Beg, Borrow, Beg - NYE Solitude with a Party Upstairs

Pulses bloom downward, rooting rotten through the spongy floorboards, moaning with the thrill of the squeaks in the wood. A mealy mouthed auteur burps monosyllabic over gentle monsoons of breakneck chords, feebly channeling the smart sensations ever-present in a lucid dream-state catatonia. Then in bleed the beats, rudimentarily, phosphorescent pill-popper plunks, riding a generia of melody right through the walls, into the foundations, squeezing the screws from their ancient slumbers in the beams, oozing 16-penny nails from their mausoleums, to reverberate into the tunnels under the street on 46^th Avenue, where gooey worms wiggle blindly in the dark, androgynous, safe, until the fleeting sleet tricks them to come up for air. The sidewalks are lined with a layer of petrified maggots teased by the subtle sensations coaxed by these lurid tones. It’s completely unfair. I wish this music would stop.

But it’s New Year’s Eve, 2011. And here sit I thinking underneath the thuds upon the modes by which a less hellish 2012 might be possible. A year anew whereby vivid epiphanies could bloom up and out, over, far away beyond the arbitrary handcuff, ham-fisted chaos so easily foisted on everyone else. A big beautiful, prolific succession of days, carefree and fun, bordered not by a false declaration under veil of poisoned veins, and gin, and tobacco, and whatever other sinister toxin holocaust of the human brain conjures a feigned “resolution.” So be it, then, that this document might at least attempt to paint a less clustered vision of the ways in which I may occupy the next 12 months locked inside my limping, dying corpse. An explosion of passionate embraces ought be awarded anyone who needs, or cares to need a reason such as the forward-succession of a number on an endlessly narcoleptic cock-tease calendar to improve a largely ignored existence, or to evolve in tiny increments the daily rigors of shame and hate they inflict upon themselves.

I. Carry over resolutions from 2011, and dare myself to break them again.

II. Publish something other than journalism pieces, i.e. my broken attempts at grounded fiction/poetry.

III. Learn to cook foods Sarah likes enough to request at least twice a week.

IV. Attend symphonies, operas, ballets and theater more often for acute opportunities to dress up and institute looming braggadocio and acceptance of getting older and wiser of the world’s gems.

V. Take my cat to the vet, and take myself to the optometrist, dentist, doctor, dermatologist, and a barber.

VI. Take long hikes in Forest Park in the spring and listen to the leaves swish in the wind.

VII. Mystify close acquaintances by virtue of melancholy introspection and intense spells of brooding on accident while drinking gin in my basement.

VIII. Barter clothes with Zach Ahern via U.S. Postal Service to revamp the dirt-cheap industry and save a small town.

IX. Collaborate with some of my more creative friends to play music, engage in art projects, trade writing, or otherwise engage in civil discourse via heretofore unknown mediums.

X. Do, think, be absolutely nothing when it’s necessary.

On Being Unemployed in the New Millennium – Week One: The Profundity of Parfaits and the Cold Reality of the Quesadilla

Friday, January 6: The trick is to reconcile the weight of knowing you really don’t have to do much, what with your unemployment check en route, and your supplemental side-job income piling up. Eschew the populist notion that to work is to be saintly. Your obedience to this ethos undermines the stone-cold law you must remember: Oh, how much you deserve this big break from the grind of things. They treated you like a worm, never forget (always remind yourself regardless of the truth). Androgynous you, snooping beak-blind in the tunnels of your office building, they never visiting your little dim-lit nest, the little blue room — naturally a supposed calming color that in fact has been known to increase the likelihood of ferocious, vivid depression. Ha! A worm?! Would a worm know that?! — where all the production happened and all your real dreams stood aside waiting for the passing of another deadline. You owe it to yourself to stress the liberation of an existence exponentially devoid of typical responsibility. You stress your malaise with the whole situation and secretly wonder when someone (an employer) will come find you and whisk you away again to grind and writhe and wriggle in another temple of toil.

