Day 200: Send a message in a bottle
Posted: February 24, 2012 Filed under: The Book | Tags: alcohol, bodily functions, destruction, fiction, food, lies, urine Leave a comment »I was awoken by bright sunlight on my face and a pressing need to urinate. I stumbled to the bathroom, knocking over bottles with each step, the noise like rubber mallets on my skull.
It was sunny outside; flowers were starting to bloom in the yard outside my cottage. Flowers? Wasn’t everything covered in snow just a few days ago? What month is this? It wasn’t important, at least right then: I needed food, water, aspirin, maybe a small glass of wine…
The quarter-gallon of milk in the refrigerator was a solid, and the bread on the counter was moldy. Breakfast was eggs and bacon—things that never go bad, right? While I was cooking, I reached for a bottle of wine—just a little, to tide me over until I could make coffee——there was no wine in the bottle, but there was a piece of paper. Paper? How the fuck did that get in there?
I scanned the kitchen: bottles everywhere, all of them with scraps of paper inside. I finally spotted an unopened bottle—a cheap, vile red, but it was better than nothing—poured a glass, drank it with my breakfast, and tried to reconstruct the last few months.
It was a blank.
I was sitting back in my chair after breakfast, drinking a third glass of wine, casting my eyes contemplatively around the cottage—most of which was one large room—when it finally occurred to me that, perhaps, the pieces of paper in the bottles might be messages from my excessively-drunk self to my mostly-sober self.
I grabbed the nearest bottle—and then realized that I was going to have to break the bottle to get the paper out. All of the bottles: dozens, maybe hundreds of bottles, all with scraps of paper in them. What to do with all that glass?
I grabbed an armful and carried them outside, to the fire-pit. I found a few logs, threw them into the pit, and broke the first bottle on one of them. The writing on the paper—well, it wasn’t really “writing,” it was indecipherable squiggling. I tried a second, a third, a fourth: all the same. A word was decipherable on the fifth scrap: “cold.” On the sixth was something that looked like “found corkscrew.”
I went in for more bottles.
Several dozen broken bottles later, all I had was a small handful of words: “wine,” “bread,” “piss,” “snow”—and a lot of squiggles. I was ready to give up, to throw the rest of the bottles in the pile and burn the lot of them—to consign the rest of the scraps to destruction, unread.
I couldn’t do it, though: surely the messages from the early days of the lost months would be readable, at least mostly? I had to keep breaking bottles. And so I did.
There were, I think, a dozen dozens. I’m amazed that I didn’t cut my hands more than I did, breaking all that glass. It wasn’t worth it: the squiggles got harder to read, not easier—some were just lines across the paper, like small children make.
On the last scrap—although who knows when I drew it, because I didn’t date any of them—as if I would have known what the date was——I didn’t know then, mostly-sober and smashing bottles…
…on the last scrap was a drawing of male genitalia. A hairy cock and balls.
I burned the cottage down, walked down the mountain back into civilization, and never drank again.
Day 235: Stare at this stranger; memorize her features…
Posted: August 25, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: alcohol, art, fiction, lies, novels, strangers, travel Leave a comment »Originally scheduled for August 23.
“…should you ever meet her, call her Aubrey and she will tell you a secret.”
A woman sat down next to me on the train. I glanced at her, reflexively, quickly, and went back to the novel I was reading: Faulkner’s Light in August. She settled into the seat, opened a magazine, started reading.
Two stops later, as the train pulled away from the station, I said — neither loudly nor quietly, and without looking up from my reading — “Tell me a secret, Aubrey.”
I waited a beat, and then another, and then turned to look at her. She was staring at me, a look of puzzlement and something that was not quite, or not quite yet, anger — and something else flitting around behind her eyes that I could not identify.
We looked at each other for a moment, and then another, and then she said: “What did you say?”
I said: “I said: ‘Tell me a secret, Aubrey.’ “
She said: “My name isn’t Aubrey.”
