Quotes

"Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; If it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere [...] One makes you strong, the other makes you weak."
- Don Juan

"I confess that I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil."
- Charles Dickens

"They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a dying culture."
- John Keats

"If it wasn't for the crimes that I was in
I wouldn't be the guy whose rhymes it is that I'm in."
- Jay-Z, "Blue Magic"

"What did I see?
Could I believe?
That what I saw that night was real and not just fantasy
Just what I saw
In my old dreams
Were they
Reflections of my warped mind staring back at me?"
- Iron Maiden, "Number of the Beast"

Recycled Hash

I can think of a few, but bear with me. On our way down to see them, she fills me in on the entire tragic situation. The two of them appear to be this perfect couple on the outside because they’re both olympically ambition challenged stoners, and you can tell that when you get into the duplex and have to thread your way through a mausoleum of about two and a half generations worth of dusty electronics and appliances to the hub of activity in any stoner household; the bedroom. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t also the epicenter of their pathos and where we all sat.

The he in this equation is of the terminally loyal variety. Now, I don’t the leave through the bedroom window approach to relationships, but you can certainly go too far in the other direction and that’s around where he is. Her, well she probably had about as many fresh notches in her bedpost within their first week of being a couple as there were days in the aforementioned week. If Homeland Security ever starts putting geiger counters in airports, I hope the pair of them have the good sense to stay home. Because of all this I had a very keen interest in engaging him in any kind of way that would distract from this fresh, unwanted information while she was splitting her time between catching up with my friend and hovering over the upended top of a cardboard shoe box while i was educated about his limited edition carbon fiber encased lamborghini branded acer laptop which once and for all proved to me that one can indeed polish a turd and add a massive mark up to it. The shoebox- as I soon found out- was where they shook out the remains of their weed and hash after smoking a bowl, and she was scrutinizing the contents of the box to decide if it was worth trying to smoke again.

Somewhere around this point in the story I gave up on making further forward progress on the highway and sat down. Cat sat cross legged facing me, so I pretended to just stare out at the water so I wouldn’t get even more embarrassed.
“So that’s it, a pair of stoners back home in a dead end relationship depress you? I had such high hopes for this story.” Cat was joking, but I was too infatuated, too earnest.
“No, no. I just needed to stop and sit down, focus.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes, patting the bottom of my bag to indicate I needed to drink more, so I did before continuing.

The verdict came down that it was worth putting through the pipe again. I’m not going to sit here and complain about free drugs but it was about as successful as you’d imagine. The whole thing got me thinking about it later, it just stuck with me.
“What, that’s it’s even more useless to re-smoke marijuana than it is to re-use a tea bag?”
“It just feels like a metaphor,” I said, looking Cat in the eye as long as I dared (ten seconds). “For this condition, this generation, this era. You ever think about how we classify the contemporary?”
“Enlighten me, professor.”
“Post.”
“What?”
“Anything, post-anything. Post Modern. Post Feminist. Post 9/11. Post fucking everything. It’s all talking about today by staring in the fucking rearview mirror.”
“Well, duh. We live in the present, the present dies. Everything we describe is the past if you cut it down to a short enough interval. The rear view mirror is the only way you know what the fuck you just saw.”
“I guess. I’m not saying this right, though. It’s like this. Our grandparents, they’re called the Great Generation, right? Lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, all that shit. Our parents are the Baby Boomers because the joy of surviving all that shit made people breed like hell before they got the sense to give out condoms in public schools. Generation X is all the original punks, skaters, hackers, all that shit. They got to be first to be raised by technology and fast food. What the fuck do we get? Y.”
“Why?”
“No, Y. As in Generation Y.”
“I get that, asshole. Why are we Y?”
“Because it just fucking comes next. A good few of us are hitting adulthood now, and all we’ve got is a culture of Generation X creation and expression repackaged as a commodity.”
“That’s a bit short sighted, isn’t it? Everything has to be derivative of something. No one gets to create in a vacuum. That’d suck.”
I started laughing and nearly chipped a tooth on the bottle trying to get it to my mouth, but came out no worse for the wear than pouring wine down my shirt. I tried to ignore it as best I could and get on with my point, but Cat insisted I take the shirt off, making me blush so hard I was sure the blood would just come gushing out of my face at any moment like some kind of twisted Sissy Spacek impression. The blood stayed behind my face and I followed her unevenly across the sand to the water where she started washing my shirt.
“It’s different now, though,” I said, picking up my train of thought to avoid noticing Cat bending over right in front of me in the eerily growing light. “Think back to Generation X in that first real burst of creativity they had. Straight up inventing shit like the skateboard and the snowboard, turning them into sports. Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The fuck do we have? Britney Spears? We haven’t even managed an Andy Warhol yet.”
“Fuck all that. What’s the point of any of it?”
“Aren’t you supposed to know, I mean you’re the one who’s going to live forever right?”
“Nah, I just wanted to stay young forever.”
“I’m not seeing the distinction there.”
“Well here’s the secret to youth. It’s not wasted on the young because you’re not supposed to be what you get to be yet, you’re not supposed to just know the right shit and do the right shit when you’re young. Youth is being allowed to fuck up and still being able to recover. When someone grows up fast, it just means they either fucked or got fucked too hard to recover.”
“So why be young forever?”
“So I can fall as far as I want and never have to worry about hitting bottom again.”
Cat walked back to the highway and draped my shirt over a log to dry, while I tried to decide if I ought to ask the obvious question.
“Let’s hope that gets dry enough to wear in three hours.”
“Why three hours?”
“Because that’s when you start work. You might want to look at your watch.”
“I’m good.” There would never be enough alcohol in the world to cure that sinking feeling, but at least my shirt wasn’t going to smell like booze when I ambled into the store for open.

