A Visit to scenic, historic, downtown Bureaucratic Hell

So...You call 'em "processing fees"; I call 'em "bribes". Wait. Back up.

After Steve Miller was done rocking (us) baby, on Sunday night, we had a couple hours worth of running around in the rain. After this, I was doin' my usual and flying back down Marine Drive.
One headlight, yeah I know. Windshield fogged up due to faulty defrost system? Certainly! Speeding? Well, probably, but not as rash as it may appear.
In any case, this caught the attention of a Port of Portland police officer, who gave chase.

When I saw the lights in my rearview, I thought I was just going to be getting out of his way. When it became clear that his lights were for me, I got ready to sit there a while.
But then I thought: oh shit. Tygh Ridge, a year ago!

Yeah crap; now here was where I thought I might very well be goin' to jail. Just south of The Dalles, on our way up to Sherar's Bridge and ultimately to Shaniko and Antelope, we were stopped on the crest just above Tygh Valley by some Wasco County deputy. I was roaring to the top of that hill in the neighborhood of 90, since I was in the middle of nowhere and all. Also, I saw him immediately and pulled over. He did a thankful u-turn in the middle of the highway.

So the problem ultimately came down to us not really having up-to-date proof of insurance. We had the actual insurance, but the piece of paper validating this claim was not readily available. The officer gave me a ticket, with a court date.

When I called the county courthouse to try to change the date, the hescher piece of shit old lady who answered the phone immediately took umbrage to the idea that I'd actually go to trial in her town: "That's what we put the phone number on the back of the ticket for!" she yelled.
She explained (bitchily, pointlessly vindictive, in a manner that was hostile far beyond any possible explanation) that really what needed to happen was that I needed to fill out a form that the nice old redneck lady was about to send me, putting her out to a great extent as she made quite clear, that 'proved' that we had, in fact had valid insurance as of that day, and now all we needed to do was pay the fine that Wasco County had decided we needed to pay.

I did it. After this, nothing. No word on how much was to be paid, or why, for that matter.
I went through the months that followed with a vague suspicion at the back of my mind that something terrible would no doubt come of this, as we had the twin forces of bureaucracy and small-towny bullshit at work. I was right.

So I explained to the Port cop that I was on my way home, explained that 'home' was St. Johns, and that I'd been working at Edgefield that night. And he took my license and registration, went back to his car, staying there so very damn long that it was clear something bad was about to happen.
This was further confirmed by the arrival of a second cop. In my right-hand side-view, I could see the furtive approach of a uniformed lady who had a flashlight that may or may not have also concealed a gun. I tried not to stare openly at her.

After an eternity, the first cop returned and asked me to step out of the car. For my part, I was waiting to be arrested, and was already turning my back to the guy. No, he said, not that, but did I have any weapons? As always, my pockets were stuffed with tools that could potentially be used as weapons, but no...We talked.
"You seem like a stand-up guy," he said, "but..." 'But' was that apparently I'd been driving around with a suspended license since April. And the law said he had to impound my vehicle, take away my license.

He also said that if I pled guilty and showed up to the court date with proof of having my license reinstated, he'd recommend that all charges be dropped. The two cops and I stood there waiting for the tow truck, making nervous conversation about the upcoming shows at Edgefield. The man of the two is quite fond of the Gipsy Kings.

They did not offer me a ride home. Bee sleeps like a series E government bond, but I tried...It was now 1:30 A.M., and...She was asleep. I tried Fergie, who I knew would be up, relatively sober and in possession of a vehicle. He came and got me, and I thank him.

All right, so this meant:

A trip to the Port of Portland Police Bureau, which is a hole in the wall on the third floor of the airport. This was to find out where my car was. $20.00.

A trip to an impound lot that, thankfully, wasn't all that far from the airport. Shitty, needlessly hostile hescher woman behind the counter refuses to conduct business with anyone but Bee, who will be driving my car back.
"Fuckin' heschers. Everything's gotta be a problem," I tell Fergie as we stand outside. This costs me $148.00.

To the DMV, where it is pointed out that I still owe Wasco County $219.oo. After this gets paid, we need to give the DMV $75.00...For some reason. At this point, they indicate that I need a copy of my birth certificate to prove that I'm really me.

This necessitates a trip to the Bureau of Vital Records, armed with an actual stack of valid proof that I am who I am. What they really want is $20.00.