The trick then, really, is to pretend you don’t care very much about your job status, and to take pleasure in the hobbies you’ve accrued outside of a normal working schedule. The trick within that is to mask your concern — once you realize your hobby-pleasure is antithetically false — for the gravity of the realization that since these were hobbies accrued in the scant hours outside of your normal working schedule, you haven’t really given them the proper synaptic outlets, or fostered, perhaps, or unlocked the hidden talents through which you’ll truly capitalize on the practice or employment of these hobbies. But when/if you realize you’re just not that good at the aforementioned hobby, or that it turns out devoting more than an hour or so to it per night between coming home from work and going to sleep before going back to work again is just overkill, or when/if the guilt comes from the shock of truncated income and you need to try, if only for a moment, to do some real boots-on-the-ground job huntin’, why then you understand in the fullest sense possible that this may be one trick you don’t know how to execute.

So long, three-card-monte adventure on Hawthorne. We will find each other again…

Week one of joblessness, laid-offness, discardedness, fuckedoverness is like making a homemade parfait. You get everything ready — your fruits, of which blueberries ought to be included, because they’re brain food, as well as your yogurt and your granola, and then whatever other embellishments you care to add — and set it all out in front of you on the counter with a modest bowl-vessel to hold it in. On the cutting board; make sure you’re doing the dirty work with a cutting board. You begin your peeling of the bananas, or the cutting of the apples, or the chopping of the pear, the sprinkling of the raisins, utilizing the cutting board, fetching the granola, studying the probability that maybe you have too many things going on for this particular parfait. I mean, how much fruit can a person eat at one sitting and not shit themselves immediately afterward? And if you pile all that yogurt on top of even a fraction of that fruit mountain you’ve assembled, the subsequent application of granola is just gonna spray all over the counter, likely onto the floor, where the cherry-eyed Dachshund will sniff it out and lick it to death before realizing it doesn’t like granola, necessitating your bare-fingered clean-up of Dachshund-licked, dead granola on a sticky kitchen floor. In the end, you say fuck the whole thing, Tupperware all the fruit and the yogurt, re-pantry the granola, and make a goddamn quesadilla because it’s easier.

Getting everything ready in your head, or on your desk, or on the cutting board, or wherever, for how you’re going to receive and react to your newfound unemployed status is a process that, at least in week one, is, as an unfortunate dupe of a Longmont Potion Castle prank call put it in a completely unrelated retort, “all blow and no show.” Lots of bravado, little noise. Lots of pacing, getting nowhere. Lots of fits and starts. Lots of zoning out and being miserable at the sheer thought of having to sell yourself to someone so you can eat. Or buy bullshit you like.

Sigh, and harrumph, and ugh. I’m gonna make a quesadilla.

I, Intercontinental

All I want to do is to climb a mountain, fucking bellow some cock-eyed diatribe improv production mile-high to the waxen ears of the horizon. Some half-baked, quarter-stewed myth unto my clumsy brood of stupid, sluggish, piecemeal gang of bums. Because we all need a little shelter from the cloaking clang-clang harangues of our fathers. Something that makes sense to us.

We don’t need flowers in our hair.

We need to plant a bomb in our beards.

We need a revolution of the ruse and the rivulet.

And incentives glimmer in the dewy sheen of our dangling carrots, betrothed and bewildered we lurch and heed, live and breathe, lie and hang our hats in stranger’s homes, walk in puddles to die a transient death, cuddle our own biceps to sleep, and preen our oily hair to tufts, and muster up the profundities inherent in total confusion, like a rhino in a hat, or a toothless lion in sub-Saharan lands.

Oh how I loathe you, Europe, for smashing all my brains into a soup, for stewing the pickle of my fickle heart, for feeding my dirty eyes a supper of ancient streets, for ladling the scents of leather boots, and pomade, and cigarettes, and brittle skeletons of a thousand wars into my sensitive protuberance and not allowing me to visit.

Oh but I hate you, Australia, even more, for stealing the sanctity of dreams for dreaming’s sake, for Outbacking my Central Valleys, for kangarooing my brown bears, for g’daying my hellos, for Sydneying my San Franciscos, for wiling my love to tread on crocodile miles in the bush, to read in foreign suns, to hike a crimson hill and blush at the winking, sinking sun, to forget me wholly and finally as that sun drops to blacken her nights and to begin my day anew and not allow me to interfere.

