What did I do/ can you save me
Walking up the road, a smooth and inconspicuous walk, always keeping an eye out for some hackneyed acquaintance behind every street corner—someone I met in a bar the other night, or an ancient figure I attended high school with, who vigorously wants to sell me a life insurance policy, “Ground Hog’s Day”-style.

Down Hamilton and across Dove, a small black car is sizing up an impossibly small parking space, between two cars. I know this dilemma, live in this neighborhood, and experience it routinely (although, actually, I don’t have a job and am at leisure, like my seventy year-old neighbors, to move my car to either side of the street at twelve pm, when the parking limitations dissolve, giving a cordial wave to the geriatric set for effect). I realize this car has no chance of fitting into the tiny parking space, and offer to the driver my very choice parking spot which I will be momentarily leaving from, ten feet up the road. “Oh, really??” the driver of this compact automobile asks me, his face a veritable cherry of jubilee. I get into my car, and as I do, he issues one more demonstration of gratitude, as if I’m giving him thirty dollars and guiding him to the nearest liquor store. “Thanks again, sir!” he shouts from his window, as I hold up my hand in the air, which could be a gesture that says, 'you’re welcome' or may very well mean 'fuck you.'

It is not long before I am wondering about the implications of this nice gesture of giver-of-parking-spaces that I have just added to my cosmic resume and issued to the universe. Will something awesome happen to me in return for offering up my choice parking spot? I am only driving across town to go to a doctors appointment and realize that I probably will not find a similar parking space when I return, beating out new york state employees, who are charged at the most basic levels of DNA, veritably programmed to find parking spaces in my neighborhood, like Darwinistic champs. But I also realize, simultaneously, that self-conscious acts of altruism may not get you anywhere, trying to switch off this impulse of self-reflection, as though some giver of favorable karma is monitoring my thoughts. But ah, well, I realize: It’s probably too late. I’ve probably already been caught, which the very existence of a doctor’s appointment may go the distance to prove.

Into the doctor’s office, the mundane interior of the hallway giving way, through the coarse glass of the waiting room door, to the mundanity of the waiting room itself. A small, mousy-looking woman looks fearfully at me as I approach the reception desk and tell her my name. She flips through a pile of  folders before finding a billowy manila folder which contains my chart and tells me to sit. There’s always some weird vibe in here, I realize, pervading the waiting area like a pestilent gas, noxiously filling the whole entire doctor’s office, and prolonging your wait into some obnoxious infinitum of time. I have some weird skin rash, but some of these people, I conjecture, are here for less benign-seeming things.

At the edge of the waiting room, a flannel-shirted man sits, tapping his work boot nervously, not reading a magazine, and just staring straight ahead. I wonder what he’s here for? I think to myself. He has knocked off at the construction sight for the morning, maybe, and instead of pounding nails or moving large pieces of steel which will one day comprise portions of a state employee parking garage, he has ended up here, instead (which, in a point of fact kind of way, would pretty much objectively sign him up for a lifetime of good karma, disproving my whole theory-of-parking spaces completely. But he has obviously not been building favorable things, it would seem, among which the doler of karma has included state employee parking garages). He was shaving one week ago, maybe, and discovered a patch of coarse and bumpy skin. And now he has ended up here, at the Terminus Point, waiting the wait, sans Time Magazine.

A woman exits the physician’s room before turning back to ask the doctor a question, and as she does the flannelled man issues to no one in particular, still staring ahead. “Sometimes I’d just rather not know,” he says into the air, as people look up at him from magazines, and then straight back down again, into TV Guide articles about the latest reality TV series which they will take in later tonight. “Maybe it’s just easier that way.”

Momentarily, I am called in to see the physician, tossing aside my own magazine, and simultaneously prolonging the flannelled guy’s wait for another few moments of not knowing. The doctor comes in shortly, and then I am pardoned, back out into the world. “Have a nice day,” she says cheerfully to me. “Okay,” I tell her, “you, too.”