Back to the DMV, who would like $25.50. My picture is taken, which is transferred to a piece of paper that most businesses I know would not accept. I apparently will be getting the actual license in two to three weeks, unlike other people renewing their licenses, who received them on the spot.

That would be an accumulated $507.50, as it currently stands. If I end up also having to pay a fine for the burned out license plate light, that will tack on an additional $145.oo.

I'm well aware that I should have kept on calling The Dalles and asking what the hell they actually wanted, and who should I shovel my money at...But I guess I kind of hoped for that rare thing that does occasionally happen; bureaucracy's inherent ineptitude causes them to forget you.

It did the opposite, and in spades. The letter -if any- informing me of legal action being taken for non-payment of the ticket would have been sent to my last address, which we vacated in February. The letter that supposedly informed me that my license had been suspended was apparently sent to my old apartment over The Troika, where I haven't lived for three years.

But that's my fault too, as I have failed to consistently update the DMV as to my address change status over the last three years. Everybody else seems to be able to find me; my bank, whatever creditors I have, my many employers. So I need to assume in advance that a state bureau will not be able to do what pretty much every other entity in society can?

Like I say, I understand that people like money, and it's noteworthy how many of these governmental bodies (The Port P.D., DMV, Vital Records) would only take cash, which anyone will tell you is easily embezzled.
I understand that ya' gotta pay to play, and we all hold our noses and do this. But the DMV in particular asked money for something that looked like a redundancy. Twice.

I don't have some whiny anti-gummint screed here for you; I even don't mind paying taxes. However, this one is beyond stupid, and I seem to have no real redress, and I just wanted to say so.

Had I not been a relatively polite person by nature, no doubt it would have been worse.

Blowback

A brief note: as I've said before, this guy has been the subject of much mirth around the house for quite some time, and as is usually true of the cripplingly depressed/insanely unrealistic, he is deeply self-absorbed. I shouldn't have been amazed that he found his way back here after Googling himself, but even more strange was what transpired thereafter. The basic text of this post was composed early last year, but only printed now, since I really don't want to talk to him. Now, here is a video of him, ostensibly awaiting a visit from some lady I assume he met on the internet, and I don't currently know if she ever showed up.



I was recently shocked and vaguely concerned to see that someone I'd been writing about had found their way back here. Perhaps you recall This Guy. Well, he was Googling himself the other day, and found that I'd written a post that was, partially, about him.
In my world, it's at least a misdemeanor to be mean to a stranger. But in this case, I was just doing my usual and making fun of shit I've found on the internet. Still though, the thing that should have made this harmless is that the intended focus of said poking of fun is never, ever to find out about it.

So, looking back through the comments, I find:
"Thanks for your in depth comments about my blog. I appreciate your honesty. I'm glad you could laugh at my audio entries. I do suffer from depression. But, I'm getting better now. (If you care to know.) How'd ya find my blog? And how many postings did you view? Are you subscribe to my RSS?"

This was from Ronnie. And then, more recently:
"How's it going up in Oregon? I skimmed over your plug. Good Stuff. Any chance you could give me more in site...to myself? You seem so confident in your judgments. How do I get that way?"

It raises questions. For one thing, he avoided the trope that most people would have thrown out here; Well, that's just your opinion. Who the fuck are you?, which has the virtue of being true, though so completely self-evident as to not need mention, and therefore, sort of a lame argument.
But he didn't do that. He also didn't do the other thing, which pretty much goes; I agree with this and this, but you got this here wrong, and...What he did was go in another direction altogether: he felt that, amongst other things, his privacy had been invaded.

Or, as a recent post of his puts it:
"The internet is a savage place.
Complete strangers will judge me...
Not that I care.
But I do feel vulnerable."
The post is titled, "I've got to be more careful". What strikes me here is that this is the internet: public domain, that is, and if you choose to publish your diary in this medium, someone is bound to say something back, eventually.

Matter of fact, this continues to fascinate me; this idea that just because you say it's yours, you think this thing that you've consciously chosen to share with the entire world is somehow sacrosanct.
This is true of pretty much all means of telecommunication (and pretty soon, entertainment, as the strangely mandatory switch-over to all digital television begins): everything you do is not really your possession, legally speaking, and can be tracked by basically anyone.

Even more disturbingly than this, though is the idea that yet again, as has often happened throughout my life, a deeply annoying and needy son of a bitch has identified me as the sort of person who would be glad to walk them through the painful process of identifying why people shun them, and then somehow managing to go through some sort of Skill Improvement Montage from an '80's movie with them, resulting in them finally scoring with Kelly LeBrock, or something.

