At home I undressed and looked at myself in the mirror.  I was flush,  covered in sweat., my shoulder-length hair in stringy knots.   My body quivered in the periodic shock of the rotating tower fan.  I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone would ever call out “Avery” in a fit of dementia, or if life is a closed circuit like that, and we’re either the ones who remind us or the ones to be reminded of.



It’s been a little over a year since I started this blog. About three months ago, I realized that my best ideas had come and gone, like so many depressive, drug-fueled weeks of unemployment, and that the one year mark  – which couldn’t come fast enough – was as good as time as any to hang up my proverbial hat and look over what I’ve done to see if I can pull out anything of lasting quality. I realized this when I got a press release in my gmail box from a friend who was about to publish his first novel. I thought, I can do that. It’s true what they say, “Jealousy fuels many an engine.” Okay. I just made that saying up. Just go with it. Stop being a dick.

When all is said and done, I think it’d be great if I could end up with something that, first of all, I’m proud of, and second of all, would insert some much-needed funds into my bank account, seeing as how I no longer have the money to change the oil in my truck or get a haircut.  When I decided to change course three months ago, I wasn’t assuming that my writing will one day pay the bills. I hope that it does, and I can continue to write with that hope, however misguided, but I can never assume. This is and probably forever will be a hobby. Prose writing, I mean. Screenwriting… well, that’s another story altogether.

Is it a hobby, is it not a hobby? Shit. It doesn’t matter. My real goal is to get me some fans. I’m talking strangers, not just friends who “enjoy my efforts”. I appreciate the support of my loved ones, of course, but it’d be interesting to see if my stuff has the ability to provoke randos across the world. I want to get laid more often. That’s what that boils down  to.

No, no. What I’m really saying is – and you don’t have to read between the lines much on this one – I’m still not sure if I have any real or lasting talent. I know I’m persuasive, and that that’s a handy skill to have as an artist – but it takes a superhuman amount of persuasion to convince someone you’ve never met that your ten pages are more rewarding and interesting than the other guy’s. And that’s what I want to do. It’s charm, isn’t it? You have to charm the world. And I’m not sure I can do it, sans dimples at least. Maybe that’s just something charming people say. Do you come here often?

Don’t get me wrong, I think I have some good stuff here. There’s a lot of stuff that could be used as fodder for a novel, or a book of short stories, or, at the very least, something that I can look back on and say, “Man, I really wanted to be a writer back then. Oh well, back to the fireworks plant. Doo de doo de doo.” It’s just difficult for me to see where it’s all going to go. Some people would say that’s the exciting part. I just wish I was back on my medication. For now I have this drink.

If you ever ask me about this, I’m still going to call this blog my “one year experiment”, because it sounds better than my “fifteen month experiment” and much better than “that time I played a lot of video games”. I don’t know why you needed to know that. Goddamn these cherries are good.

Let’s take a looksie, shall we? I’ve written a lot of shit in a year. Over one hundred and fifty pieces, some as short as a paragraph and some as long as ten pages, serious, humorous, seriously humorous, humorously serious, stuff that my cousin calls “Kaufman-esque” and stuff that I call “clever for the sake of being clever”. There are pieces that have been soundly rejected by McSweeney’s and The Onion and the New Yorker for being too oblique or pointless or just plain poorly written, which is fair, because there are only a handful of posts that were given more than a cursory glance after being drafted, and there are pieces that have had meager success over the internet, not because of the quality of their content, but because the pictures I inserted were hot on Google.

I haven’t started any brushfires, that’s for sure. But I haven’t been writing in a void, either.

Let’s be optimistic, for a minute. Did I grow as a writer because of this? Sure. I taught myself my strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths being that I know I’ll never know the full extent of my weaknesses and will never pretend to, and one of my weaknesses being that that this previously mentioned strength will forever keep me second guessing myself. This is a good weakness to have, though. I think. Someone once told me that if you don’t second guess yourself, you’re not an artist. The thing is, I seventeenth guess myself. I guess that makes me an artist and a retard.

I shouldn’t say retard. Fuck it. This is my resignation. I can say whatever I want. Retard retard retard!

