I was driving up the 5 North and I felt like I had to shave my fuckin’ head.

I got off on Alameda and cut across town to the nearest Walgreens and pulled some clippers. They were on sale, $17.50. The woman who rang me up had a Texan accent and dentures. I asked how her day was going and she said not so good, but that she couldn’t complain because she only had two more shifts and then she’d be relaxing somewhere real nice for a couple weeks. I felt like I was making a good decision, like going through with it and accepting the consequences was somehow comparable to her decision to drive across the United States and start a new life in a new town.

I got to my apartment, went straight to the bathroom and threw an old, crusty towel in the sink. I opened the package and pulled out the 1” clip, attached it, and took it to my head. I watched an unbelievable amount of hair snowflake down, some of which missed the sink completely and spread out on my floor.

When I finished I looked at myself in the mirror and felt this intense sort of fuzz that warmed my chest and rose and rose while I walked out of my bathroom and into my kitchen. I started boiling water for pasta and this feeling was still coming up, so I grabbed a Miller High Life from my fridge and chugged it. I threw some music on and began to dance around my apartment just as the water started to boil. I was so happy and liberated. Nothing has ever felt as good as getting dancing alongside the bubbles in the pan with a freshly shaved head on a Tuesday night.

baby, you kill me

We had been driving for 13 hours straight and it was 1AM and we couldn’t tell if we were in Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. We were driving down a black road and there weren’t any cars around so all we had were our own thoughts and our convoluted dialogue.

Up ahead I saw a stream of lights and small shadowy figures dancing around on the freeway. I rubbed my eyes and they went away.

Ted asked if I was alright and he said he’d drive, but I said I was ok and that I’d make it to the next town and then we’d switch. He said ok and started fooling around with the cd’s in the glove compartment.

He threw a cd in and up ahead I saw two brights lights that looked like headlights and I convinced myself that there was a car heading towards us. I braced for a head on collision and asked Ted if he could see the car up ahead and he said no and then the car turned into two lights in the center divider. I told Ted my eyes were playing tricks on me and he said his were too.

We made it to the next town and Ted took the wheel and rolled the window down and all I could think about was a deep sleep. I looked over at Ted and he kept yawning and bouncing around in his seat to try to stay awake. At one point I saw him slap his face ten times. It was now 1:45AM and we weren’t totally sure if we were heading in the right direction. Ted ducked and said he thought that there was a giant blimp floating over the freeway, but that he realized it was just the lights again. We decided it was best to pull over so we stopped in a Chase bank parking lot and closed our eyes.

I heard a band playing, people walking behind our car and someone say “Fuck you” into my right ear. My eyes were closed but I could see strange faces in the blackness under my eye lids — people with pig faces, all distorted and heavy. Our brains were mad at us for staying up so late and driving so far without rest.

We slept for 15 minutes and got back on the pitch black road, wondering if we’d ever make it back to Phoenix, AZ.

weird music video for a weird song.

I went to a large, public state college because I didn’t read enough as a child. I knew my graduation ceremony would be cheap and depressing. It didn’t mean much to very many people. It didn’t mean anything to me.

I scooted through the line with one of the only friends I’d made in my upper division classes. I told her I was very scared and she said she was very excited.

When my name was called I looked up at my parents and sister. My dad was holding a camera and they were smiling at me. I shook a the hand of a professor that I’d never met, a flash hit me right in the eyes and it was over.

I thought I’d spend that weekend in Orange County, partying and saying goodbye to all of my friends but no one seemed to be around. Instead I spent my last two nights by myself, cleaning my apartment so my landlord didn’t fine me $300 like the year before.

Neither of my roommates were around to help so I stole some of their plates and a coffee maker. Then I spit on their doors and shit in their toilet and left.

I drove back to Van Nuys by myself and I was happy to be heading that direction; any direction away from Orange County felt like a good direction. I had no job prospects in sight and no discernable understanding of what I’d just completed or accomplished.

By Sam

High school can be a heady experience for a kid who’s forever trying to figure his shit out. I didn’t come to terms with any sense identity until college, and I always wondered why. I had some good moments, some miserable moments, but mostly, as a whole, my high school experience was thoughtless and lacked any hint of introspection. I was simply a body wandering through halls in a linear direction, going through the motions, asking the most basic questions and completely unaware of it all. It wasn’t until I quit playing baseball that I felt something else: a warm fuzzy spark, similar to the way friction builds on your skin and gets released when you touch a door knob.

