Author: Brad Zellar

It was hogwash, if you really want to know the long and short of it. Pure and utter hogwash.

He knew damn well that he had better words than the words he’d been spitting at the world. He believed all sorts of decent things that, for some reason he couldn’t entirely understand, he wasn’t willing to publicly acknowledge. He was, in fact, a true believer, in all the biggest and most ridiculous things. At some moment in every day he would find himself paralyzed by pure, idiot wonder.

So much of what the world routinely served up to him –sights, sounds, smells, and all manner of sensation and random encounter– struck him as nothing less than magic and miracles. Yet at the bottom of the day, when he finally got around to sitting down with a pen in his fingers, all the gaunt terrors of memory and the moment would rise up in his head in their black robes, and he would find himself describing not a world of wonders, but the dreariest sort of pedestrian nonsense.

It was as if he had never known anything but desperation, confusion, anxiety, guilt, and futility. He had, of course, known all those things, but what really saved him and made him the person he helplessly was, a person so very grateful to be alive, were all those glimmering moments of wonderful strangeness and beauty and bursts of random hilarity and happiness.

Dear Sirs,

I never asked for your treatise.

Your recent manifesto bored me to tears.

Every one of your manifestos, in fact, has landed unwelcome on my doorstep.

No man over the age of twenty-five should write a manifesto. After that it’s just too fucking late.

I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten a single one of your earlier promises. By now, you once led me to believe, I should be flying around with a rocket pack strapped to my back.

By now I should have –at the very least– walked on the moon.

So much of the future you told me about never happened.

All those big ideas.

Would you like to tell me just what the hell exactly you were talking about?

Do you know what I have in place of my rocket pack and my moon buggy? Not much, I’m afraid. I am a blood mule. I spend my days walking all the fuck over a hospital with a cooler full of blood. There are a bunch of us. We have a softball team (3-16 last season in what is essentially a league for the geriatric and the obese) called the Blood Mules.

I’m not complaining, exactly. The job comes with decent benefits, not the least of which is the frequent opportunity it provides me to get shit-faced with nurses, many of whom I also sleep with.

Well, not many, actually. Some.

I just thought you should know that you didn’t completely destroy all of us. Not that I expect you’ll take much consolation in that piece of information.

Yours very sincerely,

Brad Zellar

The hostile colonization is now almost complete, my skull reduced to one more cluttered victim of American conquest and imperialism.

I close my eyes and I still see giant petroleum and fast food logos, neon beer signs, beautiful celebrities. I hear voices that should not be familiar, the voices of complete strangers that someone has made it their business to convince me I know, intimately.

Not someone: An immense network of someones.

I hear television jingles and snippets of pop songs I would otherwise be prepared to swear I have never heard. I find myself desiring (in place of my true, unattainable desires) products of one sort or another.

All of my dreams are now the Busby Berkeley productions of giant sydicates and corporations. Ideally, if the doctors ultimately have their way, the way I feel will not be the way I actually feel, but the way I have been made to feel. Even my subconscious has been plastered with decals for various corporations, exactly –or not quite exactly– like the jumpsuits of Nascar drivers.

Every thought is like a link to the webpage of some pirate or entrepreneur. This, that, and the next thing —every last thing— is brought to me by who? By whom? The purveyors, the procurers, the fucking delivery men.

I hear my son scraping away at his electric guitar in his bedroom across the hall, writing songs about girls who will not look his way. I often lie awake long into the night, listening to my son’s sleepless labors. My wife left me some years ago, and took with her our two daughters.

My son has a ridiculous haircut and a bad complexion that I feel certain is the result of an indifference to hygiene that he inherited from me. It seems to me that my son has talent, and I don’t wish to offer him advice that might be construed as anything but encouragement. I have had enough discouragement for both of us.

My wife told me that I have “some work to do,” and I don’t exactly understand what she meant, even as I recognize the apparent truth of her words.

I spend an inordinate amount of time splayed on the floor, the position in which I am most comfortable, my head rocking at the margins of sleep. I have spent years becoming this man. Slowly becoming this man splayed on the floor, peering into the dusty, dim astronomy of my skull. Weather permitting I might make my way out into my yard. I suppose I am a familiar and not entirely welcome sight to my neighbors, as I sit there at the picnic table staring into space, studying words and thoughts and memories, finding them in the dark, faraway galaxies of my head. Like my old dreams, I often do not recognize where these strange constellations come from, or even exactly what they are. I am continually puzzled when stray images and thoughts invade this private airspace.

I think perhaps my son, through his music, will give expression to this confusion that seems to have settled over our home like a cloud. With money he made selling fried chicken my son has purchased what I gather is rudimentary recording equipment, and he makes tapes of his songs.

“I’ve mastered nothing,” he sings on one of the songs he has written and recorded. “Is it too much to ask for a little something, a little bitty, little tiny, little bit of something?” Though he has no actual band, he calls the band that is only him, “Bottle Fly.” One of his songs is called “Taxidermy Dad.” I saw the title written on one of his cassette boxes.

For many years I was an obsessive documenter of my experiences and the life of my family. This was in the years before videotape became so easy and affordable, thank God; I was, rather, an obsessive shutter bug and note taker. I realized in time, however, that I never seemed to have any real interest in looking over my photos and notes, and neither did anyone else. I had no memories there. It was as if in taking the step back necessary for the documentation –behind the camera, hunched above the notebook– I had divorced myself from the actual experience of the very moments I was trying to preserve. The documentation essentially subtracted me from my own life, constructed a puzzling barrier between myself and my memories. I was never present, certainly not truly present, at any of these occasions, and so had no real memories invested in them. Looking back over them now I feel as if I am looking back at my life as it went on without me, as, in fact, it more or less had.

I believe this, though, about myself, and about the people I live surrounded by: we have the best intentions. We had big dreams, perhaps still have. We wish there was something we could do for those less fortunate. We intend to make some changes and improvements in our lives. We hope to make long-term friendships and to continue to meet new and interesting people. We would like to undertake a healthier diet and exercise regimen. We try again and again to be grateful for the blessings we have been given. We would like to continue to challenge and motivate and inspire each other. We dream ceaselessly of traveling to new places and having new and interesting experiences. And yet we also continue to find ourselves at the bottom of the day, at the bottom of another page, exhausted and out of words.

Shit blew up and shit fell down. The wind raged for days and it rained for weeks on end.

The water rose and swept stuff away. When the water finally receded, the sun broke through the clouds and the clouds dissipated and the sun blazed like an angry thing and the river evaporated and the earth turned to dust. The dust was carried on the wind that once again ceaselessly raged.

The news was an endless recitation of calamity. Everywhere there were eruptions of senseless violence and the clash of impotent armies. The hearts and hopes of many old lovers withered.

In the midst of all this gloom a fierce contagion broke out, and in the public spaces of the cities bodies were stacked like cordwood. Those who tried to flee sent back word that there was so safe harbor, no refuge left to escape to.

There were also, of course, tremendous conflagrations, and much was destroyed, and there was widespread famine and many starved and perished.

Yet throughout all this horror and heartbreak, neither heedless man nor vengeful god managed to extinguish the stars, and upon the stars wishes were still made, and from those wishes dreams were born, and in those dreams hope was sown, and out of that hope love was kindled, and through that love man once again learned to live.