So then Ronnie wrote this post-actually, he recorded it to Gabcast, and I typed it out verbatim.

Hey, I’m … I’m kinda trippin’ out on myself, because … I did a google search on myself and I found that these people—or this one person—was commenting on my website, on my blog, and I don’t know. It’s just weird. I just felt so vulnerable, I didn’t think anybody was listening. And um he wrote this whole thing about his perception of who I am. And at first I was kind of offended, but I don’t know this person, who lives up in Oregon. I don’t know who he is, or what he does, or how he found my blog and why he would spend the time reading it. So, it’s just weird.

I don’t know if what I’m doing is good, bad, or indifferent or entertaining or laughable or pathetic, but I’m just trying to be as honest as I can. And when I speak on these audio blogs, they’re for me. You know? It’s an outlet for me, because, you know, that’s what I choose to do. So I don’t know if I need to be more careful and edit the things that I say, and, you know, be aware that people are listening, that we do live in an interconnected world. But it’s like what does it matter? Because these people respond, you know, they write a little posting or a comment, and then that’s it. They don’t reach out to try to meet me, and I don’t reach out to try to meet them. We’re just kinda like passing by, you know? We’re still strangers to one another. How can one person know another person by reading their blog? It’s just a (stutters) fraction of who I am, and it’s a fraction of who that person is. So … I don’t know. I feel weird.

Like I said, I don’t know if it’s a good thing, if I should be flattered? Or I don’t know if it’s a bad thing, that people are listening to this, that people care, and people judge it, you know. But it’s good. It makes me realize that, you know, you can’t lie on the internet, because …. I don’t know, maybe you can. But it seems like, the more forthcoming you are, people tend to believe what’s on the internet, whether it’s true or not, you know?

All this could be a character, Ronnie Reyes could be a character, you know, and not even a real person. It could be a character study. I don’t know. But like I said, how could anyone know or judge who Ronnie Reyes is when Ronnie Reyes doesn’t know who Ronnie Reyes is? If that makes any kind of sense. And I don’t know if this is juvenile, I don’t know if this is amateurish, I … it doesn’t matter. Does any of it matter? All that matters is that right now I guess I’m feeling a little bit better, a little bit vulnerable, a little bit relieved, a little bit um intruded upon. But again, like I said, also kinda flattered. So I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I’m just talking in circles here.

And if anything, it is my hope to entertain somebody. And if only myself, then only myself. And if some stranger who’s cruising the internet happens to stumble upon this and read it, well cool. Make an effort, leave a comment, and, my goodness, introduce yourself, you know? Let’s get beyond just these blogs and postings. And be people again, and try to relate to one another. I know I need that. Maybe you do too, if you’re sitting there, at your computer, plugging away, typing, feeling kinda lonely and wondering if anybody’s trying to … or if anybody is paying attention.

Sure they are. Somebody’s paying attention. And it’s my effort to try to make an interaction with somebody. It would be neat if I could, you know, meet somebody. It’d be neat. It’d be cool. Whether it’s a friend, or a date, or somebody else. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I’m babbling. I tend to do that a lot.

Yeah, you do, and that's part of the problem. Also, it's clear that this is not some sort of performance art (although if it were, it'd be brilliant), so if in fact you manage to find this once again by searching for listings about yourself, my only advice would have to be: either be fine with people reacting to what you say (in its massive, Byzantine structure) in their own personal way, or don't publish your fucking diary on the internet.

In the meanwhile, one may check out: ronniereyes.blogspot.com.

Triple Beam Protection

You know, I was going on and on yesterday about how I don't really need a triple-beam scale, and how we don't really have any room for the damn thing, but now I'm viewing it as art.
It is far more aesthetically pleasing than a digital scale, and brings back interesting memories of junior high science classes.

Gringa Alta Prima doesn't need it, and for the time being thinks that I'm just holding onto it for her, but now I've decided: it stays, and let's start weighing things.

Now, th' Gringa took down her blog, Camilla-Jane, over the summer. But it's back, and what has happened to it is analogous to what happened to George's.
It has the problem where the space has been taken over by competing spambots. Whereas George's blog was suddenly replaced by a blog template, th' Gringa's was commandeered by some program that clearly hasn't had any human oversight for a long while.

You can tell this due to the unfortunate pairing of unrelated acronyms in the first post:
" Another option is a small business owner, with a
Professional employer organizations (polyoxyethylene). The poly ethylene oxide, also known as
Employee leasing companies, handle human resources functions ..."