Back in the car, driving ten minutes back to my neighborhood, I can’t help but think of the flannel guy, and hope everything turns out OK for him (as per the dictates of parking spaces created and cosmic influence). Maybe he is doing cartwheels in the doctor’s office right now, post-diagnosis. Maybe this is part of some grand scheme-of-things plan which doesn’t exist, and he will receive a new ‘lease’ on life, which he will forget about after ten minutes of formulating how he is going to live life differently, from that moment on. Who could say what is going to happen?

Back down the block, in the car. I know I will have to drive for twenty-five minutes, looking for a parking space. Up the block at a crawl, everybody is parked on the odd side of the street, because of the Monday parking restriction, which allows for the stoic street sweep, cleaning up the detritus of another week's-worth of life. Inching forward, and nearing my own apartment dwelling, where there, directly in front of the building appears, with rays of shine—astonishing even myself—a parking space directly in front of my door, which I lick my lips before nestling my car into.

Things are looking up, it seems. It’s a small recompense, I guess, but sometimes you have to take what is given, like a kiss on the mouth; pennies on a dollar, grit-encrusted copper coins which you will later deposit into a candy machine before blithely making off into the day with a sugary gumball to pop into your mouth, chewing contentedly as you avoid all ninety degree angles.

The ice age is coming/ better get a sweater or something (pt 2)

Most days, on returning home from work, TD silently retires to her bedroom to smoke approximately four joints, before rather seamlessly rejoining in the main room, to carry on about the night in this self-induced state of amnesia. Whether trying to avoid this same fate or it was just grim stoicism at hand, I had remained unemployed and relatively sober for the majority of six months, content to get by on blistering anecdotes in exchange for handouts from passersby. This went on until about five weeks ago, when grim fate did intervene, like some inverse edition of the television show itself, fucking everything up, and causing me to seek out drugs. I would stumble from TD’s opium den-type quarters, a confused and hazy sheen having fallen over my eyes, in such a state of lurid confusion that I actually did report to work the next day—often times to the total consternation of myself, when at about eleven-thirty every morning I would wonder what the hell I was doing in such grim surroundings, at work.

My only saving grace was wondering about the content of my fellow coworkers’ lives in between trips to the bathroom. Most of the people there seemed to be in pretty reduced circumstances, having fallen on tough times, because of the “economic crunch”, or whatever (which had become a welcome euphemism in my mind for the collapse of everything, and/or a good excuse for never having a job). I tried hard to find somebody to align myself with, and because of my rather successful unemployment streak, chose to chat it up with a forty-something housewife. We had probably been leading similar lives, I thought to myself, and conjectured that we might have something to talk about.

“How do you like it here?” she asked me on my second day, solidifying the fact that she also knew, intrinsically, that we had something in common. “Oh, you know; it’s OK,” I lied, always trying to conceal the fact that what this person may have been doing every day for the last ten years is to you evocative the most grim variety of despair, and actually, made you think of diving lemmings and death. “Oh, that’s good,” she answered. “I actually just started a couple weeks before you did. It’s going really well for me.” “Yeah?” I asked her with some hint of amazement, looking deep into her frozen face for some sign that she must be joking and secretly thinking of lemmings, too—just joking around for effect—a joke which we would be laughing about, momentarily. But the punch line never came.

“It’s really coming along good,” she continued, “I just kind of dove right in” (sic). I couldn’t believe that she enjoyed the droning, rather repetitious tasks we were completing for eight hours a day and stared into her face for some indication of the joke, which then made her uncomfortable. She finally bid me adieu, and as she did I stood there at the precipice, trying to avoid all of the cliffs in my mind. On my way home that night, I had hoped that TD would be around when I got there, I knew I was going to need something.

Some other cool people I met at my job was a mentally deficient twenty-something named Jake who was really into WWE wrestling, and a guy who looked acutely like the stapler guy from the movie “Office Space”. Whether he was aware that the constant mirth which was erupting all around him was because of his uncanny resemblance to this movie character, I will never know. My boss, a middle aged family person, who in periods of dark reverie I imagined hunched over a backyard barbeque as his spastic children did cartwheels in the grass, had clearly been picking them from the far reaches of the universe, and with these people I had been lumped in. Which made me ornery.

