Monthly Archives: January 2014

I’m not freaking out

Don’t tell me to stop freaking out. How about you stop freaking out? I’m not even freaking out. You think this is freaking out? You should see me when I’m really freaking out. Just, you chill out, all right? How about I won’t tell you to stop flailing your arms in the air if you don’t tell me to get down from this chair? Because I’m not getting down, not until we see where it went, it might still be in here.

There it is, I just saw it, I think it went underneath your jacket. Why didn’t you use the coat hangers? I’m just saying, if that thing gets in a pocket, if it’s pregnant, you’re going to take it home, it’s going to get in the walls, your walls, that thing’s going to multiply, fast, I think just one of them can carry enough genetic diversification to supply a dozen generation’s worth of population, that’s going to be some shit man.

And yeah, one little bug, that’s not such a big deal, but do you know what an infestation looks like? Seriously, you’re not going to have a free second man, you’ll see them on the walls, inside every pocket, you might as well get rid of those coat hangers now, too little, too late, they’re all going to get inside. And I hope you get used to shaking out your shoes before you put them on. You like that crunching sound? Or what if it’s a really small one, and so it just lives in there, hanging out in between your toes, you’ll be like, what’s that itch? What’s going on?

There it is! It’s right behind that box. Do you know how many of those little guys get carried around every day inside boxes just like that? It’s the corrugated material, you can fit like a whole city’s worth of bugs right inside one box. That’s why I don’t let any boxes inside my house. “Not so fast,” I always tell the UPS guy before he even has a chance to knock at the door. “Just leave it down the block. I’ll get to it.”

And I don’t care how many packages I miss out on, because you might get used to those trails of little baby bugs running from crack to corner, but what about the alpha bugs? Huh? Those giant ones that survive into old age, they’re like three, four inches big, I’ve seen a few of those a few times, they were everywhere at my old restaurant, like in the basement, there’d be puddles of standing water and I’d just see the shadows of their antennae from like five feet away.

No thanks, and you tell me stop freaking out, please, this is how it starts, I can’t believe you’re not pushing me off this chair, this is the safest spot in the room. Here’s a little tip. Throw out that jacket. Because yes, I did see it run from underneath your jacket over to that box, but how can we be sure that it was the same one? I mean, do you honestly think that there’s only one bug in this whole place?

No, there’s got to be hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. I think that’s like a rule, or a rule of thumb, it’s like for every one that you see, there’s got to be like a hundred thousand in the walls. I’m telling you, they’re bred to never get caught, most of these things go their whole lives without ever being seen by a person. But they’re there.

Throw out the jacket. I’m throwing out everything. I really don’t care what my neighbors think, because whatever it is they’ll say, they’ve probably already said it, calling me crazy. You get to like a block away from your house, you strip down out of all your clothes, I’m talking naked, I know it’s tough to believe, but you just got to do it, and you run to your house.

Because what’s the alternative? Huh? I’d rather be naked and have everyone think I’m a little crazy than risk carrying a colony of those assholes back to my house. Because imagine you have just one hiding out in your pocket. You know what that means? You’ve probably got at least a hundred squirming around in your boots, like in those little spaces in between your shoelaces and the holes where you tie those laces through.

I’m not crazy! OK, you think I want to throw all of my stuff away? Because I will. I’ll toss it all out, I’ll burn it, I’ll run bare-assed to a new apartment, I’ll start totally from scratch, it’s the only way, OK? This city’s crawling with them … just … I saw it! It’s right there! Kill it, just step on it, but don’t let the eggs get on your shoes! They’re everywhere! You stop freaking out! I’m not freaking out!

Weezer – The Blue Album: A near-perfect musical experience

I was just dicking around on reddit for a while when I came across this question posited on /r/AskReddit: What is an album that you enjoy every song on? In case you’re fortunate enough not to be totally enthralled to the ultimate eraser of time that is reddit, /r/AskReddit is pretty self-explanatory. Someone asks a question, and everybody else in the world throws in an answer.

It was late, I didn’t really feel like getting too lost on reddit before bed, and this question was floating right at the top of the front page. I almost didn’t feel like checking it out. There were already something like twenty thousand responses, and so what would be the point? I might as well just run a Google search of twenty thousand random popular albums.

And besides, I always get somewhat annoyed when I listen to other people opine about music. Tastes are so subjective. One person’s Pink Floyd may very well be another’s Justin Bieber, and when topics regarding musical preference explode like this on the Internet, there’s a tendency for discussion to devolve into name-calling and least common denominators.