So where do I intend to go from here? Well, I’m already feeling like a complete waste of space at twenty-four, so I’m guess I’m going to take a deep breath, try not to think about the shotgun in the closet, and focus on writing pieces that can be enjoyed by readers over a long weekend, instead of a long lunch. I’m going to take some time away from this thing and come back to it with the kind of sobriety than can only come from distancing oneself from one’s work. Maybe I’ll take up heroin. I don’t know.

That’s the truth. I don’t know.  I really don’t. All I do know is that I can’t continue in the direction I’ve been going. Things have to change. This isn’t the end of this blog. So don’t abandon it. Already I’m planning on posting one short story a month for the next year. Longer pieces. Stronger pieces. If you know me, you know I don’t take this kind of promise lightly.

And you should call me some time. Odds are I miss you but I’m too proud to cave in and call.

Thank you for reading. I really hope you stick around. It’s been fun, right?

Boy, I feel old fashioned.

“Has this ever happened to you before?” he asked.

I had to think about it. “No. Never. I had my wallet stolen once. But I turned around and got it back from the guy right after.”

“Huh,” he said. “Most people usually feel violated when that happens.”

I’d been out of town for four days. If I’m ever gone for longer than that, I have someone poke their head in halfway through to make sure the cat is doing well. You know, sit with him and pet him and sign Edelweiss. Otherwise, I set out three big bowls of dry food and a couple big plastic water troughs, clean the place up so that he can destroy it while I’m gone, turn everything off, and go.

I’ve never had a problem with this before. I’ve been doing it for two years now. One year in New York, one in Los Angeles. I’ve never considered that I was leaving a valuable out to be taken. I figured most robbers went into identity theft after Home Alone 2. That shit was brutal.

I immediately knew something was wrong the minute I opened the door. The cat, left to his own devices for longer than two days, is understandably sensitive to my arrival. He always pokes his little black head through the crack the minute I pry the door open, like a prisoner in solitary feeling for the sunlight on his face. Hose me down, Christopher. I imagine him saying. I want to remember what rain feels like.

This time, nothing. And when I looked straight ahead, through the darkness of my place and into my kitchen, I saw that both the kitchen window and back door were wide open. The cool night air circulated through my apartment. I stood in slack-jawed amazement for a moment.

My head played a little movie for me: close up on door, close up on window, tighter close up on door, tighter close up on window. Dun. Dun. Dun dun dun.

I dropped everything and ran into the kitchen, yelling out my cat’s name. Man I must have sounded pathetic, but you don’t think of these things when you’re in the midst of a domestic tragedy. I looked in every room, slowly coming to terms with the idea that the burglars had stolen absolutely nothing. The only difference in my apartment from then and when I had left four days earlier was that my bed was slightly untucked at the foot and my checkbooks had been taken out and sorted through. My guitar was still there, my computer, my record player.

I catalogued in my head all the valuables I could have been missing and came up with nothing. I’ve never been happier that I didn’t get into collecting antique watches.

I sprinted out into the apartment complex and shouted the cat’s name at the moon. In the back of my head I was thinking, Maybe this is for the better. He was born on the streets. All I’m doing is holding him back, with all this love and free food. And what if I meet my dream woman and she’s allergic to cat dander? Yes. This is for the best.

But the front of my head responded with, You irresponsible fuck! You let some hobo steal your cat and cook him on a spit! If you don’t start wailing like a marine’s widow right now, you’re a fucking robot!

Before my night could devolve into a pitiful weepfest, the cat jumped out of the bushes and attacked my pants. He was displeased, a little cold, but, upon inspected, unharmed. Together we sat on my bed in front of a borrowed space heater and sorted out what had just happened.

I was a wreck, but I didn’t feel violated. And I think that’s part of a problem that I’m only recently coming to terms with. If someone walked into your home right now and broke everything and set your couch on fire, you’d be right to feel violated. But the difference between you and me is that I have very little personal attachment to my apartment, or the stuff in it. Why?

Because I can’t relate to my own life.

