Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

to be a discoverer you hold close whatever

you find, and after a while you decide

what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,

you turn to the open sea and let go.

–William Stafford, from “Security”

Is the path to the waterfall an ascent or a descent?

Descents have a bad reputation that is mostly unjust. The metaphoric and melodramatic abuse of the whole idea obscures the fact that a descent can be an exhilarating, breathtaking thing, and far less arduous and fraught with competition and peril than the ascent.

On the way down, just so long as you’re not falling, you have a chance to catch your breath and take a good look around, to access whether all that climbing was worth it, and to see what you were climbing towards and from.

You have to turn your back to see what’s behind you, and it’s always a good idea to take the occasional long, hard look at what’s behind you. How else are you ever going to learn how far you’ve strayed, if in fact you’ve strayed.

I’m sure you’ve strayed. You must have.

But the human instinct is to keep going, and to associate this notion exclusively with forward motion. Implicit in this assumption are the ideas of both survival and progress, which strikes me as severely wrong-headed at the moment.

When you’re returning from some journey in the mountains aren’t you still moving? Isn’t retreat sometimes necessary for survival? And when you retrace your steps to retrieve something you’ve lost or left behind, aren’t you making the most important progress of all?

Easy world, you gave it once–

please quietly welcome it back,

that hand.

–William Stafford, from “Going On”

Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your real name?

She said something to me, something impertinent I’m sure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender.

Grasshopper? she said a moment later, offering me a thick green drink in a jelly jar.

I swear, I said, I could drink these all night.

I do, she said.

Later, she put a record on her turntable and said, My mother used to sleep with this guy who’s playing tenor. She used to follow Shelly Manne around, and I’m sure she slept with pretty much everybody in his band. She spent half of her life chasing after musicians, until she got too old and worn out. Then she started tending bar in this law-and-order dive, and all she ever dated were old cops. The last twenty years of her life she dated one cop after another. The same guys who used to make life so miserable for her old musician friends. They treated her like shit, the fat bastards. Funny, isn’t it?

She went back to the kitchen and fired up the blender again, and when she returned she settled back in on the couch and said, My mother had this big, fat scrapbook full of signed photos and I.O.U.s from jazz musicians, most of them written on cocktail napkins or scraps of placemats. It was like a who’s who of jazz musicians, seriously. Those sponges fucked her and drank up all her money and then dumped what was left of her for the old cops to pick over. I wish I still had that scrapbook. I wonder what happened to it? I’ll bet something like that would be worth a lot of money.

She got up and put another record on the stereo. I’m sure my mother screwed this guy too, she said. I remember him coming around and crashing on our couch in his underwear. He was an A-number-one creep. Creep central. Bad complexion, bad teeth, nothing really to recommend him other than a decent wardrobe and the fact that he could play music. I guess that was enough for my mother. Me, I’ve always hated musicians. Every one I’ve ever met was a bum who never even pretended to be a decent human being unless he was on a stage somewhere, and that was just so they could get some woman like my mother to sleep with them and buy them drinks. Don’t get the wrong idea, I love music; I just hate musicians, and don’t even try to tell me that’s not possible or I’ll claw your eyes out.

I’m sure it’s possible, I said. I don’t have a doubt in the world it’s possible.

Oh, Jesus, she said. Don’t kiss my ass like that. It’s so unbecoming.

I had some fine times with Gogi. We laughed a lot. She really did drink grasshoppers every night, and she had one hell of a record collection. She also had a lot of nice clothes. She hated crowds, I also remember that. I lost track of her when I moved in the early eighties, which wasn’t unexpected; I should warn you, she’d told me when I stopped by her place to say goodbye, I don’t keep in touch, so this really is adieu.

I found her obituary online a few weeks back, in a Phoenix newspaper. She died in 2002, at the age of 52, which meant that she was older than I thought, but still not nearly old enough. The obituary didn’t say how she died, or, rather, of what. She wasn’t survived by a husband or any children, which didn’t surprise me, of course. Just a brother in Boston, I think. No flowers, please, the obit said, and suggested memorials to the Humane Society. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’ll get around to sending a check.

Maybe you’ve seen my tongue limping in circles, yoked to the whip hand of my brain, sinking further and further into the muck. The words don’t come out the way they’re supposed to, or the way they used to. Something happens. Happened. It’s like when you take a picture and the print looks nothing like what you saw when you looked through the view finder. I think you could define that feeling as disappointment.