Still, I clicked, despite my attempts to maybe go to bed like a regular human being, I always wind up clicking. And the top comment was Weezer: The Blue Album. And all of that internal debate, that voice inside always arguing that you can’t really pick a favorite music, a favorite anything, that while something might sound great one day, it might not do anything for you next month, or ten years from now, all of that went away.

Because right there, that very top comment nailed it. Of course it’s The Blue Album. I enjoy all ten of those tracks. It’s probably as close to perfection that the medium of an album is capable of achieving. From “My Name is Jonas” all the way to “Only in Dreams,” there’s not a bad track, not even a bad note really.

I remember when I was in like fourth or fifth grade, I had this tiny little boom box, a CD player with only three or four CDs to play on it. When I wanted new music, I had no other choice than to listen to FM radio. It was around that time that Weezer’s first single, “Buddy Holly” got really popular on the top forty stations.

Buying actual CDs was like a once a year thing for me, and so I don’t know if it was an actual love of “Buddy Holly” or just pure chance that led me to pick out The Blue Album when the opportunity for a new CD actually arose. But throughout the rest of my childhood, all the way through grammar school to high school, I played that CD cover to cover and none of the songs ever got old.

I always hate it when people ask me what my favorite song is, as if I could pick just one song out of my collection of music to rank number one. I hate it for like a minute before I remember, wait a second, “Say it Ain’t So,” that’s my favorite song. And I don’t think I’m alone here, like this is any unique opinion. It’s a lot of people’s favorite song.

One time when I was in high school, I went to this show a few towns over, a bunch of local ska and punk bands playing at one of these all day gigs. There was this one band, right in the middle of their set, something messed up with the audio, the mics got cut but the rest of the instruments were working fine.

They tried to fix the problem, but it wasn’t happening right away, and the crowd was starting to get a little restless. After a few long minutes, the guitarist started strumming the first few bars of “Say it Ain’t So.” And everyone went nuts. The drummer joined in, so did the bassist, and from that very first, “Oh ye-eah …” the entire audience sang together in unison.

Word for word we belted out the lyrics, I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it now, this one song, such a musical representation of how I feel when I remember growing up, the music I listened to, the same songs that gave a lot of people my age those same first feelings, like wow, I never thought music could sound this good, feel this cool. This band recorded such a great song as probably the climax to one of the most incredible records of my generation.

Part of my brain is telling me that I’m getting a little carried away, that whenever I start writing about how amazing something is – did I really just call it the record of my generation? – that maybe I need to scale back the tone just a little.

So I clicked play on iTunes, and now I’m feeling it again, and no, I’m not exaggerating, this song is definitely amazing. It’s totally what inspired me to buy a guitar in the ninth grade and to start taking lessons. I remember it was like two or three weeks in with my guitar teacher, he was trying to teach me how to read music and learn the fundamentals, I was just like, hey, I need you to teach me how to play this song. And so he wrote it out for me, note for note in my cheapo blue notebook I bought for guitar lessons. It took me like a year to get it down, and for many years after it was really the only song I felt comfortable playing in its entirety.

I feel ridiculous cheesy saying this, but I owe so much to that song, to The Blue Album. I’m able to listen to it today and be transported back to those endless high school days, sitting around in my room, playing video games, bored out of my mind, no real responsibilities at all. I could listen to a CD and lie on my bed and not have to think about anything at all. I didn’t get bent out of shape about wasting time or not being productive. I could just concentrate on how awesome this music is, ten timeless tracks of pure bliss.

I’m coming back

A few days ago I woke up in the middle of the night totally unable to move. I’ve read about sleep paralysis before, when you wake up unable to move for a while, but I’ve never experienced anything like it. I thought about what was going on, that if this was like anything that I’ve read online, I just had to wait it out, to allow whatever chemicals my brain uses to prevent me from flailing around in the middle of the night to wear off and let me regain control of my muscles.

But then I saw it out of the corner of my vision, a shape moving on the floor, coming from the bedroom door, making its way closer to the bed. I was sleeping on my side, my arms wrapped around a pillow, my knees bent sort of into half a ball, and so I had a pretty good view of the whole room. My heart started racing, but I tried not to panic, this definitely had to be some sort of dream, I knew that I was going to snap out of it eventually, that my bedroom would be back to normal as soon as I could get up and walk around.

