Smith's Crossing

Sometimes I wonder if this is how Elliott felt
when he plunged the knife into his heart
And lacerated every word he'd ever spoken,
every B7 chord he'd ever strummed
ringing out in broken unison.

Then I realize I'm being melodramatic
and I have no Chiba to weep over
my own self absorption and destruction;
There will be no lost-voice addendum
to my own life's works (Because we love you)
Or the disharmony of my own mind as I drown
in crushed autumn leaves
With the trash or the breeze,
please let me be carried away.

Some Girl I Went Out With

Some girl I went out with told me about a free concert tomorrow night,

We got drunk and then got stuck in the rain,

It wasn’t romantic.

She told me her parents were hip

And recommended restaurants to her,

All I could think of was my mom telling me to eat at Apple Bee’s

We had some bougie pizza and fancy salads

And just drank lukewarm water initially,

Midway through I remembered I was already having pizza for dinner.

I wanted to get drunk early in the day

So I asked her to go to the bar down the street,

Obligation and my desire to drink carried me over the brick sidewalks.

When we parted I wondered if we’d talk again,

There was no touching

But this may have been because there was a rash over half her body.

Ode to Dave Ramsey (and My Past)

Luminous memories of a fire inside,
keep me awake/up at night
and stagnant for days.

Conversations with old drunks
remind me I'm alive,
and that I owe no debt to southern aristocracy.

The Portentous Menacing Road of a New Decade: Turning Thirty in the 21st Century

The following was originally published in 2012 (in a slightly different form) as an editorial foreword to the online lit publication Hipster Fight! At the time, I served as the fiction editor and was on the eve of my 30th birthday:

           The Portentous Menacing Road of a New Decade: Turning Thirty in the 21^st Century

      As much as we try to avoid it, time pushes us on and our lives inevitably go through tumultuous periods of change and refashioning in the same way that art movements tend to do. No, I’m not writing a bathetic “Sympathy” card for Hallmark or openly trying to ape F. Scott Fitzgerald in one of his more reflective moments; I’ve simply come to the conclusion that once I feel well adjusted, the fates irrevocably throw a wrench into my stagnant and predictable routines. Long term relationships wear out their welcome, jobs end unceremoniously, you poke your eyes out after realizing you’ve murdered your father and married your mother, rebound relationships end as quickly and as drunkenly as they began, you throw away all the crap you’ve been holding on to for several years including all those Eagles LP’s that your uncle gave you and you never really liked anyway but you kept out of some sort of familial guilt or a perceived and confusing rite of passage…but on to the next adventure, amirite?

     I should note that I’ll be turning thirty within a week or two of you reading this. The youthful indiscretion that has propelled me into writing Carver-meets-Salinger flavored fiction and maneuvered me into working for an online literary journal is tapping out its misguided end to the beat of a Replacements b-side. Little will change I’m sure, but it is a time for the façade of serious reflection tempered only slightly by some self-effacing humor.      In these waning time-trials of my twenties, people enter and exit my life as if I were a booth attendant at Grand Central Station. They greet me, stand around for awhile and then pay their fare (or vault the turnstile) and move along. Some of them make return trips, others purchase one way tickets and send me friend requests on Facebook as a consolation prize. Later, I notice they’re married and have a young daughter named Sydney, Madison or Isabella and a son named Jackson (all their sons are named Jackson for some reason…). I click on the picture just to confirm that it is in fact this person’s baby. I’m satisfied by the similarities in facial structures that I compare against my knowledge gleaned from watching hours of DNA testing on Maury, so I move along to stalk some girl that I had a crush on in middle school. She currently works at a salon and still lives down the street from where we grew up, hmmm…      

       Turning thirty, in an era that has obsessively embraced the cult of youth, means less than it used to; at least it doesn’t have the same connotations as it did for Nick Carraway. “Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm. Thinning hair.” It would be easy to get sucked into the cadence of Carraway’s thoughts at this point in my life; I’m newly single and feeling slightly melancholy and bitter about it; many of my friends are either in lengthy domestic partnerships or even married, so I see them less and less (hi Justin, Joel, Cassie, Brandon et al); and my hair has certainly been thinning for several years now, as evidenced by my regular viewing of the Bosley infomercial. Ultimately though, I’m more likely to be swayed by the fact that I’ve read The Great Gatsby upwards of ten or twelve times at this post-grad school juncture of my life.  

     Eventually it occurs to me that maybe we’re not so different, me and this Carraway fellow; both getting carried away with our own mortality while losing friends to the adult world at large…and yet as much as I can commiserate with Fitzgerald’s narrator, I keep my doubts that much will have changed once I wake up on October 16^th (hungover, no doubt). I will have technically aged a year over night, but the Nirvana posters will still hang in my room, keeping watch over stacks of used novels and upright piles of vinyl.  

     The portentous quality of aging that we’ve all stayed up nights dreading is balanced only by the promise of a still distant and opaque horizon.  So we march on, ships against the waves borne back…never mind, I am aping Fitzgerald.   

Alt-Haiku (in the tradition of Kerouac's American Haiku)

Scoach I 

Listening to Wilco,

Cool cross breeze through open bar; 

drunk, aimless, peaceful

Scoach II 

"Return of the Mack"

Plays on the internet juke box, 

Dumb girls scream; I'm back 

Interview Story (from 2011)

The following piece was originally published by Aol Jobs in January of 2011, and underwent moderate edits from site staff. 

