Top 15 Albums of 2011

Well folks, here it is. A great year of music down and the artists who have impressed are prolific enough to have further projects in the future. 2011 was a great year for music on all fronts, but the garage rock scene has become a lot better with the proliferation of San Francisco bands that are constantly touring i.e. Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Sic Alps; hell, even Girls. And then there's the multi-layered indie rock that I love to hate, but it kind of backed me off cause some of it was really really good, like Destroyer's album or PJ Harvey's. Those kinds of albums sock you in the face with gorgeous instrumentation. Did I mention Bon Iver? Personally, I like "For Emma, Forever Ago" better, but once you see the man live, your perception of religion will change. He was undoubtedly the best thing I saw all year, and I saw a LOT of shows. Then there's the singer/songwriter who can delve into anything, like Kurt Vile, my biggest man crush outside of Kurt Cobain and Sufjan Stevens, and even people like Zola Jesus are constantly pushing the bubble of what a one-person musical force can do, and Justin Vernon, of course. Even people like John Maus, currently working towards a Ph.D. are making wonderful tunage.

Anyway, I'll stop blabbering. Here's what you all are here for. The top 15 albums of 2011!

1. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for My Halo

2. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

3. Davila 666 - Tan Bajo

4. Destroyer - Kaputt

5. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

6. Ramshackle Glory - Live the Dream

7. Tom Waits - Bad as Me

8. Bass Drum of Death - GB City

9. Ty Segall - Goodbye Bread

10. John Maus - We Must be the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves'

11. War on Drugs - Slave Ambient

12. Bon Iver - Bon Iver

13. Trash Talk - Awake EP

14. The Black Lips - Arabia Mountain

15. Megafaun - Megafaun

Hope you enjoy. If you're on break, I strongly recommend all of these. If not, I strongly recommend all of these. Let me know what you think.

Peace out girl scout

Mr. Goebels

J. Reyes

Mr. Goebels

He wasn’t dead. But he obviously wasn’t alive. Byron’s still beating corpse left the police and other investigators with these two seemingly contrasted opinions. There was no traceable brain activity and his body was unresponsive, but his heart was still beating, verifiably (“His pulse is normal”). In the room were a few objects that became dead-ends, a pair of shoes that didn’t fit Byron, an empty syringe, and a note saying “All I know is nothing.” But we were all still left with this shell of a person inside the tiny apartment, daring the officials and definition-givers to come away with an answer.

Instead, they came to me. They said, “Do you know Byron Goebels?” And I said, “Used to.” And that’s where things got fishy. You see, not only was Byron’s catatonic, vegetative state a conundrum, but Byron himself was. It was hard enough to say you know of him than to truly know him. Byron Goebels was perhaps the greatest conundrum that I’ve encountered, or rather, who I’ve encountered. Not in the purposefulness in what made him tick, but in the sense that you saw his aim and never really understood how the hell he was going to get there, because no one had, unless you believed in that sort of thing.

We all went to school. At Kenyon. Me, Byron and Jeff. The first thing that you need to understand about Kenyon is that it’s very small. It only has about four hundred people in each class. It’s almost ninety percent white, high-class white, mind you, and though many of the kids were nice and seemingly artsy, a lot of times it felt like people just wanted to be interesting or different. The thing about Byron was that he took that twist and spun it into his life, where you couldn’t identify what was going to be a mere interest and what was going to be something that he would take for a wild spin at some different time in his life. Needless to say, when I met him I could tell there was something primal about him, but did not know that his life would take the spin it eventually would call to him.

We met at some off-campus party at a pink house where, after several drinks, in a more private upstairs room, a big-haired senior offered each of us a tab of some hallucinogen and we all took it. We listened to music and joked before the effects took hold and we decided the room was just too small for our overweight imaginations. We careened around the house, making fools of ourselves trying to talk to girls who clearly knew that we were up to something a little illegal. Everything was more vibrant and meaningful. Our ideas bit into each other and spawned obsession. A bit into the trip, Byron mentioned something about Jefferson Airplane and we all went back to his dorm room to listen to their album “Surrealistic Pillow” and talk about that scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Johnny Depp, who is Hunter S. Thompson, is lighting up a cigarette as the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers frantically licks the acid residue off his arm. In that scene, a square of a man is coming in to urinate when he notices that there is a man who doesn’t look entirely different from a dog licking some white powder off another man’s red flannel shirt. “We are those guys!” shouted Jeff. We giggled and spun to the waves of the sixties, swaying our arms and hips in ellipses. Byron got up on one of the two desks in the room, took his shirt off and began belting the chorus of that transcendental anthem. “Don’t you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody to love? Don’t you want somebody love? You better find somebody to love.” He beat his chest, hollered, leaped off the desk and put up his dukes. “Who wants to fight?”

