Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction

The Internet is Undefeated.

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I read somewhere on social media that the internet was undefeated. It came from a post where someone exposed a football fan who roamed the streets of Baltimore and beat up random fans of the other team. His buddy recorded him doing such a heinous act. The one who assaulted them was obviously drunk and possibly hopped up on other drugs as well, maybe cocaine, maybe bath salts, only if he was biting necks or something, so I doubted it. He was wearing a football jersey and stood well over six feet in the video, a big man, and started attacking people wearing jerseys for the other team on a sidewalk.

It was a short video, under a minute, and at the end, he looked into the camera, flexed his biceps, and said, “I don’t lose.”

What a monster, I thought. I read the comments, which was why I went on there. It was entertaining to read from the dregs of society, most of which were illiterate. All of them attacked the perpetrator in the video as if they were on a moral high ground. They went as far as finding the perpetrator’s name and where he worked. Some of them contacted his employer and showed the video. The employer ended up firing him and posting a message of their own, saying he no longer worked for the company and that they didn’t stand for such behavior.

The police used the video as evidence for his arrest. Thousands of people called him all sorts of names in the comment section and wrote things such as what was going to happen to him in jail and how his life was ruined, and that they would beat his ass if they ever saw him.

But I had to wonder, how many of those people were hypocrites? How many of them committed battery themselves? A good percentage I believed. Only they weren’t caught on camera. Only a fool who was intoxicated in public would do such a thing. When the video was rolling, I bet his friend was drunk too. A lot of those people thought the man who shot the video should be punished. I guessed they were right. Actually, this sort of behavior, drunk people wandering around and assaulting others at sporting events, went on long before this incident and long before camera phones were invented. But these people treated it like it was a new occurrence.

Anyway, the perpetrator’s life was ruined. He got what he deserved, and so on. But I didn’t saint those who attacked him online. A lot of them were probably just as despicable.

Non-fiction

Writing Groups

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I’ve belonged to a writing website for over four years but don’t go there anymore. The website has a forum where members post questions. The same individuals who answer them back each other up against any outsider who makes a comment.

I’d posted comments on there and received no responses like I was in a cave. It offended me, but I wasn’t surprised. These groups work this way. Those same members post in all the threads like the only thing they do is sit online every day and answer questions. I’d gotten snide answers before from those herd members and chosen not to join them. I just posted my work on that website for feedback, most of which was bitter and meant to be discouraging. There are resentful people who just want to destroy others because they themselves have been destroyed.

I joined a Facebook writing group for laughs and read their roasting when another member posted a chapter of their work. There are usually over a hundred comments from other members. Ninety percent of them trash the work and call it amateur. They say they hate it without giving any constructive criticism. If they do, it’s in a condescending tone. I don’t know why writers choose to post their work on Facebook. That should be the last place to share anything online. The aforementioned website would be a better option for those trying to get feedback from anonymous people. Not that the website is anything supportive for writers. I wanted to change my name on the website. My goal was to hide my identity, but the administrator wouldn’t let me because of bullshit reputation points. I didn’t understand the reason for them other than I hadn’t participated enough to earn the points. My real name is still on the website. I wish they would allow me to change it.

There’s a member on the Facebook page who posts a few sentences a day of what the other members call word salad. His posts never make sense, such as, “The advocacy of my benevolence is maladroit obfuscation.” Those sentences ramble on like that, and members roast the writer for posting them, calling him an idiot in their own words. I would feel sorry for the writer if I didn’t feel like he was trolling everyone. Wouldn’t he get the point by now? I think he’s brilliant if that’s his motivation. It would be fun just to post examples of word salad to these assholes and make them believe I was serious. I’m going to do it. I’m going to start posting such passages to them for feedback just to fuck with everyone. What do I have to lose by trolling these bitter Facebook writers who cut people down when looking for publishing advice?

Most of the time, all I read are responses from writers trying to discourage other writers from looking for agents or publishers because they’ve failed and they want others to fail to feel their misery. I implore all aspiring writers not to join those Facebook groups. They’re nothing but toxic. I also implore them to stay away from actual writing groups outside of the internet. They’re going to run into people in real life who want to discourage others as well. The only difference is it’s a lot easier to be an asshole online, so they’ll hold back like someone who wouldn’t hit someone in person but act vitriolic toward them behind a keyboard. In other words, they’re cowards. I don’t associate with such online behavior.