We just sat there in a comfortable silence for a few minutes until my curiosity got the best of me.
“So how is it that you’re going to stay young forever?”
Cat quirked an eyebrow.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re too curious?”
“No one named Cat, anyway.”
“Har har. I’m a vampire.”
“You don’t sparkle.”
“Oh fuck you.”
“You’re a vampire, this is the Pacific North West. It’s completely fair game.”
Cat pursed her lips hard enough to crack a diamond, but silently conceded the point, but I just had to press further. I guess at that point the cat was out of the bag so everything that came next was going to come next anyway, but part of me still blames my curiosity for the whole damn mess.
“Since you haven’t y’know sucked my blood or killed me or anything yet does that mean you’re like E-”
The corners of Cat’s mouth sprang up the way she did with this one smile of hers that exposed her admittedly large canines, but that was no smile playing across her face.
“Okay fine, is Buffy verboten too? Because Angel fits my point, kind of.”
“I’m going to hit you when you are not expecting it. I don’t come with any kind of gypsy curse attached or anything like that. I’m the same person I ever was, just with a few more complications.”
“So how old are you really then?”
“I told you; 19.”
“Seriously. You’re a vampire.”
“Seriously.”
“How long have you been a vampire, then?”
“Since I was about sixteen. So three years give or take.”
“I dunno if I believe that, I mean it would explain why you come off as at least twice your age.”
“Honey, that has nothing to do with me having fangs. I lived more than my fair share by the time I had my first period.”

I’d like to say that I’d have felt the same fist clenching my heart if Cat had been the ugliest girl I’d ever seen, but savage pain on the face of beauty has always been most compelling. How else could the legacies of Marilyn Monroe and Edie Sedgwick weigh so heavily on our culture? What else could knock her claim of being a vampire straight out of my head mere seconds after she said it?
“I’m not a good person,” she stated flatly, looking me right in the eye. The me sitting on that log might disagree with the me telling this, but I hate it now so much more than I did then. I usually smile at irony, but I can’t smile at the fact that no matter how right she was about a lot of things, the one thing she was most confident, most self assured in, was that which she was most irretrievably wrong, a fact which even my surviving to tell this is a testament to.

