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Adventures in Online Dating Pt. 4

In 1998 the Internet was an awful place. Well, in retrospect it was. I can’t recall what was on the Internet at the time but I kind of remember it like this:  Free e-mail, online forums where people gave their horrible opinion on everything, pornography, chat rooms, pornography, news, pornography, personal websites where people would put up links to places like “YAHOO.COM” among pictures of their car, some sort of horrible flash thing that played music, and a giant stat counter in comic sans (that usually read “044”). Somehow though, I managed to meet some women. I can’t remember the format of Yahoo Personals in 1998 or if that’s what I had, but I ended up meeting a girl from the South Shore named Ann.

Ann was from Florida; this should have been my first sign that this might not be the best idea; also she lived on the South Shore. I lived on the North Shore. I remember we exchanged pictures. I’m not sure how though. I didn’t have a digital camera at the time and who knows what picture I may have sent her. I do remember seeing a picture of her and thinking she was okay looking.

I was not really a bar person and the relationships I had been in up to this point were mostly via friends of friends and that kind of thing. The idea of dating women from the Internet sounded interesting to me. In my opinion you could at least spend some time getting to know each other. I don’t necessarily agree with this at this point. Tone in writing is hard to read in small grammatically challenged text messages and brief one and two line chat conversations at this point. I have experienced a number of let’s-call-them-disagreements because the tone of a message was read wrong. It truly is just better to talk to a human being face to face. I was kind of a pussy though. This seemed easy to me, less stressful.

Ann and I talked on the phone and she had an accent that was a dead ringer for Jodie Foster. Some of the things we had in common: we smoked marijuana, we smoked cigarettes, and we were single.

After a few conversations we decided to meet. I would drive down to her place on the South Shore, which frankly, is a pain in the fucking ass. At this point in my life, to drive to the South Shore for a date I would have to be put up in a hotel for the night, and the date would have to look like Marcia Brady, or Joyce DeWitt. Like most women I’ve ever dated, Ann lived in one of those ugly two story brick apartment buildings. This may have been my first visit to one of these “single woman with cat(s)” apartments that I would frequent for years after.  These apartments are all the same at this point. The same furniture in every one, no remnants of past men, a few cat toys strewn about on the floor, a number of CD’s that sit on a shelf writing a biography for your eyes.

Ann greeted me at the door and gave me a little hug. She was kind of dressed like a dude, or a lesbian. A flannel shirt with a tank top under it, jeans, you know. I met her cat and as it turns out the cat ended up being a little more interesting. I did not know the area so I had her direct us to places to eat and whatever other place of interest we needed to see. I went out with Ann four or five times. Each time we hung out a dinner was involved. Each time she ordered a chicken finger dinner. Four chicken finger dinners in what, a two-month period? A red flag went off after the first chicken finger dinner. I mean, really? Chicken fingers are great and all, but you should never eat a plate of chicken fingers in front of another person. If you are ever in a situation where you are eating a chicken finger plate in front of another human being you are probably on your way to a NASCAR race, or somewhere in New Hampshire.

On this first date we went to eat at some chain place where it was a long non-conversation about nothing at all. As it turned out we had all the conversations we would ever need to have over the phone. Ann was painfully shy and a pretty boring person. After dinner we drove around the South Shore, which was okay. It just looks and feels like the North Shore except you have no idea where you are going. The beaches seemed a little better. We made our way to a beach and walked and I had a one-sided conversation. She suggested we go back to her place to get high. We go back and end up playing with her cat for a little while. Her talking to her cat bums me out a little bit. She had recently moved to Massachusetts from Florida to deal with an ill grandmother and stayed. I don’t think she had many friends beyond that cat and “some of the folks at the call center” How many lonely chicken dinners on Friday nights with the cat, five hundred cigarettes and a sink full of an odd amount of dishes has Ann endured?

Ann suggested we play Yahtzee. For a minute I pinch myself and wonder if I just woke up at my aunts house in 1981, but no I’m here in the present on a date with this new girl, high as a kite on a couch…about to play Yahtzee. The Yahtzee ended up being a little more fun than I had remembered. I mean, not as fun as sexual intercourse, but it was a first date anyway.

We had a few more dates. She ended up being a little more talkative but us hanging out turned out to just be someone to get fucked up with and do some adult, non-Yahtzee type stuff…an hour away from where I lived. What tiny little spark we had kind of faded out before it even ignited really. At one point I went away for a week trip and when I came back I remember her telling me she really missed me and I made some sort of cold comment. Shortly after maybe the fifth time we hung out I broke it off with Ann…via e-mail.  The only way I guess I can justify this is it was early on in the life of the Internet so maybe I didn’t know this was a weak move? Yeah that’s it.

This would be my first of a number of “Internet dating” situations I’d get involved in. In retrospect most of them were good. The longest relationship I’ve ever been in (7 years) was with someone I met online and we are still good friends. The last real serious but brief relationship was also with someone I met online. The difference between these relationships and these random dates is that I met the long-term women without the dating stigma attached at first. It’s pretty impossible at this point, at least for me, to get thrown in the fire with a new person and adjust to their life and my life. It’s harder at this age as well since most folks are pretty much how they are going to be forever. Some of my close friends have suggested that I go on more “bad dates” like my first two I wrote about because they gave me material to write about. While this sounds enticing I don’t really have it in me to purposely seek out women I know I am not going to get along with just for something to write about. It’s obviously shallow and I’m not necessarily made of money to go on a bunch of bad dates. Well then, there are still more of these.

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1035 – Intro/Pre-Laid Off Life in “The Music Business” Pt. 1

Intro

In early 2008 I was laid off from my job. I didn’t work again until almost three years later, or 1,035 days later. Not something I’m proud of but also, who gives a shit really? The government gave me money for two years of that, other times I made money by selling all sorts of collectible stuff, gambling and somehow managing to have every single person I know buy me at least one meal (I swear I’ll buy them all a meal soon).

At the end of the day, I had some great experiences as well as some horrible ones. I moved to Los Angeles and then back to the Boston area, had a couple of significant relationships end, old friends and family members die, quit smoking and above all sat around and pretty much did nothing.

These writings will cover those times, as well as some of the times leading up to being laid off, and the adjusting back to life as a normal working person. When I was hired for my current job I mentioned to a friend how crazy it had been not working for two years, she informed me it was close to three years. I swear I have a strong work ethic, you’ll see.


Pre-Laid Off Life in “The Music Business” Pt. 1

Sure I worked for a pretty prestigious, famous independent record label for a decade, but really this job could have been any job. When you work in fulfillment or service it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling, music or paper towels. It’s a product. I never  really considered this working “in the music business”. My whole life has been around the music business since my dad has been in it since before I was born and still is, the vast majority of my friends are musicians or have something to do with it, I’ve played music, recorded music, released music and just spent time immersed in it in some way for as long as I can remember. That part of me is more “music business”,  this job was just a job…it just happened to also be a record label.  People who work at record labels or in the business in general are pretty gross. While telling the world how awful it is to steal their music they themselves pretty much never pay for music whether recorded or live. There is an entitlement in the music business there that is way beyond art and what music should be about. It’s a different place than it used to be, and as cliche as it sounds, the DIY/underground is where you’re going to find people who are truly doing it for their love of music. The good people who worked with me at the label were these people. Life there would have been awful if it wasn’t for them.

The company I worked for was an independent record label in the Boston area. I’ll refer to the company as “Square Records” since the higher ups were just that, a bunch of fucking squares. The label had a reputation of putting out quality music, also of being a shitty place to work. There were obvious perks to working there. Aside from a small handful of folks that were short lived, the vast majority of people I worked with were great people and remain at the very least friends on whatever the latest social network is right now. Anytime I run into these folks in person it’s great. We spent a lot of good and bad times together. As with any job there was a network of people you associate with that are “in the know”. The ones you complain about work with, talk about other people with, go to lunch with and maybe even hang out with outside of work. These are the people that made going to work everyday okay. In general this place wasn’t as horrible a place to work as I might make it out to be, but how boring would that be to read about?

In close to eleven years I held a few different positions there. Mostly my positions had something to do with fulfillment and direct to consumer sales and customer service. For a good chunk of this time I somehow got promoted into something I’ll never do again: managing a group of people. Everyone who worked under me was pretty cool, we had a nice tight knit group and I really have to say I miss working with them all. Even the woman I fired that one time.

One thing that set the company apart from other record labels was Square Records was a union shop. For a brief period I even became a Union Steward. I kind of got talked into it by fellow employees and then when I discovered a girl I had a slight crush on was also a steward, I joined. Unfortunately I was painfully shy and socially awkward and she had a boyfriend so nothing ever happened there. If someone was disciplined at work or fired I had to “represent” them. My first “case” was the firing of the head Union Steward who had been with the company for years. A recently hired General Manager pretty much fired him for nothing and I had to help him fight it. Even though I got involved with the union for other reasons once I realized how serious of a job I had it became more interesting and serious to me. A few years later I would end up in contract negotiation meetings on the union side of the table up against some of the higher ups including my own boss. Listening to grown men say right to your face that giving people a five cents raise on their hourly wage once a year was okay was beyond disgusting. Eventually I somehow managed to get myself into a position where I negotiated myself out of my job and into a management position. This is when things got real fun.

