These are 77 Word Stories.
I don’t like them all that much and they’re mostly drivel.
They’re all written by someone that is selfish and are selfishly written about
what was,
what is,
what wasn’t,
what isn’t,
what can’t be,
and what never will.
And while the stories may make you smile, cringe, or smirk,
know that they’re actually all written about you.
This one may fall a little short but fuck it –
it’s just the title page.
I spent the summer of 2001 in disguise; getting lost in nicotine clouds, tapping my feet to stand up bass lines, and peeling 30 cents off stickers off of hard packs of Old Golds.
With my oxygen depleting as much as the oil in my beat up Toyota; I spent countless hours hating my job and failing to figure out what kind of man it takes to appreciate peaty scotch;
Writing on napkins and not sleeping;
Falling in love.
We walk in and out of bars
every night.
We walk out of and into bars
every night.
Every night we walk in and out of bars.
Every night we walk out of and into bars.
And every one of those nights-
you fail to realize how amazing those walks
the ones where we walk in and out of bars,
is.
The glow.
The stale smoke that no longer lingers.
The promise of laughs / broken.
Fizzled.
Connecting the dots the past two weeks, I’ve concluded you’re pregnant again. You’ve been smoking a lot. Eating glass. And worse yet, diet soda. Seriously, do you have any fucking idea how bad diet soda is for you? I mean, punish yourself however you want to but diet soda is an extreme I never imagined you would’ve entertained.
“Guess what? Totally not with child. Just upset over gaining weight. Guess I’ll continue slow death from diet soda.”
I can’t really remember buying anything there.
Not anything substantial anyway.
I may have slouched through the line once or twice with some unbleached coffee filters or a jar of veganaise.
And oh, there was that colorful soap phase that I went through.
But I mostly went to look.
To cross paths with people that shopped with systems in place and medicinal reasons requiring a $14 grapefruit.
They probably didn’t enjoy underground parking as much as I did.
Shocking is not being able to prowl the Whole Foods on Sunday mornings.
It’s not the succulent fruits, wide aisles full of tasty organics, or taps that fill growlers that make me miss living on the east side of Milwaukee.
It’s the “where did you come from and where the fuck have you been hiding” eye opener that would slap me with every passing patron.
Missing your shiny floors, bevvy of ambiguous smiles, and my weekly patrols.
I cried all of these tears and now I don’t know what to do with them.
I suppose if you really want me to quantify it, I guess I cried all of these ounces of tears.
17 of them to be exact.
And still, I don’t know what to do with them.
After mixing all the sad ones with the happy ones and the complacent ones
I’ve decided I love them all.
They’re mine.
All of them.
Mine.
Have you ever heard someone complain about having too many friends?
Have you ever heard someone with a full calendar and little oxygen complain about having none?
Topsy was a flip flopper.
It was always one or the other.
Too many friends to fill up his free time or smiling faces he could only classify as people that he drank with.
Topsy was a crazy complainer.
Everything meant everything and it also meant nothing.
Topsy died alone.
Trigger, older than he looked and a proud father, was a Zepplin fan. So much so that he demanded he be called Led but since we usually went out of our way to do the opposite of what people asked-we called him Trigger.
What was he good at? Laughing. Spitting. Chewing tobacco. Finding the exact spot to drop the needle on his favorite song- George Harrison’s “Apple Scruffs.” Oh, he was good at explaining its meaning too.
Austin, 22 and paranoid, would lie awake and wonder. Nervously. Every woman that had mistakenly ended up with him after last call could hear him quietly murmur – “Are You coming for me tonight?”
A thrill seeker before midnight – but closer to twilight … You could sometimes find him sitting against the outside of a local tavern, digging and scratching at his skin; working tirelessly to scratch away the blue ink that constantly reminded him – Carpe Diem.
Conflicted by conscience.
BLONDE ON BLONDE 