Read some of the bullshit on these cups.  Caribou Coffee has this trash printed all over the window of their store, which I walk by most everyday.  It never fails to fill me with rage:  ”Give your change to charity,”  ”Plant lots of trees,” “Have a favorite charity,” “Indulge in CHOCOLATE therapy.”  The one I saw this morning – “Build communities, not empires” – made me want to smash their windows and spray-paint that very phrase on the side of the building.

I take full responsibility for my choices as a consumer.  I’m well aware that I’m not doing anybody any good by giving my money to Starbucks, Target, McDonalds, etc.  But don’t fucking patronize me with your corporate PR bullshit affirmations.  I will never drink your moose piss coffee.

Today I was getting ready for work when I realized that some of my porn had finally downloaded. I opened it up for a quick look, and saw something completely new for the first time: I saw twin brothers having sex with each other.

This kind of blew my mind – after the fact. As I was watching I was way too turned on and fascinated to think about what I was seeing, but as I walked to work some questions surfaced: Was what I just watched illegal? What does it mean that I just witnessed a huge social taboo shattered on film? Is this a sign of our moral decline? But most importantly: how much longer before I can come home and masturbate to it?

Then I started thinking of that ridiculous Glenn Beck clip I posted on Monday, about how porn is addictive. And I realized that that clip hit kind of close to home for me, because I really do worry that I consume too much porn, that I prefer fantasy over reality, and that I’m somehow harming myself because of it.

But fuck that. It’s just the shame talking, the same shame that made that dumb schmuck on the Glenn Beck clip believe he was doing himself a service by going on TV (and dragging his wife on there, too – what a jerk) and telling people how much he used to beat off. If I’m gonna look at porn and jerk off, I’m not going to feel ashamed about it. It’s not the end of the world. Nobody’s getting hurt.

I haven’t jerked off the to the twins yet but I’m going to as soon as I finish writing this.

—–

I was standing at the bus stop, watching lots of college kids stream by (it was Friday night on homecoming weekend). A group of three boys and four girls passed me by, and I immediately got a good vibe from them. I thought, Those are my kind of people.  They seemed relaxed. I thought,  They probably get high.  They were pretty, but in individualistic ways – not fashionable or conformist.

I turned to watch them go and thought about following them. The night seemed filled with possibility. I imagined trailing them to a party, subtly intergrating myself into their night, getting to know them, maybe even becoming their friend. Just witnessing their lives for one night.

Then I heard somebody say “Hi,” and I turned around to see two perky, fresh-faced young people – a guy and a girl – standing about five inches from my face.

^^visual representation

“Hi!” they said.
“Hi,” I said.
“How are you tonight?” she said.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You doing alright tonight?” he said.
“What’s up?” I asked again, as if I couldn’t figure it out. They handed me a card for their bible study. “We’re from the Greater Pittsburgh Church of Christ.”

I talked to them as I waited for my bus. They asked me a lot of questions, and succeeded in making me feel interesting and accepted. We talked about J.K. Rowling, about writing as a career, blahdey blah blah.

I got tired of it. I wanted to acknowledge the artificiality of the situation – my belief that they had approached me and were attempting to befriend me on false pretenses. They didn’t want to become my friend, they wanted to get me to come to their church. Right?

“So why do you do this?” I asked.

The guy got nervous, started rocking on his heels, as if he was afraid that I was getting confrontational. But the girl didn’t miss a beat. She said she discovered God after she came to college, and it was a great thing that made her life better and she wanted to share it with people. I could respect that. I asked her if it was something she thought she’d do for the rest of her life. “God willing,” she said.

But I don’t think she got what I meant. I wasn’t asking if she’d be a Christian for the rest of her life, I meant would she continue to just walk up to people and start talking to them. Because in a weird way, I really envy the balls that the two of them had, to start a conversation with a random stranger. Kind of like what I wanted to do with that group of cool kids just a few minutes ago… (Who, at this point, I’d completely forgotten about. What happened to them, anyway? Where did they go?)

So if I had tried to integrate myself into the evening of those cool kids, would I have been acting on false pretenses? Just getting to know them for having the sake of “an experience,” using them to tell a story, using them to make my life more interesting? I considered the idea that I was no better than the Christians, because we both had motives, because we were both doing it for selfish reasons.

Well, fuck that. The Christians have the balls that I don’t have, that may be true, but their focus is too narrow, they don’t know what they’re missing. The experiences they could be having, the people they could be meeting…I can’t even imagine. But their mission is black and white, there’s no exploration, no discovery. To them, you’re somebody who comes to church, or somebody who doesn’t.

I won’t.

