A Sofa

In suburbia, in a little backyard sits an old couch. A couch bed, but who would rather be called a sofa. A proper sofa, high backed, tan with a flower print. A stuffy thing that you might expect to find in your grandma’s house, covered in a plastic cover.

Once it was a king, the centerpiece of a living room set. Once it was the bed of dalmatians, chows, golden retrievers, labs and cats, the place where a man and a woman rested after a long day’s work, the trampoline of a small child.

The first night of it’s exile, after it was handled roughly and rammed out the backdoor, a little orange and white dog barked at it as a big, black unfamiliar shape in her territory. It was dark and cold, the ground wet and squishy from melting snow. It was scared and alone, abandoned and unloved.

As any sentient creature it knew there had been a time before it existed, and there would be a time when it was no longer there. It also knew that that time was quickly approaching, that soon enough its life would be ended, crushed in the cold steel jaws of a garbage truck.

Halloween, Part one

When I was young, very young, I dressed up as Superman for every Halloween. Understand though that when I saw “ young” I mean before Superman suits had fake muscle chest, but also before I had memories. When I was young and all of my thoughts were framed through my father's camera and slid projector I dressed as Superman for Halloween. I do have one genuinely honest memory from those Halloweens though, I remember my mother knelling down in front of me and pulling my curl down over my forehead, just like Superman’s.

We were in the hallway of our old house, at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the long rug that ran between the bathroom and the playroom. The bathroom shone a glorious white. White lighting, and yellow light bulbs and white, slick, smooth, cold porcelain tiles glared out of the bathroom and into the halls and out all the windows of the house. I doubt it was late enough at night for it to be dark out, even for a night in late October, but in my memories it was pitch black outside.

After years of being the man of steel my curl would evolve, transform me, straighten and lengthen itself, pressed down to my forehead with my brothers hair gel, a tight widows peak, an orange devilock draping down my little Halloween melon head. For many years I put on a new cape, black and red replacing gold and blue, that I tied tight around by throat, damp with sweat and rain all October. For a month I lived as a little Dracula child, hiding under beds and behind trees, falling end over end into piles of leaves, stealing away with lengths of rope to hang bodies from trees and build giant spider’s webs. Halloween would transform me too, evolve me, turn me into little beasts, raise me from the dead, turn my face whiter and my blood redder, and let me walk out at night, set lose, a full fledge vampire sucking down sugar and ready to eat the black out of the sky, to unhang the moon and drop it in my pillow case like some treat I’d claimed as mine that night.

For a long time I spent Halloween with my best friend, my brother, Jake. Jake was my best friend from one Halloween to the next, not because he was my brother, or because for years he was the only other person in life I knew besides my parents, but because he was exciting. Jake was what Halloween was supposed to be: trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Once in a psychology class someone asked me where I learned what it meant to be a boy from and my first thought was that no one has ever taught me more about getting into trouble than my brother, the kid who taught me what it was to be a boy growing up, who through torture and demonstration showed me how to hurt people, hide things, steal junk, dig holes and run from anyone. My older brother Jake showed me not only how to be a monster on Halloween, but how to be a terror every other day of the year too.



...to be continued.

Caleb Michael, ghoul

The Cave

Humans are the most messed up creatures on earth. I wish that meant more than it does, because the only reply to that statement is “no shit”, but hear me out…

I just can’t imagine that any other intelligent being could be as stupid and emotional as we all are. We don’t understand one another and we don’t understand ourselves.

We… ha… you all know that I’m just talking about myself. Not that projecting this aspect of me onto the rest of humanity is incorrect, I’m sure it’s right, but this is personal. We’re all fucked up, we’re all just chaotic jumbles of emotion staggering about in the dark and knocking into one another. We don’t know what we’re doing, we have no clue where we’re going, but we sure as hell aren’t going to admit that to anyone.

We try to form rules for this existence, to make guidelines for how to form relationships and who to form them with. We try to artificially construct rules for responding to one another, but it doesn’t work. It’s all fake, it’s bullshit. We’re all just in the Cave, chained, staring at the shadows on the wall. I just wish people could be honest with each other about the things that matter. I wish people could just see me for who I am, but no one wants that.

Like J.D. once said, “…nobody is themselves when they start dating. Dating is just acting like you're somebody you're not until the person likes you enough so you can show 'em who you really are.”

