Love, Life, and Beaver Pelts

It’s been a long time since my blog post. Let’s make a deal right now, I won’t apologize and you don’t have to pretend you actually cared. Because let’s be honest, you’re a beautiful soul and you’ve been up to your neck busy, right?

Don’t play coy you sneaky turnip, of course you were.

But here we are again. Somehow despite the odds we’ve managed to find ourselves back in the same virtual room. Go ahead and make yourself at home. I’ve been trying to get this website all snazzified for you, but it’s going slower than pumping a flat tire with a greased up armadillo, which I don’t recommend doing unless you’re prepared to buy said armadillo dinner afterwards. Maybe give it a nice sensual massage.

Come on, it’s the least you can do.

Don’t be a prude.

Or a prune.

Where are we? I zagged and you zigged, so if you take three left turns and I do a pirouette, we should be back on topic.

Which, if you’re a sneaky editor or college writing professor, you might be asking yourself, what is the topic? Where is that thesis? It should be somewhere in the first paragraph, but all I see are glorious armadillo’s and turnips.

Sometimes you can’t see the forest through all the trees, and you just have to take a couple steps back to get the whole perspective. So everybody partner up and grab hands with the person to your left and take a few steps back. Safety in numbers.

Be a friend and make sure your hand isn’t a manky overripe banana. Wipe that shit on your pants, son.

Wait, what? Nobody is standing to your left because you’re sitting alone at Starbucks on a Tuesday night and this isn’t actually really real life?

Fine. Hold your own damn hand, don’t act like it’s the first time, and meet the rest of us on the top of that hill over yonder in twenty minutes.

Don’t be late.

Oh, cool. You made it. High five.

Seriously, if you’ve made it this far you deserve an award… or a brain scan.

Start with the second and if comes up clean, we’ll move to the first. Can you say bathtub full of nutella? Of course you can, you have a very nice tongue.

Anyways, let’s get down to brass tacks.

Or tax.

Brass Tacts?

Gonna need a fact checker over here.

It’s been a while since we chatted, and as you can see there are some changes a foot. I’ve moved from my old site at WeaklyShortStories to this quaint little neighborhood in the virtual ghetto. I’m thankful for all the experience I gathered writing short stories over there through the years, and I got an overwhelming amount of positive feedback.

For those of you who are making the transition and following me through the inter-jungle, I want to say thank you, give you a good game pat on the ass, and gift you a flying squirrel, because their adorable, have harnessed the magic of flight, and come in travel size so they fit neatly in your pocket.

Don’t worry, I have a gift receipt in case flying squirrels aren’t your thing. You can return it for a ninja donkey punch to the throat, because really? Who returns a flying squirrel!? What’s wrong with you?

No, I didn’t mean that. There’s nothing wrong with you. Please come back.

I need you.

And frosting.

But mostly you.

Uh, quick segue on three.

Go.

I want to get serious for a second and spackle you with some knowledge. Go ahead and gather in close, cuddle up with your buddy on the left, for those of you that came alone… you know the drill.

I went through some major life changes in the past year. Some of them were good, and others were like wrestling feral wallabies in heat over the last remaining jar of vegemite on the shelf. I came out scratched, bruised, and with my fair share of vegemite burns.

Don’t know what that is? Don’t ask. It’s weird.

Those vegemite burns forced me to take some time away from writing. Not because I’d lost my desire to write, or that I didn’t have anything to say, but because everything I had to say was really bad, emotionally tinted garbage vomit.

The kind of stuff that pours out of you in globby piles of viscera that pool on the floor and stare up at you all, “Are you my mommy?”

Fuck no! Get away, nobody loves you.

That’s where I was for a spell. It sucked, because I wanted to be writing the most magical unicorn laden tales complete with leprechaun orgies and centaur related racism, but all that came out was the written equivalent of a fart.

And not a rainbow fart, mind you.

So I took a break from writing, got my mind straight, stole the ring of Sauron, and generally got my priorities sorted.

Are things better? That’s subjective, and the best guess comes from Theodore, the guy that rifles through my trash every week for discarded cans and bottles, which I conveniently place at the bottom beneath the desecrated remains of my broken heart, ya know… cause Theo likes a scavenger hunt.