This world astonishes and appalls me in equal measure. It keeps taking things from me and trying to hoodwink me into believing I’ve given them away.

This from my horoscope yesterday (Scorpio): “Don’t trust little ones with potentially dangerous tools.”

Okey-dokey.

Was Job cursed with sleeplessness? Do the damned sleep in hell? Not likely, I realize, but is it official anywhere?

It’s almost funny how long ago long ago was. It’s not funny, though, how much my hand and wrist have been cramping lately. Eventually, I realize, I’m going to have to learn how to write left-handed.

You there, little man, little speck, when did you forget how to leap? Leapless, you’re helpless. Go back to leap school, dammit, and relearn your old gift. How else are you ever going to leave this planet behind, even if only for an ecstatic instant?

One last observation, or whatever this is: My eighth grade shop teacher was the creepiest character I ever met, the way he’d sit there on his stool whittling the calluses on his hands with a pocket knife. I remember one time he said, “I could teach any one of you morons how to get out of a pair of handcuffs in five minutes.” He had a tattoo of Jesus wearing his crown of thorns. It was on his chest, and every day when the bell rang at the end of class he’d pull down the top of his tee-shirt to reveal the tattoo and say, “Believe in this man.” People around town said in his younger days he was a motorcycle racer who’d fathered children in damn near every state of the union. Once upon a time he’d allegedly bragged about having received more than fifty citations for urinating in public. He said it was a hard habit to break, and I’ve no doubt it is.

That’s all for this morning.

Thank you.

All summer I’ve had a retired shop teacher in my skull, trying to teach himself to play the marimba. I liked it better when he stuck with hammers and power tools.

I know my tongue’s tucked away somewhere in my face, but I can’t feel the damn thing. The world outside my windows looks like a silent Bunuel movie, and I keep trying to find an appropriately disconsolate soundtrack that’s just loud enough to drown out the marimba. I’m not having much luck. I’m open to suggestions. I’m thinking creaking violins and accordians might do the trick.

I’m always open to suggestions, whatever that means.

You can’t believe how fucking hot it is, unless you’re one of these people who will believe anything. There are trails of perspiration running down the walls. However hot it is to you, it’s at least ten degrees hotter for me. At least. My body is a furnace. I’ve taken off all my clothes and I wish like hell I could take off my skin. I wish I could turn my body inside out. Every hour represents a pendulum swing between collapse and plodding stupor.

I watch presumably religious people wearing ties come up my sidewalk and ring the bell. I think about answering the door naked to ask them if they can get God to do something about the weather, but I don’t have the energy to climb up off of the floor.

The last time I left the house the old Swedish baker (I think he’s Swedish) up the street told me a story that, unless I am mistaken, had something to do with a farmer feeding a bucket of diamonds to a cow.

As I sprawl on the floor staring up at the ceiling it occurs to me that what I’m up to is really pretty simple, if nonetheless hopeless: I’m looking for revelations. At the very least this epiphany, repeated over and over in the monotone voice with which it took shape in my head, should prove useful when dealing with telephone solicitors.

A magic wand would be useless to me right now. What I need is a magic weapon, and I’m not even sure what I’d do with that. I’m pretty sure I could find something to do with it, though, something useful and satisfying.

Suddenly, I realize, it’s grown dark, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any cooler.

Among the thoughts that crawl across my head as I stare at the ceiling is this: It’s never a good sign when a town has more than one fudge shop. And: This could almost be the moon, if little bastards next door shot off firecrackers all night long on the moon. And: I’m not even sure what tense I’m living in.

And, finally, this: No, sir, this is not a comfortable situation. This is not a comfortable situation at all.

This guy comes in and says to me, “What’s your goal here? What’s the big idea?” He was a huge man, seriously overweight and clearly laboring to balance there before me at the counter. Moist, wheezing, one of these characters who’s always swiping at his forehead with a handkerchief, and something of a throwback, I suppose, in this regard.

I took a quick glance at his shoes. Perhaps, actually, a glance is always quick, but I’ve made a long study of the shoes of huge men, and I’ve noticed that they’re always strangely worn. This particular fellow had worn down a good half-inch on the inside sole of each of his shoes. The man was possibly pigeon-toed, I thought, or perhaps the damage to his footwear was simply the inevitable result of bearing the weight of such a resolute human glacier.

