It’s my birthday today. I’m 24.
I never planned on living this long. Seriously, I thought I’d die by at least 21. I’ve accomplished everything I set out to do, like support myself and learn to not hate myself.
I’m not really sure where to go from here. How much longer does this life thing keep going? I guess I’ll have to make a new list, maybe get a better paying job and learn to like myself a bit.
Nah, I’ll probably just get drunk instead or something.
[Buy Farm.]
Explosions In The Sky – Magic Hours
crumpled in her pocket,
lay stubs from a movie, where
she blew him in row J.
[Buy How Strange, Innocence.]
Esin offered this scrawl of writing to us today, and we’re humbled. Many thanks. She doesn’t have somewhere we can tell you to go, but a photo of hers has snuck onto our Tumblr page in recent times.
I admit, to leave the lax countryside behind and take any part in the taut city streets is somewhat demanding. I just have to be in the mood and the moment can’t be sprung upon me – I need time to adjust to the thought. My own quirk, my own failing. It just doesn’t appeal until I’m there, until I’m in the swim.
Still, today, lovingly forced to take adventure, I finally advanced towards Oscar Wilde’s memorial at Merrion Square where he sits alone and aloft a stone with a wry smile forever etched on his pale face. Thought is not catching.
A boy, a man, a something, jumped into the Liffey. He resurfaced, or so I overheard some onlookers say, and was met by three police cars and three fire engines (all for a desperate swimmer). There were the drunkards who even with smiles fail to bring about comfort in me. The presence of suffocating mortification with every product I (somehow) accidentally let fall to the floor in the company of others. All plastic or food based so avoiding the ‘you break, you buy’ ruling. I had a Chinese food buffet (for the first time): I enjoyed it.
All the while I could not remove Glen Miller from my mind. My very own pressed soundtrack.
[Woody Allen and music from his must-see movies.]
Train Company – The Otherside (Limited Issue)
This song should be the soundtrack for every forlorn figure that walks, leaning into the wind, through the icy streets of Chicago, coat barely keeping the burn of the freezing air at bay, elbow crooked where a significant other should attach itself
[Buy Train Company.]
Jeff Buckley – Everybody Here Wants You
Cupping the cheeks of her arse with her white-bound stockings as he pulled her close, her smooth skin dragging against the short soft hairs on his legs, Carey had been here before.
Erin hadn’t had too much to drink, like with some of the other women Carey had brought back to his apartment. She hadn’t been impressed by his menial employment, capable of being done by just about anybody. Any fuck straight out of school looking for some cash to set himself up. She hadn’t even found him all that funny, all that interesting, all that brimming with charm.
But she was there, the under-curve of her breasts resting on his chest. The small of her back pushed in, shoulders jutting out with her neck as she drew back breaths and gasps, and sometimes moans when Carey did things right. He did things wrong, he knew. He never got the swing of his fingers, of his thrusts. He didn’t have that rhythm, that motion. But she did moan, small and private, sometimes.
Her pearl-white dress sat crumpled on the chair in the corner of the room. The streetlight snuck in through the closed blinds in his apartment. It cast shadows of their tango on the walls in a greyscale kaleidoscope turn. Carey’s hands dug into Erin’s back, drew blood from the muscles in her waist and stained the tips of her feathers.
[Sketches For My Sweetheart, The Drunk.]
(illustration by James Jean)
The Cult – Painted On My Heart
Remember that card I gave you? It said, “If I know what love is, it is because of you.” It’s true, you know. I loved you so much. I still love you…
I loved you more than you could ever imagine. Loving you was the only thing that I was ever really good at. God. Five years, you know. I didn’t love you unconditionally, though. I loved you with one important, what’s the word? Caveat? Yeah, that. All you had to do was love me back. Remember how I used to tell you all the time that all I ever wanted was for you to be happy? That was a lie. Fuck that. Of course I wanted you to be happy, but with me. Without me, I want you to be miserable. I want you to hate your fucking life, and hate yourself for not loving me like I needed you to. I don’t want to be a fond memory. I don’t want you to look back on what we had and smile out of the corner of your mouth, and do that thing where you curl your hair around your finger. I want you to suffer. Desperately. I want you to be in so much pain that you call me, weeping, begging for me to take you back. But I won’t. Because I’m over this shit.