I Interviewed at Best Buy

I am a 28-year-old who recently finished graduate school. In the fall of 2003, I was 21, not yet in college, and working part-time to full-time (depending on the week) at Domino's Pizza. Most of my nights were spent in a mind-numbing rush of angry customers, dirty dishes and clogged sinks.

Those were the days when people still mainly purchased music via physical copies of CDs, and as an avid music lover, I spent a fair amount of my spare time in music stores perusing the CDs I'd read about in magazines. On one of my days off I ended up wandering down the CD aisles at Best Buy, something I did on a regular basis. Delivering pizzas 30-plus hours a week and living in my mom's basement afforded me the ability to waste much of the money I made. This eased the pain of living at home and delivering pizza while others were off at college.

I picked up a copy of the Beatles' 'The White Album' and stared at the plain cover and the song list on the back. I couldn't justify the $32 price though, so I set it back on the shelf and continued up the aisle. With 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill' echoing in my head, a guy in a blue shirt with a name tag stopped me.

"Do you need help with anything, sir?"

He had curly, shoulder-length hair that shook when he talked. I always found it entertaining when retail workers called me "sir." As a 21-year-old pizza boy, I wasn't sure what qualified me for that title.

"No, I'm just looking around," I said and stopped in front of him. That was my stock answer for any salesman, even if I did have a question.

"Well, if you need anything just let us know."

A fun-looking job

He left me and returned to his post at the end of the aisle next to a computer. I wondered if he was actually looking anything up or was just playing solitaire when I saw him type something in. At the same time a pretty girl with long brown hair wearing the same blue shirt walked by and smiled at me. I watched her walk over to the same post and start talking to the other guy. She flipped her hair a couple times and laughed.

"What a job," I thought to myself. "They're getting paid to flirt and play around on a computer. I spent most of my working hours alone in a car smelling other people's food."

When I left, I noticed a sign by the registers that said something about an "open interview fair" happening the rest of the week. The sign read "No waiting, come in with your resume and be interviewed immediately."

A comment about Elvis

I came back a couple days later wearing a button-down shirt and slacks. The staff was quick to point me to an enclosed area in the back of the store. I followed a girl to a curtained section and waited behind a couple of other guys in a line. After about 10 minutes, someone directed me to go behind the partition where there was a table set up with a few chairs around it. I sat down in front of a portly, middle-aged man with frizzy gray hair and a face covered in stubble.

"How are you?" he asked.

"I'm doing good," I said and handed my resume across the table to him. He glanced at it for a few seconds and set it down.

"So you're interested in working at Best Buy?" he asked. He continued with some general questions, and somewhere along the way I told him of my love for music.

"I really like Elvis Costello," he said and looked down at my resume again. "I heard them playing 'Alison' out in the store before I came back here." Just then I remembered a tidbit I'd heard on VH1 earlier in the week.

"Did you know that Huey Lewis's backing band, the News, were the studio band for Costello's first album?" I asked.

I figured he probably already knew it but it wouldn't hurt to throw it out there.

He looked at me funny and smirked. "I didn't know that," he said and chuckled. He scratched his stubble for a moment and thought about it. "Why don't you stick around for a bit and I'll get you a second interview with one of the managers."

A long but worthwhile wait

I agreed (of course!) and thought it all seemed pretty easy as I waited, sitting next to the customer service counter for someone else to interview me. It felt less tolerable after an hour had passed and nobody had said anything to me. Finally, I asked a girl at the counter if she knew what the problem was.

She disappeared for a minute behind the scenes and then came back and told me a manager would be right with me. After about 20 more minutes I wondered what the problem was. She looked over at me again and smiled. Finally, out came a different man, the long-awaited manager.

"Sean?" he asked and looked down at a clipboard. I nodded my head and faked a smile.

"Sorry about that wait, I didn't know you were out here."

I figured he'd just look at my resume and send me on my way.

But still, I followed him into the curtained area again and sat down at the same table. He glanced over my resume and smiled at me.

"It's getting a little late; I'm leaving here at 7. Why don't you just call Lab Corp this week to set up a drug test and come in for orientation next Monday."

I shook his hand and he sent me on my way. It was that easy for me to get out of the pizza delivery business and get a job at Best Buy.

Months

      I hadn’t seen her in months and all she wanted to talk about was Ted.

     “I miss him. How is he?” She was wearing a yellow shirt and jeans. She’d quit wearing jeans until she met me.

     “He’s actually staying with my sister and my mom right now.” The bright yellow stuff was something I couldn’t get over. She’d worn a solid yellow dress the first time we met.

     “Ah, that’s nice of you to loan him out to them.” It wasn’t a loan so much though. My sister had wanted Ted at her graduation party, so I brought him along. A couple hours into it, I was bored of getting drunk by myself so I left to see a movie. I figured letting him stay there was better than leaving him to bake in the hot car. But in the dark of the theatre, I regretted ever leaving Ted with my sister again.

     “Anyway, thanks for asking me to lunch.” It had been pretty much out of the blue. Then again, any contact she’d had with me over the intervening months was completely random. Just when I thought she was gone, she’d pop back in.

     “Thanks for accepting.” She smiled and looked straight at me so I could see the deep cerulean of her irises…or the green. I wasn’t sure. I was partially color blind.