I was kind of the lead customer service guy in my department. Now I was the manager. Our little group had become pretty tight knit so it was a little difficult having to now be the boss of people who I considered my friends. With the mixture of my employees being union employees and my boss being very detail oriented when it came time to do yearly performance reviews I had to be extra detailed on everything. Dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s. Making sure I justified why this particular person deserved a fifteen cent raise. Reviewing people’s work performance might be the single worst thing one can do. For one thing, you are in control of if someone is going to be getting more money and how much. This is a lot of pressure for someone with no managerial experience whatsoever. My boss was a cool guy if not a little nerdy. He was into auto racing and used a lot of racing metaphors in his management and in training me to become a better manager. I still use some of his ideas to this day, well aside from that time he ran through the office with a big checkered flag because we had a good month in sales.

Oh yeah, it should be noted that during my whole time employed at Square Records I came into work high on marijuana probably every single day aside from maybe ten days out of ten years. There were quite a few people working there that were doing the same thing. Some of them managers. Since my initial position at the company was pretty much mindless warehouse work I was able to get away with being mindless most of the time. I somehow managed to get things done every day, even if it meant delegating it to other people so I could check Facebook, I mean Myspace…or maybe it was Friendster. My boss even told me once his goal for me was to have everything delegated out so I could just put my feet up on the desk and do nothing.

“Wow, management sounds intense!” I thought to myself

The warehouse was a hot disgusting place to work. In the summers it was often just as hot if not hotter than it was outside. Since there was a union that promoted from within, when a coveted office job was posted warehouse folks often scrambled to get their resumes to the particular manager in hopes to finally make it back to the air conditioned heaven of the offices.

Once you made it to the offices you were home free. It was true, people with desk jobs don’t really do much work at all regardless of what they try to tell you. They get stressed out but for the most part, desk people have really bad people skills and can’t work as a team so they are constantly talking about each other and complaining about their job. Every single person I know that works a job that is spent at a desk will often let you know about their shitty day at work or how much crap they had to put up with. You rarely hear this from warehouse workers, laborers, etc. I consider myself one of those people now. I enjoy being tired and dirty when I get home. If I had a shitty day at work or got hurt somehow then I probably did a good job that day. If a desk/office person has a bad day at work it’s probably because they couldn’t log on to the internet or they had to wait seven minutes for the IS guy to come and fix a printer.

When I became an office person and realized how office work was I was initially happy, in retrospect I feel like I learned very little beyond just how petty people can be. Office politics can be a dirty game and I certainly wasn’t willing to play. I was willing to get paid more money for doing things like keeping an online journal with well over fifteen-hundred entries (most of which were written in the office), e-mail friends, take ninety-minute lunch breaks so I could go CD shopping. I even took a four hour lunch break once without telling anyone so I could go to a Red Sox day game (they lost).

In retrospect I really wish I saved some of the ridiculous e-mails from there. In ten plus years there was a vast amount of communications between me and customers, me and artists and of course me and coworkers that would surely make me laugh out loud if I were to read them. For instance what kind of e-mail exchanges did I have with that woman I was secretly sleeping with for a little while there? What were those awkward e-mails from the even more awkward president like? He was like a creepy, younger, extra tall version of Mr Burns from the Simpsons mixed with Bill Gates and someone who looked like they probably never had really disgusting sex. Talking to him was awkward, he had a voice that sounded like Jim Henson or Frank Oz was inside of him. I really did not like this man. After working there for as long as I did he barely ever spoke to me and when he did it was to ask for something to get done for him and his interests. He was another person that basically told me my co-workers and I didn’t deserve more than fifteen cents/hour once a year for a raise (if we did “excellent” in or yearly review) in contract negotiations.

At one point, while I was a manager they had a vote to decertify the union. They brought in these professional union busting guys  to train us managers how to talk our employees into voting to decertify the union. We had to meet one on one with this guy. I remember him having longer hair and a mustache, but obviously more put together. He didn’t look like Doug Henning is what I’m saying here. I sat in a small office with him across from me. He held a clipboard with the names of the employees in my department. At the time my office consisted of four people. Three women and one man. Two of the women were former union stewards or active in union activities and the one man was a current steward. He went down the list:

“Okay so these two women used to be stewards so we can forget about them” he tells me

“Probably a good idea”

“And this guy, he is a current steward so we know how he is going to vote”

“Sure”

“What about this other girl here…?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure about her but I used to also be a steward so the anti-union vibe in our office is pretty much non existent. You guys might want to concentrate on other departments”

The union was decertified shortly thereafter. The company started putting all of its money and time towards a horrible all girl “tween-pop” group which featured our president’s daughter. In my opinion, and I’m sure in many other’s, this is when the company started getting way worse. And then people started losing their jobs.

(to be continued)

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Adventures in Online Dating (kinda) Pt. 3

We caught up on Facebook one night in the dead of summer. The second to last time I saw her I was in a bar and the second she walked in I pulled my hat down over my eyes and let my friend know I had to leave. I didn’t want to see her. The last time I saw her it didn’t end well. We briefly dated years ago, stopped and then tried again a few years after that and now here it was about ten years later. We had a few things in common, some similar music tastes and ummm, I guess that’s it. She was beyond the partying type. Well actually, that’s all she really was. There was never really any way she could be your girlfriend as every time you saw her you ended up listening to her talk about getting fucked up, watched her getting fucked up or got fucked up yourself to avoid the fact that you were with her.

I have a lot of friends from different backgrounds. People I know from punk rock music, people I know from going to hippie shows, people I worked with, people I dated or my friends dated and people I know from the vast network of suburban marijuana dealers. These types were usually the type of people who you would never really want to spend much time with but often you found yourself sitting in some room surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles listening to a group of people half your age talking about deep things like “dude, mirrors are fucked up, like why does shit have to be backwards in them?”  This is how I knew Jessica. She was one of these people. Fun enough to spend some time with here and there, but not someone you want to take on a road trip (well, I would never take anyone on a road trip). We met because of marijuana and alcohol.

Jessica found me on Facebook years after we dated and we started talking and as it turns out things got a little…sexy. If you aren’t aware, a good amount of people on Facebook and social networking sites are chatting with old friends and old lover and sparks are flying. It doesn’t matter if they are currently married, were married or are about to be married, everyone does it. Your husband probably does it or did, as I’m sure your wife has. No big deal, they’re still going to make it home tonight and be with you. At the time Jessica and I were talking I was not working. It was the dead of summer we had been talking about a week and graduated from Facebook chats to text messages. We planned on meeting and hanging out on a Tuesday.

Tuesday rolled around and it was one of those disgusting hot-as-piss humid days we get here in New England. She was currently living in an apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts. The area of Lynn, Massachusetts was the area “down by 7-11”. If you know where that is, you know that you’re not seeing many Volvos parked around there if you catch my drift. If you do ever see a Volvo parked “down by 7-11” in Lynn, Massachusetts you should probably call the police as the car is probably stolen.

I arrive at Jessica’s house at about 1:00 PM and of course lock my car. Her apartment is in a two family house. These types of ugly complexes are everywhere in New England. They are truly gross looking buildings and hers was no slouch. Jessica greets me at the door and she is right, she lost a lot of weight. She is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that is ripped way too low exposing her braless breasts. The back of the shirt has a series of holes ripped all the way from the bottom to the top, like gills. I imagine one would see this type of shirt at a 38 Special concert, biker bar or in a stripper’s closet. She also has a nice pair of jeans on.

Her apartment, which she shares with a 19-year old co-worker from the restaurant she works at, is a typical sad affair. Two mismatched couches, a reasonably sized HD flat screen. A shelf with all the Harry Potter books, all the Twilight books, a bunch of those books you see in bookstores that I assume goth chicks or chicks that shop in Hot Topic would read…and one Henry Miller book (binding intact). There’s a long wide hallway that leads to more rooms and a kitchen. The rug is filthy. There are no fans anywhere in the apartment. It is about 98 degrees here. We smoke some of my pot I brought over. She mentioned the night before we would “match, which basically means “you smoke yours and then we’ll smoke some of mine” She of course had none.

Jessica suggested we got for a drive and she would drive her car. This was good news as I was pretty much out of gas. We drove to her old town where she grew up and walked the beach. It was far too hot and she was still wearing that horrible shirt. We must have looked like some sort of fucked up biker/pimp and hooker duo walking the beach. She then mentioned her dad recently had the house done and we should drive by it. I was a little reluctant. Why would I care about your dad’s house? I hate houses. Fuck houses. We drive by and low and behold his car is there so she wants to stop in and visit him. She wants to go visit her dad while dressed in that shirt with a dude that looks like a biker. Great. I’m still pretty high from earlier and I look like the “creepy guy that’s gonna have sex with your daughter later cause she’s wearing that shirt and, well of course” I also grew up in the town we were in. I have family there who are pretty prominent around town so I decide to play that card with him. He is a pretty normal looking dad, looks like he just got in from playing golf. He offers me a beer but I take some lemonade. I mention my family and he of course knows them and I somehow make it known that Jessica and I are just friends with a lot of “yeah isn’t she crazy?” type comments. I somehow make it out of there unharmed.

