Profile Draft #3: Louie's

It’s 8:24 p.m. at Louie’s Trophy House on North Street and the north side of Kalamazoo, and I’m waiting for Arrington De Dionyso, and his band Malaikat dan Singa, amidst the stuffed Bison battling plasticized wolves that give the bar its name. Taxidermied animals roam in wild, immobile packs amidst local art on sale that have quasi-philosophical titles like “Letting Go” ($100) and “Where or When” ($100) which vary from blue black plaid paint blocks to chicken-scratch on a barely brushed with pink canvas.

The playbill and the Facebook event advertised the show starting at 8:30 p.m., but the factory-style and studio strip lighting illuminates an empty laminate dance floor and opening band still in the process of warming up.

“Generals gathered in their masses!” Ike Turner spits out from behind his trap kit. Turner is getting to become a fogey in the music scene; his bandmates are also Kalamazoo forevers. He’s a drummer that’s been around for almost two decades in the Kalamazoo area, playing for local punk-legends Minutes. He has a wee, golden haired daughter who usually accompanies him to shows but she isn’t here tonight.

“But in live versions he changes it,” he announces to his the rest of his current band, Brown Company, who are warming up their noise jams by tweaking with theremins and their guitars’ distortion pedals.

“Like, he says, witches and their asses or something like that,” he continues.

Bo Tyler boogies the sound-board operator dance back and forth from the stage and his booth, gliding across the stage and spinning around drum kits or keyboards to lay XLR cables or microphones. His real name is Daniel, but everyone calls him Bo because phone calls coming for his father got confusing. His new-haircut that looks like curly bird wings extending from his horned rimmed, tortoise shell glasses bounces along as he zooms about.

“I’m so fucking excited,” a tall black guy says as he emerges from the kitchen.

“I’m trying to get whatever energy I have left and I am putting it into this,” Bo responds, pausing one moment from his dervish.

While Bo is ecstatic, I’m worried Malaikat Dan Singa, or more specifically Arrington, isn’t going to show. I was supposed to meet De Dionyso for an hour before the gig, something we had set-up almost on the first fever night of spring, April 30th, though that was difficult on its own. It was late, 11 p.m. and he was in Kansas City.

Getting ahold of Arrington is difficult. We had to prepare everything via email beforehand because he was halfway through his tour from Olympia, Washington which had started April 4th, and his phone didn’t have any minutes, so I had to text him he could call me through a Google number which he eventually emailed me the info for anyway.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” was repeated a few times in response to yawns. I had no questions prepared and this was their only break before heading to their next show early in the morning, so I recycled the typical musician type things to say.

“Um, what’s it like being on tour?”

“It feels great, I love making music, love being on tour, love making art, with anyone interested.”

And stuff like that.

He tells me about the unusual places he’s played either with his old band on K Records that brought him to notoriety, Old Time Relijun, or his current project Malaikat dan Singa. Arrington has played anywhere from concert halls, to living rooms, to castles, to boxing rings. One time he played an 11 minute song in a train tunnel for French independent filmmaker Vincent Moon’s series Take Away Sessions.

I was dozing off. Arrington’s voice is passive, calm, and pensive--Egyptian cotton soaked in warm water, from all the matte tea he drinks. When not on stage or in the recording booth, Arrington has a black, palm sized earthenware bowl with a flat, metal straw that he carries around with him so he can rest his voice. Indonesian throat singing requires a singer to oil up their throat whenever it isn’t in use. He was wide awake, and his voice was putting me to sleep.

I asked him about why he is so serious about his recording process and the upcoming show in Kalamazoo.

“Well, in recording you are capturing a single moment in time. You are also creating something that can be listened to over and over again--recording is an art form, performing is an art form, they are similar in many regards, you know.”

I perked up, adjusted the cell-phone and peeled it from my hairy cheek, sweaty from the late night humidity and overused LCD screen. He goes on and on, digressing about the nature, the philosophy of his performance.

“Performance is about channeling spirit that is going into filling up the space in the moment, hoping to reach the people in the audience: dancing, moving, what have you. With the recording you want to create something you are going to listen to over and over again.

