thursday com(mute)

As I get older I’ve been finding myself increasingly ambivalent about thorough ass-wipings. 

It’s like listen, everyone has an asshole and most people shit out of them, so why do the two (assholes and shit) have to always be mutually exclusive?

I’m walking slower than usual to the train, burdened by the weight of cleanliness and visualizing tightly wound tubes of toothpaste being wound tighter against the knowledge that it’s impossible to squeeze everything out and anticipating someone wrapping his/her arm around my shoulder and whispering something like “hey sphincter-face, why so glum?” thereby allowing me to strangle him/her with my iPod earbud cord in an attempt to force out the remnants of what used to be colloquially known as a soul and rub them in his/her dying face like someone berating their French bulldog for rug-pissing while muttering "look at what you did, look at what you did..."

As usual, no one makes eye contact except for children. I want to wink and smile/grimace at them, but not in a way that suggests imminent molestation. More like, ah, wistful acceptance. Like, "No worries little man, Time will rape all of us soon enough."

PTSD Is So 2005

Oprah agreed on a fair way to decide initiation, which involves two closed fists and pretending your grandmother’s in the room. The compromise proved to be a big ratings boost in most major markets (except, of course, in Kandahar) and was rated as favorable by almost every viable demographic besides panty-sniffing Japanese stock brokers vacationing in Haiti and bomb-sniffing dogs out on recon.

Honestly, I think it made most people feel a little better about the future: vapid suit-herders could still meditate under clouds of dharma-jizz in obese central-air pumping boxes, highways would still shimmer in the hot afternoons and block complete glimpses of fields, bizarre tension vibes and unprovoked assaults would still be the two most sought-after traits of every washed-up child actor.

My brother came home in August with half a femur and a pull-one-over-on-you Midwestern drawl he got from watching too many John Hughes movies in the hospital. Maybe that’s why nobody argued when he stopped taking his Ambiens and started stashing them away for what we assumed would be one heck of an Alive Day party the following year.

“The least coolest person on TV is more interesting than anyone I know,” he told me while I sponged him down for the last time, his Budweisers raised above the tub like night goggles.

10 anniversary 9/11 story (yeah it's June, whatever)

Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About

Katie stood in the back of the student center, near the coat closet with its dull polyurethane hooks, hands clasped over her stick-jaw pelvis, eyes on the blue sky and bluer smoke being projected through the TV. I thought about us in ten years: I would ask if I could buy her an appletini. There would be functions to attend, pills to swallow, clubs, nipple slips and brunches. Probiotic baby food, His and Her bidets, nurses at four in the morning, IV needles. I shifted my weight and pressed my face into the crook of her shoulder. She shoved me away. “My uncle was in bonds,” she sobbed. “Well, hopefully somebody unlocked him,” I said. Katie gave me this death-by-airstrike look.  No one else laughed at the joke except for Carl, who kept laughing until the Sustainable Oblivion Police dragged him off campus. That night, Katie waited in her bedroom, smoking and checking her inbox. Her mother had been on the phone since the lines opened back up. It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

2001