And it just keeps going on like that. Then the inevitable happens:

"8 Reasons Why Your Man Isn�t More Romantic On Valentine�s Day"

It wouldn't be spam if something like this wasn't made available. How do I please my man, exactly? Polyoxyethylene?
First, some theories as to why your man isn?t...That way on February 14th:
"They can be expected, gifts of chocolate, romantic cards, and secretly retained in the fashionable restaurants.instead many men have psychological modules, enabling them from the more romantic."

Those modules sound kind of Scientological, if you ask me. There is also the problem, as there often is with material of this sort, with translation from some Asian language, which may or may not be the case with this:
"1. A person may not know how important it is romantic, the woman he is."

Although maybe that is so with this:
"2. Some men simply do not know how to do. A man may have never seen his father model romantic behavior, his growth process. Therefore, he has never developed a curry favor with skills"
Mmm. Sounds delicious. And it's right; some men simply do not know how to do. Having seen my father's growth process on a couple of occasions in various locker rooms, I feel that I...

"5. The man may be struggling with addiction. Forced to like alcohol or drug abuse, sexual addiction or provide an escape gambling,"
It is difficult, being a man. One is often forced to like things that, by the very nature of their wording, just can't be good. Also, helping gambling to escape its wrongful incarceration, while providing a sense of the heroic that we men need, strikes me as possibly being impossible.

"7. Some partners have repeatedly delayed. Husband to the well-off can buy flowers or restaurant reservations until it is too late"
I personally can make restaurant reservations for days. Until they find my corpse, phone in hand, still on hold.

There's a thing about why prepaid debit cards are good for you, in which the first sentence and the headline are eerily alike, then my favorite header of all:
"Don't Hire Someone to Steal Your Joy: Decorate Your Home Yourself!"

After this, two of my favorite posts from the original blog, "Harrison" and "Bender", though they have been rendered into giant blocks of text, with no breaks for paragraphs. So now I've seen how this can happen to an active blog, and how it can resurrect a dead one. Makes me wonder how mine reads in Malaysia.

And of course, all I have to do is hit 'next blog' a couple times, and out of the next five, four are similar babble:
"ve no, don't on the whole calculate not filial?""66 agreeable beauty picture areanot filial!"Ren Zong Da ."So, the mother who is person's son and doesn't know him for the monarch but again is everywhere drift calculate of without definite residence not66 agreeable beauty picture areaon the whole not filial?"

Again, part someone's blog, part weird sales appeal. And those are the ones that aren't entirely
awkward sales appeals.

** ** **

Not sure what else to say here. Last January when Bee and I named the New Year, we perhaps started a surreal tradition. I hadn't really thought about it until she asked me what I thought this one's name should be.
'Dane Bramledge' (say it), I decided. If there could be said to be a set criteria for this nomenclatural game, I suppose that it has something to do with being both a prefix for the phrase 'teen prostitute' as well as sort of sounding like an actual name, albeit in this Bizarro World kinda mirror image.

And I want it to be heroically dumb-sounding. I want old-school, leaky prostate, Hollywood He-Man of Decades Past kind of names like Steve Railsback, Gig Young, Richard Baseheart, Tab Hunter, Lee Majors...These could all be names that fit the above criteria, if you ask me.
So yes: happy Dane Bramledge to you and yours. More content-rich describings in the near-to-middlin' future.

Excuse Me, But What the Fuck is This?

Um, okay. Go over to www.skookumchuck.org, which is supposed to be my friend George's blog.

It has instead become something called "The World of Kevin", which probably was your average blog by some guy about his life...Before whatever the fuck happened here, because now it seems to be trying to sell you something in that inept way that blogs do (i.e. semi-coherent repetition/babbling), and has been transposed into this weird quasi-Esperanto that is seemingly equal parts Italian, Latin, Vietnamese and some long-dead tribal dialect from the Eastern Seaboard.

Let's examine this. For one thing, Kevin, who lives in Florida, is somewhat unlikely to have chosen the word 'skookumchuck' for himself, unless he used to live in the Northwest. Varieties of 'skookum', from the Chinook trade dialect, turn up repeatedly in the geographic nomenclature of Oregon and Washington ('Skookumchuck', 'Skookumjack', 'Little Skookum', etc.).
For all its ubiquity, the actual meaning of the word varies greatly from user to user. For instance, I've heard it said that 'skookumchuck' translates loosely as "good luck", whereas 'skookumjack' is "bad luck". But I have no idea, because at various points I've heard the base word 'skookum' used as a synonym for "chutzpah" (or, as the Finns would say, "sisu").