Anyway, I guess you’re asleep. I know it’s late over there. Just call me when you get this, or whatever.
[She was gone in sixty seconds; left single.]
Our friend Brent writes for us today. He also writes for himself at The Third Revelation every now and then (not as often as we’d like, because it’s great).
At the crowds back were two men. One, 39, was named Penn. Penn was tall, well dressed, and looked to the floor with insistence, as if forever in search of something or nothing. No feature discerning or impressive. He was a fluent man with a vintage lust; both virtues lost to the past.
The second, 44, held the self-claimed “unfortunate” name of Kelly Kelly, although from even a young age he would spell the first Kelly as ‘Kele’. He was shorter that Penn, certainly wider, and his neck spun from side to side with restless inquisition.
Penn was one of the final shadows to turn up to Howard Tyne’s funeral. Around the open grave were the huddled crowd – huddled not by companionship, but by a scarcity of umbrellas. A crowd starved for a conclusion to a day that offered little but rain and the impending cover of dark sky.
Penn approached the back of the crowd just as Kele had parted from the pack to put out a cigarette. Meeting as strangers, Kele spoke first.
“How did you know him,” Kele asked, pointing to the grave and not the coffin.
“We met many years ago, but we weren’t close,” said Penn.
“He wasn’t close to many it seems, not many at all. Sad life, most certainly. By his own hand, though… well, so others would have you believe. I asked for no certainty, no notion, but stories spun in the air for weeks after. It was hard to miss it – hard to tear yourself away from the whispers.”
Kele didn’t need to ask Penn, who was unmoved by Kele’s immediate openness, if he was sure as to what exactly was being spoken of. Penn nodded and waited. Kele continued, moving weight from his right leg and then to his left, shifting with each spit of wind.
Moving closer until their shoulders kissed, “Didn’t he swerve towards that young chap?”
“Swerved, he did. All they said to me is all I know. He swerved. No accident. He swerved and hit him and he took joy from it, he did.”
“Says she, the wife, they actually came from the shop door first on hearing the bang and saw the glass and broken concrete and the boy on the floor – that plastic tricycle of his, the blue one, a mess it was. It was in several pieces. Blood on the path they couldn’t remove for weeks after. He was some distance from the car; throwing distance, and pardon my phrasing. Minus a sliver of damage on the hood, admittedly a chunk of a sliver, the car seemed apart from the incident.
“I didn’t ask about it further.
“He was fucking on the lookout for someone and the story, as told by all, tells it that way, that’s for sure. What was done is what he wanted done. Don’t take what I say as perfect. Take your confirmation of the happenings at home. Trust your own. Ask your own.
“To tell you the Jesus truth, well, aren’t we all glad? They say you wouldn’t wish it on your enemy, but it doesn’t take much thought to wish it. A lie to wish nothing but goodness on any man, especially him. If ever a hungry cancer was a good cancer, this was the one. Did everyone a favour, it did.
“We’ll call a spade a spade here, him and his jittering ways – a bad man and nothing more. Be God, the one woman he loved, the faintest bit of man in him, didn’t love him back. It wasn’t the wife either. The mother it was. The moment she laid eyes on his delayed, wrinkled face she had made her mind.
“I suppose he must’ve thanked her in his prayers for an excuse then,” stuttered Penn, finally.
“An excuse to be bad? Aye, possibly,” concluded Kele, before mouthing a prayer he was unsure of.
Like cereal to a bowl, the thrown soil punched the coffins front with speckled noise, short vibrations eating the fog air. The strap that held his final home strained through the dry hands of those who held it, and they staggered a little with the weight, the wet ground and soil lessening the violent thud that could have been as the coffin bounced off one side of the grave to the other. Penn took a breath deep within him and held it for as long as moments would allow. Exhaling, his sight blinded by his own escaping white lungs, he buttoned his coat. He scraped his shoes on the gravel and shook Kele’s hand.