“I’m not sure that matters,” I replied.
She paused, and looked away, and then looked back.
“There are no secrets left,” she said, “no secrets that can be told, anyway, because the telling makes the secret public. It used to be that you could tell a secret to someone, and it would go no further, or go further so slowly that by the time it became what we might public knowledge it didn’t matter anymore, the reasons for keeping it secret had passed or no longer obtained. Now, though, there is no grey area between secret and something everyone knows — once told, the secret takes on a life of its own, contagious, viral, an incorporeal zombie that bites and infects and spreads so fast that one wakes up the morning after telling to find oneself in a wasteland, a world wrecked and forever ruined. And so what secrets I have I will keep to myself, and anyway my name isn’t Aubrey.”
After some amount of time had passed, or maybe as soon as she stopped, I said: “I’m sorry; I’ve had a few drinks too many today.”
“…but it’s 9:30 in the morning,” she said blankly.
“I know,” I said, and went back to my reading.
Day 214: Measure your IQ.
Posted: August 3, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bullshit, lies, mind, movies, music 1 Comment »The Book provides a handy nine-question, ten-minute test with which I am to measure my IQ.
Before I tell you how I did, let me tell you a few things. First, I have never taken an IQ test, and so I have nothing with which to compare the results of the Book’s test — and I’m pretty skeptical about the Book’s test, having spent 214 days with the thing. I suppose an IQ test might have been administered to me somewhere back in the depths of grade school, but I’m not sure, and even if I did take such a test, I have no idea what my score was.
Second: I have no idea what the numbers mean. I remember that Forrest Gump had an IQ of seventy-five, which was five points lower than was required by the state of Alabama for admission to public school, and that his mom had to fornicate with the principal in order to get him in. That’s my only frame of reference.
So, without further ado: according to the Book’s test, my IQ is 149, which is at the high end of the Very Bright range, and two points shy of Liar.
That seemed high, I guess, if only because of its proximity to Liar, and so I took an online IQ test — at IQTest.com, where else? — because an online IQ test is bound to be infinitely more accurate than the one in the Book —— and keep in mind that it’s late, and I’ve had a few bourbons ——— but the Internet puts my IQ at 134. Splitting the difference — which I’m going to do, whether it makes sense or not — puts me at 141.5, which I’ll round up to 142.
That’s pretty good, I guess? It’s all bullshit, of course, but I’ll take it.
Also: Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
Jours 205-211: Take this week off and spend it France, acting like the French.
Posted: July 30, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: alcohol, coffee, lies, sex, social norms, strangers, travel, violence Leave a comment »Sunday, July 24, through Saturday, July 30.
The Book had several things for me to do while in France: fight in public, sit in a café all day, sunbathe topless (no problem!), smoke three packs of Gauloises, take a lover, and protest violently against the government. I did not do these things in order, but I attempted all of them.
The first day, I sat at a café, drinking espressos, scribbling away in a notebook, flipping desultorily through Being and Nothingness, and smoking my way through a pack of Gauloises (just one pack, the first day: I planned to work my way up to three by the end of the week). It was a good day, and I felt like I’d accomplished something, even though I really hadn’t.
About three in the afternoon, a man sat down at my table. No worries, I thought: this could be interesting. I made eye contact with him — briefly — as he sat down, gave him a little head nod of greeting, and went back to my Sartre, my coffee, and my cigarettes. After a moment, I felt his eyes on me, and looked up. He was staring at me: an intense, unsettling stare. Unsure of what to do, I offered him a cigarette: he made no response, and continued to stare. I hailed the waiter, and ordered my tablemate an espresso. When it came, he calmly picked it up, and — staring at me all the while — threw it forcefully at the couple at the table next to us. Then he stood up, and calmly walked away.
I was stunned, immobile, unsure if that had actually just happened.