But the vague, formless mass was getting closer, and even though I tried to keep my eyes closed, there was a part of me that was genuinely terrified, that refused to look away despite my overwhelming urge to just close my eyes and retreat into myself. Why couldn’t I have fallen asleep on my back tonight? Sure, that would have probably been equally scary, I’ve read accounts of sleep paralysis where shadowy figures leer down at the bed from above, inching closer or even putting pressure on the chest making it feel like you can’t breathe.

But this was bad, being on my side, having this sideways field of vision. I could see everything, every shadow, the floor, the wall, the ceiling. The door. This thing had moved past the doorway and as it slithered closer, it looked like slightly more than just a dark blob. Vague features were starting to come into relief, for example, I could make out a body, it was lying on the ground, and even though I said that it was slithering, like totally on the floor, it wasn’t as smooth of a movement as it had been just a few seconds earlier. Its body didn’t seem to be propelling itself, yet it was definitely getting closer, jerking forward an inch at a time, sometimes a little faster, but not really, the whole process maddeningly slow.

A face kind of revealed itself in the darkness, but mostly featureless, smooth white skin, dark black shadows where the eyes and mouth should have been. And then it started making these sounds. It was almost like static electricity, but more organic, if that makes any sense. Guttural? Is that a better qualifier? I’m not really sure how to write out what it was that was coming from that direction, but it wasn’t really consistent, there were definitely changes in pitch and tone, almost like a weird whisper.

I was beyond scared at this point, and even though I couldn’t make out the specifics of what I was looking at, there was this one moment where I was absolutely positive that whatever I had identified as this thing’s face turned to look me in the eye. My heart rate picked up, I had never felt so helpless as I struggled to move, to pry myself free from whatever it was that kept me locked in this half-fetal position.

Could I blink? I could. I shut my eyes. I repeated to myself that while the fear was real, this all had to be an illusion, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re positive you see someone standing in the room with you, it feels so real that for half a minute or so you’re actually believing it, frozen, until something clicks in your brain and you see that it’s nothing, it’s your dresser, it’s just a bunch of shapes that took a second to register in your mind as being what they were, nobody really there, nothing sinister.

But as soon as I shut my eyes, the whispering got less static-like, it was louder, it sounded like it was getting closer, faster. Whatever control I had over my mind ordered my eyes to stay shut, but some sort of perverse curiosity pried them open, the figure was still on the floor, but now it was right underneath my bed, its face maybe a foot away from my face. It was a woman, the details of here face remained still mostly featureless, but I could definitely make out that taught, white skin, the same gaping holes where the eyes and mouth were supposed to be. It was like something out of a horror movie, even worse really, like how could my mind concoct an image so otherworldly?

She laid there for half a minute or so before I started to make out distinct words emerging from the white noise. The first full sentence came through clear, and it’s stuck in my memory. She said, “Don’t you remember me? I’m coming back. I’m coming back.” And the perfect circle that was her formless black mouth started to turn upward at the sides, like a smile.

The smile slowly spread across her entire face, and her body started to inch underneath my bed. Her words finally began to subside somewhat, first back to the static, then I couldn’t hear anything at all. By the time I started to regain control of my body, first my fingers, then my arms and legs, and finally my torso, she had completely disappeared underneath. When I managed to lift myself up, to turn the light on and check if there was anything there at all, well … there wasn’t anything.

Aside from my still racing heart, and the echo of her words in my memory, my bedroom appeared exactly like it always did. My wife started to stir, I knew that I’d have to turn the lights back off or I’d wake her up completely. I held her close the rest of the night, and then night after that, unable to really fall asleep, hoping that whatever I’d experienced was just the byproduct of an overactive imagination under just the right physiological circumstances. But I can’t really get comfortable anymore, right as I’m just about to pass out from what’s become a total lack of any real sleep, I hear those words in my head as if they’re being spoken out loud, “I’m coming back. I’m coming back.”

There’s this circular scar on my arm

When I was in high school, there was this really brief period where I felt as if I was actually having what I always thought was supposed to be the high school experience. You know, the kind that you see on TV, where everyone has a ton of friends and every weekend you go to some crazy house party where the adults are perpetually away for the weekend and someone’s older brother or sister happens to be home from college, available to buy everyone booze and beer.

I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, it was one of these giant institutions that pulled its student body from various corners of Long Island. What this meant was that I didn’t really have any hometown friends, aside from the few guys that I went to grammar school with who also attended this high school.