I hadn’t really been smoking that much at the time, and with the addition of the weather I felt pretty gross. We went back to her place. Her roommate soon came home with a nice young lady and Jessica mentioned we were “looking for some weed” I had no idea we were. I had twenty bucks on me. It was now dinnertime so Jessica cooked us some “ziti with meat sauce” that was basically ground turkey sautéed with some jar tomato sauce. If I hadn’t been starving and high I probably would have judged it more than I did. I had two bowls.

If you’ve ever hung out with someone who works in a restaurant listening to him or her talk about working in a restaurant can be amusing and informative. You get inside tips, generally the same anecdotal stories from anyone in the business. If you’ve ever hung out with two people who work in the same restaurant it can be one of the most painful things you can endure. They’ll spend hours talking about what this one did and that one did. The remainder of my “date” was spent hanging around this apartment with Jessica, her roommate, his “date” while they talked about work and made various phone calls trying to find weed. I felt like I was seventeen again!  The whole scene was depressing and made me resent “fucked up” people more than I generally do. Sitting around a living room getting high and talking about different times when you were high and future times when you will get high is not for me I guess. I left Jessica’s place around midnight and have not seen her since.

Although this wasn’t necessarily an “online date” we did meet up again online. Jessica reminded me of the first date I wrote about in this blog, just a bit younger. A sad mess of a girl who still had the same tired “drive” in her that she had ten years previous, to get fucked up as many nights a week as possible. I can’t live this kind of lifestyle at this point, and I find it actually makes me a bit angry when people are like this. Life is awesome and should be experienced in full clarity in my opinion. Every time I’ve dated for long periods of time I have spent most of the time sober as I always tell women “I want to remember these moments with you” Why would I want anything less?

While I haven’t had any crazy dates to write about like my first two I wrote about, I do have a number of old ones like this I have looked back on and without embarrassing myself too much I guess I can talk about on here. I love meeting people, even if I have nothing in common with them and nothing is ever going to become of a friendship or relationship. I find the less I have in common with someone the more interesting the experience. I write just about every day so memories are always a bit easier to access, and well, I have made some pretty poor decisions when it comes to dating and women in general. The only thing I can do now is look back and laugh.

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Adventures in Online Dating Pt. 2

My second date began with a simple message from “Karen” that read “I keep coming back to your profile and you seem interesting” I looked at her profile: one kid, 50 years old, into outdoors shit, music… I had never dated anyone older than maybe three years older than me so 50 years old was a little out of my comfort zone. Dating itself is a little outside of my comfort zone though so why not? As with a number of profiles I have stumbled upon, Karen only had one photo, which leads me to believe…Well, I’m not that shallow. Or maybe I am. I think I might actually be kind of a jerk. I don’t think I did anything wrong with Karen. I don’t know if I deserved a passive aggressive final message from her that read “That’s ok. We just spent a long day together and then…silence. Good luck with your search” This in response to my “Sorry I didn’t feel anything romantic, sorry you thought I was hard to read”

So Karen and I wrote back and forth for a week or so. She seemed kind of boring, but nice. I’ve dated plenty of boring and nice women in my lifetime. I’ve also bored women to death throughout the years making them sit through concerts and films they didn’t want to, browsing bookstores and record stores but hey that one time I did go see the Sex in the City movie in the theater with my girlfriend. My life is pretty boring right now. I have a set routine that basically consists of me going to work on three or four hours of sleep, coming home and going out for a few hours to either write on my laptop in a chain coffee shop or grabbing dinner with a friend, going home and falling asleep ten minutes into a book/movie/tv show/donut. Adding dating into this mix is a little scary but it’s mixing things up for me and I like meeting people even if it’s only for one time, never to be heard from again.

Karen has a son who is 22, he lives in the living room of her apartment which is kind of a coincidence as I currently reside in the living room of my mother’s house as well, on a couch. Yes, I’ve resorted to that. It’s not really a long story, but it’s not very exciting and anyway it’s temporary. I told Karen this as well as my last date. Just in case it ever got to the point where we were going to “take it back to my place” they wouldn’t think I was married if I said “Oh, we cant do that” She mentions he has an actual bed set up in the living room and plays “his X Box”. For a brief moment I feel a little jealous of Karen’s son! I then remember I am practically twice his age and saw Kiss live in 1977, saw The Smiths live three times and was at the game when Nomar Garciaparra hit two Grand Slams and a home run (on his birthday) something he will never experience so fuck him and his bed and X-Box.

In trying to remember all the details of this date, which was way less eventful than my first one with the Kid Rock lady I have gone back to the text messages her and I were sending that week. On one particular evening she was on the deck at some bar and we had this brief exchange

“I am on the patio at Murphy’s listening to some acoustic music what are you up to! <Karen!>”

“I just bought a couple of Ozzy Osbourne CD’s, and a Twisted Sister one”

“Great! I am almost ready to leave. Waiting for a better song. Ugghh the doors. Used to like them. But then my ex listened to ONLY the Doors <Karen!>”

Normally this is where I would write something sarcastic like “wow, great story” but I didn’t. Over the week I noticed Karen would write “three days left”, “two days left”, etc. Also the last text message I have from her came at 1:26 PM, a half hour before I was supposed to meet her “Are you still coming? <Karen!>” I probably should have replied “not if you keep signing your fucking text messages like that!”

Karen lives in Manchester, NH and her name isn’t Karen. I was meeting her on Saturday at 2:00 PM, and again she wanted me to just come to her house, something I really think women should be more careful with.  Both women I’ve met said “I can tell you’re okay by talking to you on the phone” On Sunday I was going to meet some friends for an early lunch and walk in a nearby town in New Hampshire so I figured I’d make a day of it and book myself a room in Manchester. The older I get the less I like driving late at night and besides, any night I can get off the couch I take it. I love staying in motels and hotels.

I checked into my room early at 1:30 and called Karen. On my way to her place I took some mental notes of what was in the area for my inevitable late night disgusting meal. I briefly got lost on my way and when I called her and mentioned the rock I passed that read in bright orange spray paint ‘FLU SHOTS CAUSE AUTISM” she knew right where I was.

When I arrived at her place and she came outside my initial thought was “oh my”, but not a good “oh my” I shook her hand and we got in my car. I safely played the Rolling Stones (I don’t really like to play the Rolling Stones around women I am serious with or may get serious with just in case things go bad and I “ruin them” for me. I pretty much knew from the get go that this would be a friendship “date” so it was okay). She suggested we eat and said there was a good Chinese place down the street. We arrive at a strip mall and it looks like a ghost town, giant parking lot with a bunch of empty spaces, a Building 19 and this Chinese restaurant. I half expected tumbleweed to roll past us.

My first clue that this would not be a good Chinese restaurant was there were no Chinese people working here. My second was it was in a strip mall and my third was they brought us out a plate with two chicken wings when we sat down.  Who does this? If you ever want to feel awkward around a person you just met try eating chicken right off of the bone in front of them.  The food was disgusting and I have to say eating with a complete stranger less than an hour after meeting them is a little hard. She barely ate her food and I’m pretty sure she just ordered what she did to give to that little spoiled brat of hers in the living room with the bed and the X-Box. My fortune cookie asked “How can you have a beautiful ending  without making beautiful mistakes?”

We made our way down to a river and walked around an empty parking lot until I found a bench that wasn’t below a swarm of flies like the others. We talked for an hour or so and she treated me to some intense stories like the time her and her boyfriend at the time hitchhiked across country in 1980. While she was telling me some of these stories I was trying to do the math in my head of what a 50 year old person experienced: “could she have been at Woodstock?”, “was she a teenager during Vietnam?”, “Could black people vote when she was 20?” Apparently 50 years old isn’t that old, in fact it’s nine years older than me.

Her son works at a Dunkin Donuts and I suggested we stop and get a coffee and she said we should go to the one her son works at. She guided me to a drive through and after I made the transaction I asked if that was her son. It wasn’t. Apparently she was joking when she said we should visit him at work. Thank God as for the brief four-minute drive to Dunkin Donuts I thought I was going to have to meet the son of a woman I certainly wasn’t going to sleep with but who probably would have judged me somehow. “There’s mom bringing another bearded tattooed dude by the house again!”

Driving around New Hampshire (or New England in general) used to hold my attention for long stretches but lately it’s grown tired to me. We spent another couple hours or so driving around talking and I have to say I generally liked Karen but there was no attraction and her personality probably wouldn’t have worked in the long run. I need to feel like I can just be myself around someone before I can be myself in his or her presence. Holy shit, I think I just figured out how relationships work.

