DETUNED PLAYER PIANO

Last month, I was invited to join a band. I said yes, despite the fact that I’m pretty booked up schedule-wise, and don’t have the free time to both rock and roll. (I chose roll.) Really, I was just flattered to be asked. It’s not often that one asks to do these things, and I’ve never seen a movie worth watching where the protagonist says No to these types of things.

At the first practice the lead singer, Spencer, who just so happens to be my best friend’s brother, told us all to tune down our instruments a half step. I obliged, because it was going to be easier on his vocal chords and easier on mine, too. But it made me think for a minute about the power of alternative tuning and what it means for the artist who chooses to play on an unorthodox set of strings.

I get headaches when I haven’t played the piano in a long while. I’m sure that sounds pretentious, but it’s true. If you know me, you know I’m a pretty laid back guy. I don’t raise my voice often, and rarely get in verbal altercations. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get angry, and that I don’t have a lot of anger to vent. I do, and, since it’s illegal to beat cats, I’ve found playing the piano is the only method I have of letting off what little steam I build up.

When I moved from New York to Los Angeles in September of last year, I sold the really nice keyboard I’d had since I was seventeen, the one that I’d recorded two albums with, the one that I’d trucked to all the bars in Greenwich Village for a  few rounds of sparsely attended shows.

Why did I do it? I don’t know, really. I think I was so piano’d out by the end of the musical that I wasn’t feeling sentimental. Or maybe it was because it felt like it was an artifact from a life I thought I didn’t want, and therefore wasn’t going to live anymore. Whatever the reason, when I showed up in LA with barely a thing to call my own and the headaches that often accompany moving didn’t go away after a month, I decided it was time to buy a piano.

I checked Craigslist, skimmed over pictures of waterstained upright pianos in poorly lit apartments until I found a posting for one that was in my price range, which was about five hundred bucks of my dad’s money. I called the number listed and talked to a woman who sounded very pleasant and a little surprised to hear from me. She said the piano was in great condition, but then admitted that she knew so little about pianos that she probably couldn’t be taken on her word.

That weekend, I drove out to their home in Altadena. They lived in a giant, two story mini-mansion at the end of a cul de sac. A place with bright red doors and two SUV’s out front. The two of them – both in their fifties, fit, graying – lingered in the living room with while I played scales on the piano and pretended I knew what I was doing. They told me that they’d kept the thingin a cabin up in Big Bear, and that the reason it sounded so awful is because it hadn’t been tuned in over a decade. I nodded and pushed the pump near the pedals, listening to the air escape through the cracks in the top. The player piano wouldn’t play, but that was fine with me. I didn’t intend of putting on any shows. I intended to beat the hell out of it and maybe finish that musical that I keep saying I’m going to write.

The keys were all brand new, and the finish matched my new living room carpet perfectly. Beyond the fact that it sounded like bean bags being shot into sheet metal, there was no reason for me to buy that sucker right there on the spot. So I did. I whipped out my checkbook and the couple shook my hand. I should have suspected something was wrong when they volunteered to pay for the moving.

It wasn’t until I had the piano moved into my house and the tuner showed up that I realized I had made an unfortunate purchase. “These strings are all too old to try and tune,” he said, his hands gripped the sides of his tool belt. “It’s be adding another couple tons of pressure to them, which would probably snap most, if not all of them.” I asked him how much it would cost to get a whole new set of strings and he said : “I’d do it for two thousand.”

I was furious. How could I have been so stupid? Of course the thing was going to end up costing me 2,500 bucks before it was of any worth.  I was so angry that I canceled my evening plans and spent the night getting high out of my mind and punching the keys until they howled.

That was almost a year ago, and now here I was in my best friend’s living room, playing a uniquely tuned guitar with some uniquely tuned people. Maybe being completely out of tune isn’t the total hindrance as I thought it was. Most people are playing the same chords in the same tired rhythms. I have a piano that is ugly on the ears. But what if it takes a new perspective on an old instrument to create something really new?

DEAD PTERODACTYL

One afternoon, when I was very little, I asked my older sister what the black plastic tarp beneath the rocks in our backyard was. She told me that it was the remains of a pterodactyl. It was a fantastic answer, because the tarp did look like what I imagined the winds of a pterodactyl would look like, and I was really into dinosaurs at the time. (Who wasn’t?)

I took her word for it, like I took her word on most things, and it wasn’t until we replaced the grass on our front lawn with rock and I saw the laborers laying down a plastic tarp over the ground that I realized how full of shit she was. I immediately went into the backyard and kicked the rocks around until I found the plastic. It was true. This was no dead dinosaur. You could buy this crap at Home Depot.

Then, I thought, maybe I should give my sister the benefit of the doubt. I mean, this, right here, is obviously not a dead pterodactyl… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t dead pterodactyls buried in the backyard somewhere.

