“I guess I just like liking things.”

Last week, I clocked out of work and went to McDonald’s for dinner. I emptied my tray with a good 30 minutes before I had to get back, so I decided to check out a used bookstore I’d discovered three blocks from the office. The sun was already down as I made a right from 2nd onto Grant, just two blocks past where I turn every day to go into work.

The path before me was carved out of Christmas lights strung from tree to tree on every corner. Every shop had put out a tree, a wreath, colored lights, Santa sculptures. Dustings of snow from the recent storm still clung to awnings and car roofs. The view could have been a Norman Rockwell painting – “An Americana Christmas.”

The bookstore was closed, but I parked alongside it to look at the lights. Sipping my coffee, I plugged my iPod into the cassette adapter and put on the only holiday music I own, the theme from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

I was born and raised Catholic, so I’m aware that Christmas is a religious holiday. But I think that, more than Easter, Christmas enjoys the widespread secular appeal it does because it comes along when everybody needs a break the most.

I like that we set aside about a month out of every year to celebrate for its own sake. We designate the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas to really make an effort to be happy. We take time off from work. We get back in touch with old friends. We bury hatchets, if only temporarily. We all have our own traditions with families and friends. We eat the same foods, we watch the same movies, we listen to the same songs. We ignore the season entirely, a tradition in spite of itself.

The rituals of the holidays remind us where we were last time, two times ago, five, ten.  We compare ourselves to the people we’ve been and the ones we’d hoped we’d be.

“Is this where I thought I’d be when I was 24?” I ask myself. “Wherever it is, it’s still better than 16. Nothing could be worse than 16.”

I like that we spend a month a year bending the rules a little. We try to be nicer to each other, happier, more generous. Adding New Year’s into it, we inject new habits into our lives. If not an existential wake-up call, it’s still a time to do things we usually don’t, which is enough.

Despite all the music and decorations and sales, it’s easy to not let the holidays past our peripheries. Work. Home. Work. Home. Weekend. Grocery store. Bar. Work. Home. Laundry. Work. Home.

I’ve always thought ruts are underrated, because it’s nice to not have to ask yourself, “What’s next?” for a while. But if the question sort of fades from your mind entirely, that’s how you end up 40 years old before you knew you were 30.

I like the idea that, as a culture, we set some amount of time aside as significant for its own sake, time to snap out of day-to-day life and reflect. It takes effort. Some people don’t have the effort to spare, and others might not even want to try. But with the right reminder in place, it’s easy to get into the mood of examining which parts of your life make you happy and which don’t.

A Christmas tree ought to do the trick.

It’s been a while.

Tyler Durden is wrong. We don’t all believe we’ll grow up to be millionaires, movie gods, rock stars. Culture has beat into us by now that adulthood often falls short of our childhood expectations – think “Office Space.” I think most people I know have pretty reasonable expectations for how their lives are going to play out – job-wise, family-wise, salary-wise. Most of the rich ones are already on that track by now. The rest of us are learning that brand-name sodas aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

But even if we see most of our future through modest eyes, there’s still one innate assumption that we refuse to let go of. We may not be rich. We may not be famous. But, damn it, we’ll be interesting.

We all still believe that we’re going to be interesting people. We’ll have lives that other people express interest in being a part of. We’ll have lives that, at least subjectively, are worth sharing with other people.

But a lot of us won’t. We’ll plateau in our jobs to the point where we won’t have anything to say about work that we haven’t said already. We’ll come home to our one-bedroom apartments and make pots of Kraft macaroni and cheese. We’ll watch
“Wedding Crashers” on DVD, spend two hours on Facebook, and hit the sack. Then we’ll get up the next morning, go to work and do it all over.

What about that life is attractive to other people? What facet of it is worth sharing with someone we’ve just met? What part will we look back fondly on?

Just like the rich, those among us destined to be interesting are already on their way there. We have to realize it’s never too late to turn it around. But people who don’t realize they have to *try* to be interesting never will be. The most exciting part of their day will be winning a Words with Friends game. The most frustrating will be missing a green light by a couple seconds.