Karen suggested we go back to her place and figure out a plan for later. It was 7:30 PM and I was now thinking about how the Boston Bruins were about to play Game 2 of the Stanley Cup and I had a nice air-conditioned hotel room waiting for me up the road. Also, I was hungry.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in the apartment was the smell. It smelled like a bed, a bed with sheets that hadn’t been washed in months. There it was in all its glory, the bed. A single.  Unmade, facing a small 20 something inch television unusually high and at an odd angle. There are stacks of X-Box games on a shelf next to the bed. Tons of them! On the floor leaning against the bed was a giant framed Simpsons poster, the frame was too big for the poster and I wondered if that’s why it was on the floor. Perhaps it fell, or Karen took it down knowing I might be coming over and it looked “trashy”. In her haste to get all dolled up for me though she forgot to move it creating an even more trashy looking atmosphere! Karen sat on the couch and I decided to sit on the slightly small (for me) wicker rocking chair. She was sitting to my left at ten o’clock, directly in front of me was a computer desk or what I liked to imagine “where the magic happened”. There was a big uncomfortable iron outdoor chair they evidently used as a computer chair.

She created a playlist on her computer  (and went on Facebook for a minute!) which I should have expected since earlier when I asked her what her favorite concert ever was she replied “Tool”. 50 years old and Tool was your favorite concert? There weren’t enough red flags in the world that could have gone up at that moment. She must have seen like one awesome Yes show in the 70’s or something, come on. Tool. I hate Tool. Fuck Tool. So the playlist comes on and we hear some kind of modern hard rock type stuff and then that “It’s been a while…” song comes on. Staind. I need to get out of here and soon! It’s probably 2nd period by now!  I wonder if there is a Taco Bell near the hotel, I certainly didn’t see one.

She informs me her son gets out of work at 10:00 PM and then rides his bike home; once we start getting over to the rock and roll side of 9:30 I start getting ready. At about 9:51 PM she suggests we go out to see an Allman Brothers cover band. I fucking love the Allman Brothers so this is tempting but then I remember it’s not the actual Allman Brothers so I say

“I should probably get back to my room as I am meeting my friends early tomorrow”

At exactly 10:00 PM just as Karen’s son is taking the last bag of trash out to the dumpster behind some random Dunkin Donuts in New Hampshire I stand up and let her know I’m going to leave. She walks me out to my car. She gives me a longer hug than I was ready for and then kind of stands waiting for a kiss. I walk away and say goodbye.

I’m again reminded, “flu shots cause autism”. I snake my slightly melancholy self back to the hotel through some dark winding roads I’ll most likely never see again. Karen was a nice woman but not for me.

Now, where the fuck is there a Taco Bell? I find a Dunkin Donuts and grab a cup of coffee. I pull up Google on my phone and find a Taco Bell, less than a mile away. I figure how much more depressing of a day can I have than eating Taco Bell in a hotel by myself on a Saturday night?

Well…I get back to my room just in time to discover the Bruins are about to go into overtime. I get settled at the little desk and open my first item of 8% meat wrapped in some sort of tortilla and game play begins!  Eleven seconds later the game is over. Ouch.

The next afternoon at my friends place I get a message from a new girl. It reads simply “You’re cute, how was your weekend?” I assume this is some sort of spam or joke but I write her anyway. We spend the rest of the day writing back and forth. Perhaps that fortune in the cookie was true.

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Adventures in Online Dating Pt. 1

I recently decided to try online dating for the first time. If you thought it was just cold in New England temperature wise, you should try meeting people here, they’re all just as cold.

I won’t name the site I used for this, but out of the few I checked it seemed the best. I assume they are all about the same. You can see who is viewing you, it’s free and you can send vague, brief messages to women similar to what I used to do when I was a teenager.

The mere thought of going on a date with a woman I chatted with online once or twice and maybe spoke on the phone for an hour with is a truly frightening thought, but I ended up diving head first into this…twice.

I put my profile up on a Thursday night. My profile is pretty generic, but to the point. I hate boring women, I love music, humor and travel. I have a few pictures up some of me smiling, some of me with a guitar. From what I understand chicks dig dudes with guitars. Since I’m kind of a creepy looking guy, the rare pictures of me smiling seemed to help.

I looked around and saw a few ads that seemed interesting and sent a brief message. Most responses I got were pretty generic and as I learned over the next couple of weeks, most women on there have no idea how to hold a conversation. At least with me, if I wasn’t interested in someone I just didn’t respond to message(s) they sent. One message I got out of the blue from “PatsFan122” read “Want to chat? You came up in mututal (sic) match” That’s all it said.  As it turns out, most people on here don’t read your profile. No surprise. I read the majority of the profiles unless they were too wordy or not wordy at all. I’m not going to lie though and say I just pass right by profiles of women I don’t find any physical attraction to. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I think it was Bob Dylan who said “life is too short for ugly women” Or maybe it was Dylan McKay from Beverly Hills 90210.

A week or so later, on a Sunday afternoon at 2:07 PM, the day before a holiday I get a message from a 43 year old divorced mom “with kids”. We write back and forth for a good hour or so, there are a few grammatical errors in her brief replies. She then suggests we talk on the phone and just sends me her phone number.

She has a pretty thick Massachusetts accent, which is kind of a bummer, but I knew this was coming. We talked for about an hour, and then she invited me over to her place to “watch the Red Sox and drink some beers” So the minute this woman started writing me I pretty much knew there was nothing in common, she clearly did not read my profile too well and I wasn’t necessarily attracted to her but she wasn’t hideous or anything.  If anything this would give me some practice hanging with a complete stranger, even if said stranger was COMPLETELY FUCKING CRAZY.

Here is a complete rundown of my three or four hours with “Donna”

I arrive at her Section 8 apartment building about twenty-five minutes after talking to her, about five hours after receiving my first message from her in my inbox. There are two ways to get into the building and I call her on the phone a little confused as to where to go. She looks pretty much like she did in her photos. She is short, thick, dyed blonde. She opens the door and immediately says “oh I told you to go to the other door” These kinds of “bossy” comments happen throughout the night. Her 11 year old son is with her dad for the evening, her 22 year old son does not live here anymore. She has obviously been smoking and drinking for most of the day. There is an ashtray full of thin white cigarettes on a messy coffee table that also is covered in bills, three or four remote controls and three Bud Light cans. For whatever reason apartments of single women always have some sort of sad quality to them. She suggests we go get some beer. I don’t really drink beer that much, and although I’m far from a beer snob I’ll drink semi above average beers when I do. She says she will drive us to the liquor store. We get in the car and drive to the liquor store that is literally about 70 yards from her building. I could probably hit a golf ball with an aluminum softball bat further away than we just drove. She asks what kind of beer we should get and I of course immediately answer “Budweiser” I get us a 12 pack of Budweiser and pay for it on my debit card. I briefly think I should have paid for this with cash so there is no paper trail and then I remember I am not married. She buys herself a pack of cigarettes, some cheap brand called “Maverick Lights”

Upon arriving back at her place she suggests we play on her son’s Playstation. She wants to play her favorite game, Jeopardy. She is “awesome at it and never loses” Before this happens though she needs to make a phone call…I mean three phone calls. She first calls her son who apparently was out playing dodge ball with some kids while his mom was home with some man she met an hour ago. She then needs to call her mom for some reason. She puts her mom on speakerphone and talks to her for forty five minutes. They are shooting the shit about “Cathy” and “that new restaurant” and whatever other boring shit women in their thirties talk to their mothers about. Thankfully the Red Sox game is on and they are winning.  She then calls her best friend “John” and puts him on speakerphone and lets him know she is hanging with her “friend Chris” He sounds as bored as I am sitting there. He just returned from a day out fishing. He didn’t catch anything aside from a nap before she called.

My intense first date with Donna finally resumes and in an attempt to set a mood for us she decides to play some music.

“Do you like Kid Rock?”

“Are you fucking kidding me, of course I do!” is my answer. Me, the guy whose profile clearly states that I love The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Bad Brains, The Specials, Wilco and The Smiths.

Of course the Kid Rock is on the loudest volume possible about four feet from my left ear. In my life I’ve heard a few Kid Rock songs. They usually show up on a radio I have no control over. On this night I got to hear a whole hour or so of his music. I guess I still don’t consider myself a fan of his music after hearing a whole record. In fact I think I would rather listen to a drunk guy (with mittens on) try to play Blackbird by the Beatles on an out of tune acoustic guitar every day for the rest of my life than listen to a minute of Kid Rock again.

We then get our Jeopardy on. To say I beat her would be an understatement. I think the final score was something like $9100 to $250. At one point in the game there is a question in the “Art” category.

“ooh I hate aht, you into aht Chris?”

“Nah, aht is gay” I tell her

I realize I might be getting a slight buzz from the three Budweisers and four or five shots we have taken up to this point. I’m still able to beat her by correctly answering “What is Impressionism?” to the clue “ “19th Century art movement in Paris….” She answered “Mona Lisa”

I think I’m in love.

Even if she’s smoked about eleven cigarettes by now and clearly has drank me under the table.

