UNEMPLOYABLE 1

Well I guess somewhere along the line I just let go of the steering wheel. I could pick a time, a death, a decline. When I was caught trying out the new fuck machine I built with the family vacuum cleaner, or maybe a loss, a betrayal. It would definitely be more entertaining. But I have no writer’s memory, I hardly have a memory at all of the past. But somewhere along the way and early on I just gave up fighting and I went along with the currents that surrounded my life. Everything just started to careen out of my imagination and into reality, out of my wishes. Decisions became steppingstones, then alternatives, and then just easy ways. I just refused to accept my narrow definition of life, and with no redefinition in the ass pocket. I just went along as if it wasn’t mine. There were big moments among friends and family; marriages, deaths, fucks of the century, far away places, all of which I cannot account for much of my consciousness being present. And here I stand in the middle of the intersection in front of my suburban condo watching the traffics light switch back and forth between honey ryder way and south ness lake drive. And I want to joke and be lyrical I want to be that guy, Early Chevy, Bill Murray (Anytime but Meatballs,), or Hank Moody. I could write a book of names of these guys I’d rather be, but thats kinda gay. The sad part, neither I nor my father are on that list. I should take that as some kind of yield sign, but like all the others it sweeps by like a blurry disregarded orange pubis. This might define the entire spectrum of my conscious capacity as a human being. But nonetheless, big change is here and it is demanding more. It is upon me.

My only reply now is to grip the threads of my severance, and remnants of my old sedate routine, my old career. It shrouds me like a giant apathetic fur coat I can’t get off. Glued to my skin, ingrown. Something so large and unwieldy, grotesque, ignorant and crass. I aspire to let this foreign cocoon melt from around me, around what I once consider my special unique little soul. To do this would be the most conscious and awe inspiring act I could accomplish thus far, but I just don’t know if I have the stomach for it. Am I hoping to re-emerge like the Encino Man. To come to the aid of some dull community and re-energize the place with my free fucking non-existent spirit, fuckin unlikely.

I spent a lot if time insulating myself in this so called unclaimed life. Even talking to therapists for years trying to accept myself. I should of just been fucking, maybe even the therapist. But I am serious this second skin, this bullshit coat of the past is the very thing that now paralyzes me in every aspect. Joy is dead. I enjoy fucking her corpse. She is a ceramic vase with a latex glove taped over the mouth and the middle finger yanked through it and out a hole in the bottom. All this time it's my time. Obsession after obsession trying to avoid this fork in the road and these fucking traffic lights that I am now facing on all sides represent. A decision I avoid. And yes it will definitely cut like a knife. Its 5 am and the traffic in the burbs is slowly coming to life, a few well disciplined souls driving to the jobs that keep them a sleep in their cocoons of safety. Doing what we were trained to do. Hallalueh, Money! Well even if I am unemployed, at least I can share in some of the more basic forms of life's maintenance. We all have to take responsibility for existing, shitting, and pissing, pants down or not. This precious moment of life, this great random chance that chose us to exist. Unlikey, like so many other things, all the moving parts. All the time moving and ticking, in our bodys, on the highways, in the malls, in our girlfriends. And all I can muster is a petty odes to the heavens, a white collar yodel only heard by the objects that I surround myself with to help define me but jobless only represent all the lost chances and avoidances of a true life I should have been scheming for.