And we are slowly realizing that fact. And we are very, very pissed off.

[Last Post Deleted]

Sorry, but I’m taking my last post (the one about “The Wonder Years”) down. You’ll see why in a couple days.

Cheers!

People I Meet in Bars III

Ogi’s is where I meet people outside of work. It’s the nice bar in town – it’s really an upscale restaurant that’s open until two on weekends. They serve a legit steak, but their specialty is their sausage platter, two homemade sausages, potatoes, and a side of veggies for $9.99 on Saturdays. I don’t even bother going inside once I get off work, though. I just take a seat wherever I can find one on the patio, and Boris the waiter comes by before too long. He knows me. He calls me “Shiner.” Guess why.

Ogi’s is where a wider circle hangs out, Lauren and David’s hometown friends, a few people over at Channel 2, plenty of former OA staffers. Apparently copy editing for the OA is a more popular job than I realized; I’ve met three people that sat at my desk before I did.

One Friday night, an older guy worked his way into the rough circle of chairs we’d formed around three tables. He was in his late forties, probably, wearing a polo with no undershirt and plaid shorts. His socks were rolled up to mid-calf. I was sitting next to Marshall, whose face lit up when he saw him. “Holy fucking shit, it’s Scott!” Marshall exclaimed.

“We … are … “ Scott shouted.

“MARSHALL!!” they finished together. Everyone broke out laughing. Old joke.

Scott knew everyone I didn’t, knew David only marginally as that guy who writes that column in the paper every Sunday. Scott was either already drunk or good at faking exuberance on a second’s notice. He became the center of attention the minute he sat down, started talking and only let people get a word in when he stopped to drink. No one seemed to mind. Everyone loved Scott.

Eventually, the talk turned to Las Vegas. Marshall and Crosby were talking about taking a trip there sometime in the fall when they could both use a couple vacation days. I’ve gambled plenty, mostly during guys’ poker nights, and I can’t help but see money I’ve traded in for chips as money I’ve spent to have a good time. If I win, that’s an added bonus. But if I lose, I just tell myself I spent ten bucks the way I’d have spent ten bucks at a movie or at dinner or at a bar. No Saturday night out is really free, after all.

But Vegas talk was getting Scott excited. “Have I told y’all about my first trip there?” he asked us.

“I don’t think so,” Marshall said. “Please, sir. The floor’s yours.”

Scott took a sip of his whiskey and Coke. “I can’t tell you a lot about it, to be honest. I was out on the floor of some casino or another. Once you’ve been to three or four, they all start to look the same.” He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He was easily twice the age of anyone else there.

“Sure,” Crosby said.

Scott continued. “I was back at the hotel I was staying at, and I was drinking a lot. A lot. They just keep serving you, bringing these free drinks by, and I was going nuts. I was at the blackjack table. I was playing every hand, shitty or not, because you can’t win if you don’t play, right? Anyway, I must have been there for a while, because this bouncer came up to me and told me it was time to call it a night. ‘You’re fuckin’ up, guy,’ is what he told me. ‘You’re fuckin’ up.’ And this whole time, I’m looking up at him, and I’m saying, ‘No. Not me, no.’” Scott grabbed the collar of his shirt between his thumb and index fingers, tweaked it as he grinned broadly at all of us. “I’m telling him, ‘No. I’m a winner!’”

“I’m gonna guess you weren’t a winner,” Marshall said.

“I don’t remember leaving the floor,” Scott said. “All I remember is getting back into my room and digging through my pockets. I found two ATM receipts, one for $900, one for $1800, and $80 cash.”

The circle exploded.

“Oh, that’s not even the best part,” he said. “The best part was calling my wife — my first wife, of course —“ he added with a sly grin, “to wire me enough cash to get home.” He took a drink, shook his head. “That was a fun conversation.”

Time out.

