Cinnaminiatures EOY

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There is no better place to put your words than inside of your best friends' mouths.

Fast and Forward

One of the saddest places you can find yourself is in the comments section of any given YouTube video. Another is in bed with someone that used to love you much more than they do now. You know these as facts, but there you find yourself, reading and reading into.

It’s not quite masochism. It’s more like having quite little will power. It’s more like being unable to change direction once you’ve got momentum. So, you keep on scrolling down to see just how much blind hate strangers have for each other. And you keep sleeping with someone that would rather sleep alone. And you’re up for hours just thinking about what an idiot you are for doing what you do.

One of the happiest places you can find yourself is at the very top of your favorite roller coaster at Six Flags, the greatest America. Another is on the road in tumbleweed country with a good girl by your side, when you’ve left your mind and entered some sort of silly, cathartic limbo. Fast and forward, pedal to metal, gunning for the sun.

You can’t win them all. You can’t win most of them. You actually can’t win many more than just a few. But, you can watch a video all the way through without checking to see what users concealedcarrie14 or Can't Stump Trump have to say. You can stretch out in bed and sleep like an ‘x’ marking a spot that’s all yours. You can buy a can of Coke for reduced admission price to a kitschy theme park. You can hit the road, hard and for days. High hope is dangerous, but moderate hope, say the height of a Christmas tree, is A-OK. 

What We Do Some Sundays in October

We curse the earth for being so beautiful and so unsympathetic and we curse the people that follow its lead.

We go out for breakfast and promise that it will be the last restaurant meal we eat for a week. A week at least.

We find a television channel colored green and gold and we watch it without knowing what we’re seeing. We watch socially and we drink semi-abusively.

We choke up when Humane Society commercials come on.

We get bit by Asian lady beetles that try to winter in our houses.

We talk about Halloween. We lose ourselves on Amazon.com searching for bald caps or fake swords or whatever. We open new tabs to imagine road trips and spring breaks. Our minds spiral into futures of foreign dialects and gas station showers.

We order a pizza for dinner: mushrooms and black olives. Thanks to our combined thimbleful of self-control, we don’t order breadsticks. We promise, “last meal,” “week at least.”

We sit atop the reservoir and talk about the rich women that live high in the skyline.  We are curious as to whether or not they are terrified by thunderstorms and whether or not their concierges help them load their whole foods into the elevator.

We forget to buy flowers at the farmers market. Again and again.

Planning an orchard visit, we wonder if we are the teeth or the apple or the worm or God.

We remember all of the text messages we forgot to reply to this weekend. We assume it’s too late to reply now.

In keeping with our habit of never giving up ghosts, we talk of this summer’s vacations like they were years ago, like it didn’t rain so much, like we didn’t feel lonely even among our best friends, like everything was perfect.

We laugh sweetly and sincerely at each other. We goof around. We love each other. A whole lot.

We get clean for the week ahead and get into bed without makeup or shirts on. We wear underwear, though. We have our periods. We’re in tolerable amounts of pain.

We dread Mondays. We can’t sleep.

We sleep.

High Lives

There were three cans of High Life at the boat landing off of Willow Road and we planned to make them ours. Jesse scoped them out when he went fishing with his uncle the Saturday before.

Our moms asked us where we were headed and we said, “Brenner’s.”

“Oh, good! Ask his mother if she needs anything,” and “I think that’s a great idea.”

The truth was, of course, that we were headed out to learn how to get drunk on 1.5 High Lifes. High Lives. The truth was that Brenner’s dad had recently died in a car accident and Brenner talked about it a lot. Even when we were at pool parties or at the movies with girls. He didn’t hide it away like I did my brother in prison or Jesse did his parents not having enough money for Chuck Taylors. For Brenner, it was all there, out loud. So, some days we ditched him because it was too much. It stretched our budding sympathy too thin. Sometimes we just wanted to hang out without picturing Mr. Daniels mashed up against his car’s dashboard.

When we got close to the boat landing, we stashed our bikes in the bushes. Jesse kept looking over his shoulder as we walked towards the dock. He had 20/20 vision. No cops, so we crept towards that busted down dock and grabbed those cans like they were dreams come true. Or Kristy’s tits or Lara’s or someone’s.