It’s as if someone had come in and torn up my hotel room. I couldn’t weep for my endangered belongings. I best I could do is put my hands on my hips and say, Aw, shucks! This is going to take forever to sort out!

Now, I have a lot of shit. When I moved to Los Angeles a year ago, I petitioned my parents for the funds to secure enough crap to comfortably surround myself. It was the only legal coping mechanism I could think of that didn’t involve buying a plane ticket for an ex-girlfriend. It took me ten months to get the place looking like it belong to me, so, logically, I should have some attachment to the paintings that I picked out from Etsy and got framed at Aaron Brothers, or the rug I debated for hours over at Pier 1, or the piano that I found on Craiglist that I’m composing the latest incarnation of my impossible musical on. I don’t. I don’t feel sentimental about much of anything on this side of the country, with the exception of a few scrap books and irreplaceable artifacts that I’ve had since I was a kid. The funny thing is, to took some stranger to crack open my kitchen window for me to see it. I just don’t care.

I’m not trying to be cool here. I know it sounds like I’m dealing with a very serious situation in a blasé manner. I’m not. I’m only saying that my gut reaction was far from gutting, and that my response was tragically intellectual. That’s what gives me pause.

That’s not to say I wasn’t scared. I was. I called Liz a few minutes after rescuing the cat and told her what had happened. “I don’t like this,” she said. It sounded like she meant it. “That’s too scary. I could call Victoria and have you go stay at my place.”

“Why? Because you think they’ll come back?”

“Maybe.”

“Really?”

“Why not?”

“I figured it was one of those ‘lightning strikes twice’ situations.”

There was a long pause. “No.”

I spent the night propped up in bed, facing the window and door that the invaders had used to breach my home. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep, but enough to be sluggish the next day. It was something I hadn’t done since I was twelve, when I stayed up all night at my grandpa’s cabin,  searching for ‘true life ghost stories’ on Yahoo.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of movies where people have been assaulted or raped or kidnapped and forced to do crystal meth, and, if these people survive their encounter, the stories inevitably become about how their lives just aren’t the same anymore. They’re scared. They can’t go outside. They can’t go down dark alleys anymore. And I always thought to myself, Why? You were mugged. You got your mugging out of the way. Statistically, you’re set. Go about your life.

But it doesn’t work that way. When the reality of the moment sinks in, you’ve got that reality hardwired into you for the rest of your life, and all you want to do is keep that feeling of terror from ever touching ground again. I suppose that’s what we’d call in the humanity business “vulnerability”.

The next morning I rattled every window in my apartment to see what it would take for someone to get in. In my bedroom, there’s a window right next to my bed that’s in a permanent unlocked state. There’s not much I can do about it besides install a new lock. The thing is impossible to open anyway, and the other side is covered with iron bars. I looked around my bedroom anyway, surveying the room like I thought a thief would.

What in here do I really care about? Not much. My life. That’s the most valuable valuable I’ve got, and the only thing I feel I have a duty to protect. The only question now is: where do I intend to keep it?

When it comes to spilling family secrets, I’ve got two options. I could shotgun some scattered scandals at you to, you know, whet the appetite, let you pick and choose which interesting nugget to pocket away or just drop one big drama bomb all over your gossip-hungry faces. I say we go with the latter, because that makes good TV.

Okay. Here goes. Deep breath.

I am Santa Claus.

Okay. Obviously I’m not everyone’s Santa Claus. This isn’t a Tim Allen vehicle. Sadly. What I meant is that I’m Santa for my little sister. I play Santa for her. I’m the Santa to her… child.

Don’t tell her. She doesn’t read this, so I feel comfortable saying it here. She’s seven, and we think she’s still into the fat old elf, but there’s no way to be entirely sure. We can’t be like, Do you ever get the impression that Santa isn’t real? Doesn’t work that way. You have to wait until some asshole sixth grader spoils it for everyone and then sit her down and patiently explain that sometimes parents lie to their children because that’s tradition. That the role asshole sixth graders play in our ecosystem.

