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High-res →
I feel as though my perceptions of love were gloriously distorted by my childhood obsession with Harvest Moon 64. I have come to believe that love should be as easy as bringing your dog to the bar where your beau works and proceeding to show her aforementioned dog for hours on end because inside the bar time stands still. Due to a glitch in the admittedly buggy game (or a glitch in the admittedly buggy lives we lead) your beau never ceases to be amazed by your dog; her love grows exponentially every time you press the “A” button.
In five years time, I can imagine my desperate Match.com relationship profile reading: “looking for an honest woman who loves dogs and understands the allure of living in a small farming town where everyone knows your name.” I see myself in a smokey bar in New York City sharing drinks with a girl who looks far too childish, with eyes too wide, and with a name like Popuri.
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A List of Books Lent Out and Never Returned (or, Why Do I Feel Inspired to Write This?
1. Adverbs by Daniel Handler - I lent this out to a girl with the initials C.M.; I thought I was in love with her at one point in my life, but by the time I lent her Adverbs I had thrown that notion away. She was a gymnast. She still texts me sometimes. I’ll never get the book back.
2. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - I asked C.H. for this book back before I went off to my first year of college in Buffalo. He said he had already returned it. He’s a fucking liar. Just kidding, I bought a used copy for 4 bucks, so I’m not too worried about the whole situation. One caveat: all of my Salinger books used to be the Little Brown Books versions, with the rainbows on the binding; now my copy of Catcher stands out.
3. 44 Presidents by MZA and Maria Sputnik - I bought the zine version of this book off of Maria’s livejournal before it was published for real. I gave it to my history teacher to look at and he promptly lost it. I think this loss hurts the most. I didn’t care very much about my history teacher, I cared about the rubberband bound book. I only payed 3 dollars, but those sheets of paper were worth way more than that.
4. Wicked by Gregory Maguire - This is just sort of embarrassing.
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I’m just one big ol’ muscle. They tear me down and I just get stronger and stronger and stronger, until someone calls me out on taking emotion steroids and I am banned from the game.
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Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives
There is a diner near my house that has been there for my entire life and will be there long after I have died. That’s probably a lie; the diner will be demolished ten years from now to make way for Wendy McDonalds the King of the Arby’s Castle. That’s what our future looks like: fast food conglomerations.
Two nights in a row now, I have found myself at this diner drinking coffee at midnight. I used to know all of the waiters there: young Mexican guys in white collared shirts and bow ties. One guy has a snaggletooth.
Ocean Township isn’t small, but I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who would notice when someone new rolled into town, especially when this someone new is a waitress at my favorite diner with Ramona Flowers’ hair and perfect features.
She wears these tiny white button-up shirts. It doesn’t seem like they should be allowed. I swear to god they’re nearly see through. You’re sitting there, trying drink your dish soap tasting coffee, shooting the shit with your friends because nobody had an empty basement to get shit-faced in that night, but it’s impossible to pay attention to what anyone is saying because she is perfect and pouring you free refills (which, generally, doesn’t fly at the diner) and you can not, for the life of you, figure out when the fuck she started working here.
I don’t think she speaks much English. I’ve been referring to her as Maria, but I have no idea what her name is.
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The library is the perfect place for comic books. Comic books are expensive, so it’s great that I have a friend like the government with such an extensive collection. And with comics, I don’t have the compulsion to deliberately highlight the shit out of every page like I do with novels.
I’ve been reading Y: The Last Man via my local library and as I checked the virtual card catalog, I noticed someone other than me had taken out the third book of the series. And the fourth. And the fifth. Underneath the familiar annoyance of having to wait an indeterminable amount of time for the continuation of a story was a bizarre feeling of community. Someone, somewhere in my county, is experiencing the same story as me, only slightly ahead of me, from the very same books as me. I wish the roles were reversed. I would open up communication with a note folded carefully at the end of the book:
“Are you finding this as abso-fucking-lutely amazing as I am? It’s hilarious and heartbreaking and the art! Oh man! The art! Also, have you noticed that Agent 355 is becoming less and less androgynous as the story progresses?