We ran into a clearing that we knew eventually emptied out into Brookside Park. Jesse, Brenner, and I used to make forts back there when we were younger. There were still remnants of duct tape in the kitchen where we used to spread dandelion heads on birch bark and call it buttered toast. Aluminum cans in tow, we sat down, river rocks vaguely outlining our forest home, which we once imagined to be mansion-big and mansion-fancy.

I opened my can first, which I remember feeling proud of. We synchronized a proper “Cheers!” and Jesse said, “here goes nothin’,” something his five-year-old sister starting saying every time she went outside. Jesse thought it was really annoying and always told her to quit it, but she wasn’t my sister so I didn’t think much of it at all. Thought it was a kid saying kid stuff, big deal.

“Eck.” It tasted like piss or metal.

“Maybe it’s old.”

“Maybe some lake water got in.” I peered into the hole and saw no tell-tale signs of contamination. I guess I assumed contamination would materialize as lime green sludge or something similarly obvious.

“Let’s chug it.” We swallowed as hard as any sewer drain, and fast, too.

“Do you feel anything?” I asked

“I think so.”

“Me too.”

We split the third can sip by sip,  passing it back and forth, our faces twisted up from a taste we’d not yet acquired. When the cans were as empty as cans can be, we crushed them with our sneakers and hid them under the log we used to use as a couch.

Running back to our bikes, we laughed. Hard. Jesse tripped on a root; we were sure we were hammered. We biked around the new cul-de-sac, in and out of driveways that led to early-stage basements or empty lots. My eyes felt warm and I was certain it was harder to steer straight.

“We can’t go home yet, man. They’ll know.” Our parents. The capital They. The Boss.

“We’ll just bike around for a while then. I have gum for our breath.”

So we biked around for a while then. Unless we wanted to circle around the whole town, we had to pass Brenner’s house, so we rode at what we thought was a camouflaging speed. Sure as shit, when we passed Van Buren, Brenner was out mowing his front lawn. His dog, Moose, was barking at the lawnmower. Sure as shit, Brenner saw us as we passed.

“Oh, hey guys!”

“Hey, Brenner.” I called back.

“Whatcha guys doin’?”

Jesse replied with a story about running to the Quick Mart as an errand for his mom. I couldn’t for the young life of me stifle the laugh that was creeping up my throat. Jesse hit me in the chest.

“Well we better get back.”

“Okay,” Brenner responded, scanning our expressions.

I mustered a “See you tomorrow, man.”

“Yeah.” Brenner started the mower and Moose barked loudly enough that we could hear her for blocks and blocks.

The truth was that our blood wasn’t drunk. Only our hopeful minds were. The truth was that if anyone needed a beer or a suburbian opportunity to do something city kids weren’t afraid to do, it was Brenner. If anyone needed to feel like an honest-to-goodness teenager, it was the kid who couldn’t stop thinking of the worms eating his buried family. We knew we should have invited him. There were three cans under that dock, one for each of us, and his dad was dead, for crying out loud.

Letters to My Past Selves Pt. 1

Dear Casey the Teen Detective,

I know this will come as a shock to you now, but you will never solve the murder case of JonBenet Ramsey. The folders of research and the mapping out of the crime scene that you and Chelsea worked on were well-intentioned but wonderfully amateur. I remember being you, sitting in that purple room on school nights, circling the details of JonBenet’s last moments like a clumsy human-hawk with dental braces alternating black and orange for Halloween, rubber bands training the molars into place. I remember thinking that if we just cared enough, more than the police officers or lawyers or coroners, we could figure it out. We were still so scared to grow up at that point that we could imagine ourselves in her tiny body. We could be her. Certainly more than any detective could be. We were closer to her fear; we got lost in retrospectively wishing it away and wondering what place it had in the story. The story that we planned to end with a period and a back cover.

