Words

-You can’t put a Yin-Yang on a sign that says “Relaxation Spa” anymore unless the black dot is winking and the white dot is made of jizz. It almost seems racist to just leave it up there, as if everyone doesn’t know. You know.

-Saw a place today, don’t know what it was. I’m pretty sure that the plaza’s name was not the name of an establishment within the plaza, as there was no such establishment. However, the package goods store, the chiropractor and the three places up for lease were perfectly fine being under the umbrella of “Chicken Vacation,” and that doesn’t particularly bother me; after all, I imagine it could help business in a way.

Especially the chiropractor, amongst cowards.

But wouldn’t an enterprising mind at the fucking least open up a vegan restaurant there? It’s a vacation from meat for the human and a vacation from death for the chicken. Win-win.

-I drove past a sign today, telling me that I’d be in Yardley if I drove 5 miles west. Immediately, I thought back upon this woman named Emily. We worked together in sub-contracting, editing and proofreading transcripts of focus groups. I learned so much about diabetes that year.

I passed, and there was Emily, and all she had to say was all she ever has to say in my head, which is, “oh my God! Is River Road near Yardley? ‘Cause that’s like right by where I live!” So now, every time I pass anything Yardley, a blonde twenty-something with a French last name and a burning desire to shop a lot at Fashion Bug pops into my head. What an imprint.

-Ever see the movie Imprint? It’s a Takashi Miike flick, the last film of the first season of Masters of Horror. If you’ve seen it, then you likely have no idea what it’s about; I’ve seen it, I don’t, and I’m smart.

But if I remember correctly, it’s maybe about a 19th Century-or-so aborted fetus with blue hair, the spirit of which goes to work in a ghost brothel. Or the blue-haired girl lives, and helps Mom perform abortions, and then works in a demon or ghost brothel, where she either kills or gets killed by Billy Drago, who loves her. I think. Oh, and there’s a ton of prostitute torture that happens to be some of the most harrowing stuff I’ve ever seen in a plain ol’, run-of-the-mill, steak-and-potatoes, shits-and-giggles movie.

This movie was so special that Showtime actually never aired it, at least not in the US. Apparently, there was no way that they could edit the movie so that it…made sense?, so they never showed it.

This would happen to Mr. Miike all the time, if his movies were ever shown in the US with any sort of frequency. Ichi the Killer is not representative of his body of work, in that it’s relatively coherent. Same for Audition. Izo’s closer, and that’s a two-hour thesis on the nature of accepting one’s personal fate…cloaked in fight after fight after fight after fight…after fight…after fight. After fight. Then watch Visitor Q. Fuck you.

So when Imprint was finally released on DVD, it was gobbled up by horror hounds everywhere who gasped, gawked, shuddered and then had a sandwich. These characters, these folks know how to shrug off a woman, hung upside-down, having her nails ripped out and urine running all over her face as she cries while evil, black-toothed den mothers cackle and punish. Good movie to show to someone who never watches horror, or likes nothing but rom-coms and remakes of Forrest Gump.

Why bring this up now? Bring this up now because I thought of my Fashion Buggy Buddy and Yardley and the Imprint she put upon my mind, and then I crossed a creek called Cuttalossa Creek, which triggered the thought of the blue-haired girl and the abortion doctor performing frontier medicine out by a creek where women were, in the saddest and most desperate way possible, cutting their losses.

Yeah, all for that.

Or maybe all for this: maybe 7, 8 years ago now. A long-time friend of mine from “back home,” Cheeks (his name is actually Cheeks, which is a lie) and I were talking about high school while maybe drinking or eating or both. It was at Ruby Tuesday’s or Bennigan’s or TGI Friday’s or Harper’s. No, not Harper’s. It must’ve been drinking, because I barely remember this story.

What I do remember of it, though, is that we were talking about the types we were in high school, the people we remembered being in that Breakfast Club-sort of way that people can often paint themselves. What I remember of this story which is, of itself, based on hazy memory, is that Cheeks was on the fucking money about the guy he was, and I couldn’t have been any more distant from my own target.

I, being so deep and creative and dark, and no one listened to the music I did or watched the movies I loved and held so dearly, my shield against a world that hated me…was completely full of shit and had no idea. Cheeks looked at me like I had two heads and one of them was made of nothing but blooming dicks as I went on about how I was a loner. It was great.