I never followed up on that assumption – you’re welcome Mom and Dad – but I do think about this little leap of faith sometimes when I have prolonged conversations with my little sister. It’s funny how you easily you forget how gullible children are when you don’t have them in your life very often. They really will believe anything you tell them.

I once believed in Santa Claus, though I can’t remember why I thought the idea of a fat merry dude flying around the world delivering the latest commercial products was feasible. Obviously. The same goes for the Easter Bunny. I mean, think about this for a second: these are some of the most fantastical characters ever devised, with miraculous powers and unexplained motives.

Were there other holiday figures that came before that were too much even for gullible children to believe in? Are these characters the craziest we can get without crossing the line?

I wonder about people who believe in God, in whatever form he may take for them.

When I was told that Santa Claus wasn’t real, did I ask for evidence? I doubt it. I probably ran to my parents and they asked who told me and then admitted the truth: they were big fat liars. But what was to keep me from doing the same thing there that I did for the dead pterodactyl? I could have just as easily said, “Mom and Dad say he’s not real, but just because there’s no evidence that he exists doesn’t mean that he doesn’t.” But I didn’t, because I knew deep down that the world makes more sense without this Santa Claus character, and therefore my parents were telling the truth.

The more we learn about the universe, the more that feeling of “something here isn’t right” will grow, and God will shrink. Sure, they’ll be reactionaries who fight back and indoctrinate their children, but they have and always will be in the minority. I’d put money down that in next couple hundred years, maybe even in this century, if we don’t blow each other up, God will take his rightful place next to Santa Claus.

When children ask their parents some of the more complicated questions “Where do stars come from?” or “What happens to people when they die?” and these parents will talk about a benevolent creator who manages every moving part of the universe because it’s the easiest answer to give. And when one of the more enlightened children at school tells our boy or girl that God doesn’t exist, he or she will come home crying and the parents will have no choice but to give up the ghost.

WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS SHIT, SARAH?

About a month ago I saw a man choking a woman as I was walking past the Music Box on Hollywood Boulevard. It was night, and they were about a half a block ahead of me, in the darkened perimeter of the pay to park lot. They were two vague silhouettes, one forcing the other against the fence, so indistinct that I couldn’t tell if it was an act or real. I picked up my pace, checking behind me to see if anyone else was seeing this. No one was. When I got about twenty feet away, he shouted something fierce at the top of his lungs. “WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS SHIT, SARAH?” Primal. Like she’d been doing it since the dawn of time. I inhaled deeply and she turned towards me, her curly brown bangs covering her eyes. The distraction was enough for her to break free from his grip and take a few steps towards me and the theater. She was tiny, buxom girl squeezed into glittery silver dress. She was beautiful. He followed close behind, a slick-haired horse with impossibly long arms and intense, bleary eyes. I locked eyes with him as he passed. He grabbed her arm once more and I took a tentative step forward, my arm raised at elbow level. “Do you got a problem?” he asked and started towards me. I put my arms out and said, “No. I just want you to stop choking your girlfriend.” She took off towards me, past him, her heels clacking against the pavement, stomping over the names of long-dead movie stars. “Just keep walking,” she said. I did. I took a few slow steps backwards and watched her boyfriend start towards us, then back towards the theatre, then towards us, and back again before finally throwing his hands up in the air and crossing the street. The girl, who didn’t have any marks on her that I saw, walked two steps behind me all the way to the end of the block. I saw a police car idling at the light. “Are you alright?” I asked. “Yeah,” she said, embarrassed to the point of annoyance. “Do you want me to get the cops?” “No.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.” She dove into her purse and pulled out a phone, shaking her head in disgust. “Okay,” I said, and then walked away.

THANKSGIVING AFTER THE TERRIBLE THINGS

When I think of Thanksgiving, I think of the cool desert air ruining my perfect part. I’m nine or ten, and my entire family is gathered in the foothills. I step out of the back of the van. My hair is puffy, blonder than it is now, and I give up on it after a few swipes of the comb. There is no sanctuary from the wind. Not out here. Our only protection is beneath the veranda. And that’s where the relatives are.

Out here, you might as well be the only family in the world. You break bread because there’s nothing to eat for miles. You give thanks because you are the only survivors of the apocalypse. A pair of hawks circle above, diving in and out, the only reminders that there is a living world beyond your bloodline.

Let us feast upon tortilla chips and turkey sandwiches! Let us poke our fingers into the holes of the blue, latex painted picnic tables! Let us give short hugs and have long talks, and speculate about disparate cousins in desperate places! Let us preach to our grandparents and patronize our children! Let us wonder whose dog it is that’s running around! Let us ignore the potato salad! Let us argue! Let us agree! This is Thanksgiving! Let us give thanks that we have survived as long as we have!

Because when this is over, it will be over. And when we return to the safety of our circles to practice silent grievances, there won’t be any sweet breads. All we’ll have is our memories, which we’ll try to suppress, like the low rumbling of the earth before the quake.