But how I love you, Portland, for sticking your sore thumbs out to welcome even thieves, for pounding hail upon your slacker hack intruders to test the mettle of a generation broke and bored, for making the most of the marriage of melting pot Multnomah, for bridging the poor idealisms of the east to the bourgeois has-beens of west in solidarity, for Tabor, the last of the primeval volcanoes grumbling in a land that knows no heartbreak.

And how my heart breaks for you, Portland, to choke your skies with clouds year-round, to shield your roses, to soak your sons with rain, to fool us all that somewhere else is where we want to be, when we know full well your sleeping sun is yearning to reward us, and to treat me like a little king in every way.

Operation: Eavesdrop Entry #1

When you were little, at some point you probably thought you could play professional baseball. What was the turning point in which you realized you were not skilled enough to play at that level?

One of my earliest memories involves the wielding of a truncated red plastic baseball bat around the expanses of my front yard in Redding. The thing was a "bat" in the sense that it slightly resembled the shape of one, though closer appeared as a dime-store caricature of Bam Bam's wooden club. I would have likely been content with a tree branch, the garden hose or a piece of rebar, but the big-little bat made such a thwump! when you connected that the accompanying thwump! in my chest endeared me to an early bond with the cosmic delight in making things happen with my own body, will and power. There was an oversized white plastic ball to go with it, replete with useless raised "stitches" and no holes. I don't know how much time I spent heaving the ball up with my right hand and swinging left-handed into the chain link fence that surrounded our tiny patch of land on Bond Street in the Enterprise area of town (an area I'd later regard as a pod of the worst kind of woe-is-me white entitlement refuse. The streets near Bond would eventually jibe more with reports of violent assaults, Noriegaesque drug busts and baffled garage salers wondering why no one was manning the piles of discarded junk in the lonely lawns). I remember vaguely not being allowed to stay outside for long, as the twitchy stroll of some fucked-up druggy inched ever-closer, or the emergence of steamy windows in the van parked across the street yielded orders to come back inside.

But I used my time wisely as a kid, and was rarely seen without some kind of baseball cap atop my head and continued practicing when I could. It wasn't until I was maybe four years old that I realized I was right-handed, and the impact of that discovery blazed a lopsided trail through my senior year at Anderson Union High School in 1998. Having suddenly the focused, coordinated wherewithal to hit a ball consistently and with pretty awesome accuracy, I recall diving headfirst into the hubris of someday becoming a professional baseball player. And what a dream that is! How focused and how pure! How universal and how necessary! What spirit it stirred in my prepubescent head! So much so, in fact, that I have no fucking idea how I ended up playing tee-ball for the Shasta Dam Area Little League. I was drunk with determination, though until that time, I'd never really played baseball with a team - an allusion referenced here with regret for a still-lingering affliction for perfection in myself. If I'm in control, everything works. Everyone's happy. The process has a predetermined result of indomitable accuracy and infallible meaning. I have no concept of a team, still, and don't know if I should.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My first year of organized sports saw me lottery-picked onto the impossibly named "Artesians" tee-ball team. Our uniforms were red, with red mesh hats, red stirrups, white pants. The hats, in particular, were comically huge on our little seven-year-old domes, and implored demeaning observations that we looked "soooo cute!" I fucking hated it. And I always forgot my pants, so I'd wear blue jeans. And nobody cared because, I think even then, everyone knew that everyone in the Shasta Dam Area Little League was poor, and that the Prado family, for all its known prowess in athleticism, its natural gravitation toward music, were one of the poorest families in town. We got by on our senses of humor, too, but mostly we were each given golden tickets out of the neo-Dust Bowl milieu of Project City either by playing music, or playing baseball. Before there was much of a tangible interest in the dalliances of John Lennon, there was the tactile worship of Will Clark.

