If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right

(I will be self-publishing some work in the first half of 2010, as I'm becoming exceedingly disillusioned with the publishing world at large. I hope to learn how to utilize the scraping cogs of an ancient printing press, as well as a state-of-the-art book-binding machine in the next few months.
In the meantime, this is a two-part excerpt from a story that spans currently around 29 pages, double-spaced, describing the beginning weeks of a self-prescribed tail-spin stemming from two months of alcohol abuse, a city-wide power outage, a storm of apocalyptic bravado, a haunted theater, a suicidal dream, and a broken heart. It’s based in California, but I only used that locale because I was most familiar with it. It could have been based anywhere. This sort of thing happens everywhere if you know where to look.)

Eric

The sun plumb forgot to rise. I got a call from an associate of mine; he too, like everyone in town, was trapped in the midnight sash of the blackout. The bars had power, he told me. Everyone would be drifting to the nexus of the taverns to exchange stories of where they’d been when the flicker of the bulbs ushered in the flickering candles. And, of course, to drink. I grabbed a jacket – a corduroy patchwork number, blazer-heavy, silt-brown – to brave the winds and whipping garbage caroming into the sidewalks and abandoned cars along Main, and made my way.
The place glistened from a block away, a buzz of activity siphoning the silence of the powerless grid, like a string of Christmas lights with only one active filament. A steady drove of hysterical things gravitated toward its beacon like alcoholic moths to a wobbly flame, ants corralling toward the Twinkie, marching to a beat of Celtic promise, like Irish brigadiers must have marched, fueled by the lasting paste of potatoes on their tongues, or Scottish bagpipes whirling their whistle for freedom toward the crown of England. It could just as easily have been the methadone line in a Harlem alleyway, everyone itching and feverish to get a piece of power, a piece of comfort, something to soften the shivers.
Eric was already seated with a couple of hangers-on – old girlfriends who orbited him like moons. Pushing past the throng, we huddled round the teakwood table. Every “excuse me” and “pardon” created a Panacea shift in the brood, human tsunamis manifested toward the shore of the bar, swishing whiskey sours out of their glasses, imploring innocent patrons to expel meaningless apologies for the clumsiness of wayward elbows.
There was an annoyingly loud buzz of noise, divided between the nasal-twang of the Hank Williams tune on the jukebox, the hiss of the wind when the door would allow more lost, seething minds into the bar, and the general fizz of drunken discourse.
“Man, I didn’t have time to eat all fuckin’ day, then when I finally remembered that I had some tots in the freezer, I popped them in my oven. Fuckin’ power went off two minutes into it. Fuck it, I’ll just drink instead. It’s…”
“…sooo cold at my house! Ohmigod you guys! The heater doesn’t work either, and the cat pissed on all my blankets, so I was washing them when…”
“Goddamn it. This is the only bar that has power? I fucking hate this place. This shit would have never happened in SoCal. The way their power grid’s set up, each section of town is delegated equal…”
“Nothing like a depressing Hank Williams song to start off your night,” I hear myself say to no one in particular.
Eric looks at me like a caveman might have looked at fire for the first time ever, a dumbfounded film across his blue eyes, his jaw dragging into his bourbon. It always takes him a while to get that something has been said that may have some comedic value or even some kind of relevance to his life at all. Sometimes he executes these stares with no climax to speak of, just a quick Neanderthal bedazzlement followed by a swift synapse wave break toward whatever his last thought was, or an ocular return to whomever’s breasts he happened to be ogling before the interruption.
Luckily this time, a Hollywood grin infests his face, and he howls. He’s taken a keen interest into my spiraling dementia, the frozen-rope melodramas of my depression. He’s taken to calling my abrupt weight loss the “Big Dive,” and I secretly think that his ceaseless ambling of well-worn paths toward ex love interests is an attempt to cultivate a sadness for the purposes of deflating the girth of his own belly. Either way, he’s become a partner in tell-all drunken confessionals at the Tower, and made clear that his own limitations to function within the realms of society were to be as reflexive as they were self-prescribed.
Self-prescription being a brand new hobby of mine, I decided to take arms with the lug and bull-charge through the darkness, and the cold, and the sadness sipping my froth, which is precisely why I chose to meet him out in this mucky fucking weather at the snap of his pudgy fingers.
I sip the froth off my Guinness, and grab a stack of cardboard coasters.