I’m sure you’re laughing right now. I was. It’s a funny story, after all.

You know how on The Office, Jim’s thing is that he plays pranks on Dwight all the time? At the beginning of the show, it was funny. Jim was this chill, normal, everyman type, stuck at the same desk as this nerdy, neurotic automaton. Anyone in Jim’s place would do the same thing just to stay sane on a day-to-day basis. Sure, put his stapler in Jell-O. Hide his wallet in the vending machine. Send him faxes from the future. Why not? That shit’s hilarious, man.

But, along the way, Jim lost the moral high ground, somehow. Slowly but surely, Jim stopped being … cool. He started to get smug. In the later seasons, especially, the idea of Jim and Pam against the office stopped being funny. It just came off as douchey. Especially when his pranks got so elaborate that you started to wonder why he put so much energy into demeaning this guy he sat next to every day. This is where the show’s realism works against itself – would you work that hard to terrorize a guy from your office?

I got home that night (in May, four months ago) and wrote up everything that had happened. Scott was a real character, the kind of guy you could only meet at a West Texas bar at 1:30 a.m. on a Friday. He was a writer’s gold mine.

Then I remembered that he was twice as old as any of us, and I wondered how many years it took him to be able to tell that story with a smile on his face. I wondered how long it took him to refer to be able to refer to his first wife casually, like the woman he’d stood at the altar and married wasn’t worth more than an aside in a drunken story. I wondered how comfortable he really was, laying himself down for castigation like that.

I tried to picture myself telling that story, blowing $2700 of money I’d worked for in a drunken surge of self-assuredness.

Jesus. I still try to keep some of my college escapades a secret from people who weren’t there.

People I meet in bars only seem like a gold mine of material until I take a second to remember that they’re actually people.

Big Adjustments

I wrote this in a non-fiction writing class I took my last semester of college, and I also included it in my Plan II thesis. I try to keep most of what I write under wraps so literary magazines or, who knows, legit publishing companies will accept it as “never before published.” But this one is easily the least marketable, and I thought people might get a kick out of it.

Big Adjustments

I still remember one of the last things my mother said to me before she dropped me off for my freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin. We were driving down Guadalupe Street, known locally as “The Drag,” an avenue packed with clothing stores, moderately priced restaurants, coffee shops, and other establishments geared towards the university’s population of 50,000 students.

“You’re in college now,” she was telling me. “Your dad and I aren’t going to be there to tell you what to do. We can’t look over your shoulder to make sure you’re studying. We’re not there to tell you not to drink—we wish you wouldn’t, but if you do, that’s your choice. But whatever you do,” she said as we passed by a two-story building whose sign read CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY! COME ON IN!, “you’re not allowed to go in there.”

I had just graduated from the Catholic private school I’d attended for eight years. My graduating class consisted of forty-four boys. Adjacent to the school was a monastery peopled by Hungarian refugees who’d fled to Dallas, Texas, of all places, during the Communist takeover of the 1950’s. Aging monks with thick accents said a weekly mass for us and heard our confessions about once a month. Over the school’s intercom, they led us in prayer at the beginning and end of each school day. They taught us Latin, showed us how to diagram sentences, outlined the finer points of Dante’s Inferno.

More importantly, though, they inculcated us with a staggering knowledge of Catholic theology over eight carefully regimented years. We spent seventh grade studying the Old Testament and eighth studying the New Testament. Freshman year was “Catholic Dogma and Doctrine.” Sophomore year was “Contemporary Issues and Moral Theology.” Junior year, “Church History.” Senior year, “World Religions” – a cursory, one-semester review of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism fashioned more to inoculate us, I suspect, than to enlighten us. By graduation, half of us could have become priests ourselves.

The monks weren’t just brainwashing us, though. They were teaching us the way of viewing the world that they’d dedicated their lives to. They believed in it, and seeing that level of faith on a day-to-day basis, we couldn’t not buy into it, too—a little. They welcomed our candid questions, our skepticism and doubt, addressing them with patience and humor. They told us that doubt inevitably resulted in stronger faith.

