One day in college, 2005, while stalking one of my crushes on MySpace, I checked out Kory, her little brother’s page, her little brother who had gone from being a conservative, proverbial spokesperson for American Eagle to an all-black-clad, butt-flap-wearing, dumpster-diving anarchist in like three days. His favorite bands were Crass, Dead Prez, and Flux of Pink Indians; he was getting arrested at a protest of some sort in his profile picture; his “About Me” section read, “RED AND BLACK RESISTENCE.” What I remember the most, though, was under the “Television” section, he had written, “Smash it. Read a fucking book.”

Because I’m abysmally narcissistic, I took Kory’s comment personally. I began to look at other friends’ pages, specifically their “Television” section. While a few friends listed shows they watched, the majority was pejorative: “Fuck tv”, “makes you a zombie”, “television sucks”, “aw hell no”, “no”, “It’s in the garage”, and so on. One of my friends had, in lieu of text, a gif of a monkey peeing in his own mouth. Another had, basically, an English 101 paper written about the government, mind control, conspiracy theory, and how we need to “wake up, be brave, and turn it off.” Apparently there was a revolution happening, some sort of intellectual renaissance – but I wasn’t a part of it.

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I have no common sense. It’s been a year since I graduated, and it’s taken me a year, working in a busy kitchen, to learn that I have no common sense. I am beginning to understand what common sense is, however, and I seem to have leased its concept long enough to work in the busy kitchen that reminds me every day that I have no common sense.

Here’s what I’ve figured out so far: common sense means you have to make things happen quickly and efficiently. There always needs to be something cooking. You have to be a machine. You have to produce. If you aren’t producing quickly and efficiently enough, you are scolded, told to work harder, and you work harder, no questions asked.

I have friends, who have killed other human beings in the Middle East, tell me that they would rather get deployed again than work in a kitchen.

You are a piece of shit. Nobody you work with gives a fuck about the Samuel Beckett quote you want to use right now, no matter how applicable it may be, because it’s not producing anything tangible. It’s not slathering 1000 Island dressing on rye bread, nor is it washing the plates stacked up in the heavy bus tub sitting on the floor next to the pot full of soup you burned earlier, you piece of shit.

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Hey – it’s been awhile. My MFA-related job as a line cook has taken over my life, my dreams (literal and figurative), and my time to read and write as much as I want and need to. I did just read (before I received a text, asking if I wanted to come in to work early to help subdue today’s behemoth prep list) a great essay, Darwin and the Art of the Three Star Review over at Vouched. I personally tend to read more music reviews than book reviews – often times more than I actually listen to the music, but anybody with a fetish for reading book reviews, often times more often than the book under review, ought to check this essay out. Perhaps I’m a little biased, as it’s written by my friend Kyle Winkler and published on my other friend Christopher Newgent’s website, but it’s a great look at the phenomenon of judgement over a lifestyle that goes unrewarded more often than not. That’s all. I miss you guys. Time to go make gumbo, mainline corn pasta salad into the Appalachian veins of morbidly-obese yuppies, and slice off an opposable thumb.

…Texts from Bennett is amazing. It’s been viral for a day or two, which, in Internet time, is like a year or five, but if you haven’t seen the site, it’s a series of text conversations between the author of the page and his 17 year-old cousin Bennett, who is essentially a wannabe thug who is so clueless, offensive, and a good example of why conflict and unhappiness exists, that he’s almost endearing and sort of a genius. The dichotomy between the seemingly knuckle-dragging Bennett and his obviously-educated cousin works so well because, in spite of how embarrassed they appear to be, knowing each other, you can tell they respect one another. If you haven’t laughed your ass off yet today, click the link at the top of the post. You’re welcome.

The other afternoon in Skyrim, as my housecarl Lydia and I delivered our mortal, respective steel-sword jabs and firebolts to the reanimated corpse of King Olaf One-Eye in his tomb, a fat fly, in real life, flew into my temple.