It all sickens me so much. But, the worst part is that I’m sure I am really no better than anyone else in this aspect. I just sit here and write and wonder about everything, instead of going out and making connections, instead of interacting. I write here and hope that someone will get it, someone will understand where I’m coming from and get that this stupid little blog means far more to me than it ever should. I assume that someday someone will read around all the jokes, all the literary references and insanity and find those little bits of me that are pure and real, the true essence of all of my confusion, and understand.

But, in the end it’s not for them that I do this, I do it for myself and only myself. There is that hope that someone will understand it all, but that’s not the point. I write because I would no doubt go mad otherwise and become some twisted, wretched.

I know I’m just fumbling around in the dark here, groping for others in the hopes that perhaps they can see, perhaps we can save one another. Maybe someday I’ll find the light.

Stare into the Abyss

There is nothing worse than reaching out desperately for someone to take your hand and pull you from the abyss, only to watch them stare back at you in confusion. Worse even than them looking down at you in derision, or callous indifference. To know that it’s not that they don’t want to help you, but that they cannot. How could they when you don’t even know what you’re searching for yourself?

You’re just Holden wandering through the wintry streets of New York, faking a gunshot wound in a bathroom, running about with that goofy ass hat on.

I want that hat.

And the most fucked up thing is that I want to be Holden.

I know I care too much, worry too much, analyze too much, think too much. I pace, fret and wonder about everything until I can’t do it anymore. But, I want that. Giving in would be too easy, being content would just feel like giving in. Feel like settling.

It’s not that I’m unhappy, far from it really. That’s not to say that I’m never upset, but generally I like my life, I like who I am. But, that’s the thing… I enjoy this. I enjoy the good fight. I enjoy the discontentment and endless self reflection. I like the torture.

Why should I push it away? Why should I pretend? Why should I try to feel something that I don’t? I’m looking for something. What? I don’t know… I don’t even think I truly believe I will ever find it. I’m not sure how any human ever can. Maybe this is where people think fate comes in, God comes in; maybe this is why so many of us are so bitter and cynical.

I wish I knew if I believed in fate or not. I always pretend to be such a logical person, but I’m really not. I always felt I believed in progress, but I don’t know if I do. I’m a burning pyre of contradiction. The rationalist and the dreamer, the optimist and the pessimist, Aristotle and Plato waging war in my very core. I love and hate humanity simultaneously, and that’s probably the hardest to admit. How can I even be? I feel like the main character of some Romantic novel…

I want to spread my arms out to the night sky, tilt my head back and scream my lungs out to some dark street corner, but I know I could never do it, just as Holden never could speak when he called Jane. Something holds us back, leaves us mute. So, I’m left to sit here and use my sign language on this keyboard, to bang out my frustration at the world, my frustration with myself, and wish I was making some actual noise.

“Got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time.”
“It can’t get any worse.”

Scully

It’s funny how everything can change so quickly. People come and go like waves washing over a beach, slowly eroding the sand castle that you spent so much time building, slowly breaching those walls you put up. Feelings appear and vanish, transform and regress, sometimes without even your realization. It’s impossible to pinpoint any of it, especially when those sharp feelings recede into vague recollections. At least the lessons learned remain, even if you don't always follow them, and those memories that once brought pain and uncertainty are nostalgia-drenched to happiness. Sometimes I feel that is how I wish to view everything, through the lens of five years in the future where everything is shaded like a sepia picture. It would be so much nicer then, so surreal, like the plot of some Hollywood movie.

It’s funny how one little moment can change everything, how an event can make you see things so differently, how you can be so certain of a thing one week and be lost the next. When a crushing loss can mean the opening of new doors, the realization of new happiness is it possible to predict anything? Should it be that way? Is it fate, or just the spin of the roulette wheel?

It’s funny how words on a glowing screen can encapsulate so much, can be so important given everything. How they can bring hope and comfort, and how the human mind seems to always seek that out wherever it is available.

It’s funny how friendships can change so much, yet be stuck at the same point they once were because of something totally out of your control. When you’ve known someone for seven years it’s hard to change, anyhow, even if things are different than they used to be. At least that familiarity is comfortable, the knowledge of your feelings is reassuring, and you have someone to talk to who never gets mad or annoyed at you. At least you know that you’re wanted, that you’re loved, that you belong. At least you have Star Wars, The X-Files, baseball and sitting in front of a computer until four in the morning because you can’t bear to tear yourself away.

At least someone misses you…

“I was saddened when I first got back this evening and you weren't around.”