I was brought back to myself by a young man yelling in my ear — obscenities, I assume, but it was all in French, and I don’t speak French. I’m sorry, I said, but I don’t speak French, and I didn’t throw that espresso at you. The man kept yelling, and soon I was yelling too, trying to make myself heard and understood. It didn’t work, of course, and soon the two of us moved beyond words: he pushed, I took a swing, and then: a blur, a scuffle, bodies colliding, then red, and then darkness.
I came back to myself in my hotel, lying naked on my bed, bruised and bloody in places, but I felt worse than I looked. I grunted, sat up, and saw her — the woman from the café. I tensed, which hurt, and so winced. We looked at each other, but said nothing.
She had a bottle of something on the table in front of her, and two glasses. She poured the glasses — a deep amber liquid — lit two Gauloises, and walked over to the bed. She handed me a glass and a cigarette, and sat down next to me…
I woke up late the next morning with the worst headache of my life, and she was gone.
Somehow I made it through the morning and into the afternoon, but I don’t really want to talk about it. I spent the first part of the afternoon — once I felt like a human being again — sitting in a café, drinking espressos, smoking cigarettes, and taking stock of my situation. Sit in a café, fight in public, and take a lover — three tasks down! And I was halfway through my second pack of the day! Nothing like a hangover to make one want to smoke, I guess.
I finished my espresso, bought another pack of Gauloises, and set off in search of a topless beach.
I found one, sort of, somewhere along the Seine — the Paris-Plages, a series of temporary beaches erected during the summer. All sorts of folk were there, but none of the women were topless: apparently it’s not allowed. This made me angry, much angrier than it should have, and before I really knew what I was doing, I’d taken off all my clothes, thrown them into the river, and was shouting anti-government and pro-breast slogans, sprinkled liberally with obscenities.
I think I’d hoped that the people of Paris would rise up, cast off the shackles of their clothes, and join me in a new, naked utopia — but it didn’t happen, obviously. People stared; a few laughed, some took pictures. One dude handed me a bottle of wine at some point. Then the police showed up, and arrested me.
I spent the remainder of my vacation in jail. I was escorted to the airport on Saturday morning, and allowed to board my flight back to the States; I was not, however, allowed to return to my hotel room, and so came home empty-handed, dressed in the jumpsuit I’d been issued when I’d been booked and processed.
I had plenty of time to smoke in jail, though — I went through four packs a day while I was on the inside. Game, set, and motherfucking match, Book. What else you got?
Day 188: Get a life coach.
Posted: July 7, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bastards, bullshit, ignore-ance, lies, star wars, wikipedia, WTF 1 Comment »What the hell does a life coach do?
According to the Wikipedia — or, more specifically, to a Wikipedia article with “multiple issues” — really, the thing is pretty unreadable, but you get that sometimes when anybody can edit a thing —— anyway, “life coaching is a practice that helps people identify and achieve personal goals,” and life coaches do this “using a variety of tools and techniques.”
Well, glad we cleared that up.
Life coaches aren’t therapists, they aren’t counselors, they aren’t psychologists or psychiatrists or psychoanalysts: they don’t bother with the past, apparently, only with the future — though how that’s possible I don’t know, since dealing with goals for the future has to take into account where one is in the present, and an (honest) assessment of one’s present has to involve looking at how one arrived where one is, which involves dealing with the fucking past.
Life coaches are bullshit artists, then: con men and snake oil salesmen, whose goal is to make people feel good about themselves without actually changing their lives — because actual change in the sucker’s client’s life might make the life coach obsolete — so that the people give the life coaches money.
Of course, I’m basing this less-than-flattering assessment on one section of a poorly-written Wikipedia article. Maybe I should see what some actual, professional life coaches have to say.
LifeCoach.com bills itself as “the way to effortless success” — and, as anyone who’s ever done anything worth doing knows, “effortless success” does not exist.