Toby


Toby and I made small talk and he told me a story about the residents across the street, now stirring in their yard, staying up all hours of the night on their porch, drinking and being rowdy and trying to shoot the moon with a slingshot full of bottlecaps. He gazed at the men with their dogs, propped in tattered porch chairs, cans littering the yard and puffs of gray smoke billowing from their open mouths like spirits escaping for better ways to be.
Toby was on a temporary hiatus from boozing and had ordered a mystifying row of drinks to sate his thirst. Tomato juice, orange juice, coffee and water sat in a proud row waiting for him upon our return. He looked sad and pale and unhealthy, and seemed to know that no matter how hard he tried, he was the victim of a larger demon — a wild drifting phantom who may have gone too far in search of this truth and even to an extent caught wondering whether it was truth at all or just self-destruction. And if his truth was self-destruction, his skin and bones and droopy eyes did little to shield that fact from the rest of the world. And he wanted it hidden. Everyone knew it.
His serving gig at one of the more posh eateries in the city demanded he clean himself up a bit, at least for his five-six hour shifts, within each of which he'd pocket around 400 dollars in tips alone per night. On the job, he appeared a model of learnedness; astute in the culinary extravagances inherent in the world of raw fish, while maintaining a polite, if not irrevocable five-star visage and genuine respect for an affluent array of pushy diners.
At night, he fumbled slowly, sluggish into seedy corners, into the alleyways of the dankest dives in town. Sometimes we'd find him mumbling to himself, or to strangers, mimicking the high-pitched sopranos of heavy metal singers, with nothing in his eyes; nothing, it seemed, in his heart anymore. He stuttered out syllables that obeyed cadence, but neglected to string the proper letters together to create useful words - ergo tangible sentences - and often added interestingly hilarious character qualifiers to their conclusions, morphing inquiries as normally coherent as, "Where have you guys been?" to "Zuhfuck yerguys bin, trash?" What happened to Toby to create this monster is anyone's guess.
I snubbed my cigarette out early from the caving of pity and concern for him and his plight, and dared not ever tell him what kind of epiphany it had been for me, just then, to see his pain, to see him wearing his fears on his face in the afternoon air. I only know him well enough to indulge his stream-of-consciousness banter, not enough to confide in him or burst with my secret analyses. I snubbed it out and said, “Okay Toby, let’s go inside.”
The moment had passed.

Ode to Olaf

When the sun shines on Portland, the rainbows run away. I found that out easily enough this afternoon as I awaited the 35 bus to downtown. A fair-weather glinting ribbon half-arced the sky in blustery hues, seeming to land directly on top of the Plaid Pantry across the street, luring the Power Ball putzes toward its beeping entrance. "A pot of gold can come in many forms," I venture to myself, knowing full well that the gamble's in the gutter, not the gale. And with that, the wind picks up and whisks the sun, the half-sleeping moon, the promise of a mid-day respite from the frost-bitten throes of winter, and the rainbow all away with one big WOOOOOOOOSH.

Earlier - much earlier, in fact - as I awaited yet another goddamn bus at 6th and Pine downtown, katty-corner from the breakfast rush at the Downtown Chapel, I wince at the wind and the rain pick-pocketing my warmth, and am approached by a walking garbage bag, rooted by heavy black work boots. A little beanie hat bill peaks out from underneath the shiny cloak, and I can see he's just crossed Burnside from the Chapel, and is headed over to the bus transfer station, to convert two bucks fare into five hours of warmth. There's no better seat in town, and he knows it.

But the lanky vagabond is getting nearer and nearer, and I realize he's coming to talk to me.

"Hey, man, you happen to have an extra cigarette?" he asks.

"Uh, yeah, I do actually," I offer cautiously. I'm no stranger to good will, but I've also not had much practice in the subtle arts of speaking to enormous Hefty-clad transients, so I give him the cigarette, smile, nod my little "you're welcome" and swivel heels to get a view of something that didn't frighten me. The cross-street fountain, with its teasing geysers did wonders for a second, until I'm tapped on the shoulder by the immense, gloved paw of something much bigger than me.