I knew instantly that I didn’t like the tone of this fellow’s voice, and frankly wasn’t much interested in whatever it was that he might have to say. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. There was a compensatory rudeness that one often finds in the very unhappy or the excessively overweight. I am well aware, believe me, of the bigotry implicit in my attitudes toward the very large, and it is people like this character who are largely responsible for it. It seemed like I was always having to deal with them.

The man swung one of his big arms up on the counter. It sounded like someone had dropped a fat, metropolitan phonebook. He commenced to drumming with his thumb, in the process blowing a wet wheeze in my direction, a wheeze that carried with it across the counter the stale smell of what I thought might have been chocolate milk. I noticed with a combination of fascination and disgust the film of sweat his arm had deposited on the counter top.

He began to reiterate. Guys like this, I’ve learned, are masters at reiteration, generally of the inexplicable.

“I would just like for someone to explain to me what it is you people think you’re trying to accomplish here,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“I’m sorry” I said. “But you’re asking entirely too much.”

–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

Ella was on the front porch, blowing into an empty bottle with a straw, shivering a fly that was trapped there at the bottom. The fly was woozy and slick with cola, and was rolling and tumbling in the little bottle hurricane that Ella was producing with her straw. The fly was done for, Ella knew that much. It had gotten itself into a pickle, and would spend its last moments at the bottom of the bottle, drunk on cola and flopping itself unconscious.

Roland Schramm came around the side of the house with a globe in his arms and crawled down under the porch. Ella’s grandmother had thrown out the globe because it had a dent in Asia, and Roland had fished it out of the trashcan out back. Roland’s dog, Perry, followed him everywhere and was under the porch with him. Perry was a first-class leaper, and a shy dog.

Roland lived across the back alley and went under Ella’s grandmother’s porch all the time to smoke. Ella could see him now through the slats of the porch, hunched beneath her with his head down and his dog curled up in the dirt. The smoke from his cigarette came up through the floorboards of the porch. Ella didn’t mind the smell; it smelled just like Roland under the porch. Her grandmother no longer made a stink about Roland smoking under the porch, because if you hollered at Roland he would spray paint on your garage or break things. It was easier to just let him go under the porch, where he kept a stash of motorcycle magazines with pictures of men with tattoos.

Ella was bored. It was no good, being a girl in the world. The yards and bushes and woods all around her were full of dirty boys, chasing each other with sticks and throwing things and still hollering into the darkness when she was already in her bed. That’s unfortunate, her grandmother would say whenever Ella complained about her life.

Have a heart. That was another of Ella’s grandmother’s sayings. If her grandmother were to come out to the porch and see Ella torturing the fly in the bottle, that was exactly what she would say: Have a heart, Ella. That poor fly is one of God’s creatures.

Ella had never seen her grandfather, but he was in the world somewhere, and her grandmother was sour about it. There was a card on her grandmother’s bed stand, which had been there all the years that Ella could remember. The card featured a funny drawing of a man in a tuxedo. The man was holding a tray on which was a sparkling diamond ring. Inside the card someone had written “If you’re loving me like I’m loving you, baby, we’re really in love.” Those words, her grandmother said, were written by Hank Williams, but the handwriting was Ella’s grandfather’s. They weren’t, her grandmother said, worth the paper they were written on.

At least once a day Ella’s grandmother would drag her in under her chin, wheeze what sounded like tears into her hair, and murmur, “Bless your little pea-picking heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Ella could not begin to formulate an answer to her grandmother’s question. All day the old woman sat at the kitchen table, scribbling away at her word search puzzles and watching a television that was on top of the refrigerator. Every afternoon in the summer Ella’s grandmother would send her up the street to the Gas-and-Go to fetch a bag of potato chips and a can of diet Cola. Her grandma would give Ella a five dollar bill and instruct her to get something to eat for herself as well. Ella would ride her bicycle to the library downtown and spend the remaining three dollars and twenty five cents making photo copies of beautiful women and beautiful clothing from fashion books and magazines. Shoved in the drawer of her nightstand and tucked in her school books Ella had hundreds of photo copies of exotic clothing –and shoes; Ella loved shoes– the likes of which she had never seen in Prentice. She also liked to make copies of photographs of sports cars. Ella wanted to be a secret agent like James Bond, only a girl. In her dreams she was often driving a stolen Jaguar through the streets of Prentice.