Bill Blalock promises an “ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives” (emphasis his) — that’s a sentence that doesn’t really say anything. He does acknowledge that the coaching process might initially be “discomforting and even painful,” and that it can be “difficult” to talk about one’s “issues.” On the other hand, before becoming a life coach, he “held management positions at Frito Lay, Inc., Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc, Ernst & Young LLP and Cadbury Schweppes” — and one should never trust middle management.
I cruised Tina Ferguson’s site for a few minutes — it’s pinker than I like — but I have no snarky comments to make, because I can’t make sense of anything she’s saying. Alright, I do have one snarky comment: what kind of successful life coach asks her readers to send her money to blow at Starbucks? I mean, if any of you want to send me money to spend on beer coffee, that would be awesome — but if I was already charging people to spout bullshit at them, asking for tips for the bullshit I gave away for free would be tacky.
So, I think I stand by my initial assessment. Life coaches: people who take your money and make you do stupid things that aren’t really going to do you any good.
Why would I want one? Isn’t that why I have this stupid Book?
Day 185: Join a political party.
Posted: July 4, 2011 Filed under: Politics, The Book | Tags: bastards, bastardy, bullshit, lies Leave a comment »Allow me to be blunt: political parties are one of the fundamental problems with our entire political system.
If we had, I don’t know, a dozen parties — a dozen viable parties — and a coalition-type government wherein no one party controlled anything, then maybe I wouldn’t have a problem with political parties. As it is, we have two parties that are little more than factions of the military-industrial-bureaucracy complex, and then a bunch of parties nobody takes seriously.
Political parties don’t make sense. Short-term alliances around specific issues make sense, if the goal is actually getting things done. Political parties aren’t about getting things done, they’re about maintaining the status quo, and keeping in power the people who are already in power.
There’s nothing to be done, of course, because the bureaucracy that runs this country is a giant, many-armed, beak-mouthed, voracious, horrible, stinky deep-sea-squid of a motherfucker — we can cut off an arm here, an arm there, stab it in some other place, but it keeps growing arms, faster than we can get rid of them. Individual politicians are like this giant squid’s intestinal worms, which it shits out all over everywhere in a violent, continuous flood of excrement.
I’m not really sure where that came from. I hate politics, though, and I hate the system, and I have a deep mistrust of anybody who does politics for a living. If politics and politicians had anything to do with “liberty and justice for all,” I might not be so cynical about the whole enterprise, but I’m not holding my breath.
Day 171: Put a sticker on a piece of fruit.
Posted: June 20, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: anarchy, art, food, lies, pranks, trolling, work Leave a comment »In the spring of 1963, Mr Brian Smith went to work at Hyam’s Sunshine Farms Fruit Processing, Packing, and Distribution Plant in Topeka, Kansas.
Mr Smith was a man without a past. That sounds more mysterious than it actually is: he had a past, an ordinary and uneventful one, uneventful enough that it had withered, died, and blown away, leaving nothing behind. He lived alone, he had no friends, he had no family. He was a regular at a local grocery, a local diner, a local bar, but in each of these places he was more a piece of furniture than a person: he spoke as little as possible, was as forgettable as possible, was taken for granted.
Hyam’s Sunshine Farms Fruit Processing, Packing, and Distribution Plant — or just Hyam’s, as the locals called it, the full name being too cumbersome for everyday conversation — bought in bulk bananas, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and other such fruits as do not grow in Kansas, repackaged them, and then sold them to grocers across Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. In late 1961, Mr Hyam began negotiating with a chain of grocery stores in Oklahoma, but that deal was still “in progress” when Mr Smith went to work for Mr Hyam.
Mr Smith’s primary responsibility was placing the Hyam’s label on the fruit, after it was uncrated, before it was re-crated. Sometimes Mr Smith had to place the Hyam’s label over some other label: the label of the farm that grew the fruit, or the label of the distributor that sold it to Hyam’s, or sometimes, with fruit imported from South America, a label affixed as the fruit went through customs, coming into the United States.