I scrolled through X yesterday and found a post where an older woman shared a photo of herself at an NBA game. She was proud to be there, so she innocently showed it to the public, and a bunch of people responded with how ugly she was. I knew it was coming before I even read the comments. A lot of hurt people are out there who just want to spread hatred because it’s too deep inside them like a splinter. I remember long ago, my therapist at the time called it aggression. That sounded too vague to me. Of course it was aggression, but what was the root cause?

The only solution is to remove these social media sites. That’s it. There’s no other way. If we eliminate them, the world will be a better place. After all, weren’t these sites geared towards teenagers to begin with? Now adults use them to market themselves. If they’re not doing that, they’re just hurting others, these people who’ve never grown up.

Now the presidents are participating in the same immaturity: Democrats cutting down Republicans and vice versa. Imagine if our first president, George Washington, had X. Would he have stooped so low?

There’s also the shocking display of illiteracy. I can’t speak for past generations, but these new generations appear as if they were never taught how to write in school. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read posts and comments from those who use such ignorant grammar as “should of” instead of “should have”. What are teachers doing at school these days? Just letting their students run amok in classrooms and never disciplining them to sit and read something for God’s sake? It’s only going to get worse. I’m astounded by the degree. The movie Idiocracy should be assigned viewing at all schools.

As for these online writing groups, those people are well-educated more often than not. But like I said, too many are out to hurt other people rather than help them. With that being said, I won’t forget the few who’ve guided me in the right direction.

Non-fiction

On Boredom

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I’ve been in a phase where nothing interests me lately. Even past interests have become a huge bore. I can’t explain anything, such as the symptom where I lose my breath–what I call a phenomenon. Every night after work, I leave my apartment and go for a walk downtown for an hour and a half. When I come back, the sun is down, and my legs are spent. Whenever I take a shower, I’m short of breath when I wash my hair, like I’d run a marathon. Not to mention, when I get up too fast, I get dizzy. My doctor has tried to wean me off some medications. I’d been taking too many for too many years, and I believe these are withdrawals. Medications are a bugger. I looked up bugger in the online dictionary, and one definition is a person who penetrates the anus in sexual intercourse. Well… there you go. The dictionary folks don’t hold back, do they?

Maybe the medications are a bugger if they’re the cause. If not, I don’t know what to say.

Anyway, in the middle of October, when all I have to look forward to is football, my therapist suggested I pick up a hobby. I don’t have enough. When it comes to them, I think of crocheting or some shit like that. There’s a store called Hobby Lobby. On the outside, the store looks like the size of a Walmart. I’d never been inside one and never planned to. I asked my therapist what the hell was in there, and she confirmed it was what the name implied. Not that I took her advice seriously, like I never do, because she’s not that great, but most aren’t. Once a week, I have to sit for fifty minutes with her over a telehealth session, and after the first ten minutes, I run out of things to say. Her insights don’t help. So I asked her how her weekend went to kill the time before the fifty minutes were up. She’d driven with her boyfriend, whom she called her partner, to Bakersfield to watch the car races, and she also ate barbecue instead of going out to eat. What a boring way to spend her days off. I’m always eager to go out eating rather than eat someone’s cooking if they’re not a professional chef. If there’s one hobby, I eat at restaurants. I should be a food critic.

Anyway, I can’t kill the boredom, which is here to stay. Bukowski once wrote, and I paraphrase, that all excitement is either illegal or too expensive. Who can argue against that? After all, who wouldn’t dig a night of illegal street racing? After attending traffic school, I learned you could serve up to six months in jail for participating in such a hobby. Not that I plan to. In the Rodney Dangerfield movie Easy Money, he sat in the living room with his wife and expressed his boredom. She said whenever she was bored, she would take up knitting. “Why don’t you knit me a beer?” he said. I could vouch for that.

Boredom kills. Maybe people die not from old age but from boredom. They just get too bored and die. Too many laws have set the stage for people to be bored. You can’t do anything anymore. I sit in a coffee shop where a sign out front says NO LOITERING, NO SOLICITING, NO PANHDANDLING. Shit. What can you do? You can’t even stand outside of a coffee shop anymore. A few minutes ago, I stood out there and felt like I was doing something wrong, just existing. So I came back inside and sat where I was.