Ella’s grandmother was her father’s mother, and she would seldom give Ella information that was helpful in forming an impression of a man she could no longer remember. “He liked to put rocks in his pockets when he was a boy,” her grandmother would tell Ella. “I used to have a basket full of them down in the laundry room. Eddie’s rocks.” When pressed for more information, Ella’s grandmother would say things like, “He used to listen to a radio that was the shape of a motor oil can,” or, “He loved tomatoes.” One time she told Ella that her father had been a crackerjack jumper, the best in his class. “He got a ribbon for it,” she said. All of these details didn’t add up to much in Ella’s mind, and her conversations with her grandmother regarding her father always boiled down in the end to the fact that Ella’s father “hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans.” Men, she was told, were good for three things: running off, killing each other, and making babies they wanted no part of. Ella’s father, it turned out, was good for all three.

I’m not kidding you, for about twenty seconds I thought I was looking at a giant snail, and I mean a really giant snail, just the soft, slimy part without the shell, maybe six feet tall and walking upright –or creeping– like a man.

I saw the thing come slowly through the hedgerow at the back of the lawn. I was in my workshop in the garage, monkeying around with one thing or another. It was just after midnight and I was about ready to call it a night.

I had a big window right above my work bench that looked down the long slope of my backyard to the flower beds, the hedgerows, and the garden plots beyond. I saw a brief flash of reflected light when the giant snail first slipped through the bushes and out of the complete darkness.

I think there was a little bit of a moon that night, and I watched as the thing moved slowly along the edge of my yard in the dark shadows. I might have shook my head. I must have. The whole idea seemed alternately crazy and terrifying, but I would have sworn there was a giant snail sneaking towards my house.

I was so transfixed by this spectacle that I was taken completely by surprise when the motion light above the kitchen window popped on and revealed a stark naked Ted Hickock –pink, heaving, and glistening with sweat– standing in the middle of my backyard.

At one time Hickock had been my insurance agent. He was paralyzed for an instant when the backyard was flooded with light, and then he clumsily straddled my fence, plunged over, and trundled off into the darkness.

To this day I can’t explain why I never mentioned this disturbing incident to another soul, let alone called Hickock on it. I guess it seemed like such an awkward situation all around, and, frankly, I felt embarrassed for the man. Hell, this is a small town, and something like that could ruin a fellow’s reputation.

–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

 

The other night I dreamt I was in a boat floating in thick fog, talking to God.

Look, He says to me, I’m just hoping to catch a few fish. I didn’t come down here to listen to you bitch.

I wouldn’t think you’d need to fish, I said.

Very few people in this world need to fish, He said. But it just so happens I like to fish. I’m a sportsman, and though, yes, I could technically cheat –at this as well as at anything else I damn well please– that’s never been my style. I don’t much go in for flashy stuff and intervention. The fish don’t know who’s on the other end of the line, and that’s the way I like it. The truth is that if they did know, it would only make it all the more difficult for me to catch them. Do you think for one minute that if those fish down there knew I was in this boat they would eagerly impale themselves on my hook just to make me happy? I can assure you they would not. Unless and until somebody wants or needs something virtually all of creation runs from me. Oh sure, there are nuts –there are always nuts– but I think you know what I mean. You’re all fish to me –understand, of course, that I’m now speaking metaphorically, but that’s the way I’ve always thought of you– and when I go fishing it’s virtually always bad news for somebody. And I’m terribly sorry, my friend, but today that somebody is you.

And with that God pushed me out of the boat.

 

–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

 

I can’t deny that I am offended when certain individuals question my credentials as an authority on the sedentary lifestyle. God knows, yes, unquestionably I am offended. I say let these critics come here and gaze upon me in my unlaundered pajamas, as I slump here on the floor eating Tootsie Rolls and composing lazy and, quite honestly, uninspired monologues to my dog. I lack the energy or attention span for television. I can’t be bothered by the weather, understanding as I do that in my present state it can have no bearing –I’ve no intention of setting foot outdoors any time soon, implying as such an adventure would that I have some destination in mind, something compelling enough to drive me up the stairs for a change of clothing. Not likely. Not likely at all.

