The Light You Can’t Escape

robert langellier

Marc ordered one more drink. Saw the fluorescent light shower on the back of the server’s neck as she bent it to watch the glass fill. She was bone thin, with her skin stretched tight around her elbows, knees and hips and all the other corners of her body. Marc stared at the arching vertebrae bulging from the back of her neck, reptilian, rippling with each little movement of the nape.

            Above the server on the wall were the colored lights of beer companies, liquor companies, advertising themselves. Behind that, in the background, were the darkened windows of the brasserie looking out into the black city street, to which Marc’s eyes were drawn. He felt suddenly hot under so much light and in the face of the dark windows. The feeling made him hyperaware of his situation, of his location at the brasserie and the hour and his thoughts.

He decided to leave. Got up, left before the drink arrived. Swung his coat up from its spot on the shelf between two booths by the entrance and threw it on, swung his scarf over his neck on his way out and tried to loop it, but the loop stuck. He’d tied it wrong. Tried it again, slung the scarf, threw the end over and looped one side, and the second loop didn’t stick. This, all outside the brasserie on the sidewalk, snow falling from above. In a minute it would stop. Marc knew this — the snow never fell consistently here.

He started, and for some minutes he wandered down Boulevard Saint-Germain, looking for a local tabac. It was 9:30. The snow fell at dizzying speeds and degrees, sticking only to the tops of the cars and the heads of pedestrians. The Parisian streets at night were cold, and very dark and very bright at the same time. Lights from storefronts blazed, always in motion at the speed that Marc paced down the busy street, cut off for moments by the shadowed bodies of passers-by that moved alongside him. If one light were shut by a body to Marc’s right, 20 more from grocers and brasseries and cafés would still glare from every direction. It was a world of light, and not a damn tabac in view.

Marc took an alley to the left. Slipped along the pavement to the next street. Whatever street. Rue de neige. Rue de lumière. And there, finally, a tabac. Marc walked up to enter. Through the window he could see the young homme, bending down inches from him behind glass, stacking up chairs. Locked. Sunday, of course. The sound of the metal bolt pitching against its frame caused the young homme to look up, catch the eyes of the good-looking man on the outside. The young homme for a second was stricken by fear, which quickly melted into an apologetic shrug and a return to the chairs. They were to be stacked, and he was to go home. 9:30.

In a sudden burst of drunken rage, Marc slammed his open fist into the glass door. Immediately, with the force of impact, a rush of pain exploded along the length of his hand, and up the ulna to the elbow, where it stopped. Marc recognized that it stopped. The forearm, the hand, were not him, so he didn’t feel it. The young homme, and his father at the bar who owned the tabac, looked up again and did not move. Looked at the clean, good-looking creature at the window, could do nothing but look at his eyes. And with that, Marc struck again, breaking his wrist upon the thick glass of the door of the tabac. The resulting minute crack in the window was imperceptible to anyone but Marc. A couple pedestrians stopped hesitantly on the sidewalk at the noise of the rage, but continued on for fear of the rage. The two men in the tabac remained still, the young homme still holding onto a small chair. Marc held the eyes of the young homme, ready to kill the bastard. To the two men inside, the lights of the Monoprix and the streetlights behind Marc lit up his edges on all sides and made him a terrible beast. Still the young homme did not move — the passers-by straggled on.

Marc’s hand was shooting bolts of heat down his arm. But it did not go past his elbow. He lifted his hand again, clenching his fist, and something in his being slowed his movement at the last second, his third blow weakened by the overrides of his brain, and when his wrist did come in contact with the chipped glass, he broke. Roared with pain, turned around violently and threw his free left arm out at the people five feet from him on the sidewalk, who then began to walk faster than before. The injured man, he burst into the busy street, letting out a long and howling cry, and for a moment everyone paid attention. For ten seconds he was the fear of Saint-Germain. But the noise quickly dissipated and the lights glowed over it anyway, so Marc turned again to the young homme, who by now had escaped to the tabac’s back room with his father. He grinned at the empty room, tipped his hat in a polite and sinister way and continued down the rue for the next métro entrance.

The métro at night is much lonelier than it should be. It’s by day a place of commute and connection, but at night it’s a place to hide from the colored lights. In the métro the lights are pure white, very artificial and bright, no jinks to them but very pure and serious luminescence. Not like the supermarkets and jewelers and pharmacies and cafés that wanted your eyes for specific greeds. Just light to show things and to drag them sullenly out of darkness. One can see how it can be a lonely experience.

Marc stood at the edge of the platform and looked left. No train. He looked right. No train. He looked at the other three people on the platform. Not one of them moved. Not one of them looked at him. The lights of the métro continued buzzing into everything in the underground room, blistering bright. Forced Marc into clarity. He didn’t want it — he was not drunk by accident — but it was métro light and the clean straight plainness of métro light is so oppressive and so chemically reactive to alcohol and quiet that Marc, in a way he had never known in the métro, was forced to see everything exactly as it was. Full of light.

At that moment, movement caught the periphery of his eye. A faint shift in matter to his left, to the stairwell. Marc turned his head, focused. Just in time to see a rat scurry along the bottom step and disappear into the recesses of the métro’s long reaching tunnels. It was no telling to Marc when the rat would ever be in light again. But it had been there in the light, and while none of the other three men on the platform had seen it, Marc had seen it, and he was relieved for having seen it. It was calming and relatable.

It was all Marc could see on the métro ride back home to Raspail. Saint-Sulpice. St.-Placide. Just the rat. Raspail. Denfert-Rochereau, Alésia.The rat. At the end of the line, Marc descended the métro and ran up into the clean night. It was 10:15 and now raining. Marc moved maybe a half a block before he came near upon an empty parking lot. There was a large ornate building for which the parking lot was built, but Marc didn’t know what it was. In the middle of the parking lot was a tall streetlight, which towered over the flat ground of the nearly empty lot. It was a vast empty square lit only by its surrounding light poles and the tall one at its center, causing the drizzling rain to glimmer in front of all of it. He moved toward it but stopped at the edge of the lot. His head was still dizzy, but he could easily see the reflection of the streetlight on the wet concrete between him and it — long, and white, and bright on the black surface. A clean little ovular line in the earth coming straight toward him. Slowly, but sans hesitation, Marc paced along the edge, to the other side of the lot. Wherever he went, the reflection of the beacon followed, always pointed, always facing him. It didn’t matter where he stood. The center was pointed and always moving with him and toward him. Marc blinked. Moved back the other direction to the other side of the lot, where the light followed him again. For a moment he stood silent, considering his next move. Listened to the rain pitter on the hard ground all around him. He blinked once more, so as to imprint the beacon of light on his mind as he turned away, and he walked in the other direction, thinking of the rat, the reflection stretching after him at the same speed that he walked. 

Vanishing Dangling Sounds

robert langellier

The arc of Ron’s sentences would often loop up and hang there suspended and strangled, unsure of where to travel, his sense of locutional direction suddenly vaporized, the arc left to flitter in the air for a moment and fall lazily to the ground like dropped paper scraps. They would come out as half-thoughts, mere hesitations: There was a bridge next to the uh—the uh—. And then nothing. It was at this point of change, this stopping moment in the sentence arc, where his sanity would be momentarily hooked and slammed, a brief interruption to the listener but a monumental shakeup of Ron’s sense of clarity. Because it happened all the time. This getting lost in communication. It was in part the devastating notion of lingual possibilities, the incalculable multitudes of word combinations, thought combinations, where a sentence could be shifted and adjusted mid-course by a single word, and the whole thing would diverge: I was in the car—on the car—on her car—on her something—in her something… Ron did not trust such a feeble and fallible thing as himself with the great responsibility of assigning language in its proper order. And since Ron preferred the universe to be in perfect order, he was greatly depressed by the overwhelmed synapses between his tongue and his mind. And he soon became a picture of shining quietness.