But anyways, Theodore collects cans cause he wants too. He’s not tied down to the man, and he lives life on his terms. If you ask Theodore why he doesn’t use the Juris Doctorate he earned between can runs, he’ll say “It’s just different, Broman.”

Side note, Theodore thinks my name is Roman. Probably because I told him my name is Roman. I didn’t know he was a good natured soul when we first met and I was afraid he was going to shiv me and search through my intestines for spare cans. Dude takes his canning seriously.

But Theodore is right. It’s just different. Life changes and you gotta be able to roll with the punches otherwise one day you’re gonna catch one square on the jaw and then it’s lights out. And when you’re lying face down on the mean streets of life all million dollar baby like, you’re gonna wish you hadn’t gone all cheap skate on that chastity belt.

Some things in life are worth spending a bit more on.

This is a cluster bomb of words and I’m wondering if maybe I forged my comeback a bit too soon.

Regardless. I want to share something I learned cause it might help someone else. So if you’re one of the 3.8 people who’ve managed to read this far, watch out! There’s .2 of a man behind you!

Guard thy ankles!

Ignore that, I’ve been sucking on cough drops like meth laced oxygen.

But here’s what I’ve learned.

Life is harsh. We were told that as kids, but it’s easy to forget cause when we think of bad things happening, we don’t imagine them happening to us. That’s why I like to write stories. I like making bad things happen to other people.

Unfortunately life is playing the same game with us. It throws us in a cage full of porcupines hopped up on Aderol before covering us in fish shrapnel and throwing us in a shark tank.

I mean, you can’t be upset about that because it makes for a good story, right? And what’s the point of doing all this if we don’t, at minimum, have a good story to tell when we emerge on the other side missing an arm and covered in quills.

But life doesn’t always come hard like that. No, life is a sneaky fucker, like the Trojans hiding in a horse only to emerge in the dead of night to slit your throat and set fire to your cabbage. Erm. Yeah.

Life has one card in particular it likes to play, and it’s like Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber. Nobody gets out of the game unscathed. It’s called Love, and in the immortal words of some tv show or movie or prophet on the street, “Love, it’s a son of a bitch, man.”

Actually, that might have been Theo again.

Regardless of who said it, they are pretty on point.

I mean, falling in love, and being in love, and eating bacon, are great. But it’s hard and dangerous to do without an apron.

Cause people are broken. We can’t always see their broken parts, but direct line of sight isn’t a prerequisite for the existence of something. Most of us keep our broken parts hidden behind our back where nobody can see them.

It’s safer to keep them back there cause then we don’t have to look at them every day. We don’t want to be broken, but nine times out of ten, we don’t know how to fix ourselves. Duct tape and WD-40 go a long way but that’s just putting a patch over the problem and then covering yourself in oil.

That second part is actually pretty fun. The first part, not so much.

This is all existential marble gargling, but you can’t live your life with hands behind your back. There are so many wonderful things out there to fondle and caress.

Go ahead, use your imagination. Look with your eyes, and your hands. *Wink Wink, nudge nudge*

Now here’s the shit-storm-tornado, (which is a way better movie than Sharknado by the way), we fix ourselves by showing our damaged fiddly-bits to others with the hope that maybe they can look at it and say, “Oh yeah… you just need a little fizzitdoodad.”

And you’re like, “Of course, that makes so much sense.”

So you get a fizzitdoodad, fix the problem, and the system is running smoother than Windows ’95 after a fresh reboot. But it’s not a permanent fix, cause we’re fragile and your mom and dad didn’t love you enough to splurge on the Super-Mega-Awesome Lifetime Protection Plan for $19.95 when you were born.

Instead your Dad went and bought a roll of duct tape and said, “Meh, this will be fine.”

Thanks, Dad.

Dick.

Just kidding.

Kinda.

So like a couple six years olds playing Doctor in the sand box, (which is the absolute worst place in the world for a game of Doctor, by the way. Two words. Sand. Everywhere.) you show your vulnerabilities to whoever is shooting you that come hither eye.