THINK

In New York there’s a cafe called Think. It’s a coffee shop, but one of those coffee shops where the coffee is an afterthought. It’s the people here who matter, and on any given day it’s packed to the gills with bohemians, both the clean and dirty kind, avid readers and avid writers, Scrabble players and crossword enthusiasts, students putting off the homework assigned by their teacher, who happens to be sitting across the room, flirting with the pretty Latina girl on the bar stool, who herself is waiting for her anorexic friend to come out of the bathroom. It’s a carnival, really. And, like a carnival, when you go there, you don’t go alone.

I only went when I was meeting this girl who seemed to have watch a movie a day at the Angelica. We would always meet at peak hours, perhaps because we wanted enough fodder for our conversations. We certainly weren’t going to talk about movies, because everyone at art school wants to talk about movies. How annoying. We wanted to talk about our lives, which, as it turned out, happened to be a lot like living inside a boring movie with no point or punch-line. We had very few friends in common, and had a tendency to kick me really hard when she fidgeted, but she was beautiful and laughed honestly, so I forgave her.

I also went there to see my friends, the couple, who wanted to be distracted from life or work or each other. I would come in, intentionally disheveled, and we’d discuss what I was wearing, or who I’d been hanging out with the night before. The discussion would invariably drift towards gossip, which we were suckers for, but it was okay because we were all aware of how unseemly it was to be interested in the personal lives of other people.

Oh, and this all went on while some incredibly loud accordion music skipped.

Think isn’t a bad coffee shop. It’s just a bad coffee shop to do anything but make small talk or flirt apathetically. It’s funny. I used to play a game where, as I entered, I would note what page the people sitting in the chairs by the door were on in their books, and then check what page they were on when I left. If the difference was higher than ten, they belonged in Mensa. Over twenty, they were a Buddhist monk. Over thirty, they were probably deaf.

Sometimes I’d wonder if these people were performing some sort of intellectual mating ritual. Like the peacock displays his colorful plumage, the coffee shop patron displays the book cover. Sometimes they run into someone who has read that book, or is reading that book, or, who knows, wrote that book, and a beautiful relationship begins. I wonder how many lasting relationships begin with pretending to read.

Near the tail end of my Think experience, when I was giving up on it in favor of a much quieter, less popular café called Tea Spot that was only three blocks away, I met with a friend of mine there to go over notes on a play. When I arrived, he was curled up in the immediate corner, his black-framed glasses reflecting blank, out-of-order pages. He apologized that there was no seats left for me, and I leaned on the bar for an hour straight while we talked about Stoppard. As I talked, I felt like I was giving a speech to the patrons seated around us. My expressions became bigger. My hands stayed above my waist. The café was theatre. The world was pretending to work around us and we were working to pretend within it.

MY WEEKEND IN ARIZONA: THE INDEX

Abortion
“downsie” babies, 91
I’m writing a play about, 101

Air Force, 38-40

Allred, Kelly
birthday party, 1, 3-9
on puking, 4
on pussies, 3
on what a shitty host I am, 9
on what isn’t cool, 6
on whose bed I can pass out in, 9

Arizona, 1, 32, 95, 131

Bananagram, 42-44

Birthday, 2, 7-11

Boot Camp, 39

Brindley, Ricky
is that, 38

Buffalo, New York, 91

Bully Mammoth, 29, 30

Burritos,
lets go get, 33, 80
Rebas, 81-83
wanting so bad, 32-33, 78-80
who has the best, 31, 77

Chandler Fashion Mall, 15

Cheese Fries, 88

Clayton, Amanda, 23, 29

Cleaning up broken glass,
how to, 22
how not to, 21

Cousins
dating one, 90
fucking one, 91
you should introduce me to more of yours, 91

Cork
brunch at, 11, 86-91
the free donuts at, 80
the huge portions at, 79

Cups, Colleen
on Katie, 30
on Mark, 27, 34, 38
on me, 28, 30, 33, 39
on why she can’t play Bananagrams, 39

Cruise, 2, 14, 29, 55, 90, 109, 123

Dad
on finances, 2, 18, 66, 121
on my blog, 7, 52, 119
on the cruise, 2, 14, 29, 55, 90, 109, 123

Dungeons and Dragons, 49

Dynasty Warriors, 19

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 28

Exercise, 1, 142

Faggots, 1, 49, 72, 133

Figueroa, Javier
I miss, 38
where is, 33

Ford, Mike
on Darkfall, 41
on girls I’ve supposedly fucked, 90
on kids, 43
on marriage, 44

Four Peaks, 37-45

Goebel, Logan
I miss, 28, 38, 87
his girlfriend, 23
letters, 22
toasting, 40
what’s good for, 34

Hangovers, 11, 78

High Life, 22

Jello Shots, 8-14

Jungle Juice, 8-14

Las Vegas
being chased by scary people in, 83
Scheppe’s 21st in, 90
the Bellagio, 77
the Palm, 78
why don’t we all go to, 92