“I hear these things in my head, and maybe different things I have heard over the year, reformulated in a different context. There is an underlying communication that goes behind that sound.

De Dionyso spoke kind of like—or at least I imagine like--his parents, two urban ministers who were active in Spokane, Washington,  “the place that the David Lynch movie Blue Velvet is supposed to be about” he mentioned. His words linger with authority and intelligence—with pensive pondering. His parents  “had lots of books at their house--on politics and religion and art” His mother worked in the Peace Core in El Salvador, which the sort of spacey staring at the clouds kind of character Arrington inhabits now seems to have been birthed from.

Off stage he is more like a theologian though, stuck with indifference and references cultural or philosophical meanderings--Carl Jung and Walt Whitman casually popping in conversation as references to his music or lifestyle. He went on.

“Spokane tended to be monocultural, boring people who weren’t really like pursuing things with their minds. It’d be weird if you ran into anyone that knew who Jean Jacques Rousseau was, they’d be like ‘Jean Jacques Rousseau was, that’s like communist stuff, right?’” Spoken is where Arrington is from. It’s like Spokane packed up the little boy Arrington into too small a box, and once someone cranks him up for conversation this musician, artists, throat singer, intellectual pops out forever, and goes on and on and on...

“It’s this sort of like, this, uncontrollable joy of being alive, being a spirit that lives inside a body and celebrating that, that...immense joy and terror that is all wrapped up into that thing we call life. And singing about that can be fun.

“I like it to be as fun to watch as it is to listen to, but if it is too bright people feel too self-conscious.

“Anytime is a good time to dance.

“I dunno.”

Our conversation fizzles out as it approaches midnight and we make plans to go out for beers and a tour of Kalamazoo's foodstuffs before his show next Sunday, May 5th.

I actually listen to some of his music--and that video by Vincent Moon he mentioned.

Ever heard a frog mixed with a jaguar? I haven’t. I mean, that’s the closest comparison to anything I’ve heard. That isn’t meaning to exoticize the Indonesian language, but this impossible noise emanating in equal portions from this vibrating section of his neck and his fiercely white hot boiling eyeballs that glow and stare out forever like a pin light through a cave. His robes and scarves of varying hues of beige, gold, red accentuate his jerky motions--but never distract from the eyes.

Five days later, back at the show, I now understand Bo's enthusiasm, but it only causes me to twitch as the clock keeps ticking away and the floor remains empty save for two middle aged flies who buzzed in from the bar with their drinks to walk out to the smoking porch beyond the stage.

I check my phone: it’s closer to 9 p.m., and my only company is the cheetah print, the dead wolves, and Bo.

Sean Hartman, a blonde-headed, grizzly bear sort of bearded guy with the demeanor of the stuffed animal walks in. Sean is in the second opening band for the night—still managing to play with Forget the Times even with his newborn’s birth---Eloise Coltrane Hartman---just over a month ago. He ushers in a man with patterned robes and two grunge punks that look like they came straight out of a wet Seattle basement from the 90’s. Arrington is here with his back-up band and the story—and the show---can start.

Arrington, when he isn’t playing, spends most of his time outside. He is skipping out on the openers and the patio of smokers in favor of a log in the parking lot under the orange streetlight that gives him feral stripes that run shadows through his beard and down his cream, gold, and red combination of suit jacket, hoodie, and tumbles of clothe that comprise his outfit. Arrington mumbles words at the still setting sun—late summer skies full of miasmatic purples and toxic blues. Silver rimmed glasses sharpen clouded eyes slanted slightly shut from staring at yellow lines repeating on a black road for the two-hundred or so miles between Kalamazoo and Chicago.

We talk, and then go inside for the end of Sean’s set.

“Get ready for Maalikat Dan Singa, because they are way better than us,” Sean says.

The jaguar dances on the stage—that big cat prowling as it snarls in some distant space case baritone. Arms become limbs that flail listeners into mirroring his movements, devouring them with those king kat eyes, yellow under the stage lights. The set ends somewhere at midnight and everyone leaves.