I wanted to say all kinds of things that I just didn’t have the authority to say yet, so all I could manage was a frail why.
“The things I’ve done, the things I know I’m capable of.”
I blew air through my nose, not really knowing what to do. How to argue. Going back as far as I can remember, that was one thing that people always said to me. I knew how to argue, I knew how to dismantle opinions, to prevail through charisma, sarcasm, or logic and yet here I was with not even a pair of scrabble tiles to build a retort to.
“See, I made you speechless. Mr. I Have An Answer For Everything.”
I licked my lips and swallowed carefully, weighing my options silently until I finally found my words again.
“I’ll prove you wrong. I don’t know enough yet to convince you, but I will.”
“What if you can’t? What if there’s something so terrible you won’t be able to look at me again?”
“There won’t be.”
“There will. There is. I could scare you away right now if I wanted to.”
“I really don’t think you could.” She never did.
Cat withdrew for a moment and smiled at me.
“I like your innocence.” I bristled.
“I’m not innocent.” I’m really not.
Cat laughed not unkindly at my bristling.
“It’s not a bad thing.” I’m still inclined to disagree.
“You’re not stained, damaged, and fucked around.” I’ll agree to that, but I still don’t like being called innocent. I just kind of shrugged and exhaled. I’m really fucking stubborn. She probably could have been a serial killer and I’d still have fallen in love with her if for no other reason than to prove her wrong. Granted there were far more reasons than just that, but it really is how stubborn I can be when I want to. Unfortunately so is she. So was she. So I plowed on, spinning my wheels in quicksand, but doing it anyway.
“What does it matter what you’ve done up until the point I saw you? I wasn’t there to see the hows and the whys. I just get it filtered through your, I dunno, self loathing or regret or whatever it is; the way you see it now. All I can judge you by is how you treat me, how you are around me. If you go off and rip someone’s head off in front of me, that would mean something. I could speak to that.”
Cat stared back at me, the gears in her head grinding away loud enough for me to hear until she finally spoke.
“You are so frustrating.”
I shrugged and apologized.
“Not in a bad way. I’d just call you an asshole. You just think things through, and I don’t see much of that.”
“You must hang around some pretty stupid people if I’m some kind of high water mark.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do that. All that ‘I’m not that smart’ bullshit. You are so just shut the fuck up and agree with me because I’m right.”
I shrugged, and she continued.
“I do though; hang around with stupid people. It sucks, but it works.”

More raw stuff.

I think the last time I did anything you’d call brown bagging I was sixteen and thinking that the fresh bills coming out of the mint had my smiling mug on it. Don’t misunderstand me here, we all did at one point or another until someone or something brought you crashing back down to the Earth. I know I certainly did that night, because it earned me the nickname “Slurpee Machine” owing to what it looked like when I puked up everything I ate from what felt like between a week earlier and everything I’d yet to eat for the next week. Modern medicine tells us that you can’t vomit what you haven’t eaten yet, but I wouldn’t count out the possibility that a vengeful god gave me just enough of a taste of liminal time to experience my breakfast from the next morning going the wrong way before it went the right way.

So I probably should have known better all things considered, and if I hadn’t sacrificed my memory to Dionysus using a $20 bottle of sauvignon blanc in a paper bag as the dagger, I might be able to tell you if I had. Known better, I mean. Because knowing and doing are two different things where dating is concerned. When a woman like Cat is involved, the improbably gorgeous bad girl with a whiff of mystery about her, you just throw in with her. It wouldn’t even be fair to say In Cat We Trust except as a placeholder. In Infatuation We Trust is more like it. I’d stop rambling about this and get on with the story, but I see you. I see that stare, like you haven’t been there, teetering across a precarious pile of old driftwood in the dark.

Out on the islands where my dad took us on vacation we called that driftwood “the highway.” Any beach you care to name in the lower mainland and probably anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest has it. They’re either big old logs that broke free of one of those corals they float down the water, or trees that ended up in the ocean from a storm or erosion. All the practice I got back in the day as a kid that went home with splinters all over the place until I could keep my balance is probably what kept me alive that night.

You can feel how sturdy a log is by the vibration under your feet every time you step down on it; the worse it vibrates, the sooner you ought to get off. I blame that for why I couldn’t stay focused when I asked Cat if she knew what I found depressing. Being the way she is she responds
“Republicans that get away with telling people theirs is the party of Abraham Lincoln?”
Yes, I said, hopping down from the shaky log I was on and nearly impaling my foot on a sharp branch sticking out of the one I landed on. I let that hang in the air for a few seconds before Cat brought me back from my silent drunken musings on the oft overlooked exodus of the Dixiecrats.
“You’re supposed to be saying yes, but that isn’t what I was thinking of.”
It’s a good thing that the amount of wine I had brought enough red to my cheeks that a bit more wouldn’t be noticed, and it’s a better thing that it was probably lost in the dark. Except that vampires see in the dark, so it wasn’t. She had to talk me back another three times as I protested about being so apparently drunk after less than half the bottle, but I finally managed to make it back on topic to tell a story from the last year I spent back home before coming out to the coast.

When I get drunk, I get a bit bitter about my hometown. It’s not a bad city really, just boring and more than a little backward from how I want to look at the world, so I probably referred to it as skoal stained and cowshit reeking, which isn’t entirely off track. If you’re at The Ranchman’s on any night of the week and they’re playing “It’s Five O’clock Somewhere.” Which is often.