It was sometime during my third week when I defected. For some reason the job we were doing seemed so horrible that taking two hour lunch breaks and infinite trips to the bathroom, to hang around and make calls from as though it were my personal office, seemed like perfectly acceptable behavior to me. I was just returning from my “office” one day when my boss interrupted me. “Can I talk to you?” he asked seriously, motioning me into his own office, which smelled markedly better than my own. “What’s this I hear about taking long lunch breaks? We offer a half-hour lunch period and two paid breaks.” I kno! I said to him. It’s just not enough for me. I then erupted into a rambling characterization of the ineffectual nature of the job, before suggesting the movie rental “Modern Times”. My boss had never heard of this movie, but nevertheless he did not seem to appreciate my rental suggestions. Our employee/employer relationship had at this point not broached the point of movie rentals.

“Look,” he finally said, “maybe if you feel like this place is some kind of concentration camp, you shouldn’t be working here.” There was a brief silence, during which I stared back at him, waiting, hopefully, to be told that I was fired. But then, inexplicably, he said something else: “You know, it’s funny: at the other location, where people go out to smoke cigarettes in back, there’s a fence which runs around the perimeter, and last night someone said it looks like some type of prison camp.” We both had a good laugh at this joke, although I guess it’s not too funny.

Life is a raw deal, and employment pretty much blows— unless you’re SG, in which case you have everything figured out. It is my lack of ability to figure things out, I think, or my massive ability to sum everything up so well which seems to be causing Problems--all deductions figured out between marijuana cigarette breaks in TD's opium den.

You sunk my battleship
In ten minutes, just to defy my normal routine of hanging out and listening to Thee Oh Sees with my roommate, I am going to abscond, just to see if I can go get robbed. I’ve never really been held up at gunpoint before, but I hear the opportunities for being mugged in the neighborhoods in front of the Delaware Price Chopper (sic) are rife with possibilities, another mugging just the other day. Me sauntering down the street, and an attacker just within sight, lagging momentarily behind. It will probably occur to imagined mugger with massive chagrin, as I have a life savings of about a dollar-twenty five in change in my pocket, but what can you do? It’s boring around. And I will accept any form of stimulation, be it a punch to the head or a stab wound to the neck, just as a deviation of routine.

I probably should get a job soon—I probably should get hit by a car. But these are alien thoughts, strange and disconcerting to the senses—such an anomaly of thought process that I almost don’t know what to do with myself. Rings of a tree, a simulacrum of simulacrum. I really probably should just go outside now.

I got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming

Chocolate chip pancakes with my sister, Kiki. Today is her birthday, and so why not schedule a hangout? It’s not often we get to do these kinds of things, mired down as she is in her job, and me, with my own goings on, or whatever.

As a child, my sister once bought me “cool clothing” with money she earned at her job as a checkout person at the local grocery mart. Later, she would drive me to high school, even though I was her annoying brother, four years younger, who would eyeball her friends with all of the fascination of someone witnessing the presence of some exotic jungle bird for the first time. She is, when it comes down to it, probably in a position to alienate me for all time, and with a lifetime of validation. That would make sense to me. But there she is, and here I am, eating chocolate chip pancakes in my apartment, after so much time passed by.

After breakfast, she relates to me about her job. I always find it weird that I don’t know what my friends and family actually do at work all day. I’m sure these people have explained these things to me, at one time or another, but I just don’t know how their job titles quantify. But then, maybe it comes down to the fact that most jobs, in my mind, broil down to answering phones and carrying out completely mundane tasks, for eight hours a day. And so it’s rather self-explanatory.

My sister works for a not-for-profit agency which is in the business of facilitating the wellbeing of people with mentally deficiencies. She explains how there is always some crisis going on with one of the facilities she oversees. “It’s always particularly unnerving when you have to explain to a family member how one of our clients has alleged that the hired staff has been smoking crack and touching himself in front of their son all day. That’s probably the most difficult part about my job.” Yeah, I say, “I could imagine that would be kind of awkward.” And if all that isn’t bad enough, recent legislation has been put in place which could hold people at the administrative levels of this rather unfortunate employment sector accountable for things which go on, miles away. “Hmm,” I say, at a total loss. I want to ask if she smokes a lot of pot, but think of something else to say at the last moment. “Have you ever checked out yoga?” I ask. “No,” she says, she hasn’t.