"Dude," the bagged-bum begins, summoning a tone so rugged and low in the throat, you'd have thought his Adam's apple might be rotten, "you packed these smokes killer!"

I take a breath. He's friendly. A little dumb. A little pushy, but harmless in spite of the assumptions derived from his physical wealth. He gives me a grin. He's got a chipped tooth that makes him seem even more loopy, but he's not drunk. He's not on drugs.

"I've been trying to quit, man," he says, "but one vice at a time...I've been sober for a month and four days...or was it five?" he gestures to a far-less imposing sidekick.

The sidekick nods.

"Five days," he ends. "By the way," he begins again, "my name's Olaf. Olaf [unintelligible]."

I don't hear or understand the flippy-tongued last name, or whether it was a last name or middle name, or if the whole fucking thing was made up.

"Try to guess where my family's from?" he bribes.

"Uhhh, Germany?" I shrug.

"Yep, you got the first one; what's the second one?" he says.

"Ummmm, Beeeellllgiiiiuummm??" I trail.

"Nope." he says.

At this point I don't give a shit anymore. "There are hundreds of countries I've never even heard of, so why don't you just tell me," I think of saying, but then weigh the four-inch height difference, steel-toed combat boots and the fact that his name is Olaf into consideration. I shrug again.

"Norway," he boasts proudly. "This town is stuck on stupid," he then exclaims. Before I can take offense - which would have consisted of my abrupt departure via ANY bus that happened to open its doors at or near that moment - he clarifies himself. Luckily he's not talking about me. I swallow Mount Lassen down my throat.

"You hear about them stabbings down 'round here?" he asks. "I was minding my own business down at Sisters of the Road, try'n to get some food, and you see my bag over there?"

I look, and see a blue mini briefcase latched on top of another small piece of wheeled luggage.

"That's a Sampsonite," he lies. "Some guy, a black guy, comes over wobblin' 'round by my bag and opens a beer over my bag!"

I'm supposed to be feigning shock at this breach of the Hobo Handbook, but instead I choose for some reason to stare directly into his eyes without even a modicum of emotion over what he'd just said. Maybe I've just had too many beers spilled on my bags to care.

"I said, 'Sir, can you please not open up your alcoholic beverage over my bag?" continues Olaf. "And the motherfucker pulls out a knife and threatens to cut me with it!"

I reveal a slight look of surprise to him. The other public transit patrons are peering out of the corners of their eyes, silently reprimanding me for their assumption that I'm humoring this homeless man for lack of the stones to send him on his way. In reality, I'm starting to warm to Olaf.

"What did you do?" I ask.

"Pulled down my shirt like this..." he says as he pulls down his shirt like that. "I said, 'do it, man! Do it!' 'cuz I knew he wouldn't do it. He ended up leaving, but then two days ago, he came back to the same place and stabbed somebody. Fucker got picked up, went to jail, everything. I ain't about to get cut up, but you can't mess with a man's bags; especially a homeless man's bags, you know?!"

Olaf starts to giggle, revealing that chipped-beef tooth. I muster one of those lethargic "phew!" expressions to him and for myself, and we share a brief moment of camaraderie. He shakes my hand in his; like a salamander greeting an ape.

Even earlier that morning, before any bus had any business out on those roads, to pass Olaf and his nameless sidekick on the freezing streets, I was kept awake by dreams, stress, worrying about money just one year after I'd decided I could live without it. The fact that I'm making a little bit of it now is probably the cause. It's easy to say something is worthless if it's not around.

But talking with Olaf in the slick shadow of Big Pink, under the windows of some of the wealthiest citizens in the city, discussing the plight of a knock-off Samsonite's near collision with the foam of a dive-bar beer, the near-death experience he endured, and me with $700 bucks in cash ready to deposit into the bank to pay rent later that day; I could have cried. I gave him two more cigarettes; one for him and one for his buddy.

"Take it easy, Olaf," I said as I boarded my bus.

"Safe travels, friend," he returned.

I'd have felt better for Olaf, his sobriety, his somewhat genial disposition, had his optimism not seemed illusory. I came close to where he's at not too long ago. I held the knife a night, dared myself to do it. I can't pretend I'm better. It's a heavy feeling to know there's no more wisdom hiding under a warm blanket than under a garbage bag.

Safe travels, Olaf.