It’s late November. Although I do keep my south window open to air out the smoke from the cigarettes I smoke in my nonsmoking apartment unit, there’s otherwise no reason for flys’ presence in my apartment. Perhaps it’s the rotting ramen scum splattered on the dirty dishes in my sink that they’re attracted to. Yesterday, two small flies buzzed around my apartment. I gradually weakened them with bursts of Febreze – weakening the unclean with sterility, like casting healing spells on the undead. They either flew out my window or died somewhere inside, their corpses missing or stepped on, rubbed into my apartment’s thick, brown carpeting. Maybe the fat fly that 9/11ed into side of my head was their mother, and she was furious. Or maybe it was the reanimated corpse of my good friend Eric, who ODed on New Year’s Eve, 2004, and he was telling me something. Telling me that it’s not okay to have logged 35 hours into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after having owned it for a mere week.

I paused the game and stood up and reached for Edward P. Jones’ story collection, Lost in the City, but immediately felt guilty about using books to kill a fly, and left it on my bookshelf.  I chose, instead, a Spokane Values coupon brochure, settling on the practical newspaper-or-expendable-print-material-as-fly-bludgeon cliché. I chased the fly around my apartment, wearing my Oxford sweatpants, and the button-up shirt I’d worn the night before in an effort to “dress up” for a friend’s birthday, which she didn’t show up to, the shirt I slept in. The fly was sluggish and easy to whap, but without a surface, my swipes did very little, except cast the fly farther from my reach. When the fly buzzed over to my bookshelf and settled on In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien, I remembered the interview some fellow Barkers and I conducted last spring, the interview I’m supposed to be shaping, the interview I was so excited about having landed, the interview my Vietnam war historian father was so proud about my having landed. I remembered that I used to be in school, that I used to work hard, or at least was under the impression that I was working hard, when really my two years of grad school were little more than me hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock of life. I took a swipe and the coupon brochure slapped Alice Munro, Henry James, John McPhee, and Tim O’Brien, but it barely touched the fly, who buzzed away, and off into a corner.

What the hell am I doing with my life, I thought. I then pulled out my laptop and started writing.

Just a quickie today – Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, “…one of the most fully-realized, easily enjoyable, and utterly engrossing role-playing games ever made,” has just released. My freezer is stocked with microwavable garbage; I’ve moved my television into a different corner of my living room so the afternoon sun that shines through my south window doesn’t cast a distracting glare on it; I’ve taken several days off work; I’ve turned off my phone so my boss can’t call me into work; I’ve been sleeping slumped forward in an uncomfortable chair to ascertain the homo-erectic posture needed when I’m leaning forward and casting entanglement spells on the dragon I’m about to behead; I’ve accepted the fact that posting this grotesque litany has decreased my chances of getting laid by 800%; I await a surfeit of nerdgasms. Don’t even get me started on the new Zelda game releasing in a few weeks. Yup – my waltz with the Seven Deadly Sins has gotten frisky and taken me to a VIP room with Sloth and Gluttony, and I couldn’t be more excited. St. John Clarke may have once said, “Growing old consists, abundantly, in growing young,” but since I’m hardly old enough to subscribe to such a sentiment, I’ll still find time, between filling kobolds with flaming arrows fired from my +5 bow and pestle-banging alkanet flowers and mort flesh into my mortar, to make it to Voice Over.

In the meantime, here’s a video by Gary Wilson, one of my fellow music snoot Luis’s recent discoveries; expect a blog post about him soon.

I’m attracted to scandalous, manipulative women; in fact, the reason I have an MFA and live in Washington State is because of a scandalous, manipulative woman, though still a dear friend. (Long story, happened in 2008, etc.)

Yesterday, my friend/co-worker Danielle and I were talking about fucking and relationships like we usually do during work breaks. “I like the chaos,” she said, in reference to why she always dates disastrously alcoholic douchebags, who play in bands, thrive on narcissism, and probably have Xeroxed copies of their younger selves Scotch-taped to their bedroom ceilings, so they’ll have something to masturbate to while they’re lying in their own vomit the morning after maxing out their sixth credit card on their steady decline.

