Silent Night
Silent Night as done by me
Commercial Break
A little birdy once told me that instead of just wanting to be a writer, and saying I wanted to be a writer, and pretending that I was a writer, that maybe I should just take a year and focus on writing. It was optimistic and brash and totally unreasonable and for one reason or another it looks like that’s exactly what I’ve done.
But it’s time to back-burner all this for a while. I’ve got bigger fish to fry, apparently on one of my larger front burners, and the pretense I’ve been sleepwalking under has now collapsed under the wonderful weight of reality.
I’ve written more in the last year than I had in the previous three or four. The last time I had written regularly, and then taken a decisive break from it, was just about six years ago. Things changed for the better for me within two months of doing so and I’d welcome a similar turn anytime now.
This isn’t a huge deal, or a huge break – I hope to be back in early November (and just maybe putting links on twitter) – but I’m writing like this because I need it to feel like this.
Thanks for checking in over the last year. We’ll see you next time.
Lookalike Love
Are you a shut-in narcissist happy to masturbate in front of a mirror, yet always left wanting more… of yourself?
Do your exes (or crushes) vaguely resemble each other – and you?
If you wore a wig – or cut your hair – would that new image sum up your picture of an ideal mate?
If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, thank your empty sky that we have the solution to one of your many, many problems.
Other computer-based compatibility services would have you fill out a questionnaire, getting to know the “real you” in however many different and overcomplicated ways.
They are trying to set you up with someone with the same fractured view of the world.
And they are wasting your time.
Think about this: Most people who aren’t ultra-rich pair off with someone more or less “in their league,” right?
We take that premise to its nth degree:
We find you someone who looks like you.
Those so-called “brother-sister” couples you see out there are onto something, and not merely a legal way to work through two lifetimes of psychological complexes.
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And they’re okay with that.
Are you?
Do you want to be?
Here’s how our system works:
1) Sign up with us online.
2) Include a picture.
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We’ll give you a way to contact your closest three matches. If those relationships don’t pan out, and both parties report back that they didn’t, you’ll then have access to more candidates (people who will look less and less like you) for a small fee every time after that first batch of three.
Is our service not exactly what you’re looking for? Check this out: We’ve listened to our customer base and, for another small fee, we can make hair color, eye color and skin tone uncheckable variables to cover your whole range of mommy and daddy and sibling and cousin issues. Accuse us of exploiting the most damaged, fine, but know that you would do the same.
But don’t think our system is just for attractive people who haven’t yet found themselves. For all you fucking ugly people out there, rest easy. Continue to hide yourself from the world as we do the legwork, sparing you more of the rejection you’ve felt all your life and eventually finding for you another poor unfortunate soul on whom genetics (or bad luck, or other environmental factors) has played a similarly terrible and permanent practical joke.
Simply put, what we offer will be of use to every single self-centered person out there.
Too busy with a high-paying job to meet people?
New in town?
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Disfigured?
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Let us find your physical match.
And then go fuck yourself!
Sleep Walk
Sleep Walk as done by me
The People of the State of New York vs. howlingman: Epilogue
This post is like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and too many others like it: A sorely late if not entirely unwelcome addition to a long-finished series. In my case, it was a series of posts originally part of another blog entirely – guess the name – relating a long, winding, long-winded tale of my reckless youth (and baseball). It began with a prologue, which I hope you’ll take with a grain of salt given that I was six months out of grad school and clinging to the falling sands of my education. The nutshell version is that I did a questionable something and needed a lawyer, and the fake name I gave that lawyer in my bloggy retelling was “Elaine Gillies.”
That story, the night it began, and the months that followed, is simply a part of my personal mythology. It’s not particularly funny or inspiring and I am not particularly heroic but my interest in it is more in the narrative and the nexus of happenings that happened. So much happened for it all to come together the way it did that, well, if it wasn’t a religious thing or a fate thing it was at least a thread of immutable order amidst the proverbial chaos. And now here I am, six-and-a-half years post-ordeal, five-and-a-half since I wrote up the damn thing, and I think it’s all coming back around. A long break, an empty summer, a postponed move to Astoria just in time for my birthday (probably) and a little bit of life later, I’m back where I was, using my mid- to late-20s to move about a mile (probably).
Finally, something I recognize.
This weekend I went to see Silence! The Musical, the comedic, theatrical take on Silence of the Lambs. It’s playing for the rest of the summer at Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. Just an excellent show. Airplane!-style funny with tremendous talent all over the place. Inside, we’re down the couple of steps from street level, printed tickets in hand, trying to find the right line on which to stand, not the will call line, not the line to get into the attached bar next door. Finally able to stand still, still a foot freakishly taller than everyone as usual, my perspective is enhanced by the waiting crowd, generally an older, smaller demographic. A couple of workers patrol the area, taking drink orders for intermission, handing out baskets with lotion in them, one in charge of the velvet rope. And then another lady in a blazer, a dark one with a bright red shirt underneath. Delicately pretty if I may say so, and strangely familiar. I look once and twice, from a number of feet away, and I tell my cotheatregoer, “I think I know her.” We pass the unhinged velvet rope, consider buying a shirt (“Would you *$%# me?“) and get to the door, where the lady in red (and blazer) stands handing out programs.
We take ours, and the swell of people behind me won’t relent for more than a few seconds. But I have to ask, “Is your name Elaine?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Elaine Gillies?” No hesitation now. “You were my attorney once, a [redacted] case in the Bronx. I’m Dan Mooney.”
The name might not have rung a bell but if not Elaine’s a decent enough actress.
I shook her hand twice, shocked to see her, happy I said something. I told her everything worked out okay. Ten seconds lasted a minute. My friend and I peeled away, finding our seats where I told the nuts and bolts of the lawyer story over again, though not in so many words.
I didn’t see Elaine after the show. She might well have vanished, I don’t know. If this whole saga is a story, a play (as I sectioned it) and I’m a player and she’s a player, her new role was completed anyway. But: that’s fucking crazy talk, metaphors run amok: She’s real and I’m real, and everything that happened really did happen. It all might seem codified and dried out because it’s now written, or somehow blurred with fiction because it is just a retelling. Lesson learned, though: The past is gone in one sense but only one. In three others it’s as here as it ever was.