Still, we’re pretty sure she’s onto us. This year her Christmas wish list is: clay, cardboard, and olives, so it’s entirely possible that she figured it out a while ago and is just fucking with us. Either that or she’s the weirdest kid on the planet.

My reign as Santa began three years ago, when I was drafted by my stepmom while drinking my fifth or sixth beer by the pool. It was during one of our annual extended-family Christmas parties, which we’ve stopped having these parties since, opting instead to spend the night with people whose insanity we know and enjoy, as opposed to strangers who are far too ridiculous to even get a bead on, and who we only put up with because they just so happened to share a genetic link with us. We scaled down, trimmed the fat. Now we save a lot of money on rolls.

Anyway, my first year as Santa, I was understandably tanked. When my stepmom handed me my little sister’s note and asked me if I could take care of it, I muttered that I wasn’t sure I was up to the job. She said it’d be easy: all I needed to do is eat the cookies and carrots, then respond to the note in the style of a thousand-year-old saint who delivers goodness and happy times around the globe on an annual basis. Easy. Use Meisner.

By the time the party was over and it was time for me to do my job, I was even drunker than before, so I handed off letter writing duties to my ex-girlfriend, who happened to be enjoying the party and was giving me the gift of not making me feel like a selfish asshole for a night. She wrote a really nice letter back, very expansive, but perhaps a little too feminine for my tastes.

Santa is a guy, I said. He’s not going to talk about feelings and stuff. He divides the world into Naughty and Nice. That’s the way his brain functions. Cut to the chase. You were good, here’s your reward, time to hit New Mexico.

The next morning, I re-read the letter she wrote and discussed some of the finer points with my little sister. Wasn’t Santa really into your personal life? Weird. It was interesting to see what she got out of it. Despite some creepy language, she went along with everything we came up with, even while we were fine tuning the Santa myth to amuse ourselves.

In the years since, I’ve made sure not to be too fucked up for my Santa duties on Christmas Eve. It shouldn’t be that hard a promise to keep to myself, but I’ve noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to go to sleep sober. The night before Christmas, my head used to be filled with anticipatory dreams of material things, now it’s just filled with bad songs from the early nineties.

One year, I can’t remember which, I bagged Santa’s cookies and brought them to my friend’s house, where, in a dazzling example of reality subverting expectations, we all got stoned and ate them while watching late night Christmas specials. This year, we snarfed them down while getting drunk in a hot tub.

Could my little sister even begin to imagine when she wrote her letter to Santa that the response would be penned on the back of a college biology textbook in a smoke-filled drug den? Could she foresee the cookies she baked being destroyed by four full-grown men in swim trunks, or that her brother is responsible for the dreamlike spree of non-sequiturs in his letters?

I doubt it. But one day, the truth will come out, and all the Christmas mornings of me asking a few too many questions about what Santa wrote will make as much sense as it doesn’t. I’ll have to hang up my hat, give up my part as the willing accomplice in the greatest ruse ever pulled on a seven-year-old adopted Chinese girl living in Phoenix, and go back to tricking full-grown women into thinking I’m someone I’m not.

Labor Day
Bindo LuFonte, the 7-Story tall bowling champion from Venus
If you belong to a labor union, expect a visit from Bindo LuFonte at noon exactly, but only if you lock yourself in a windowless room (a closet will do) and don’t make a sound for twenty minutes. When you go outside, the impression left from Bindo’s foot will be big enough to fill with warm water and relax in.

Vernal Equinox
A Water-Damaged Set of Encyclopedias
Celebrate an untilted planet by crowding into the garage with your loved ones while  the Water-Damaged Set of Encyclopedias fills your oven with sugar cookies and balloons!

Valentine’s Day
J-10031, a wrongfully accused prisoner who was shanked in the bathroom
Those unloved souls who receive no valentine cards will be haunted by the spirit of J-10031 as they fall asleep at night. He will no doubt keep you up until the wee hours of the morning complaining about the unjustices of the word and turning all your rugs upside down. Better find some love, kids!

All Saints Day
James van der Beek
Speak Latin at work or school all day and when you come home, a James van der Beek movie will be on your Tivo.

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?

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.