Left 4 Dead 2, 37, 90-92

Lester, B.J.
did you hear about, 30
who the fuck is, 31

Littler, Courtney
on being overtly pretentious, 13
on closing on a house, 9, 19, 81,
on the word “kew”, 15
on trifles, 14, 23

Littler, Hannah
on dogs, 2-4
on guitar, 4
on teeth, 59
who she loves, 3, 6, 19, 29, 50, 53, 90, 106, 109, 124

Littler, Teri
on a date, 38
on that pork dish I like, 8
on what time I should pick Hannah up, 4

Marijuana
did Amanda make brownies, 32
is it okay if I smoke a little bit, 38
“let’s go for a drive”, 45
why don’t we do this more often, 40, 44

Mika
hates Scheppe’s red shirt, 35
loves everything about me, 31

Mittman, Arie, 32-39

Mom
on being called “Deb” by her grandkids, 12
on Golden Lunches, 16
on her mystery Thanksgiving, 12, 14-15
on Weight Watchers, 13
on why Scrabble is no fun when you’re taking score, 13

Native Americans, 16

New House, 90

Peanut Brittle
better with or without bacon, 23

Ralston, Bob
on cat food, 12
on a great meal he had in Seattle, 17, 19
on that picture of the eagle, 15

Scheppe, Mark
on his girlfriend, 28-31
on insurance fraud, 39
on morality in the Army, 32
on staying in town this weekend, 28

Scrabble, 15-18

Skateland, 4-8

Space 55, 28

Sports
tickets to the “sun’s game”, 30
you don’t know anything about sports, 41, 93

Ted’s Hot Dogs, 89-100

Thanksgiving
seafood surprise, 14
what will it be like on a cruise?, 2, 14, 29, 55, 90, 109, 123

Things I Can’t Remember
because I blocked them out, ???
because I was drunk, ???

Trifle, 32, 38

Venker, Mark
diet concerns, 37
on cousins, 94
on his girlfriend, 31, 99
on possible lesbians, 105
on my weird outfit, 26
on work, 20

Writing
blogs, 60, 101
how I’m obviously running out of ideas, 142

BLISSFULLY BANGING AWAY

I intern at the iOWest Theatre. I’m the office guy. Every Thursday. I love the theatre. It’s one of the only things that has made my life in Los Angeles bearable. But, I have to admit, when I first started working there, I didn’t have a whole lot of pride in the place. It had nothing to do with the people, or the talent. It was the place, the physical entity. It’s something that even the most die hard ioWest enthusiasts will admit: it’s situated in a terrible part of town, and has a style that seemed to have grabbed onto the nineties and never let go. It just looks…old. And when it comes to comedy, old is bad. Very bad.

My lack of pride never affected my work. It just made me mopey. Not that there is ever much work to do. Then and now, I answer the phone, hang up posters, or tidy up the black box. I do it well and rarely complain. However, once in a blue moon I’m tasked with doing something beyond my limited, middle-class suburban skillset, like hang up a curtain or put together a bar stool.

“Can you put these boards up on the wall?” my boss asks.

“That’s a drill,” I reply.

My boss squints when I take the drill from him, as if I might look smarter if I’m blurrier. I smile and pretend that I was born with one in my hand, though I feel a little uneasy every time I pull the trigger. It could drill right through my leg!

I stammer, “What I mean to say is, yes, I will use this machine to hang up these boards. I will not be looking up POWER DRILL SAFETY TIPS on Wikipedia the minute you walk away.”

I’d say this system of “never tell someone you can’t do something even when you have no idea how to do it” works a good ninety percent of the time. I’ve never royally screwed shit up, and even learned stuff in the meantime. I haven’t been fired yet, either, which has to count for something.

“So that’s how you build scaffolding,” I say, wiping the dust on my pants. “I always just assumed it was a lot more complicated than that.”

“I don’t know why,” my boss replies. “Now, do you have health insurance?”

“No.”

“Then I probably shouldn’t ask you to climb up there.”

We stare at the ceiling lamps, two stories up. I put my hand on his shoulder and wink. “Good thing you never asked,” I whisper and begin my ascent.

All in all it’s a very casual affair. There’s only been one time I was thrown a job that I feel like I shouldn’t have been asked to do. One that actually went beyond the pale in terms of intern work. And it was in my third week working. Back when I was too afraid to say, No. I don’t know if I’m more inclined to say No now, but back then it was taboo, if only in my head.

It was strangely warm on the mainstage that afternoon, which isn’t good, considering that it was empty, and adding sixty bodies was bound to jack the temperature up a couple dozen degrees. Clearly, the air conditioner, though on, wasn’t doing its job, so I called the repairman and let him into the office a couple hours later.

“Can you take him down to the air conditioner?” my boss asked. I glanced at the repairman, a tan Middle-Eastern man with a permanent sourness tattooed to his face. He cricked his neck, annoyed.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“In the basement.”