Sunrise Over the Back Balcony

robert langellier

In a sunrise you can witness the planetary shift at once. Besides shooting stars and sunsets, it’s the only time you can look at the sky and see it change in real time. You can see the universe moving, groaning out of bed. (Yes, you can see clouds move at any hour, but on the scale of things those are no more in the sky than my tall friend Will’s head is.) One second the sun is buried in the sheets of trees and pillowy rolling hills, and suddenly an explosion of light, a zero moment where the spin of the earth bangs the door open to a morning. And you’re rattled awake by sunlight that’s violent and warm. Where you once and will soon feel small and powerless, a hairy mote plugged to the wall of the universe in a frozen split second of time, instantly to combust and disappear forever into the infinites, well, now you’re a planet. You see a sun get up and conform to your very most powerful animal senses, sight and touch, its heat launching over the skyline and into the skin above your arms, and the Universe is your servant, not the other way around. It moves; and I move, you realize, and so why aren’t you a sun? You share and identify with its personalities. A heated body of energy. A mortal object. A collection of matter. No thing can make two objects so alike than being. The stained wooden railings of the outdoor balcony with industrial stamps still on them. The dirty trickling water that rolls lazily over concrete and jutted rocks and logs in the cut out creek below, moving toward the urban woods. The shot-out silver beer cans tied together with string and hanging over the water from a tree branch, dismembered by whizzing airsoft pellets. The chee-chee of the wintering chickadee. All is covered in light.

Editor, give me a title

robert langellier

It's come to my attention lately that there are more important things than blogging on invisible Wordpress accounts about journalism articles you've already written. Like blogging on Classic Brian, for example. I'm going to talk here about why journalism sucks, and why journalists are some of the suckiest people you'll meet. Here are the reasons:

Journalistic publications suck. Classic Brian does not have editors that pare down my silly antics and acrobatic wordplay after just having told me to write with more voice. It does not tell me I need to transition from point to point. So I won't.

Editors have no idea that you're 21 years old. Someone told them all that everyone is 11 and just learning the language. They will treat your clearly thought-out and purposeful sentence constructions as your 5th grade teacher would. I'm aware that "A white button-down." is not a sentence. It's a sentence now, fucker.

Editors get really mad at you for not knowing AP Style in its entirety. Why would I ever spend five seconds learning some of the most meaningless memorization facts ever thought up? If I write "Austin, TX," the world isn't going to end when you change it to "Austin, Texas." That's an editor's job, anyway. They have to have to do something, right? In other news, I'm going to lose about a half a letter grade in my class for my unparalleled failure to know or look up AP Style in my articles.

The word "snark." The magazine work I do is a pathetic excuse for storytelling. I get 600 words to tell a story. Fuck that. I poop 600 words. What kind of story can I write in 600 words? All I can do is draft an advertisement. Vox Magazine is a well-designed Add Sheet. My editors compensate for this literary straightjacket by gleefully informing me that I can insert some "snark" into my writing. Thanks! I squeeze a droplet of voice into a story, and I unfailingly get this comment back from whichever editor is reading my story: "Great snark!" Good god. I want to throw up on my Word document. If you think a pinch of "snark" is going to save a story and make it worth someone's time, God help you, and may journalism destroy you.

Journalists take themselves real seriously. Especially with stuff like ethics. Accepting gifts. People treat free beer or a hot dog like it's a car. I did a story last week where my videographer and I were offered some barbeque from a source. She hadn't eaten all day, man. It was night time. She said no, and left. Jessie, you are literally starving. If you're so susceptible to brainwashing that you can't eat a sandwich and tell the same story you had before your sandwich, you shouldn't be in journalism. I'll take all your beer.

Journalism is for pussies and people with poles in their butts.

Questions about nose zits

robert langellier

I don't even know how to react to this feeling. I have a zit in my nose, man. It doesn't really hurt, I don't think. It kinda feels like a rash or a skin inflammation, except a rash that also takes up the air inside your nose. It kinda feels like my nose is distended. Like somebody's blowing up a balloon in my nostril.

I'm just really out of my element here. What in my life can I compare this sensation to? Besides balloons. It really opens up the doors of perception for me. This is a thing that, as far as I knew, wasn't supposed to happen, wasn't able to happen. What am I supposed to believe now? Maybe I'll get a zit on the book I'm reading. Look out, "White Noise," you're about to get stuffed with pus. I hope the pages stick. Then I won't have to keep reading it. "White Noise" isn't good, guys. Don't read it. Maybe I'll get a zit on my imagination. Maybe I'll get a zit on my friend. That would be wild. She'd have to sympathize with me for the zit that she has.

More importantly, everywhere around my left nostril is pretty sensitive now. So how am I supposed to pick my nose? Get back to me on that, guys.

Is the tissue stuff on the inside of your nose still even skin? Can a zit develop on that stuff? I guess so. So that begs the question: if that's skin, then where does your skin end? Does it keep on wrapping, up inside your nose and folding under the inside of everything in your body? Can I get a zit under my scalp? On my retina? That would be insane. Imagine that popping; your entire visual world for a few moments would be a white explosion of upside-down pus. I can't say that I don't want that to happen to me someday.

Guys, do any of you have zits in your noses? I'm thinking about getting some people together to talk about it.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and tag this with my name. To 100!

A Day of Purple Witch Tits, Part 3

robert langellier

You see, you know, right, once your head stars a-baking and your whole legs get aching and cranking, then everything gets weird. The, uh, the air’s getting pretty hazy, see those milky puddles of heat on the road up ahead, sweet desert mirages, they must be Champaign…or Decatur…almost there. Brain is boiling, roiling, churning, kind of disintegrated I think. And so now it’s no thoughts, just sounds and perceptions lighting off my now sensitive senses—VROOM—dynamite blue—and it’s not painful, just a trip. Out goes critical thinking, and it’s a wonderful thing when that happens, when you’ve lost the sheer ability to analyze and meditate, just to be an animal for a while, and no more playing god, and being a human is somewhere between the two—VROOM. A car pulls up by.

“You need a ride, friend?”

Sheeit no, no, I’m doing something here. “Nope!”

“You sure?”

No, no, no, no. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Alright.” A sweet bastard with a comfy buncha seats speeds away—VROO—

—and Illiopolis! The halfway point! right on schedule—

—Boy, oh, boy, ow boy. It’s a good time for some water, no, sunscreen, yeah. Round the corner, hey a turn! and two more hours before the next one. Take a rest. Little highway sign dinky little shade, gives enough shade for just my head, body’s cooking in the hard dead prickly weed grass. No, keep on! Pretty soon I’m singing to myself, singing some crazy ones, making stuff up, then “On the Road Again,” then some modern pop standards “I used to ruuule the world…” Down below the purple witch tits are glowering at me, like, “Have you replaced us?” “Yes, tits, I’m with I now.” And they reach out and touch me with longing knobs, so I just walk pow in the middle of the road, there’s no cars for days, whew. And here now I’m trying accents, talking to myself in Russian, British, Aussie, French, everything I can think of, mixing them up, too—“Vat do you vant, mate?”—and I’m the most ridiculous thing walking down the road sputtering nonsense to myself like a loon. If they saw me I know they’d lock me up, because oh goddamnit I’m crazy.

“Man, I’m going crazy out here!”

“It’s okay!”
“Whoo-ee!”

I wonder like always what time it is. I’ve still got hours to go, I know that much, but I’m real beat. But it’s okay, I’m running on sensations now, burning along in some crazed frenzy. I take my sunglasses off and the world simply *explodes* with light like a Claritin commercial, yes, just like that. I need cleaner glasses. God, it’s a real wash of light, an electric jolt, and it’s the only way anything changes around here is to put a different color of light on it—the only way anything changes—whoo...

And VROOM—(here goes a movie scene)—goes my friend Eliot’s car past me. He’s on his way back from a trip to Oklahoma right now, interesting place to vacation. Weird he’s out here on Old 36 by Illiopolis, that’s strange. I call him.

“Heyyy, man, how’s it going?....Yeah, I was wondering if you could give me a riiide….Oh……….Oh, okay, yeah that’s fine…I was just thinking maybe there was a chance you’d be driving your car on Illinois Old 36 somewhere between Illiopolis and whatever the FUCK town comes after it, turn your car around and come pick me up!!”

Man that sure rolled off the tongue, ohhh it felt good to say! so I fake hang up the fake call and take my phone back out of my pocket and do it again. 

“Heyyy, man, how’s it going?....Yeah, I was wondering if you could give me a riiide….Oh……….Oh, okay, yeah that’s fine…I was just thinking maybe there was a chance you’d be driving you car on Illinois Old 36 somewhere between Illiopolis and whatever the FUCK town comes after it, turn your car around and come pick me up!!”

You see, I’m a movie star, and I have to get this line just right for my audition, and I just can’t get it perfect. It’s gotta be articulate, natural sounding, energetic, with a big crescendo up to the last line, the big cathartic climax, so powerful I thrust my body and swing my arms in a way that can be seen by cell phone satellites and transmitted into the other receiver and understood by the actor who plays Eliot. It’s such a long line, sucks out my breath, and for an absurd half hour here I am in the middle of the universe belting out these sentences over and over and miming my phone to my ear.