That first year, I hit 15 home runs off of the tee, and I think we only played 10 games. It's not a figure I boast about often, for obvious reasons, but at the time I was convinced I was some sort of deity, planted for kicks by a woolly world hell-bent on making me feel apart from instead of part of. My translucent Pat Morita-style spectacles skiing down the face of my undeveloped proboscis, I would trot out to home plate, take my hack, watch that ball shrink high above the manzanita-red hills by the Indian reservation across the street until it plopped into the shitty gravel lot. Though the tin stands stomped their chorus of approval, I ran alone. Though my coach greeted me at home plate, I crossed it alone. In the dugout, in the flurry of seven-year-olds scared to death of baseballs, leering at me for the audacity of my aptitude, I sat alone and wondered what it'd be like to stop being the asshole. Because of this, for everything I ever did right, I four-fold absorbed it as being wrong.

Aside from making every other player on my team feel like jackasses for not being as good as I was (as if that were my fault), I had also recently skipped 2nd grade for being able to do long division in the first week, and was also placed in the Gifted and Talented Education (G.A.T.E.) program at Toyon Elementary School. I didn't really have a chance.

If donning enormous, Japanese-karate-instructor glasses hadn't parsed me off the norm, the straight As did. If my developing interest in devouring every book in my path - and winning the Book-a-thon Competition every year for the whole school - wouldn't single me out for ridicule, the crotch-torn blue jeans would. There's no way a kid from Central Valley can stand out and get away with it. So over time I chose to blend in. Pretending to be stupid, that I wasn't good at sports or didn't care, made me happier than I'd ever been. But it was a fine line to toe.

Just after that first year of tee-ball, I had my adult front tooth dislodged from my gums by a childhood friend a year or two older. Standing much too close to him to have been pitching - he using an aluminum bat and me lobbing him a hardball I wasn't used to - my mouth, confidence, and trust in my abilities all changed forever. I still wear a retainer.

But since that time, my physical stability has been nearly Herculean. I have never broken a bone, nor have I knocked on wood. I'd a permanent fat lip, permanent dentures and an even worse permanent self-image than ever, but the seeds of folly never permanently took root. Fittingly, I moved on to farm league baseball (Pythons), then tried out as a nine-year-old for the 9-12 year old league - the "major" league - of which only about 10 actual nine-year-olds would make it. Each team had maybe one younger sprout and a bunch of seasoned veterans to round out the squad. My tryouts were - unsurprisingly to me, surprising to everyone else - successful, and I was selected by the Pirates, a team coached by Steve Ray, father to Ricky Ray, who was years later a sought-after quarterback by the 49ers (he ended up in the Canadian Football League where he's won three Grey Cup titles and is one of the premier players in the game). But in 1990, he was just another freckled, greenhorn second-base fucker who didn't know anything about anything except that he wanted to please his dad. He never talked to me, setting an example that would be followed to the last cold-shoulder letter by everyone else on the team. In fact, I have absolutely no memory of speaking to any of those people, and being the only nine-year-old on the team, I rarely did anything but warm up the right fielder in between innings, chew bubblegum, and watch the stands to see if my dad would show up. I have absolutely zero memory of that happening either. But I do remember this...

During a game with the league's best team, the Indians, whose dominance sprung almost exclusively from the right pitching arm of an intimidatingly large black 12-year-old named Ty Young - one-third of a brother trio (not that way) who would go on to essentially dominate every sport all through high school and beyond all over the county - something incredible happened. Ty's fastball was my first observance of perfection, or at least a semblance of it. I could never quite see its movement, save for a trail of white-and-red cometing into - and almost perpetually popping out of - the catcher's mitt. Everybody lunged with futility, eyes no doubt cinched down with gooey kiddie tears, hitting nothing but the mosquitoes surrounding home plate - their inevitable accumulation being the result of ankle-deep puddles 10 yards away at the base of the concrete water fountain.