I came to a conclusion today, and I might be slightly off with my insight, but here’s how I see it: It was through quitting baseball that I was able to realize the overbearing power a father can have on a kid’s self identity and self worth. Let’s backtrack. My parents forced me into baseball from an early age, and while my recollection of it is filled with apathy, I have to presume that I enjoyed it at some point. I was an active kid so I’m sure I appreciated the ability to run around outside with my best friends, but I also never developed that essential competitive gene that seems to run rampant on my Dad’s Midwestern side of the family.

By the time I reached middle school and high school, my parents admit they had to drag me out on to the field. In my opinion, it should have ended there, but perhaps I wasn’t strong willed enough to take that step myself. I also felt an immense amount of pressure to continue playing. My father grew up on sports. He played football and ran track in high school and got a full ride in college on a football scholarship. He was extremely proud when I performed well and Baseball, and other sports, were one of the only ways that my dad and I have ever really been able to connect. It was only through sports that I was able to feel genuine sense of interest and support from him.

In this sense, sports were my dad’s identity morphed into my own. If sports died inside of me, a part of him died too. That’s why quitting ball was ultimately devastating and still one of the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I remember walking into my coaches office and telling him that we needed to talk. I started by telling him I was genuinely stressed and unhappy with my life.  When I told him I was thinking about quitting, that my heart wasn’t in it anymore, I started to cry uncontrollably.

Then he said a line that tore threw me and etched itself into the back of my brain: “You sound like you don’t like yourself very much.”

What I find most interesting about this experience is how bad I felt for wanting to take my own life in a new direction, a direction that conflicted with the path and mold my dad had envisioned. It was sheer identity crisis at the time because I purposefully took  a step away from the person I had been my entire life, and there was a moment afterward when I was like, “wait, I don’t like baseball, so who am I and what do I like?” More, I think my dad’s disappointment is equally fascinating. The fact that my dad was even remotely affected when I decided that I didn’t want to play ball, and that HE was sad when I decided I no longer enjoyed a sport, is a trick of human ego and father-son bond that is hard for me to completely understand.

A quick observation: I was born in a small town in Kansas. The town had about 10,000 people. Good people, salt of the earth. About the age of 25, I decided to move to California. Towns you have never heard of in California have more people than the most populated town in Kansas. So I moved from a small town, where, despite the small number of people, you will never feel alone, to a town with millions of people where you can feel so isolated that it might as well be a ghost town. I have often wondered why this paradox existed.

Why is it that you can be driving down a tw0-lane Kansas highway and a farmer in a tractor, who has no idea who the hell you are, will wave as you pass, but in Los Angeles someone will think you’re  a nut bag for saying hello, or worse, take it as a personal affront? Why, when you walk down the street in my home town can you never go more than a block or two without someone stopping to talk to you, but in Los Angeles you can walk for miles with no one bothering to look you in the eyes?

It started with the giant roach near my air conditioner. I tried to kill him one day but I missed contact. He hid under the vents and hissed at me all night.

A few more started appearing here and there. I was embarrassed by them, but I pretended they were not a problem. I’d see a roach or two every few days or so and smash them. I let a few suffer. I watched their legs twitch and applied more and more pressure right before drowning them. People can do these sorts of things to roaches, and still feel OK about themselves.

When my girlfriend came over I’d keep the lights dim.  When I was by myself my eyes would study every inch of my walls, just waiting for something to move. Crumbs on my kitchen floor turned into baby roaches. An itch on my leg at night was a bug finding a home in my leg hair, I’d thrash my legs together to be sure.

I asked my friend for help one Saturday at 2:05 AM.

“I dunno man, buy some of those roach motels or something.”

The next night I poured myself some wine and watched a baby roach run laps around the base of the glass. I immediately went to CVS and bought a package of 12 roach motels. The instructions said to remove all food items and make sure your sink is clean.

I washed one dish and noticed the first worm, a little white thing with a black head.

It was crawling around the rim of a coffee mug in my sink. I squished it and saw another one near the faucet. Then more on the wall. I opened my cupboard and saw some crawling on cans of beans. They seemed to be multiplying from an old package of rice that they’d eaten through.

I called Mom.

We talked about how I’m irresponsible and not fit to live by myself, so I said I had to go and told her I loved her.

I put on yellow gloves and began smashing them with my finger tips. I cleaned their small guts with a damp sponge and anti-bacterial spray. Two hours passed and I was still discovering them in new spots. I felt overrun, like I’d lost control of my apartment. After each worm smashed I reached a new low. As their heads poked out of dark cracks in my cupboard I thought hard about what I’d become over the last year. I thought I was Daniel the independent, but I was really just Daniel living comfortably among the roaches and worms. Daniel the irresponsible. Daniel the mess.

Sent Jan 21, 2013 9:51 PM

A: The house of existence is really a shanty in the desert waiting to get blown to pieces by the wind

Sent Jan, 22 2013 6:19 AM