I suppose, though, that eventually –rather soon, actually– it will be necessary for me to venture out for a new supply of Mountain Dew.

Time doesn’t stand still. It never does that. It dribbles along the floor like a capsule full of light, throwing off odd little wobbly shadows. When the arm of the turntable drifts slowly across the black surface of the record and settles in its cradle the silence sounds like a car alarm bleating across the muffled fields in the darkness.

Haven’t moved. Sitting still. Some curiosity about that pile of books tottering in the corner. Looking for a moving surface, line, origin. Backspace. A clear dream would leave you even more confused than when you blank-screened your way through every flat stretch of darkness, with only some vague whoof booming in an otherwise empty fog.

Fred’s infatuated, you recall hearing some stranger say, and you try to imagine the rest of the story, to no avail. Outside your windows the night is full of people with big plans, lashed to each other by the lunging insecurity of a big city. Lost luggage. Elder clutter. Monument. Why, I oughtta….hang on a second. Hang on a second….No, sorry, it’s gone. Lost it. I felt an idea creeping along the margins of my brain.

I cannot the American say ‘piece of cake.’ Go far, I driving. Car has problem, slow, then not moving. My mother she mooing, with me unhappy. Things are problem. We must going a great distance away, life to do over. Beginning new, with family there in restaurant. Town is small. Wife she wants the television, things to sit.

I miss my days as a juggler, when I had a little bicycle and a wagon and I went from town to town, camping under the stars at night and entertaining in the streets and town squares every day. Eventually, however, things changed and it became necessary for me to make some adjustments in my act. The city fathers wanted me to include a message, to lecture the local children about bicycle safety and kindness to the elderly. Before too long I was instructed to include information regarding the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, and to warn the children about the perils of unplanned pregnancy. I was told that I was no longer to camp out under the stars, and eventually the little town banned juggling altogether and I was conscripted to work in a local dental office.

I get disturbed when clothes disappear. Everyone does, I know, but it’s not like I can, you know, tolerate much disappearance. I have no wardrobe, dammit. I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. And I have to be honest with you, I never expected to see Mark Trail’s girlfriend –actually, I think they might be married now– in a bikini. I was just so taken aback.

I never learned how to say "These things don’t matter." I never learned how to sit still, to stare hard at one thing. I did, however, learn how to sit up all night, rocking in place, my mind a buzzing test pattern, the static symphony that follows "God Bless America" when the little local radio stations sign off for the night. But if you sit there on the floor for too long and for too many nights you start to lose touch with some of the old, vague stirrings, good feelings, what’s it’s like to walk in the quiet country, the stubbled fields dusted with snow, the hard gravel frozen under your feet. Walking the railroad tracks, the sky layered and gray and settling low over the landscape, the impressionism of late November, the muffled silence, a distant skreeing of a crow wobbling black above the trees. The murmur of a creek rippling through a fractured stretch of open water, the flat clanging of a railroad crossing further out in the country.

The ceaseless rustling of grain elevators, the farm houses settled down the long driveways in the falling darkness, the sound of your own breath, the rough rasp of prairie grass and corn stubble, dog clattering in the ditches, the tiny snap of a shotgun someplace far off in the country, the distant scrape of a jet plane sounding like a moon-dragged, storm-tossed sea. Spires on the horizon along the town’s edge, water towers, gas signs looming. You start to lose touch with those things, with the person you once were in a long ago place.

Now, back on the floor, Coltrane at his fattest and most mournful. Thick. Screwing higher, more lost, more puzzled, more hurt. Jimmy Garrison playing the bass like a talking drum. In the fog there is an automobile wearing a shroud, a casket wrapped in a flag, a large animal breathing through its nose, sinking deeper into the mud.

The board of directors retreats to a backwoods resort, where they will drink all weekend and brainstorm names for funeral homes. Forest Park. Shady Oak. Final Rest. Comfort Care. Sounds too much like a nursing home. Meadow Wood. Paradise Valley. Ever Rest. These names, they will all agree, sound too much like cemeteries, so for a time they will simply make up names, fictional families and hyphenated partnerships with some suggestion of quiet, appropriate dignity: Birnstead and Mather. Hambrooke and Pierce. Junius-Peavy. Aarden and Sons (The double-a was a nice touch and would gain them prime placement in the Yellow Pages). The board of directors intends to buy up funeral homes in small towns all over the Midwest, and then to franchise them back to the yokels. Death was a growth industry in these towns –death and methamphetamine– and even as they drink themselves insensate they are secure in the knowledge that their plan is a sound one.

