Metaphors are bullshit.

We are who we choose to be.

Even when circumstances require us to be something specific, the choices we endeavour to make tell us a great deal about ourselves.

Lately, I have been trying to make more responsible choices. Like drinking significantly less and finally hauling my ass to the dentist to figure out exactly how much damage I’ve done by routinely bathing my teeth in stomach acid as a consequence of said drinking.

Turns out, I’m doing all right. But I made a really stupid decision on Sunday.

In sorting out my life, I was cleaning out my room. In the process, I figured I could just throw out a bag full of my own personal information, as long as it was buried deep inside a larger garbage bag full of the grossest stuff lingering in my fridge.

It isn’t even ten minutes after I’ve pitched this thing that someone climbs into my building’s dumpster and begins tearing through everything inside it. I watch him as I scrape the frost off of my car.

Eventually, he emerges from the dumpster, places a few items in his bag, and wanders off down the dark alley.

I figure whatever damage I’ve done, I can’t undo now. I drive off into the night, across the river to the apartment where I’m catsitting, wondering what steps I might now take to protect myself from the machinations of this clever fiend.

He’s going to get access to my credit cards. He’ll take out new ones in my name. Empty my bank account.

Victimize me.

Ruin my life.

Do I call Visa? Do I call the cops?

Even if I went back and climbed into the dumpster and found some of those bills and statements and stubs, I couldn’t be sure I got them all.

But at least I could be sure no one else would get whatever else wasn’t already being traded to gangsters for crack.

If I don’t at least check, I won’t sleep.

I drive back across town. I get out of my car and walk towards the dumpster as someone passes with her dog.

I’m too stressed to worry about my pride.

I open the dumpster with my left hand and flash my smartphone inside with the right.

There it is.

The green plastic bag that I had been careful to bury inside a larger bag among decaying produce and month’s-sour milk.

It’s now out in the open, so I grab it before anyone else can. There’s only one thing that I’m certain is missing.

A not-quite-rotten banana.

I remember, earlier that afternoon, thinking it was probably still good, but just not worth the chance.

I fear many things in this world.

But nothing more than how you will react if you ever connect this blog to me, which I have always considered to be an inevitability.

I have not always lived the way you wanted me to, and I can guarantee that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Although I like to tell myself that, if you were able to understand some of the nuances of my motivation, you could still be proud of me.

But I’m in no hurry to test that hypothesis.

After all, our differences are negligible compared to our similarities, as undesirable and heartbreaking as they may be. And now it seems, mommy, that I have inherited your most disturbing and unique predisposition.

I am addicted to casserole.

Pasta.

Potatoes.

Veggies.

And the cheese.

So much cheese.

There’s just something about a complete, piping-hot meal fresh from oven-kissed glassware. It fills the endless expanse of emptiness.

Like summer’s bounty rising from the dust.

I’ve never particularly cared for tuna, and I’m not sure how you’d feel about my latest tex-mex experiment. Our preferences are undeniably different.

But we share a common understanding of the dish’s basic elements. Perhaps, one day, our disparate tastes can come together in a properly hearty and delicious recipe.

It doesn’t need to make use of bizarre ingredients.

And I won’t suggest politically, morally or socially provocative monikers for this casserole.

When we prepare it, I promise not to be high on drugs, but I’ll probably come up with some ideas for it while I am.

Love,

Your son

A bizarre realization has manifested in my consciousness during the latest epoch of my life.

I completely disregard sex and/or gender in pop music.

Now, I have always done this, and I have always been aware of the fact that I do it. But an alarming number of people apparently do not.

In narratives, we’re supposed to put ourselves in the position of the protagonist.

What’s in their pants doesn’t matter.

Unless it’s somehow relevant to the plot.

I always communicate this challenging concept to dudely dudes through Aretha Franklin’s Respect, which was originally written and recorded by Otis Redding.

Most men have heard Franklin’s version. And are prepared to hear it again.

At a Chili’s.

Or maybe a strip club.

The point is, they all hear it and empathize with a person’s desire for respect. Not simply in relationships, but in all aspects of life. Perhaps relationships aren’t even on their minds.

But the hook is ace.

So they identify with it. However they can.

This is just how I interpret lyrics.

Maybe I’m the only guy in the world who, upon hearing Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl, imagined himself coming to grips with drunkenly snogging another dude. I guess all other guys were just salivating over the thought of her making out with another chick.

Which is a fair interpretation, I suppose, but not immediately where my mind goes.

Although, maybe it should be. I mean, what am I?

Gay?

All too often, our perceptions of gender roles tend to be just that limited.

This is exactly what Gwen Stefani was talking about when she observed, “I’m just a girl in the world. That’s all that you’ll let me be.”

When Just A Girl came out, I was a confused boy being raised in a pretty religious yet aggressively feminist household, constantly confronting a world that was neither of those things. The pressure to be something other than myself was unyielding and immense.

Just like the protagonist’s experience in the song, the dominant force in my world was not what I wanted, but what everyone else demanded. Regardless of how it was packaged, it was always obvious to me that Just A Girl had very little to do with sex or gender.

It’s about the way we relate to our own individuality within a broader social context. Even if the goal is to express the uniquely female aspects of this experience, the song communicates that message to a wider audience effectively by being more general.

The girl is everyman, and her experience is universal.

Or it could be just a feminist anthem.

If that’s all that we’ll let it be.

Let’s say you’re an alchemist.

One, uncommonly-normal night, you get mind-bendingly, blackout drunk on ergot-tainted barleywine that a pitiable traveler traded to you in exchange for a cuneiform scroll, which you lacked the knowledge to read, anyway.

