Pompadoured

I will stare at gadget blogs I have already read that day and think “I have already read this” for a few seconds before closing Safari. I will then stack the papers on my desk very neatly, and open up the egg of Silly Putty I keep in one of the cubbies on my desk and make a wiener or a ball out of it. There are always one or two pieces of paper around to represent things that I need to do that I have not done, which makes me feel unproductive and weak. It takes me upwards of fifteen minutes to actually begin work, but once I start I work until something happens. Maybe the baby will wake up, or Jenny will ask me to do something, so I will stop. I will also stop once I feel like I will fuck the poem up if I do anything else to it, and this occurs, usually, after I fuck the poem up by doing something dumb to it. I hit command+z a few times and then command+s once and close the window by clicking the red button at the top.

I took Zicam and then I took asprin. I took vitamin C pills. I took a lot of other things. My body aches. I drank an Emergen-C. I watched MTV Cribs, and wondered if the celebrities still lived in the same houses. Right now, I get random pains in my body.
I’m listening to Gui Borrato. I don’t know what I should be thinking about. Earlier, I laid with my head under a pillow and tried to meditate. I kept saying “nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing” trying to clear my head. And then I said “pretty green curtains, pretty green curtains, pretty green curtains, pretty green curtains” because we have pretty green curtains in our bedroom. Jenny was taking a shower. I would fall asleep for a few seconds, and then the fan would blow some cold air on my face, and that air would go into my nose and dry it out, and I would feel worse.

I slept upstairs on the futon because Jenny was snoring loudly. The upstairs was hot, because if the heater is on, the air upstairs becomes warm and thick. I took the baby monitor with me. I tried to sleep, but sat in front of my computer and read reviews of 50 Cent’s new videogame where he goes to the Middle East and fucks shit up with G-Unit. I changed the lightbulb in the lamp by the futon, because it was a black light and I can’t read with a black light. Royal woke up and started crying, so I went downstairs and tried to take his temperature. Out of three thermometers in the house, only the one you stick up the butt works. I gave up on taking his temperature, because the butt is complicated and we did it not long before, and I held him for about fifteen minutes until he was calm and asleep again. I went back upstairs, twittered, and fell asleep. At eleven he started crying again, and I woke up in ‘I need to do something’ panic mode, went to see when Jenny last gave him Tylenol and how much, tried to take his temperature with the non-butt thermometers (unsuccessfully), gave him Tylenol, held him close, and put him back to sleep. In the morning I got really worried when he didn’t make any noise into the baby monitor, and held it up to my ear for like three minutes.

It gets oily, but it remains luxurious. Sometimes I will roll down the window in my Honda, and take my hat off. It makes me feel like a pony running really fast. I feel really important and distant from people when I wear my sunglasses and let my unwashed hair fall over them, like I know really cool shit that you don’t, and you hate me for it, but not really. You envy me. Also, I have gotten a little rounder in the past year, so I feel a little like Rick Rubin behind a soundboard working on a new Slayer album when I type poems about commercial armageddon in my text editor. My filthy hair helps me feel confident when I pick at the mole on the back of my head while I stare at my computer screen, and I somehow rip it off, but don’t care because my hair is already dirty and blood isn’t that big of a deal. My hair is oily, but it remains luxurious, even when the back part is bloody.

I typed some edits to a poem, and turned up the volume on my speakers. I switched windows to my browser, and pasted some text in the window. I adjusted my seat, so that I was more reclined than usual. I adjusted my pants, because my junk was in a awkward position. Bun B said something about marijuana, and I remembered the good-looking glass bong I had seven years ago, but broke on the bottom of a city trash can when I decided to stop smoking weed. I was feeling hard, like the edits to my poem were good, and tingling in a way that recognized my place in the world and my personal relationship with rap music; reconciling those disparate parts of my consciousness into one solid thing for a very small period of time. I put my Nikes up on the coffee table in the office. I checked my email and turned the volume up. Jenny was shopping for dresses online behind me, even though we decided not to buy things online anymore.

I woke up, and I read the news on my phone in the fold-out bed in my parent’s barn. I thought about politics, and felt cold, and worried about scorpions on the concrete floor. My son talked to himself for a while. I got up in the middle of the night to open the door to his room, worried about scorpions. My dad warned me about the scorpions. I read the news some more. I thought about politics, and walked around the bottom floor of my parent’s barn in my underwear. I went to the bathroom and looked at my stomach in the mirror and thought about politics and hit my stomach in an unconfident way with my hand. I put my clothes on from the day before, and I went to pick my son up out of his Pack ‘n Play. I thought about politics on my way to the Pack ‘n Play. I think I stopped thinking about politics when I picked my son up out of the Pack ‘n Play and he was really happy, kicking and squealing loudly.