There is a conversational impasse at which point we look outside and realize it’s snowing again. “Hey,” I say, “See that pool house over there in the park? –On the other side of that is a gigantic hill, and if it snows enough, maybe I could go sleigh-riding tomorrow.” We have a good laugh at this, at how ludicrous and lightweight my life must seem (which is, when you objectively examine the facts, probably not unlike the lives of the people in one of the houses she oversees—the notable difference being not my lack of access to prescription meds, but markedly lower levels of group cohesion and poor choice of hair style).

I walk my sister out to her car and say goodbye, pointing out directions to avoid a sketchy neighborhood. And then she pulls off, away. On the way back in, I notice the snow is still coming down pretty good. Tomorrow seems hopeful to me.

Please let me be lonely tonight
My ye olde housemate/caretaker is cooking something including onions right now, causing my eyes to water and tears to stream down my face. I don’t really cry, I don’t think, having done away with tube socks and emotions ages ago, and so am confounded by the watery solution coming from my eyes today. Oh, man, I think, what is going on here? And then I realize: it’s the onions.

It is occurring to me today, for the one millionth time, that the city I live in blows, and it will continue to blow, forever (the greatest, most all-time crushing Albany moment I’ve experienced thus far, outside of some ludicrous/ embarrassing moments which hold little to no merit on account of the fact that I was too drunk to actually remember them, was looking at the LOB on Madison recently and being sent into a full-throttle depression over its scale size and color. The sky was some wasted ink cartridge color gray that day, stretching out interminably to nowhere, and the building and sidewalk parodied that color below, their mimicry taken directly in through my eyeballs and related to my synapses, sending me down. The architecture itself depresses you, and I knew the people inside of those buildings were doing something unnervingly depressing, making it a full on shit storm of depressingness. But then, maybe it’s just me, like usual). I was attempting to explain this same feeling to someone the other day, but I don’t really think they knew what I was talking about, impervious to the dour worldview of architecture and downward spirals.

Two enthusiasts of the rap music genre have recently moved into the apartment next door to mine. I encountered one of these individuals recently, on coming home one day. “Oh, you moved in next door?” I ventured brightly to one of them. “My name is Ryan,” I said, shaking the new neighb’s hand. “How’s it going,” said neighbor said. “My name’s True Master.” I took this in, thinking it over, before True Master disappeared behind the door of his rental compartment. It was a striking name, you had to admit, out-classing my own rather pedestrian name by twenty furlongs, which then (obviously) elicited some rapid fire succession of “street names” to replace my own. I was stuck between two, when the phone rang, snapping me from my reverie.

It was hard not to get caught up in the proactive nature of the new neighbors, planning events and shows, right here in the courtyard of our building. “All that’s really respectable,” I told El Smell on night, “but in the end I can’t help but think there will be some inherent futility involved with all of that. I mean, even if something really cool is created there will be no one to fully appreciate it, so it seems like a total waste of time. I mean, we’re living in Albany, after all!” I said, as some rhetorical punctuation point. As I said this, I thought simultaneously of a car signaling into a drive on a desolate country road, signaling repetitively into the night to no one in particular. But, when it came down to it, in the end, whatever ended up taking place, I knew I would be there. Which pretty much seemed inevitable- I lived there.

Everything blows, but what can you do? It seemed logical to try and have as much fun as possible, even if you were surrounded by lame ass motherfuckers at all times. Springtime couldn’t be too far off, I didn’t officially have a job to go to, and El Smell was making that onion dish right now. It wasn’t much, but it was something to hold onto. To keep yourself from spiraling—to keep yourself from tears.

This city has got me feeling like a motherfucker

Walking home from SG’s in the dead, glaring middle of night. It’s a nice night for this time of year, the temperature rising twenty degrees and tricking you into wearing lightweight garments. But all at once the cold comes rushing in, making you think twice about your threadbare jacket and the holes in your shoes.

Up Dove and down Jefferson, past the sketchy bar, with the faint cacophony of the goings on indoors, where people are reveling in throwing darts at a cork board, and drinking two-dollar drinks. This is what we do, how we pass the time. I think about going indoors and seeing if there’s anyone I know inside, but there’s no kind of refuge for me, tonight.