Mr Smith worked quietly and diligently for Mr Hyam for ten years, clocking in and out at the same time every day, drinking one cup of black coffee on his morning break, eating a sandwich and a pickle for lunch, smoking two Lucky Strike cigarettes on his afternoon break. He did his job well, but not exceptionally: he was, as his supervisors remarked to one another, thoroughly and merely adequate.
In the summer of 1968, when Mr Smith was well assured that his work was not closely monitored — the regularity and adequacy of his labeling having been unvarying for five years — Mr Smith began affixing altered labels to the fruit moving through Hyam’s Sunshine Farms Fruit Processing, Packing, and Distribution Plant. The alterations were minor, at first, and accountable for as printing errors: “Toepeka” or “Ham’s” or a PLU with the central numbers transposed. Mr Smith went no further than this for another two years, watchful for any sign that his alterations had been noticed.
They were not.
Mr Smith’s altered labels became progressively transgressive, incorporating profanity, communist slogans, anti-war sentiments — and still, nobody took enough notice to contact the public relations department at Hyam’s.
There is no indication of why Mr Smith embarked on this venture, or whether he took the job at the fruit-packing plant only to put this odd plan into action. The early, misprinted stickers were procured by altering the plant’s standing order with the local printer, Donnelley and Sons. Mr Smith seems to have special-ordered the later stickers from a printer’s shop in Tulsa, under a false name, and paid cash: this is only guesswork, though probably as close to the truth as anyone is likely to come.
In the last weeks of 1972, Mr Smith took his altered labels a step further, a step too far: all the labels featured was a crude drawing of uncircumcised male genitalia, white on red. These, at last, attracted the attention of the management at Hyam’s, and Mr Smith was soon identified as the culprit. He was summarily fired on a Tuesday afternoon, March the sixth, 1973.
He was seen later that evening, driving westward out of town, and never heard from again.
Day 159: Find a way to grow $10 into $100.
Posted: June 8, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: art, bartering, economics, lies, money Leave a comment »I was on my way to the hardware store — the last trip needed to finish my third broken-pipe-in-an-inconvenient-place plumbing project of the year — when I passed a garage sale. Yes, on a Wednesday: I thought it was weird, too, which is why I stopped.
It was a typical garage sale, I guess: some shoes, some ugly clothes, some ancient kitchen appliances, miscellaneous crap, a collection of inspirational cassette tapes, shit like that. There was also, however, a cardboard box full of toys: action figures, mostly, of the sort that come in children’s “meals” at fast food joints — which is to say, most of them aren’t actually articulated, and so are more properly “static” figures instead of “action” figures.
There was also a watering can in the box, for some reason.
Five dollars for the whole box.
I bought it, obviously, even though most of it was crap: I had a plan, and I had five dollars left over for glue, which I bought at the hardware store.
When I got home, I hurriedly finished up the plumbing — it still leaks a bit, but the leak is underground, so that’s okay, right? — and got to work on my get-rich-quick project: an action figure collage. This might sound stupid — probably because it is stupid — but it’s also ART (in all capitals, which you figured out, because you’re reading this and must have noticed that I wrote ART in all capitals) —— it’s ART, I was saying, and ART sells for lots of MONEY, and money is what I was after.
Amazingly, I managed to sell the thing today, too, and for a lot more than $100: I can’t specify how much, as part of the non-disclosure agreement the purchaser made me sign — and obviously I can’t name the purchaser, either — but let’s just say I’m not going to run out of bourbon any time soon. What I can do for you, dear readers, is provide a picture of the stunning piece of avant-garde post-futurist found-materials assemblage-collage ART that I produced today:
(Just in case it needs saying: all of this is a lie. The collage is real, but it’s on a car — a VW Beetle, apparently — somewhere in Canada. Also, I didn’t take the picture. Also, one of the three plumbing projects involved a hot-water heater, and not a broken pipe. I did finish the most recent plumbing, though, and it doesn’t leak. Yet.)