I also heard a cop say it this way once; "I couldn't skookum it," meaning he couldn't figure (whatever) out. I've heard the word used in manifold other ways, and I'm gonna stop going down that road now, since we'd be here all day, and neglecting the wonderful world of Kevin.

The guy himself probably has no idea that his blog has been hijacked. It says here that his name is Kevin Pruca, he is a 34-year-old (married) male whose birthday is March 27th. He lives in Crestview, Florida and his favorite quote is "Lorem ipsum consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur vel eros.consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur vel eros."
Now, that above certainly looks Latin, but I'm thinking that it's not. Kevin enjoys listening to such generic-sounding song titles as: "One Funky Kat", "Back in the Day", "Rockin' Out" and one that's just called "Live in Concert".


There are some photo albums (unobtainable) that feature 'Hiking at Summit Rock' and 'The Grand Canyon with Friends'. Below, there is the Friends List. It's true: when I look at 'Mason' (odd name for a lady), I too think "Bibendum quis, dapibus ut". (She's the Michelin tire man?)

The whole thing sort of feels like those transplanted memories one might provide a cyborg with, to make it feel a little more human. Or those soothing wallpaper images that are already on your computer the very first time you turn it on. They're beautiful in their way, but it feels wrong to enjoy them.

And that brings us to "Red Vines, the perfect super food". As you can see, these are red grapes, which grow on vines, yes it's true. Perhaps Kevin/spambot is actually telling us that the popular brand of licorice whip known as Red Vines is the most healthy food of all.
Actually, why do 'perfect' and 'super' need to do their work paired up in that way? Isn't that gilding the lily?

This "post" repeats itself five times, and there are no others. Well hell; you got me here, let's hear your pitch.

"Eliquatuero dip numsan vent lam, conum facillum init lut doloreet ullametuero od tet adit, commod tatummy feug tiam velit praese exer aute enit alit, veliqua modit dolorer commod niam onul laore praese exer aute enit alit."

After all the effort that seemingly went into this enterprise, you'd think they'd find some decent translation software. But the problem doesn't seem to be Latin-English translation; it seems to be Every-Language-In-The-World- to English translation.

Let's examine that. 'Eliquatuero', 'ullametuero' and 'praese' all look pretty Italian to me, whereas 'dip numsan vent lam' could easily be on the menu in a pho restaurant. 'Conum facillum init' is Latin, I'm pretty sure, but then 'doloreet' appears, and perhaps that's pidgin for 'dolorous' (or it's the noise a Money Bird would make).
'Od tet adit' has a Danish feel about it, while 'tatummy' frankly reminds me of Chinook (or Mohonk, or any number of dialects that no longer have many native speakers). What the fuck is this?

I don't know, and I'll probably never know. I love the interwebs there for this kind of thing: a spambot is speaking in tongues, and strangely seems to have borrowed the address of my friend's blog, and hollowed out the carcass of a complete stranger's, nestling inside like a hermit crab.
All that said, I hope George gets back up soon, perhaps with pictures of our recent trip to the spawning grounds of the mid-Columbia. Sex n' death baby! Liebestodt!

Update, and an addendum: George's blog is back in its proper place. Apparently there was something (deeply) wrong with both his computer and the server he uses.

Also, someone named Kevin has commented and written about the 'language' I'm dissecting up there. He has a different last name than the 'Kevin' whose world we explore in this post.

And finally; it's true that what fish do this time of year can't really be described as sex as such. In human terms, it would be like a date shortly before both parties will be dying. The conversation would be something like, "I love you, honey. Now go jack off on that pile of eggs I just laid."

Beeswax (as in 'none of your')