Stirred on the morrow, with the sun already plummeting towards the horizon, you find your laboratory in perfect condition. All of your equipment has been well cleaned and properly stored. However, you are missing a wide assortment of raw materials.

Most notably?

All of your lead.

Apart from this, the only thing out of the ordinary is a conspicuously-large pile of gold on the floor next to your work bench.

Alone on the hearth, you find a corner from a page in your notebook.

It is singed quite badly.

You’re distraught over the escaped enlightenment, but resolved to cherish the gift.

That thirty bucks just disappeared into the night. And it really is my fault.

I shouldn’t have tried to fill a prescription in a parking lot at two in the morning.

Obviously.

But then again, I’m pretty friendly with calculated risks. And even closer to consequences. Frankly, I’m relieved he wasn’t a cop.

The fact is, these meds are really tough to come by. The guy grifting me knew that, and I was just drunk enough to let him get my hopes up.

I never did catch his name. Someone said it might be something along the lines of Smurf. It’s not much to go on, but I’m mildly inclined to hunt him down.

I would let the whole thing go if he hadn’t speculated about my motivation.

“People usually want that if they have down sickness.”

down sickness

I’ve got a good idea of what he meant by that, as I am intimately familiar with the broader parameters of this phenomenon. It’s why I was looking for an off-label solution for the treatment-resistant variety.

Now maybe, for my situation, this is an unecessary and ill-advised course of action.

But I don’t really have a problem bringing a gun to a knife fight.

My personal experience tells me it’s an effective approach. And Smurf seems to have some observational wisdom that confirms this.

It’s an indigenous knowledge, not necessarily more or less correct than any other knowledge. It’s likely incomplete, but undoubtedly unique enough to offer a fresh perspective on an exhausted topic.

Rather than retribution or vengeance, if I’m going to pursue this guy for anything, it’s that.

Either way, as far as I’m concerned, a few bucks ain’t a bad price for a valuable lesson and a mildly interesting story.

Metaphors evolve with technology.

Just because you’ve burned some bridges doesn’t mean you can’t send a couple texts across that (ever-expanding) gulf.

Maybe we don’t think in terms of bridges anymore.

Maybe we think in terms of electronic reality.

Curiously enough, when I envision a burning bridge, the image in my mind is from Chrono Trigger on Super Nintendo.

That’s me. Just a game being played.

I’m bound to get boring.

Eject me.

Play another one.

Reset and jack up the difficulty.

It can be every bit as fun, but you’re going to need to step up your game.

I felt really guilty about it at the time, but not so much anymore.

I didn’t realize that one of the most significant people in my life had already split.

Was already tied up with someone else.

If I had known that, I might not have been so reluctant when a beautiful, drunk, young woman began making out with me in the middle of one of the shittiest raves I had ever attended.

It’s impossible for me to deny the fact that those brief moments between the two of us were probably the best kissing experience of my life.

Maybe that says something about me. Maybe that says something about her.

Maybe it says something about the moment.

People desire to be loved.

They go about fulfilling those desires in whatever ways seem most reasonable to them.

At the time.

Under the circumstances.

Later wishing they could take it back.

Wishing they could have seized the opportunity.

Crying for three seconds as they ride down ten floors.

Screaming incoherently from the floor in the hallway.

Raging against the void.

Solidifying, resolving, into themselves.

Learning how to love.

The day of my sister’s wedding—the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima—was extremely emotional for me.

I knew it would be, and very seriously considered grinding its edge off with some prescription painkillers before leaving the house that morning.

But fuck it.

This was only going to happen once. Regardless of how awkward and overwhelmed and vulnerable I would feel, I knew I needed to feel it.

I wanted to feel it.

By the end of the ceremony, I was welling up like a baby gorilla whose mother had just been murdered. I hung around the narthex of our family’s church. Before extensive renovations, this space was the chapel proper, where my siblings and I participated in countless services and pageants together. I waited for the crowd to empty out of that once-sacred antechamber, until only the nucleus of my family remained.

My sister gathered up her dress, walked over to me, gave me a big hug, and said, “Don’t worry, brother, I’m still your sister.”

“It’s not that,” I rasped. Words did not fail me so much as my entire higher functioning was viscerally immolated by a synaptic blast wave. I don’t know how I found the ability to release what I felt.

“I’m just so happy for you.”

Hours later, my parents looked out over a gathering of hundreds of friends and relatives. To keep his composure, my dad said nothing and cast his gaze downward. Despite the obvious parallelism between the two of us on this day, this is a story I don’t know how to tell right now. Maybe it’s not even important.

“You’ll have a tendency to focus yourselves inwards,” said my mother, speaking for both herself and my dad. “But remember, the two of you are part of a community, and you should focus your love outward.”

That moment has decayed, but the shadow of those words is still and forever flashburned onto the concrete of my soul.

Several months back, I was making sandwiches in my parents’ kitchen. At the time, it was also my kitchen.

Just as my crispy beauties were coming out of the press, my dad walked in with my near-centenarian grandfather.

“Are you making some lunch?” Grandpa asked.

“Yeah,” I eeked out.

“You know how you fix that?” The patriarch asserted as though he was criticizing my craft.

“How?” I asked, not entirely sure what he was getting at, but eager to recieve a kernel of his vast wisdom.

“Get married,” he began.

I wasn’t following.

“Then you don’t have to cook your own meals,” he finished.

“You can make someone else’s meals, too,” interjected my father.

Never in my life had I been so confident that I would just prefer to eat alone.