“I’m not glad with this end, friend” Penn muttered. “Not entirely. It wasn’t by my hand that he passed.”
[Get the new release that is the Boxer.]
When he was in his usual jovial mood, Big J liked to call them Big Boy Drinks. Right now he felt more like calling it what his mother did: Poison. “I’m going to drink a good deal of poison tonight,” she would tell him.
Despite his mood, Big J kept the laugh in his voice as he told Scotty that he was coming over to the party for some Big Boy Drinks. His voice was a dense cloud in the crisp frozen air as he spoke into his bulky Nokia on his way from the front door to his ’97 Ford Taurus.
As the car warmed up, its dull dashboard lights flickering at him, J huffed into his gloveless hands and hugged his body. He didn’t know how cold it was; the thermometer outside his mother’s house had frozen over. When he finally pressed the gas, he heard the whir of his bald tires on the ice. The futile spinning had no traction. From experience, he knew not to keep trying. The friction would only melt the ice and act as lubricant in an ever-deepening hole.
Muttering words his mother only used after several doses of poison, J climbed out of the now tolerably warm car and found the pieces of plywood next to the front porch. Jamming a piece under each tire, he shifted the car into drive and walked around back to push.
Big J looked like an elf that just soiled itself as he waddled in all his layers to catch the car crawling at 5 mph away from the ice it had recently escaped. He hopped on one foot trying to keep pace with the car as he stuck the other leg inside, easing himself into the driver’s seat.
The snowplows didn’t come this far out of town. Instead, those with trucks and jeeps strapped chains on their tires and matted down the snow for the sedans to follow timidly later. Driving the two miles to the Niles city limit, J could feel the give, sense the slide waiting to happen if he braked too quickly or took too sharp a turn. It made him feel trapped in a pedestrian pace. When were they going to invent teleportation already?
The Taurus rolled past Scotty’s house around back to the barn. Inside the amber-hued barn interior, half a dozen gathered around the beer pong table, which was directly in front of the wood furnace. Bruce Springsteen was on the battered cassette player’s radio. Scotty’s dad nodded at J after putting a new log in the furnace and brushing his hands together. He was trashed.
Scotty had been throwing parties in his barn since they were 15. It was almost a decade now they’d been gathering at the side of bails of hay, drinking beer, and smoking. When his father found out, he was furious — furious that they hadn’t invited him. Immediately, he marched back into the house and returned with his own contribution of PBR to the 30-pack the scared teenagers had mustered. Everyone laughed. Now even the girls didn’t mind that much when Soctty’s dad got drunk and stared at their asses. Everyone needs a few minutes away from his wife, they figured, and were flattered.
But there weren’t any pretty girls here today, J noticed. Scotty’s sister Jill, whose two children were asleep in the house, was there. So was Steph, Scotty’s baby-momma, with whom he was cheating on his girlfriend. A couple others in thick coats rounded out what was a ragged and sparse crowd.
“Grab a Big Boy Drink,” Scotty said.
“Do you want Miller or Bud?” his sister asked, leaning over the cooler. She was missing a tooth.
“Oh, give me a Miller, whydonchya,” J said.
“Ah, a man after my own heart,” she said and tossed him a can of Miller Lite. Big J thought the difference between Bud Light drinkers and Miller Lite drinkers was about as consequential as the difference between a furnace and a space heater to a freezing man.
“Cheers,” he said, raising his can into the musty air.
A couple cans in, J broke the seal out back near some trees. There was no bathroom attached to the barn; if you had to shit or had a vag you went inside the house. The warmth of his penis heating his shivering hands against the nippy air, J thought about the bathroom he had been in a few hours earlier.
When he had seen the letter on the counter, he was surprised his mother hadn’t opened it. Unable to find a proper letter opener, Big J used a pair of scissors to cut open the envelope. It was from Michigan State. J had taken as many classes as could possibly help him from Southwestern Michigan College, the junior college. He had been accepted at Notre Dame, but his mother told him plainly that the money wasn’t there. A sizable state grant at State was his ticket out of this town.