In room eleven there was an old snapshot with serrated edges taped to the mirror above the dresser, a photo of a dark-haired woman, her eyes closed and her head tilted slightly back, standing in a dark angle of shadow. Outside the shadow the sun was shining on an impossibly bright pastel world and a street lined with vintage automobiles.

On top of the dresser was a rusty tacklebox, full of corks, keys, paper clips, and pencils; a bottle opener, screwdriver, fingernail clippers, pocket knife, and a few bucks in change. The drawers of the dresser held a disorderly sprawl of socks, underwear, tee-shirts, and a few pairs of slacks. Just inside the door was a clothing rod on which was hung a handful of snap-button western shirts, a blue windbreaker, a plaid wool jacket, and a nylon parka.

On the bedstand were several pairs of fine sunglasses and an assortment of baby food jars, each of them blooming with an almost lovely green mold. Under the bed we found six pairs of shoes –sturdy, plain, solid browns and blacks– and a shoebox full of old photographs of horses. There was a battered leather suitcase stuffed with scandal magazines and paperback westerns.

The man had a small refrigerator, inside of which were three ketchup bottles, eight cans of Budweiser, and an opened can of cling peaches.

He also owned a nice Stetson Stratoliner cowboy hat and two pairs of worn boots. There were no paper documents, no letters, wallet, or checkbook; no reliable identification and not a single photograph of another human being other than the woman on the mirror. Were it not for a battered old Rawlings Enos Slaughter model baseball mitt with a name written along the fat thumb in black magic marker the man would have died entirely anonymous.

The mattress was now stained with blood black as motor oil, and there were random splashes on the wall and bedstand that were dusty as powdered tempura.

Here are your waters and your watering place.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

—Robert Frost, “Directive”

I am looking back into a world now gone forever. Thinking of a time that will never return. A book of photographs is looking back at me. Twenty-five years of looking for the right road. Post cards from everywhere. If there are any answers I have lost them.

—Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand

All I ask is for the recognition of me in you, and time, the enemy, in us all.

–Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

You were directionless for a brief time in the 1980s. Okay, for ten years in the eighties.

You’re trying, you swear.

You wouldn’t go that far.

You don’t really want to get into it tonight.

You’ve scratched mosquito bites until they bled.

Tom Cruise can kiss your ass.

You’ve been so drunk you thought you might never be sober.

You make frequent use of the phrase I never thought I’d see the day, and you mean it.

You once found it amusing to throw rocks at cattle, until you read somewhere that casual cruelty to animals was a frequent precursor to homicidal tendencies.

You were soundly defeated by algebra.

You used to think Howie Mandel was sort of funny.

In past lives you were a jack rabbit, an astronomer, and a concierge.

You’ve got a box of old letters around there somewhere, including one from either Hall or Oates (you can’t keep them straight anymore, but it was the shorter one with the curly black hair).

You don’t know what you were thinking when you bought that Cuisinart.

Your boss is a Jewish carpenter.

That? No, that’s not yours.

Briefly, you had a thing for that Julie girl at Arby’s.

Your get up and go got up and went, and then unexpectedly came back with renewed gusto (unrelated to directionless period in the 1980s).

Your refrigerator is full of mysterious condiments.

You still have a box set of James Herriot paperbacks on your bookshelf and, bless you, you’re not the slightest bit self-conscious about it.

You occasionally dream you are a fish.

You wished on the moon.

You once had a disastrous adolescent haircut that made you wish you’d never been born.

Sure, you once owned a pair of earth shoes. They were really comfortable, and went well with your painter’s pants.

You lost your virginity to a complete fucking asshole.

You have very little patience for the drum solo.

You can’t keep a secret.

Oatmeal was never your thing.

You sometimes look at your record collection and wonder what you could have been thinking.

You do not want a whale-sized penis, but thanks for asking.

To your eternal regret you did not buy that photo of the blind ventriloquist you once saw in a junk shop.

You forgot what you were going to tell me.

You’re sorry.

This wasn’t what you had in mind.

You regretted your words the instant they left your mouth.

You never should have sent that letter.

Etc.