But sometime around junior year, one of these few guys befriended a clique from my town’s public high school. One night I got an invite to a party at some kid’s house, someone that I didn’t know at all. I mean, I knew a lot of the faces, I’d see them at basketball games and stuff like that. But never in a social setting.

Just like that, I went from not knowing anybody to befriending a couple of dozen people. And like I mentioned earlier, it really was all of the crazy that you see on TV, house parties on the weekends, insanely casual parents of people who I’d just met that had no problem letting thirty or forty teenagers get drunk in their basements and backyards.

I had drank beer and the occasional mouthful of liquor before, but the closest that I’d ever been to getting drunk was almost finishing a six-pack with a couple of guys behind a playground supply shed one summer night. This high school party scene that I was now suddenly a part of, there was beer pong, people brought funnels, everyone was smoking pot.

Marijuana was something that, as a little kid, all the way up until my junior year of high school, I promised myself I’d never touch. I don’t know where it came from, but I had a legitimate fear of drugs, like all of those videos they showed us in school, every warning about how it only takes one time for this stuff to ruin your life, I bought it. I was genuinely afraid.

But then it was like one day, I was at my second or third one of these parties, someone offered me a little pipe and I consciously felt that terror not only go away, but there was a total shift in attitude, a complete one-eighty from fear to an embrace. I took a few hits and got really stoned, I woke up in the morning without any lasting permanent damage and I thought, wow, that wasn’t really anything to be afraid of.

And it went like that for a couple months or so, each adventure seemingly more outrageous than the next, all the way until one night, some guy got his hands on a box of cigars. Everyone lit up but, not really knowing how to smoke a whole cigar, everyone got bored. I don’t know how what happened next actually happened, but a couple of guys started taking the their cigars and burning each other’s arms with the lit ends.

One after the other, everyone present got sucked up into the frenzy. It became this macho test that nobody present made any effort to back away from, to stop and think even for a second, what the hell is going on? And then it was my turn. I didn’t put up any fight either. I was drunk, I was high, I felt invincible.

And the next day when I came to, I looked at this oozing open wound on my right bicep, I couldn’t make sense of what had happened. This thing took forever to heal, and it was right below my t-shirt sleeve, so there was no use in covering it up. I made up some bullshit story about working at the restaurant, how I’d accidentally dropped a lemon into the deep fryer, causing a huge glob of grease to splatter in a perfect circle on my arm. And everyone bought it, my parents, the doctor that summer who looked at it curiously during the course of my annual physical.

I still tell that story. There’s not much of a scar now, but it’s noticeable under the right lighting. I’ve told it so much that part of that lie has actually grown pretty deep roots, that sometimes it takes me a minute or two to remember the truth, that I got sucked up into some weird animalistic moment of mass insanity. Someone had a crazy drunk idea that caught and spread like fire that night at a party.

I’m totally embarrassed to write this all out, I’ve never really told anybody I’m close with, but there’s got to be some lesson that I can take away. One is that, whatever I was trying to get out of being part of that group, friendship, acceptance, none of that stuff was ever there in the first place. As quickly as I had been taken in by my group of peers, I was summarily rejected a few months later when, one night at a different party, some kid I’d never met before decided he didn’t like my jokes or whatever. He convinced everyone to turn on me, casting me out on the spot.

Another is, in what ways is whatever was inside of me that night still a part of who I am today? I’d like to believe that I’m an independent thinker, that you’d never be able to find me sucked into poor decision-making by peer pressure and the social dynamics of groupthink run riot. But I don’t know. I thought I was independent back then. To what extent am I truly self-aware of the decisions I’m making day-to-day?

I guess it’s a good reminder every now and then to look at that barely visible scar on my arm, to be grateful that a superficial inch or so of skin is the extent of the physical consequences. But it’s a scary reminder. Just like how my convictions abruptly reversed course in a split second under the right circumstances, in what other ways might my values today be similarly overturned? It’s a good idea to take stock of my life and ask, how much freedom do I really have over my everyday actions?

Dear Bill Simmons:

You guys ever read Grantland? I read it all the time. It’s great, a professional web site dedicated to long form essays about sports and pop culture. The sports stuff is perfect for a guy like me. I like sports, and I want to be up-to-date about what’s going on in the sports world, but I don’t always have the attention span necessary to watch full games or follow complete seasons. And for whatever reason, ESPN doesn’t do the trick, I can’t seem to latch on to Sports Center or any of those other sports/news programs.