No, it wasn’t. I was probably hammered, and that meant that I was probably twice as afraid as ever that I had shattered on the floor. I look at it now and like it, but I probably defended my lonerdom for either as long as I could or…well, I guess any scenario is “as long as I could.”

We’re still friends, so I guess I didn’t lose my shit and try to hit him, which would’ve been a miserable failure. He’s gone on to become quite fit and probably pretty strong, and had I tried to start some sort of ruckus, he would have described the ruckus to me. Mess with the bull, you get your own bullshit back at you?

I thought about the fragments of what I remembered of that night, and it all got mixed up with Relaxation and French last names and Yardley and Chicken Vacation, Yin-Yangs full of winking cum and blue-haired, aborted film directors and my first reaction was, “I’m completely full of shit.”

Still feels pretty right.

As the night falls over, though, I’m becoming far more comfortable with the idea that I’m a fiction. I think of a line from a Kathryn Bigelow movie, one of the two that she did between Near Dark and The Hurt Locker that isn’t Point Break, called Strange Days, and Angela Bassett’s character tells Lenny that “memories are meant to fade.”

I remember that line every time like the first time I heard it, when I was 16, and it still makes me shudder, get a little weak. I keep on thinking that I have this incredible memory. I remember all of these things from one ride, one route, just today. I remember how all of these things go together or don’t, how they clash to make new mountains of memory.

All I really remember is a line, a block of ad space in the air, a vague time in a bar that might or might not have been a bar.

I’m a fiction. There are facts along the way, things that happened that are real, happened in my life. And then, maybe some aren’t real and never happened. Memories are meant to fade, and that’s a little bit of why I write, right? I write to remember my own past, but never tell the whole truth. There’s a spin on it, something there that, in my mind, makes it a better read, worthy of having been written. And then, do I remember the thing or do I remember the story?

She’s crying when she tells Lenny that memories are meant to fade. Her memory of the man he was is fading, the man she cared for in the first place almost gone as he stands before her. In the movie, Lenny climbs out of the muck and comes back whole and strong, their embrace ends the film as the year 2000 floats over the screen and offers all of the hope and change that the actual 2000 did and didn’t.

I don’t think I come back. I’m not the loner, I’m not John Bender. I don’t remember whole stories, only words, pieces. I’m never who I thought I was and won’t be what I think today. Memories are meant to fade and I am only words. And even that’s not the full truth by this moment.

Saturn’s Return (First of 2)

So, Amy Winehouse died today. It wasn’t something that necessarily caught anyone by surprise, I’m sure, but it’s still definitely interesting to see what happens, how people cope when someone in her realm dies. She, as much as I can say without being too familiar with her, is someone who has been around for the past few years. She was certainly a spectacle, a snowball of calamity that might not have wanted to get so big, but did. She was, like a Michael Jackson or Lindsay Lohan, picked apart for public consumption, her music easily overshadowed by her disastrous celebrity.

She died at the age of 27, which seems to be a cursed year for musicians. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and a host of other musicians big-time and not-so-big-time have kicked it in their 27th year. Almost all of the circumstances surrounding each of their deaths is at least strange and at most unbearably tragic. Overdoses to drownings, disappearances to murders to misadventures gone fatally awry, the story for each of them isn’t just that they were famous and died, but that they were famous and died in amazing ways. Some of them are forgotten, others become eternal legends, but they all get a stifling amount of dead.

Mind you, I’m no expert on this. I saw that Ms. Winehouse kicked the bucket, saw that she was 27 and thought, “oh, isn’t that when they all die?” A few minutes later, a friend posted a Wikipedia link on Facebook, and I caught myself up with great haste. I hadn’t realized just how many people had become a part of the “27 Club” until I looked at the page, and it was a bit sobering to see just how much of a trend it is for musicians to die so young.

Immediately more interesting than that, however, was a little “see also” provided as a Wiki Wormhole to endless learning. The term, “return of Saturn,” was familiar enough to me; I’ve seen it in music for over 15 years. It’s a Goldie album, a No Doubt album, and the idea figures heavily into one of my favorite songs from the band Tool, “The Grudge,” which is the opener from their 2001 release Lateralus.

Given that, I’d never delved deeper into just what the concept meant. Truthfully, I just thought it sounded cool and musicians, independent of each other, were coming up with the phrasing. Turns out, it’s an astrological concept, and it also happens to be completely fascinating.

So the story goes, the “return of Saturn” refers to the orbit of Saturn around the sun, and where it is in relation to an individual’s birthdate. When Saturn rounds the sun and returns to where it met you in birth, it’s said that a major life event occurs. Most people only go through 3 returns of Saturn, so it’s characterized that the first meeting represents the abandonment of childhood, the second meets the actualization of maturity, and the third is when a person truly becomes wise. This is all shaped by whatever elements a person has to battle at these crucial moments.

I, as a relatively stern rule, don’t put much stock in astrology. I feel like it’s a matter of one’s own perception; like a spiritual buffet, we take the characteristics that best build the character of our individual selves and leave the rest. It gives us only what we want and nothing more. This, also, is what makes astrology so appealing at a surface level.

For most people, even for myself on occasion, the prospect of being able to dissect my  psyche, understand my role in the world and predict my own future with little to no effort is massively enticing. It can be fed in any dialect, any writing style, and because there’s so much good or inert, and so little bad about horoscopes and the culture around them, there’s next to no risk. Such a comfortable trap…

…but today, in reading about the return of Saturn, I was entranced. It takes roughly 28 years for Saturn to make its orbit around the sun, and that connects well with my belief that people disappear when they’re 28, to deal with whatever shit is flung their way and emerge a better, stronger person. It’s said that the range for Saturn’s return is from 27 to 29 in someone’s life, and that resonated with me like nothing else.

Again, I’m most likely just filling in my own blanks to make a theoretical fallacy seem logically correct in application to my life. But I remember almost dying of a drug overdose when I was…27. 28 was the worst year of my life. 29 threatened to follow suit for the duration, but I was finally cleared of the fog in my mind and heart on July 3, 2010, just about a month from my 30th birthday. Falls pretty well into that range of Saturn, no?

I thought of that and thought again of Amy. It was curious to me that the 27 Club and the Return of Saturn were tangentially connected to one another through Wiki links. I thought of her, and Kurt, and Jimi, and Janis, and applied the idea.

Their challenge, as Saturn returned for them, was just to stay alive. Had they curbed the pain, the negativity and misery in their lives long enough to make it through, perhaps they would have transcended what we know of them. They could’ve made art on a new level, music that went further than they (or we) could have imagined, or abandoned it altogether, in search of some great new thing.

Kurt Cobain might have gone to Haiti to help after the 2010 earthquake. Janis Joplin might have left the road and settled into happy domesticity. Jimi Hendrix might have died later, saving a child’s life in a New York City subway tunnel. And Amy? Maybe she’d have just cleaned up, put out a new album, been revered as one of the greatest singers of her generation.

I followed another path through Wiki entries later in the day, eventually stumbling upon a concept in quantum physics called “Schrodinger’s Cat.” Essentially, it states that a cat, trapped inside a “diabolical mechanism” that could potentially kill in the cat in an hour’s time. We can’t see the cat, as the device is closed to outside view, and Schrodinger believed that we had to assume the cat to be both alive and dead, since we can’t verify one or the other. Since we can’t observe the cat’s survival, or its passage from alive to dead, it could reasonably be one, the other or anything in between. Our observation and the act of definition: dead, alive. That’s what makes something whatever it is, so goes the theory.

The idea bleeds into the “many worlds” philosophy, where numerous outcomes exist as potential which is then manifest as a reality when the choice is made, the path traveled.  It’s Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” the buddhist’s Fourfold Negation, the “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it…” argument and Marvel Comics “What If?” comic series all rolled into one.

Here, Amy Winehouse is alive. Saturn returns and she faces it. She lives to actualize herself, become wise. Kurt Cobain gets old and fat. Jimi Hendrix fights crime and Janis Joplin’s the first female President of the United States. All of it exists and doesn’t exist, verified here this one time and one way because we understand the choices made and the paths taken. That doesn’t mean that the other layers don’t exist, maybe even folded upon one another in the same instant. It just means that Likelihood A occurred, and Amy Winehouse is dead.

I processed the news the way an addict would: disgusted with the death of Amy Winehouse because I see in it the worst of what could have been a very real existence for myself. I could’ve not been rushed to the hospital, had numerous bags of saline pushed through my veins to keep me from dying. When Saturn returned for me, I could’ve died of a drug overdose. I’d have been an unknown in the 27 Club, but I’d have been there just the same.

I realize that and hate that someone with so much more couldn’t do the little thing I did: stay alive. Such thinking made me completely cold to the news of her death. I’m no great man, and I got over myself in Saturn’s return, so why couldn’t she?

Whatever the reason, she didn’t. Or, maybe Schrodinger would think that she did, just not here. Not this layer of life. She, like her aforementioned club members, were exploding rockets in this existence, and they burned out quickly, unsteadily so, leaving us with what some consider a tragedy, a waste of potential.

I try to just see it as inevitable. Which it was. And wasn’t. And both. I don’t know, but I can verify through my observation of the news that she is now dead. However it goes, I can only hope that she doesn’t have the misfortune of crossing paths with a world of famished consumers at a media buffet more than once. No one needs a possible outcome of her talent and a world that treats the sick as entertainment mingling ever again.

A Quick Nod to how the Media Wants Your Fear to Kill You

Sitting down to read the news this evening, I found a number of articles regarding the summer heat I (and most of the country) am currently experiencing. Most of the country is dealing with temperatures well into the 90s, and topping 100 in numerous states. Add the humidity, and the heat index is expected to soar past 115 in parts of the country more accustomed to 85, 90 degrees of pain this time of year.

I’m from Florida originally, so I tend to look at these types of articles and just chuckle. Real heat is there, and it’s there for 9 months of the year, when it finally gives birth to psychotic, party-going child killers and hammer-wielding high-schoolers. Then, it’s cold for a week and nice for the remainder of the time, when all of the northerners are there to abuse the locals. Good deal, right?

Well, with the heat comes reporters who have to dish out stories on it, and with that comes a range. One end sees rational, interesting articles, written purely to inform and improve the public’s awareness. Others…well, here we go. From the AP, pillars of virtue (in comparison to News of the World):

Blistering heat wave stressing nation’s power grid

NEW YORK (AP) — A lengthy, blistering heat wave that is blanketing the eastern half of the United States is putting significant stress on the nation’s power grid as homeowners and businesses crank up their air conditioners.

Here’s where we all collectively shit our pants and remember catastrophic blackouts of previous years. This is where we openly weep as our older relatives slip into comas and die because they can’t keep their insulin cold. Here’s where people don’t just deal with the heat, but rather begin to fret about it. Most importantly, though, here’s where frantic folks light their sneakers on fire in running out their doors, holes burning in their pockets as they gear up to use the plastic cards melting in their wallets to buy a bunch of shit they don’t need.

First paragraphs are great in a news article; we’ve all been trained to look there for the 5 “W’s” and the “H” of a story, so that’s where we assume the most pertinent information is going to be found. Most times, we’re not even disappointed in believing that way. Unfortunately, I find more often than ever that this belief is being wielded as a tool against us.

“Read the first paragraph, asshole! Do you feel it? Feel the fear? Well, the only thing that makes the fear go away is a purchase! If a hole’s keeping you from feeling whole, go out and buy shit to fill it! Big shit! Buy a generator and a 50-gallon drum of premium Exxon gas, now with Techroline! That way, when your dumb ass dies because you didn’t factor in the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning due to running a generator in your garage because it’s too God-damned dangerous to leave it outside in your gated, lawyer-rich community…at least you’ll die with lungs that have also been ‘stripped of harmful deposits that can rob your engine of its power and vitality!’ Don’t wait! The stores only have ’3′ generators left, until the next shipment arrives in an hour! And for God’s sake, get all the water and canned food you can!”

I’ve lived in the wake of actual disasters, those being the twin girls Frances and Jeanne, two Cat. 2 or better hurricanes that squarely smacked my hometown in 2004. Each time, my family and I went without electricity at the house for 10 days. We had all the water and canned food in the world…now, if only we’d had a camping stove. You know, a little kerosene burner. Simple thing, in stock, dirt cheap.

So when Frances passed, we ate the canned food cold. That, at its most simple, means that we ate cans, because all of the food found inside cans has the taste of Can, until you cook it out. We learned one very valuable thing from this situation, and this is probably the best advice I can give to anyone in any emergency: order Chinese for dinner. Save the cans for when the rest of the world has resorted to cannibalism, because the Chinese food is somehow piping hot, gorgeously fresh and far tastier, no matter what you think the meat might actually be.

So we’re all perfectly terrified now, in a panic and burning essential fossil fuels to wait in lines to get other things, like more fossil fuels. One paragraph, and panic sets in, because this particular article broke the rules, told a shade of the truth in its first paragraph to set us up for a swerve in the second one, which reads

Utilities say they’re ready for high power demand and widespread electricity shortages or outages are unlikely. Lines and equipment are not fully taxed and there is more generating and transmission capacity available than usual because of the weak economy. Also, not many major storms are in the forecast, meaning fewer downed power lines.

So…wait a second…so it’s just hot? It’s hot, so more people are using their air conditioners? Isn’t that what you FUCKING DO when it’s hot in the 21st Century CE? Look back at that second paragraph and see how many levels of “not fucked” we have: utilities are ready. Lines and equipment aren’t fully taxed. More capacity available because the economy’s in the shitter (meaning you’re less likely to turn on the A/C in the first place!). Few major storms, leading to diminished worry about downed lines. I counted four.

Four levels removed from “not fucked” and we get a headline like “Blistering heat wave stressing nation’s power grid?” It’s a true statement they’ve made, but that headline, like the first paragraph, is designed to instill a fear that compels readership. Considering how few people have the time in the psychotic lives they’ve created to actually sit down and actually digest the entire article, the style of writing involved here quickly dips its feet in a pool of actually being dangerous, causing panic which can permeate every other facet of others’ lives. Imagine the nervous creep who reads the headline, catches that first paragraph in his or her RSS feed, and then drives like a maniac to the grocery store. Only one person was injured along the way in this hypothetical of mine, so don’t feel bad. She has to go to the hospital, but thankfully that’s something that stimulates the economy: no harm done.

Read if you want, read if you need, but don’t read for fear of what might be if you don’t. Should you be diligent in tracking down information, in verifying it before it becomes a golden bond that can not be broken in your mind and heart? Sure. Do you? Maybe, but “probably not” for a lot of people you might know.

I could probably check out my Facebook page right now and find 50 people who would freak the fuck out at the 1st paragraph and let the rest be damned as they speed off to injure my imaginary victim. I don’t have all that many friends, but that number is more than 10% of my total. How many people do you know? What’s your percentage?

Fear rots us down to crude caricatures of what we could be if we’d just read the 2nd paragraph. Sometimes, though, we just can’t get to reading it. It’s unfortunate that the world has been grafted and bound to work this way, but it’s also just the unavoidable way things are.

If you’re a writer, a journalist, consider most of your words forgotten. I have over 1200 words right now just to make this point, and how many will get read? And by how many people? If you’re about to have something published, and it could even be perceived as important information, just follow this quick question: “Is there enough intelligence in the world to counteract the stupidity I’ve just triggered?” If, for one second, your answer is “no,” write something else, write it another way, don’t write at all. In a world using words as weapons, lay down your arms if your aim is off the mark.

I’m dying to not have a topic this time, but I will anyway.

I think the whole thing is best surmised with “I made it home by closing time, filled a 24oz. cup (I’m lying, it’s 30) with 100-proof vodka and cranberry juice. You know, for the urinary tract…and I had a blast.

Unless you break down the per-diem on a basic Netflix subscription, tonight’s fun, at about 20 bucks, cost about $5/hr. That’s a dirt-cheap good time.

No, add the gas. 40 bucks. The 4 energry drinks were 9 bucks, because two of them were double strength and on sale. No…they were 9 bucks because they were 9 bucks. Nothing else factors that.

Gummy Savers: $2.25

Bottle of vodka: $15.99 (Smirnoff 100 proof)

2 little guys of Three Olives, different shitty flavors: 3 bucks.

Tax: not a fucking dime, because I bought it all in Delaware.

In order to rid ourselves of awful assumptions, let’s say that I was then beamed instantly from Delaware to Phoenixville, PA, and that’s where I found out that these little tiny flavored vodkas made my sugar-free energy drinks taste better than anything I’ve ever had.

Lie: actually going to cost me a lot someday, I’m sure.

My intention was to go to the store, get a new kind of soap, a shower poofy thing, some Tylenol Prime Ministers. The problem with this, of course, is that my heart always screams “ADVENTURE!” when I get behind the wheel of my truck, so a ten-minute trip ended up taking 4 hours, criss-crossing 2 states, costing me $90.24 and being wonderful.

I didn’t even get the soap. That’s what I fucking wanted in the first place, and it’s still at the store. I sang karaoke, made some dude laugh for about an hour straight, ate chips with a retarded guy (I don’t know, okay? If I knew, I’d say it, but since I don’t, “retarded” stays.), drove in a big fucking loop and got home by closing time.

I didn’t feel alone being alone tonight, and that’s always good.

I didn’t even get the soap.