I thought Royal had a dirty diaper but, like any dad, I just kept driving. Royal usually sleeps in the car, usually with his elephant blanket and his pacifier, and usually he’s out within the first twenty minutes of being on the freeway. He kept fidgeting, throwing his rattle/ring toy on the ground, and waiting for me to pick it up. I did lots of the thing where you dig around the backseat blindly while trying not to swerve off of the road. I decided, responsibly, to pull over into Love’s Truckstop and change his diaper. Love’s has an Arby’s attached, and I wondered if it was open at ten in the morning. There were lots of cars in the parking lot of the truckstop, but there were only truckers standing around. I could tell they were truckers, because they were standing on the commercial truck refueling side of Love’s and not the non-commercial side. Truckers watched me pull Royal out of the back seat, and throw him into the front. He had a clean diaper. Truckers watched me put his pants on, and put him back in his car seat. I wanted to get a Diet Coke from Arby’s, but I decided against it because the truckers were still watching me. There were a lot of them.

I walked in and two people immediately asked if I needed help, one was the lady behind the copy counter, and the other was a guy with what seemed like five name tags. I walked around looking at printers at first, looking at the largest printers they have. I pressed some buttons on the printers. The guy with the fifty name tags looked at me like I was lying to him when I said “just browsing” less than a minute before. I walked by the computer section and looked at an iPod dock that is also a table lamp. There were matching staplers underneath it, on another shelf. I walked to the three-ring binder section, and pulled out a big pink three-ring binder. I put the binder back, and went to look for medium-sized binder clips. I stopped to look at a premium line of pens, highlighters, and dry-erase markers. They all had really nice packaging and a dumb name in a futuristic font. I found the binder clips, and felt like they wouldn’t help me organize my papers well enough. I walked back to the three-ring binder section, past the premium pens, and grabbed a maroon three-ring binder. I then spent five minutes looking at three-hole punches on the next aisle, some that cost over fifty dollars. I bought an eleven dollar one, because it had a sturdy construction, and was made by a brand I knew. The man with five-hundred name tags checked me out. He asked for my ID when I handed him my credit card, and stared at my face for an uncomfortable amount of time.

I smoked the cigar Jereme Dean gave me. Sam Pink and I talked about not being an awful person. There was a man across the street in a hooded sweatshirt with the hood over his head. He had his back against the wall so he could see oncoming traffic. I would see random people I knew from the internet inside. Molly Gaudry wanted us to come in, but I was busy making myself sick with the cigar. The people outside were talkative, and I was enjoying the cold weather on the street. Jereme talked-up a girl with a pretty face. There was a building across the street, and the second story looked like it was being supported by a single exterior beam. Two large women pulled up in a Dodge Magnum along the curb and motioned for me to come over. They giggled for a minute and asked me where they could find a pipe for weed. My first thought was to ask Sam, since he lives in Chicago. I motioned for him, and both Sam and Jereme walked over to the car. In what seemed like the most confusing exchange four people could ever have, Jereme translated the giggles and awkwardness for Sam, and Sam was able to help them find a head shop nearby. I paid the cover eventually, so I could go tell everyone we were leaving, and ask if they wanted to go with us. I found Blake Butler, Elizabeth Ellen, and Aaron Burch, and they seemed ready to go. Mike Young was somewhere in all of this. I had too much Tequila and the cigar made me queasy. There was a band playing on a stage, and the large audience packed into the front. A few minutes later I got into a cab with Blythe Winslow and Blake, and we had one of those long cab rides where you’re not sure if you’re going in the right direction or if someone is going to throw-up out of the window.

Sam Pink, pulling the cover off of a decorative pillow, said the mezcal tasted like shit. I thought it tasted a little like seawater but sweeter. I found the mezcal in an upscale liquor store with hardwood floors and tall shelves of liquor spanning the entire length of the building. Blake and I split the cost. The mezcal came with a woven cover that was the wealthy Mexican equivalent of a brown bag. The cover had bright red and blue in a zig-zag pattern. Once I got past the seawater taste, the mezcal made me very wobbly and everything seemed much brighter. I carried it in a cheap plastic flask with an aluminum screw top that I bought at the upscale liquor store. We waited for a train, and I stood near the edge of the platform taking swigs out of my flask, offering it to anyone who looked interested. When I told people it was mezcal they would make ugly faces and decline. Later, and for no reason, Blake grabbed a foot-high stack of sheets from the hotel laundry service and dumped them on the floor of my hotel room. I left the bottle, the cover, and the cheap plastic flask in a small trash can along the wall of my hotel room, underneath the only window.

