Going through a couple of my old ones right now, I stumbled upon a couple of those little snippets of thought that I love finding in these things. Sometimes they transport me to the time I wrote them, or at least give me some vague sense of nostalgia, but at the very least I either think “Oh, hey, that’s great, I should use that for something,” or “man, that was fucking terrible, what was I thinking?” There’s even one page where I had written some stupid, out-of-context thought and apparently went back to it months later, crossed it out and put an arrow pointing towards it and a note that said “Thought it was a good idea at the time.” I guess being my own worst critic can be a good thing, but sometimes I feel like it paralyzes me when it comes to writing. Hopefully this blog can help me get over some of those fears. I’ve never feared the criticisms of anyone else, but the most disappointing feeling I’ve had as a writer is when I write something and look back at it and say “Man, that was terrible.” It’s more embarassing than being caught masturbating (especially when you’re masturbating to the writing of yours that you like).

So, for tonight, here are a couple little nuggets from the archives that I liked. There is no context, just loose ideas that I might use for something someday.

1:

I fantasize about yelling at my boss in jobs I don’t even have. Do you know what it’s like to be turned down or overlooked for a raise or promotion in your daydreams? It sucks, man, it really does.

2:

He was the kind of guy that wrote nice poetry to his girlfriend about putting rocks in his shoes so he would remember each step he took towards her and ruined it by later describing in detail the pus-filled blisters and blood-soaked socks at the end of the day.

3:

“If the world were black and white, would color cameras have been invented first?”

4 (from a journal entry when I was driving the buses on the Vineyard. I would write some of these down in the two or three minutes I had at a bus stop during my shift.):

Small, obnoxious kid goes into a frenzy, forcing everyone on the bus to listen to a rant about the entire story of the new Harry Potter, despite pleas from the other passengers not to ruin it. [It had just come out.] Continues anyway, visibly angering a teenaged girl with the book in her hands and a bookmark in the middle. Boy reveals that he is about to be shipped off to camp for a month. Passengers all cheer and applaud the missing parents and sympathize.”

—

Man uses the last two dollars on a $16 change card. I go to throw it away but he wants to keep it. For a scrap book. His used up, wrinkled bus change card.

—

Morbidly obese couple only passengers between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, arguably the more scenic, if not the most, of the down-island routes. The husband asks, “so a lot of people come here, right? From all over?” When I say yes, the wife snorts and shouts, “WHY?” Their grunts, sweating, moaning and complaining about the heat, and the numerous stains on their shirts, combined with their utter ignorance will make me question my next piece of bacon.

When I go out to write or read,
The corner-of-the-coffee-shop girl
Becomes
Center-of-my-mind girl
And
Waiting-in-the-rain-for-a-bus girl
Becomes
Saturday-morning-reason-to-not-get-out-of-bed-because-she’s-in-it girl
(And some of you may have noticed by now and I’m sorry
but I won’t hold it against you when you walk out of my life
without a word so we’ll call it even)
The day when singing-to-herself-while-she-walks-ahead-of-me-and-doesn’t-think-anyone-can-hear-her girl
Stops singing to me
Will be very sad indeed.

First up is an article I had written about a band in high school, Slow Leslie. Looking back, it’s not such a terrible article from a 17-year-old. I’ve definitely written worse.

Next is a piece about an antique car show that was going on at the time. I believe it still happens annually. I haven’t read this one again since I got the clip, so I have no idea if it’s good or bad (maybe you guys can tell me, huh?).

And finally, at least for now, an article about the high school’s yearly “Hell Week” football camp to get the kids in shape after a summer of laziness. I remember being upset at the time that the lede was changed so heavily – the one the news editor put in there seems so bland to me, but I’ll admit I’m biased. I don’t even remember what the original said at all, but I’d like to think of it as some great injustice anyway.

As usual, enjoy and let me know your thoughs. Keep in mind that these are from seven years ago, so cut me a break if they’re not perfect.