Some people like camping. I went camping when I was eighteen and visited Chicago, if you could call someone’s backyard a camping trip. Still, we set up tents. Wouldn’t that have qualified? I’d come to see my long-distance girlfriend. She’d dumped me right before I got there, but I saw her anyway for the first time from California. She fooled around with her new boyfriend in front of me in the tent. At least I could escape to a lake behind the house, which also justified it being a camping trip. Ever since that time, I’d never been in the mood to go camping. Besides, I hate mosquitos and bears.

Non-fiction

On Owls and Wrestling

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Not an hour ago, I woke up. Now in the desert, I sat on the patio with gusts of wind hitting me and the sun rising. An oversized cockroach scurried under my table. I hoped it wouldn’t crawl onto my shoe. The thing was as hideous as all cockroaches are. They’re completely harmless but so ugly that people stomp on them with no sympathy, even when they’re living things. They don’t care. They would rather not see something so disgusting coexist on this planet. Why did God invent cockroaches?

I could understand an owl. Last night at the Dodgers game, one swooped down on the field of play. On the radio, the announcer mentioned it.

“Did I just hear that right?” I said. “An owl is at the Dodger game?”

“Rick Monday must be losing it in his old age,” my father said.

If there was, how was an owl able to feed himself at the game? Owls are nocturnal, but still, you would think one would keep away from a massive crowd, even if it landed on the field away from them. Owls hunt for mice, so there might’ve been mice in the stadium.

“There was a time when I was working for the county,” my mother said, “and we had to tear a building down, but we couldn’t because a barn owl was inside it. I went and chased it out anyway.”

My mother would’ve broken the law because of the World Wildlife Federation. I only know about it because the acronym is WWF, the same as the World Wrestling Federation before it became the WWE.

As a kid, I used to follow wrestling heavily. My favorite wrestler was Rowdy Roddy Piper, although I barely saw him wrestle. For whatever reason, NBC or USA Network never showed him wrestling. I loved his outfit. He was supposed to have hailed from Scotland, but when he was interviewed, he never spoke with a Scottish accent. It was always more of a New York accent. Either way, he always wore his white T-shirt with his plaid kilt and played the bagpipes through his entrance to the wrestling ring before he disrobed to his wrestling underwear, whatever they called it, along with his wrestling boots. His muscles glistened under the lights overhead. Wrestlers were always ripped with tanned skin as if they went to the tanning salon every week, and they were almost always hairless except for George “The Animal” Steele, an old man with pasty skin and hairy shoulders. He used to eat turnbuckles in the wrestling ring. Word got out that he used to teach high school science, I imagine not for too long. You never know. Some of us quit teaching and end up wrestling in front of millions of maniac fans. George and Rowdy Roddy Piper are both dead now. Hardly any wrestlers make it to old age.

Non-fiction

The Same Old Expectations

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An old friend, who hadn’t reached out after two cold years, had actually texted me last week unexpectedly to check on me. Coming from him, it’s always been unexpected. And how was I doing? Well, not too good. But I didn’t tell him. Instead it was the usual: Oh, things are great. All I wrote was confirmation that what another friend I hadn’t talked to in years had said about me was true: that I’d gotten tired of LA and moved to Palm Springs in February.

Life is a whore, he wrote.

I didn’t argue against that. In all honesty, my heart leaped in surprise to hear from him. All that time, he’d written me off like most old friends had done. That’s how friendships work. People grow apart.

He’d written to me that another friend of ours, a woman whom I hadn’t thought about since probably 2007(?), had married a gay man, which didn’t make sense, but okay. For some reason, he’d brought her up.

In the summer, he’d announced on social media that his apartment had burned down, but he didn’t mention that to me in the text. All his fans, since he’s a quasi-celebrity, had written their condolences to him in the comments. I never wrote a thing. Like I said, he’d written me off, so we weren’t on the level of communication. But an inkling was still there that he would write to me at some point.