It’s funny how a sentence can change everything, can make you think so differently, even when you had already realized that those feelings exist. Sometimes you just need a kick over the edge. Even if everything is so uncertain, even if the distance feels insurmountable and even if fear creeps in where it never was before, it doesn’t change anything. It’s best to just close your eyes and enjoy the sound of her laugh and the warm feeling in your soul. At least you have happiness that way; at least you can smile. That’s what matters, because eventually all those other feelings will be wrapped up in a nice coat of nostalgia anyway.

Even if nothing ever comes of it all, and the odds don’t seem good that it will, you at least have those memories, you have joy. Even if there are so many coincidences, so many things that would have to go right for it to end as it was meant to, it doesn’t mean it can’t end happily. And who knows, perhaps there is something to all that fate stuff after all. I know that’s what they tell me in the movies. Besides, I would rather my life turned out like Field of Dreams, in any case.

Box Score

“I’m reading the box score, Scully. You’d like it; it’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box, and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny, summer day back in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me, they tell me even though lots of things can change some things do remain the same.” –Fox Mulder

One day, Mulder reminded me of something my dad once told me, something about how I should love baseball because of how much I enjoyed statistics. My seven year old self never really understood that, because things like wins and losses, points and touchdowns, goals and assists were so much easier to understand than ERAs, batting averages, WHIPs, or slugging percentages. But, not understanding all of that stuff never stopped me from loving the game, and it never stopped me from playing second base, or debating All-Star team rosters with my grandpa on lazy weekday afternoons. And when I grew, and my knowledge of math increased (though I will never admit again that math has ever helped me better understand sports), I began to get what my dad had been trying to tell me all those years before.

Baseball is the game of statistics, the game of numbers. I learned what all those funny acronyms and abbreviations stood for, and what they meant. I learned all the little intricacies of the game, and I fell in love with it all over again. It wasn’t just whacking a ball with a stick and running bases or catching and throwing, it was strategy and numbers that stretched back into the foggy reaches of time, numbers that meant something, that could restore something. I might never be able to recreate a summer day in Boston in 1920, but I can damn well know what happened at Fenway that day. So, I think back and wonder what it was like to watch Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth or Mordecai “Three Fingers” Brown, and I dig up all those charts filled with numbers and abbreviations and marvel at the order and simplicity of it all.

Once at a game at Comerica Park a blonde in the row in front of mine caught my eye. She had her hair back in a pony tale and a baseball cap on her head, and to my amazement she was filling out a score card as she watched the game from the bleachers. She was recording for posterity that day in time. It was quite possibly the most attractive thing I had ever seen in my life. Just watching her slender fingers marking outs with a pencil and seeing her rapt attention at every movement of the game was intoxicating. I understand if that makes me seem crazy to most of you, but I’m sure that someone out there understands. I know Mulder would, at least.

Ballparks themselves are intoxicating… the rumble of the crowd, the call of the vendors, the warm smell of hotdogs and the freshness of the air, the warm sun shining and the inviting sky spreading out in every direction. There is just something about them that is different from all those places called Arenas, Bowls, Domes and Coliseums. They are parks, they are fields… they are expansive and open. I feel sorry for those cities that don’t have a true ballpark, but are forced to share a facility with some other sport. It just isn’t the same. I’m lucky enough to have two of them, though one is a haunted shadow of its former self.

It has been a long time since I was last in Tiger Stadium, but I’ve went past it many times since then and I know it’s still sitting there at Michigan and Trumbell, just waiting. No matter how long it has been, though, I know I’ll remember those long, claustrophobically low tunnels that must still be there, and the field where so many of my heroes and my father’s heroes roamed for summers stretching back decades. I still know those steep bleachers that made you feel as if you were right on top of the field and I can hear the seagulls crying out in my mind. I can still remember sitting along the third baseline, cracking shells and popping peanuts into my mouth, the mitt on my left hand just itching for a foul ball, and my dad next to me keeping track of the game on a scorecard.