My home life was fairly religious, too. We didn’t say a nightly Rosary, but my mother did drag my sister and me to Mass every Sunday morning and encourage us to pray about our problems. I was surrounded by Catholicism every waking moment. The Catholic perspective was the only one I knew. I didn’t feel frustrated, necessarily, as much as sheltered. I wanted to experience life outside of my little bubble, and for that reason more than any other, I chose to attend the University of Texas.

Now, I didn’t consider myself an evangelical or a missionary, by any means. I didn’t go to college believing that I was right and everybody else was wrong; I’d always suspected that Life’s Big Questions had more than one correct answer. I had found the ones that worked for me, was all, with reasoning behind them and a community that felt the same way.

Imagine a guy with a television set that only gets one channel—PBS, let’s say. He’s aware that other channels exist, but he’s perfectly happy watching Ken Burns’ documentaries and phone-a-thons and classical music concerts. What else would he need? Then, one day, on a whim, he calls the satellite company and orders their 500-channel package. He picks up his remote, points it at the TV, and for the first time in his life, pushes the channel-up button.

Needless to say, leaving home for a public university in the liberal bastion of the South was something of a culture shock.

I suppose my first jolt was discovering how marginalized Catholicism is in the real world. During my first Sunday of dorm life, I spent an hour scouring the University’s Web site, trying to find the on-campus Catholic Church. I asked my next-door neighbor, a sophomore, if he knew where it was. He laughed. Then, when he realized I was serious, he told me, “Think about it, dude. If UT was going to associate itself with any religion to begin with, do you really think they’d pick the Catholics?”

Then, there were classes. I was taken aback when my psychology professor announced on the first day of class that he could denounce any major world religion in under thirty seconds. I let out a nervous laugh, like I expected campus security to burst in and drag him off the stage for uttering such a blasphemous comment aloud.

Biology class was worse, though. In a discussion section, we were flogging around the creationism / evolution debate. The TA mentioned how evolution contradicts the Book of Genesis, and I shot my hand up in an I-know-the-answer burst of excitement that any third-grade teacher’s pet would be proud of. I recited what I’d been taught – that “pretty much anyone with a brain” could see that Adam and Eve’s story was an allegory and that there was certainly some wiggle room for evolution in “God’s plan.” About five other hands went up, and the TA just said, “Well, that’s one opinion.”

Finally, there was my social life.

My neighbors freshman year were the alpha-male, hard-drinking, small-town-Texas expatriates I thought existed only in myth. They came to college ready to act out its stereotype with everything they had, egging each other on in the process, from going to 9 a.m. classes blackout drunk to Wednesday-night beer-pong tournaments to littering the hallway with Keystone boxes and cigarette butts. The guy across the hall informed me that chugging a bottle of Robitussin produces the same effects as dropping acid, a fact he demonstrated two or three weekends a month. Another neighbor set up a running tally of each guy’s hookups throughout the semester, assigning point values for the girl’s attractiveness and how far he’d gone with her.

I had left home ready to experience life outside of the Catholic bubble, but this nightly debauchery was on a level I hadn’t known existed. My naivety endeared me to them. Their first order of business, of course, was to get me drunk for the first time, a long story for another day. I spent the first month at the core of their shenanigans, drinking, throwing water balloons at passersby from our balcony, trying to prove to them that I wasn’t a dumb Catholic school kid. Then, I realized I was.

One Saturday night, we all got back from a party. Upon seeing a guy pull a girl into his room and slam the door, I stumbled over to my roommate and tugged at his sleeve. “I think Beth is being raped,” I told him. Beth isn’t her real name, for the record.

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

I explained the situation. He sighed, shut his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose for a moment. When he opened them, he said, “Matt, when a guy takes care of a girl at a party, chats her up, brings her drinks, walks her home, he deserves a little something at the end of the night. She wouldn’t be in there if she didn’t want to be.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She’s not a slut. She’s a nice girl.”