“We regret to inform you blah blah blah you’re a piece of shit blah blah blah,” was what his darting eyes saw upon ripping the letter out.
Calmly, J folded the letter back in the envelope and walked upstairs to the bathroom no one used. The lock on the door gave a satisfying clack, indicating his safety within the sanctuary of the porcelain alter. Big J sat on the toilet and read through the letter three times, soaking up its empty optimism and kindness, letting its every word ping off the back of his skull. Then, slowly, he tore the letter into tiny pieces of dead tree, rolled the pieces up into miniature balls, and dropped them between his legs into the water below. His glasses fogged and he wiped the runny mucus from his nose with the back of his wrist.
Sitting with his face in his wet hands, elbows on his knees, J stayed still until he couldn’t stand the tingling of his dead legs.
Back outside, J put himself away and zipped up. It was too cold to stand out here thinking.
Each team had one cup of beer left. Big J and Jill were on one team, Scotty and Steph on the other. When Scotty nailed the last shot, Steph pulled him close for a kiss and murmured, “Oh, you’re such a good marksman.”
“That I am, honey. That I am.”
Big J hit the rebuttal to euphoric shrieks from Jill. She held a drink aloft with one hand and tried to hug J with the other, spilling beer down his arm. Two kids, J thought to himself as he felt the warmth of her body on him.
The two girls thought it was ever so cute when the rebuttal was hit twice again after that. J thought it was dragging out the inevitable.
When J struck the corner of the cup with the ball and it popped up to hit Steph’s boob, Jill giggled and said, “Sheash, nobody can win here!”
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Big J’s parents loved asking him when he was a child.
He would look up from his plate of macaroni and cheese or his action figures and beam an adorable smile chock-full of seemingly perpetually chipped teeth.
“A Peacemaker.”
It never failed to get a laugh out of them; it was the only consistent way J could get them to look happy. Though he did not understand the joke, he would always laugh along just as loud.
In his mind, a Peacemaker was a legitimate and straightforward profession. The 7-year-old J had warped — though not objectionable — ideas on war. From the smatterings he’d heard about battle and his own combat experience from the extensive and thorough Lego battles he imagined, war was simple. Two nations agreed to fight over some tiny dispute or another and built a giant wooden box with ledges on the side. Then army guys positioned themselves on the various ledges, Country A on the left and Country B on the right, and shot at each other. If your country shot all the machine gun-toting members of the other country in the box, your nation won. Sometimes, an insubordinate and over-eager infantryman would lob a grenade into the middle of the box, killing anyone left over. It was suicidal, but it brought an end to the engagement with a sort of cat’s tail draw J had experienced in tic-tac-toe.
A Peacemaker would walk in the open gap in between the opposing militaries with each hand holding aloft a “peace” sign, the first two fingers of each fist sticking up like Asians tourists in a photograph. He would cry out, “Peace, dudes, peace.” The military men would cease shooting and listen to his plea for an armistice. Sometimes, they would agree that shooting each other got them no where. Other times they would agree to ignore him and continue fighting. Somewhat frequently an itchy finger would shoot first the messenger of reconciliation before turning back on the official opposition.
It was a dangerous job, but one that surely had a decent salary considering the potential risk.
His father would tousle his hair and tell him, “Jason, you can be anything you want to be when you grow up if you work for it.”
Though the existence of the position was concrete in J’s mind, his own moral steel was up for debate. He wasn’t convinced he had what it took to go through with a real Peacekeeping mission.
When he heard a crash and yelling one night, a relatively frequent occurrence, J knew he had to be strong. If he was going to ever become a full-fledged Peacemaker, opportunities such as these must be seized. He swung out from under the covers in his pajama flannel onesie and softly padded his way down the carpeted stairway. In the kitchen, he saw his parents facing each other, faces flushed, eyes huge, fingers pointing. The blender was in pieces on the floor.