Profile Draft #2

It’s 8:24 p.m. at Louie’s Trophy House on North Street and the north side of Kalamazoo, and I’m waiting for Arrington De Dionyso, and his band Malaikat dan Singa, amidst the stuffed Bison battling plasticized wolves that give the bar its name. Taxidermied animals roam in wild, immobile packs amidst local art on sale that have quasi-philosophical titles like “Letting Go” ($100) and “Where or When” ($100) which vary from blue black plaid paint blocks to chicken-scratch on a barely brushed with pink canvas.

The playbill and the Facebook event advertised the show starting at 8:30 p.m., but the factory-style and studio strip lighting illuminates an empty laminate dance floor and opening band still in the process of warming up.

“Generals gathered in their masses!” Ike Turner spits out from behind his trap kit. Turner is getting to become a fogey in the music scene; his bandmates are also Kalamazoo forevers. He’s a drummer that’s been around for almost two decades in the Kalamazoo area, playing for local punk-legends Minutes. He has a wee, golden haired daughter who usually accompanies him to shows but she isn’t here tonight.

“But in live versions he changes it,” he announces to his the rest of his current band, Brown Company, who are warming up their noise jams by tweaking with theremins and their guitars’ distortion pedals.

“Like, he says, witches and their asses or something like that,” he continues.

Bo Tyler boogies the sound-board operator dance back and forth from the stage and his booth, gliding across the stage and spinning around drum kits or keyboards to lay XLR cables or microphones. His real name is Daniel, but everyone calls him Bo because phone calls coming for his father got confusing. His new-haircut that looks like curly bird wings extending from his horned rimmed, tortoise shell glasses bounces along as he zooms about.

“I’m so fucking excited,” a tall black guy says as he emerges from the kitchen.

“I’m trying to get whatever energy I have left and I am putting it into this,” Bo responds, pausing one moment from his dervish.

While Bo is ecstatic, I’m worried Malaikat Dan Singa, or more specifically Arrington, isn’t going to show. I was supposed to meet De Dionyso for an hour before the gig, something we had set-up almost on the first fever night of spring, May 30th, though that was difficult on its own. It was late, 11 p.m. and he was in Kansas City.

Getting ahold of Arrington is difficult. We had to prepare everything via email beforehand because he was halfway through his tour from Olympia, Washington which had started April 4th, and his phone didn’t have any minutes, so I had to text him he could call me through a Google number which he eventually emailed me the info for anyway.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” was repeated a few times in response to yawns. I had no questions prepared and this was their only break before heading to their next show early in the morning, so I recycled the typical musician type things to say.

“Um, what’s it like being on tour?”

“It feels great, I love making music, love being on tour, love making art, with anyone interested.”

And stuff like that.

He tells me about the unusual places he’s played either with his old band on K Records that brought him to notoriety, Old Time Relijun, or his current project Malaikat dan Singa. Arrington has played anywhere from concert halls, to living rooms, to castles, to boxing rings. One time he played an 11 minute song in a train tunnel for French independent filmmaker Vincent Moon’s series Take Away Sessions.

I was dozing off. Arrington’s voice is passive, calm, and pensive--Egyptian cotton soaked in warm water, from all the matte tea he drinks. When not on stage or in the recording booth, Arrington has a black, palm sized earthenware bowl with a flat, metal straw that he carries around with him so he can rest his voice. Indonesian throat singing requires a singer to oil up their throat whenever it isn’t in use. He was wide awake, and his voice was putting me to sleep.

I asked him about why he is so serious about his recording process and the upcoming show in Kalamazoo.

“Well, in recording you are capturing a single moment in time. You are also creating something that can be listened to over and over again--recording is an art form, performing is an art form, they are similar in many regards, you know.”

I perked up, adjusted the cell-phone and peeled it from my hairy cheek, sweaty from the late night humidity and overused LCD screen. He goes on and on, digressing about the nature, the philosophy of his performance.

