Love and Skunks

So many things that we want out of life are always just out of reach. If you read Shakespeare’s love sonnets, they are about a woman (or man?) who is ideal but unattainable. Inspiring and impossible. Good for provoking poetry in whatever world where your idea of perfection exists, but inaccessible in the world of the actual. The literary term for this is “the petrarchan woman.”









It’s like letting a hamster run around in one of those clear plastic balls in a room full of cats. No matter how much those cats want to eat that delicious hamster, no amount of pawing at it will afford the snack. The petrarchan hamster. Or maybe our ideal lives are running around in an impenetrable plastic bubble.

Maybe that’s why I write. Just one less degree of separation between my actual and petrarchan lives. Maybe I can’t eat the hamster, but writing gives me the opportunity to at least smell it. And it smells good.

I have a hard time thinking of the ideal woman that would be perfect for me. Apparently Shakespeare did too, since he was writing about someone. He needed inspiration. Any attempt at a relationship I’ve ever endeavored has just been an attempt to define the petrarchan woman, not to capture one. So my love life is like playing the lottery. No winners yet, just a lot of wasted dollars.

But petrarchanism is not limited to love or life plans. In fact, I think that it’s more appropriate for the little everyday expectations that we all experience.

Let’s make up a word! Micropetrachanism. Definition: ideal expectations for everyday, trite events. But that seems too long and difficult to spell / read, so let’s shorten it to “micro-p.” Yeah, that’s got a nice ring and suggestive tone to it.

Think sandwiches. I’m not sure if I’ve ever gotten a sandwich that lived up to my expectations. It never looks like the picture on the menu or in my head. Has society ruined my sandwich experience by creating an image of sandwiches that is unfair or unattainable? It’s just like the media making teenage girls anorexic because toilets like Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton get so much coverage. Only I’m talking about sandwiches. Irony.

You know what vastly alters your micro-p? Alcohol. Expectations tend to be exaggerated or modified. Beer goggles, beer muscles, liquor haze. I like to self-medicate with alcohol to overcome my severe social anxieties.

Jay literally thinks that nothing can harm him when he’s had enough to drink. He eats Christmas ornaments and jumps off of balconies into bushes. Jump is the wrong word – it was more of a tuck-and-roll situation. Rocks’s only expectation for climbing a telephone pole as quickly as possible was applause from the crowd of people outside of a bar.

But the next morning is a shocking return to clear-thinking and more realistic expectations. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Eating glass leads to an odd prickly stomachache. Rolling off of a balcony results in the inability to lift your right arm in the morning and questions from your landlord about why his landscaping is destroyed. Pole climbs often result in a night in jail.

Have you ever made a drunken decision that you expected to turn out significantly different than what actually happened? Drunken micro-p.

Monday night. Jay and I are absolutely hammered. We stagger home from the bar and on the way in hear an animal surveying our garbage cans, which were right outside of Jay’s window and the front door. The smell indicated that our visitor was a skunk and our drunken micro-p led us to have a “good” idea. Let’s catch the skunk and let him loose in our neighbor’s apartment.

Drunk and giggly, Jay armed himself with some sort of box to trap our new friend in while I prepared to swing the door open. On three. 1. 2. 3! I swung the door open, but our curious little pet had been wise to our plan. There was the business end of the skunk, pointed directly at us, and he let us have it.

You know in cartoons when a skunk sprays and there is a giant green plume of smelly gas that fires out of his ass? That’s not so far from what happens in real life. It all happened in slow motion. A thick, greenish cloud of the stinkiest substance known to man released into the house and all over us. Astoundingly potent.

This may have been the hardest I’ve ever laughed. It smelled so terrible that it made our eyes water and the smell woke up our neighbors. We quickly scampered through the house to the back door, stripping our clothes off, laughing hysterically, and crying. It probably wouldn’t have been as funny if we were sober.

Our pants and shoes were never the same after that.

Micro-p. What you think is not ever what is. But idealism is a fucked up thing. Think of your patrarchan man or woman or hamster. Has it changed since you were younger? Is it possible without experience? How boring would life be if ideals and reality were the same? The difference between the two is the fun part of being alive. Adventure, drama, surprises, and skunks.

Learn what you can from the discrepancy and move forward. Don’t be the asshole that throws a fit on the waiter because your sandwich doesn’t look exactly like the one on the menu. When you buy a case of beer, lay out a change of clothes. And keep playing the lottery. Because hey, you never know.