Donna now decides we should listen to more music seeing as I have beaten her at Jeopardy. She starts going through those music channels on her TV set and playing a minute of a song and then changes it. Lady Gaga. Bruno Mars. Cee-Lo. Justin Beiber (really).The volume is at a level where we can’t really have a conversation. She does this for about forty five minutes in this bizarre blur of attention deficit disorder and this weird regressive childlike manic episode. I begin to think of a way out.

“Donna, I should probably go home soon, it’s getting late”

The conversation before the music came on somehow turned to politics and she of course did not like Barack Obama because he was black and would “probably vote for Trump if he had run” There were a few pretty bad racist comments made as far back as our first phone call.

I guess the main reason I went on this “date” was out of curiosity and just because I pretty much knew how surreal it might be. Stepping into this world I normally wouldn’t ever go to; drinking Budweiser and blaring Kid Rock with my racist date.  I chalked it up to a funny experience I could write about and tell people about. I always talk to anyone who approaches me, sometimes much to the dismay of people I am with.

On my way out I told Donna that she really should be careful whom she invites to her place. It’s really none of my business, but obviously there are some sick people out there, but also I guess there are men out there who would have been perfectly comfortable on a date like this.

A week later I had another date. It went relatively better than this one did, but there was no click. Actually, it didn’t really go well either. I’ll get to that one next.

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Joplin, MO to Amarillo, TX – 2006

9/11/2006

Joplin, MO to Amarillo, TX

In Amarillo,Texas after a mostly bland day. I didn’t do any site seeing today aside from what was outside of my window at 75mph…and then I got pulled over in Oklahoma City.

So there I am cruising through the city limits of OKC. It’s pretty hot outside, and of course it’s pretty boring. The only thing you can really do is smoke cigarettes, listen to music and smoke marijuana. In my messenger bag on the passenger seat I had an Altoids case with a tiny bit of marijuana in it and a glass pipe; one of those one-hitters that’s pretty much just a less sketchy looking crack pipe. That is left in the front little pocket of the messenger bag, usually zipped up when not in use. At this particular time, presumably because I just used it and well, marijuana makes people stupid and lazy I left the little pocket open. Out of the, erm, blue, flashing lights come up on the ass of my rental car with the New Jersey license plate. Three or four days into this trip and I am unshaven and dirty, and at this very moment high as a kite. This is as close an accurate description of the conversation with the policeman as I can recall. I think it’s pretty close.

License and registration…where you coming from?

Boston

Why do you have a New Jersey license plate?

It’s a rental

Where you heading?

Los Angeles

What’s in Los Angeles?

My father

Are you driving back?

No, I’m flying back

Do you have a plane ticket?

No

How are you flying back?

I am going to print the ticket at the airport kiosk

Where you coming from again?

Boston

You staying with your dad there?

Yes

In Boston?

Yes

I thought you said your dad was in Los Angeles

YES, I am staying with him in Los Angeles

 

(the policeman is leaning in my passenger side window…around this point I look down and notice my messenger bag flap is open and the pipe is clearly in view)

I’ll be right back, I’m going to check out your information

Okay

 

(I need to get the flap on my bag closed somehow while he is at the car so I lean over to shut the glove compartment door and nudge it with my elbow closed…phew?)

Well it looks like your stuff checks out

 

(oh yeah, in my suitcase is a much bigger bag of marijuana. Stuffed into the pocket of a pair of pants)

Okay, thank you sir

Oh, one more thing, do you mind if I look through your trunk?

Sure

 

(I open the trunk and then he tells me to step away from the car. He opens my suitcase and starts lifting things up, including the pants I had the bag in…puts everything back and doesn’t bother with the three smaller bags that could have easily been filled with hands or feet of my “victims”)

Well you’re all set buddy…so Red Sox fan eh? That Manny Ramirez, he’s a character huh? All that hair. I tell you, if he was on my team I’d make him cut it

Yeah, heh.

Well, just remember we do things a little slower down here in Oklahoma

After this I pretty much didn’t stop until I got here in Amarillo. I found this hotel “The Ritz” that was $39.95 a night. The billboard was promising, there was a chandelier pictured on it. Free HBO. All the good shit. I walk in this pretty big place and should have taken my initial feelings of uncertainty after noticing the sign wasn’t lit up. The grand lobby with chandeliers, and a creepy Shining looking ballroom made it seem okay if not a little odd. I pay my money and make my way to the room. I walk in and immediately notice these huge bugs that look like black cockroaches with wings on the curtain and leave the room. (I later learn these are called “Palmetto Bugs”) I tell the guy at the counter I’ve decided to drive through the night.

I find a Holiday Inn that is huge with a pool, courtyard, comfy chairs inside, big TV and all that good stuff for a little more money. No bugs. Aside from these pleasures it sounds like someone is moving a gigantic safe or a big dead horse body across the floor in the room above me. I’m not sure if this is a smoking room or not. It’s interesting smoking in this situation as it’s like you’re on a ski trip in high school and you’re breaking some kind of rule.

Initially I smoked a cigarette in the bathroom with the shower on so the steam would kill the smell. I then smoked by the little porch I have here and then realized it looks out upon a courtyard and someone might see me. Then I realized I was 36 years old and from Massachusetts and could give a shit less what will happen if they figure out I smoked in here tomorrow when I am already 292 miles away from here…and I paid cash.

I must say I am extremely glad I got to see a sunset here in Texas on the drive here. It’s obviously not as nice as a California sunset but it’s better than a Massachusetts one. The road here from Oklahoma City was so straight I forgot how to use my steering wheel for a minute at one point. With nothing in front of you, behind you, or on either side of you it’s impossible to even explain how huge the sky looks. I can’t imagine there is a camera with the ability to capture it how it really is. I took a couple pictures while driving and while at a rest area


Every guy I saw at a rest area, gas station, etc today looked like the kind of guy that would just punch you in the face after telling you how abortion stops a beating heart. That or they looked like the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin. Which I guess is the same kind of deal.

Car is at 2,071 miles now. Windshield and front grill of the car are dirtier than a landlord’s soul.

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Pray For Me, Really?

There’s this place I hang at, this national coffee place. I guess I come in here almost every day. There are a couple of colleges nearby. One of them is a big Christian college; most of the people hanging out in here on a daily basis are students from there. At this point I just assume everyone in here is a Jesus person. Whatever the opposite of one of these people is, I guess I am the opposite. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see or that hasn’t been proven by science. Generally though, I just don’t even think about this stuff at all, and the fact that people study it seriously is beyond me. Perhaps someday something will click with me and I will get it. Regardless, there are thousands of books written about all of this stuff by people far more intelligent than I am so maybe there is something about it. It just doesn’t really interest me, especially as long as baseball and information about the Rolling Stones exists for me to study.

I come in here during the week and write and umm, “work”. I have gotten to know all the people who work here, some of them are also students from that college. Recently a couple of people have started talking to me and ask what I do while in here. Seems a little odd to ask someone what they are doing. What if I worked for the government? What if I was writing poems to my wife who died on September 11th? What if I was some kind of a fucking asshole who didn’t look like I liked being talked to? Actually, I kind of look like that, so it always surprises me when this does happen. I am a mean looking person. Usually when I am by myself I tend to put on some sort of “mean” face so I don’t get strangers talking to me. I especially do this when I am traveling alone. (“THINK YOU’RE GOING TO MOLEST ME AT THIS EMPTY REST AREA? WELL GUESS WHAT I HAVE TATTOOS AND A SCOWL ON. JUST TRY IT!”) But if I am a regular somewhere, I sometimes don’t want to make regular friends with anyone beyond a “hey” You run the risk of conversation starters that are uninteresting or some sort of running joke. I really hate when you have some sort of un-funny running joke with a casual friend or someone in a store you frequent. “HEY THERE HE IS: MR TRIP ON THE SIDEWALK COMING IN THAT ONE TIME! HOW YOU DOING BUDDY? WALK MUCH?! REMEMBER THAT DAY?!”)

A few weeks ago a young man came up to me. I always see him in here with a group of friends, male and female studying. A friendly looking kid, good looking, outgoing and generally someone you would want in the kind of situation where I don’t know…if you just got shot in the neck, this might be the kind of dude you want cradling you on the ground telling you everything will be okay. Also the type of kid you’d want helping to rake leaves in your grandmother’s yard. So I told him I “write…and am also looking for a job” The latter part of this is true to an extent, but I hardly do that while I am in here. Well, sometimes. I asked him what he does and he mentioned he is a student and is studying, etc. Exactly as I imagined. Nice enough guy, and now every time I see him he asks me how the job hunt is going and I ask him how school is going and that’s that. Sometimes he’ll talk about hanging with the guys on the weekend and I wonder what that entails. Presumably not dudes regaling each other with stories about all the pussy they ate the previous weekend around a big pile of coke.

I love heavy metal music. Selected stuff though…I think if I was to label myself as something it would be a metal/punk rock guy which obviously could mean hundreds of things. As much as I love metal and wear heavy metal shirts all the time I don’t listen to it as much as I used to. One thing newer bands have been doing is doing spinoffs of other logos or fonts and adapting their band’s name to them. I’ve now seen two bands use the Boston first album cover. Torche are one of my favorite bands, and although they get thrown into the metal realm I think of them as something beyond metal. I can’t explain it. Last year they were selling t-shirts that were a tribute to of the one of the bands responsible for inventing death metal, the Bay Area band Possessed.