“Okay, how do I get in?”

“You use this key.”

“How do I get there?”

“You go out the front door and take a right. It’s the second door on the right. 141, I think. Use this key on the elevator and take it one story down to the basement.”

“We have a basement?”

“He’ll show you which room it is.”

“And do I leave him there?”

“You probably won’t want to. It’s like David Lynch shit down there.”

He was right. The basement was a total mindfuck. The minute we stepped into the elevator, I felt like I was entered the realm of obtuse symbolism. First there was a puzzle: we had a key, but we didn’t need it. So why did we have a key?  What key? Poof. Check your pockets. There is no key. You are a cog in the machine.

Before I could note how strange the whole key situation was, the repairman punched the B button and the elevator began its irritatingly slow descent, screaming metal agony the entire time.

Down, down, down we went; down the rabbit hole, down into the underbelly of Hollywood, descending one story in the time it would take a normal elevator to travel ten. We slid the gate open and stepped out into a long, dimly lit hallway. The ground was covered in unevenly-cut carpet squares. The doors were all the same color. Weird stuff, sure, but the weirdest part of all is that somewhere, in one of the rooms, an anonymous drummer was punishing a snare to the sound of guitar feedback.

The repairman led the way, down the long hallway, past the room where presumably a man was wailing on a drum set while tripped out on acid. We ended up at the tiny room that housed the air conditioner, a giant silver box with a tube that led up the wall and into the ceiling.

The repairman peeled the box open and peered inside. He used a chisel to break of giant chunks of ice. Every few seconds he would push me against the door and toss an ice brick into the hallway. It didn’t matter where I stood. I was in the way.

“I tell them to replace. Once a month. They never replace,” he said.

That sounded right to me, but I didn’t say anything. I felt like he was telling me because I was part of the problem, not because he wanted to confide in someone. I kept myself flat against the door, waiting for this all to be over so I could go back upstairs and tell people, “No, you want the Improv. Let me get that number for you…”

After he’d ripped out the old filter, which looked like the pelt of a drowned cat, I escorted him back upstairs to the office.

He stood outside the door, his hands and knees wet, too angry to talk to my boss. “Tell him this is last time I fix!” he screamed. I told him that I would relate his fury as best I could and sent him on his way.

“Were there new filters down there?” my boss asked. “Did you check that pile next to the unit?”

“Those were empty boxes,” I said.

My boss leaned back in his chair. “You don’t drive here?”

I already knew where this was going. I was going to have to drive his car to Home Depot and buy filters and bring them back to that horrible place. I was going to have to be a man and pretend I knew what I was doing, once again. This charade of being a capable human being certainly has its downsides. You have to play the part once you’ve committed.

I went to the store, bought the filters, and brought them back to the theatre. As I took the elevator back down to the basement, I pondered whether or not it would be smart to carry a cyanide pill on me. It seemed like a smart move, this being LA and all. I wondered who sold cyanide pills and if a prescription was necessary. I exited the elevator.

The drumming was louder now, and I paused outside the door for a second, ready at any moment to flee for my life if the door opened and a band of colorful rock demons lept out at me, like a living version of one of those black-light posters you see in stoners’ bedrooms, but it didn’t happen. Whoever was in there was blissfully banging away, unawares of the dimly lit world outside his little padded room.

I located the room with the air conditioner and tore open the four filter boxes. For a half hour I worked on my knees, my body half-in the air conditioner unit. My pants were soaked in ice cold water, my elbows coated in black gunk. I stuffed the goddamn things in as best I could, pausing every few seconds to groan and choke on the mold smell. By the time I was done, I was wopping wet. You couldn’t have shaken the violated look off my face with a paint mixer.

I set the boxes aside and returned to the office. I couldn’t lie to my boss. It was a terrible job, and I wasn’t sure I’d done it correctly.

“They didn’t fit like I thought they would,” I explained. I didn’t sit down, to give the impression that I wouldn’t allow myself the comfort of sitting if my job wasn’t done and done right. “I sort of crammed them in there. Emphasis on ‘crammed’.”

My boss glanced at the clock. It was almost time to leave. “Okay…” He rose from his desk and turned off his computer monitor. “Let’s take a look,” he said. “We need this thing working for the shows tonight.”

He led me down the stairs. I wished I’d been able to fix it. I wished that I was that capable. But I’m the un-handiest person in the world to have around if you want to get something real done. I’m great if you need someone to read your poems, but terrible at everything else. I knew shame all too well, but shame over something so trivial was new to me. It made me wonder what it was I really cared about.

We passed the green room, which joins a hallway with tons of photographs adorning the wall. My boss pointed out the teams he was on back in Chicago. In the bar, he and I joked with the bartender, who was watching a ballgame, about the state of my new pants. And as we exited the theatre, into the orange smog of the afternoon, I stopped and took in the façade, old and ugly and outdated, and for the first time since I moved to Los Angeles I felt pride.