“Heyyy, man, how’s it going?....”

I liked to imagine that walking is like running…cyclical…where you wear yourself down to hurting and if you keep at it you’ll eventually circle back to 0 and hit your second wind, your runner’s high. In reality, walking is just a straight vertical line, a constantly depleting line, and when you hit 0 it’s not the start of something beautiful anew, you just stop walking or go into the negatives. It doesn’t ever get better as I’ve been telling myself repeatedly since noon.

(((There is one truly rejuvenating grace in the world, and he drives a pickup truck, stops next to me coming from the west, and blesses me:

“I saw you when I drove by earlier, I thought you needed some water. Got a couple ice cold ones right here for ya.”

“What! Wow, that’d be incredible. Thank you so much, man, you’re a lifesaver!”

“No problem, take care,” and oh for a moment I believe in god or at least his guardian angels. I take down a whole bottle of Aquafina right away—my own water has looong since run warm—till I think I’ll puke. For the next five minutes I must say “wow” fifty times out loud in wondrous gratitude.)))

And then the cold water is gone, it was only a moment in time. In another half hour the water man is a memory, a dream, a hallucination. Perhaps something that happened in a past life. ……

This is the longest I’ve ever gone without anything to send my undivided attention to. For once I wonder if that is not some modern industrial age trivial dependency, if that is really some inherent animal need. I don’t know. I don’t know I DON’T KNOW. But it hurts now, I’m starting to hurt a lot, and there is that to focus on…

So I’m not crazy anymore. You go crazy when you don’t have anything to focus on. Now there is unimaginable pain. Every part of me is on fire from the sun. My legs are a different color. My calves are burnt. My muscles and joints are screaming. My eyes don’t open all the way, my body is soaked. Every step is an entire day’s workout; I feel freshly horrible with each one. There isn’t a moment I don’t think that my body will collapse at any second. Crumple to the ground. Die. Blow away with the sand. I am obliterated. My pack is heavy, very heavy now, and it’s killing, cutting, drilling into my shoulders. The water, the food, the supplies, it’s too much, too heavy.

My friend Bridget once told me that torturing small-brained sentient creatures is worse than torturing a healthy human, because the mental capacities of those animals is such that their entire beings, everything they know and believe in and understand, is searing unending pain as long as it envelops them. There is no dream of escaping, no family to think of, no god, no happy memories—it is a universe of pain.

Around me is all this horrible, twisted land, world of mirrors where you never know where you are, because you’re never anywhere at all, just in the double reflection of the place you were before. I look back and see a water tower that was there an eternity ago, slightly larger. I see ahead a cell phone tower that has been there as long as I’ve been alive, always the same size. On this kind of trip you will learn to hate tall things. There is no way out of it, the mirror shoots forever. Decatur is no more than a knot in my throat. Champaign may as well be somewhere I go when I die, I will never reach it elsewhere. By now I’ve abandoned the notion of it entirely. I came out here for solitude, which apparently is no better than any other drug in excess. I sit down in the grass and let out a whimper. I am miserable. The ground is hard. 

I decide to hitch home. I try thumbing in both directions, because I don’t care which direction I’m going, as long as I’m somewhere where there are buildings and shade. Of course, now that cars see that I’m clearly in need of a ride—I’m limping, or sitting down, thumbing—they avoid me like I’m breathing an airborne HIV virus. Eventually I have to give up, and I straggle on in the sun looking for any kind of shade—a gutter, a culvert. I have to stop every 10 seconds or so to sit down, so the progress is brutally slow, but, dragging my feet through the purple chicory weeds, I eventually after some agonizing time reach the next little town, just a few houses as far as I can tell—Harristown, just 5 miles outside Decatur, where I would’ve rested the night and made it to Champaign tomorrow. The first one on the right has a lawn, a real lawn, and a mid-size oak in the front yard. From down in me comes a little choking sob. I’ve done it. I sit down by the oak, make some calls, “Come pick me up.” Looking east, I can see the shimmering mirage of light dancing and refracting on the highway, and I let my head fall back, and I wait for a black Nissan to appear through the haze…almost there.

A Day of Purple Witch Tits, Part 2

robert langellier

Sometime around noon I sit down aside a grain silo to eat lunch. A banana, an apple, a cherry Kashi granola bar, a little bit of green Gatorade leftover from work yesterday. I’d say more around 11:45, actually, because it quickly becomes a race between my desire to eat slowly and my lust for fast dissipating shade. This is the town of Dawson. The silo is the first thing I reach in the town, but I think I can see the other side. It’s so quiet. There is the quietness of the road, undercut by the low rumbling of fast distant cars, which swells and wanes with such frequent consistency that its roar is swept back into the unconscious fabric of silence. Then there is the quietness of this town—a real lonely silence, one that feels either peaceful or dead. I don’t know that anyone even lives here, maybe it’s one of those towns where people come to work and leave at 5 to go back to their families somewhere else. I wonder how the town is at night, if it even exists, or if it is simply sucked away into some infinite spinning nothingness until the first 1998 rusting red pickup pulls up for work at 5 in the morning and it snaps back to slow-decaying reality. Across the road and down a ways I hear a man and a woman bickering, so I look up, but I don’t really hear them, I see them as forms moving and shifting in the heat of the high noon, but their sounds are lost to my true ears sitting there under the silo—I just watch them, and just like that they are gone again, spinning into infinite nothingness somewhere. Strange rural town bugs crawl around me, as foreign-looking as the people. They are desperate just like me for the shade, although I don’t think they know my pain, for I’ve just been five hours without it. 

Dawson is too lonely. I need to get out and keep moving. Not that the road is any less lonely. I think that is the silly thing about being a traveler—he's no more than a sad failure to settle. I believe any person wants to settle deep down, no matter what they say. People want to be in the best place for them and they want to be happy, simple as that. Why would a traveler go someplace if he didn’t think it was the best place for him, in some way? And then that changes, and he’s not happy anymore, and it’s off again. Maybe travelers set the bar too high, maybe they need to learn to compromise and sit still a while. Then again, maybe all people are travelers, and the great majority of people got unhappy a long time ago when they settled, and now they’re just convincing themselves over and over and over again I am happy I am happy I am happy. So maybe the travelers and the settlers are both unhappy, I don’t know. All I know is travelers are unhappy. So maybe I should stay in Dawson a while…but I’m losing time.

In a minute I’m out of Dawson and back on the road. (“Want a ride somewhere?” says a pickup. “It’s hot out today.” “No…” and it gets harder to say so each time…)

You’d think, maybe from seeing Castaway or reading “Far Side” comics, that it takes weeks of isolation before you go crazy and start talking to volleyballs. In reality, it’s about 5 hours. Maybe the blazing sun boring into my scalp through my Sox cap doesn’t help, maybe it doesn’t help that the general scenery has changed less than it does in a Cormac McCarthy novel, but I find myself chatting me up like I’m an old friend.

“Man, this walk is sure taking a long time.”

“No kidding,” I say. “I think my feet are starting to hurt.”

“Good thing we decided on shoes!”

“Yeah, that’d’ve sucked. WHOO IT’S HOT!”

“Bam!”

“I can’t wait to get there,” I say. “Mmm gonna be good.”

“Champaign, AiiyyAH!!”

I like me. I’m kind of goofy, sort of a character. I get along with me well, and I kind of remind myself of my friend Conor. I only wish I had more to talk to me about, but this landscape has really worn my capacity for critical thinking down to a stub. I guess I can not think at all, it’s what I’ve been doing for most of the trip anyway. 

I decide not to talk about the landscape, just observe it. I and I remain silent for a while in sort of awestruck appreciation for the sheer beauty in emptiness. Just like white can be the most powerful color in a painting, so can Illinois’ utter flat blandness be translated into unabridged beauty. If each acre of view added a set amount of beauty to the final sum of a landscape, then Illinois would be the prettiest state in the country next to Kansas and Nebraska. Provided you are able to see over the corn, you can almost make out Indianapolis ahead of you and Kansas City behind you. There’s something undeniably evocative about Midwestern farmland. Maybe it was planted in our blood by 18^th century expansion brochures, or the Homestead Act, but it’s there, the feeling of unwritten potential on a blank tilled slate, the infinite infancy of American cropland. Coming from above: the warm blue and white of placid skies, the dark green of distant trees (all classic oak and maple), the golden brown of crops, the bright verdancy of the grass at my feet, and the reflection of all colors, the black of the road pining away to other skylines. 