M-O-N-E-Y

One day last summer, I woke up to find that some jackhole from Chico had accidentally deposited over $600,000 into my bank account. At the time, I was, as my associate Daniel Taylor might put it, "indigently poor," and have pretty much stayed that way since I reversed the deposit back into the silken hands of some real estate developer or whoever else arbitrarily deposits sums of that caliber.
I struggled for literally one week - the time the bank told me it would take to look into it and reverse the mistake. So I was roaming around with over 600 Gs in my account, and some seriously heady schemes winding their ways through my depressed little brain. I'd been looking for a way out as it was - from Chico, from my job, from everything I knew, basically. Having a shit-ton of money seemed to be a good first step. There were all manner of plots: Take it to the casino and bet on red in on the roulette wheel literally every time, doubling the bet until it hit so I could make some kind of profit before I had to give it all back, fleeing the country to become a criminal in Santorini where I would read and fish (learn to) and write forever, etc. In the end, after a hellish stomach ache and lots of horseshit drama, I just let it go.
I thought that one day it might make a good plot for a short story, but at the time, turning the loss of $600,000 into even $40 sounded cool, so I pitched an editorial draft to the Portland Mercury, who said they were interested. They never bit on the story and it was never published. Anyway, I'm posting my little intro draft to it here.

The Day I Could Have Had
One Man’s Struggle to Stay True Blue While Keeping Himself Out of the Red
By Ryan J. Prado
The day began like any other. After traversing the lonesome block and a half from my downtown apartment to my office, coffee in hand, paid for in change, I hoof it up the carpeted staircase, snake the corners of the desks until I finally cozy up in my corner workstation and fire up the computer for another day of editing and emailing. Another day of sifting through the minutiae of the music industry, to fluff or huff the careers of artists I’d never meet and who would almost always never have to worry about a 9-5 gig…okay, maybe more like a 10:30-4 gig – you know what I mean. I’d experienced one of those raucous Chico Wednesday evenings the night prior, hopping bars that served you dollar drinks, paid for in change, and was more than a little heavy in the eyelids. My stomach groans, imploring me to abandon this makeshift fasting ritual which had become so mandatory over the last few months.

“Shit, am I really gonna hit up Zach for free Woodstock’s Pizza again? Standing in that back alleyway like a degenerate street urchin jonesin’ for a fix didn’t exactly do wonders for my self-esteem last week…,” I think to myself. I resolve to curb the growl with steady sips of java and move on.

Go through the motions; open up the Google mail; open up the (insert networking site here); and finally, check my online bank account to see just how destitute I really have become at the age of 27, and perhaps to deduce what sort of a number I did to my finances the previous twilight. Enter my password. Yawn and slick my fingers through my matted, greasy locks of hair. Enter my security clue. Note the pungency of my unwashed blue jeans…”Did I wear these last night?” Wait the agonizing wait for my paltry balance to reveal itself to me, to ruin my morning and my day, to beseech me into finding ways to make ends meet in this stifling little college hovel. I take a sip of my coffee, and after the horizon of the lip of the coffee cup descends back down toward my desk, a peculiar numeral flashes into view. Under the section of the online banking account page where you are made privy to your “Available Balance,” there is not the roughly $180.32 I was expecting (and silently dreading) to see, but an outlandish, bloated beacon of $646,675.32.

Surely, my eyes must be playing tricks on me. “Fuucccck,” I admonished myself. “Did I get drunk last night and deposit a string of arbitrary numbers into my checking account? That’s something only a goddamn imbecile might do! What the hell is wrong with me? I deserve to be behind bars!” But then a cool wave of relief washes over me as I remember that I had been nowhere near a bank the night before, only staggering sloppily through the thoroughfares in between bars with quarters and dimes wrestling in an insolvent battle at the bottom of my pockets.

I wipe my eyes and look again…same number. Same enormous amount of ducats heaping in my bank account. Me. The guy who eats once a day to save money; the guy who revels in the random food hookups in sketchy alleys and who has been reduced to drinking Hamm’s while publicly deriding the plight of the local bum from his apartment overlooking the City Plaza. Scrolling down, I notice, finally (things had begun to twirl in slow-motion long ago…the 25 seconds since I’d stifled a guffaw seem more like an hour) the culprit: A wayward deposit from the day before for the sum of $646,495.00. I snoop the deposit details from the user-friendly interface and discover that the offender is not the depositor, but the depositee (i.e. the bank), for there is but one number difference, at the very end, from my account number to this unknown man’s.