Mustering all the courage he could find within the confines of his onesie, J formed his stubby fingers into tiny bunnyears and walked into the kitchen saying shrilly, “Peace, dudes, peace.”
Both accusing fingers dropped as his parents turned to look at him. J grabbed the closest of each of their hands in his, creating a semicircle.
“You shouldn’t fight with each other,” he said. “Peace,” he said.
Then he joined his parents’ hands together. For a split second, they stood staring at each other, palm to palm with their fingers interlocked. Then his father gave a tiny cough, or maybe it was a scoff. J could never quite tell when he thought of the moment in later years.
His mother knelt next to him and messed his hair as his father turned and left the house through the front door.
“Are you crying, mommy?” J asked her.
“I’m crying and laughing,” she answered.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because I’m happy and sad at the same time.”
That night J fell asleep on her lap as she sat on the sofa, a glass of wine next to her.
*****************
When he felt bloated and burpy from the booze, Big J drove home. Surrounded by the early morning dusk, he coasted through the desolate town, then over the padded snow up to his curb. The snow on the lawn was soft and high, up to his thighs maybe.
As he waded to his door, his neighbor’s dogs barked at him. They were a pair of labs. When his neighbor didn’t feel like standing out in the cold to watch them as they peed, she would tie them to a stake and let them do their business, sometimes forgetting to bring them in for a while. The labs were at the end of their leashes, close to J’s yard. Their grinning, barking faces peeked up over the snowbank. The heat from their bodies had melted pods in the deep snow, where they sat, stuck.
[Buy The Golden Archipelago by Shearwater.]
[Buy Blocked Numbers by the Crystal Skulls, which has since disbanded, many members joining Fleet Foxes.]
[Buy Admiral Fell Promises by Sun Kil Moon, if you proved immune from my previous prompting.]
[Buy Trouble In Dreams by Destroyer and check out the Bejar-O-Matic or Destroyer drinking game.]
[If you have energy left after buying all those records, check out our new tumblr page. It’s got pictures and stuff.]
[Also, Joan wants you guys to comment more so he can feel validated in his life decisions, but I’m more of the opinion that if you have nothing to say it’s better not to say anything. Then again, I’m also desperately lonely, so I’ll leave the decision of commenting up to you.]
Brand New – Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis
My next?
Your next drink.
Oh, well, sure.
What are you drinking?
A beer will do – any beer. Whatever you’re drinking.
I don’t know many women that like beer.
I have a taste for it.
A beer it is. L, could we get two over here? (Sure, man.)
I’m Erin.
Carey. A pleasure.
Not yet, but maybe soon.
Maybe. Winding down from the working day?
You could say that.
I know this’ll sound lame, but: come here often?
First time.
Makes sense. I’m a regular.
A regular what?
A regular here. At Gallagher’s.
Oh.
Yeah, I like the place.
Why?
Just a funny mix of riff-raff and raff-riff.
Raff-riff?
Yeah, raff-riff. When you think of riff-raff, just think of the opposite. Raff-riff.
Hah, clever, Carey.
So what do you do?
I work with people. More than I’d like.
I hear that. People, man. People can get you down.
I only see them getting up, but it’s always going down, sure.
Staying long?
Probably ’til the end of this drink. I guess it depends.
We’ll see. What’s with the wings?
The wings?
Yeah. Coming from – or going to – a costume party or something?
Sort of.
[Buy Deja Entendu.]
(illustration by James Jean)
And so we enter with the crashing distortion of boisterous guitar firmly layered over that twinkle of bells. It’s bluesy, it’s psychedelic, it’s dream-pop. Her voice has that drug-like charm, enchanting and calm. It swarms with emotion through pleasant chimes and it’s just so trusting, like a cool breath upon your ear. And it’s end; the stuttering finale, the tambourine shake, and then to fade and through to audible black. “Count my stars. Let them shine. I know they shine.” It’s a certain type of poetry. It’s a certain kind of sound – a guarantee of stillness and comforting elation.
[Dig deep, count some change, and part your many silver coins for Among My Swan.]