And the purple witch tits. 

A purple witch tit—the name I’ve assigned this shit plant—is a ubiquitous indigo flower that resides along the edges of Illinois highways. Why it grows solely within twenty inches of the roadside I have yet to come up with a reasonable answer. I doubt very much that paved asphalt provides many essential nutrients to purple witch tits. Perhaps, I think to myself, all the water runoff from the highway on rainy days catalyzes their growth. I don’t buy into that theory because a) a marginally higher intake of water doesn’t justify the sheer explosive dominance of healthy, strong little purple witch tits and b) if it did, then other plants would benefit too, and we’d have jungles thousands of miles long and twenty inches wide along every highway in America. But we don’t; we have only purple witch tits, and it is my personal dark conspiracy that some generous asshole planted them everywhere for our 70 mph visual pleasure, because yes, at 70 mph filtered through bug gut centimeter-thick glass, purple witch tits are absolutely splendorous additions to the landscape. Children learning colors and boring suburbanites can be entertained for minutes on end by highway bookend color streaks, pretending on their way to Podunk that they are flying in between landing strips on the violet runways of Aubergine Airlines. I can just see some well wisher Bible metaphor man sowing seeds from the window of his car as he drives, as if the whole damn highway is a garden for his knobby plants. 

They are somewhat pretty, the flowers—fish fin purple petals with ragged indigo edges clawing out from their centers. Pretty, very pretty, until their warty little appendages touch against your leg as you walk. When this happens, all virtue of the plant is lost to its up close ugliness. Any beauty, edibility, medicinal qualities, all lost to its up close ugliness. 

It takes some time to build up a hatred like this. As I first began my trip, purple witch tits were some small annoyance, nothing more; an easily ignorable irk. But a note to my someday fiancée: anyone who says that time eradicates the hatred of bad habits or little irritations, that person is full of shit. Anyone who’s ever had a college roommate can confirm that. There’s no hump to get over, no soft agreeable landing on the other side. Purple witch tits do not grow on you, unless you count reaching for my calves and ankles as growing on me. Within a number of hours, I’m prepared for the Sisyphean quest of ripping out each and every stalk of purple witch tit on Old Route 36, one by one, every single stem. Had I known at the time that purple witch tits fold up and lose their pretty color with the late evening, I would have counted the hours minutes and seconds with joy until their temporary demise, because with an ugliness so offensive, one can only wish even more ugliness upon it. 

Purple witch tits, then, are my primary companions on my trip. I later find out that this plant is known in real life by real botanists as chicory, and I resolve never to eat chicory again, if only to decrease demand for it.

Also among my companions are the only slightly less common pink candy noses (milkweed) and the little white-flower weed too boring for me to assign a fake name to (Queen Anne’s lace). I don’t know why these weeds are so wildly omnipresent on Illinois highways, but I hate them all in equal individual ways like a mother loves her children. 

My only respite from the gaudy pink white and blue flower parade on the roadside and the horrific dangers of the road itself is the train tracks running alongside the highway about 15 meters to the left. It is my secret bitter conspiracy that railway builders space out the sleepers just close enough to make them incredibly awkward to walk upon. It comes to mind that walking on rail tracks might be illegal, but this is America, and I’m innocent until I know I’m guilty, so to hell with it. Now where is my hobo pack? I should look good, in case someone takes a picture. Off in the distance ahead a horn bleats and wails and hollers, and whoop off the tracks for a minute, wave to the conductor, back on the tracks. A half an hour later a big giant one carrying a bunch of steel boxcars comes chugging and roaring and global warming from behind me, and I can only imagine it must’ve simply exploded through the one I saw going the other direction earlier and kept on going unhindered. 

I don’t like trains, no matter how much I like American tradition. They’re grotesque, hot, steamy slabs of iron riproaring across the serene farmland, big metal brutes, blunt instruments trying to slice open the land and doing a pretty good job of it, if you ask me. There’s nothing good about a train these days. 

One thing the tracks illuminate even more than the road is the endlessness. Maybe something about the narrower tunnel of vision unraveling away for days, straight as an arrow, don’t even think about wavering from this eternal line, here to the Atlantic, rigid and true American, austere, stolid, UNCHANGING. Simple and clean. Nothing to misunderstand about it—you’re alive and in the grass, and what else so you want?

I’m getting a little uncomfortable in the heat.

A Day of Purple Witch Tits, Part 1

robert langellier

At 7 a.m., I switch off my car. “The Wild Hunt” is my pump-up jam. I fold up my headphones and drop my iPod in my pocket. I turn off my phone. There are no electrical outlets in Illinois cornfields, so I’ve left my charger at home. I strap on my cumbersome academic backpack full of water, food and sunscreen. I stare boldly at the rising eastern sun and move toward it out of the Walmart parking lot, a symbol of my exodus from industry and more importantly a place where my car will not be towed for the next two days. I’m going to Champaign, from Springfield, IL, on foot. It’s 80 miles between, not a terrible threat to one who trains in long distance moving. I wonder why I’m going into the sunrise and not west into the sunset, because I’m trying to be poetic here. But sunsets are for endings, I justify, and this is the beginning of a journey. Perhaps I will go east until I have reached the western sunset of where I came from, and I will have taken the long and proper way to the ending. And it is all about the journey anyway. Yeah. My reams and scrolls of Google Maps printouts flutter and billow in the wind as I awkwardly try to study them. Six miles on Sangamon Ave, continue onto Camp Butler Road.

My trip will take 2 days. On the night of Day 1 I will stay with Phil Romano, 52, a man I met on the internet a day before. On the night of Day 2 I will presumably stay with Eliot, 19, who lives in Champaign. That’s the plan. On the night of Day 3 I’ll call someone in Springfield and tell them surprise I’m in Champaign come pick me up. I don’t want to give them foreknowledge of my trip and allow them to tell me my plan is stupid and they won’t pick me up. This way they’re trapped. Anyway, I can’t very well walk back to Springfield. I have to be in Missouri for work by Day 4. There’s a limit to my wanderings. I will have to return like Emerson to the village if I want to be able to pay for my suits.

Exhilaration and freshness fall out of me as I cross the first bridge of the first highway. Maybe I should be taking this as a dark portent, as the first step of any bad thing is usually bold. But the weather is beautiful, sunny, intermittent white wisps of shade, and high 80s—no time to be thinking of portents. The top of the first bridge, the first view of the familiar skyline—familiar because all central Illinois skylines are the same—is not quite real. It’s because I haven’t been to that skyline yet, because it is only a picture still, because it is only false distant light that sprays into my eyes and romances me, that it isn’t real. It’s a beautiful landscape, and an endless expanse of sauntering solitude, full of enough fertile earth to care for me and to keep me and the rest of the American population nurtured in womblike quietness for the rest of our lives. Were I to know the fearsome reality of things like this before I started them, I would never to my ability start anything at all. That’s the beauty and benefit of romanticism. A romantic will never get what he wants, but he will get something, and enough to turn the next person in line into a romantic. He gets the landscape and the fields, but not the pathway into heaven and its Elysium fields that he thought he saw running through it. Which is just as well, because really there were only the landscape and the fields to begin with. I step off the bridge, put on my aviators, what a remarkable view. 

My main route to Decatur is along IL Old Route 36, a little B-side route of a highway that may have once connected real towns and carried real travelers. Now it has me, my detailed Google printouts, and residents of towns like Buffalo and Dawson, too small to even list their populations on their entering signs. It is the most direct route between Walmart and Philip Romano besides the interstate, on which I am not allowed, presumably because government workers with shovels do not want to clean up splatters of human paste on the roadside, slowly untangling cords of intestines that have wrapped themselves around the cornstalks and down into draining culverts. I know I would not like to be either the current or the former human in such a scenario. But as I walk, on the left side of the road to avoid being rear-ended into the afterlife, I wonder if it’s any less unnerving to be on roads where the speed limit is 55, cars go 65, and more importantly there are no rumble strips. I consider myself a relatively bad driver, but if normal drivers find themselves tearing into rumble strips even a third as often as I do, I have about a 50% chance of my vital organs remaining within 50 feet of each other at the end of the day. Rumble strips save more lives a year than drunk driving takes. I don’t know if that’s a real statistic, but I imagine it to be.