P.S. I’m kind of lonely and sometimes, when alone in the house, I pretend I’m the last man on Earth. It doesn’t help.”
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A Cute Thing That My Dog Does (The Internet Likes That, Right?)
Dogs hate thunder. It is either because they have supersonic hearing and the thunder seems incredibly loud to them, or because thunder makes dogs believe the world is ending, like the summer sky does to me when it turns that weird yellow color in the late afternoon. I can’t remember which one it is.
My dog’s name is Banjo. He’s a tiny, skittish Jack Russel terrier. He’s 11 years old, or possibly 10. He has a doghouse in the backyard and full reign of the laundry room where he makes his home.
About 10 minutes ago, Banjo went missing during a thunderstorm. He wasn’t inside. I live in a small house, so it’s easy to tell when he’s not roaming around. I hoped he wasn’t outside, considering I just gave him a bath this afternoon. I braved the downpour, stood on the deck my dad had stained a garish blue, and squinted in the direction of the dog house. No luck.
If he wasn’t outside of the house, and he wasn’t inside the house, Banjo must have scampered into a dimensional rift that had opened somewhere in the kitchen, and there wasn’t much I could have done for him at that moment. My best bet was to crawl around on my hands and knees to check under the furniture.
Underneath a purely decorative loveseat in our living room cowered Banjo. Upon me telling him that it was completely safe to come out from under the couch, that the world wasn’t, in fact, ending at all, Banjo wiggled his way into the open and allowed me to scratch behind his ears.
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Writing about the Hills while Watching the Hills
I have spent another afternoon watching the Hills. It truly is an amazing piece of television. It’s fucking brutal. The fifth season was light. Audrina and Justin Bobby. Kristen and Justin Bobby. Kristen and Brody. Brody and his obnoxious girlfriend whose name I can’t remember. Enzo. While it did bring to light how fucked up twenty-something relationships could be, especially in Hollywood, otherwise the show was easy. It was escapism in its purest form. And I like that version of the Hills.
The sixth season has utterly blindsided me. As far as I know, season five ended with Kristen and Justin Bobby sitting on a couch as Kristen moves out from her Malibu pad. It was an oddly hopeful ending. In stark contrast, the first few episodes of the sixth season is some of the darkest, most fucked up reality television I have ever seen. Spencer is a monster powered by crystal. Heidi looks like a monster. Kristen is partying hard in Miami without a mention of Justin Bobby. Audrina and Ryan Cabrera? I must have missed something. I am four (or three? or five?) episodes in at the moment and I’m no closer to understanding what is going on and locating the light at the end of the tunnel.
And it is absolutely incredible.
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Ohio is for…
I’ve been think a lot about Harvey Pekar today, the work of whom I have never experienced first-hand. I didn’t even recognize his name this afternoon when I read he had died. I glazed right over the first few mentions of him that I saw. Someone worth remembering seems to die every day. I don’t take much notice to the deaths that I am unaffected by. It wasn’t until someone attached “American Splendor” to the title of a tribute that I went back and read everything I could about the man.
The first time I was introduced to Harvey Pekar and American Splendor was through the Cleveland episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. I didn’t know it then, but Harvey Pekar is Cleveland.
Anthony Bourdain almost entirely features people like Harvey. The chefs Tony seems to like the best couldn’t imagine leaving the cities they call home. And every time I watch No Reservations, which is nearly every day, I want that feeling so bad. I have always lived here, near Asbury Park, NJ, except for that brief stint in Buffalo, but I have no strong feelings for the area. I want a community. I want a city that I can wrap deeply within my identity. I want a city that I know better than myself.
I’ll be running to the library first thing tomorrow and I’ll be bringing home as much of Harvey Pekar’s writing as I can.
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In other news that isn’t a long-winded three-part series on a topic that is only of interest to the author: The Hills series finale is on Tuesday. I’ve watched more episodes of the show today than I had during the four years it was on the air. The marathon is so addicting and voyeuristic. I try to cross the living room to get to the bathroom and I end up watching 4 episodes in a row.