Well, he did. This week, he presented me with an opportunity after he’d been given money to open up a business. One of the arms of the business, as he called it, was publishing. He’s been looking for writers to send him short stories for a sci-fi/horror anthology. If my stories were good enough, he could make a collection of my own, and he would pass them on to an editor to polish them up.

When it comes to opportunity, I jump with joy, but also my nerves catch on fire. What if I can’t produce up to his standards? The pressure tightened around my throat. I even started to panic. That was Thursday night after the football game when I heard from him.

The next morning, I wrote him back before the sun rose and congratulated him. How cool it was that he’d been given that opportunity. I thanked him for reaching out to me. Even though horror and sci-fi aren’t in my wheelhouse, I said fuck it. I would give it a shot. If it sucked, he would let me know, and we would look for ways to improve it. What have I got to lose except more hope? You know what they say about expectations. Actually, I don’t know. What do they say? All I know is expectations are a real bitch. They get me in trouble and usually end in colossal disappointments. I expect the world out of my fortunes, and more often than not, they turn to shit in comparison.

He shared the titles of some of the stories he’d conceptualized. They sounded like Flaming Lips albums. If you’re familiar with that band, you would know one of their albums is called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I was filled with doubt after reading the ones he’d sent me. How could I accomplish writing anything near his standards with such epic titles? But again, what do I have to lose except hope?

Non-fiction

A Week Without a Brain

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I watched the game last night. The Atlanta Falcons played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Atlanta celebrated their former quarterback Matt Ryan and inducted him into their ring of honor. He spoke to the crowd at halftime when his old team was trailing by seven.

But the second half told a different story. Just when I thought the Buccaneers were about to jump to a commanding lead, the Falcons came back somehow. I was sort of watching the game while scrolling through my phone. Not that offense bores me, but it gets too monotonous to see no defense. In the second half, both teams kept scoring. I like a little defense to add suspense.

Anyway, with around two minutes left, the Falcons were down 30-27 when their quarterback, Kirk Cousins, threw an interception to Buccaneers linebacker Devin White to seal the game, or so I thought. All the Buccaneers had to do to leave with the victory was drain the clock and force Atlanta to call all their timeouts.

On a third down, after the Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield handed the ball off to his running back, there was a penalty against Tampa Bay that pushed them out of field goal range. With around a minute left, they had to punt on fourth down back to the Falcons, all because the referees completely missed a facemask penalty from one of the Falcons defenders that would’ve caused an automatic first down for the Buccaneers. All the Bucs would’ve had to do was kneel a few times until the clock turned to zero.

What ended up happening was Kirk Cousins received the ball again and had one more shot to tie the game, and that was exactly what he did after he marched his team to midfield. A strike to wide receiver Drake London put them in field goal range. With no timeouts, the offense rushed to the line of scrimmage and was able to spike the ball with only a second remaining.

But the kicking team wasted too much time to set up and suffered a delay of game penalty, which shoved them back five yards, making the field goal attempt harder. It was payback after getting away with the facemask penalty. Yet and still, Younghoe Koo booted the ball between the uprights and tied the game at 30. They went to overtime.

On the coin flip, Baker Mayfield called for tails, but it was heads. As you would’ve imagined, the Falcons defender elected to receive. So with all the momentum, Kirk Cousins marched his offense down the field again. Right after a big gain, receiver Drake London got hurt from a collision and had to be pulled out of the game. A backup with the last name of Hodge (I didn’t know his first name) so far had only one reception. On the very next play, Cousins, with his record-breaking five hundred-plus yards in the air, connected with Hodge down the middle. It was a simple ten-yard route. Hodge shook off his defender and jetted to the endzone. No one on that porous Buccaneers defense could catch up with him, so he scored the game-winning touchdown. The Falcons had come back and won, 36-30.

The teammates jumped all over Hodge and celebrated behind the endzone. In only the fifth week of the season, it was like they’d already won their Super Bowl. And in the locker room, they sprayed each other with what appeared to be champagne. It was like they were the Yankees after winning Game 7 of the MLB World Series. I believe it’s never a good sign for a team to celebrate this early when so much more football meeds to be played. It makes me worry about the Falcons. Will they be as competitive down the stretch? Something tells me no.