Exhilaration and freshness fade away a little bit once I realize that if I manage to miss a turn, I could end up walking an entire half hour before I’m really sure of it. If I’m walking at 3 mph, the distance I travel in about a half hour is the same as if I drove a car for a minute and a half, and this is coincidentally the strongest argument my friends use for thinking that this is a ridiculous thing I’m doing. Terror strikes each time I see a street that doesn’t appear to be on the map. Something similar to terror, but with a more steady, consistent pulse, begins festering when 19 minutes pass and I’m still not on Camp Butler Rd, 25 minutes, 30 minutes. I can’t lose a half hour; I’m already arriving at Decatur after nightfall. Why did I even attempt this. What a laughable embarrassment to be turned around on the first hour of the trip, to have lost too much time to continue. I’ll be home by 9 a.m. Good god. I will never tell my friends about this. I’ll tell them I slept in today. Failing is absolutely not an option, especially this early, but I have to find—oh, look, Camp Butler Rd. Hoorayyy. 

Ah yes, my exhilaration and freshness. It is back and I’m once again floating above the pavement in the great American trip of vast American beautiful waves of grain, yes, Kerouac. Of course, 12 hours is a long time to be alone, and pretty soon I find myself hungry for human interaction. Just as apple cores are to beggars, my simple brief hellos with the traffic taste like buffets of conversation. 

One thing I notice in particular about highway drivers, people in trucks are friendlier than the regular people in regular cars. My only communications for these 12 hours last about 2 seconds each, the time it takes for me to nod the brim of my blue and white Red Sox cap to oncoming cars and for them to lift a few fingers off their steering wheels back at me. It’s the ones in the trucks—the semis, the construction workers, the government trucks—that wave. Most other people in cars and minivans sort of look at me and move on, either registering too late that someone acknowledged their existence on earth, or afraid of or disgusted by the dirty vagabond and the dirty wild things that they imagine must go on behind those big blue aviators (I do look pretty trampy), although what on earth exactly they can’t pinpoint, because their imaginations are restricted to summoning up only gross ambiguous blobs of fear. Nevertheless, it is the truckers I can count on to wave—a meaningless gesture, but it’s all we have, and I think that is why truckers do it, because they are in the same boat. I see one truck in particular, one of those multilevel flatbeds of death, stacked up crushed cars on its back, and I imagine what it must be like to be the grim reaper’s janitor. The driver nods at me, and I continue on.

One other mode of communication: every once in a couple hours, someone takes pity on the boy walking in the blazing sun and pulls over to pick him up, take him as far as the interstate. “No,” I say politely to the first truck and “No” again with a smile when he persists. “I do this for fun. I like this.” The most effective form of hitchhiking, I think, is to be on the highway and pretend like you don’t need a ride. Only then do you have their compassion. Let the needy stay needy—there is something ambiguously fearful about them.

John Michael and His Inescapable Joy

robert langellier

John Michael is filled with inexplicable joy. It is a joy that builds, and it has been building for several years, but it is only very recently that it has exploded into a new realm of inexplicable joy. This is for a number of complicated reasons that happened by chance to coalesce together in time.

But now his happiness is consuming him. It is wrung from his feet when he walks and wrought from his nostrils when he breathes, reflected in magnified degrees from the light running wild into his pupils. Everything from John Michael radiates and booms and swells, pushing forth into the world in a swirling surge of questionable sincerity, questionable only because this new level of inexplicable joy is so radically new to him that he cannot bring himself to bow fully to the notion that this John Michael is truly even John Michael. 

This joy is strange to him particularly because nothing is going particularly well for him these days. It goes, it goes, but there is no brilliant thing that has tangibly changed around him. The joy brings big smiles on him when there is nothing really to smile about but the wind and its gallivanting into his body. They are big grand smiles. Banished and despised are simpers, no wry grin on his face anymore, but big grand openings, great invitations to his happiness. It is enough to set John Michael on fire. Enough to bring on an urgent sensitivity that is so riveting it is almost sexual. Where another less recent version of himself would twitch, an anxious twitch, his current body will swell and rise, a sinful-feeling tingle that reaches the root of every follicle of hair. It covers him, and traps him in the sense of overwhelming, inescapable, and paralyzing pleasure. 

I suppose that in consuming it is also becoming. John Michael is turning into nothing, nothing but a practice ground for glee to spread its wings and swing its hips and not have to answer any questions like why, or for how long. He is nothing at all but the very concept and outlet of happiness. Nothing, or perhaps everything, for it is as if all feelings and stimuli are churning within him at once, churning in the vacuum void of his soul and riving him from that old beast who tried filling it with single, unannexed emotions. These sensations are even the bad ones, which when thrown into the mix are on some universal perspective still great things because they are definite things, and I can find no other quality truer and more pure than definition. And so, by some vantage, John Michael is now becoming either nothing or everything, which perhaps makes him a character and not a person, because if he is nothing or everything then he is understandable and noncontradictory, which are two things I know people are not. And maybe this would trouble John Michael if it did not bring him so much joy.

Nevertheless, there is still the vague notion in John Michael that everything he has been lately is stacked together like hundred dollar bills on a summer day, and any breeze, this one or the next one, might send everything loose. But as he thinks now in waves of joy and not in time, it is of little bother to him. 

A Philosophical Crisis on the Subject of Salads

robert langellier

Oh my god, what is a salad?

Language is here to signify things, right? And so a word represents a thing, a thing or a concept or some thought that can be visualized in your mind. And so what is a salad? It's so flexible. That word can go so many places. Like, like, what constitutes it? What universal boundaries does a salad abide by, do you know what I'm saying? What are the edges of a salad, what are its basic requirements? I know there are leaves involved, leaves man, leaves are involved in fucking a lot of things. Maybe a tree is a salad. Okay, salads also have other edible things in them. I would say that's in the definition, maybe requirements are a) must have leaves and b) must have not leaves. Except trees bear fruit, man, so is a tree a salad? There's no fucking requirement for what "not leaves" is. Conor puts raisins in his salads raisins raisins. That pretty much kicks down the door for anything, there go the floodgates, I think. Maybe I'll put headphones in my salad. I'll have my salad with some flags in it, thank you very much. Put a full grown tree in my salad, put a salad in my salad, if that doesn't tear a hole in whatever dimension salads live in, and yeah then put that interdimensional hole in my salad thanks. I'm so worried about salads, because what does that do to language? What does that mean for communication, what does it say about all of our words, do you hear? Am I coming through to you do these words even mean anything DO MY WORDS MEAN THE SAME THING TO ME AS THEY DO TO YOU what is my message that I'm sending if you tell it back to me correctly, what's to say that those words that sound accurate and correct in my head don't mean something totally different in your universe in your head LIKE I'M SAYING WHAT IF THE COLOR GREEN FOR ME IS YELLOW FOR YOU? What about salad dressing, salad dressing? What are the boundaries of dressing? That it needs to be liquid? It can be white and goopy or just this red thin runny watery vinagre or basically anything, so it just needs to be liquid. Well water, water falls from the sky and really gets all over the lettuce in the trees, so the trees, the trees are definitely salads. I have two tall salads in my backyard. I'm surprised nobody's eaten them, they've been sitting there for a half a century. I guess you could say that salads are supposed to be edible, but man I remember some salads that have been just... I mean, there are people who put raisins in their salads. So I don't know what to think, man, can you really just say salads are intangible undefinable ineffable but very real, like I know it when I see it, like salads are some kind of threshold test for court case pornography? I don't think so, no, no, I don't buy into that game. I've become skeptical as to the existence of salads. I see piles of fruit and leaves, I see piles of meat and leaves, I see piles of raisins and leaves, which okay I guess that goes in the former category, I see piles of bread and peanuts and leaves, I see maple trees, I don't see salads. No, No, I refuse to let the foundations of my language, of my universe, to come crashing down on account of a salad. On account of a nothing, a thing that doesn't exist. So yes, I will have a pile of fruit and leaves. And put some liquid on it. I want it to taste good. Or, or, I guess, to taste alright. I'm on a diet, actually.

Urushiol, my love

robert langellier

Poison ivy, not so different from drugs, after all.

First I make a sacrifice, of my body. I don't need my lower legs. I'll sacrifice those. With drugs I guess it is your liver, or your lungs, or your brain. But something must be offered, and I think I'll offer my lower legs, yes. Those curvy ankles and flat calves and tops of my feet. Those appendagal luxuries, I don't need them. Once I've made those concessions, my legs already lost in my mind, there is nothing left to fear.