TRIANGLES STABBING CIRCLES IN MAHOGANY SPACE

You want tea.

Alright, mugs. Lots of mugs to choose from, here. A whole mess of mugs. You got your simple black, a million times washed, wake-up and chug a pot of coffee mugs at eye level, and as we tilt towards the ceiling you’ve got your prettier mugs, the friend from out of town variety mugs, glossy like a donut, bright like the southern half of Italy.

You know you don’t want the ones at the top, the ones with words on them, such excess of unused nostalgia, so you take something that looks like it can survive a dishwasher, because you know from experience that there are Things Will Which Not Survive the Dishwasher in this house. You have to drink, but take your life into your hands every time you get a glass of water. Every bowl is a gamble. The cups here can reprimand you.

Put the mug in the machine and turn it on. Snap the tea bag into its place and press start. Technology.

The cereal is on the cereal shelf, the milk is on the milk shelf. The cereal and the milk go together in the bowl you know can be washed because you’ve done it before. You stick a spoon in it and shovel it in while the machine makes you a drink.

GGGGGHHHHHHTTTTTTTTT.

The red light blinks on the television. Blip. Something to watch later. CLICK. Your tea is done. CLACK. Your cereal is gone. CLINK. The bowl goes in the dishwasher and the dishwasher goes on.

This tea is too hot. You decide to sit on the couch and watch it cool.

No, no! You have to think before you sit on this couch, Chris! Sure, those pillows look comfortable, but that’s all part of the ruse. They aren’t for laying on. They’re decorative. You have to move them, stack them in neat little piles on the other end of the couch. Then you can sit down. And don’t even think about setting your drink down on that table unless it’s kissing a coaster, pal.

You need to be careful now with this tv. Something is happening inside that little box. It’s recording. Someone is depending on it, for crying out loud. Just leave it alone. Drink your tea and leave it alone.

This tea is too hot. You familiarize yourself with the living room.

You brought a piece of art home in one piece. It lies against the wall. Black frame, white matte, black border, gold matte, triangles stabbing circles in mahogany space. It’s gorgeous because you don’t get it. It used to hang in your apartment but girls gave it weird looks and asked where it came from and you said it was a gift. Then you shut up because you felt guilty. Everything in the room was a gift. You didn’t want them to know.

You want to go back in your room and fuck but the roof comes down on you. Surprise, surprise. You should have had renter’s insurance!!! you think as you become intimately acquainted with your upstairs neighbor’s things. A helicopter sails overhead. You didn’t even know he had a record player. You’re a little angry that something so antiquated has crushed your face.

Maybe you should just die. You know, give up. I don’t have to tell you everything is going to feel so quaint from here on out. All of your stories are going to be about the earthquake. That reminds me of the earthquake, did I ever tell you about the earthquake? People will roll their eyes. We get it. You survived an earthquake. Not everything has to do with the earthquake. Some subjects are so slight they get blown by our own breaths. You don’t have to grab them all.

The piece of art is a little scuffed on the corners because you were too lazy to put Styrofoam on them. You were too lazy to capitalize Styrofoam, too. The computer did it for you. You wish you had capitalized Styrofoam instead of relying on the computer. You wish you’d put Styrofoam on the corners of the picture, though you have no idea what purpose that would serve. Oh, I’ll tell you what purpose. It makes you look like you can play along, fake it even when this world you’ve come back to is as abstract as those circles and triangles you swore to protect. The girls hated them because it was intentionally confounding and you hate them for similar reasons.

The door opens and the alarm beeps. The house says hello and so will you.

This tea is hot.

DO WE HAVE A PROBLEM?

At the age of seventeen, I nearly became the victim of road rage.  If things had gone only a little differently, I’m sure I would have been the subject of one of those blurbs you read in the local section of the paper, my full name in fat bold letters, followed by words like “altercation” and “bludgeoned” and the cross streets of the tiny funeral parlor near my high school.

It was the middle of the day, on one of those Arizona afternoons so warm that you could hear the ground humming. I was driving to the movie theater with my friend Mark Scheppe, who is a great guy, but not the kind of guy who is going to stop you from doing something ridiculous and irresponsible. He’s the best kind of childhood friend, the kind who revels in watching other people be stupid and does his best to enable it whenever he can.

We’d stopped at the gas station to buy some soda and candy. We were planning on sneak it into the theater. I can’t remember now the movie we were planning to see, but I remember that it was animated, and that no one wanted to see it but us. That’s how things usually went. For a while there, I think we were dating.

On the way out of the gas station parking lot, Mark and I began screaming at each other. It wasn’t angry screaming, but the type of screaming you do when your body is hopped up on sugar and caffeine and you’re stuck in a little moving box and you have no way to get your energy out.