Non-fiction

My Latchkey Years

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I grew up as a latchkey kid with television on my brain. My parents worked and wouldn’t come home until after five at night. Most days after middle school, I would entertain myself with cartoons and sitcoms.

My favorite show was Batman from the sixties on what was called then The Family Channel. I don’t know if it’s around anymore, the channel that is. I’m sure the TV show, because of Batman’s popularity, is syndicated somewhere. I watched all three seasons since that was how long it had lasted. My favorite villain was The Riddler, played by Frank Gorshin. He wore green tights with black question marks and a pink mask over his eyes. He would send riddles to Batman and Robin to give clues about what crimes he was about to commit. For every episode, there was another villain, and the Riddler was featured in the first one.

Out of all three seasons, the Joker, played by Ceasar Romero, appeared the most. I remember the episode was in the third season when Batman and the Joker competed in a surfing contest. It was so long ago that I forgot why they would do such an asinine thing. They surfed in full clothing–Batman in his cheap costume and the Joker in his purplish-pink suit–and they rode surfboards in front of a green screen of an ocean that couldn’t look any more fake.

My favorite Joker episode was when the Joker managed a bank to steal money of course. While he was managing it, he disguised himself under the alias W.C. Whiteface. Even when Batman and Robin visited the bank, the Joker still wore his makeup and purplish-pink suit, and yet somehow the dynamic duo didn’t recognize him because the Joker referred to himself under the alias. In a chase scene, after they discovered it was really the Joker, Batman ran after him in an alley outside the bank, and the Joker hid inside a police car and put a policeman’s cap on his head. While he sat in the driver’s seat, Batman and Robin stopped to ask him where the Joker went, completely fooled by the Joker wearing the policeman’s hat in full makeup, and the Joker told them he went thataway and pointed in the direction behind the car. And so the dynamic duo continued running that way. Eventually the Joker would be caught and sent to the Gotham City penitentiary by the end of the episode, but it didn’t erase the fact that the caped crusaders still fell for the Joker’s ruse in the cop car.

I memorized all of the Batman villains on that TV show and even bought a book that summarized every episode. Some of the villains were just downright goofy, like Egghead played by Vincent Price. His head was shaped like an egg, and he would say things such as “Egg-celent” or “Egg-xactly.” That was all he really did–nothing special.

In another episode, King Tut, played by the actor Frank Bruno, hypnotized Batman and made him dance “The Bat-Usi,” which was a typical sixties dance move where Batman grooved to what I believed was surf rock, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the episodes for as corny as they were.

Speaking of corny, pretty much all the shows I watched in my latchkey years were exactly that. Almost every afternoon, I would watch Saved By the Bell. It didn’t matter how many reruns came on. I would watch them again and know exactly what was going to happen. In case you’re not familiar, it was a sitcom that took place at a high school, and none of the jokes were funny. That is, I never laughed once. Maybe some people did, but not me. I think I watched those shows just because I had a crush on the cheerleader Kelly Kapowski, played by Tiffany Amber-Thiessen, whom some people might know from the show Melrose Place, which was a spinoff of another corny show that I watched back then: Beverly Hills, 90210.

I don’t watch TV anymore, but I’m still a latchkey kid in the body of an adult, it seems. Maybe someday, I’ll revisit those shows on YouTube or somewhere, but it’s doubtful.

Non-fiction

Led Zeppelin or The Beatles?

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Yesterday, I gave my reasons for choosing Pink Floyd over The Doors. But what about Led Zeppelin versus The Beatles? Nine out of ten people, I would bet, would choose The Beatles, but I’m one of the ten percent who thinks Led Zeppelin is better. Since ten years old, I’ve been a Zeppelin fan.

In his bedroom, my older cousin in North Carolina played Led Zeppelin IV for me. At the time, in the mid-eighties, he was about fourteen, and I was about ten. I remember he played “Stairway to Heaven,” and the song put me in a trance. After hearing it, I started buying every Zeppelin cassette at the record stores. Although I began with Led Zeppelin IV, I moved on to Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin I and every album up to Physical Graffiti.

As I sit here in my late forties, I believe Led Zeppelin I is their best because of its heavily bluesy influence. Fundamentally, in some form or fashion, the blues had influenced every rock band, although Zeppelin experimented with other genres.