So the story goes that people get so bored in this city of just hit a million, that a favourite pass-time is to just drive around and talk, and in the heart of oil country you can do that without living in a box. One such night I was reclining in the shotgun seat in my friend’s car fighting madly against her sudden urge to subject me to some mild nostalgia in the form of that Justin Timberlake album where he’s kicking a disco ball in half on the cover, when she got a marginally better urge. We knew each other through slinging coffee for the same rich bastard corporation, so I hadn’t met many of her friends, which were what your grandparents might call a colourful bunch. Cautionary tales, mostly, and her idea was for us to swing around and visit arguably the most cautionary of all.

They’re friends of hers, basically un-biological siblings, the kind of people that let you believe that you really can choose your family. What feels strange for her about it is that they hooked up. You don’t much like thinking about your siblings hooking up, even when they aren’t really your siblings. The other problem is that she knows way too much about either of them for it to feel good to her, and isn’t that always the way. When you only know half the baggage in a relationship it’s easier to sign off on it, but when you know even more than each one knows about the other and it’s a head on highway collision in the middle of winter waiting to happen? Well now that’s a whole other breed. It’s what they call pathos, when you know something that eats you up because you can’t tell the person on account of getting in some kind of shit or looking like an asshole, and what better way to look like an asshole than to tell your best friend that your other best friend- that they are fucking prodigiously- is an asshole they need to flee from post haste?

Twilight

So I watched Twilight. Predictably, I hated it. The day before I read an interesting if somewhat confusing article on feminism and vampire fiction, which really just added more fuel to the fire. The thing about Twilight is that it's nakedly pornographic in that chaste mind fuck sort of thing that people pretend is porn for women (which is really yet another reductionist portrait of female sexuality, but that's a rant for another day). I wish I could even say that it's Laurel K. Hamilton written for the teenage set, but Hamilton knows how to give us characters in three dimension and relationships with real emotional weight.

I can't even really complain in a male post-feminist sort of way that Edward is incredibly flat as a character, because Bella is possibly even flatter. We never really get a look at just who she is. She barely even exists, and really only ever functions as a proxy for the teenage female viewer.

We get a few of the same scenes in Twilight as we do True Blood in terms of the struggle of the domesticated vampire and the male vampire's dilemma in entering into the company of a fragile, mortal, innocent girl. The main difference is that Bill and Sookie remain constantly aware and grounded of all the implications of their relationships and the inherent difficulties. Bella and Edward glide across all of these except for the one or two that provide us with a thin patina of drama to fuel the angst.

Twilight is grown from fertile soil that could have done numerous worthwhile things with the themes and situations present, but seems to almost intentionally snub them. Explore the myth of the domesticated, sensitive bad boy. Explore the tendency that teenagers have to want their first real relationship to last forever. Take an interesting look at how native north american teenagers raised on reserves interact with non reserve teenagers. All grand lost opportunities.

I wanted to empathize with Bella, and a few times it almost looked like I could. I've been in that situation where you want to be with someone who is constantly telling you that they're bad for you while being the complete opposite. The problem is that you never really see where her attraction to Edward- or his to her- scratches the surface. Every time they start to have a conversation, the dialogue fades out and the music takes over for a slow, fuzzy montage. We the viewers cannot be bored, we cannot be shown the characters actually connecting in any legitimate way.

I just fear for a generation that is being preyed upon so viciously by tapping into all of it's most vulnerable fantasies and pumping them for money in mediums that are only going to encourage them. Both the novels and the films are just perpetuating nonsense fantasies about romance that are only going to bedevil and disappoint these girls when they reach adulthood, and isn't that what Sex and the City is about? Crashing into the wall of the truth behind the Disney princess myths and filling that emotional hole with empty sex, expensive shoes, and candy-sweet cocktails?

Rough Beginning

It used to be that a tattoo didn’t have to mean fucking anything. If I got tatted up with motorcycles and naked chicks, it could just mean that I liked motorcycles and naked chicks, right? But after all those goddamn tv shows where these chicks get on just to get off about the big long weepy story behind the fucking tweety bird on their hip, nothing is safe. I didn’t used to give a shit that people believed everything they saw on tv, even when it meant that they assumed I was trying to fuck them sideways every time I got under their cars, because let’s face it- I usually was. Usually am. Fucking verb tenses, anyway you get where I’m going with this right?

I go anywhere these days, and people want to know the story behind my tattoos. It got so bad that every time I get dressed in the morning I take some duct tape and tape my sleeves to my wrists, just to make sure that if I have to stand up on the subway- which I always do- they won’t slip so that some salaryman asshole catches a glimpse of the ink under there and decides he wants to find out what dead homie that motorcycle is for and what bitch that married some other asshole that is riding it. They really ask me that, as if you know I’d be blind to the symbolism of a dead friend fucking an ex-girlfriend. I may spend my days under cars, but there is oxygen down there too.