The Beach

Western New York weather is like a firm kick in the balls. Some days you can take it in stride, but other days it takes you down hard and brings you to the cusp of vomiting. 

Usually, the first few warm days after the long winter make people act like it’s July. By “warm,” I mean 45ish. But I swear, it feels so good after so much snow and wind that no Western New Yorker can tell the difference. It’s like a disease. Or a developmental disorder, rather. Climatic retardation. Out come the shorts, away go the jackets, and every typical college skank rejoices in the first opportunity to let the bottom of her ass hang out of a clearly inappropriate skirt. Flip-flops are also a must for this celebration of the end of winter. It doesn’t matter how cold you actually are as long as you look cute, right girls?!

But everyone suffers from climatic retardation here. Not just the skanks.

When my former roommate, Jay, and I moved into our first apartment together, we had access to a small balcony on the front of our house. In the world of balconies, this was a sickly little fellow. If balconies were American Gladiators, ours would have been a cancer patient amongst the muscle-bound. ‘Now let’s meet the gladiators you’ll be facing off against today: Nitro!  Titan! Viper! And Chemo!’ It looked as if it was ready to fall off at any moment. My landlords knew that it was on its last leg – they were sure to instruct us that no more than two people were allowed on it at any one time.

It was late March. 45 degrees. Another former roommate, Keywork, happened to be there that weekend visiting me. The three of us, already moronic and impulsive enough, were struggling through a tough instance of climatic retardation. We were spending a lazy Friday afternoon watching TV and having a few beers.

And that’s when the Corona commercial came on.

You know what I’m talking about. I can wrap up every Corona commercial ever made in a few words. Perfect beach. Palm trees. Lounging. Coronas. I’m not sure who actually uttered the idea first, or how the already incredibly dangerous balcony got involved, but before long we were discussing the logistics of transforming little Chemo into the perfect beach. Simply enough, our climatic retardation led us to believe that we should live like the Corona commercial. After all, the winter was over. Who could blame us?

Jay and Keywork departed to get sand and tropical plants. They paid for one 20 pound bag of sand at the local Home Depot. Poor Home Depot. They have a self-loading policy on larger landscaping items like sand. They stole 49 additional bags. 1,000 pounds seemed like it would be enough. With the addition of a couple of potted tropical plants, some mini lawn chairs, a grill, a case of Corona, and a couple limes, we were in business.

Two bags of sand per trip up the stairs meant 25 trips up the stairs lugging 40 pounds of sand. This beach was hard work. But eventually the work ended, and the beach party began.

Friends arrived. Kathryn. Dan-O. Nicole. Shaylah. Adam. Joe. Sarah. Denny. All great people that wanted to enjoy the beach with us. The Coronas were on ice. Limes sliced. Hot dogs cooking away on the grill. Paradise across the street from a Sonoco. What more could anyone want? Winter was a thing of the past and we had our own personal beach.

I’m not sure about the validity of this statement, but I’m also fairly positive that Keywork talked some girl into having sex with him out there. Nothing screams “I had an awesome time last night” like a little sand in your crevasses.

Let’s take a moment to think about the overall weight of this little project. Our landlord didn’t want more than two people on the balcony at any one time. I weigh 180. Jay comes in at an impressive 160. So let’s round up and assume that a “person” means 200 pounds. We had at least eight people enjoying the beach all simultaneously. And let’s not discount the 1,000 pounds of sand. That’s another five “people.” 13 altogether.

I don’t care if we extended our landlord’s balcony person limit by 11. We were living the dream.

But the thing about climatic retardation is that it’s always premature. The first few warm days in Western New York are always followed by snow. It’s science. A week of enjoying the beach was followed by the harsh realization that 1,000 pounds of sand weighs a lot more when it gets wet. A lot more. And of course, another winter storm arrived to alleviate our climatic retardation and dampen our masterpiece.

Now, standing on the beach was accompanied by the house making noises. Bad noises. Like that creaking noise in movies that you always hear before a roof flies off or someone falls through the floor. Our climatic retardation a thing of the past, we began to think clearly and realize some of the more poorly planned parts of the project. 

The sand was wet. And heavy. And once out of the bags much more difficult to transport. Chemo was screaming in pain. We were legitimately concerned that our actions were going to lead to the entire front of the house being ripped off when the old girl finally couldn’t take it anymore and collapsed.

Apparently our landlord felt the same way. One late night at the library, I got an angry voicemail from him. Simply enough, it said, “Hey this is Mark. Either the sand is gone by tomorrow or you are. And you’d better not just shovel it off into the front yard.” Damn. That would have been easy.