It was about an island. The animals on the island were birds, and sometimes they were sea lions. The birds would be up high, overlooking a large rock-filled beach. At one point a hawk-like bird, I can’t remember what kind of bird, swooped down towards an iguana. The iguana was running very fast, hurling its left and right sides alternately forward, barely coming into contact with the rocks on the beach. The hawk-like bird was very far away, and the narrator said that the bird took a very long time looking over the various groups of iguanas on the beach, which were scattered along the coastline, to spot an iguana far enough away from the larger group to be easy prey. The hawk-like bird grabbed the iguana’s head and squeezed it until the iguana stopped wiggling. Later, the television show talked about sea lions. The sea lions would, at times, lay in the shallow water on their backs. They looked really relaxed. Jereme fell asleep on my bed, at some point, I think. Gena pulled open a few of the pedicure tools she bought, and was frustrated that there was no pan big enough to put people’s feet in.

Daniel Bailey and I got on a train and rode for a while. Then we got off of the train, and walked though a steel, full-sized turnstile. We took a cab to a Seven Eleven. I bought one of those creamy Starbucks tallboys and a jumbo Tabasco-flavored Slim Jim, and did them both over the trash can by the entrance to the store like some fat-assed junky with his calorie fix. I think I was drinking the tequila that I bought with Blake Butler, too. The combination of all these things, if it is even possible to describe, pulled my stomach out of my mouth and rubbed it along the parking lot as I walked in circles trying to figure out where the fuck we were going. I was ready to party hard, I think. We walked three-quarters of a mile in the wrong direction, coming to a corner with two Mexican restaurants. Both restaurants looked like Italian restaurants that realized bad Midwestern Mexican food with too little cheese and lots of thin tomato sauce pretending to be chili gravy was a better investment than half-way decent Italian food. When we finally made it to the bar, twenty minutes later. A fat man in an orange shirt, and a woman with a big chin and a clipboard made us wait outside because of the fire code. The bar had surpassed capacity. A line formed behind us. We felt like we started something important. The fat man in the orange shirt waved us though after five annoying but funny minutes of confusion, and we entered the bar. The bar played, initially, a retarded mix of country music any fat-jawed dumbass from Texas, like myself, would be ashamed of loosing on the world. I think I ran over three women on my way to the over-crowded bar which, thankfully, I was tall enough to reach. Daniel and I slammed beers, and refilled our glasses with the flasks we kept throughout AWP. We were the typical ‘drunk long-haired hobos by the on-fire trash can’ of the club. We met an old friend of mine there and it was nice to see him. Everybody else was clean-cut and hiding their STDs well. They played dirty rap, including that song about ejaculating onto the backs of beautiful women. Men in orange shirts would walk by every five minutes and try to take the glasses we were using for our liquor, and we would quickly grab them and hold them close to our hobo bodies, shaking our heads like hobos protecting infant hobo children. I danced awkwardly for a while, pausing only to guzzle my tequila and to stampede small people on my way to get more beer. We stumbled out onto the street an hour or so later, caught a cab back to the train, and chatted drunkenly, but earnestly, back to the hotel, meeting Blake and a nice collection of other too-drunk but friendly people in the Hilton lobby.

The Cuban sandwich I ate with Shane Jones had ham and pork, and maybe another kind of pig. I’m not really sure how many kinds of pig were packed into the sandwich, but it was an number more than one and not exceeding four. The meat was tender. The bread was toasted on both sides, and the sandwich itself was flattened like it was cooked between two hot, small-sized bricks. There was swiss cheese on the sandwich, and it came out of the sides, but only slightly, inoffensively, seemingly just to announce the presence of cheese on the sandwich and not actually come into contact with your fingers. This made the sandwich very edible. Pickles were the only vegetables on the sandwich, if pickles are still considered a vegetable. They were the crunchy, ridged kind of pickles, like you would find on a typical hamburger at a ballpark or community pool. I’m pretty sure the Cuban sandwich I ate also had avocado mayonnaise on it. Shane’s BLT sandwich had avocado mayonnaise for sure, so maybe I’m just projecting his sandwich onto mine, but I’m almost 70% positive my Cuban sandwich had a thin layer as well. The mayonnaise was tangy in the way that you would notice something was special, non-regular about the mayonnaise, but subtle enough to not actually place that special taste into the realm of avocado. I ate the sandwich quickly, with a bag of thinly-cooked garlic plantain chips and lemonade from a can. Shane bought us both coffee afterwards, while I went to pee in the brightly colored, but sterile hostel next door.