Poison ivy is euphoric. The sensation of scratching those desperate itches, as calming as cigarettes, freeing as drink, as high and the hallucinatory bliss of a psilocybin trip. Oh yes, yes, the energy is nearly sexual, an epidermal orgasm. I feel the burning waves rippling and undulating up, down, up, down across my ankles and begging for more, more, more scratching, heavenly scratching, never stop, no, more, harder, yes!! It is climactic relief, release of catatonic liberation urges. The freezing hand hovering above the screaming skin, finally freed to tear into ecstasy, opening holes, wide holes, wide new holes in feeling. All in exchange for a little seeping blood, a tiny expense, and we consider it a supreme nuisance. So what of a little scar, a little red bump textural tattoo, a gleeful admittance of all the gleeful fun I've had itching in my room? Let it be, spread. It will grow with my ecstasy.

And what of this little drug? this little thing that moves on me and takes over my legs and the movements of my fingernails? It is double-bonded urushiol ripping out the undersides of sensitive, sensitive, once so definite, spirited, vigorous, durable skin. Urushiol— that is, the ugly pale-yellow heinous culprit responsible for the big bad bumpy rash. Responsible for all the good relief. It's the same little liquid in ivy, sumac, oak, all the same, just in different shapes, slightly different feelings. It is just a drug, and I've spent much of my life running from it in the same way that I've run from the other drugs I'm told are bad for me. And even when I've been high, even when I'm scratching those desperate itches, I've still avoided it, convinced myself it hurts, that it isn't good, like denying that going to the bathroom is one of the singular best isolated sensations of my day. Those tiny climaxes that masquerade as villains. I won't buy it.

And the thing, the thing with poison ivy is, I am rewarded for my pleasure. With each sacred itch comes another, it spreads. And then there is even more pleasure, even more euphoria enveloping my skin, until one day I may be inflamed, encased in a red bumpy cocoon of my ecstasy, from my burning ankles to the hot lobes dripping from my ears. It will be a transfiguration, truly, from the hard shell of smooth healthy skin, to the transcendent embodiment of burning, bleeding pleasure. I will be simmering, simpering, red and warm in that hot, hot feeling.

The Anti-Plan

robert langellier

If i haven't told you yet, this is what i'm planning to do this summer. This is how much you will see of me. These are the directions i'll be moving myself:

i don't actually know— and i like it a lot that way. i know that my room is clean and impeccable and i like being inside it. i know that i have a firepit in the backyard. i know that i have books about drugs and the cosmos and nursing homes and Monterey Bay, California. i know that i have some string instruments, some more broken than others, and a piano, only a little broken. one of those string instruments is a violin, which isn't mastered quite yet. one is a banjo, which has a considerable length to go to mastery. i know that i have a very long story to sift through, edit, and fix to make pretty. i'm particularly excited about that. i know that i have a language, French, to learn how to listen to and interpret, which is difficult because theyslureverysoundandsoitsoundslikethistoforeignears. i know that i have a very important piece to work on regarding age. i'm both very excited and dispirited by that. i also know that i have to stay awake for as long as i can at some point, for the pressing purposes of science and jokes.

All of these are great things, but they don't tie me. Things i don't have are classes or a job with a fixed schedule or anything else which does tie a certain person to a certain place. and so— i may end up anywhere, anyplace, anytime, whimsically, hopefully. i'd like to move around a lot. although— i know that plans don't often go the way they are planned, and disappointment is an inherent quality present at the end of every plan. i'm sure i'll spend more time here than i want. i'll probably play some Mario Party at Conor's. and i'll probably enjoy that a little bit.

And i know that i have free rent in Springfield. i know that i have leases in Columbia for most of the summer, and friends who live in Columbia during the rest of the summer. i know that i have a job in Columbia that can be picked up and left off in 24 hours' notice. i know that i have a pair of jobs in Springfield that aren't fully lined up yet, but assumedly can be picked up and left off in 24 hours' notice, or else i will leave them.

i know there are some certain people in Columbia i am very excited to see, and i know there are people in Springfield i am also excited to see, and there are also a couple of really stellar people in Champaign. i know there are music festivals to attend, some hitchhiking to do, some pretty exciting nursing homes to poke my head into. i have a friend who will be living in Tucson who would like to see me, or to see me in Cheyenne. i have a friend and his father in Ludington, Michigan who are prepared to imbibe me with the cuisine and adventure of an outdoorsman's summer paradise.

In short, i am very open ended right now, in most all respects. i don't even know who i'll be close with next year, because even that is in rapid flux, but that's alright, because if i dive in and come out with no friends, i have books about drugs and the cosmos and nursing homes and Monterey, CA. i don't think i've ever dangled in wind currents more loosely than i am now, i'm going with the flow so hard. i don't know where i'll be in three weeks, and that's pretty exciting to me. i don't know if this qualifies as an extremely ambitious season or an extraordinarily unambitious and noncommittal one. But my summers lately have been magical in varying ways, so i'd like to think this one will find a way to be so, too.

At the Wheel

robert langellier

I can rejoice in the days when I can drive the two lane roads fast with the windows down and bright, banal pop playing. Those are the greatest days.

Tonight is not the greatest, it’s a pretty bad night, but it’s a hot night and the windows are down and I’m at least going fast.

            I work in the nursing homes. Or rather, I volunteer in the nursing homes. Or rather still, I invest in the nursing homes. Time, that is. I invest time. I put time in, and it is like volunteering, and I take out experience, and eventually when I’ve amassed enough of that I shape and mold and ball that experience up into a brilliant work of art, a grandiose, seminal masterpiece of magazine literature, which I sell for profit, and that is how it is like working.

            I choose nursing homes to invest in because they are a problem. They are prison-like institutions, which is a simile made to me by the majority of residents I’ve gotten to know. They are inhumane, identity-thieving places that treat breathing, sentient animals like nonbreathing, nonsentient obstacles. They are ugly monsters of bureaucracy, creatures foaming with regulations that tie sprightly elderlies to their unneeded walkers (falling is a liability) and throw pie-baking parties (the most exciting event of the month) to the dumpster because the granny smiths are not FDA-approved. They are waiting rooms for the funeral pyre.

            And it is a growing waiting room running out of chairs. Baby boomers are settling in today, and tomorrow, when the aging process is liable to have become even more arduous and desperate, I will be. That is why I invest in their improvement.

            I try to treat these elderly folk as people. It is a lot to ask of me, but I do it. I do not baby talk them because they are not babies. I do not yell unless they really can’t hear me. I do not talk to them about the weather, or about dinner. I talk to them about their histories and their happiness, and there is much and there is little, respectively. Nobody from this particular institution pays me, and so I have no need for pretending, no motivation for putting on airs. No reason to say, “Ma’am, it’s okay” when I really mean, “Ma’am, be quiet and go to your room if you do not need assistance.” I don’t say either of these things. I have no cause to advertise today’s daily activity as “fun.” I have no purpose toward bustling past a woman murmuring, “Help me…” because she is too frail to get back to her room in her wheelchair in less than ten trying minutes. I have no agenda to buff the appearance of the place. I have no agenda to convince these people that they are invalid and happy.

            My agenda comes from a different source. It comes from no administration, but from the cognizant mouths of residents who very ably tell me what they want and what they need and what they are capable of and how they feel about their environment. And there is a chasm between those two agendas.

            Tonight is a bad night, though, so let’s return to that. It’s draining work, what I do. It makes me happy that I may be doing something good, but it is the most depressing and lowdown feeling experience to be in the place, which makes me even happier that I may be doing something good. I hate being there. It is overwhelming and insurmountable and the unhappy atmosphere is crushing to anyone inside who has no motivation for putting on airs. Rarely do I feel good upon leaving the place. I didn’t tonight. On my way out, I heard a harmonica, and there is no music in that place so the blowing was enough to elate me. I meandered over to check it out, whereupon a desk nurse called me over.

            “Can I help you?”

            “I’m just listening.”

            “You like that harmonica?”

            “Yeah.” A man in a wide-brim Texan hat was sitting in a wheelchair by a side door, blowing. He wasn’t very good.

            “He’s been banging by that window forever now.”

            “Oh yeah?”

            “He lives down the hall that way.” She pointed.

            “Well, I love harmonicas.”

            “Are you leaving?”

            “Yep. I’m out of here.”

            “You wouldn’t mind taking him with you?” She grinned.

            “Sure thing.”

            I walked up to him, and after an awkward exchange, I convince him he ought to play by another door to “get a new view.” Convince is a strong word. I rather told him he should play by another door until he conceded, because it was difficult to make out what he was saying.