We were getting our fucking asses kicked all over the place by Ty's blinding fastball, and toward the end of the game, after a towering two-run homer by Ty essentially drove the spikes into our coffin, the team, and most notably Ricky, started to mope with exaggerated despair in the face of The One. After about the third time Ricky struck out looking - something decidedly abnormal, rest assured - Coach Steve removed his erstwhile star-seed from the lineup at the beginning of the sixth inning (the final) and put me in to fill his spot. It was not only the first game I'd been put in to play that year, but also the first time Ricky had been taken out of a game during our season. Between innings, looking dejected, Ricky gave me a quick glance as his dad told him the switch, then sat down gloomily on the dilapidated wooden bench in the dugout. I ran out, forgetting every aspect of the fundamentals of the game as I trotted into the bright lights to tens of onlookers, and plopped myself at second base.

I'd like to think something happened during that half-inning, me out in the wiles of the field I'd until then only practiced long-toss in. But I don't think it did.

We had last ups against the formidable Ty in that last inning, and wouldn't you know it? I was fourth up. Which meant that if the three assholes ahead of me would simply have frozen in their loopy stances and not removed their bat from their shoulders, I could have sat "on the ball" - as they call it - watched them all blow it, and at least reveled in my name being added to the lexicon of active players for once. But the first person up - someone named Joe or Jon or something, whom I only remember for his unfortunate kid mullet - was hit ever-so-slightly on the arm by a wayward Ty Young fastball (I doubt he threw any other way but hard). Now, unless there was a double play, I would be batting against Ty. Me. 4'9" tall and weighing some 100 pounds. Ty. Probably 5'7" and 120 pounds of dynamite-arm. Fuck. I thought of Ralph Macchio going up against the Cobra Kai, how badly that turned out at first, and readjusted my specs atop my nose.

As expected, my next two teammates embarrassed the sport, and themselves, and struck out looking. What the fuck is wrong with these bastards?! I opined (I'd a sailor's tongue long before it's considered for a man to be justified). I would now have to be the last player to bat, ostensibly. I must have Spock-transported to the batter's box; I don't remember how I got there. I only remembered the sound of the gasp of the coaches and bystanders as the teeny plunk! of Ty's first fastball grazed the mullet-kid's arm, then the heavy breathing of my lungs inside my own head. Suddenly, I was there, where everyone else had been, trying to avoid eye contact with Doc Gooden.

I didn't even see the first pitch Ty threw, but I swung anyway, fouling it off straight behind home plate. I knew enough then to know if you fouled the ball off directly behind you, you were on it, only slightly not on it, which was more than close enough for me. A whoop! of electric applause erupted from the stands and inside my dugout for my brush with trumping the immortal Ty! No one had touched him all night long. I smiled a little bit. So did Ty. He was so much bigger than me, so much older. It was one of those smiles - mine anyway - that was so injected with giddiness that it wouldn't go away. Little tears formed in the corners of my eyes, happy ones, for knowing I wasn't expendable. I realized then that I'd already beaten him.

But the count was only 0-1.

The next pitch whizzed toward my ankles, and I only had time enough to bunny-hop two inches before the ball skipped underneath my cleats. My smile evaporated. Ty scowled. I suddenly realized that someday I would die. And then it happened.

With the count 1-1, Lemmy Kilmister on first base and me now knock-kneed and pussified, I greeted Ty's third steaming-hot fastball with a wicked thwump!, sending the ball zinging (sssssssssssssss) into right center field for a base hit. I was so excited I almost forgot to run, the thwump! cascading in rolling arches in my chest, and made it just in time to first after a relay from the outfield. I absorbed the waves of adulation like a houseplant being spritzed with water. A thunder befell the echoes in the stands. I wondered if this was how Will Clark felt all the time.

The people watching the game knew what had happened; my coach knew what had happened; and most importantly, I knew what had happened. I'd defeated the powerful Ty, if only that one time. That the next kid struck out to end the game didn't matter.

From then on, I treated baseball only slightly differently. Incensed at the competitiveness of the sport and the unfair popularity of local family legacies, while also having been imbued with the skills to execute knuckle-curves at above-average levels despite no name recognition, I would perform only as much as I cared in that moment. I would not look beyond that game, that pitch, that swing, that call, unless I actually gave a shit in that moment. The moment I drove a base hit off Ty Young, I was convinced special places were destined for my future. And the moment I realized that, I knew those places didn't have to feature ball gloves, sliding pants, Louisville Sluggers or umpires. My future was being written with every new experience I could deign to endeavor.