And so those days of subtle genius gone
Days spent fishing for leaves in the back yard
Full of hammocks and skinned knees, dew at dawn
And the dog has been missing since the sun went down

He bounds into view with the sun at noon
A strange creature with five legs instead of four
One dangles from his mouth, clearly not his own
And it will be used for walking no more

As blood stains the deck and drips from his mouth
It is a strangely beautiful nightmare
One that leaves a wanting for the waking
A curiosity for the mortal

Bent and broken at all the wrong angles
Flesh stripped away in no certain pattern
And no one will touch it save the dog and
Flies begin to materialize and feast

We three sit with our faces against glass
Groaning complaints of the sight and smell
And turning away is not an option

It stays for two days and quickly becomes
An average, common place sight
Like some everyday monstrosity

And when it leaves under cover of night
Reclaimed by some wandering creature
And no longer some scavenger’s bounty
We are forlorn and must look elsewhere for decay

And we are not disappointed, to say the least.

When people ask me about driving a garbage truck, I usually tell them it’s as bad as it sounds, only worse, and then I pause for a minute as if to think reflectively and tell them “well, once you got used to it, it wasn’t so bad.” Maybe I’m just a fake motherfucker, but I get sick of answering the same questions all the time, so I at least have fun trying to perfect the same responses, or make up ridiculous answers (“No man, I loved that job! I found so many cool things in the trash, and I never had to bring my own lunch, if you know what I mean!”). For the first week, I was miserable and convinced I would quit. During training I was riding around in a residential truck with a Brazilian kid named Ramon who drove like a psychopath and would pretend to be a stupid, uneducated foreigner when dealing with some of the customers (“Yes boss! Sorry boss! Next time better boss!”) while I tried to hold back laughter (he and I had actually gone to high school together and his English was pretty good).

Anyway, between the smell and mess that came with the job, I was sure I wasn’t going to last, but I managed to deal with it. When people say “Oh, man, that must have been terrible,” I often just shrug and say “Yeah, but it was great writing material,” which is largely true, but I never really did anything with it. I do have some notes and images I jotted down while I worked there that I’m particularly fond of that I’ve always wanted to turn into something worthwhile, so in the next few days or weeks I’ll turn those into little vignettes to be posted here, so at least I have them in one place. Some of the characters I worked with there are too good and three-dimensional not to write about, and I had some pretty scary and life-changing experiences as well that warrant attention.

The most prominent image I have of that time and the one I tell most people about is picking up the dumpster of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was one of the most depressing experiences of my life, repeated every other week.

The first week, I didn’t realize what the ashes were. The next, the cremator came out with his big gloves and tongs carrying a plastic bag. He had a look about him as of pure misery that made me not feel so bad about my limited contact with the co-mingled remains of Spike and Mittens.

On a rainy day, the ashes became wet and sludgy, like a kitty-ash Slushy. It would slide down the metal sides of the dumpster and slop into the soup that had been building up in the hopper.

On windy days, it was like that scene in The Big Lebowski, when they’re spreading the ashes on the cliff and they all blow into his face. After blowing my nose into the shop towels in the truck, I wondered if I could figure out what part of Fluffy I had just gotten a little more intimate than I ever would have liked to with.

As bad as those were, probably the worst was when a corner of the dumpster, which was a small little two-yarder (it was right next to a veterinary clinic I also picked up on alternate weeks – one week was cat and dog shit from the vet clinic, the other the ashes from the MSPCA) got caught on a tree branch when I wasn’t paying attention and dumped ashes all over the ground. The shovel that was pinned to the side of the truck had been broken for a long time, since a dumpster had been knocked out of the truck and almost killed me when it hit the side and shattered it, so I had to scoop up the ashes by hand and put them into the truck.

And that’s when I decided to go back to college!

Stay in school, kids.

(Oh, I remembered just now in my last post I promised kittens and rainbows. Well, I got the kittens, but I owe you some rainbows. My bad.)