One mis-entered numeral from a bank teller, and I went from despondent 20-something charity case, to confused, rich and suddenly scheming mound of criminal skin and bones.

End Draft

The saga continues...but some things are more important:

Short Story Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story I was writing, and which I've now abandoned temporarily (gotta pay the bills). It takes places as a journal entry from a freshly independent (sort of, he's been orphaned) guy who's hesitant of everything and suspicious that everyone he's ever known has been lying to him about everything he's ever heard. I just haven't posted anything in a while, and to those 2 or 3 of you who actually read my blog, thought you might be interested. I'll try to finish the story soon, possibly for this writing contest I'll probably lose.


Dream Journal Entry 64: Suicide by Spider
I'm in a bathroom. I fumble around the medicine cabinet for a while before I find them, reading labels, deciphering elongated physicians' babble and looking for just the right touch of morbidity to splash in my hand and throw down my throat. I was hoping for something red because I thought that if I took enough of the stuff, I'd start to foam at the mouth and that crimson might offer up the most shocking hue to fit the mood...but the pills were white, like most pills. I didn't know this, and didn't really care once I realized the fact; but regardless, ever since I could remember, I always hated taking pills anyway, white or otherwise. This seemed to be the genius with this course of action. To say that I was attempting this abhorrent cry for help purely for my own bizarre experiment — to analyze whether or not I had the stones to cast the first stone on myself, for the purposes of forging a new path toward identifying the lengths I'd travel for my quasi-suicidal obsessions by subjecting my own brain and life to them — well...it seemed to me, logically, a stroke of pure Einsteinian poetry. It appeared to me, theoretically, as the kind of thing that garners the bestowing of some international prize for brilliance. It was going to be the cornerstone of my maturity into a devious but respected career, one that would seem to critics and colleagues in the field of non-licensed psychology as, technically, "risky," but ultimately hugely beneficial to the evolution of the school of human emotion. Or maybe it was, actually, just a kid in a medicine cabinet with a broken heart. (Why does my heart heave?)
I knew that my girlfriend at the time (who was she?) would have had some kind of capsule to aid her in sleep. I am about 18, I guess, in the dream, and wrestling with the silent slings of sorrow found within someone who's walked in on his lover — at our shared apartment, on my bed — banging guts with someone else. It's a vivid image, but I'm sure it's happened. You'd think I'd have encountered this fabled scenario later in life when I was a middle-aged, hair-plugged desk jockey for a crumbling insurance firm with a Porsche parked in the lot; but alas, sometimes life speeds things up. I couldn't have blamed her. I've been known to bother zombies with the lawnmower pull-cord ritual that passes for my nightly respiratory activities. Dreams don't care how old you are.
I find the cylinder that espoused the longest ingredients and purported triggering of pharmaceutical wizardry, decode the hospital jargon (though I didn't read anything, I just knew...) that professed that the pill would make me drowsy, and then suddenly feel myself hesitate. There seemed to be a chink in the armor, a rabbit-like trance ensuing like when danger's near and instantly there's no direction to run that seems absolutely safe.
Looking around the bathroom, I begin to take note of my surroundings, sort of acclimating myself, I suppose, to the weight of the gift of free will on human boys fresh out on their own with a gal pal in tow. Could it be all that bad? Could she have simply been confused and drunk in this mirage, and thought that she was actually riding me like Barbaro in a mad dash to the finish line at Churchill Downs?
So go the hazes of a man gut-shot by a woman, even in dreams. So focuses my eyes to trivial things on the wall. (There's a rustle behind the drywall, like a trapped rodent beating its head against the studs.)
I see the seashell pendant that I'd given her, which my mother had given to me to give to her, which my grandmother had given to her to give to someone, anyone else, really, as long as it was out of her bulging ruby- and pearl-bulged jewelry boxes. I see a sloping claw foot bathtub. I hear my dog (I don't have a dog...) snooping its sniffity snout all along the bottom crevice of the bathroom door, begging with weak, bitchy whimpers for me to open up and pet her, probably sensing that I was doing something ill-advised and hoping her preciousness and innocence might rouse me from my ruse (that or she was scoping out a brand new corner of the house to shit in). Corners...