Hm. Mysteries and secrets. My most oft-given piece of advice is: "Don't want people to find out your secrets? Don't have secrets." Nonetheless, we all accumulate them. Not everything is for public consumption. I've been A Sneak on a few occasions in my life, doing a bit of domestic spying to make sure that all is well. I used to be obsessive about it, but lately it's more like something to pass the time with, and very little at that. I learn what I need to learn and no longer ruin my stomach about it.
One of the great lessons of low-level espionage is that if you obtain information by inethical means, you need to either never use it or be very careful about how you use it. Another reason why secrets are poison, and are weapons against the possessor.
I have a few things on my mind today, and don't really know if I feel like discussing them in semi-public, if you couldn't already tell. When I pile up a few too many secrets, I usually just divulge them, for good or bad, and am done with them. Here? Well, it's easier to divert attention.
I haven't forgotten the tenets of psychic warfare that I learned from others and trained myself in, once upon a time. It's just that these days, I'm trying to use those skills for good deeds. Dunno though: everyone's got needs. If'n I'm trying to impress someone but not look like I'm trying to impress them while being myself but not so much that I'm scaring them away while signifying that there's a great deal that I know and have done but see it at the same time as no more meaningful than the things that everybody else has seen, done or known...And showing interest above all else, but not being a creep about it, that calls for pretty much every floor in the department to be working pretty hard. Honesty is the best secrecy. And the habitually honest are the best liars too, since no one ever suspects them. Their word is their bond, and so it is ultimately up to them to decide whether or not to abuse that trust, possibly for personal gain, or to attempt to make things a little better for everybody, but on the sly and perhaps in ways that would seem highly inethical, were anybody watching. For some reason, I don't have any problem keeping anyone else's secrets. Or, I know who needs to know and who doesn't.
Maybe I'm saying all this for a reason, and maybe I'm just fictionalizing. Who can say? Maybe I'm just engaging in that left over boyhood I-wish-I-was-a-secret-agent shit.
Like most American little boys, I was obsessed with war, but I never wanted to be a soldier (I noticed the 'die-er' part at the end, for starters). My granny was a wise woman, and when we were watching a movie one time, they were giving us the usual tour of what hell boot camp actually is, and she didn't say-"See? That's what'll happen to you if you join the armed forces." She said, simply, "Don't you want to be a Marine?"
Nope, I decided. Especially after I saw the concentration camp footage that they make you watch in this part of the country, circa seventh grade or so. My romanticization of war was offically done at that point. I decided that since soldier was out, athlete seemed unrealistic as did cowboy, I wanted to be a rock star/detective/secret agent/assassin.
I suppose that some little boys dream of being president too, but I never had that one, either. I'm actually one of the least secretive people I know, for the abovementioned reasons, but it does make one feel special to be in possession of a unknown fact. In the intervening years I just noticed how hard it is for people to communicate at all anyway, and decided that secrets are poison, and the ego is a weapon.
Hm. This was going to be a post about the records I bought today. Heatmiser, Delta 72 and Blue Oyster Cult. Now, I'm not so sure I'm into it.