Jeff and I were sitting there, kind of shocked by the radiance of his performance: it was something so primal that it caught both of us unaware and in our heightened state of sensory puzzlement, we stared. And that’s when Jeff said it, kind of what summed up Byron completely. It was quick and quiet, like a falling star, but no less glorious. He rubbed his eyes and dropped his jaw before announcing “Wow.”

Byron laughed and tossed his hair, “I’m just kidding. I don’t hit girls. And it’s stupid to hurt people anyway. I just thought that would be something that Hemingway, or one of those other unstable drunk fuck writers would say.”

Jeff and I nodded, because it really didn’t make sense to fight, after all, we had really just met and I had never been in a fight before, so I figured it was best not to embarrass myself in front of my newly formed friends (and I did hope they were my friends.)

“I’m hungry,” said Jeff. So we ate ramen and listened to psychedelic music, while fighting the workings of powerful hallucinogens.

The rest was like that. College and parties and a lot of drugs, but Jeff and I never had the substance intake of Byron. Byron drank like a fasting monk and, like a fasting monk, only believed in the transcendence of the human mind and spirit. He called it being “unstuck,” and always used to say that our generation was neither a beat generation nor a lost generation. In his opinion, it was our duty to be a little unstuck. But it often felt like he was channeling a little too much beat generation, except, according to him, he was thoroughly disgusted with the beats’ behavior, in the sense that the beats were these people who were so enamored with breaking through the realm of humanity to something else, but it didn’t mean anything so they always returned to their illicit habits of drugs and sex and misery. The time I told him that he was doing the same thing he smashed his vodka bottle on the wall and told me to shut the fuck up through bleary eyes and stumbling words. I’m sure it hit a little too close to home for him, because that’s what Byron did in college. He would finish his work and drink or smoke a couple of bowls of cannabis or do a couple of lines of cocaine or ingest some sort of hallucinogen. It was unstable to the max and he was unstable, sure as hell beyond unstuck, and we were going to tell him that it really wasn’t healthy for him, and he was beginning to lose himself, but we never actually had to because his parents were both killed by a drunk driver.

The report goes that they were coming back from A Streetcar Named Desire, which had been so good, and were surely talking over the merits of disillusionment when a drunk man in an old purple Honda ran a red light directly into the side of his parents car, killing his father in the passenger seat instantly on impact. His mother was not so fortunate. She was cognizant of the rescue process. She saw the jaws of life tear her car apart. Her husband pulled through the car’s broken shell. Her limp and failing legs crumpling on the ground. (“That’s not my husband.” “Mrs. Gottlieb, your husband is dead.”) And she would almost remember this in her death. And that “almost” is key. The crater in the left side of her head was simply too much for her to live. So Byron’s mom died peacefully sedated with the help of strong opiates on the way to the emergency room, thinking she was the luckiest girl in the world.

And Byron never drank again. And he stopped doing drugs. He lost his luster, his original magnetic quality that we felt around him. His eyes glazed over and he got really quiet. He had nothing to say to us for a long time, except that he didn’t want to be there anymore. Aside from several trips home to work out what would happen because his parents were dead, he stayed pretty much in his room, alone. When he left for the funeral, we were quiet too. He came back damaged and different.

“Those bodies in the caskets weren’t them,” he said, staring at the ground. “They were dolls. Vacuums where my parents used to live. Ideas of the past. Done up like dolls.” And I remember this most specifically because he paused as a tear left his right eye and slid to the corner of his mouth. He shuddered and wiped his eyes, saying “I guess I’m a man now.”

It didn’t take too long for him to make up his mind as to what he would do. He packed all of his things, his hi-fi sound system, his records, his clothes, his posters, his sheets, and didn’t so much as leave a note. That day he left Kenyon and never came back as a student.

The only silver lining of the situation, and it was a hell of a silver lining in my opinion, was that he amassed a fortune incredibly quickly and had the ability to drop out of school and focus on really anything that he wanted to. Byron had no siblings so he was pretty much got all of the money his parents had. Naturally some of his extended family members had some perks given to them as well, but it put Byron in the unrestricted position of being able to do whatever he wanted for the rest of his life.