I of course had to have one of these. Aside from loving both bands, the thought of having a shirt with an upside down cross on it seemed like an awesome idea at the time. I even wore this shirt when I drove across country a while back. I literally stopped before I got to the Texas border and put it on. My original plan to wear an Eyehategod shirt the entire time in Texas but it didn’t work out as I couldn’t find it, so this was the next best thing. (Now that I remember that stop, I stopped for three things: to change a windshield wiper because of the amount of bugs I encountered in that first 1500 miles or so of driving, to put that shirt on, and get high on medical marijuana I had taken back from California. In the fifteen or so minutes I was there I literally saw a tumbleweed, a guy in a cowboy hat and a cactus. I was for real in Texas, even if it was just that little piece at the top. The following picture is from that very stop

I got all my shit together and drove on)

I stopped by this coffee place the other night, not to stay though, just a quick stop. I was wearing this upside down cross shirt under my jacket, but you can still kind of tell what is going on. I saw my buddy in here, and waved to him as he was across the place. He got up and came over and started talking to me. Asking about my job hunt, I asked him about Halloween and then briefly wondered to myself if these students even celebrated Halloween, or is it not allowed? Apparently it is allowed. At the end of the conversation as he was walking away he told me he would pray for me for an upcoming job interview and then winked at me. During that whole conversation which was all of maybe seven minutes I kept trying to keep my jacket closed. In a way I can’t imagine anyone would care. I guess if I was a Satanist I wouldn’t be talking to this young man in the first place. I did feel slightly guilty though when he mentioned he would pray for me. I also felt uncomfortable because he winked at me. Winking is one of those things that should only be done under a few circumstances: If you are a creepy dude in 1982 trying to pick up a woman, if you are a grandfather and you just gave your grandson a new baseball mitt or if you are a chick.

As it turned out I got the job, and although I am pretty certain I got the job because my friend recommended me to the owner, I’ll thank my new Jesus friend the next time I see him for “the help” Hopefully I’ll be wearing something nicer.

Oh, here I am with the shirt on

1

French People, Hippies and Bourbon

So I went up to upstate NY on Tuesday to see Allman Brothers and Bob Weir because, as much as I love Slayer, Venom and Exodus I am a hippie when it comes down to it. So I get to this hotel up there and I’m walking to the room and this gigantic man in shorts and sandals that looks like a cross between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Oscar Wilde is coming down the hall carrying a box of wine as well as a big jug of wine and muttering in French to his surrounding family trailing behind him. So he already has one strike against him which you can pick out of two:  a) He’s wearing sandals, b) He’s French. I make my way into the room and it looks like every other hotel room I’ve been in. I of course immediately turn on the air conditioning to the highest setting. I go to the desk and pull the chair out and there is some sort of dried up white stuff all over it (hmmm, milk? Liquid Paper? Queso blanco?). I decide it’s best to just push the chair back in and avoid it for the eighteen hours I live here. I survey the rest of the room, figuring out the often complicated configuration of the lights and their respective switches in any hotel or motel you stay in.  Bathroom is pretty small. Also any mirror in a motel or hotel is somehow made to make you look so ugly and disgusting; I’d love to know how they make them like this. Perhaps some weird trick or voodoo that adds fifteen pounds to a person and removes any kind of tan skin from your body. This reminds me, maybe next time I stay in a hotel I’ll grab a skinny black person off the street and have them look in the mirror in my room and see if it turns them into I don’t know…John Candy or Rosie O’Donnell.

I have two or three hours to kill so I put the television on and end up on some Vin Diesel movie that is beyond horrible. He is an undercover cop, he’s a badass, etc. I end up turning it off and read instead. Out in the hall I hear some commotion so I get up and look out the peephole and there is Mr. Philip Seymour Wilde with his family with towels in full on “we’re going out to the pool” mode.  They disappear and now doors start opening and closing out in the hall. That steel lock sound, like what classroom doors sound like, or doors in a very important office building. Literally the two rooms I’m sandwiched between and the room across from me. It’s like some bizarre video game where you keep going in one door but come out another one. This happens for the remainder of my stay at the hotel. With me getting up every third time to see what the hell is going on, running to the peephole only to see a quiet empty hall.  “Chick-chick!”…”chick chick!” every five minutes maybe.

I open the blinds and notice I can see down on the swimming pool, which is now filled with a dozen or so of what I presume are the French people opening and closing the doors as it has briefly stopped. The Oscar Wilde dude is swinging his arms and talking in a very animated manner to a man who looks like a cross between Vladimir Putin and Hunter S. Thompson. Like he was probably some sort of assassin in the French Army. The Oscar Wilde guy is like an inch from Putin’s face, and I can tell his breath probably stinks of shitty wine and rotten cabbage from three stories up. The children are all in the pool while the wives sit in the sun away from each other. They vacate the pool after an hour or so and the doors start opening and closing, with me jumping up each time, and never catching anyone in the hall. It was like when you try to jump on the head of your shadow and you just can’t.

Even though I don’t really drink alcohol, I’ve been enjoying taking a shot or two of hard liquor and that’s it…maybe some wine. I think my experience with beer is over at this point as I never seem to finish one and almost 100% of the time I feel sick if I drink more than two beers.  So while driving to the show I decide that I should find a liquor store and buy two nips of bourbon to drink when I arrive at the venue. There is a huge line of traffic going left into the traffic light in front of the venue, I pass it all on the right heading into downtown Saratoga Springs, and maybe a block up there is a liquor store. There is a woman that looks like a fitness trainer buying about twelve bottles of wine. The transaction takes what seems like about nine minutes. There is Grateful Dead music playing over the speakers of the liquor store, and it’s an audience recording, probably from the early 80’s. The woman behind the counter is wearing a shirt with Jerry on it so she’s obviously hardcore. I find this odd, as Bob Weir is scheduled to go on stage in about fifteen minutes and this woman is trying to figure out how to add these twelve bottles of wine up with a calculator. I have absolutely no idea what kind of booze is out there now. In the last ten years, I’ve maybe been drunk four times, and if someone says “let me buy you a shot” at a show I usually have no idea what it even is. Tequila? Whiskey? Bourbon? Are those the same thing? I have the nine minutes to think about what I want, trying to read the bottles and settle on “Bulleit Bourbon”, the bottles look like medicine bottles from the 1800’s. The tennis instructor lady struggles with her box of wine bottles and I make my way to the counter. “Two of those little bottles of boo-lay bourbon please”. “Bullet?” she replies. Now I think, “did I really just mispronounce that? Why is that spelled like that? That gigantic Oscar Wilde guy is in my head and making me believe everything is French now, great. I pay for my shit and ask the girl if she’s heading over to see “Bobby” (if you’re hardcore you call Bob Weir ‘Bobby’ and people know where you’re coming from). She says “the guy with the tickets was supposed to be here at six so I can leave…but he’s not here yet”. (6:45 and the show begins at 7:00). I say “cutting it close!” and leave.

Since the venue is now on my right I’m able to avoid that whole line of cars turning left and get right to the red light and turn right into the venue…well, a new line of traffic. While sitting in the line of traffic I wonder how I should deal with these bottles of bourbon. Should I park and then just down them one after the other? I pass a sign that says “NO ALCOHOL IN PARK” (the venue is in a giant beautifully wooded state park) and immediately take the bag on my seat and put it under the back seat, and then three minutes later decide I’m 38 years old, by myself and have worried about worse things than getting caught with two sealed nips of bourbon in a bag. I take one out and decide to drink half of it. I’m now “operating a motor vehicle while drinking alcohol”. Since I’m basically sitting in a line of traffic I don’t struggle with the morality of this for one second. Like I’m suddenly going to be completely shit faced and veer out of the traffic jam into an autistic boy. I now get to an area where there are guys directing traffic into the parking lot(s). I am paranoid that one of them may be a police officer who will smell the booze on my breath and I will be arrested in upstate New York. (I’m reminded of the time I was in Lynn driving along the ocean where there is often summer traffic, the state police had horses out and I briefly got scared the horses were trained like police dogs and would smell the marijuana I had hidden in my bag.) I take out a mint that I just bought recently that taste like RASPBERRY ICED TEA. Seriously. I almost think you could have one of these with a meal to substitute the drink and just eat one each time you would normally take a drink they are that good. I get up to the guys, neither of them are police, however there is a man sitting in a “Park Ranger” truck that could bust me so I should be careful. I am thankfully directed to the best place to park at the venue, in one of the grass parking lots. Driving over grass is one of those simple pleasures one can experience from time to time that is akin to I don’t know, watching a puppy roll around on the floor for twenty minutes, or eating a marshmallow. For some reason parking under trees on grass is one of those things for me. I pull into my “space” and as soon as no one is looking finish the contents of the two bottles, and transfer the two joints I rolled into my wallet where nobody will find them. The band has already started as I walk to the concert area. They are okay, nothing special, without Jerry Garcia Bobby is a bit lost. It’s nice that he does some of the Jerry songs and still sounds exactly the same, but something is missing. The song of the night was Creampuff War, which I obviously never saw The Dead play as they only played it seven times, the last being in March of 1967.