Comerica Park is newer, more open, and perhaps the grass is greener now, but I know it will never replace Tiger Stadium. No park can ever replace that old warrior in my heart. But, CoPa is a good park, and the skyline from it makes me think about how much I love the city, despite everything. It’s funny how those surroundings gave me so much courage, how thousands of people around me brought me comfort. It’s odd that friends chattering away and the thrill of a potential comeback victory made me do something that I probably would never have done otherwise. So, I talked to the blonde girl with the scorecard and the Tiger’s hat. I told her that she was beautiful, and she smiled at me. I talked to her, and my heart thumped at her smile and the look in her blue eyes. I felt alive… and it didn’t matter what she said, how she responded, that was never the point. It was only the movement of her lips as she formed the words, not what she spoke, that mattered, the gentle curve of her jaw line and the happiness that I knew my words brought her. So, we talked about the game and ourselves, and it was unbelievable. We talked about filling out scorecards, four seam fastballs and our lives. And it didn’t matter that she had a boyfriend, that I never got her phone number, or that she lived in Cincinnati, because I was happy. Nothing but that one brief moment mattered in the end. Of course, as with all good love stories, the night ended with fireworks, brilliant streaks of neon color lighting up the cool Michigan night. I haven’t seen her since, and know that I never will again, but all that is important is that I was there, watching baseball in a park, speaking to an angel with a scorecard, and that the Tigers won it in the bottom of the tenth. It was exhilaration, it was pure joy, and it was a moment that will live forever through the pencil marks upon a piece of paper. Sometimes, things just seem to come full circle, I guess.

“Shut up, Mulder, I’m playing baseball.” –Dana Scully

A Siren's Call

I wrote this a few months ago, and while I have already released it onto the web, I figured I’d post it here with a few minor revisions so that it can be with the brethren that sprung from it. Because, it’s the spark that started this whole thing, at least for me. It began like this… and everything sort of took off from there.

I never write anymore, I used to, constantly. Letters, words, sentences flowing from my fingers through the keys and appearing almost instantaneously onto that big, bright convex screen, streams of consciousness just rushing from my brain to my fingertips. I wrote a lot, it was soothing, cathartic, and my company in the dark, me, my mind and the screen. And it always returned to the same feeling.

Now the screen is flat, and the colors are sharper, but nothing has truly changed the experience. I just don’t do it. I used to. A lot. Sometimes I think about it, and I long for it, sometimes I wonder why I don’t write anymore. Sure, I write… I write essays, and I write e-mails, and I write instant messages. I write notes on marker boards, and random bits of info on scraps of paper, but I don’t write.

The urge still comes to me late at night, an urge that I can’t even truly describe. I grapple with the words, with the idea, with the logic of it all, but never feel I have anything concrete. I want to write, not just about anything, but about it. It is as if my soul is longing for release, my mind needing some sort of outlet, but that’s not really it. My first memory of it came in the low, hallowed whistle of a train passing through the night. How many times when I was young I sat awake at night, the darkness wrapped around me just as securely as my blankets, staring at my ceiling, and that train beckoned me like a siren’s call. How often I wanted to fling my covers off of me, and run through the deserted streets to find that train, as if the answer could somehow be there.

The struggle is still the same now, a fight for some sort of meaning from this feeling I have deep in my gut, in my mind, in my heart. Frost once wrote, “I could say 'Elves' to him, but it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself.” That’s how it feels to me. I can only grasp some fragment, some part of the mystery. The mystery wrapped inside an enigma. It is not loneliness, not discontentment, nor contentment, not fear or anxiety, or excitement. It’s not need, or worry, not calm, or wonderment. Is it rational? Irrational? I know others have felt it, but here I am still searching.

It is the sensation of staring at a Hopper painting, of singing to myself late at night while driving in the car alone, the rumble of the wheels on the pavement and the streaking lights of suburbia surrounding, but never touching me. It is gazing up at the stars on a cool spring night and feelings so small, and yet so large at the same time. It is the existence of a sparkling, shining world of newly fallen snow, where everyone is safe, yet isolated in their little igloo of knowledge. It seems to take shape in Something Wicked this Way Comes, in the insomnia of Charles Halloway and the running pf Will and Jim. But does Bradbury truly understand it? Do I misunderstand him? It seems to be a paradox, but it cannot be. I will not believe that. It makes me feel like Holden, wandering through the streets of New York, searching for something he doesn't understand.

It is the longing that someday someone will understand, and the fear that no one will ever be able to grasp it, least of all me. The drive to discover the true meaning, and the wish that one day someone will be able to help me find it.

And as I tap away at the keys, it always comes back, welling up in my gut and causing my mind to long to understand it, my heart to reach out and grab it. It is the realization that every word I write, every thought I think, every feeling that strikes a chord in my being is inherently entangled with it, this unknown that is so familiar. It is the hope that humanity has some purpose, and that I have some reason for being, but the fear to truly believe.

Sometimes I look back for it in the ignorance of childhood, sometimes forward into the future, but it’s always there, throbbing in my gut, whispering something I cannot truly hear.