Part 6

Sunday, recovering and denying our tomorrow selves of well rested dignity. Mimosas pour through the cigarette clouds that stretch through the brown filter of noon. There is no morning before this, pajama PBRs resting on the leaning tables of last night’s unstable songs replayed in strange contexts. The royal residence of golden couches and their weary threads, presiding over the forgotten dominions of the church commuters all sincere and full of passionate irresponsibility. Sunday. The bones of trees make morbid crosses and pagan gods of a leafless hour, scratching the windows of our dreams while cars spill seminal psalms into the blushing virginity of dawn. How could anything be so pink and distorted as your innocent denial of widely accepted bullshit? The collapsing apocalypse of beer cans scatters language into the thousand tongued mouth of humanity and pianos. I understood but couldn’t explain. I articulated what I couldn’t accept. I played the music I could never make. I have read the books I would never write. I have sealed the fate of prose with unwavering punctuation, abandoned page after page of potential and begged hormonally for forgiveness. I have rendered myself incapable of operating the heavy machinery of God. I have set about the business of jamming gears and salting the rim of my evenings. Those with sober convictions can carry their exalted texts and test pilot confidence. It was never my job to drive this damn thing, just to chronicle the moments leading up to the crash. Maybe someday, pulled from the wreckage, archaeologists unemployed and bored will set in permanence the narration of uncertainty to which I have bowed my fingers slightly in the blue light of false technology, and revise their histories accordingly. It’s Sunday, and Christ can’t pry my hands from free will and fate, or the crushing can of my own divination.

Part 5

It’s a city of old webs inhabited by the ghost of a spider. Why are we here, all arachnophobic and indifferently stuck?

Part 4

On a clear night in Richmond, as cliché and unusual as that may be, the buildings are propped like illuminated bookmarks between the transient pages of smokestacks and time in their holiday garb, in rigid conversation with themselves like suburbanites at an inadvertent bad sweater party, drinking from the rubber chalice of the Dominion Power Company, recklessly buzzed and generally unaffected. The southern scale megaliths are arranged flatly like cards against the unwashed grid of windows in the apartment, neither played nor interpreted by it’s cement box inhabitants, wearing their own indifference and stitched seasonal inflexibly. Decaying trees still dot the oversized windows of overstuffed condominiums staked in the riverside, blinking like battery powered broaches on the saggy tits of winter, stubbornly electrified and shedding needles into the receding carpet of January. Richmond always tells you that you’re wrong. It’s 60 degrees and raining on the discarded Christmas tree skirts, but the holidays aren’t over yet and your sweater is still on. How can you be expected to stay sober, waiting for a city to wake up on a hopeless Saturday night while the river swells slowly and goes somewhere more interesting or at least somewhere else? We had plans together, you whisper as your tires massage the atrophied thighs of the city and smoke climbs the suicide windows of dead offices and restaurants empty their bowels into the alleyways. You bet the polished coin of your weekend on the windowsill spread, chanting big money and beer. And Richmond tells you that you’re wrong.

Everyone here is Tom Waits without a record deal. Everyone here is escaping the in-laws of standard, the households of guilt, the anniversaries of nothing. Mailbox Moms insistent on computer illiteracy and tucked-in tops shake the inky finger of judgment from their frescoed morality and makeup mirrors while we asleep in our windows watch the sky shatter, pregnant with prophecy, empty of promise. The cars make serpents in the streets. The mailman delivers messiah. His hands are red with brake lights, his eyes are inevitable, his bags are full.

We do not write back.

We do not believe in the gods of our parents, the sacrament of postage and paystubs. Their savior is antiquated. Our scripture is electric. Hunched over the flattened scrolls of the lost book Synthesis, you tell the world you are different, you are serious, you are filled with the articulation of destiny, the intuition of progress, intimations of prophecy, tendencies of greatness. You tell yourself you will be heard. You tell yourself you will be right. And Richmond tells you that you’re wrong.

Part 3

Part 3

I ride an old rusty Vespa. It’s belonged to a long line of Richmond scooterists, and I’m told at one point someone was bitten by another human over possession of it. It’s late December and this morning the obscenely large lock I bought to ward off the adolescent neighborhood scooter thieves was frozen shut, a clear indication that it’s too fucking cold to be riding. In sinister chorus with this situation, the car grunts at being roused before noon and refuses to start. The lock will yield to persistence, but the car battery is out like an amateur drinker on New Year’s Eve.