In between bands I walk around the park and find a bench. A grimy looking couple in their fifties come over and sits next to me. They are both wasted on who knows what. The conversation of course revolves around being fucked up/getting fucked up, and then they pull out a pair of binoculars. The woman unscrews the cap on the binoculars and drinks whatever is in it, offering me some. I decline and then ask them where they’re from, they are vague with “here and there…all over”.  After I tell them I’m from Massachusetts the guy tries to explain to me where he is from but I have absolutely no idea what he means “Where route sixty-six and one-forty three meet”. Oh there, right. I just say “I’m from Boston” and leave it at that. They decide to go get a beer and I decide to get an ice cream. I see two security guys walking by talking into their little walkie-talkie things heading over to the beer area where apparently a fight has broken out. I casually walk over to a group of security guys struggling with some guy writhing on the ground telling them to leave him alone, etc. Since I am addicted to any kind of “World’s Wildest Police Whatevers” television shows any chance I get to see something like this in person is a bonus. Since I’m carrying a little dish of ice cream with me it can’t really be any better. Also of note, this took place at an area where there is a tiny stage where they probably do poetry readings, or small plays. The mini-stage is surrounded by a dozen or so long benches, so I grab one of those to eat my ice cream and watch this unfold. I showed up a little late as the guy was restrained and cooperative when I sat down. To my left some “in charge” guys are tending to a guy who is explaining “he just came up and punched me in the face”. The guy has blood all over his face, and although I am not eating anything red I decide to leave the area. Nothing to see here.

The Allman Brothers come out and are great as usual. I’m still adjusting to them without Dickie Betts, but eh, not bad. They play a few of my favorite songs and I make my way to various areas of the lawn to watch it. The crowd is a mix of younger people as well as older biker looking men and women. They play the jam Midnight Rider, you know the one…”I got one more silver dollar” and some woman with a mullet says to her dude with the leather vest  “THIS IS THE GREATEST SONG EVER”, I of course totally agree with her, especially the harmony vocals Warren Haynes adds to these newer versions. They start what I assume is the last song of the night so I make a run for the parking lot. It’s dark and desolate out there and there is a girl walking alone way ahead of me so I change my route a little as I would probably be nervous if I saw me coming. I avoid all traffic getting out of the venue and make the thirty minute drive back to the hotel with no problems.

For some reason I decide that after eating at Fuddruckers for lunch (which included jalapeno peppers), drinking two nips of bourbon, eating a little bowl of ice cream and smoking two joints by myself going to Taco Bell would be a good idea. Fast forward to 7:05 AM. Not the best idea I’ve ever had, really.

In the room when I got back I looked in the nightstand drawer to see if there was a map in the yellow pages as I was maybe thinking of going to nearby Lake George in the morning and taking a paddleboat tour or going to the Frankenstein Museum they have there (!). The yellow pages are all cut up with a knife throughout the book. After watching a Chicago/Earth Wind and Fire concert I fall asleep around 3:30 AM.

I am up so early and obviously feel like shit. The air conditioner is on full blast still, so it’s about 50 degrees in the room, I’m surprised I don’t see my breath. I remember the sign advertising the free continental breakfast which usually consists of mini muffins and the worst coffee you can ever have. I walk down there after looking in the trick mirror and now look like someone who drank bourbon, smoked two joints and ate taco bell, but also someone who hasn’t slept in five months.  I make my way down and there is the French Oscar Wilde guy and his family as well as about nine thousand other people with French accents, British accents. Lots of young people around 12 years old in this line. I unsuccessfully toast a bagel in the toaster and make some coffee. I find a table for four that is empty. Soon after a British couple and their son come and sit down with me. All of the boys are wearing ties. Exactly how you imagine young European boys. I finish my bagel and coffee and go back to my room, realizing I need more coffee. I go back down now there are ATHOUSAND people down there, there is an awkwardly tall priest meandering around. I kind of cut the line and make two cups of coffee to bring back to the room. Unfortunately they only have what is basically the worst coffee ever, French Vanilla. Flavored coffee is bad enough as it is, but this could be the worst of them all. I ask the front desk kid where all these folks are from and what they’re doing, just remembering there are two large buses in the parking lot. “They’re from some choir group traveling to Montreal”

My last two hours in the room are spent listening to the Europeans open and close doors, as they are checking out now. I wonder how much of a mess they probably made in their rooms for the cleaning ladies to clean as when I looked out at the pool after the French people left there were drinks left on the tables. As usual I cleaned the room up as best I could, emptied ashtrays, threw any trash out, put the towels in one place, etc. On my way out there was an older cleaning woman in the doorway of the neighboring room wiping her brow as I walked by “It’s so damn hot in there” she says. I reply “Well, I left the air conditioner on in my room; you can go take a break I’m sure no one will notice”. As I walked away I meant to add “Oh, and I did NOT do that to that desk chair” but I didn’t.

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Boston to Oklahoma City to Boston


We set out on this trip one Tuesday, at the worst time to set out on a trip, late afternoon. I should have seen this is a sign this trip would make me feel like Marlow in Heart of Darkness. It was hot and rainy and we were filling a U-Haul with all of her belongings. This was the end of a seven year relationship, and I was going to help her move back home. I was responsible for what would seem like difficult tasks like pulling a washing machine and dryer up stairs through a spider web and God-knows-what infested bulkhead out of the basement up into this U-Haul truck. I had this horrible pain in my upper back for a few days before this and all of this moving actually made the pain go away. I was slightly disappointed in this as I had kind of grown to live with being in pain every day of my life, at least when it comes to my back. My arms and shoulders felt nice and worked from all of this lifting as well. I immediately was reminded of how great it feels to have arms that feel like rubber from lifting heavy objects.

We would be driving from Massachusetts to Oklahoma City, OK. We would also have her two cats with us, which is a whole other world of shit; if you’ve ever driven with a cat in a car you know it’s probably the second worst thing to have in your car while driving long distances. The first would be another person. Driving with another person on long distances is definitely a test. A test I know I will always fail at. Like a test I didn’t even take a class for let alone study for. I think the only people you (well, me) could travel long distances with in a car is a person who just died and their body is stowed away somewhere and you are basically just transporting the body. I hate having to stop when I don’t need to stop, and thankfully she isn’t one of those people that need to go to the bathroom if a drop of water is ten feet from her. You ever meet one of these people? Every time they take a sip of a drink they have to visit a restroom immediately after. I couldn’t travel with one of these. I like to push myself and try to do things like drive seven hours without stopping.

I drove the first night. Of course it was raining, hot and we had cats making all sorts of noise in the car. Traffic in Massachusetts was for the most part a hot miserable rain soaked mess. At one point a person pulled next to me yelling and pointing at the car we were towing. Oh yeah, we would also be towing a car on the back of this U-Haul truck. I have never been able to back up anything with a trailer. From time to time one of those know-it-all types will say something snide like “Well all you have to do is turn the wheel one way and the tires go this way, turn it the other way and they go that way” This couldn’t be further from the truth. You’re looking through these giant oddly shaped mirrors so everything is backwards. There is noise and sun in your face and the whole thing is a horrible experience. This situation would rear its ugly head the next morning. Back to this guy yelling at me to pull over: I pull over and can’t figure out what is wrong with the car we are towing. A few miles later another guy pulls up, this time I can actually hear him. Not sure if you know this but when you are going any speed over say….20 miles an hour and yell to someone at a car next to you they can’t hear you like in the movies. Now that I think of it I can’t think of one movie where this has happened. I hear “your ramps are down”. Turns out we were dragging a ramp. This was fixed. Six or seven hours later we arrived in Syracuse, NY. I would not drive this truck again until a day after we arrived in Oklahoma City because I apparently “follow people too close” to which I let her know “well, you drive too close to shit on the right”

I didn’t have a laptop at the time so writing for this trip would have to be by hand, which at this point in my life is not fun. I learned to enjoy it once I was on the train coming back. Here is what I wrote night one:

“Depressing motel, area of country and situation I am in right now. But with all things negative a positive always comes along and fixes that straight away. This kind of travelling where I am not relaxed isn’t really my idea of fun but, eh… The fun comes later. When I think of back home, and when I say back home I don’t mean ‘back home in Massachusetts’ I mean where I have spent ‘time’ the last few months and felt happiest, like myself. It’s nice to have people in my life that don’t owe me anything that I can feel completely comfortable around. I actually feel like myself. This feeling crossed with that mysterious feeling of the unknown and distance is an oddly satisfying feeling I’ve been spending time with for the last few months. I like this feeling much better than the uncomfortable feelings I sometimes feel in reality. I keep thinking I want to write a letter but then realize just living and being is good for right now. I have too much in my head to think about anything else, especially if I am happy the way it is now”

Driving through upstate New York, I have done it so much in all parts of it…well, all parts off of Route 90, which isn’t much. I like it up there. Some of it, when you start moving more west anyway, feels like it is five years ago, or even twenty years ago. There is this lonely and sad feeling of claustrophobia and emptiness that appears late at night there driving past orange lit parking lots for hours at a time. I love it and hate it up there at the same time.