I thought of the time that I'd cornered my lover by the sink while she brushed her hair before the Christmas party; she was wearing a glittering turquoise party dress, the seashell pendant swung tenderly across her collarbone and dangled neatly between her breasts just above the low-cut neckline of the gown. She was about to affix an equally marine-colored corsage hair clip to the up-swirled do flanked on the left side of her mane when I stopped her to tell her how much I loved her. She smiled in the mirror at me, never turning around, never saying anything (with her mouth, anyway; I don't remember her face), just staring into the reflection of my eyes, blushing and looking more vulnerable and capable of submission to the love I'd paraded in front of her. She was capable. She knew it. She knew I could be the one who would take care of her, who'd caress her when she was somber, and who'd admonish her when she'd done something wrong to me; I could be the one who stuck it out and battled through this fork-and-knives life for a shot at some spoons on the other end. But she looked afraid. (I see a black widow now, descending down a silken thread from a new hole in the wall...that hole wasn't there a second ago. My chest hurts...) And behind that mirrored stare of hers, into the eyes of my reflection, was this bottle of pills resting even then, which I was now about to imbibe. To crush her. Finally. To make her feel. Forever.
I blink a quick daydreamer's blink (it's a nightmare... I know it now), winking out a swift and lonely tear that drizzled down to die on my bottom lip. (The spider is now the size of a small cat, swelling with an unknown bulge, hooked up in a lonely web next to the medicine cabinet...) I stare at myself for about five minutes into the mirror (five minutes in dream time, which felt more like an hour). Do nothing more than admire and repulse myself. Another two tears descend from my bottom eyelids and join the still-salty reserve of the first, creating a kind of crybaby bridge between my top and bottom lip. (The red hourglass on the belly of the beast is opening up like a pod, expelling smaller arachnids that form a line into a tiny opening in the frame of the medicine cabinet...marching like black-death brigadiers...why am I not reacting to them?...) I’m not necessarily sad or depressed, just ushering in that kind of apprehensive pout inherent in all the facing of new experiences; like swallowing a lump down your throat when you meet someone new — I'd never met this bottle before. (The host spider sits in stoic meditation, with thousands of eyes reflecting my furrow-browed gaze at it. I could swear it's smiling...)
When I figured I was ready, I shut off the light, light a candle (the mother spider squeals at the flame...) and turn on the faucet of the bathtub so if someone comes home, they'll think I’m indulging in a late-night soak. (There are noises, like keys on a typewriter coming from within the cabinet...) I write a note. It’s a list of the people I'd miss if I didn't wake up (from the pills in the dream, anyway), and a reasoning for why I think this was such a monumentally inspiring thing to do. (The cabinet begins to shake and pop with what sounds like popcorn, blackened ooze, syrup-thick, seeps from the cracks in the door of the cabinet...) I pop the lid off the bottle, up-end it into my mouth (the bottle was nearly full and consisted of about 40 or so pills) and crunch down the drowse-riddled devils. Their bitterness mixes with the salty rim of my lips and reminds me, briefly, of opening my mouth in the ocean for the first time and tasting all the fish. (A torrent of tiny black widow offspring shoots from the exploded door, some halved as if they've been given live autopsies. They lunge in one huge black cloud of terror right into my face, and I claw and gnash at them with what I come to realize are long, razor-sharp fingernails. Their black blood and my blood mix together and my face begins to erupt into plumes of acidic smoke. I try to scream, but my mouth is filled with them. I look into the empty cylinder of the pill bottle and see only little black legs, spider parts, black ooze, sour smells.)
I stare at myself for about five minutes into the broken mirror, my face contorted like a splintered Van Gogh, rivulets of purple goo road-mapping an otherwise calm visage.

Thrift Ticker (What Happens in a Recession Makes You Real Again)

Down the estate sale, refuse rows I walk, where everything smells like a sneeze, and the only things worth my patronage might take weeks to unearth. The hardbacks loom with sky-high tags and gutter-gloom titles; the keystrokes of only the most saturated serial novelists weighing the foreverness of a secondhand shelf to the pompous or the poor (it's tough to tell, most often).
The treasures frown behind a locked glass case, victims of a thoughtless throwaway or desperate pack rat purging. Everything looks sad; everything has a story, a life of its own, a memory shining in the flickering closet dawn of a mind too willing to forget.