At home things are no less bizarre. El Smell has taken to locking herself in her room, interrupted only by short trips to the kitchen to get something or other, where my attempts at conversation are thwarted by monosyllables and grunts. Needless to say, things seem grim.

It’s a strange life, and a strange time to be alive. And it would be entirely possible to retrace your steps, to find out how you got here, from the womb, but that’s old news--something thought of, and thought of again, the thoughts themselves like so many layers of a tree, layers and layers removed.

At the threshold an empty plastic milk container rattled past my feet, like some absurd tumbleweed. And then I scurried indoors, like a rat, out of the cold.

The building I am living was considered to be some kind of an historical site. The Aqua Ducks tour bus told you this five times a day, when it drove by, and an internet website. It used to be an ice factory, used to construct square ice blocks. That had seemed about right to me.

If I had a reason I could blow you all away
As one more daily reminder that you are inhabiting a cultural landscape with which you feel no connection at all, a vast and barren tundra rife with life forms engaging in totally inane behaviors, the tv sits like a leering, dead black cube in the corner, waiting to be turned on, and send you from your precariously-located perch on the precipice, right down to the dark canyon floor, over the edge. I happen to live in an apartment which comes with cable TV, and so the death is ever-present, filtering in to my room too often, against better judgment. Reality TV, I have discovered, has broiled down to the bare naked crack cocaine-type substance which has lead to the creation of a TV show on A&E called “Parking Wars”, which features a motley collective of hulking humanity giving out parking tickets in between wolfing down takeout food in their patrol cars. Between leaving tickets on people’s cars the contestants routinely turn to the camera and offer insane nuggets of wisdom, acute glimpses into the banality of their day jobs. It really is pretty distressing.

But that’s old hat: I grew up in the nineties, when putting people with boring lives on television still seemed like a pretty good idea. It was somewhere around the same time that MTV figured out that music videos were old news, and people would much rather watch a bunch of fraternity bros cavorting in a large urban mansion together. So many years later, they seem to be milking this same formula, putting said fraternity bros from middle America in the same living spaces with gay and minority factions to rub proverbial elbows. Somehow, despite seasons’ worth of the same frat archetype being largely dismissive of the alternative lifestyle-livers, they seem to be sticking with their guns, citing, I guess, a massive interest in these behavior patterns on behalf of the general viewing public. Although, in this context, I guess it’s more acutely akin to watching a bunch of laboratory rats, testing the same conclusion over and over again, which has already been concluded hundreds of times before, documented and sealed, with stamps of invalidation and zeitgeist.

This year’s “The Real World” is set in Brooklyn, New York (a massive coup to anyone living there now—uh, yea: sorry to anyone I know currently living there, but when MTV co-ops your city for its ostensible cool-factor, it’s a done deal. Although that begs the question of how ‘real’ things actually are when you're living in a Red Hook mansion and given a car to commute in—because hasn’t driving been rendered passé at least two months ago by M2?), upping the knee-jerk hate factor. The producers have apparently decided to up the ante this season by adding not only a token gay person but by also adding an eighth cast member, who is transgendered. It does not take long for the hounds to start smelling, and before long the fraternities have called out the transgender, talking it up behind her back. “No, that’s a man,” one bro cites. “No, I saw boobs,” another bro retorts. The token indie-rocker interjects, with white-light compassion (her cultural significance and entry onto the show, a massive arm sleeve tattoo and a Death Cab cd or something).

Sucks, but even the most boring people I know are infinitely more exciting than these goons. Which begs the very important question of why my life has not seen inclusion in a reality TV show? It would have to be one of those A&E variety numbers, but it would be blistering in content. TV cameras could follow me around in my actual life, as I walk around the apartment pulling my hair out, and scuttle to my girlfriend’s house in the freezing arctic temperatures, cursing into the air for effect. And if I really wanted to spice things up, I’d just start talking to myself, or go to a friend’s to play Candyland, where the reality would be realer than real, and approaching something else instead- the steel fisted approach of an imaginary punch to the stomach, which would be the dullest and most lightweight punch of all time.