“Nice girls like to get laid, too,” he said, and he walked away.

I realized then that I would never quite fit in with my new group of friends – I was a Tee Ball player, and they were the New York Yankees. They let me tag along because I was nice enough and because I was clearly in awe of them, but I didn’t have the fortitude to make it to the majors. As long as I hung out with them, I would always be more of a novelty than a member of the gang.

I phased myself out of the group by Christmas. We remained on nodding-at-each-other-as-we-passed-in-the-hallway terms until May, and on-campus run-ins aside, I haven’t talked to any of them since.

I feel the need to point out that, even after we parted ways, I never judged them. I still don’t think their lifestyle was wrong, or that the one I returned to was right. It was never a clash of moral versus immoral; it was a clash of square pegs versus round holes. In Catholic school, I was as Catholic as everybody around me, and it suited me. In college, I tried to be as much of a partier as everybody around me, and it didn’t. I’ve always been more of a Starbucks guy than a Sixth-Street (the hub of Austin’s bar scene) guy.

I’m not as Catholic as I used to be, partly because the private-school Kool-Aid has worn off, partly because I’ve learned class lessons and life lessons that don’t quite jibe with what I was raised to believe. My spiritual life is a work in progress. A person’s belief system dictates the way he lives his life. I still don’t know how I’m going to live mine, but my first semester of college showed me how I’m not going to. And that, I’d venture to guess, is half the battle.

Archive

I was searching my inbox for an article I sent myself a couple weeks ago when I found this. I have no memory, at all, of ever writing these words. Guess I can rule out The New York Times as a possible employer — or at least hope they don’t keep email addresses on file.

To: letters@nytimes.com

Date: Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 11:51 PM

Subject: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to express my disappointment that your publication printed an early review and details of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This goes against the express wishes of the author and anyone that calls themselves a true Harry Potter fan.

It is hard enough for a Harry Potter fan to avoid spoilers on the Internet and news stations now that the book appears to have leaked; now we have to avoid trusted outlets as well. You’ve not only disappointed millions of children around the world with your actions, you have disappointed the millions of adults who look to the New York Times to be a bastion of good taste and standards. When the New York Times succumbs to such tabloid tactics, who won’t?

Many ask why we care – why fans aren’t all so rabid to get the book that we’ll sop up any illegal download or purchase. There’s one simple answer: We respect the author. We thought that a newspaper like yours, where so many of your reporters become authors themselves, would understand and respect that. We’re so saddened that we were wrong. We feel let down by you and your editorial board.

Sincerely,

Matt Jones
Harry Potter Fan, and member of Jo’s Army

Only in Odessa.

I’d like to share two quick stories.

The first happened during my junior year of college. I was making a Ken’s Donuts run for me and Rey (who was stuck at the Quad desk); it was easily after 2 a.m., maybe after 3. I made it there and bought donuts and kolachies just fine. I was walking back down Guadalupe toward campus when a guy from behind me started calling for my attention. I turned around.

I was under the awning of the Taos Co-Op, if anyone knows where that is. He was a black guy, obviously poor, judging by his clothing and the fact that he was wheeling an old bicycle. He wore a thick bandage around his right elbow. “How you doin’, man?” he asked me.

“Good,” I said. I was holding my paper bag of food and wearing jeans and an unbuttoned polo. I had a crew cut back then, and I was white, which I still am.

“Hey, man, I was wondering if I could borrow $13. My son’s in the hospital, you see,” he told me, “and I need to get some gas in my car to go pick him up. I’m supposed to pick him up tonight.”

“Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me,” I said.

“Are you sure, man?” he asked. “You look like a nice guy. A cool guy.  All I need’s $13. It’s not that much for a guy like you, right?”

“Don’t have any cash,” I said. “I’d help you if I could.”