And pow, presto, whiz-bang, boom! It’s love. It feels good, like a Turkey Bath.

Turkey Bath? Turkish Bath? Sound it out. I dunno. I don’t bathe.

Anyway, the closer you grow towards this new thing, the more intimate your understanding of it becomes. But now remember when you were a sad panda lost in the forest with your nose pressed against the trunk of a tree? Yeah, you could’ve been in a mall for all you know, you can’t see anything but that goddamn tree.

Where’s the forest? Where’s the sky? Where are my pants?

The point is, the closer you get, the easier it is to lose perspective of what it is, and who you are in relation to it. By that I mean, if you stand next to a blue whale long enough, A) it’s going to suffocate and B) you’re gonna forget that you are not some tiny inconsequential assortment of star fart.

To complicate things, love, life, and all those fuzzy teddy bears in between, are constantly shifting like a house of mirrors where you’re forced to stare at yourself until you either find the exit or break down in the corner and cry in the fetal position while you wait for the pimply faced teenager taking tickets at the door to come and find you with his judgmental eyes.

Don’t look at me when I’m crying!

Okay, look.

That moment of vulnerability changes everything, my underwear included. You open yourself up, and you change.

Poof, it’s magic.

Your darkness and everything that’s been hiding in your nooks and crannies is exposed. The trench coat comes off and it’s just you flying free in the breeze.

But that other person, whoever it is you’ve handed your steaming pile of insanity, has changed too. You’re no longer just two people. Cause we’re all wearing masks, and playing a part. Sometimes I’m that overly self-confident ass on the bus listening to his Natalie Imbruglia on full blast. Sometimes I’m the guy pretending he doesn’t speak English whenever somebody hits me up for money on the street. Other times I’m the guy biking around downtown Oakland in nothing but underwear and a cape cause I like the way the wind feels against my bare thighs.

Point being, we’re all a thousand crazy people crammed into one single body. And when you find somebody else to share in that craziness, you become something more.

Something beautiful. Because those ugly parts now have a counter, a partner in crime, an opposite, an equal.

Now they don’t seem so ugly. Cause the mind can only take so much ugly before it overloads and makes a computational error.

So, now we aren’t so ugly. Aren’t so smudgy. And damn if we don’t look good. We’re prancercizing through the park like we’re the goddamn cock on the walk.

And you know what? You are.

You are a huge walking (maybe even flying?) cock.

Revel in it. Throw back your head and cock-a-doodle-doo your heart out. Because if you’re an American cock, you’re gonna wind up a chicken nugget in some little seven year olds happy meal. Them’s the facts of life, son.

But live it up while you can, cause none of us were promised any of this. You wake up, put your pants on one peg leg at a time, and you get out there and do something that has meaning and purpose to you.

And that’s the important thing to take away from this. Cause heaven forbid things go sideways like a hydroplaning moose high on Turkey Bath Salts (I think I’ve got this metaphor thing down).

Also, here’s another thing to take away, (no not that bag of parting gifts, this aint Oprah), I’m in your corner. Like a creepy corner man, I’m ready to throw in the towel at a moment’s notice on your behalf, or I’ll cut you deep and open your eyes so you can get your ass back in there and fight another round.

ADRIAN!

Who? Nobody.

Now stop looking at me, I’ve run out of words to say. All that’s left are vaguely comprehensible guttural sounds. Stop back next week, I’ll ween off the peyote.

In the meantime how about you leave me a comment? You can call me out on my malarkey and overuse of periods, parenthesis, and piranhas. Or you can be more constructive with your feedback and tell me what gets you out of bed in the morning.

No, that’s not supposed to sound hollow, melodramatic, self-deprecating blah blah blah finger in throat, gag gag gag.

You’ve taken the time to come out to my neck of the woods, risking all sorts of cybercrime in the process, and I want to know what drives you. Are you a writer? What do you write?

Read much? Only on the toilet? Which do you find leads to a more satisfying morning movement? Fiction or non-fiction? Picture books?

Are you a unicycle connoisseur or a flamingo wrangler?

This is a two way street, so come on in the out hole and let’s have a conversation. Erm.

Forget that.

Anthony