I know where she’s coming from. After all, you wouldn’t read a book devoid of conflict, right? You can’t grow a flower without a little rain, yeah? What’s the point of carrying on if you’re perfectly content, am I wrong?

Well, The War on Drugs doesn’t give a shit about ever getting anywhere, much like me and the women I love, and that’s one of many reasons why Slave Ambient is the best album I’ve heard all year. Owing equal parts’ debt to Bob Dylan, Sonic Youth, Neu!, My Bloody Valentine, and Bruce Springsteen, in terms of influence, the album is all about storytelling and escape, about simultaneously chasing and running away from something, only to never find anything, but realize that there was never really anything to run away from in the first place. Says Stuart Berman over at Pitchfork:

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I’ve not written a word that I would consider “writing” in about a month. I’ve been in LA, watching porn stars dry humping goth kids on dance floors at kick-ass concerts; I’ve been mentally stealing recipes from work to wow dinner party guests, for whom I don’t have room to host in my cluttered apartment; I’ve been making playlists on my iPod to play at work, trying to coordinate the perfect day for every worker and every customer, which is very impossible, and therefore satisfying. I’m not asking for help, or anything – I’m from Indiana, where pride is born – but I’d love to hear a few suggestions for how to stop fucking off and dry-humping dusty year-old essays and crank out something new and worthwhile. I’ve been reading Donald Ray Pollock’s new novel, The Devil All the Time, and it’s phenomenal – it impales you in the same way Jude the Obscure does, and I guess that’s kind of productive, but I’m also not from the South or England, nor do I sacrifice animals to save my cancerous wife (those deets are in the dust jacket; I’m not spoiling anything), so yeah. I don’t mean to sound all MFA-exclusive, or anything, because I realize how irritating that can be, but how the hell, fellow recent and semi-recent MFAs, do you teach yourself to sit down, stop decompressing after graduation, realize that summer’s over, stop being scared of failure, and just write? I was kind of a dirtbag before I moved here; I’m too old to relapse. #whitewhine

…it’s pretty much exactly like this.

As tempted as I am to name this, “I’ve listened to this goddamned song like 26 times today, pt. 3,” such posts are usually fast-food posts – quick and efficient ways for me to fill my weekly cup of blogging with lukewarm soft serve that goes nowhere, but does enough. But I think I’m onto something here after repeated listens of Das Racist’s, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” the majority of which, in case you haven’t heard the song before, or haven’t listened to the YouTube link above (which you should), consists of the following repetition of lyrics, swapping a few articles and pronouns, and taking a few twists here and there: “I’m at the Pizza Hut (whut?)/I’m at the Taco Bell (huh?)/I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” over a treble-y, somewhat irritating beat. Essentially, the two members of Das Racist trade off vocal duties, as though they’re trying to figure out where they are, even though it’s obvious. Or is it? It’s a completely stupid song – except that it’s not. Beneath all the seemingly-sophomoric absurdity lies a subtle but intelligent indictment of the shambles that is the contemporary human condition.

Fellow Barker Tim Greenup, also known as the most awesome person on the face of the Earth, and I were texting back and forth the other night. I was telling him about the gulf the song has created between the employees at my job, between those of us who love it, and those who change it the second it hits the speakers. We both decided we stand by the song, talked about why, and most importantly, how the song is so great. Says Tim, “There’s a lot being explored in the negative space of that song. So Dadaist.” Anybody who knows Tim, in real life or through Bark, knows that his tongue is usually in cheek 85% of the time; but there’s always truth to what he says. I don’t know much about Dada, except that smart and artistically-inclined folks like to name drop him, that he’s minimal and subversive (I realize I could Google all the necessary info on Dada, but I’m trying to break that habit), but Tim’s mention of Dada was the catalyst for the thinking that brought me to my thesis statement, if it may so be called. We’ll start with the negative space.

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