            I wheeled him across the hall and gave the desk nurse a nod of acknowledgement. Upon arriving at Pop’s room—that is his name—he requested to be stopped there instead of at the nearest side door. Inside he reproached me.

            “Why did I need to be moved?” Pop is old, but he’s big and he’s confrontational and he’s not taking my shit.

            “I just thought you might want to play at a different window.”

            “What was wrong with me playing there?”

            “I, uh, I just thought that, uh, you’d want a different view.”

            Now he began each word slowly, with seething emphasis. “What was wrong with me playing there? Why did I have to be moved?”

            “Well. The nurse told me to ask if you’d want to be moved somewhere else.”

            “The nurse?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why couldn’t I play by the door? Why did I have to be moved?”

            “Well. I don’t know. I, uh. The nurse just told me to ask if you’d want to move somewhere else.”

            “I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I was happy right there.”

            “Well you should’ve told me that. I didn’t know that.”

            “Right. Go along. You’ve done your duty.” Pop knew.

            And so I left then, having removed the obstacle from the nurse’s area. I turned the music on loud in my car, and I began driving fast, fast enough to shatter any fear of youth and speed and control that I had before having witnessed the dead, unholy opposite of it.

Memory Audio

robert langellier

You don't have to read this. But that's what this is about, that's what inspired this thought. It's by Nadia Wiwatwicha. Do you remember her? I do.

A few years ago my grandparents moved. They lived in that Quincy, IL Victorian house my entire life, and most of theirs. When I visited then, I knew it was the last time I would see the building with my eyes. In a heroic attempt to capture the image of that particular "last," I decided to invoke that one thing where you listen to a song while something important happens and you associate that song with that moment in time and space forever and ever and ever. Except normally, that happens by accident. You just happen to listen to "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith on the way home from a 4th of July fireworks party where your first love stood you up. Or just by chance your mix CD breaks and it plays the first 30 seconds of of track 1 for the remainder of the entire summer. They are coincidences, and sometimes they don't even happen at exceptional times at all. Sometimes songs monopolize driving through a small city in the winter at night, or sitting in sand on the Atlantic coast. That's pretty greedy of those songs, in my opinion, but it isn't my fault or their fault because it's all just coincidence.

Anyway, on that particular day I decided to test if I could do it on purpose, if I could break the coincidence principle, because apparently being at my grandmother's house for the final time is something I recognize as probably important but that in reality I don't really trust myself to treat with all that much sacredness. At some point in the day, I walked around their backyard, probably billions of times, listening to "Thrash Unreal" by Against Me, which, for anyone who knows me, isn't something I'd typically listen to elsewhere because it has electric guitars and loud noises. ("No mother ever dreams that her daughter's gonna grow up to be a junkie.")

I walked around listening to that song, punching slow and heavy footprints into the low and wooden borderlines of my grandpa's treasured garden that I historically have liked to break things in. Repeat, repeat, repeat. ("No mother ever dreams that her daughter's gonna grow up to sleep alone.") This, until I felt satisfied. Maybe I should've chosen a less ominous and dually applicable song than one about the horrors of denying your own aging, but I did this until I felt satisfied. And you know what, it worked, god damn it. I actually have vivid memories of the menial task of simply walking in circles around a fucking yard. All it took was the simple decision to remember it, and then some merciless musical repetition. I completely intend to document the rest of my life in this way. My memoirs will be a Spotify playlist.

Robert - Unforgivable

Roommates, what is this?

Did you think I wouldn't notice? Did you think this wouldn't irreparably ruin my toilet experience? What kind of sick joke are you getting off on?

This is not how you put toilet paper on a toilet paper spinner. It would've been so easy, so easy, to flip it around before attaching it, and you know it. Are you mad because I haven't bought toilet paper in a while? Because I brought two fresh rolls from home after break, and believe me, they're so thick and soft it's like wiping with a marshmallow,* which more than makes up for the lack of quantity of rolls. You probably noticed when there was about a week there when our toilet paper didn't immediately dissolve upon human touch. Where did you think that toilet paper came from?

Is it because I haven't done the dishes in a while? Because that's completely unrelated, and if that's the case, then you're sending confusing messages.

It can't be because you're simply not intelligent enough to realize the difference between a forward-rolling roll and a backward-rolling roll. I'm sure you're just as frustrated as I am when you have to occasionally reach those extra inches to the little butt crack created by the intersection of roll and wall and pull out toilet paper from underneath. It's just an unattractive look, honestly. Who's still going to want to go to the bathroom after they walk in and see that? Not me, and that's why I simply haven't for the last few days.** It's getting uncomfortable. Please change it.

You really know how to hurt me, roommates. Do it right.

*Except less sticky
**Conor, we should also go 7 days without bathrooms this summer

Gardening

robert langellier

I am not a gravedigger but a gardener. My cemetery's plot is sprawling grass, a deep green grass, well fertilized with well-placed organic fertilizers, three inches of dried blood under all its infant trees, catalyzing wondrous growth and making this place of death a beautiful place of death. This is my place, and I take great pride in making it a place of life, in a way that overwhelms the sense of grief that litters the living bodies of its streaming visitors, takes over that sense and makes it wholesome.

This is not a shovel. It is a whisk that churns up the earth and plants bodies. It is the spark of an invisible circuit reaching for the hundredth time the beginning of its next round. I lower attractive and easily degradable caskets—laughingstocks of defiance against nature—slowly and with dignity but with tangible happiness into the earth. Over the next few decades, termites, roots, and water will penetrate the varnished wood and in measured steps dilapidate it. Once the walls are fallen, scavenger bugs, the maggots and the worms, will parade inside in throes and devour the decaying tissue of the once spunky and charismatic woman who met her untimely end on a mountain road one day. Eventually that tissue will be inside the bodies of thousands of bugs, who will then die themselves and fall likewise into the clutches of the earth. Those pieces of human will scatter then, carried by water and gravity, and by still more earth-swallowing vermiform creatures, and they will scatter again as fish swallow water and birds swallow earth-swallowing vermiform creatures, until the beautiful Rebecca Gold spans the length of seven states. And eventually, those little microscopic morsels of carbon will be in the aid of new growth—atoms will combine and attach, detach and reform, move like currents within the loam, and with no real finality culminate in a great new being of life.

And then my gardening will be complete.

Robert - Conversations with Steve

Me: Hey, Steve, I see we’re incidentally walking directly at each other on the sidewalk. One of us should move.
Oncoming Steve: Nah.
Me: You don’t understand. We’re going to collide. Okay, here, I’ll move to the right. Crisis averted.
Oncoming Steve: And I’ll move to the left.
Me: I don’t think you understand how directions work from opposite angles.
Oncoming Steve: You’re right. Look, we’re going to collide again.
Me: That’s OK. Here, I’ll move to the left.
Oncoming Steve: And I’ll move to the right.
Me: Steve.

Oncoming Steve: (bump)

It isn’t your fault. No, you’re just walking to class, and you’re innocent. You did all your reading. You double-knotted your shoes today. You even tucked your shirt in. You know, that shirt that doesn’t even really need to be tucked in if you’re feeling especially casual, but you did anyway. You didn’t ask for your happiness to be wrenched from underneath your neatly-ironed chest pocket. Yet, there’s Steve, a stranger in a red flannel shirt and skinny jeans, strolling right toward you, oblivious of his impending collision course.

There’s a thought process here. My first strategy is to call the other person’s bluff. Walk straight, they’ll realize what’s up and move deftly to the side. After all, you’re sort of on the right side of the sidewalk, and that’s how cars work, right? This strategy is made possible by a curious mix of fear and pride. There’s certainly no way I’m moving out of the way first. Whether that’s because I have too much dignity or a complete inability to resolve minor conflicts, I’ll never know.

Eventually the inevitable occurs. Nothing.

Nothing occurs, and it becomes obvious Oncoming Steve over there is equally conscious of the rising issue. By now he’s only about 12 feet away and approaching fast. From there it’s a series of desperate attempts to communicate telepathically and resolve the crisis with minimal actual movement. I study Steve’s face carefully, trying to read his eyes for his next move. I study his hips like I was taught as a sixth grade football cornerback, just in case he tries to juke me. I sort of hope he does.