“Oh, good, man. Good to know. Is there any way you can get any cash?” he asked. And it was then I noticed that he’d happened to flag me down right next to an ATM.

I sighed. “I can’t. Sorry.”

“You sure?” he asked. His gaze flicked to the Citibank logo not three feet from us.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“No one fuckin’ wants to help me, man,” he muttered as he turned away. “No one wants to help.”

The second story I want to tell happened tonight. Crosby and I were at Zucchi’s for $1.50 pint night. A drunk guy crashed into our table and spilled both our beers, and the waitresses kicked him out and comped us each a couple drinks, apologizing all over themselves. We both told them it wasn’t their fault, because it wasn’t.

Around 1:45, after last call, another guy stopped at our table and started chatting us up. He asked us our names, what we did, where we were from. We obliged him with polite chit-chat and drunken laughter for a minute. “You know what my next question is, right?” he asked.

“Haven’t a clue,” I said.

“Ask us,” Crosby said.

He looked left and right, licked his lips. “Can one of y’all buy me a beer? She’ll give it to me after last call. I know her. But I just was wondering if one of y’all would buy me a beer.”

“I would, but I just closed out my tab. Sorry, sir,” was Crosby’s response.

I took his lead, even though I’d paid in cash. “Me too. Sorry.”

The guy—Craig was his name, he told us—was still all smiles. “Well, it can’t hurt to ask, right? Just tryin’ to get one more drink before I head home.”

He toddled away, and Crosby and I picked up our conversation exactly where we’d left off. Craig came back a minute later with a half-full pint glass in his hand. The waitress had given him someone’s empty. He rested his elbows on the table, laughed and joked around with us like he’d come with us.

Craig was older, in his late 40’s, had to be. He was missing one of his front teeth. He was tall, black, wore a thin white T-shirt over torn khakis.

The waitress kicked us out at 2. I waited outside for Crosby while he hit the bathroom. Craig waited with me, still making jokes, rambling about I-don’t-even-remember-now. On the scale of sober to blackout, I would have classified him as “rather” drunk. He asked me my name again; I told him it was Mark.

Crosby came out, and we started crossing from the porch to the parking lot. Crosby and I shook hands as he unlocked his car. Craig was monopolizing my attention, so all I managed was a quick “Take it easy” as he got in and closed the door.

“Hey, man, which car’s yours?” Craig asked me. I pointed to my gold Volvo, knowing it was a bad idea as I was doing it. “Say, could you give me a ride? I just live right over there—“ (he gestured vaguely down Parkway) “—and I don’t wanna walk, man.”

This was my mistake. Without conscious thought, with a polite smile on my face from whatever joke about Jennifer Lopez’ ass he’d just cracked, I said, “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a poor choice. He asked me how old I was; I told him 24. He acted all surprised, because I’d mentioned something about how J. Lo’s ass was probably insured for more than Fred Astaire’s legs. “Man, you’re older than your years, huh?” he was saying. “I thought you were just a kid, but man, you’re smart. You’re wise. You know who Fred Astaire is—man, you’re a smart guy. I misjudged you, man. I apologize.”

This whole time, as he was buttering me up, I was wondering how to get out of my casual promise to drive him home. I’m not against the idea of asking a stranger for a ride home from a bar. I can see the realization that you’re too drunk to drive, the hesitancy to call a friend up at 2 a.m. on a weeknight, the hope that someone you’ve been talking to would be good-natured enough to do you a favor. But you have to realize that you’re putting the other person in a dangerous position, and you have to compensate for that as best you can. If I ever had to try it, which I hope I never will, I’d like to think I’d say something like, “My name’s Matt. Here’s my driver’s license. Here’s 20 bucks. I just don’t want to get arrested.”

I told Rey about that first story I mentioned as I was giving him his sausage and cheese kolachie. He had the same thought. “If I needed gas that badly,” he said, “I’d fall the fuck all over myself trying to pay them back. I’d offer to mow their lawn, I’d cook them dinner, I’d take them out drinking when my next paycheck came in. I’d let them know exactly how much I appreciated their help.”