“Performance is about channeling spirit that is going into filling up the space in the moment, hoping to reach the people in the audience: dancing, moving, what have you. With the recording you want to create something you are going to listen to over and over again.

“I hear these things in my head, and maybe different things I have heard over the year, reformulated in a different context. There is an underlying communication that goes behind that sound.

De Dionyso spoke kind of like his parents, two urban ministers who were active in Spokane, Washington,  “the place that the David Lynch movie Blue Velvet is supposed to be about” he mentioned. His parents  “had lots of books at their house--on politics and religion and art” His mother worked in the Peace Core in El Salvador, which the sort of spacey staring at the clouds kind of character Arrington inhabits now seems to have been birthed from.

Off stage he is more like a theologian though, pondering with indifference and references cultural or philosophical meanderings--Carl Jung and Walt Whitman casually popping in conversation as references to his music or lifestyle. He went on.

“Spokane tended to be monocultural, boring people who weren’t really like pursuing things with their minds. It’d be weird if you ran into anyone that knew who Jean Jacques Rousseau was, they’d be like ‘Jean Jacques Rousseau was, that’s like communist stuff, right?’” Spoken is where Arrington is from. It’s like Spokane packed up the little boy Arrington into too small a box, and once someone cranks him up for conversation this musician, artists, throat singer, intellectual pops out forever, and goes on and on and on...

“It’s this sort of like, this, uncontrollable joy of being alive, being a spirit that lives inside a body and celebrating that, that...immense joy and terror that is all wrapped up into that thing we call life. And singing about that can be fun.

“I like it to be as fun to watch as it is to listen to, but if it is too bright people feel too self-conscious.

“Anytime is a good time to dance.

“I dunno.”

Our conversation fizzles out as it approaches midnight and we make plans to go out for beers and a tour of Kalamazoo's foodstuffs before his show next Sunday, May 5th.

I actually listen to some of his music--and that video by Vincent Moon he mentioned.

Ever heard a frog mixed with a jaguar? I haven’t. I mean, that’s the closest comparison to anything I’ve heard. That isn’t meaning to exoticize the Indonesian language, but this impossible noise emanating in equal portions from this vibrating section of his neck and his fiercely white hot boiling eyeballs that glow and stare out forever like a pin light through a cave. His robes and scarves of varying hues of beige, gold, red accentuate his jerky motions--but never distract from the eyes.

Five days later, back at the show, I now understand Bo's enthusiasm, but it only causes me to twitch as the clock keeps ticking away and the floor remains empty save for two middle aged flies who buzzed in from the bar with their drinks to walk out to the smoking porch beyond the stage.

I check my phone: it’s closer to 9 p.m.,  and my only company is the cheetah print, the dead wolves, and Bo.

Arrington de Dionyso Narrative Draft (Incomplete)

It’s 8:24 p.m. at Louie’s Trophy House on North Street and the north side of Kalamazoo, and I’m waiting for Arrington De Dionyso, and his band Malaikat dan Singa, amidst the stuffed Bison battling plasticized wolves that give the bar its name. Taxidermied animals roam in wild, immobile packs amidst local art on sale that have quasi-philosophical titles like “Letting Go” ($100) and “Where or When” ($100) which vary from blue black plaid paint blocks to chicken-scratch on a barely brushed with pink canvas.

The playbill and the Facebook event advertised the show starting at 8:30 p.m., but the factory-style and studio strip lighting illuminates an empty laminate dance floor and opening band still in the process of warming up.

“Generals gathered in their masses!” Ike Turner spits out from behind his trap kit. Turner is getting to become a fogey in the music scene; his bandmates are also Kalamazoo forevers. He’s a drummer that’s been around for almost two decades in the Kalamazoo area, playing for local punk-legends Minutes. He has a wee, golden haired daughter who usually accompanies him to shows but she isn’t here tonight.

“But in live versions he changes it,” he announces to his the rest of his current band, Brown Company, who are warming up their noise jams by tweaking with theremins and their guitars’ distortion pedals.

“Like, he says, witches and their asses or something like that,” he continues.