Thank you. The first bird is singing its tune and I am not doubled over with a gut full of Strychnine. Back then my only goal was trying to avoid being spoken to in the midst of a week long street party in Key West. I am long past those times of ignorance and bliss, semi-ignorance and bliss, and then just blatant denial and bliss... Those times where the vigor of my grand rebel(lion) could be spilled on the belly of some willing party that had a fantasy of her own to fucking promote. We would trade flyers and hold each other in hostel showers, on church steps, up against the cinder block walls of a nightclub. Nobodies promoting shit now, Reston is just adding to its padding around its little special unique soul. Recanting over and over again, "I am special." Those times when younger was better, when younger wasn’t so lecherous. On some girl's eighteenth birthday in a far away land. She pulling me into her, behind the white bars in a fearful town so wrought with hatred and me just getting off and then off to the waves in the morning so ignorant and free. So uncaring and selfish, not much has changed, except for the fucking. I have burned through a lifetime of riches thinking only of NOW the moment, my moment, my time. And now looking back at it out from this dead end street, I am just a weird dude sitting in the street, closer to resembling a cracked office worker than a teenager, trying to comb my hair over the bald spot. Where all the dead end streets remain dark and solitary, no more to be awakened with laughter, and friendship, when the shatter bottles beckoned us on to the next dark alley that we could awaken by our youth and our unity. I long for those times but maybe just to not think of now and the new, and the continued and ultimate span of my existence.

If I sit her long enough I will have to exchange uncomfortable glances across the street to the two neighbors that will be standing at the bus stop waiting to be driven to their time killing jobs of importance and meaning. Of esteem building and rationality. Of manufacturing self-worth. Of exercising their passions. A passion that I am sort of dissing. I don’t mean to. I am merely chosing to melt my thick coat of apathy. The one that has encased me for so long I cannot remember. I love my life and all it has been and all who I have shared it with. It’s the future that I fear and I always have and see as something dark and unyielding. It makes me feel powerless and angry. Angry at the past, at my failed relationships and the newest unwilling partners, I asphyxiate them in small compartments of my mind. Refusing to see the infinite possibilities in life. And I am banishing myself from all that I have built up to this point, it has just become a shoulder piece that enslaves me. The change that I had longed to gradiate through my daily routine, when I was employed, has darkened my color to a shade so paralytic it has rendered me unemployable.

The parking lot is empty outside my bedroom window, everyone is gone for the day. Its now 11 am, and even my creepy hairdresser neighbor is off to the Hair Cuttery, Bubbles or the Daily Dye Job. I hate seeing her on the sidewalk. I think I make her small head hurt, my existence disproves some vital building block in her creationist theory. She wanted to help me when she and her husband first moved into the building but now we’re grinding along the backside of hello. Once she mentioned she had someone in mind for me and I told her I would rather have a drink with her, and that just about did it. And of course I did not mean it, it just came out wrong, I really just wanted to hang out and become friends without the pressure of a blind date. Well a few months later I get a knock on my door and I am working in the studio shirtless and sweaty. I open the door to this young townie looking meth-head candidate from Sterling, a slim and sprite little skinny with long straight light brown hair. Her feet planted a bit wider than a mormon boy, prepared to discuss something more visceral than religion, a fucking judo chop? It was quick though nothing more than, “Oh I am sorry. I musta got the wrong place.” I assumed the goods did not meet her approval. I was preoccupied and let the door slam in her face and continued some inane act of tightening something here or loosening something there on some vintage mountain bike. Lame. This little social vignette might also encompass the entirety of my 5 year participation in this community in which I am deemed on the bulletin board flyer as a, “co-owner.” Whatever, back in my 1994 days of employment these things didn’t matter. It was the second time around in the old AOL job. I learned more about the swing, the technique. I experimented more socially with the idea of the job, and how I could push those boundaries. How to live freely among the world of the un-confrontational. I became a corporate vampire. The job become my patron and my only output is this weight that I can no longer carry. Don’t give me too much credit it was of course a mismanaged bloated pig spitting out money, this is a common practice among the employed.

I had taken quite a bit of money away with me on my first tour of AOL, but have since blown it. But hey there's no shame in returning, even a guy that took away 10 million came back with his tail between his legs to collect the easiest 100 grand in town. However despite this corporate generosity, one by one I watched my friends all move away to various cities for more fulfilling and exciting lives. I am beginning to understand why. To me it was just the final stone in a long series of stones that were laid out in front of my shoes, by friends. And those stones in the not so distant past sinking below the surface into the soft sediment of my memory, and me here alone in the middle. The dot of the exclamation at the end of a big joke on myself. And the traffic lights seem to switch more often when I stand in the middle here and smoke.