The next day, I put on my generic white sneakers, the hole-y jeans, the pit-stained white T-shirt, the Pat Morita glasses and the cap, and went back to school. I took out my book about the Wintu Indians, whose spirited bones sunk deep below me, forgotten beneath the asphalt foundations of my homeroom trailer, and read deeply of the ways to build a fire out of flint, sticks and roiling friction. No one at my school uttered a word about my triumph over Ty. As I read on, I noted in the margins the obviousness of the notion that you can, in fact, start a fire without a spark.

AFTERTHOUGHT

It's ironic, I suppose, that I'm reminiscing on my days playing baseball, now a journalist, struggling to find anything worth caring about in the fleeting tom-tom world, while currently donning a throwback Oakland A's practice jersey and intermittently checking Spring Training updates. The question posed for this essay wasn't "Why did you stop playing baseball?" but what the turning point for me was in realizing I didn't have the skills to play at that level. The answer is, with the proper quotient of humility, I'm not convinced I absolutely didn't have the skills to play at that level. I simply became less interested in running base drills and laps and more interested in girls, music, literature and girls. In that order, with very little variation.

I have no idea whether or not I'd have ever been good enough to make the Major Leagues, but I do know that based on instincts and athleticism alone, not to mention a pretty goddamn good throwing arm, had I actually given a shit anymore I could have probably gone into a later stage of the game. If even a semi-professional team. As my brother Noah will attest, by the time I attempted to revisit the baseball diamond at age 27 for his semi-pro NorCal Pirates, I simply didn't have the drive to succeed at it anymore. It was just something to do. It wasn't who I was anymore.

I know I still have a better arm than some Major League players. And that's enough for me.

Operation: Eavesdrop

Dearest Friends,

In an effort to dust off the cobwebs of an unforgiving winter spent cowering underneath a heating blanket watching reruns of Peep Show, I want to embark on a new literary project. While I’ve been plugging away at several drafts of different short stories, poetry collections, and even a few misguided attempts at novels (not there yet) for years now, I’ve always had a problem with perseverance when it comes to my own literary ambitions. It could be because I already write for a living and when I come home, the last thing I want to do is spelunk into the nether regions of my brain to unearth some (hopefully) ripened nugget of wisdom. It could be because I have issues with limitations. Either way, I’m tired of having stacks of dusty journals staring angrily at me from my desk; tired of coming home and realizing that since I spent all day in an office writing about politics that I can’t think of anything beautiful; and most of all tired of simply not writing outside of work as often as I did only two years ago.

When I moved to town, I was broke, starving, and super fucking bored. So to try and stir the ice a bit (or more than I already was…ahem), I asked some friends to give me a topic – any topic – and I would then write a 1,000-word essay on it and post it to my blog. It was an experiment for me to keep my literary appendages limber as much as it was a fun whatehaveyou for whoever gave me the topic (assuming they’d even bother checking it out later…). And while that sad undertaking yielded but one actual essay – regardless of the tens of ideas I received – I am now convinced that through the ever-inspiring majesty of my current circle of cohorts, I might be able to try this again.

So here’s what I want from you, if you’re interested: I am looking for topics from my friends that I will backlog and choose from every single day for the rest of this year to write at least a few paragraphs on, if not more, and add it to my blog in a series called “Operation: Eavesdrop.” These topics can be questions, one-word nouns, pop culture references, foodstuffs, animal coital positions, etc. – essentially, they can be anything. I’m not saying I’ll be commenting on whatever it is with any sort of expert perspective. I’m not even sure it will make sense, but I know it will get me thinking, and it will force me to write something brand new everyday aside from my cheap attempts at baffling chore codes in Sharpie on my left hand.