It was about one in the morning. Cold. Snowy. With the threat of eviction hanging over our heads, we had to think quickly. A couple of snow shovels, a borrowed pick-up truck, and a sheet of plastic later, we were in business. We constructed a slide of sorts and shoveled the sand down the slide into the truck. It actually didn’t work too poorly. Only a couple hundred pounds escaped to the front lawn, I’d say.

By four o’clock or so the beach was gone, reduced to nothing but a memory and some severely weakened property. Poor Chemo. But she's still hanging on. I don't think that I would tempt fate by actually walking on it ever again though. 

In the end, it turns out that we aren’t that much different than the inappropriately dressed skank that, upon re-wintering, reverts back to her low-rider jeans that show off the top of her ass crack instead of the bottom of it. Climatic retardation brings out an exaggerated aspect of our warm-weather personalities. For the skank, her best weapons are her apparently over-used body parts. For people like us, it’s being a moron in a somewhat intelligent way.  Outdoors.

I’m not sure if you could blame any of us. But now I live in an apartment with a much larger porch. And what’s life unless you constantly outdo yourself? 

Look Closer...

Just like many of the other things that I've been motivated to attempt over the last several years of my life, I owe my stab at web-authoring to Mike Rocks. Good guy. Notoriously smart. Notoriously unique. We'll be in dialogue, please visit his blog.

I think that mirrors are one of the most interesting and overlooked staples of the human condition. Jacques Lacan theorized that infants first begin to encounter struggles with selfhood and identity when they first encounter their reflection in a mirror. The complete body that the infant sees doesn't correspond with his or her underdeveloped physicality. The rest of our lives are simply spent trying to live up to that ideal image we first see as infants. Inadequacy starts young.

Wouldn't it be fucked up to have a kid and never let her see herself in a mirror? There are far too few 'human experiments.' If ethics wasn't such a demanding bitch then we could watch half-wits race through giant mazes. Only the winner gets to eat. 

Looking at yourself in a mirror is a random experience. For me, anyway. What do you think when you're staring at yourself in the morning before that big important meeting? I look good? You look good? Are you talking to yourself? Or yourself in some Narnia-like mirror world full of goat people and talking lions? Personally, looking in a mirror only serves as a means to further push me into a state of mind-blowingly random self reflection. Go look at yourself. Not just to make your hair look elegantly disheveled or pluck your eyebrows. Look and think. Here's my best attempt at self-reflection (pun?), stream of consciousness style:
 

You. There you are. You love dark, heavy beer. Stout. You love to simplify things. You always complicate. A true champion of contradictions. And incomplete sentences. You squander all your cash; it’s not as much fun in the bank. You are capable of writing long, wordy sentences that vaguely justify seven years of college and reflect the ubiquity of literature in your life as a perpetually confused, drunk, and potentially intelligent human being. But instead you spend hours on practically nothing; you squander time like you squander cash. You wish you could put some time in the bank and earn interest on it. Nine percent. Or maybe 11. You hate MLA format.  You must  be  close to bankruptcy by now. You have so many student loans that the Internal Revenue Service has deemed you their honorary “sugar daddy.” You wonder about the first person that cracked open a sea urchin and tried eating it. You think, “What the fuck were they thinking?” You associate with similar intelligent idiots. Your closest friend says things like “Every time I hear that song ‘Bring the funk Bring the noise’ I get a painful erection that won't go away until I kill a migrant farm worker.” You think it’s hilarious. You wonder what Freud would think. Or any other stuck up intellectual whose sense of humor is undoubtedly as poor as their sex life. You can’t figure out if it’s “whose” or “who’s.” You know that it doesn’t really matter. You enjoy randomness. Your  mother loves cats. You are allergic to cats.  You know a lot of useless facts, but you don’t think that Jeopardy is a feasible option. You write all the time and marinate your metaphors in the vomit induced by last night’s overconsumption. You are disgusted with that last sentence – the metaphor makes you want to vomit. You think that vegans will be fucked if some bored scientist proves that trees can feel pain instead of finding a cure for cancer. Your favorite kind of doughnut is jelly; you don’t really care for the taste but you love the concept. You think ‘sea urchin’ vaguely sounds like ‘searching.’ You want some brave soul to try eating you. You really enjoy sexual innuendos. There you are. You.

Some of my blogs will take this form - mostly incoherent rambling. Some people have called me unique, but I'm just an infant, baby. Time to live up to my reflection.