Craig was doing none of this. He was acting like we were friends, because friends do each other favors, because that’s just what friends do. My plan was to shoot straight with him. If he was calling me a smart guy, then surely he’d appreciate me saying, “Look, I’m new in town, and I don’t feel comfortable giving a 48-year-old man a ride home.”

Right?

I was waiting for Craig to take a breath so I could jump in and let him down easy. But then, Crosby rolled down his window. He’d never left. He’d been typing on his cell phone the whole time, so I thought he was responding to a text or something before driving home. “Hey, Mark,” he called, with just the hint of a smirk.

“Yeah?”

“Afterparty at Jon’s. He just texted me.”

“On a Tuesday?” I asked. Just for a touch of realism.

“On a Tuesday,” he said. “Need a lift?”

“For sure,” I said.

“Well, can he meet you over there?” Craig asked Crosby. “He was just about to give me a ride. We were gonna stop by the 7-Eleven so I could pick up some toilet paper [this was news to me, obviously], and then he was gonna drop me off.”

I didn’t even respond. I flicked a quick wave in Craig’s direction and walked around Crosby’s car to the passenger side. He was rolling his window up before I had my door closed.

“There’s no party at Jon’s,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“Nope, there’s not,” he said, emphasizing each word lazily. We drove over to the 7-Eleven across the street. He bought a pack of cigarettes, I got a candy bar. By the time we got back to the parking lot, Craig was gone. I got in my car and drove home.

I need out of this city. Or, at the very least, to learn how to be a douchebag.

‘Parks and Recreation’ is pretty solid so far.

I’m tired of resignation. I’m tired of feeling like I’m just putting in my time somewhere while I try to figure out my next move. I’m tired of seeing my “real life,” the one where I’m content to be where I’m at with a career and friends and financial stability and all that, as this ideal lifestyle around the corner that I’m still working toward. I’m tired of this default mindset that my day-to-day life is something I have to get through in order to be happy later. Ted Mosby’s happy. Jim Halpert’s happy. Chandler Bing’s happy. What’s the difference?

Writing

A lot of writers think they can only write once they learn something new and decide it’s worth sharing; for fiction writers, the output is most often a short story with a Scrubs-ian moral or lesson somewhere in the last third. They go about their lives keeping their ears to the ground, trying to twist meaning out of a chance encounter in a coffee shop, believing that they could rap out the next “Catcher in the Rye” if only they could stumble on something worth actually writing about.

Others just trust themselves enough to write what they know. What they write comes out of their default setting, the way they’ve seen the world for decades. Sometimes entire paragraphs are word-for-word transcriptions of mantras they recite to themselves like prayers, unbidden, automatic. The hesitation in embracing this method, I think, doesn’t come out of vulnerability, but out of some secret suspicion that working like this isn’t really work. The inspiration to do so should be the realization that an author’s hard-wired truth might be his reader’s epiphany.

People I Meet in Bars II

David, Nathaniel, Zach and I were at Woody’s.

Woody’s is as close as you can get to what jumps to mind whenever someone says “West Texas bar.” From the outside, it looks like an abandoned building – the four walls, windowless, are sheets of plywood painted white. The flat roof keeps the rain out, and once that goal was met, the builders clearly didn’t stress themselves with aesthetics. There’s no parking lot to speak of, just expanses of concrete in the front and back in which patrons park their cars in straight-ish rows. Tattered remnants of posters for bands and bull-riding competitions cover the chipping green paint of the door.

It’s hard to imagine someone getting stabbed in the parking lot of a suburban sports bar. Woody’s, on the other hand…

The four of us were sitting around a table with three empty pitchers and one full one. Neon beer signs gave our faces a reddish-orange glow. The smoke from Nathaniel’s cigarette floated toward the ceiling, joining the cloud formed from God knows how many others. We sat, watched a group of oil workers play pool, listened to country song after country song from the jukebox, shot the shit about the newspaper business. It was about all we had in common.