If a topic is a question, I’ll try and answer it. Otherwise, there are no rules for this. And, to set the record straight, I feel like a bit of a dunce asking you to help me think of things to write about, but honestly, I’d rather do this than focus solely on re-editing my old stories out of boredom and a work-stressed head.

So what do you say? Please send up to five topics to ryan.prado@gmail.com, and I will begin as soon as I have a nice batch to work with. I appreciate your assistance, and look forward to reading whatever crazy shit you derelict assholes come up with.

Sincerely,
Ryan J. Prado

Sayonara, 20s

This is what I looked like.

Red Wine Blues and Rubber Duckys

[Location: Delta, CA during Wes and Jenna Highfield's Wedding, perched on a bar while loud drunken discourse swirled around me and a bridesmaid threw up on Wes' cream-colored rental vest, September 18, 2010; also somewhere between Redding and Portland, OR September 20, 2010]

The blind's blades broke like bankrupt bureaucrats. The visage of venetians parted for vomit in the violent night, with train's cogs humming, with pain's moans moaning. But to the urgent bar back, bellows heckled, chuckled, hucks and sour beers hung in harangues of a groove-jam din. The mess we're in, huckleberry, greenhorn, wiggles, digs... and every flutter bleeds in a burlesque ballroom bed. The ringing of the bells in our heads will echo, fleck, wreck our sunrise with choo-choo stirrings of sleep in the Lakehead Delta dust.

...And I wake from that train track reverie into the snaking vestibules of the Coast Starlight, writhing north in this familiar trek back home to Portland. The space-black Monday gives way in shifts, slides in a hiccuping projector as my eyelids shutter-stutter, half-an-hour at a time. The sun comes first in faint promises of pink, illuminating a low, low fog in the valleys beyond the pass between California and the future.

I'm seated next to a crocheting grandmother whose charm lies in her willingness to share everything she's brought along for the trip. Cupcakes, cookies, crackers, Boston Baked Beans, assorted other candies. I decline these with several variations of "aw, no thanks," but accept her offer to pay for coffee if I go get it for the both of us. But this is all after I wake up. When we first sit down, I ignore her as I do anyone else attempting to commiserate via railway ramblings.

"If you get cold, feel free to drape this blanket here over your legs!" she says shortly after we take our seats in the dark coach car. "It's much too big for little old me."

I'm too tired to respond, and as of yet unaware of her relative sanity. But in the morning, with the young hick country kids howling in the lounge car, strumming horrendous renditions of Slayer songs and "Dueling Banjos" - as well as jockeying in decibel position the loftiest tolerances for whiskey in bogus Larry the Cable Guy impressions - we begin to chat. The "where ya headed? "Looks like rain!" "You ever been through this country before? There's a great Chinese restaurant here...at least it used to be here..." It's the typical discourse for a long-haul like this, and a position I dread being put in prior to boarding but secretly enjoy while I'm mired within it.

"I can churn out about 50 of these hats in a week's time," she boasts, fidgeting with burgundy and white yarns. She's crocheting hats for homeless youngsters, a program set up through her church, the warmth they'll provide destined for an impoverished nation of cold domes she can't quite now recall. "One of the one's by Mexico, I think."

"They're beautiful," I say and secretly mean it.

"Well, here then! Pick one!" she offers, fishing a finished beanie from her stressed snack bag. She'd apparently started and finished one while I dreamed. This one's greens and yellows, mellow hues for me, the mellow man trying to forget everything nice about the world. This gift serves no dual purpose, no bribe, no hidden meaning at all. It's just a hat made by a wonderful grandmother, destined, now, for me, an impoverished mellow man.

I never once looked her in the eyes. Told her I was a writer as she old-lady swooned and asked me my name so she could brag if I ever had anything published outside of magazines or newspapers.

"It's all a drop in the bucket," I tell her and dread to hear my own negativity.

I'm such a fucking defeatist. I'm such an asshole.

"You're gonna be just fine," she smiles, happy lines webbing the corners of where I should be seeing her eyes but cannot. "I've got a feeling about these things."

Someday, I want to accept a gift, a compliment, anything, and not wonder what I did to deserve it. Someday I want to give someone something and expect nothing in return.