Besides that I’m just having a summer.  Rob Wolfsham just visited me and we had a good time hanging around Pittsburgh.  We drank beer on my back porch, went dancing with flirty straight friends, and ogled daddies at the local wave pool.  It was fun.

On the Backwoods front, the illustrations are rolling in.  Michael Kirwan has showed me three of them so far, and let me tell you, they are beauteous.  It’s hard to stay continually excited about my project throughout the long, slow process of getting it out there, but seeing these illustrations is helping to keep it alive in my mind.  It’s exactly what I wanted – the drawings will totally enhance the text, make it all that much sexier.

N– had the house to herself that night, a Friday. When everybody got there they had already dropped, so we took ours. First thing I remember is that my friend Neil, always the provocateur, brought along a movie, and we watched this as the acid took hold: “The Miracle Worker.” One clear image: Helen Keller’s father leaning into the crib, realizing that the baby was deaf and blind, and screaming into its face. Oh my God.

I went outside. It was night, but there seemed to be light everywhere, shifting over the yards and houses of the neighborhood in sheeting, nebulous patterns. Matt was on the back porch, having a bad trip, his eyes wide and nervous.

Mike was eating party mix, that all-purpose concoction of mini-Melba toast, cheese crackers, pretzels, peanuts, whatever else. “You know why they call it Party Mix?” he said. “Cause when you’re at a party, you don’t give a fuck what you’re eating.”

Dan was in the dark bathroom, alone. Someone went in to see what he was up to. “Nothing,” he said, sitting on the side of the tub and looking nervous, like he was trying to cover something up. “What’s going on?” they said again, and looked behind him. He’d knocked over a candle, and spilled glorious ribbons of red wax all over the white porcelain.

I remember being distinctly creeped out by The Prodigy’s “Breathe” video. Who wouldnt’ve been?

In the morning we took a tour of Blairsville, my rural town. Somebody wanted to go to Bolivar Falls. Julie hated the idea; had been there a thousand times. “Everybody always wants to go there, and it’s this huge long walk up a hill and it’s not even that great anyway.” But we went still; to a little waterfall and swimming hole deep in the woods. Neil looked around at graffiti’d rocks, trash on the ground. “It’s exactly like I thought it would be,” he said. Nobody wanted to jump in; Neil eventually did, though, out of principle.

Next we went to the abandoned mental hospital. We found an old silo filled with water on which was a layer of fluorescent green algae. “This would be a perfect place to hide a body,” Matt said. He never forgot about that silo, and when I told him years later that it had been torn down, he was sad.

I had been recruited to drive. On the way out of the field I backed into Eric’s car. No damage, just a scare. Oh well.

We went to the park and waded in the stream. God, where didn’t we go? I felt like we’d lived for days in the space of one night. At some point it had to end. I didn’t feel changed from the experience, like everyone said I would. I hadn’t had any huge insights. I felt like I’d taken a drug and that was that.

Kari* was driving, Lisey was riding shotgun, N– and I were in the back seat. I knew Lisey, but I’d never met Kari before. They were sort-of girlfriends. I was struck by the music Kari was playing. “It’s Belle and Sebastian,” she said, and had to repeat the name a few times cause I’d never heard of them before. The album was The Boy with the Arab Strap. “It’s their new album,” Kari said. “I liked their last one a lot, but I’m not too sure about this one.” I immediately fell in love with it; the music hit me deep in a rare way. Already it was feeling like a magical trip.

Night was falling as we reached Tom and Erin’s house, who were Lisey’s friends. They were ravers and were my first exposure to that scene. Everyone said that your first time taking ecstasy was your best. The stuff they sold us was said to be “molly”; close-to-pure MDMA. I’m inclined to think it actually was. It was in a capsule; a whitish powder. In retrospect it had the properties I came to associate with purer forms of ecstasy – a rolling, cresting sensation with intense peaks and vibrating valleys.

I’m shaking as I write this.

We stayed in the house the whole time. The lights were dim. They were playing techno music in the living room; pounding sounds and rainbow lights streaking across the walls. Often this was too intense for the four of us. We would end up on the couch in the next room over. Tom and Erin kept to themselves, letting us have our own experience. N– asked Lisey, “What’s the meaning of life?” “Show your teeth!” Lisey said.

More folks showed up; including an older queer guy who I was instantly voraciously curious about. He was a character, a big hulking guy wearing a feathered top hat. He had a thick West Virginia accent. I hadn’t met many queer people at this point. I was asking him a million questions. “Damn, hippie, you writin a book?” he said, and laughed.

Later I bonded with Kari. We were sitting on the couch together, apart from everyone else. “Sometimes I look at people and I wonder, are they really happy?” she said. This was just the sort of cynicism I could relate to. I knew then that she was a friend.