The funniest part of it isn’t that I get hassled by schizophrenics all day- they can’t decode basic symbolism or so I read somewhere- it’s that the best stories aren’t in the tattoos. No, the best shit is what gets told while the tattoo gun is buzzing and some poor motherfucker is screaming. You ask people what the manliest place on the planet is, they’ll tell you it’s the bar or the gym, maybe even an autobody shop like mine but that’s all bullshit. Bars and gyms, that shit is all peacock posturing and flexing. The only place that compete with the tattoo shop is those barber shops full of crazy old negroes in the Bronx, and most of them have checkered floor tiles too.

What separates tattoo shops is that once you get under that needle, when it’s ripping through your epidermis six hundred times a minute, all that posturing and bullshit just evaporates. You can’t put up a front, and you’d be an asshole for trying. The truth of the situation is that under the right circumstances, a mystical bond develops between the tattoo artist and his client. I’m sure you want to laugh at that shit but you have to respect that tattooing has some truly mystical fucking origins.

Back in the day in Japan, before they started running storefronts with walls of flash like they’re LA or something, you didn’t even get to pick what they put on you. You had to be introduced to the guy who was going to tattoo you, you had to bring him gifts. It was like wooing a chick, you had to have a relationship before he’d stab you with a steel tipped bamboo needle.

The guy who did my back piece- nutty guy who calls himself Yayo- he’s a callback to that shit. He’s as white as rice, but he gets that bond. The tattoo doesn’t have to mean shit, but the tattooing does. It’s all about the experience, he tells me. You ought to remember the getting it done the same way you remember the tattoo.

He’s got this one story he’ll tell you on the second session of a backpiece, once you’re committed to him and are too scared shitless of walking around with a half done back to leave once he digs into the real crazy. He assures me this story is one hundred percent true, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t make me regret harassing him for three hours to tell me why he calls himself Yayo when he looks like he hasn’t shoved anything up his nose since he could talk and he’s got “Gotham City” tattooed across his back.

“So you really want to know why they call me Yayo?” he asked while he was changing machines, from the nice little pussycat of an eight needle he was using for linework to the hellcat of a sixteen magnum for the colour on the devil chick he was gouging into my back.
“Sure as shit I do,” I said, watching him in the mirror.
“Well, what do you know about vampires,” he asked me, squirting out some red ink into a little plastic cup.
“You mean those gothic weirdos that post up pictures of themselves smeared in ketchup on that emo-kid version of myspace?”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “I mean the real as hell Bram Stoker kind,” coming at me with the hellcat. I wasn’t sure if I should be more worried about the implications of his last statement or the needle he was about to rake against my back. I tensed up as the needles, cut into my skin. People always want to know what that’s like. A liner, that’s just like getting a fucking needle dragged through your skin, but a hellcat magnum like that? It’s like Jack Bauer coming at you with a lit cigarette and twenty questions about a nuclear bomb, so I think you can forgive me for my less than thorough questioning of his story.
“You’re trying to tell me that there’s vampires running around out there?” I asked him between more than a couple winces.
“I am suggesting just that,” he said. “It was about six months after I moved to LA. I was working at a coffee shop down by Venice Beach where you get absolutely all kinds. Back then I used to start work so early that if I timed it right I could take my first break of the day just as the sun was coming up. I’d just sit out there in the sand with the tourists, the junkies, and rollerbladers and watch one of the most spectacular sunrises a man could ever see.

It sounds kind of sick, but the colours you see reflected off the haze of smog? The pinks, purples, and yellows? They’re fucking gorgeous. I could never say for sure, but you know I think that’s where those nutty highlights you see in new school stuff come from, the sunrise over the smog. So anyway, it was one of those mornings when I had just come back from that sunrise and was totally lost in my own shit, just throwing up drinks in complete autopilot until she walked in.

The sun was just up, so I figure she must have been feeling and thinking that she was about three different kinds of shit, but in that moment she looked so much more. Picture this, she’s like five-three and within twenty of a hundred. Hair like it’s about to catch fire and burn the whole place down. I lose it so bad that I’ve got boiling hot water pouring down my hand and I need the cashier tugging on my apron to realize it. This is LA, the city where you know they front like they invented the idea of the beautiful woman but it’s more like LA is the city where that idea came to die, and here I am burning my hand off because here comes one of the last really beautiful women in the world. I guess I should have noticed that she was pale like she was carved out of alabaster on Venice Beach, but I reiterate that there was something really transcendent about how this girl looked and my hand was about ready to fall off.