She broke up with me through email. Allison and I were 13 years old; we had made out consistently for a whole week, taking breaks for meals of course, and agreed to “try to make the distance work.” Two weeks after her summer vacation ended and she was back home, she said she couldn’t stand the distance, that maybe we should leave our options open, but she wanted to remain friends. And so, my first break-up came from my computer screen.

Now, ten years later, I read and re-read the email from the United States Center for Immigration Services, which announces that, after four months of waiting, my request for a visa for my fiancée, Ivona, has been approved.

I am definitely a product of the iGeneration; my cell phone is glued to one hand, my iPod to the other, and I was quite literally weened on a keyboard, according to my mother. I have had entire romantic relationships (with people I’ve known “in real life” beforehand) play out almost exclusively on AOL Instant Messenger. I think it’s fitting, therefore, that my first romantic trauma, as well as my greatest romantic triumph, have been revealed to me by the glow of a monitor, with the faint buzzing of processor fans to keep me company.

Iskra was the AIM girl. She and I had been in an English class together our freshman year, and I developed a crush pretty quickly. On the last day of class for the semester, I asked not for her phone number, but for her screen name.

We chatted briefly now and then and discovered we shared taste in music, and we both aspired to be writers. Nothing happened, as I lacked the courage to try to make fantasy into reality, and Iskra faded into the background, only to emerge now and then through chance sightings at the dining hall. I started dating someone else, and she transferred to a school closer to home in New York.

Iskra and I kept in touch, with a random instant message here and there. Once, between “on” sessions of my on-again-off-again with Elizabeth, I confessed I had had a crush on her, now that she was safely in another state and rejection would be a couple hundred miles away at least. It’s much easier to be brave when you can block the person if they say no.

To my surprise, she admitted the same, and over the course of sophomore winter break and many late-night IM conversations, a relationship started. We talked about everything, and occasionally actually called each other on the phone. The first time, I was taken aback and slightly embarrassed by the fact that I hadn’t heard her voice in a year and I had forgotten what it sounded like.

Still, we tried to make plans to meet. The lack of cars of our own, and money to travel with, made things difficult. I called her a minute before the ball dropped, and we lamented not being able to exchange a New Year’s kiss. Slowly, things slowed down and, quite frankly, I got bored with the iRelationship scene. We “broke up” when I finally realized that it didn’t feel like a real relationship. To this day, I haven’t seen Iskra since freshman year, despite efforts to make it happen for many months after it ended.

Every relationship I have been involved in has had a long-distance component to it. Part of that is from living on an island, and part of it is probably some latent naiveté; I always think it’s going to be easier than it turns out to be. Technology has been a necessary part of those relationships. I have had outrageous cell-phone bills as a result, I have browsed Facebook profiles and pictures for hours at a time, and Googled then-current and potential mates out of boredom, or curiosity, or in the hopes of discovering some interesting fact or embarrassing deal-breaker.

In our parents’ time, so I’m told, when the summer ended, so too did the summer relationship. Those who tried long-distance were subjected to, (gasp) writing actual letters and sending them from post offices (some of which are rumored to still exist, although for what purpose I am unsure).

The Facebook poke and MySpace comments have all but eliminated the need to have real-world flirting skills. Instead of buying your loved one a real gift, you need only spend a dollar or two on a picture that displays on their profile for all to see — limited edition gifts show you really care. People get married, and divorced, and have funerals in online video games, and eHarmony ads are all over television and the radio.

In today’s increasingly technological world, we’re falling in love with the illuminated pixels displaying Flickr photo pools and matchmaking websites, and with the sounds our email programs make when we have new mail. I, personally, check my cell phone obsessively in case I missed an important text message or voice mail.