The smart trousers ding-dangle on the edge of a clipper hanger, trying to hide in a thicket of slacks, belaboring the grip and tug and pull of another voyeur vagabond to stretch and tease their limits. (The red-stickered sale denims know that the crimson appendage they've been bequeathed spells doom for their waistbands; who wouldn't want size 34 501s for $3?) To be cast aside a second or third time (doomed for the landfill after four) the ultimate fray in a threadbare, boot-cut nightmare ("Those denims have eyes," you think. "Them buttons, they cry and bleed with every pudgy finger smudge.")
All the sad picture frames full of strangers, for the lonely to hang in their homes, creak and splinter, specters staring with lost eyes and yellowed complexion, no smiles, old clothes, marked for death, watching from the cart-clogged aisles their wardrobes fondled. Not one of the bleeding pairs of eyes (no buttons, real eyes) could be attached to someone tall, for no shoe size measured within these walls eclipses 11, and so I go barefoot forever (and secretly believe that having larger feet equals larger heart equals longer life). And every waistband's Humpty Dumpty girth means the appetites of the dead or purging surely beat my own.
Dog-eared hare plush spits an alkaline spark to a crooked 9-volt beat in a sea of toys, twitching a tourette break dance in the company of his inanimate peers, juking semi-circles 'gainst the bargain bin bears and cubs like a meth-head Haight Street panhandler on the make. Twitch, twitch, slide, fidget, futile begs for snooty connoisseurs, their helium heads already cloaked a morbid black within the jaws of the generous equine.
The vases stand full of perfume. The candle's wick hollows half-mast a phallic Virgin Mary. The heroin kid down the turntable aisle neglects to note the irony of lamenting the absence of the needle, and another skims the records for hidden tracks.
Cyclical. Figure-eights. Grooves in the Bread records spiral to the center and stop, and skip, and fuzz-hum to a stuttered thump, like the world outside these walls; like the walls within every wondrous life ping-ponging within my view.

The Land of Stinging Nettles

After snaking through the arbor tunnel, greeting waves with a tall, gray-haired man with some sort of tribal sword tattoo inked on the right side of his neck, talking on a cell phone, we circle a small welcome grove to come upon the den-home of Mandeja. I've never been to such an instantly awe-striking dwelling. After traipsing up the stone walkway to the front door, you're suddenly socked by a sun-room study with window-ledge reading/lounging bed, the whole ceiling a grid of windows and new, unpainted crossbeams, travel books erupting from a Vesuvius corner shelf, seashells and ships in bottles adorning the sills, string lights lining the doors and the smell of new wood.
It's nestled in the northwest portion of Puget sound, surrounded by woods of tall, naked-trunked trees, redwoods and firs, ferns, all manner of budding floral growth and something called a "Stinging Nettle," which I'm told to avoid for obvious reasons. Dragonflies have already taken an interest in my scent, and probably seethe with the intrusive plumes of cigarette smoke I exhale into the frigid, starlit dusk.
Up one small step through a door to the left of the entrance is situated the living quarters, which consists of another window-flanked day bed, a clotheslined row of matching gardening gloves hanging by clothespins from three branch support beams running vertically, and a dining table fashioned from a knotted plank of glossed wood in the corner.
There is no TV, no computer, no contemporary gadgets of any sort save for an antiquated CD player with a bold collection of salsa, calypso, blues, folk and Latin reggae albums to its left, the tones of which serve only the more to levitate this wooden jewel to loftier bravado. Like a magic pyre jutting from the ashes of a genocide, or a secret gingerbread home where Hansel and Gretel surely must have inhabited at some point - a Tolkeinian hallucination fathomed only in dreams and with total disregard for the whims of dirty white men living in the emerald castles across the Sound into Seattle.
The air hangs like muggy clouds in a terrarium haze to hide the sheets of sunlight, while wild hares sit idly in the fever-green meadow lawn, thinking of nothing, never blinking, never rooting around, just being in the no-nothingness of a twirling forest world.
The cottage Mandeja's built is almost too perfect. Nestled just north of the main house, its flanked by a garden with snapdragons, slug-tailed prehistoric foliage and salmonberry bushes. There's a quaint shaded staircase that leads to a cold porch with a table and two lonely chairs. The resident renting the abode is out, so I peak through the window-grid door to find an empty Bohemian living area; a mysterious tome at the spine rests on the coffee table in front of a trippy day bed davenport. Around the back, I can see the staircase to the loft bedroom, from which the thicket mesh of cloudy island fog and camouflage-fragrant woods kiss their reflections in the mirror.


