then I asked how she was doing.

She answered, “I’ll be dead by the end of this!”

She kind of looked at me like I should help her. But I’m pretty sure that’s not even her sidewalk, and the pile she was scraping was well off to the side, pretty much a non-issue.

I laughed and said, “What are you doing?”

“Getting ready for the next one!” she said.

I started moving away. “Good luck Madame!”

She didn’t reply and I walked on quickly.

Well, I guess we’re all just getting ready for the next one anyway. The only time we really live is in the middle of the next one. Or something like that.

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At It Again

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These two old folks are acting strange outside. They are old. They must be up to something. The woman is about seventy or eighty and short and she’s reaching to the top of a hedge of bushes with a snow shovel and scraping the snow from there. Scraping scraping, and she’s just started when an old man, about the same age, looks like he just walked off the set of a British comedy, walks out of his house purposefully. Shovel in hand. Probably ready to start scraping, I don’t know, I got the hell out of there.

Yesterday these same old folks were scraping piles of snow on the street and flattening them on the ground like they were making some kind of strange snow paella or crushing snow garlic or some shit.

They know something I don’t.

And on my way back from dropping GF at the T, a bald man in faded jeans and a spotless white button up shirt came running towards me as if in a dream. And he yelled, “Look at this!” pointing to the snow piled up on the fence next to us, “Look at this! Twenty more inches coming down tonight!” He yelled as he ran past me. Where was he going?

“Shit!” I said, just to sound agreeable. I don’t really care if it snows four feet in the next five minutes.

Then he started laughing maniacally, and I looked back, and he was looking back at me with his hands in the air. I laughed maniacally in return and hurried along. I would have hurried faster if I knew I could’ve avoided running into the octogenarian snow scrapers.

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Hot Damn My Feet Are Cold As Ice (The Interruption Story)

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Readability Index: Readable

You know I realized something while at work today, one really great thing about blogging is that no one fucking interrupts you. They just can’t do it. They can distract you if they comment on a previous post or like it and that star comes up. But they can’t interrupt. Which is great. Because I feel like I get interrupted all the god damn time. It’s annoying as hell.

For instance, today at the bar.

This dude comes in, he’s a salesmen that sells us liquor and shit, and I met him once before and can tell he’s just a smooth operator. And we exchanged names and a handshake and a howdy do and I haven’t seen him in a month. But he rolled in today and I knew I knew his name but I couldn’t remember it. Well he didn’t give a good god damn about that, just called me man and I was happy to do the same. Even when I remember people’s names I usually just call them man. Or yo.

Well I could see he wasn’t in a mood to talk and that was damn fine with me because I didn’t have any idea what to say to him.

And hot damn! My feet really are cold! Wish I had a Labrador Retriever to retrieve my slippers.

Well, I just went on about my business and then all the sudden he got his food and he wanted to start talking. So I drug my ass over there and said “Oh what’s up man.” And he said in a philosophical manner, “Can I have more ketchup?”

And you have to understand about the ketchup, it’s house made and they serve it in these what’s a call it’s and they only fill it about a quarter way up so you get enough to cover the top of four french fries. I may be revealing too much about where I work here because probably anyone who has seen these little fuckers…what do you call them…filled a quarter way with ketchup well that’s something you won’t forget.

So to get on with the get down, I knew what the hell was going on here. I was hip to the mother fucker’s jive in a way. I felt we connected on a personal level.

Myself me, I don’t even like that house-made bullshit. I like Heinz got damn it, probably because I read this review in a newspaper about house-made ketchup that said that shit was not worth doing since Heinz is the only ketchup that delivers a hit to each of the four sensations you can taste – sweet salty and bullshit bullshit whatever the others are. So I’m damn well mystified by these little…what the hell are they called…filled a little bit up with this strange version of ketchup that no one even wants. Okay, a lot of people really love it. But anyway.

So I’m happy go lucky as a mother fucker running over to the line and getting some extra ketchups. I grab one and I think shit man, this ain’t enough, so I go back and grab two. And I feel like I pretty muched hooked a brother up by the time I get back there. But our man the salesmen couldn’t give two shits I would soon learn.

I said, “Here man, I got you the double double.”

“Thanks,” he said and kept eating like a lonesome Rotweiller. Shit even WordPress doesn’t know how to correct that spelling of Rotweiller. But you get the point…perhaps.

Well I was ready to walk away and call it a day. But here this mother fucker, and got damn this story is going on forever, here he goes and says, “How come they only put a little bit?”

Well darn my socks I was happy as a lark.

Wait, now I got a recommended link for Rotweiller. So what the fuck am I spelling it right or not? Ah fuck it.

So I launch into this campaign of commiseration. I say “well shit man I been trying to figure that out myself! First of all…”

“You guys got any grapefruit juice?”

“…”

“…”

“…what?”

“Grapefruit juice?”

“Yeah. Yeah we…sure man no problem.”

Man that shit done fucked up the next five minutes I couldn’t believe it. And now that I spent twenty minutes writing about that shit, I really hate that mother fucker! Argh! He’s got kids too, the crazy son of a bitch. I’m a straight up go to his house, find his kid and smooth interrupt her when she’s telling a story.

Nah I’m just kidding about that. I’m sure she’s cute.

But shit! This mother fucker damn well knew we had grapefruit juice too because he sells the shit to us!

So yeah, I’ve always hated being interrupted. I hate when people don’t listen to me. I mean, especially because I don’t talk anywhere near as much as I write. I’m a quiet dude. If someone asks me a question, I’ll answer. And you’re going to damn well interrupt while I’m answering your question! Hoo shit!

First time I ever got amped on this blog so…well I’ll just publish this and take a deep breathe. Breath? Rotweiller.