Bo Tyler boogies the sound-board operator dance back and forth from the stage and his booth, gliding across the stage and spinning around drum kits or keyboards to lay XLR cables or microphones. His real name is Daniel, but everyone calls him Bo because phone calls coming for his father got confusing. His new-haircut that looks like curly bird wings extending from his horned rimmed, tortoise shell glasses bounces along as he zooms about.

“I’m so fucking excited,” a tall black guy says as he emerges from the kitchen.

“I’m trying to get whatever energy I have left and I am putting it into this,” Bo responds, pausing one moment from his dervish.

While Bo is ecstatic, I’m worried he isn’t going to show. I was supposed to meet De Dionyso for an hour before the gig, something we had set-up almost on the first fever night of spring, May 30th, though that was difficult on its own. It was late, 11 p.m. and he was in Kansas City.

Getting ahold of Arrington is difficult. We had to prepare everything via email beforehand because he was halfway through his tour from Olympia, Washington which had started April 4th, and his phone didn’t have any minutes, so I had to text him he could call me through a Google number which he eventually emailed me the info for anyway.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” was repeated a few times in response to yawns. I had no questions prepared and this was their only break before heading to their next show early in the morning, so I recycled the typical musician type things to say.

“Um, what’s it like being on tour?”

“It feels great, I love making music, love being on tour, love making art, with anyone interested.”

And stuff like that.

He tells me about the unusual places he’s played either with his old band on K Records that brought him to notoriety, Old Time Relijun, or his current project Malaikat dan Singa. Arrington has played anywhere from concert halls, to living rooms, to castles, to boxing rings. One time he played an 11 minute song in a train tunnel for French independent filmmaker Vincent Moon’s series Take Away Sessions.

I was dozing off. Arrington’s voice is passive, calm, and pensive--Egyptian cotton soaked in warm water, from all the matte tea he drinks. When not on stage or in the recording booth, Arrington has a black, palm sized earthenware bowl with a flat, metal straw that he carries around with him so he can rest his voice. Indonesian throat singing requires a singer to oil up their throat whenever it isn’t in use. He was wide awake, and his voice was putting me to sleep.

I asked him about why he is so serious about his recording process and the upcoming show in Kalamazoo.

“Well, in recording you are capturing a single moment in time. You are also creating something that can be listened to over and over again--recording is an art form, performing is an art form, they are similar in many regards, you know.”

I perked up, adjusted the cell-phone and peeled it from my hairy cheek, sweaty from the late night humidity and overused LCD screen. He goes on and on, digressing about the nature, the philosophy of his performance.

“Performance is about channeling spirit that is going into filling up the space in the moment, hoping to reach the people in the audience: dancing, moving, what have you. With the recording you want to create something you are going to listen to over and over again.

“I hear these things in my head, and maybe different things I have heard over the year, reformulated in a different context. There is an underlying communication that goes behind that sound.

“It’s this sort of like, this, uncontrollable joy of being alive, being a spirit that lives inside a body and celebrating that, that...immense joy and terror that is all wrapped up into that thing we call life. And singing about that can be fun.

“I like it to be as fun to watch as it is to listen to, but if it is too bright people feel too self-conscious.

“Anytime is a good time to dance.

“I dunno.”

Our conversation fizzles out as it approaches midnight and we make plans to go out for beers and a tour of Kalamazoo's food stuffs before his show next Sunday, May 5th.

Five days later, back at the show, I understand Bo's enthusiasm, but it only causes me to twitch as the clock keeps ticking away and the floor remains empty save for two middle aged flies who buzzed in from the bar with their drinks to walk out to the smoking porch beyond the stage.


*Note* The second half of this piece is not yet complete, as most everything happened last night. No spoilers allowed, but there will be more--I promise. My intended place of publication is Kalamazoolocalmusic.com. This is a sandpaper low grain draft. Please forgive me.

Complication: Zac Probes Non-fiction

Call me unoriginal, but I hate being called unoriginal. Bending words on a computer screen to alleviate the experimental lusting within my strange and lewd cranial-scape is just too much fun. Necessary, would even be appropriate. Coloring pictures used to be all about staying within the lines, but all I want to do is see how fuzzy I can make them.