Through the forest blockade to the rear of the cottage lay jungle trails, swampy, soupy paths more often matted by the hooves of deer than by size 13 Asics. John the woodworker whistles while he whittles away his day, giving refuge to veining, wooded routes, in some spots speckled with functional gypsy wagons; in some spots muddled by foot-long diameter fungi. The scent is like being born again.
By now I know already that the whisper-leave hush I hear is tempered resolution - the hominid vulnerability, tranquil untouched microbe husk in real-time dying woods, with gasps of cackling motor boats chugging from the capitalist cuneiformia to Asia and the Bering Strait as reminders to the necessity (disease) of distraction in the name of progress. Their foghorns honk, gasoline-spewing engines push the hulking steel through the salty waves, cutting fish in half, killing crucial oceans by insistence of the dollar, yet still we watch, in awe, and listens with paws cupped 'round our ears to the orchestra of powerful, catapulting evolution in the old Sound dissonance. It's a give and take, always. You take the sweet with the sour every day of your life.
Further west, where those old cargo vessels float toward but can't continue past, the apocalypse manifests with an invisible roar, genocides that are hidden to the States rage free and clean like the flows of an impenetrable lava, burning everything in sight, in path, with zero defense, therefore zero concern. The ancient wars explode into myths, then legends, then reality, and back again in a cylindrical assembly belt - blood as lubrication for the cogs, pride siphoned for power, death as the final stickered product. But if no one sees it - if it's marketed poorly or there's simply no capital with which to burst its hype, we're not buying. Darfur. Sudan. Israel. These wars are waged on principles that people who live in glass houses would never examine. Nest-egging shatter-proof walls seems safer. Everything boils down to love, anyway. Unfortunate are the myriad avenues to fail at it.
But back in Langley, the cold black streets creak with every footstep, tease the foundation floor off the coasts of Whidbey Island in the vast expanse Utopia off the western shores. You need a ferry ride to get there, and an open mind to stay. It's littered only with the misty stench of drooping sea, fragrant redwood Pitney trails and the loaded nostalgia of a seaport villa - like an Under Milk Woodian mirage just a quarter-turn globe spin away; Dylan Thomas' eyes closed forever before setting their thinning, bloodshot maculas on this treasure. When the tide is low, summoned by the stubbornness of the swiss cheese moon, you can wander 200 yards into the swampy water world of stinky seaweed and hermit crab castles, cordoned, of course, to a point by the waterfront real estate parallel posted to keep the tourists from the talent. It's a sad, romantic strip of road serving as the cultural epicenter of this mostly unnerving miasma, but as with almost any island community, its endearment is measured in its quaintness, rather than any contemporary elegance.
Seagulls perch and squeal atop any and all forms of precipice; earthy throwback activists with dreadlocks and rainbow-dyed T-shirts saunter and sip soy-based libations, and cradle organically crafted local wares as symbols of status in the dithering horizon shadows of the Space Needle skyline across the wavy sea. Garbage hides not in crooked corners or guttered walks waiting for street cleaners to sweep away the guilt, but in the proper waste receptacles; spendy vessels teeter by the docks, moored by a love of the shackle-free dominance of their resilience and a totalitarian bondage as useful lodging and transportation vehicles rather than gleaming trophies for insecure mainland putz exhibitionists; and the children skip and breathe fresh air, cradling soppy ice cream cones between their sticky fingers, laughing, bedazzled in the kind of wonderment of the world you'd be hard-pressed to duplicate in the clogging, smoggy fog of a major metropolis.
A thousand threatening redwoods couldn't break this enchanting post. A million bolts of lightning couldn't forge a dent in its mystique. A hundred days of rain would never drown the din of its silent, peaceful majesty. I don't think I've ever visited a more wonderful place in my life.