We screamed stuff that only makes sense when written in capitol letters, like, “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR FACE!?” or “WHY ARE YOU SITTING LIKE A LITTLE FAIRY BITCH?!” or “YOU’RE SO FUCKING RETARDED YOU GOT KICKED OUT OF RETARD SCHOOL!”

It was boldly hurtful and abusive shit. It wasn’t that funny, but we would, without fail, double over into laughing fits every fifteen seconds when one of us said something particularly grotesque or non sequiter. Our jaws throbbed from laughter. I suppose that’s what being friends is all about; you do a lot things below your mutual intelligence level, if only for the sake of filling the silence.

Now, this game would be just another pointless artifact from my youth (We don’t do this anymore, right, guys?) if I didn’t, at the time, have the strange habit of driving with my windows down, even if it was 120 degrees out. I hated the stuffiness of a car cabin and I hated having cold air blown in my face even more, so, oftentimes, I’d show up at people’s houses looking like I ran there, with curled hair and dark stains on the back of my shirt.

The windows happened to be down while we engaged in this cathartic competition and, after a minute or two on the freeway, we realized that someone had overheard us. And they’d taken it the wrong way.

The thing about Duel is that you can make reasonable assumptions about a guy driving a tanker trucker. Spielberg has made a fortune by preying on our fear of the unknown, but it’s not too tough to imagine who was chasing poor Dennis Weaver through the California desert. A Honda Civic, on the other hand, could be driven by anyone, and when you have one of those riding your ass while you’re driving seventy on a busy freeway, the mind reels.

“I think this guy is following me,” I said with a degree of amusement. “He’s been riding my ass since the on-ramp.”

Mark turned in his seat and watched the Civic swerve back and forth within the lane. “I think you’re right,” he said.

“What should I do?”

“Slam on the brakes?”

“That’ll kill us.”

“Yeah, but they’ll die first,” he said and buckled his seat belt.

“Should I turn off on Cooper?” I asked, pointing at the passing sign overhead. “Do you think he’ll follow us?”

“Probably.”

I flipped on my turn signal as I merged into the far right lane, as if to say, “Look, buddy, I got nothing to hide.”

The Civic followed us as up the off-ramp. I considered utilizing the middle lane, which allowed for a left turn or right turn, but figured that any bold moves would only make us look guilty. I stuck to the right side of the road and waited in the line to turn. We could see the movieplex from here.

The Civic pulled up next to us. I made sure to turn towards them, as I’m the type of guy who wants to know when he’s going to be shot in the head, so I can say something really witty.

The driver was a pale woman with curly black hair that went down to the print on her t-shirt. She was clutching the steering wheel like it was trying to get away from her. She leaned forward to get a good look at us, her eyes wide and her eyebrows arched, like an angry muppet. The man in the passenger seat was a gaunt man in his forties, tan and shirtless. His face was long and snakelike, with a mole that punctuated the sentence of his brow.

He rolled his window down and leaned out. I was glad to see he wasn’t carrying a gun. He motioned for me to roll my window down. I glanced at Mark. He looked down, deferring judgment to me. I pushed the button and the window slid down into its thin crevasse.

“Hey,” I said, as if I were about to ask for a stick of gum.

“Do we have a problem?” he asked. Though he looked like he’d been in a fight before, he had a generally friendly demeanor about him; it was more condescending than angry, like your friend’s Dad who came home from work to find you in his living room, occupying his television for the fifth afternoon this week.

I turned to Mark. He didn’t seem to have a problem. Neither did I. I answered truthfully. “I don’t think so.”

“Do we need to pull over?” he asked.

I didn’t know what this meant. I assumed it he was challenging me to some sort of street brawl.  I wondered if this was some sort of road code, and that by saying no I was dishonoring myself and my family name. It didn’t matter, really. All I wanted was to eat candy and watch a movie that afternoon. Getting pummeled to death by this friendly stranger wasn’t on my to do list.

“No. I don’t think so,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” he replied, like it was the last line of a comedy routine. Woman is always telling me I spend too much money on stupid things I don’t need. So I said, didn’t you just buy yourself a goddamn outdoor pool? Yeah, that’s what I thought!

He recoiled into the car and said some comforting words to the angry muppet who was driving. She didn’t seem satisfied; she shook her head and threw her hands up in the air. To send the message home, he shot us a final, menacing look. Our faces must have broadcasted pure terror, because it was enough to make her smile.

Our cars turned in opposite directions. Mark and I were silent as we pulled into the parking lot. I kept checking my rear view mirror, ready to see the Civic behind me again. Surprise! That was a test, and you failed!

I parked the car and we both sat still as I rolled the windows up. We were both sweating our asses off, a little from the sun, but mostly from the near-death experience we just had on the freeway.

Mark turned to me, his hand on the door handle and asked, “What would have happened if you’d said yes? What if you’d been like, ‘Sure, I’ll pull over?’ What do you think he would have done?”

“He probably would have beat my ass.”

