Good Morning Heartache, What’s New?

It’s the entire horn section of the once great Chickasaw Falls marching band outside playing the collected works of Miles Davis’s hapless widow (who, claiming to be possessed by the spirit of her late husband, refused to stop composing polka choruses until she dropped dead twelve long days after Davis’s own tragic death). It’s that at nine in the morning on a sad Tuesday in Brooklyn.

When a friend comes to town for only a short time and you don’t have a real career and you don’t have kids, you put your life on hold until they leave. If your friend is at all interested in your life, you have some time to think about the damn thing with a little more perspective than usual.

Well, such a thing has happened to me these last two days. It is interesting that an entire life can seem so fraught with things to do and then one can decide to stop doing those things and experience no immediate consequences. I remember one time my little brother brought me an Xbox to play with and I put everything on hold (and, as I was planning a wedding and working two jobs there was a lot to put on hold) and even skipped meals and personal hygiene whenever I could (whenever my wife wouldn’t notice) to play that damn game. There was minor backlash after two weeks of being absorbed in that alternative reality, but not as much as i had imagined.

It makes me wonder if the stress I put on myself to “be productive” in day to day life is justified, healthy, or useful. I guess that depends on your definition of useful, and for me I guess I am still too immature to stop taking things to their philosophical nadir, and so my definition of useful is anything that makes me feel good right now (since we could die any second and even if we don’t the universe is expanding in all directions at once so anyway we are getting less and less prominent in the world and to begin with we weren’t even at the level of ants on a galactic leaf).

Bike Project Day One

It’s been a strange morning. Outside the cold is enough to bite your nipples off. The cold is like a son of a bitch bastard with a vengeance. Like Hurley Turley and the Run Around Gang all came down from the sky with a nipple ripping fetish. And what it really gnaws on is your fingers. My fingers, to be more exact, since I’m the one around here with no gloves. Or rather, one glove, and that’s about worse than having none.

We woke later than usual. Or at least I did. I don’t know when GF got up. I got up at 9 and I felt like I had to piss a river. But I also felt tired as shit. But what I didn’t feel was the least bit sick. I guess last night’s nose hi-jinx were just a fluke. Either that or the wine, red meat, Emergen-C, and mysterious pink pill put the virus to bed.

I was having a dream that a blogger made this cartoon about penguins killing a lion with a cannon. The lion was holding a gun up to them and snickering but he didn’t know they had a cannon. Then a million penguins came out of the cannon after they shot him with it and they all chased him down this hole. But then the lion rallied, and he was after all of us, and it wasn’t a cartoon any more.

It was cold as a bitch. Somewhere in the middle of the night I had taken my clothes off. How is it hot in the middle of the night and then cold in the morning? I don’t know.

Then I came out and was hungry but couldn’t think of what to do and it was almost time to walk GF to the metro anyway. The “T” rather.

I put on my thermal long sleeve shirt and about thirteen hats and we went out there, into the blinding white. And it’s supposed to snow more tomorrow. Things weren’t looking good for the start of my biking to work deal.

Coming home I tried to notice a few things that I could write about. All I noticed were that some of the trees had no leaves. And some of them were evergreen coniferous trees or some such, and I remember two leaves blew across the road. And a man nearly killed me when he made a maniacal left turn in front of on-coming traffic.

When I returned home I set to work at once on figuring out this bike situation. I turned the key in the lock. They’ve been sitting outside for months with that lock around them, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when it didn’t turn all the way. I came inside and got a hammer. I read that this particular lock, “OnGuard,” was notorious for rusting out or some such. I cursed my misfortune. I looked up bikes on  Craigslist. I gave up and read some Hunter Thompson essays.

Then I went out and tried the lock again. Well, I had been using the wrong key. The lock came easily undone when I used the key that said “OnGuard” on it. Son of a bitch.

Then I tried to ride the bike, but the tires were flat as shit, so I still need to go to the shop. And the rear brakes don’t seem to work.

It’s nearly twelve now. So I’ve got about two and a half hours to figure out if I can get this bike working well enough to ride to work. Not exactly what I want to spend my day on, but the days go by so fast anyway, it’ll be Monday before you know it.