I have difficulty with what producing and consuming products means for people and the environment, and what exactly my influence as a consumer is.
There’s also a really abstract distance between products and people that bothers me.
Most people are ignorant of production, the implications for the people that refine the raw material for products and the people that fashion the raw materials into consumable goods.
I struggle with it, because I’m conflicted at times about the necessity of a great deal of what is produced and the benefits that production brings for people, and what those benefits exactly are.
Eating meat is something similar for me. People eat hamburgers and never put a face with the sandwich. They don’t know what it’s like to take life and consume it, and as a result have no actual knowledge of what they are feeding themselves.
I think it’s necessary to point out that while we are a highly conflicted people in terms of political ideologies, individuals in America are not individually conflicted. People have beliefs that may demonstrate a general knowledge of critical issues, but their positions do not reflect the subjective nature of those issues, or an actual knowledge of action and consequence.
Manufacturing creates jobs. It is important for jobs to exist. It creates jobs when people buy things, and as a consequence the standard of living for people, overall, is able to rise. There are great benefits to this process, no matter how necessary it is. There are also dark consequences for those benefits, like corruption, abuse, and environmental destruction.
The forces of industrialized man conflict with the forces of nature.
Recycling, wearing organic cotton, and praying nightly to some Wiccan god will only go so far when the population is growing at such an incredible rate. To think that we can somehow control nature and reverse our course abruptly is not only arrogant, but unrealistic in every way.
I think “fuck nature” pretty often. Nature will destroy us when the time is right. To worry about the survival of our species is a waste of time.
I’m most content when I don’t care about anything but my immediate surroundings, my family, and my friends. I feel like some sort of Dark Lord of Sharper Image when I think about the impact my purchasing decisions make in the world.

I spend all of my blogging time on Twitter now. I don’t feel bad about it. I will probably blog here when I feel like real blogging again, which is inevitable, but right now I only feel like Twittering. It’s easier. I can think less and interact more.
Also, if you’re not down with Twitter, I don’t care. Shut up.
http://twitter.com/pompadoured

We made a backpack for Jimmy, and strapped it on him. It was January, and there was no snow. We were in Texas. The ice in the trees was melting. Eva wore too much makeup.
I called our insurance agent to see if we were covered, and we were. The Explorer was running. Jimmy was cold, the dog was in the backyard, and Eva had her own ideas.
The earth was still rotating slow enough for us not to fall off. Things were okay. Much later, on the side of the road, in the dark, I realized that I left my shampoo at home. The radio was on. It was January 18, 2003, and I was about to start walking.
Headlights passed by, and Jimmy was curled up with his mother, looking at her fingernails. Eva had her other hand in his backpack, digging for a flashlight or some gummy worms. It was cold. The dog was in the passenger seat. I made a sign with my hands that was like ‘stay right there, and don’t go anywhere.’

I’ve got some news. You can’t know it yet.

I’m part of “bonus content” with Matthew Simmons in the new issue of Hobart. We review some flash games that we like.
I also have a new website that I’ve been working on with some people. It is “bonus content” for internet literature. I’m not going to tell you where it is, because we are just starting. Other people have started to link slowly. I will link slowly.

He’s probably the most obnoxious person to look at in the entire world. I am frightened by his love of bongos, the University of Texas, and not wearing a shirt. His site plays reggae and is 100% Flash.
And truthfully, even with all of those negatives, I am not above loving McConaughey. I laugh out-loud every time I read one of his ridiculous McConaughey-styled proverbs, and I will likely buy some piece of shit from his celebrity fashion brand J. K. LIVIN, because it’s too incredible not to. He plans on selling Koozies and flip-flops, which are like my two most important life items.
In short, like The Hills, The Cheesecake Factory, and gin, I never cease to be blown-the-fuck away by how awesome McConaughey is, even when I try to forget about his existence.
The Texas Monthly article describes an encounter with McConaughey in his Hollywood mansion where, by a pool overlooking “half of Los Angeles,” McConaughey talks at-length about how great the ice from Sonic is, and how it took him a long time to find an ice maker for his home that would make the same ice that Sonic makes.
And surprisingly, as of this morning, I really want an ice maker that makes the Sonic ice. It is my new life goal. That ice is incredible. It takes a McConaughey to add something like that to my life.
It takes a McConaughey to teach a man like me how to fly like a sparrow on the wings of freedom, man.
Rock on, Earth.