If you know me you might be asking yourself why I am up before noon, which is the same question invariably lurking in the stagnant battery acid and echoing vaguely through the lifeless wires under the hood of my car as it replies to the alarm of the starter with a persistent snooze button.

I got a job.

A real one.

It’s not important what it is. It’s stressful, it’s early, and it’s not enough hours. Other than to say that I have to deal with a lot of angry animals, I’m not going into detail. Like corporate News, I am prioritizing information, sorting and filtering, choosing what knowledge you should gain access too, and what I don’t want or care for you to know. So there’s your soundbyte: Artist gets day job. Coworkers astonished at mode of transportation. Artist cold and indifferent to office opinion.

As for Captain Morgan, for all its nascent opportunities, like money, instant yet fleeting popularity and the company of cock-tease escorts, I’m not the type of asshole I need to be in order to live with myself doing that shit. You can only pretend to be cool with frat boys who want to know Where’d you get them ho’s? so many times before the reality of institutional misogyny starts to weigh on your conscience for supporting it. Not that I didn’t enjoy looking at them, but contrary to popular opinion, I believe you can ogle someone respectfully…particularly if they’re scantily clad enough to make a deposit in the proverbial spank bank. There’s another soundbyte for you.

And besides, who wants to be sober in a bar?

So I quit, but not for my girlfriend, or any demonization of my former employer, who was actually kinda cool in a way completely incompatible with anyone I voluntarily associate with. If I could have had a few drinks before my willing and public self-degradation, I might have kept with it. I’m sure they’ll find someone else to fill the oversized leather boots and don a faux moustache.

“But dude, you’re Captain Morgan, you’re The Man!”

No, you’re The Man, I’m The Captain.

And: Damn The Man.

Part 2 of a book in progress.

PART 2

We of the Myspace generation exist in an automated society of quantified friends and virtual personalities. Nothing is tangible. Your car, clothes, music, your party, your girlfriend, can all be measured in pixels. They are the images by which we create ourselves. We don’t write books, we don’t collect music. We write blogs, we download songs. We are the hours we devote to picking a song that best reflects our synthesized selves. We are the vastness of our extended network, we are the cultural composition of the pictures we have stolen from our mirrors because we are all we need to send friend requests. Fuck rejection. We don’t even remember asking you.

We are the cleverness of our .com/…

We are

Status: In a relationship

Hometown: Fuck you

Zodiac sign: Aquarius

Smoke/drink: Yes/Yes

We are hurt by your Top 5.

A good day is an event invitation.

Has invited you to…

…Pajamas and Pancakes!

…Graduation!

…Fajitas and Margaritas!

….Haiku Death Match!

…Peace Festival ’07!

…Witness the union of Amanda and Bihzan!

Graphic design is everything. Nothing is tangible.

(Repost.)

About Me: Myspace has a dog and a cat and a girlfriend, and poetry and paintings that I post in bulletins that go to each of my 352 friends. Graffiti is obsolete.

Sometimes I stay up and scroll through the blue twilights of my friends list. Attitudes by Mygen, profiles generated by…What color is your URL? Hundreds of little boxes rise through your laptop like how windows might look if you jumped off a building. You hit the ground of your social life and look for more stories to add. Nothing is tangible. (View more.)

You are invited to parties, art openings in California, baby showers in Maryland, you are invited to shows in London, poetry readings at the café around the corner, circuses at a gallery downtown, dinner at a friend’s house, protests in Mexico. It doesn’t matter if you go. You smile at icons and watch videos from YouTube about the president’s malapropisms. We are all “Online Now”.

I check my(girlfriend’s)space and watch her digital flirt. Tube Top has 426 friends. Tube Top is asleep in our bed. Tube Top has 49 comments. Who are these pop collar profile picture pickup lines? My indigo solitude photosynthesizes. Becca turns over under the covers.

Status: In a relationship

Smoke/Drink: Yes/Yes

Nothing is tangible.

I’m nobody’s hero.