Reading "Writing for Story," by Jon Franklin, topples over writer's blocks, kicks our motors into fifth-gear, all with that Dad voice full of salt-pepper and knowing. He's reassuring but is careful to not prop writer's up on watery legs. His building blocks are solid, clear, and defined. Note-cards, structure, laptop--go out, write, keep your nose to the ground.

About half-way through the book, where he starts going on about stories involving Heroes, Dragons, and how sub focuses cannot occluded, my own focus waned. A little tick in the corner of my eye, twitching, twitching, nudged its way into the heart of the irreverent rebel--the royal ass-hole of experimentation--and would not shut itself up until I acknowledged the form Franklin was smoothly, casually introducing was too damn velvety, clean, bleached.

Franklin isn't a bad guy, nor is the book bad either. But it doesn't resolve my desire to experiment. You have to know the rules to break them--yeah, I have heard it before (any bad writer has)--but I don't know if I want the Secret to be hard work.

Is that pessimistic of me? Or just lazy?

*lights a cigarette, sips some coffee*

Ugh.

Canned Meat: So Does that Make Process Writing Silly Putty?

Like those pieces of newspaper clips rubbed off onto gelatinous impermanence of warm-flesh like stretched rubber that smells of dust and tile shavings.

"The trial and mild inconvenience of being a privileged white male. The first in a series. I am experiencing homelessness. "

I keep saying these words. Even as their impetus comes closer to a close, script keeps blossoming out its rusted soil. During a group discussion involving the paper, I realized how uncomfortable that statement (and others in my narrative post below) made readers. 

Instead of acquiescing those uncomfortable moments and themes, however, I wanted them bolstered. Enforced with more disgust and buttressed with distrust. I know someone, somewhere, said that is a bad idea. Maybe it is. I'll admit that I made the narrator less relatable, and perhaps that makes the piece harder to enter. Better yet, maybe it makes it easier to reject. 

Rejection of a narrator would have been a great objective, though I am not sure if that is what I intended. Deliberate confusion of the reader, and provocation of their sensibilities intrigues the writer in me as much as it challenges the creator outside of me. The only thing connecting the words sometimes is the thread of incoherence, self-doubt, and slathered opacity which viciously defends the body from outside contaminants. 

See Sophism. 

Um--does it re-create a stable, healthy, stale environment with a unstable, sickened, interesting environment? No, not necessarily. But I'd like to think that it challenges readers to combat truths they want to believe in others with the reality they face, and the ideas that nest themselves in the memetic gestures as familiar as a middle finger. 

Meanwhile:

http://marcusrubio.bandcamp.com/album/h-h

Oh yeah, definitely the artsy type. 

Second Verse, Same As The First. Final Draft On "Dependent On Independence" (Working Title)---Intended Publication: Modern Love

 The trial and mild inconvenience of being a privileged white male. The first in a series. I am experiencing homelessness.

Heading West on I-94, towards Chicago on a bus—not a Greyhound bus, so excuse the apoetic tones—brings me back home. Closer to home, anyway. My parent's home. One of the places I grew up, that sort f thing. Rainbows on the ceiling of the college-brand bus stamp outward in a swooped chevron gradient that reminisces with kitsch mariachi gas-station portraits of the Virgin Guadalupe. The felt is very dazzling. Damn pattern stares at back from the seat in front of me like someone slapped a Lite-Brite onto Guillermo Gomez Pena's mustache. I'd like to think he'd like that.

Avoidance forces eye-balls to dim and brains to start along that line of musty dusty memories that shouldn't be that dank or undisturbed, hence the whole avoidance thing.

So I'm avoiding the obvious question: Why are you without house and home, but still able to type up, post, and edit these texts about your homelessness? It doesn't seem authentically homeless. Perhaps it's disrespecting the status, not giving the term its due. Although there is probably someone on a pigeon-cluttered corner who could take a dollar in their plastic, clinking McDonald's cup as a fine for the artistic liberty.