Day 156: Redesign an everyday object.
Posted: June 5, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bicycles, lies, movies, revision, technology Leave a comment »There are two ways this could go — two ways it does go, because this happens all the time — the object in question can become genuinely better or more useful (the iPhone being the best recent example I can think of); it’s far more common, though, for the object to just get more complicated, without becoming any more useful, and often complication makes the object less useful. To wit:
Any idiot design student can take something that works just fine and render it non-functional — and I could have taken that route, no problem: spill-proof glasses which are hollow spheres, energy-saving lamps that don’t turn on, fans with no blades, &c.
I didn’t want to bullshit my way through this task, though; I wanted to do more than “redesign” something: I wanted to reinvent, to revolutionize — and I wanted a technology so old and so ubiquitous that people don’t even think of it as technology anymore.
As an aside: I’ve been using a lot of italics lately, and I’m not sure why. It just feels right, is all. Also I’ve started using longer dashes, and probably nobody cares, but I love dashes — Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is full of dashes, of all sorts of lengths, and they’re one of the many things I love about that novel.
Anyway, about the “everyday object” I chose to radically improve:
I chose rocks.
There’s an old episode of The Simpsons in which Bart and Lisa play rock/paper/scissors — as another aside, I have no idea what that should look like in print — and Bart picks rock, like always, and thinks to himself: “Good old rock; nothing beats that!” — and loses, because, of course, paper beats rock.
Well, not anymore. And that’s not all — except I can’t really tell you what else the New Rock™ does, or what modifications I’ve made, because the patent isn’t filed yet, and I don’t want my brilliant ideas stolen. Rest assured, though, New Rock™ will change your life in ways you can’t imagine: New Rock™ will not only replace your old rocks, it will replace your blender, your kitchen knives, your plunger, your spouse, and your sense of self-worth.
New Rock™: this shit just got real.
Day 145: Start an urban legend.
Posted: May 25, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: alcohol, famous people, fiction, food, handsome men, lies Leave a comment »Despite the title of this post, this actually happened to a guy I used to work with.
So this dude – David – left the store one night – we worked at a Starbucks, in San Antonio, at Bandera and 1604 – here, approximately —— anyway, he left work one Saturday night about 11:30, headed to a party at some dude’s house out toward Bandera (the town for which the road was named). It was late, he’d had a long day, he didn’t really know where he was going, and he got lost.
He’d been driving along for a while, passing no lights, going through no intersections, before he realized how lost he was. This was back in the days before everyone and their gerbil had a smartphone with a GPS, so he was really and truly lost. He kept going, looking for a place to turn around, found a driveway – and saw a big house, set pretty far back from the road, with a bunch of lights on.
He decided to go knock on the door – surely they would know where their house was, right, and could give him directions back in to town?
Of course, they might also rape, murder, and eat him – shit like that happens, you know.
Well, he took the chance. A gorgeous “farmer’s daughter” type answered the door – she gets prettier with every telling – and invited him in, to maybe have a drink?, she said – and David thought he’d found his way into one of those stories. So he went in, he sat on the couch she pointed him to, he said yes when she asked him if bourbon was alright, and then…
…he shat a brick when someone else brought him his bourbon. Not only because it was an old man, but also because it was Bill-motherfucking-Ghostbusting-Murray.
They ended up drinking and talking all night. Turned out that the dude who owned the house – the farmer – and Bill had gone to college together – at Regis, in Denver – and had done that one thing, together, that one time, but only Bill managed not to get arrested for it. Sometime around dawn, Bill made them all waffles. “Best waffles I’d ever eaten,” David said. After a few rounds of mimosas, he got directions back in to town, went home, changed, and came in to work for another closing shift.
He told me the story. He told it several times that night, to coworkers and customers. Finally I said to him: “You know that no one believes you, right?”
“Yeah,” he answered: “That’s what he said.”