So, then, little one, for all the mysteries that you won’t solve (Did her family kill her? Was it a fan? Is it normal that you don’t really think she is in heaven because you don’t really believe that’s a place?), you will have uncovered one great truth, young skin-and-bones: empathy makes you smart. Perhaps not smart in a gavel to the sound block sense, a hard evidence-to-hard evidence-to-synthesis-to-correct answer sense, but in a more universal, gravy-textured sense. Empathy is gravy. And of the world’s meat and potatoes, which aren’t better realized, more complete, than when they’re covered in beautiful, brown slop? You will forget the names of the dead girl’s parents and the town in which she lived. You will remember this ever-growing way of solving problems. Don’t worry, you selected the better memory to keep.

One last thing: your braces look better in monochrome. But, not yellow. You'll get a lot of corn-in-your-teeth related shit for that.

Love,

Casey the Budding Insomniac

The Anonymous Children that Bum Me Out

I remember the day I learned that some people go into hospitals, and just like blue jays, steal mothers’ brand new babes. It was then, but is no longer, the worst thing I had ever heard. It was then I decided you can never trust a pretty bird.

With tennis shoes and a mission to collect field research, I walked the state fair. Breathing in fumes of newly poured blacktop, I spied two brothers ruffling one another's hair. One of them came barely before the other into this world and I much before the both. I wondered what my additional decades gave me and what from me they stole.

A pretty-skinned boy sat across from me on the bus. He was slipping into and out of sleep repeatedly. He looked painfully tired the way children often do.   His mother shook and scolded him each time his eyelids gave in to his exhaustion. She slapped his hands, which were so puffy and small that the knuckles looked concave. I suppose she had her reasons. But the boy, out loud, and I, in loud, whined, whined, and wished she weren’t the boss of him.

Where exactly I was I do not recall, but what I was I do. I was a sunburnt, lonesome young adult who knew better than to get sunburnt and was just being dramatic about calling myself lonesome. The littlest of ladies, seated on a park bench close by, peeked-and-booed me for five minutes. She looked at me in a way that I hadn’t been seen in a while. This girl closed her eyes just to open them at me again. Would it always feel that important to be seen? Would it ever be enough just to see? The jury is still out.

I dropped a two-year-old on a concrete gymnasium floor when I was in third grade. Parent-teacher conferences or something, and they let us run ourselves out of energy while the adults talked about whatever they felt they needed to. I was a dinky little thing, couldn’t lift my backpack half the time, but I thought I could lift this young boy onto my shoulders and give him a fun ride. Just like the dads do. When I lost my balance and he fell hard onto the floor, I pretended I didn’t do it. I pretended, even worse, that I didn’t notice. It’s amazing how long that was my natural reaction to serious situations.

My father has always been a good neighbor, shoveling snow well past the boundaries of his yard and such. General good looking out. A few years back, he told me that he’d stopped flashing his headlights at oncoming cars when he scoped out a police speed trap. He had seen something on TV about a kidnapper getting caught in the act of abduction simply because he got pulled over for speeding. Often, I think about the kids trapped in cars my dad no longer signals and how maybe some of them get saved.  More often, I think about the reality that no matter what we do when we’re cruising down I-94 at night, there are many cars that get from A to B uninterrupted, even when the passengers in those cars are more afraid of B than anything else in the world.

A young girl, grey-minded and blue-blooded just like the rest of us, wobbled down the sidewalk and bent her knees to level with the earth. She picked up worm after worm and placed them in the freshly soaked grass. If she could help it, not a single creature would die by a bike tire or a left-foot Nike. Onlooking, I turned that scene into the big picture (as college had taught me to do) and imagined all of the American people as worms and as the shoe coming down. Then I punched myself in the thigh for being such a tool, thought about my massive loan debt, and picked up a rain-drawn worm to put back in the grass just because I felt like it.