“I doubt it. I bet he would have been too confused to do anything.”

I laughed and got out of the car. The parking lot was jam packed, and we were parked on the far side, near the jeweler. It might as well have been a continent away in this heat. By the time we made it to the ticket line, we had no sodas to sneak in.

“People are fucking retarded,” Mark declared, surveying the tops of the heads in the lines in front of us. He’s very tall, so he’s allowed to make blanket generalizations like that. He sees things we don’t. I nodded. “I don’t think I could ever get that angry,” he added, taking out his phone to check for texts.

“We’ll see,” I said, not really thinking, and turned around to survey the plaza. There were just a few old people sitting by the fountain. I was surprised to be relieved. What wasI so afraid of? I didn’t really expect the couple to have followed us, did I? The conflict had been resolved, and for some reason I was still shaken up over it. None of it made sense to me. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, and didn’t feel like there was anything I could have done to deserve being harassed in such a bold way, in plain view.

The movie might have been entertaining. I couldn’t focus. All I could do isl hear that voice in my head, asking me that same stupid, asinine question over and over again…

Do we have a problem? Yes, yes. Of course we do.

BOOK OF STUBS

I have a book filled with ticket stubs. It’s a scrapbook, with portrait-sized eggshell colored pages that crack like bubblegum when you peel the pages apart. It’s almost completely full, a process that has taken almost eight years (and one ticket-heavy trip to Europe) to accomplish.

It has every ticket stub I remembered to pocket in the last decade – from the Hendrix Junior High Talent Show in October of 2000 to the last ticket I bought, The Men Who Stare at Goats at the Grove this past Saturday afternoon.

I actually feel disappointed when I go to a show and they keep my ticket. Cheated, even. The tragedy unfolds the same way every time: I hold my hand out with fingers like pincers, the bored usher tilts his or her head and gives me a look that says “Go on in, you idiot!” and all I want to do is say back, “I’m not going anywhere until you give me proof that this happened!” but I don’t and walk in with my head bowed.

I told my friend Caroline, who I went to see the movie with on Saturday, about this little neurosis and she said that it wasn’t as weird as I thought, actually. In fact, a lot of people have this hobby.

“Patches does that too,” she said. “I don’t know if he scrapbooks them, though. That might be too much, even for him.”

She was right. I don’t strike many people as the scrap-booking type.

It all got me thinking about what I expected to come from my hard work – which it is, by the way — you try slaving over a scrapbook with a gluestick, surrounded by a dozen piles of flimsy, easily blown-away-by-the-fan ticket stubs organized by month.

In fact, try doing anything with a gluestick. You’ll remember why you left that fucking thing behind in fifth grade.

I knew that I had to be doing it for a reason other than whatever enjoyment I got from looking back over what crappy movie I saw in July of 2005. I concluded that there were three possible futures for my ticket stub scrapbook, barring a house fire:

The first possible future is that the book ends up beneath a glass case in a museum. You know, as part of one of those boring collections you skip over – like when you see old campaign buttons or rare books of poetry?

Maybe there’ll be an exhibit on the golden age of movie-going, since most of my tickets are from theaters; or maybe they’ll be on display to showcase an era where paper was in such rich supply that we had an excess of it to use in such frivolous ways. I imagine the placard reads “Donated by the family of Christopher Littler”, which is disappointing, because it really should read “On Loan”.

The second possible future, and the one I liked the most, is that the book ends up in the private collection of a stuffy, pretentious Littler scholar. The book would be rebound and laminated, or whatever they do a hundred years in the future to preserve books.

It’ll be the perfect roadmap for tracing my path to creative inspiration; something to be poured over by Littler scholars worldwide who hold an active interest in every trip I took and every film I saw.

“Oh, he watched Osmosis Jones right around the time he wrote The Inner Man!” they’ll shout as their glasses fly off their noses. “Fascinating!”

They’ll do their best to put my life together with the bountiful information they obtained from that archaic social network, the facebook, and release books about their findings called “Bigger” and “The Little Dreamer”, which are the only two clever riffs off my last name I find acceptable.

The third possible future is one in which my children find the book tucked away beneath my People’s Choice Awards in a dusty closet alcove and say, “Huh. I didn’t know Dad collected ticket stubs,” before tossing it in the trash.

Then, my daughter – who will probably be a recovering alcoholic at this point – will say, “Maybe we shouldn’t throw it out. Let’s make a third pile: a Maybe Pile.” And at the end of the day, when the Keep pile is on the verge of toppling over and smothering my grandkids in Pulitzer Prizes and pictures with Obama, the book full of ancient ticket stubs will migrate into the trash pile and end up amusing a nostalgic bum for a couple hours at the dump.

None of these options sound super appealing to me, which leads me to believe that I’m saving these stubs out of some primal need for hoarding. We all have things we need to collect. For me, it’s the worthless remainder of things come to–

Do you smell smoke?

OH GOD MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE!