#7 (deconstruction)
part three
ROADKILL THAT I SAW ON THE WAY TO KANSAS CITY
1. Squirrel
2. Wild turkey
3. What was a groundhog doing trying to cross the road?
4. Fallen raccoon who was being visited by another raccoon who was very much alive, darted herself out of harm's way as she saw my car cresting over the hill. I steered over the corpse as not to run her over a second time. Raccoons are scavengers but they're smart: I assumed she was there to pay her last respects to her friend
5. Snapping turtle sprawled on the curb who appeared as though he died from natural causes
6. Doe apparently dragged to the side of the road and covered with a dirty area rug, macabre and very nearly carnivalesque; maybe its own Shroud of Turin
7. Might have been a Pomeranian, or Shih Tzu
BILLBOARDS THAT I SAW ON THE WAY TO KANSAS CITY
1. ABORTION IS MURDER!!!
2. LOOKING FOR A NEW HOME? CALL SANDY TUCKER RE/MAX OF LIBERTY 816-781-925_
3. TRI-COUNTY PROPANE
4. 14.5+ ACRES AVAILABLE CALL REALTY EXECUTIVES 816-630-5177
5. ENJOY YOUR FREEDOM? SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! GOD BLESS AMERICA
Sparkle Ninja brand gum tastes like Strawberry Quik, at least what I remember Strawberry Quik to taste like since it's been such a long time. And I can't find anything I want to play through my iPod so I switch over to FM. Through the dial: COUNTRY, COUNTRY, HORRIBLE POP SONG, COMMERCIAL, ALTERNATIVE ROCK SONG I LIKED TEN YEARS AGO, static, COMMERCIAL, COMMERCIAL, INANE R&B, COUNTRY.
I'm thinking one thousand miles away through sunglasses. My teeth are sharp, I'm using them to scrape some of the dead skin on the inside of my cheek. I wonder how much more colorful my life would have been had I originally been raised in the orbit of another big city, San Francisco, The Big Apple...hell, even Chicago. Would I have been happier? Would it had inspired me to do big and better things with myself by now?
My car is filthy, I haven't washed it since the last warm spell from January. To the answers for my questions I decide: probably not. At least here primarily Baptist northwest Missouri the absence of culture forces me to create my own. And at my age I know myself far too well to understand I would have been mesmerized by the bright lights and the artists and eccentrics to ever be something that wouldn't have fallen in line with the city's already established vision. In fact, those places are already graveyards in their own right, crumbling memorials to the last American Century. From them nothing new has been born in at least twenty-five years, probably more.
It's here where anything is still possible. My home is post-America and gas is $2.52/gallon and climbing. The sky looks like Monet. A purple yellow pink haze of fresh wildflowers covers everything. It's time to ride.
Oh, but this was the worst meeting I've ever had the misfortune of having been deemed "required" by Microsoft Outlook to attend. Two hours of sitting in a leather chair, and that was the very best part of sitting in place for two hours. Everything else was a disaster. I don't know if the AC was on the fritz or maybe it was everybody in attendance expelling massive amounts of carbon dioxide from trying to stifle terminally-bored yawns that caused it to be hotter than the wages of sin within the 5th floor conference room, but it enhanced my dissatisfaction to nearly unparalled depths. Every last detail of building an insurance policy in the Fronttier system was dissected, discussed, fucked with, and from deep in the well of my heart I silently asked myself, begged myself: is this what I've been reduced to? Has shit really come down to this?
I lamented the death of my twenties, just for a moment or two.
Or maybe it should have received a proper burial at the very least.
It has a way of exhausting me in knowing that I am hopelessly the only person around who thinks the way that I think. At work, I don't know why we need to fix what isn't broken, especially when there are so many things out there that are broke that nobody so much as even notices. I would say something but I would invite many dirty looks, terse messages showing up in my inbox. Even when I'm not taking myself seriously I need these people to take me seriously. Unfortunately. When shortsightedness and absurdity smacks me square in the face with so many like-minded people agreeing with one another about all the wrong things, I resign myself to being the silent minority. Life feels safer that way.
Once the ordeal was over I scrambled out of the office building and ran into my car. The afternoon sun lent to a moment of quiet meditation but some of the voices of the meeting still rang in my ears. My elbow on the armrest and pursed lips and fingers combing through my hair and maybe I'm just not cut out for this, you know? But what else could I do? Probably nothing. So what else should I do? You need to die, just a little bit more, just enough.
And then a shot out of nowhere: just at that very moment it occurred to me how what the fuck handsome I was.
*****
It's weird how the human brain works. The human brain will tell you that it is a complex upon complex, mysterious and beautiful, a miracle of Nature or Creation or to whatever the brain will accredit its existence. And it tells you this only because it can. That moment of that afternoon, mine was checking me out. Does this ever happen to you? Is this just a defense mechanism, a way of bringing neurochemicals back in balance?
Fridays are casual so I was wearing a pair of distressed jeans and a light blue-on-green patterned dress shirt that wasn't tucked in because I never feel comfortable tucking shirts in. I liked the shape of my brow behind the pale of my brown tinted sunglasses and the length of my lashes, the sneer on my face framed by a beard of blonde-on-brown. I liked the way that silver compliments the tone of my skin. My messy hair just doing its job without much product or attention. My shoulders and my chest, even my neck. The wolfish look in my eyes that all men will have sometimes whether they're aware of it or not.
I could certainly be doing worse at my age, I thought. Shit.
It doesn't happen very often, not at all, to randomly feel as good about myself as I did that afternoon. People tell me how good looking I am often, probably more than what should be socially acceptable for someone of my age and station in society. But I don't believe them. Women approach me in unlikely places for unlikely reasons: shopping centers, the post office, Wal-Mart. And it's always stuff that you can tell that they already know. Do you think you could tell me what time it is? You look like a man who knows where things are, can you tell me how to get to _______? They ask me to jumpstart their cars and grant me a peck me on the cheek and a lingering waft of their perfume as a reward. But they'd do that for anyone. I get a phone number just about every time I make it down to Kansas City even if I'm looking for one or not, and whenever I'm with a group of people at a restaurant the waitress seems to always be looking at me as she explains what the specials are and what's on tap. But what of it?
Maybe it's in the way I carry myself, the polite-yet-clever style I use while going through the motions, especially lately, and I don't know why I'm doing it. I catch myself unwittingly using double entendres and squinting ever-slightly in their blue brown green eyes. In any event, it undermines how I normally feel about myself. All I am is white trash. People are only humoring me because they're afraid of me. I'm a loser. It all goes with the territory of knowing myself at my very worst, of being witness to myself at my most unflattering. I'm actually kind of gross. I grow hair from the ridges of both my ears that I actually have to shave, and then there's the kind growing out of my nose that I get too lazy a lot of times to attend to with a pair of tweezers, so whenever I breathe in my nostrils whistle. I have flat feet, size 12. Sometimes I get diarrhea after eating too much Chinese food, and maybe I get to where I need to go before the bell tolls, but maybe I can't.
I could go on.
*****
A BRIEF LIST OF THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE AS A KID BUT I DO LIKE NOW:
Beer
Spinach
Math
Getting in trouble
*****
And you know, that's it. That's all I have left to say. If it's at all possible to document the thought processes of a lonely thirty year-old man who works at an insurance company for the sake of posterity and future generations, well, if I haven't succeeded I think I've managed to do more on this subject than has yet to be achieved in human history. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be proud of me about this.
Surprisingly (at least to me) quite a lot has happened during the three weeks it took for me to pick and choose my current goings-on smorgasbord style. My haircut has grown out some and leveled off and no longer looks as obscene as it once did. The weird old guy at the coffeehouse must have caught wind of my instruction manual as he no longer approaches me while I'm trying to read the local alternative newsweekly. I went out with a Type C a couple of times until I decided to stop things before anybody got hurt. I even quit listening to Neko Case. All in all, shit's been pretty good these days.
And for those unwilling to read thousands of words about that I offer the abridged version:
While looking at this it can be ascertained that there are many things for me coming up on the horizon. I will be planning an expedition to find and recover my Hysteria Tour t-shirt very soon, and steps are being taken to prevent me from forgetting my obligatory bologna-and-ketchup sandwich and SlimFast. Also, I'm apparently getting a raise pretty soon. And the landlord is selling my apartment building which will nullify my lease, which will raise many other questions about where I want to be and what kind of lifestyle I want to live.
I might write more about these things, I might not. All Livejournal is for me at the moment is another way to have fun. Sometimes this comes in the form of tackling my most prominent bullshit, sometimes I guess it's more experimental. But it's whatever I want, just like everything else. My golden thirties are wide open and I wish I could find my Def Leppard t-shirt as this would really bring it all together.
Until next time I remain faithfully yours,
Also salutations upon salutations,
Jay Ouderkirk
Sunday, April 9, 2006
Excelsior Springs, Missouri
ROADKILL THAT I SAW ON THE WAY TO KANSAS CITY
1. Squirrel
2. Wild turkey
3. What was a groundhog doing trying to cross the road?
4. Fallen raccoon who was being visited by another raccoon who was very much alive, darted herself out of harm's way as she saw my car cresting over the hill. I steered over the corpse as not to run her over a second time. Raccoons are scavengers but they're smart: I assumed she was there to pay her last respects to her friend
5. Snapping turtle sprawled on the curb who appeared as though he died from natural causes
6. Doe apparently dragged to the side of the road and covered with a dirty area rug, macabre and very nearly carnivalesque; maybe its own Shroud of Turin
7. Might have been a Pomeranian, or Shih Tzu
BILLBOARDS THAT I SAW ON THE WAY TO KANSAS CITY
1. ABORTION IS MURDER!!!
2. LOOKING FOR A NEW HOME? CALL SANDY TUCKER RE/MAX OF LIBERTY 816-781-925_
3. TRI-COUNTY PROPANE
4. 14.5+ ACRES AVAILABLE CALL REALTY EXECUTIVES 816-630-5177
5. ENJOY YOUR FREEDOM? SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! GOD BLESS AMERICA
Sparkle Ninja brand gum tastes like Strawberry Quik, at least what I remember Strawberry Quik to taste like since it's been such a long time. And I can't find anything I want to play through my iPod so I switch over to FM. Through the dial: COUNTRY, COUNTRY, HORRIBLE POP SONG, COMMERCIAL, ALTERNATIVE ROCK SONG I LIKED TEN YEARS AGO, static, COMMERCIAL, COMMERCIAL, INANE R&B, COUNTRY.
I'm thinking one thousand miles away through sunglasses. My teeth are sharp, I'm using them to scrape some of the dead skin on the inside of my cheek. I wonder how much more colorful my life would have been had I originally been raised in the orbit of another big city, San Francisco, The Big Apple...hell, even Chicago. Would I have been happier? Would it had inspired me to do big and better things with myself by now?
My car is filthy, I haven't washed it since the last warm spell from January. To the answers for my questions I decide: probably not. At least here primarily Baptist northwest Missouri the absence of culture forces me to create my own. And at my age I know myself far too well to understand I would have been mesmerized by the bright lights and the artists and eccentrics to ever be something that wouldn't have fallen in line with the city's already established vision. In fact, those places are already graveyards in their own right, crumbling memorials to the last American Century. From them nothing new has been born in at least twenty-five years, probably more.
It's here where anything is still possible. My home is post-America and gas is $2.52/gallon and climbing. The sky looks like Monet. A purple yellow pink haze of fresh wildflowers covers everything. It's time to ride.
Oh, but this was the worst meeting I've ever had the misfortune of having been deemed "required" by Microsoft Outlook to attend. Two hours of sitting in a leather chair, and that was the very best part of sitting in place for two hours. Everything else was a disaster. I don't know if the AC was on the fritz or maybe it was everybody in attendance expelling massive amounts of carbon dioxide from trying to stifle terminally-bored yawns that caused it to be hotter than the wages of sin within the 5th floor conference room, but it enhanced my dissatisfaction to nearly unparalled depths. Every last detail of building an insurance policy in the Fronttier system was dissected, discussed, fucked with, and from deep in the well of my heart I silently asked myself, begged myself: is this what I've been reduced to? Has shit really come down to this?
I lamented the death of my twenties, just for a moment or two.
Or maybe it should have received a proper burial at the very least.
It has a way of exhausting me in knowing that I am hopelessly the only person around who thinks the way that I think. At work, I don't know why we need to fix what isn't broken, especially when there are so many things out there that are broke that nobody so much as even notices. I would say something but I would invite many dirty looks, terse messages showing up in my inbox. Even when I'm not taking myself seriously I need these people to take me seriously. Unfortunately. When shortsightedness and absurdity smacks me square in the face with so many like-minded people agreeing with one another about all the wrong things, I resign myself to being the silent minority. Life feels safer that way.
Once the ordeal was over I scrambled out of the office building and ran into my car. The afternoon sun lent to a moment of quiet meditation but some of the voices of the meeting still rang in my ears. My elbow on the armrest and pursed lips and fingers combing through my hair and maybe I'm just not cut out for this, you know? But what else could I do? Probably nothing. So what else should I do? You need to die, just a little bit more, just enough.
And then a shot out of nowhere: just at that very moment it occurred to me how what the fuck handsome I was.
*****
It's weird how the human brain works. The human brain will tell you that it is a complex upon complex, mysterious and beautiful, a miracle of Nature or Creation or to whatever the brain will accredit its existence. And it tells you this only because it can. That moment of that afternoon, mine was checking me out. Does this ever happen to you? Is this just a defense mechanism, a way of bringing neurochemicals back in balance?
Fridays are casual so I was wearing a pair of distressed jeans and a light blue-on-green patterned dress shirt that wasn't tucked in because I never feel comfortable tucking shirts in. I liked the shape of my brow behind the pale of my brown tinted sunglasses and the length of my lashes, the sneer on my face framed by a beard of blonde-on-brown. I liked the way that silver compliments the tone of my skin. My messy hair just doing its job without much product or attention. My shoulders and my chest, even my neck. The wolfish look in my eyes that all men will have sometimes whether they're aware of it or not.
I could certainly be doing worse at my age, I thought. Shit.
It doesn't happen very often, not at all, to randomly feel as good about myself as I did that afternoon. People tell me how good looking I am often, probably more than what should be socially acceptable for someone of my age and station in society. But I don't believe them. Women approach me in unlikely places for unlikely reasons: shopping centers, the post office, Wal-Mart. And it's always stuff that you can tell that they already know. Do you think you could tell me what time it is? You look like a man who knows where things are, can you tell me how to get to _______? They ask me to jumpstart their cars and grant me a peck me on the cheek and a lingering waft of their perfume as a reward. But they'd do that for anyone. I get a phone number just about every time I make it down to Kansas City even if I'm looking for one or not, and whenever I'm with a group of people at a restaurant the waitress seems to always be looking at me as she explains what the specials are and what's on tap. But what of it?
Maybe it's in the way I carry myself, the polite-yet-clever style I use while going through the motions, especially lately, and I don't know why I'm doing it. I catch myself unwittingly using double entendres and squinting ever-slightly in their blue brown green eyes. In any event, it undermines how I normally feel about myself. All I am is white trash. People are only humoring me because they're afraid of me. I'm a loser. It all goes with the territory of knowing myself at my very worst, of being witness to myself at my most unflattering. I'm actually kind of gross. I grow hair from the ridges of both my ears that I actually have to shave, and then there's the kind growing out of my nose that I get too lazy a lot of times to attend to with a pair of tweezers, so whenever I breathe in my nostrils whistle. I have flat feet, size 12. Sometimes I get diarrhea after eating too much Chinese food, and maybe I get to where I need to go before the bell tolls, but maybe I can't.
I could go on.
*****
A BRIEF LIST OF THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE AS A KID BUT I DO LIKE NOW:
Beer
Spinach
Math
Getting in trouble
*****
And you know, that's it. That's all I have left to say. If it's at all possible to document the thought processes of a lonely thirty year-old man who works at an insurance company for the sake of posterity and future generations, well, if I haven't succeeded I think I've managed to do more on this subject than has yet to be achieved in human history. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be proud of me about this.
Surprisingly (at least to me) quite a lot has happened during the three weeks it took for me to pick and choose my current goings-on smorgasbord style. My haircut has grown out some and leveled off and no longer looks as obscene as it once did. The weird old guy at the coffeehouse must have caught wind of my instruction manual as he no longer approaches me while I'm trying to read the local alternative newsweekly. I went out with a Type C a couple of times until I decided to stop things before anybody got hurt. I even quit listening to Neko Case. All in all, shit's been pretty good these days.
And for those unwilling to read thousands of words about that I offer the abridged version:
While looking at this it can be ascertained that there are many things for me coming up on the horizon. I will be planning an expedition to find and recover my Hysteria Tour t-shirt very soon, and steps are being taken to prevent me from forgetting my obligatory bologna-and-ketchup sandwich and SlimFast. Also, I'm apparently getting a raise pretty soon. And the landlord is selling my apartment building which will nullify my lease, which will raise many other questions about where I want to be and what kind of lifestyle I want to live.
I might write more about these things, I might not. All Livejournal is for me at the moment is another way to have fun. Sometimes this comes in the form of tackling my most prominent bullshit, sometimes I guess it's more experimental. But it's whatever I want, just like everything else. My golden thirties are wide open and I wish I could find my Def Leppard t-shirt as this would really bring it all together.
Until next time I remain faithfully yours,
Also salutations upon salutations,
Jay Ouderkirk
Sunday, April 9, 2006
Excelsior Springs, Missouri