Ignore the Vonage banner and Pepsi pop ups, ignore the guaranteed* ring tones, the featured movies, ignore the singles ad and it’s underwear, ignore Victoria’s Secret and the new ways to save and the AT&T webcasts. Write a blog about something real. Current Mood: None, or Other.

Part 1: A book in progress.

I’m nobody’s hero.

The heroic thing to have done would have been peering conspicuously through that plastiscene shimmer and grabbing every stem of polished insecurity beneath all that foundation and blondness, pulling them out with a calm savagery. Look you fake fucking bimbo, if you’re too good for Becca, I’m too good for you. You’re a sorry painted clown excuse for equal opportunity PR, so how’s about you taking your P.O.S and shoving it up the familiar territory of your mascara wand, and me quitting, right now?

There are no self respecting exclamation marks in promotions meetings, only that mechanical, scripted sort of speech that you might expect to drift through the cracks of a sorority meeting with the dean. Think of Times New Roman as an accent, rather than a font. I would say all of this without emotion, dead pan like one of Tarantino’s gunmen. Maybe stop in the doorway and raise a knee like Captain Morgan.

But

I’m nobody’s hero.

I am, like you, a capitalist. I didn’t want to be a capitalist. I didn’t apply for a position of privilege, but one day in D.C., our proud nation’s capitol, I was given one. And a pastel blanket. And my very own number. In so many rows and rows of neonates, the lines at Wal Mart seem logical.

I didn’t apply for this. But I did apply for a promotions gig with “Liquor Concepts” (we’ll call it), the marketing firm for the Liquor Company responsible for nearly every middle shelf booze label. I found their ad on Craigslist: “Hey guys, Got a little Captain in you?” Compensation: $35 an hour.

I could be a marketing genius, but I’m not dead yet. Instead, I drop out of school and dress up like Captain Morgan on the weekends, make an ass out of myself, hand out free shit, go home and wait for New York to cut me a check. Drink responsibly, folks.

The interview was at Starbucks. I won’t call myself a connessieur, or even spell it correctly, but I am somewhat of a coffee aficionado. I have worked at half a dozen local independent coffee shops and not set foot in a Starbucks since I was a punk rocker because it seemed cool and…I was dejected and…in high school.

I knew it was her when she walked in. God doesn’t make hair that blonde. Her nails made clicking noises against the light. The baristas stood in a line waiting to incubate an order I would not be giving them.

I see a friend who picks up promo gigs for a living. Same interview.

“Hey man.”

“Oh shit, hey, how’s it goin’?”

“Good. Good. Captain Morgans?”

“You too, huh?”

“Yeah…you think that’s her?”

“That’s what I was thinkin’.”

He ends every sentence like it’s the punchline to a joke only the audience is supposed to laugh at. We walk past the counter like a coin that a vending machine rejects. No metaphor is perfect.

“Rachelle?”

So that’s it. I go home from the interview, which is not an interview for me so much as it is a formalized posing of the question Will you do this? And of course I can fit it in between my busy schedule of hating capitalism and buying things, and I know you don’t care because, well, you are a capitalist.

Becca is on the floor when I walk in, organizing torn envelopes into financial equations.

“Hey baby, how’d it go?”

I tell her and she smiles and I explain about the Morganettes and their corsets and how they’ll be going to the bars with me and she asks if they’re hiring and they are.

Solve for X.

I’m nobody’s hero.

My first night on the Captain job starts at Rock Falls Tavern, it’s a Southside bar that isn’t quite a dive but definitely walking the plank. No pirate jokes, they remind me.

They had me watch a video about the do’s and don’ts of being a rum icon.

1. Don’t be over the top.

(No speed)

2. Don’t be too mellow.

(No weed)

3. Be flirtatious

Not horny.

4. Make asinine facial expressions.

5. Don’t pretend to be drunk.

Similarly,

6. No drinking for 4 hours prior to your scheduled promotion.

This in mind, I walk in behind my corseted harem, who are blowing whistles and waving as though I am the fabulous consolation prize for being one of five drunks at Rock Falls (which I will later find from a gay foodservice philosopher is un-affectionately called cockballs in many circles.)

I throw down my treasure chest and yell “The Captain is here!”

I’m nobody’s hero.