Not until my late twenties did I really dig into the Beatles catalog. Before then, I’d only known them from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I really enjoyed, and of course their early years when they wrote “Twist and Shout,” which I never got into. My friend who was a die-hard fan burned me a CD of The White Album and Abbey Road. He swore by The White Album, but I thought Abbey Road was a more cohesive work, while The White Album was more of just a collection of songs. Nothing against it, but I thought “Birthday” kind of ruined the vibe because they used to play it at Chuck E. Cheese when I was celebrating my birthdays as a young boy, so I always associated it with those times.

But in my twenties, I was still impressed by their albums, such as Rubber Soul and Revolver, just as much as I was with Led Zeppelin’s discography. I’d been more involved with heavier rock, and Zeppelin became a big influence. The Beatles were more of a pop band, which didn’t detract them from how great they were and the fact that they dabbled in psychedelia and many genres. Me personally, I would stick with Zeppelin, but not by a lot. Their best work outdoes The Beatles best work.

Non-fiction

Pink Floyd or The Doors?

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This morning, I listened to music on my iPhone on shuffle mode, and a song played from Pink Floyd. It was an instrumental track from Dark Side of the Moon that had me asking myself which band I prefer: Pink Floyd or The Doors? Since I own a fair amount of Pink Floyd albums and maybe one or two Doors albums, the question wasn’t too hard. In fact, I don’t even think it’s close. It’s Pink Floyd by a mile. Nothing against The Doors, but I just thought they were weird for the sake of being weird. Maybe if I’d lived in the sixties and experienced them when they were still around, I would’ve enjoyed more of The Doors. But as a child of the eighties who discovered them at my aunt’s house in Central California when I was about eight years old, I looked at The Doors in a different light.

In the mid-eighties, I lived in Pittsburgh, and to see my relatives, my parents flew with me out to California. In her living room, my aunt had a large stack of vinyl records below her silver turntable. Of all those records, if I could remember correctly, she included the first Doors album along with LA Woman. At that age, I thought “Break on Through” was groovy. In its entirety, I listened to the first Doors album, and the record was scratched and crackly when it spun beneath the needle on the turntable. It played like a children’s album on acid. Appropriately, the last song was called “The End.” Jim Morrison did his thing with his spoken word poetry about nothing except psychedelic imagery, and it spooked me. I must’ve been too young to listen to that record, but it still intrigued me for how scary it was. My aunt let me keep it with a stack of other records such as The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I really enjoyed that one, and The Doors album grew on me the more I listened to it. Although I couldn’t say what they were about, both albums told somewhat of a story.

And then around that age, I visited my older cousin in North Carolina. He collected cassettes, not vinyl, and introduced me to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which was even weirder than The Doors but a different kind of weird, a subtle weird. Once again, when my cousin played it for me, I was too young to understand the theme of the album. Not until I was in my twenties did I find out from a friend that it was about how time and money both drove someone insane. It was an intriguing concept, I thought. By then, I came to appreciate Pink Floyd more than The Doors.

For a good reason, after about fifty years, Dark Side of the Moon is still on the album charts. Now, in 2024, it reached number one again in the UK. How incredible. In fact, it could be considered the greatest album of all time, which makes me wonder why Pink Floyd isn’t mentioned among The Beatles or Rolling Stones. Maybe their catalog wasn’t as impressive. After all, the Syd Barrett years were too weird for me, far too psychedelic to the point where they were unlistenable. My friend said that Syd purportedly went on an acid trip and never came back. Many years later, he visited the band at their studio, still tripping. By then, Roger Waters had taken over as the lead singer, and they dialed back their weirdness by a lot to make their music more inspiring.

With that said, other than Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle was, for the most part, an enjoyable listen, except for the twenty-three-minute song “Echoes.” Wish You Were Here, which was about the absence of Syd Barrett, fatigued my ears with its long tracks. Animals and Atom Heart Mother were too conceptual for me, and The Wall was only good if I was in the right mood. Otherwise, the album sounded too bipolar.

But if I had to compare their discography to The Doors, I would say it was much more impressive. Although LA Woman was cool, nothing from The Doors came close to the depth of Dark Side of the Moon. I was never quite a fan of Jim Morrison howling all the time, and The Doors always used too much organ. His poetry sounded too pretentious, while Roger Waters, who co-wrote most of the lyrics for Pink Floyd, struck a chord in me.