Flippant Flipping

I think it was Joe Rogan who said “it’s not racist to be racial.”  Absolutely right. So, with that, know that I’m going to be racial here. I’m going to put forth stereotypes, but we do know in the backs of our minds that, often, stereotypes become such for good reason.

Here’s one to start: Philadelphia is a very well chocolate city. It may be covering some Dutch shortbread cookies, but it’s cocoa and mocha and all sorts of shades of brown. It’s cheap chocolate, too; there are lots of poor motherfuckers running around this city, like they’re running around a lot of cities…and I honestly love it. Not for the culturally-sensitive reasons you might surmise, but rather for a ton of really racial shit.

Because I happen to live in a working-class, primarily black-but-sadly-gentrifying neighborhood, there are lots of produce trucks and quality, inexpensive food markets. I love fried chicken, and I can get it cheap. In fact, the chances are better here than most anywhere in the city that I’m going to get some bad-ass southern cooking, really fuckin’ good fried catfish and hush puppies that are worth a God damn.

I can also get cheap bootleg DVDs, guys pass out business cards to make really good R&B mixdiscs for me, and when a black guy asks me for a dollar in town, he usually has a good story, a great lie, some kind of skill he’s marketing (killer musician that rakes in a couple hundred bucks a day working on the streets in Center City) or, at the very least, looks genuinely happy that I gave him a couple of bucks for a 24oz. Day’s Cola and a couple of Lucies.

Or crack. I don’t give a shit, because it’s his or her life. I’m not my brother or sister’s keeper, no matter what bullshit one wants to feed me, and these are grown-ass men and women who might not be brilliant scholars, but are still accountable for their actions. Simple as fucking that. And to a degree, I think they understand that. They might not like their lives, but they understand that the day-to-day is about what they do: working harder, hustling, two jobs, three jobs.

Contrast this sharply with the white beggar. Largely, they’re hipsters, transients who don’t give a shit about the dollar you just gave them, ’cause they’re white and someone’s going to give them another dollar in a minute. Unless they’re insane, or often if they’re disenfranchised or truly afflicted war vets, they’re often just fully capable youth who are simply not using their bodies or minds to do anything but feed off of the rich whites that they view with disdain as Matrix-style binary code copies of their shitty parents. It’s a temper tantrum that I’m expected to subsidize, and I truly fucking hate it.

So, I said all of that to say that, when I almost got into a fist-fight this afternoon with a black guy who said stereotypical things like “muthafucka” and “you flipped the bird at me, white boy,” I didn’t want to throw on the guy because he was black. He was an asshole, pure and simple.

The scene is set: I’m going down to 31st and Walnut, to drop my girlfriend off to get her bike fixed. I make a turn down the road, and a black Chevy Suburban is blocking the path. I veer over as much as I can, and this piece of shit starts playing chicken with me. I turn, he turned. 3 times with this shit, and then as he passed me, he gave me a kind-hearted one-finger salute as a gesture of his goodwill.

Philly is a city of maniacs, racists, thugs, monsters, criminals, corporate scum, generationally-wealthy inbred suburbanites who come into town to slum it, hipster douchebags, college kids, people who reclaim building lots in town to create green spaces that smell like shit, a lot of really hard-working, decent people and some awesome murals. And we all have pretty well come to the understanding that the middle finger is a bit of a gritty, urban, “have a nice day!”

This, I suppose, means I shouldn’t have been surprised when this guy took a U-Turn in the middle of rush hour traffic to come back down a blocked street and use his Suburban to as a blockade. There was a woman behind me trying to get out of this mess herself, and this guy took the opportunity to argue with me over a middle finger.

“Muthafucka, you flip the bird at me, white boy?”

“Oh yeah. You did it, so I gave you one back.”

“I didn’t shoot no bird.”

“Yeah, the fuck you didn’t.” This guy started giving me a really hard look after this, like he was Bokeem Woodbine and I was a RealDoll of George W. Bush.

So, here comes stupid Chris, with “listen asshole, you’re blocking three people from getting the fuck off this street. Are you gonna move your ass or not?” He seemed confused.

He stared at me like he wanted a fight. And I did, too. He was about the same size as I am, same weight, but I’m almost remarkably quick for my size, and he just looked like he was going to need 10 seconds to get out of the Suburban. In that time, I was going to slam the door on his body, reach in and beat the living shit out of him. And he probably thought the same thing of what he was going to do to me.