The Internet has changed the way people meet and fall in love. The days of the shy guy getting up the nerve to approach the hopeful girl at the high school dance are long gone. Girls are just as likely to make a flirtatious Wall post as guys are to ask a girl out over instant messenger. And of course, before all this they can learn just about everything there is to know about the other person in their “About Me” section or through a Google search.

Whenever we need an update on our friends or lovers, we need only check their Facebook status or away message, and a relationship is only as real as Facebook says it is. Those who are unattached can be judged based on their “Interested in” and “Looking for” listings. Our friends are ranked by their placement in our Top 8, or Top 16, or whatever it is these days.

Currently, my fiancée is home in Bulgaria. We haven’t seen each other in person in four months, and it will be another three weeks or so before we meet again. When we first started dating, she insisted that I should call her, that it was the man’s job. Now, through voice-over-Internet programs, she calls my cell phone, for free, because it’s cheaper than me calling Sofia.

We have many aspects of a real relationship, despite the seven hour time difference. We play each other songs we like (or, rather, we send them to each other to play). We send each other pictures of family, of places we go. We email regularly, and we plan the wedding, debating over guest lists and catering prices, all with headsets on.

It’s not easy, although it’s easier for me than it is for her. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I’m able to ignore the bad parts and not get too hung up on the distance. It takes a certain degree of detachment to make a long-distance relationship work, unfortunately. This is not the first time we have been apart for months at a time, and it always takes a while to get back to the same level again. Having hundreds of pictures on my hard drive, of her, of vacations we’ve taken together, makes it better, but after I’ve pressed the power button on my PC, the bed is still conspicuously empty.

These days, with her gone, I can’t take her out to a restaurant or bar and be proud to be with the most beautiful girl in the room. Instead, I send friends whom I haven’t seen since I started dating her links to my photobucket account when they ask what she looks like. During an upcoming vacation she will take with her mother to Israel, we won’t talk, with actual voices, over the phone or Internet for 10 days. In a two year relationship, it will be the longest time we haven’t heard each others’ voices. With today’s technology, it makes perfect sense for her to be a quarter of the way around the world and for us to talk every day.

Technology has undoubtedly changed the landscape of love forever, at least in terms of how we find it and communicate it. What I have learned, though, is that it can’t be a replacement for love. Love today is still sought after ruthlessly, as evidenced by the fact that millions of people a year make profiles on social networking and dating sites. Entering “love” into Google brings up almost 2 billion results. There are how-to articles on every facet of it. Everyone can be an expert now.

That need for companionship is so human, so carnal, however, that machines can’t completely fill the role, in my opinion. But it can help find it.

Despite how we stumble upon it, I think the general idea has stayed the same. As society becomes more accepting of changing gender roles, as gay and lesbian rights are more widely championed and people are less persecuted for their personal relationships, I think love will become more “free,” in a liberated sense, than it ever has. And that change, in my mind, is a good one.

Soon, friends won’t say “you should meet my friend Jennifer, you’d really like her,” they’ll say “this creepy guy in my art history class poked me and I’m totally grossed out. I should Google him to see if he’s a sex offender or something.” And of course, they’ll say this to you in an instant message from thousands of miles away.

Anyway, I exported this particular article in PDF format, so I’ll just link it here instead of copy/pasting it. Keep in mind it’s from 6 years ago, when I was 18, and it’s the only sports article I’ve ever written. I didn’t expect the first article I’d write for a major newspaper would be a sports article, but hey, it’s still a proud accomplishment.

Enjoy.

In other news, I had to get a shot of cortisone directly into the bottom of my foot. I have a (fairly common) tissue buildup along a ligament that runs the length of the foot, and this should break it up. Despite the freezey shit the doctor sprayed on, when he jammed that needle in, it was the most excrutiating pain of my life. The best part is, I have to get 3-5 more shots, once a week for the next 3-5 weeks. Oh, and I have to have oral surgery to remedy an issue going on in that area, too. The doctor assured me that a biopsy is just standard procedure but he’s 99.9% sure it’s not an issue. Fun shit.