I don’t remember what I did with my aunt’s records. My mother may have sold them at a garage sale or thrown them out. But still, I appreciate my aunt for giving them to me. They were some of the best gifts of my childhood. Maybe I should’ve kept them. At least, years later, my friend would burn a CD of all of Pink Floyd’s MP3s, although something about vinyl would’ve made those albums better keepsakes.

Non-fiction

Werewolves

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Yesterday, I went grocery shopping to pick up unsalted butter, ground beef, tortillas, sour cream, carbonated water, and peanut butter cups. It was a quick visit. When I went to the checkout lane, the bag boy (or bag man, because he looked much older than a boy) said, “Sir? I can help you at the next lane.”

It took me a second to realize that he meant me, which was great because there was no line there. So on the conveyor thingie in the next lane, I placed all of my items, and the bag man got behind the register.

He said, “Hey, handsome.”

I shot him a look, and he looked back at me, waiting, and there was a long, awkward, uncomfortable pause.

I said, “Hi,” and never thanked him. My reaction had been instinctive. To mediate the situation and quiet the awkwardness down, I began smiling and acted friendly towards him–but not too friendly. My headphones were around my neck. He started checking out my items–beep, beep–and glancing up at me, and I tried to avoid eye contact.

“What’re you listening to?” he asked.

“I uh, what?”

He gestured at my headphones.

“I, uh, don’t know.”

“Music? Podcasts?”

“Uh, yeah. That.”

The exchange went longer than I’d hoped. Through the sensor, I scanned my grocery card for a discount and dropped it to the floor out of confusion. Also, I fumbled my phone before using it to buy everything through the ATM pad. Still, he kept looking at me.

“How many bags do you need?” he asked.

“I, uh, don’t know.”

Then I saw the bag I’d brought inside. “Oh yeah. I brought this.”

When it was time to get out of there, I rolled the shopping cart towards the exit with a feeling as if I’d stolen something when I didn’t. I decided to leave the awkwardness back at the checkout lane.

At about three in the morning, I awoke with a pain on my tongue. For a week, it has been hurting. Last Saturday, when I bit down hard on it, it started bleeding, and the damn thing still hasn’t healed. All I do is aggravate it with my teeth. I can’t stop. At least to numb the pain for fifteen minutes, I use a product called Kanka in a small bottle. It’s a liquid that tastes like tree sap.

Anyway, in the middle of the night it’s at its worst. I thought about werewolves and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I visited YouTube on my MacBook. When I opened the lid, the screen appeared without a login. How strange. I would always need to use my thumbprint or password to log back in to my laptop. But this time, it bypassed that. So to see if the login would activate, I kept opening and closing the lid, but it wouldn’t. For MacBook repairs, I searched online but I didn’t get a firm answer to the problem. Instead, I let it slide and went to YouTube. Since I kept thinking about werewolves, in the search box I typed “werewolves,” and a bunch of results came up for horror movies all from the eighties, when horror was at its cheesiest, and clicked on a scene at the end of a movie. With the cameras rolling, a beauty contestant accepted her award on stage and suddenly turned into a werewolf. It horrified me. Usually, werewolves don’t scare me, but the makeup was so hideous that I couldn’t help but be disturbed. Not that she even looked like a werewolf but more of a pig person with a pink face and a sort of piggish snout. Whatever it was, it kept me awake all night. But I wasn’t as worried about pig people attacking me in bed as I was about reality. Who has room for monsters when real life is ten times the horror movie?

I stayed in bed, wide awake, until I crawled out at about seven o’clock in the morning. If I could paste the movie scene to this blog, I would, but I also don’t want to get in trouble. What if I get sued because of some lame horror movie from the eighties? I’m not sure what I’m allowed to do on here. A long time ago, I had a blog that I took down because the content was too embarrassing, and I’d posted a picture of a street sign on there. I think it was a STOP sign but I’m not sure. Anyway, the photographer who’d taken that picture sent me an email in which he asked me to delete it or else he would take legal action. Ever since then, I’ve become too cautious to post anything like that again. I just stick with my words. The world is full of werewolves.