Things That Make My Throat Hurt

Sad, sad movies in which the girl gets the diagnosis, the dog saves his boy, or the dead romantic sinks to the ocean floor, and he’s as blue and cold as anyone’s ever been

Morning bus rides from home to not home

Any mall for more than fifteen minutes, with its exhausting fluorescence, overpriced imports, and security personnel profiling the young and un-white

The radiator’s screaming, dry heat as it settles like baby powder in my airways

The memorable dream about the old man and all that he needs from me and that he’ll die when I wake up, unless, perish the thought, he recurs

Orange-flavored candies, the kind that aren’t fooling anybody’s taste buds

Watching someone I love cough in bed, their eyes red and searching for sleep

Impersonations of Bale’s Batman that I wouldn’t dare perform for anyone living outside of Bathroom Mirror, USA

The impossibility of keeping my un-tuned mouth shut during my favorite bands’ shows

The phrase, “the end of an era”, even when I say it

Sugary touchdown shots at a dive bar during football season

The clock in every corner of every room that ticks my mother’s minutes, my father’s working memory, and my brother’s last chances away

Wrong-tube sandwich bites

All the bad -isms that I’ve heard co-workers and television deny the existence of

The days after the nights spent sleeping head first in the traditionally ass-first toilet bowl

The part when Peter has to fly back home alone, the only boy still lost

The happiest days of my life, both as they happen and as they are kept, catalogued neatly in my mind 

Staying up late to write out a list of things that make my throat hurt

Bad Writer

Slowly and especially on Chambers Street, winter is moving earth. It’s surprising how much expansion and contraction can happen within one season. I drive a Buick over what feels like a medium-scale model showing the first stages of the tectonic plates shifting.  I swerve around the miniature faultlines.  My right blinker illuminates a little chunk of East breaking off into a little chunk of West. Maybe I say this every year, and maybe it’s just my growing in age or cynicism, but doesn’t it seem, Casey, that the winter is losing it’s light? Doesn’t it, Casey, seem like the Wisconsin wonderland has lost its snow globe iconicism? The wind chills deeper. The snowflakes fall; they no longer dance down.

Over tea, like a real god-damned writer, I think about this. Then I think about how late I am to thinking about this. How thousands of other semi-fresh adults have considered it before me and will consider it after me, likely with more talented brain-to-hand-to-pen circuits with which to express it. This is why I never get any writing done. These are the ellipses that leave many a Google Doc unfinished. After paging through their open ends, I search for natural ways to mute this anxiety. Passionflower, valerian root, exercise, and boyfriend dates to distract myself from the issue at hand: that I don’t know if I want anything enough to work through the hard parts of it. That although I feel a loyalty to the ever-evolving mutt named English Language, I so fully do not understand how to, or how to need to, materialize it.

I detest the self-inflicted pressures of creating seemingly more than I do the desire to do so, yet I still come back to the blank page.  Is this a calling or is this a habit? Does this feel good or does this feel like shit? Is the constant stream of words through my head meant to be filtered into spring water for the masses or simply to be admired in quiet solitude?

Annie Dillard wrote my favorite book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and she also wrote many other books and she also wrote a book called The Writing Life and she also wrote many other books. Somehow. In The Writing Life she says, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.” I hesitate to read what professional, deservedly respected writers think about writing. I know what they’ll say. They’ll say they write for days in windowless rooms, even when it hurts. They’ll say their work is necessity. With it, they are in an early American marriage, until death do part. They make their work matter more, as if it were alive, and feel arbitrary less, as if it were to mean something in the end. I admire that and hope to understand how it feels someday.

I am a bad writer. This is not to say that I am necessarily inadequate in the finding, splicing together, taking apart, forcing, and balancing of words themselves, the taxidermy of it, it is to say that I am a bad employee of Writing. I work hard enough when I have to or when a project presents itself either by assignment or flirting muse, but I do not work overtime, do not take my job home with me, do not stay in on weeknights to ensure productivity on a Wednesday. When I sit down to write, I am all in and I am passionate. Then, when the phone rings, I am zipping up my coat; I am going out for pizza and a vodka seltzer. I am going out to tell Molly she looks pretty. Out to give and receive that good feeling. Out wondering how writing a fiction will ever mean more than making her day. Wondering how to leave the social group for intellectual solitude.

So, I’ve got these two strikes: the fear that my skill will always submit to my self-consciousness and uncertainty and the reality that I am more motivated by surrounding myself with the life in my sweet-blooded people than I am with the life I can literally create. I haven’t struck the third. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I keep notebooks and write for my blog and send letters and arrange silly lyrics for my friends to sing. That’s why I am in this adulterous marriage with a spouse I do not trust and who does not trust me. A spouse who I don’t love as much as many others could love, but who I, selfishly, will never leave.