It was a Wednesday night, probably 1:45 already. Wednesdays and Thursdays are my days off, so I was game to hang out as long as everyone was still conscious. Nate and Zach had work the next day, though; Nate was interviewing a Holocaust survivor who was speaking at the Ector County Library. He and Zach wanted to call it a night, but David managed to talk them into one more pitcher. David’s pretty good at that.

When David came back from the bar, Dos Equis sloshing and occasionally spilling over the edge of the plastic pitcher, he’d made a friend. The guy was probably just under six feet tall, wearing a checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up, hair below his ears, and a backwards, tattered Texas Rangers cap.

“What’s up, guys?” he said. He was slurring. “My name’s Eric.”

He was young, our age, maybe younger, with a friendly face. We introduced ourselves.

He pointed to each of us in turn, testing himself. “David. Zach. Matt. Nathaniel. Nathaniel. Matt. Zach. David. Four solid white-guy names, right there. Five, if you count Eric.” We laughed. “Have I seen y’all here before?”

“Maybe,” Nathaniel answered. “We come here every once in a while.”

“Yeah, I thought I recognized y’all,” he said. “I’m here like every night. I live right behind here, so what I do is, I get home from work, walk out the back door, walk in the back door of this place—” (he pointed to the glowing exit sign behind the bar) “and chill the fuck out until closin’ time. I’ve racked up a $500 tab this month, already. They know I’m good for it. They know where I live and all.”

“What do you do?” David asked.

“I work in a factory.” With his thick West Texas accent, he pronounced it “fact-ry.” “I just started two months ago, but I’m already making some sweet money. Like, close to six figures.”

I believed it. In Odessa, a roughneck’s paycheck beats a copy editor’s — or a reporter’s, or a managing editor’s, or even probably a publisher’s — any day.

“But yeah,” Eric was saying. “I like this bar. I like my life right now. I’ve got my job. I’ve got my house. I’ve got my bar. I’ve got my girl. She’s gorgeous, man. I’m ready to marry her – I’m ready to settle down and marry her.”

“How long have you two been together?” I asked.

“Three weeks,” he said. “But she’s pregnant, so someone’s got to be there for her.”

David’s unrestrained laughter didn’t seem to phase him. “She’s pregnant already?”

“Well, she was pregnant when I met her,” Eric said. “I’ve got a daughter of my own, myself. Love her like hell. I call her every day, send her money ‘n’ shit, but I can’t visit. She lives with That Crazy Bitch.”

“That’s too bad,” Zach said.

“I’m ready to get straightened out, man,” said Eric. He was going now, a goofy grin on his face, beer on his breath. “I love this girl. I’m ready to get married and settle down. I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen, man. Went to juvie when I was sixteen, which was bullshit. They got me for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. You want to know what the fuckin’ deadly weapon was?” He held up his right fist. “This, right here.”

David started hitting the table, he was laughing so hard. “Are you serious?”

“I hit that motherfucker once. Pow.” Eric swung at air. “Hit him in the face, once, and next thing I know, he’s rolling around on the ground and his eyeball’s hanging out of his fuckin’ socket. That was some nasty-ass shit, man. I never want to see shit like that again. Hey, can I bum a cigarette?” he asked Nate.

Nathaniel took out his pack of Marlboro’s and handed one over.

“I’ve got that house out back,” Eric continued. “It’s a nice house, three bedrooms, air-conditioned, and it’s in pretty solid shape. I’m tryin’ to convince her to move in with me, but she’s not going for it yet. She’ll come around, though. We love each other. She’ll come around. I’m ready to quit fuckin’ around and just—live the rest of my life, you know?”

We all nodded. Eric’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, read the screen. His face lit up like Christmas.

“That your girl?” I asked.

He looked up at me and laughed. “Naw, man. That’s my booty call. She’s comin’ over in about a half hour and wants me to be ready for her.”