We were both fearful, but both strangely brave, angrily calm. Honestly, this wasn’t going to get resolved without a fight or a concession. So I pulled the one of the classier moves I could have mustered at the moment, saying “I’m sorry” and staring a hole in him like his face was made of cheesecloth and there were the best breasts ever on the other side.

He had a look of fear in his eyes all of a sudden, which I don’t fully understand. I think he might have realized that, whether I actually am or not, I’m fucking crazy. And here’s another black stereotype: black people are scared to death of crazy fucking white people. Whether he was or not, I don’t know, but a minute later I was dropping my girlfriend off and getting on with the rest of my day.

The rest of the day was absolutely brilliant, getting my first drive in of the season along the banks of the Delaware River, on New Jersey’s and Pennsylvania’s side. It calms me like nothing else, and while I needed that, I can’t help but nurse this nagging thought in the back of my mind that I wanted to still be angry.

I still wanted that fight, to beat the shit out this guy and then get off on self-defense because the simple act of blocking my car with any sort of malicious intent is immediately attempted assault and stalking, along with whatever else they’d throw at him, because a number of the police here in The City of No Homo But Some Homo Bro Love are pretty racist, too.

And I felt more than a little guilty. My girlfriend was there, and she could have been dragged into something serious. I made the best of a bad situation, but the way I said “I’m sorry” was with such vicious spite that I might as well have dropped an N-Bomb right on his face. I didn’t mean that, but all of the anger was there.

I’m not like that. I expect everyone to better themselves constantly, and it pisses me off that people are so unwilling to take that challenge and beat the shit out of it. It’s not a black thing, but it can be directed at black people. Just like a white person, or a Latino or Indian or Pakistani or any other race under the sun. Or religion. Or sexual preference. Do what you want, be who you are, but better yourself. I’m not a racist, but just having an altercation with a black guy, one where that dreaded word of words wasn’t even spoken, I feel racist.

I shouldn’t. It’s misplaced guilt. It’s bullshit. The only things I should do are seriously consider taking up a martial art as an aggression release and exercise, do my damnedest to control my occasionally wild temper, and maybe stop letting the Eagle fly as often.

But until I do, I’ve found out in two events over the past year (one briefly mentioned in the 3rd paragraph of this blog from last year , and this one from this very day) that I think I might be getting addicted to anger. I might be starting to fully feel this rush of either fighting or getting right up to that point, because I was buzzing off a natural high for hours after words. I never sang Megadeth, Journey, Cee-Lo Green and Pin-Up Went Down so loud, so well, so powerfully truck-shaking in my whole little life.

And on top of that, these two points in the past year of my life mark two of the strongest ticks on the seismograph of my existence that register the highest in making me feel like a full-blown man. I feel strong, capable, smarter, bolder and just plain better than I have in what turned out to be a pretty good 2010, but a total shit 2011.

I’ve had ulcers that I was told could actually be stomach cancer, and threw down over $3,000 I didn’t have to have the tests done. One of my best friends almost died. My mom almost died, and has since turned into someone I’m having trouble liking all that much. She was a hero before January, and now I have trouble even respecting her duplicitous nature. It kills me, and makes me feel like a weak, unable child. And that was just January and February. So punching that old man in the face after he swung on me last year, and having my own personal Cuban Missile Crisis with a racist piece of shit today are truly hallmarks of my life as a man.

I have vices. Pills, drinks, food, caffeine. I don’t smoke cigarettes, I don’t gamble regularly and never gamble much, I don’t fuck irresponsibly and I love everyone in my life. Fighting will not be on that side of the fence, though. Fighting, loving the idea of kicking an ass or getting my ass handed to me is a vice that can kill me as much as all the others, and easily more. In one shot. This is a dangerous mood, an interesting time. But a guy needs to feel like a man to truly be a man, to be things that people need from a capable, adult human being.

People fight all day, for all sorts of things. They say “choose your battles wisely,” but I think I’m going to go with “pick your fights hastily and prepare to lose, but know that you tried a lot, and that you made progress.”

Fights for careers, for respect, for acceptance of my work, for my life, my honor, my loves in this world and the beliefs I hold essential to who I am are fights worth picking over and over again. I’m ready to stop letting stuff slide…unless it’s stupid and frivolous. I’m going bold, not going dumb. And to quote some dumb, fun-to-me stuff I’ve been saying like a pull-string catchphrase on the back of a baby doll, “this is when the shit gets real.”

Finally.