Grantland covers what’s going on in sports while at the same time peppering its front page with headlines about blockbuster movies or professional wrestling. It’s enough to keep me engaged while simultaneously providing me with enough knowledge of pro sports to prevent me from sounding like an idiot the next time I try to chime in on a sports related conversation at work.

But the more I grow attached to Grantland, the more painful it becomes to read. All I see is this awesome web site where likeminded writers contribute with long blocks of text about all of the stuff that I’m interested in. Instead of walking away from a Grantland session feeling satisfied with having consumed something entertaining, I’m left with this empty yearning, an almost indefinable envy.

Like, why can’t I be a part of Grantland? Hey, Bill Simmons, are you reading this? Of course you’re not reading this. I’m writing this whiney complaint on my personal web site, hoping that if I sprinkle enough searchable keywords, (Grantland, Bill Simmons, Grantland, Grantland, Grantland,) the wondrous properties of the Internet might somehow make this blog post pop out from obscurity, to magically appear in front of the eyes of someone with some power, someone in charge of hiring writers to write for Grantland.

Because it kills me to read Grantland, to have that feeling like, I could do that. I could write really, really, really long essays about my favorite TV shows, or what I like about comic books. I do it every day, right here on this blog.

But professional writer, how do you get to be a pro writer? Everything I’ve read online, advice from writers who’ve succeeded in making a career out of their words, it’s always along the lines of, “Write every day. Keep writing. Eventually something is going to happen.” And I don’t know, I don’t want to be too negative, I know that I can’t just expect my wildest dreams to come true because I want them really badly, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I’ll read Grantland, I’ll browse Gawker, I’ll watch a funny episode of The Colbert Report, and every time I find myself really immersed in an interesting point, or losing myself to one of those laughs where the muscles on the sides of my jaw begin to fail, my joy eventually turns to jealousy, without fail. Why can’t I be doing this for a living? Why do I have to be a spectator to this constant parade of cool stuff bombarding my senses at all times?

I’ve written cold-call letters to all of these outlets before, really long, well-written pieces to various editors of magazines and TV shows, all of them asking the same thing. Please, let me do what I’m doing right here, for you, for money, for a living. I’ve tried making these inquiries serious, or changing the tone to something more absurd. I’ve reached for clever, I’ve resorted to begging. And every single time, it’s the same exact reply: nothing.

Actually, not exactly nothing. One time when I was right out of college, I painted this giant oil painting of Stephen Colbert. I had it shipped to his studio with a note begging for a job in the graphics department, and a few short months later, I spotted my painting hanging on some wall in what had to have been a screen shot from a behind-the-scenes clip.

Whatever, I’m at a loss of what to do next. And yeah, it’s all pretty demoralizing, just wanting something so badly but never receiving any reply at all. Maybe I have to be even more persistent. Maybe I have to keep writing over-the-top letters, but on a more regular basis. That’s where you come in, Bill. No, I don’t blame you at all for not answering the personal request for employment from some guy on the Internet. You’re a famous television personality. If your mailbag is the tip of the iceberg that I’m imagining it to be, I’m sure you have like eight different email addresses all filled to the brim with crazy questions and random nonsense.

But I’m thinking that, if I can just get your attention once, like if by writing a personalized open letter on a fairly regular basis, maybe you’ll see how serious I am about writing for Grantland. It’ll be like when Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four had to somehow snag the attention of Galactus before the space lord devoured our planet whole. And these pieces will be my ultimate nullifier. How does once a week sound?

Obviously I’m hoping you see this in the future, after I’ve written like five or six months worth of material, you’ll see the latest letter, you’ll be like, “What is this stuff? How far does it go back?” and you’ll read every single post, all the way back to this sentence. And you’ll think, “Wow, this guy is serious.” And I am serious. I’ll write whatever you tell me to. When you say, “Write,” I’ll say, “How high?”

Unless somehow this first letter immediately goes viral. It’s totally unlikely, I know, but if it does and you wind up reading this right away, please be assured, I have every intention of keeping these letters up for as long as I’m alive. I’ll even write out a bunch of reserve letters to go up only in the case of an accident, something that would result in my untimely death. This way it’ll look like I’m writing from beyond the grave. I doubt that would help my career prospects at Grantland, but it would be a pretty cool Internet trick.

Bill, can I call you Bill? Mr. Bill, please give me a full-time writing job. Or anybody else. I’ll take it. (Can I have off next Monday? I’m going skiing.)

Love,

Rob G.