The moment of truth arrives at about the 8-foot distance. Decisions need to be made here, or I face becoming the laughingstock of the entire sidewalk from here all the way to that big tree over there. I don’t want that. I look into Steve’s eyes. He’s afraid, too. He knows the stakes. With a reassuring smile I let him know everything’s going to be okay. Of course, I’ve no way of knowing, but Steve looks like a nice kid, and I’m sure he has dreams of his own. With a sharp intake of breath, I bite the bullet and veer slightly to my right. So does Steve. Oh god no. It seems he and I are of tragically similar mindsets. With only one more step to go, I make an emergency change in trajectory. I awkwardly swing my leg around and turn back around to the left. So does Steve. Oh god no. With a dull, unenthusiastic bump we lightly collide, mutter apologies and carry on with our heads down. The day is lost.

Robert - I Just Want to Play with My Ball

There are things in the world that I will always appreciate more than money, art, Hannah. Those things are these things.

Recently, I couldn't believe giant bouncy balls are still only 25 cents at Old Navy. Recently, I stole a big red punch balloon from my neighboring apartment. Now I have two beautiful things in my life.

Now what to do with them! Well, that's easy, play with them constantly everywhere always all the time. I've been doing that. Punch balloon stays in the apartment, it is for indoor play--because otherwise the adjacent apartment will find out maybe. Maybe they hear me pounding it against our dividing wall hundreds of times in repetition? Who can say. Bouncy Ball goes outside, only when it is cold; it only fits in the big pockets of the big coats. anyway, I have some findings:

One. Punch balloon is light and easy to kick up and up and up forever. today i am Lionel Messi. I am the best soccer player in the living room.

Two. Punch balloon is amphetamines of balloons. That just means I'm addicted. I can play with Punch Balloon, alone, in my living room for like seriously 20 minutes. Everyone gone in the apartment, just me. It would be much longer, maybe three times longer, if not inhibited by resounding shame.

Three. Bouncy Ball is much more daring than Punch Balloon. Bouncy ball makes great leaps off the third story brick of buildings and sometimes accidentally the third story glass of buildings—and sometimes yes the first story siding of white sedans in the road. accidentally. Bouncy Ball is a man of accident, very fragile in direction, easily swayed by evil cracks and the laws of physics as it bounces in a spin, deflecting off into wild and crazy aims. Bouncy Ball is independent, and will one day leave me I guess. For he lives hard and fast, throwing himself into the world like a tiny bouncing dot—and really, what are we? at best these tiny bouncing dots. at par big bulbous masses of air, held by a thin rubber skin and falling to the ground too easy. like big punch balloons. at least punch balloons are loud.

Four. Great things are only Great in the places they ought to be. mohandas ghandi would not be a poor leader in canada, only a poor citizen. likewise, Punch Balloon is not well appreciated by the masses on the crowded, jammed, claustrophobic outdoor sidewalks. Punch Balloon is not the greatest ambassador to close fit bodies. likewise again, and this is more important, Bouncy Ball is not at home inside an apartment. Nobody is happy about the explosive and ricocheting noises of hard things hitting their softer things. He is as unwanted and as cumbersome here as David Guetta playing at max volume as I enter the apartment. nicki minaj, dear heaven. i'm sorry I ever listened to Monster.

Five. This is the most important- listen. Bouncy Ball hates pockets, but I keep him there often. That is because of my ultimate discovery. When I bounce Bouncy Ball along sidewalks, and I talk on the phone, no strange looks. Oh, look, that boy is chatting with someone, it's like he's spending time with friends. his bouncy ball is just extra. When you bounce Bouncy Ball along sidewalks, and you don't talk on the phone, plenty of strange looks. Wow, that kid is fucking depressing! only a bouncy ball in the world... fuck it. It's not depressing to have more fun than anyone else has ever had ever. I've solved the conundrum by experiencing Ultimate Fun whilst holding my phone silently to my ear. the same thing goes for playing with Punch Balloon alone in your apartment when your roommate barges on. it's a sacrifice, oh, a sacrifice for the sake of friends, for without friends, who would play with my bouncy ball with me? oh, the things i must do when, damn it, i just want to play with my ball.

Robert - Fixing Words

Some words were incorrectly done. They somehow gained acceptance in the English language over time, but they do not fit the things they describe. For example, "tits" are not a girl's breasts, or in the context that it's used, nipply mountains of desire. Tits really are tiny dots, such as those made by a bored pencil in a boring notebook. Somehow or other, our culture has convinced itself that tits are the fleshy projections of a female's upper torso. Nope. I'm not having it. In addition to "tits," I'm here to fix some more words that were improperly assigned in the English language.

1. Clandestine. I got this word by typing "word" into the Labels box and getting the tag "The Word Clandestine." I don't know. But it got me to thinking. First, that I didn't know what clandestine meant. It means to keep something secret because it's illicit. Ohhhh no. I don't think so. Not anymore, it doesn't. To be "clandestine" is to be something of a heavenly quality. Think about it. I can't hear the word clandestine without either hearing it in a deep voice that I assume to be Poseidon's or visualizing rays of light beaming out from the emboldened word. Clandestine is the nature of the gods. And that is nothing to keep secret. Take that, The Word Clandestine.

2. Éclat. Nope. This is wrong. Éclat is not a sensational or brilliant scene. An éclat is a disgusting dish of vegetables involving things like avocados and eggplant. Would you like an éclat platter? Éclno!

3. Trope. Ah. Something to rinse off my palate after that disgusting éclat. This tray of tropes looks amazing. How do these common figures of speech taste? Like bite-sized clumps of almond, coated thickly in milk chocolate. And holy shit, some of these have caramel in them. I love tropes.

4. Vicissitude. I will agree at least that there is an unwelcome change occurring, because I certainly do not welcome these life-threatening slashes across my chest made by this sword. That is what vicissitudes now are. Vicissitude is too sharp of a word to be something as broad as "change." Listen to that. Vvvv. Agressive start. Someone's getting hurt somehow. Sissss hissing snake yikes that's scary. Tude. That sounds like "feud" and people get hurt in those. The combination of Vs and Ss work well to smelt a sharp, deadly blade, one that causes those deep, blood-letting vicissitudes all along your body.

5. Glib. Glib is snot. Let's face it. When you describe someone as glib, you're putting on a façade. You're telling people that you find someone to be fluent or talkative, but insincere. What you really mean is that they're snot. Actual snot. You think that that person is a disgusting glob of mucus dripping over the earth. The dictionary backs me up here. It's telling me that "glib" comes from the German "glibberig," which means "slimy." I'm not surprised. Don't beat around the bush here; call the spade a spade. Let's stop calling snot insincere and start calling it snot. Okay, guys? Okay. Now let's get to Frindle-ing.

Robert - The Center

Poor people are pathetic, and rich people are shitheads, but there's really nothing wrong with middle class people, so I guess that's why everyone refers to themselves as middle class. It's a way of middling out. A way to keep from stepping on anyone else.

Of course, if you're so careful not to step on anyone else, you're not even going to end up making a footprint. Maybe a light toeprint, if you look hard enough, the spot where you danced around people's opinions too carefully. We're okay with that. We're okay with shirking the limelight, the thing that makes us noticeable and criticizable and murderable. We're okay with not being looked at. And that's a funny thing, I think. A funny thing that we're alright with that, with locking ourselves into middling positions and carrying on with our heads down.

We're afraid of being too stupid. Stupid people are ignorant. We're afraid of being too intelligent, too refined. Intelligent people are elitists. No, but you, you are just right. You are perfect right there, and don't move. Don't move an inch. We're afraid of our arrogance. Arrogance is too blunt, too forward, too abrupt. Too striking to others. We're afraid of reproach, to have to defend the roots of our arrogance to the other people who are also afraid of our arrogance. We're afraid of our arrogance and also of our modesty. We're afraid of the weakness of humility, the timidity and the smallness, because smallness does stand out in a crowd, despite what you think. Arrogance and timidity, they are both destructive things, and we try to avoid them both at least a little.

We're afraid of our own political left and the political right, because they are radical and crazy. The center is where our rationale is. That is the safe place where we can't be attacked. And then someone shows us the global scale, that our political left is the world's political center. And that might change things for us, but probably not, because the world is not our neighbors and our neighbors are who can attack us.

Our neighbors are who we have to defend against. They are constantly at the ready to attack, with their antagonizing looks and their loud silences with hasty conclusions in their brains. Mostly, we're probably defending against ourselves. Being afraid of not being rich, not being intelligent, not having other things too, is a powerful fear. It's a lucky thing that we have a middle ground, a place where we can keep from stepping on other people, and from being considered at all. Our neighbors can't attack us if we say we're middle class, firmly agnostic, politically independent. You can't attack what you cannot see.