Mysteries

One day I was sitting around my house on Decatur Street, in Olympia, when I was still pretending to go to college. It was afternoon.
In my kitchen sat the dysfunctional freezer/refrigerator combo. Things in the fridge had a nasty tendency to freeze, and the freezer-I swear-was almost warm. So, if I wanted to keep my ice cream (only thing I wanted frozen anyway) cold, I had to put it on a nice, cold brick that had been in the freezer since I had moved in. Room enough for a pint of Ben and Jerry's, that's all.
Next to the brick was another brick, in a Ziploc bag. Next to that; a giant spoon that had also been there when I moved in, and did not belong to my housemate (who shared my first name, incidentally). The motor for the freezer must have been nearby, because as I say, it was irritatingly warm in there.
So, on this afternoon, there was a knock at the door. It's the guy from the next house over, who is forever peering through his blinds at us. He has some sort of relationship with the owner of the house I live in, which makes me like him even less, and feel a bit cheated that I have to live next door to his snoopy ass. He would occasionally get in his car, drive around the block (through the alley behind my home), park and go back inside.
His relationship with the owner-"Actually, I used to be married to her," he eventually said-belies the fact that he is not the landlord. That honor belongs to a nervous young lady at a property management outfit. But at the same time, I de facto had two landlords, and...Knock knock. Here he is on this afternoon, at my front door.
"Uh," he said, "do you have a brick in your freezer?"
For a minute, I just looked at him. Then I said, "Ah, yup. Are you talking about the one in the plastic bag, or the other one?"
"The other one?"
"Yeah. The one with no bag?"
"I don't know anything about that, but the one in the plastic bag is from Hoffman middle school, which burnt down. My daughter attended school there. Can I have it?"
"Uh, sure."
So I went and retrieved it. I said, "All this time I've been wondering about this thing...Every time I've thought about throwing it out, actually. So why was it in my freezer?"
He didn't really have an answer. More little comments about how the house really belonged to him followed.
Not long after this, my housemate, one of the biggest liars I've ever known, male division, was accused by a houseguest of ours (the other biggest liar I've ever known, female division) of trying to rape her. This had happened while I was out of town. She had initially moved in while sleeping with me, since she was inadequately bisexual for the house she lived in. It was a casual thing, and she told fantastic bedtime stories.
His story didn't hold much water with me, and besides, when he found out about the accusation, his first words should have been, "But I didn't do anything." His words instead were, "I'm ruined."
In the hyper-emotional gender politics of the early 'Nineties, in that most hyper-politicized of towns, this was tantamount to ruin, certainly. A Chinese foreign exchange student had been accused of date rape, the year before, and had basically been run out of town. Accusation amounted to conviction, and at a rally held on campus, the accusor took the stage as the emcee said, "This is not an accusor, this is a survivor!" Our erstwhile houseguest had waited until she found lodgings of her own, and had levied this complaint, not with the police, but with his band. Shrewd move.
Most people in that town at that time really hated me. During the summer of 1994, I had broken up four couples, as I had decided that nothing mattered any more, amongst other stupid reasons. The only person who believed me when I said that the accusor was every bit as bad of a liar as the accusee was my ex-girlfriend, who had become ex-ed when I admitted that I had cheated on her. With erstwhile houseguest.
Erstwhile Houseguest was still ostensibly friends with me, and I called her. I asked if I could come over, and hear her side of the story. What she told me he had said just didn't sound like him, and what she told me had happened sounded frankly fictional. I gave her a hug, and walked out of her life forever.
All this left was the flood of threatening phone calls I then had to field. Buncha meek little geek-boys, happy to have a chance at being a hero through the anonymous medium of the telephone. I answered one day to hear the voice of a guy I couldn't stand, and couldn't stand me, since I had dated one of his ex-girlfriends (the terror of tiny town, I tellya') that he had expected to reconcile with, upon his return to town several years down the road. He had clearly wanted to leave a threatening message without having the inconvenience of having to talk to an actual person.
"So Mark; you calling to threaten my housemate, too?"I quickly confronted him with the news that his behavior was illegal, and that I had taken to recording all incoming calls. He was used to being the moral judge of us all, so he had to work pretty hard to get back on his high horse. But get back up he did.
"Well...Um, I'm just calling to say that I disapprove of his behavior...And yours, too."
"Well, that just breaks my fucking heart, coming from a keen observer such as yourself. Make sure to tell all the rest of those cowards that if anything happens to my housemates, all of you have been recorded threatening him. Take care, now."
My housemate then fled north, to Sedro Wooley, where he lived in a nasty little trailer. I had no job, and no way to make rent, no friends to move in and help out financially. His mom had co-signed on the lease, and I received an angry phone call one morning from erstwhile housemate. I reminded him that he, rather than stay and fight these (he said) untrue allegations, had grabbed his nuts and ran. I was in no way financially beholden to him. I hung up, and never spoke to him again.
Nonetheless, my half of the rent was due, and I had no idea how to pay it. Sitting around in a greater slough of despond than I had been on the brick afternoon, on another afternoon, the mail came.
In my box, I found a check for exactly the amount that I needed for rent. It had been issued by an employer that I had ceased working for, some months previous. It was made out to me, but clearly was not mine, as whoever's check it was had made less, hourly, than I had. That particular company specialized in underpaying the mentally challenged to do janitorial work, around town, and had hired a bunch of us (the "normal" ones) when they got a large contract to do cleanup on a demolition site. In any case, they'd screwed me, and I left when they did.
So, I don't need to tell you, I cashed that check without another thought, paid my rent, and got the hell out.