We started to come down. N– was feeling crappy. “What’s wrong guys?” Tom asked us. “We’re bummed cause we’re coming down,” N– said. “Well, there’s a remedy for that,” Tom said in a knowing way. He brought out a little green plastic snorter, and we did bumps of ecstasy mixed with ketamine. I don’t remember feeling much from that.

Nor do I remember sleeping over. I know we left in the morning. It was a sunny, pretty morning. I felt mellow and good; I think we all did. We stopped at a rest stop. “Who makes rest stops?” N– wondered. “The state, I guess,” I said. “Oh,” N– said. “States are nice.”

We laughed about that one the rest of the way home. “States are nice.” States are nice, because the rest stop is nice; because we can drink water at the rest stop and go to the bathroom and buy a snack, too.

I don’t want to put a negative slant on the experience, though it wasn’t all good; and my further experiences with ecstasy weren’t all good either. But the simple gratitude and empathy the drug often engendered are worth noting. “States are nice.” Why not?

*names changed

He’d purchased some high-quality pot, beautiful green-white buds that he stored in a jar in the cupboard for my arrival. Also he’d bought some papers soaked in hash oil, but those came later.

The three of us – me, my brother, and Chris – piled into the bathroom and took hits out of a bowl, I think. I coughed a lot, to where I actually thought I was going to puke.

Afterwards we were standing in the kitchen; Chris was talking and I noticed things getting weird. Time seemed drawn out.

Chris had to pick up his girlfriend at the airport, so we all got into my parents’s car and drove there. I sat in the back. My jaw felt like it was opening on its own, some muscle memory opening my mouth, and I kept having to close it. I articulated this to them; Chris said he knew what I meant. We got to the airport and I went inside with Chris. I’d never been inside the Pittsburgh airport and it kind of blew my mind. It looked so futuristic and modern.

After this my memory is hazy. We went back to their apartment. My brother and I watched “A Thief in the Night” and smoked the hash-oil joints. I remember moments of the film sticking out at me like the most absurd and hilarious things I’d ever seen. We would rewind it and watch it over again and laugh our asses off. Then the movie was over, and it was like I hadn’t even seen it. Time was all fucked up. I didn’t want to smoke anymore. I wanted to be normal again.

Weed was never very good to me.

“Didja ever see a Playboy?” he asks, and I say no. We bike to the railroad yard, to a section of abandoned track. John leads me around a rusty coal car. There in the tall weeds is a pile of tar paper.

“My brother and his friends found them,” he says as he lifts the tar paper piece by piece. Color appears. There’s a Playboy, a Penthouse, and several other magazines. The Playboy has photos of a television actress I recognize. She holds a newspaper over her breasts, her pubic bush standing out like a black shock from her white thighs. I watch John leaf through them. He makes detached comments, pointing things out to me. He picks up a Penthouse Forum, says “This one’s just filled with nakedness.”

When he’s done he covers them back up with the thick, black tar paper.

I go straight home. My dad brought home a pumpkin, and he and my sister hover over the kitchen table, getting ready to carve it. He’d been wondering where I was. Did I want to help them carve it?

As I take off my shoes I notice that my socks are covered in black burrs that I picked up in the tall grass of the railroad yard. They are dark and menacing, insect-like, with twin prongs that attach themselves to the fabric. I pick them off one by one, the guilt setting in my stomach, sickly and dense.

A few days later I run into some boys – two are from my class, the other is an older boy from around the neighborhood. I want to impress them, so I take them to the magazines in the railroad yard. I watch them look through the magazines.

Before we leave they hide a couple of the magazines under the freight car, so John M—’s brother won’t be able to find them. They take the rest with them, and we head on our bikes toward one of their houses. In the backyard they put the magazines in a bin and set them on fire. While I watch they take turns peeing on the fire and on the magazines.

It’s got to be one of the most depressing things ever put to print. I mean, look at that fucking cover.

The sentences are as bland and safe as grandma’s plastic-covered couch. They read…well, sort of like a greeting card.

Writing is a good form of self-expression, Stauss unequivocally states in the introduction. What better place to have your writing appear than in greeting cards?

Indeed.

With this genre, you are expressing your own thoughts at the same time you are helping others express how they feel. This is possible because many find it difficult to say what they feel, and they will buy a greeting card to speak for them. Who knew a greeting card industry manual could read like a treatise on the soul-crushing alienation of modern life?

In the author bio it says that Stauss spent eight years teaching children and adults with a variety of learning disabilities. Through her books, she hopes to decrease the level of frustration felt by many.

In some small way, I think that’s what all writers are shooting for.