From upstate New York to Oklahoma City, the trip was pretty uneventful, long stretches of road where neither of us talked for hours, I dozed off for a good chunk of the time. Other times we had the radio tuned to talk radio and everything there is right wing and/or religious. One show we listened to in Missouri had a show talking about how bad video games were. The woman prefaced the story with “Video games, like other horrible things like abortion, pornography and homosexuality…” The people calling in were worse. I briefly thought of calling in but realized even trying reason with folks down there is probably not even fun.
“I trust no emotion
I believe in locomotion
But I’ve turned to rust as we’ve discussed”

I caught a train out of Oklahoma City early Tuesday morning for a brief four hour journey south to Ft Worth, Texas. The night before I left, I slept about two and a half hours. Monday night. The next time I would go to sleep would be Thursday night/Friday Morning around 3:30 AM.

The double-decker train was an empty train, a pleasure compared to the rest of the trip which was back to back full trains. Arriving in Ft Worth it was hot as piss outside and although as the case with most train stations it was a shady area of town, I only got approached by one guy asking for change to “buy an ice cream”. I hate having tons of change in my pockets especially if I am going to be sitting for long periods of time. I handed him a handful of dimes and pennies and he made his way into the train station and did indeed come out a few minutes later with an ice cream. Who doesn’t love an honest beggar? I would also meet an honest beggar in Chicago who asked for money for “The Jack Daniels Foundation”, I of course gave him a crisp dollar bill. I did quite a bit of writing on the trains, and since I didn’t really have a full night of sleep over three days some of it made no sense. Here is some of it:

“6. If enemies are not close. You will automatic win any battle. For I will move far from.”

“When I reach California I will burn this book finally. Words in here from 1992. Some guy in 1992 wrote about long forgotten women. Such messy writing that I purposely used so no one could read it if they found. Who knows who all of these spirits are in here, I can’t imagine I will ever need to refer back to this to improve anything in my life. I will throw this book in a barrel. Like in Repo Man when they have the ‘Plate-o-shrimp’ conversation. You know, like dudes under bridges in Los Angeles burning shit in barrels. Having a couple of beers”

“Feel like I will start seeing things any minute now. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in whateveramountofdays now. I feel like ripping this map in front of me into a trillion little pieces. I stare at it and the schedule for hours. Not minutes, hours. This is all you can do here sit and wait sit and wait sit and wait. People are off sleeping, sweating and smelling up that car back there. This thick warm bad breathy hospital silence lit by a thin strip of lights on the ceiling as you sway to the back of each car trying not to bump heads and legs spilling into the aisle. You get good at this acrobatic feat by the end of the trip. Even in the shape I am in, like if I tried to operate heavy machinery, it would not be pretty. I can’t believe that this trip take 24 fucking hours to get from Chicago to Boston. It sounds like some sort of trap the Gods of confusion set. Let’s make this guy think something is true that isn’t true. Wait, what? Some moments here I blink my eyes but they don’t re-open. I enjoy sitting in these cars writing even though I just saw stars while writing that last sentence. I saw an Amish woman at a pay phone at the Chicago train station”

The first half of this trip was pretty depressing for the most part. The second half I met a number of people that I spent a good amount of time with and as painfully tiring the trip was I felt like I was having a good time and was able to keep my mind in other places other than where it actually was. This first group of people I saw for a couple of days walking around and hanging together. A young man about 22, but maybe younger. Big tall, could be menacing, but a baby face. At least 6’ 4”. Also, had one leg and was on a crutch. There were two other girls, around the same age. One was a nerdy looking girl, glasses with a jeweled chain on them to hang from her neck whatever those are called I have no idea. Other girl seemed young and sheltered, kind of an unfortunate look that I won’t go into but let us say she kind of looked like this bass player from a Canadian rock band I won’t mention the name of. I kind of got the vibe that this girl was sort of a pain in the ass and these other kids did not like her. When I did meet the three of them, at the end of my trip to Chicago, or about four hours left in that journey they were mean to her. Right to her face. The young girl did not understand sarcasm and was getting ruined and not knowing it. I felt kind of bad and then remembered this is how young kids are, they judge and judge and pick on and pick on until they eventually settle in on some set of standards which is: Be a dick. Don’t be a dick. I picked the latter when it was my time. On the other hand, these other two, the nerdy white girl who did in fact know things about Star Trek and asked me “is that Gandalf?” regarding a tattoo on my arm seemed to have been around, and this kid with one leg. He was writing in some little notebook. At first when I saw him I said to myself “jeez, fucking trench coat mafia over here”. Same sort of reaction you have if you see like a Juggalo. This kid though, here I am judging him the second I see him, meanwhile I looked like an even bigger asshole on a number of occasions from age 10 to say age….39 so yeah. He was a nice kid, the nerdy girl was nice but I could see was a little too “oh my god I am in art school, check me out” for me.

The annoying young girl would be on my next train from Chicago to Boston. She was going to Ohio somewhere with her mom. These people looked like they stepped off the set of Little House on the Prairie. The girl may have been annoying, but was 18 and probably never left the little town in Arizona she was from. She sat with me on the next train in the lounge car while a line of folks waited for food, coffee and drinks. She was very loud and told me a story of some young kid who ran his car into a metal fence at her school and blah blah blah eventually winding her way to September 11th somehow telling me in an un-ironic way “now that is a day I will NEVER forget”. I replied, “well yeah, you’re not supposed to forget that day”. She mentioned they had it on the television at her school when it happened and I told her we had a similar situation when I was in high school when the space shuttle with Christa McAuliffe blew up. She said “was that Apollo 13?” Ouch. The whole time the line of people can hear every word of this painful conversation until finally she leaves and people stop looking at me and having eye-rolling contests with me. I never saw her again.

I met some interesting artists and musicians later in the evening, a tall pretty girl from Portland, Oregon originally from New Hampshire. We both thought we looked familiar but I think she was much younger which leads me to believe we probably do not know each other at all. I talked with her and these two artists from the Oakland area, one also played guitar and trombone with Citizen Fish. Very cool down to earth people I enjoyed shooting the shit with for a few hours.

The last day of the trip my head and body were gone. I spent the better part of the day dozing off for a few seconds here and a few seconds there. I probably looked like I was on drugs. The last time I felt semi-normal on this part of this journey was for my long layover in Chicago where I left the station, went to the Sears Tower, shot up the elevator but the lines were too long for the deck so I just went back to the lobby and had steak and some sangria before heading back to a Starbucks to charge my phones and then back to the station to wait. It was nice not moving back and forth on a train. Had a couple of good phone calls and then back to hell.

The evening is when I met these folks above. The next day, the last day where I never even attempted to go to sleep until I eventually reached the critical/best point of being exhausted the “now I’m completely wired and don’t even know what it feels like to be tired”. From around noon on the last day until we arrived in Boston around 10:30 PM I was wired. I spent about three or four hours with this African-American woman maybe in her early 50’s. She was a writer and also a minister. We talked about life for a long time and it was great. She was an intense person and we connected on all sorts of subjects. One of those people you meet along the way that gives off a cool vibe. She has a book available online that I am going to check out. One thing I enjoy about taking these trains is you are trapped on this thing with these people and you are kind of forced to talk to them for hours at a time as long as they are willing to do the same. Most of the time it turns out to be a great conversation. As I was saying to the woman “everyone’s story is interesting on some level. If they have the gift to tell a story then that story is even better”

I spent the remainder of the day with a guy named Dennis. He was from Milwaukee and was heading to Dorchester to see his mother who was sick. Dennis, turning 50 drives a tractor trailer, and has been with the same woman for I think he said twenty-six years. He kind of looked like Snoop Dogg, which I’m sure he would take as an insult as he told me he didn’t like rap music. He had some great stories of driving trucks in different parts of the country. We both mentioned different parts of the country we enjoyed seeing. He clearly has more miles on me and more states but I feel like I have enough road experience to talk about a number of places in the US anyway. One thing I really like with sitting with some of these strangers for hours is how much you can learn about people if they are willing to tell stories and are as bored as you are with just sleeping in your seat all day. So hanging with him until the last few minutes of the journey was great as we were still swapping stories about areas of Massachusetts. Good times indeed.

There were a number of other people I spent some time with but most of them weren’t as interesting or were kind of messed up.

Best part of this trip was probably the last couple of days. It was a long mentally and physically exhausting trip that I still haven’t fully absorbed. If anything it was an exercise in patience and a preview of the lengths of road I would travel by myself a few weeks later. I forgot how long some of these drives get. A three hour chunk of driving through nowhere has the feel of a five hour chunk of driving. That second trip had an ultimately happier ending for the most part, and had a laptop for documenting that trip as I go with hopefully less stream of conscious than this. But for now, here this is.

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