Get your adverbs here

I have a friend who works at a lonesome barbecue joint in the daytimes, when he is not the karaoke jockey at night. He often asks me to come down and visit him, when things are slow. We talked about a lot of things, yesterday, including the rarely used positive form of a lot of commonly spoken words ('evitably', anyone? 'Couth'?). We then somehow got onto the topic of imaginary friends. My sister, jealous about my rich inner life, which I often talked about, once looked at me and said, "Well, I've got an imaginary friend, too."
What's her name?, I wanted to know. "Lolly," she said, and elaborated no further. I then noted that the newspaper on the table had been open to the comics page, which in those faraway days featured a comic by the same name. It was sort of like if she had looked at me and said, "Shirt. I dunno. Leave me alone." I was kind enough not to ask any follow up questions about Lolly.
Then I crack open the Harper's magazine today, only to find all these case studies of actual six and seven year olds, and their imaginary friends ('Skateboard Guy: invisible eleven year old boy who lives in child's pocket...', 'Fake Rachel: lives under child's bed...', 'Simpy: blue skin and black eyes, wears funny clothes...', 'The Good Indian, a.k.a Don Vont: appeared when child spent a lot of time in the woods...', 'Sergeant Savage: G.I. Joe doll who is sometimes an invisible person, 100 years old...Child likes his shotgun, dislikes his face...', 'Elephant: invisible five-year-old female elephant, seven inches tall, gray color, black eyes, wears tank top and shorts. Child likes that she plays with child, dislikes that sometimes she is mean."). When we get that specific, I start to recall the outlines of my own phantom friends. Sometimes they were transmutations of favorite toys, or more specifically, the odd items (interestingly shaped sticks, pieces of engines, melted bits of plastic) that I would drag home, name and give characteristics to. But frankly, I've always been a writer (first novel; "The Exorcist Omen", age five), and I never really had imaginary friends (my actual friends are enough, and have always been, thanks); I made up characters.
My daughter used to have this sort of weird worship thing going on with these two water bottles when she was four. The bottles apparently represented two imaginary fish named Thlith and Glichh. I liked them so damn much, I put them in one of my novels. Can you see the scenario?
"To get through the mountain pass, we're gonna have to make a deal with Thlith and Glichh."
"Who's that?"
"They're two imaginary fish..." But the two characters in question are in a realm only somewhat like our own, and despite the fact that they know that the people they are about to parley with, to escape serious peril, are strictly speaking, 'imaginary', they have been manifested by the belief of a small being in another realm, and they'd better take this one seriously.
I grew up next to a family of evangelical Christians. They weren't the most liberal sorts in the world, but their son was my age, and we were natural friends. (I'll tell you the story of how they forced me to accept Jesus into my heart, causing me to miss the reruns of "M.A.S.H." I really wanted to watch, some other time.) I spent a lot of time over there, and though I thought their house smelled icky (too clean. I associate that smell with religion to this day), I became immersed in some aspects of their culture. And again, liberal they weren't, but this was the '70's, and liberal the world largely was. They had an album called "The Music Machine" for the kids. It's a fantastic piece of your ecumenical Jesus hippie material-I own a copy of it now, in fact, and see nothing at all shitty about it. It pushes such controversial concepts as Tolerance and Patience.
The song "Patience", in fact, is where this one gets weird. Its chorus goes as follows:
"Have pa-tience
have pa-tience
Don't be in su-uch a hurry..."
But I heard the song in the background of conversation so many times, I only resolved the chorus into this wordless rhythmic humping:
"Nk nk nk.
nk nk nk.
Nk nk nk Niiik nuh nk nk..."
Which eventually resolved itself into a name:
"Lloyd Ink-strom
Lloyd Ink-strom..."
Strange, but I was a kid, you know? Why question it? Perfectly good name. I developed him into a character. He was the richest man in Bubble City (don't ask); sometimes a bad man, as the richest man often becomes, but generally a thoroughgoing good egg, ready to lend a hand. The strangeness of how I acquired the name did come to sort of haunt me, a bit, and I took to looking through phone books for the nearest Lloyd Inkstrom. Never found one. By the time Lloyd found his way into my earliest sexual fantasies, it became clear that his days were numbered.
Now, flash forward to my seventeenth birthday. I receive a birthday card in the mail. The text, poorly penned, addressed me in the diminutive form of my name, and assured me that though the author of the missive had been 'away in the merchant marines', he had been keeping track of my progress, and thought that I was doing just fine. "Best regards...Lloyd Inkstrom".
Oh. Well, lessee...My mind struggled to find any sort of rational answer. The crap handwriting did, in fact, look like something I might have written to myself in the single digits...But I have no recollection of doing so, and I remember things pretty damn clearly all the way back to my first year of life. I asked everyone who would have known about Lloyd if they had done this (and how weird would that have been, ten years hence?), and to a person, they all denied it. To this day, it remains a mystery.
If someone sent that to me, just when the pudding started to get a little too thick, they had tremendous insight into how I really work: my best friends have always lived up there in my head, and I hardly think that I'm the only one for whom that is true. And it also brings up another angle. Does it mean then, if no one I know was truly responsible for this, doesn't that suggest that maybe the act of creating a character means something a great deal more concrete than we 're willing to credit? That maybe I actually brought Something into the world, and he's out there wandering around?
This opens the door to all kinds of shit, if so.