A thousand dollars, that's how much it cost. Probably. The ASUS Ultrabook with a thirtysecondstartup from slick slice of aluminum to solid-state running machine was a gift from your father who is currently spending his springs in a Dutch resort drinking mango smoothies on the flour-textured beaches of Aruba. With his younger girlfriend. Did I say your?

Let's get rid of introductions. It starts with Abby, my girlfriend. No she didn’t kick me out. In fact she and I will be coming on a year of consistent tolerance of each other’s pizza toppings come April 28th, meaning that dating her for a year has made me vegetarian and I can no longer enjoy pepperoni. I’m assured that there is a meatless alternative.

April 28^th was incorrect, it was yesterday, April 16^th. Still managed to find a gift though: some pink tailors measuring tape from Meijer's. Over avocado sushi and moonstone razberry sake that tasted like NyQuil, I told her to wrap it around her neck and measure out the distance with two fingers for comfort.

It's cute 'cause it's for a necklace I plan on getting her. Handmade. Really tight fitting. We're into that sort of thing.

Abby is a about year older than me with a few months in my favor. She is a senior, which has allowed her to enjoy off-campus living from the wee, prestigious liberal arts college we both attend. Typically you aren’t allowed to leave until your senior year, as underclassman are encouraged to focus on college community, which tacitly allows upperclassman to follow the higher pursuits of illicit substance abuse and undisturbed sexual activity.

With such benefits, we started living together almost a month into our relationship. Not much discussion was needed. Quickly my dorm-room was abandoned to the roommate who gave his grumbled consent to the new living arrangement with something like a “I’ll be sure to have sex with my girlfriend with this gift you have given me.”

Access to the piles of stale, smoky clothing; moldy library of paperback Hermann Hesse novels; and iron, Finnish steamer trunks that comprised my material possessions, remained within my meager college dormroom holdings. Moving out is really easy when you can leave all your crap where you left it. But, due to student conduct laws and housing bullshit, I was required to continue paying the Department of Student Living three to four thousand dollars for what was effectively my now-ex roommates single room “masturbatorium.” That's what he called it, I promise. I wasn’t there so the accumulation of tissues and ransacking of thirty dollar Target bowl chairs didn't irk me that much. I got to live with my girlfriend while having a safe back-up plan that only needed a bit of bleach to be as good as new.

Until a few weeks ago. Though this ASUS laptop is a mighty gift indeed, luxury doesn’t come naturally to my divorced parents. With my mother and stepfather working to pay off my (twin) step-sister’s college bills, and a father prone to gallivanting across floral Caribbean beaches with his girlfriend, myself developing a sense of fiscal responsibility doesn’t seem too obtuse. Well, for me anyway. His girlfriend is, like, ten-years younger than him too.

It’s not pleasant. Thinking about money doesn’t produce hives but I’d like to think it agitates my self-diagnosed psoriasis. Or I hope that is psoriasis. Either way it creates the nervous gut-busting grumble of anxiousness and dependence on others when I realize I owe them.

So when thinking about my tuition bill, and pondering on why six to eight thousand dollars added to my student loans were being poured into someone else’s sex cave, it dawned on me like a TLC special that an easy way to save money would be to just move stuff out of the dorm space.

When the official opportunity came to uncheck student living from my tuition box, I took it.

Whoa there Zachary, that's a little abrupt. You moved out once, without all your stuff, then at an undisclosed time presumably close to a year later you did so again with your stuff. Moving in with your girlfriend isn't homelessness. You had a dorm room, you chose to give it up because of money.

But being a full time student, even with two part-time jobs, finding the money and time to apartment hunt was difficult, and the soonest one I could find was ready for move-in April 28th. That left me with a month of homelessness. That's what happens on April 28^th, every now and then I need a reminder.

Here is this petite, auburn-haired stage director and blacksmith with the tendency to squeak like a woodland creature when tickled telling me that she wants me to live with her. Really live with her this time—no back-up plan, unmarried, and barely able to help out with utilities. No questions asked. Any conversation went mostly like: “Are you sure?” (because she knew what I was asking about), then “yes,” then “Are you sure?” (read those italics), then “yes.” Basically paying for my housing. Cook my meals. Comfort makes me uncomfortable. I owe her.

Admittedly staying with Abby is nice, but acquiescing living space to her other five housemates can be taxing. Not to say that they don’t deserve the space, they pay rent and all, but they bump into my vintage ‘80’d speakers and scoff at my collection of Beach Boys vinyl. One of them talks to their television all day with the volume maxed out, like has a conversation with the characters on screen, her inside voice just as declarative. You can hear her and Shaggy talking about Scooby snacks through the nimbus tones of Brian Wilson's “God Only Knows.” My stuff shouldn’t be there, in their home. I owe them.

No, I’m not technically homeless. I have loving, amiable, welcoming girlfriend and friends, too, who are allowing me in their home with no real escape plan. I’m stuck there. They know that and I know that, and it doesn’t seem to cause them to break out in various skin diseases but my fingers are itchy. Though Scooby-girl did yell at me for being disrespectful and “inconsiderate of others sounds and space” the other night. “Fuck you.” is what I want to say. My gums are bleeding, even though I bought that gingivitis fighting CrestMint to “help combat tartar build-up.” Ever notice that logos, catch phrases, all these products, their names are always forced together to make them sound more catchy? CrestMint, Mike&IKe. Monstrous. I am burden, and it doesn’t matter if I am light or heavy or catchy or easy or hard. I'm verbiage; dense, confusing, and without a point. I'm pretty sure that makes me heavy, but Abby's scale says I've been losing a pound or so a week. Better start with the protein shakes come the new apartment—my new-roommate has a hook-up with some calamine that he says will “make my boobs bigger in no time.”

If I want that independence: from finance, parents, school, people; albeit for only two weeks, I have to depend on her. I hope she moves in with me afterward—I can't cook and I don't have a bed-frame. She hasn’t kicked me out, and I haven’t snuck any pork-roast into her curries so hopefully that means we’re in the green in terms of relationship status, but I’m in her hands for another two weeks.

Next time I'll fly, and maybe an A-listers' hirsute style will be baring down on me from the in-flight commercials. Maybe that will make for a better story.

Because I Am Silly...

Sometimes I forget to read the titles of articles, books, and short stories. It’s actually kind of weird for me because they are the most enjoyable part of any story to write: anything from obscure Stanley Kubrick references to multiple sentence long abstractions on the feeling of 95% cotton on a bearded face have all made it into my obnoxious headlines.

Where am I getting with this? This is a necessary self-reminder, not  a literary device--I ramble sometimes. I recently became engrossed in this article by Susan Orlean from a collection of literary journalism. She was writing about this wee 10-year old boy-- which was originally supposed to be this story about MaCaulay Culkin but she was super-sassy so that doesn't matter--generally covering the life of cooties and cartridge-based video games.

Stirring me out of my general nostalgia was this quote:

“..the collision in his mind of what he understands, what he hears, what he figures out, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he pretends to know, and what he imagines, makes an interesting mess.”

The agelessness of her analysis struck me as revelatory of what narrative journalism should aspire to become. It seemed so out of the blue, in the midst of Streetfighter II ramblings and elementary school drama, but still wildly appropriate for any age at any time--this young boy just happened to be more impressionable due to his place in time. So natural! So unique! So contemplative!

Then the natural progression of my pause brought my eyes to the tip-top of the page where the title poked itself into my cornea: “The American Man at Age Ten.” Oh, well duh. It is supposed to be removed from time. It is supposed to be about his natural progression. It is supposed to be a contemplation of the beginnings of the male psyche during one such specimen’s formative years.

Now that doesn’t devalue the quote, or the gentle progression towards the general critique that Orlean jumps from the many spring-boarding ‘whats’--it just felt intriguing to have the story told without the obligatory spoiler at the beginning. It isn’t a big spoiler, but just enough to take away my ignorant a-ha moment. Oh well.