Immediately, Byron began to travel, and not in the highbrow sense of the post-graduate backpacking through Europe or doing some mission work in a third-world country: Byron put all of his money in an account that he could use for emergencies, but then began to travel with the bare minimum of supplies he would need, citing the guy from Into the Wild as the inspiration for it, (“That guy is a legend.” “Dude, he fucking dies at the end of the book!” “Fuck off.”), trying to focus on hitchhiking or ferrying from one place to the next. He kept contact with Jeff and me through physical mail since he’d got rid of his laptop, sending a postcard from each exotic locale detailing his adventures and the way that they had affected him.

“I’ve been living with a family of farmers in Guanajuato, Mexico. A little ranchito called ‘Porullo,’ it doesn’t mean anything in Spanish, but I think it’s close to ‘paradise’ in English. We till all day and harvest beans. We slaughter a hog on Saturday and cook it for the town on Sunday after church services. I stand at the top of the town and watch the lights flicker at night and watch the constellations and wonder which ones are my parents. I walk around the town square at nights with Coronas and hold hands with the local beauties (and they truly are beauties.) The men blast Ranchera or Norteña music from their cars, and make rooster noises at the local girls that never seem to work, and dissipate into friendly laughter. But life for the local gringo is good and my novelty is still far from worn, though they are still surprised to see a white guy work the fields. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure at this point. Haha. I love it here. But in a few months I may not. And I may move off and try something along the Ganges River in India. Or maybe I’ll make my way over to the rice paddies in Japan. Or just take a trip through the rest of South America, kind of like Che Guevara, but I won’t start any revolutions after, cause I don’t think those ever end well for the guy who starts them. I haven’t thought it through, but I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. That’s what I know. That’s my prayer. I sing my song for America and look for ethereal lights in the sky, but you can only see them in the cold. So I’ll keep wandering. And wandering.”

These kinds of notes came from everywhere, and he did eventually end up spending some time in both India and the rest of South America, though he said he enjoyed South America much more. I assume it was because he was always a good Spanish speaker. Sometimes he included pieces of his work, mainly poetry, and sometimes he wrote about his adventures, but either way what he told us were only slices of himself that would always leave us guessing what he was really doing.

Happenstance by Byron Gottlieb

The water boils with silver churnings

Scales break the surface and fly into the air

We have our nets ready

But sometimes we forget

To use them

And find ourselves lost

Lost in insignificance

I lost myself today

When the fish flew

And knocked scales

And sense

Into my head

And I stopped caring

And smiled

The poem above is from one of Byron’s journeys with the fisher-people in different parts of Asia. It conveys the way beauty can make us lose ourselves, especially when it is something completely natural. Byron believed that there was beauty in everything, but you just had to hold yourself still enough to realize that there was a lot more going on in a single instant than you could ever fully process. He didn’t think that you needed materials to be happy or to be whole, but you had to have a life rich with experience just so you could really know what was out there.

Eventually Byron stopped mailing and though he dropped off my Earth, he didn’t drop off my mind. Longing or nostalgia for him rested in a small part of my heart.

What I’ve come to understand was that Byron wasn’t a part of this world. He was always trying to find a place deeper, more real. Discover the small pockets that could hold the largest amounts of beauty. He wasn’t disillusioned with the world. Instead, he loved the world more than he loved anything else, but found that there were always more crinkles in the fabric of our universe than could ever possibly be understood. So he looked to the people who didn’t care about the intricacies and found that there was a lot we couldn’t see because we didn’t keep our eyes and ears close enough to the ground.

After I was summoned to the apartment with Byron’s shell, I became curious. How does one even attain that state of nothingness, where you’re alive but not conscious. I immediately thought of Eastern religion, but my mind also fluttered to the empty syringe, on which the police office were currently running tests to find out what had been inside it, and also on the pair of boots that didn’t fit Byron. Why would those boots even be there?

I called in a favor from one of my friends who works at the department of homeland security to see where Byron had been before he reached whatever state he was currently in. It was a pretty wild look at a guy who had been to so many different places, most of which he had done illegally. The information said he was still technically a citizen of the United States, but I can’t see Byron going through the effort of getting naturalized in another country. Neither can I see him getting a new passport each time he needed to, which answered the question of why he had traveled illegally to other countries. He didn’t think it was important.
The trail of where he had been ends somewhere in Nepal, but it’s anyone’s guess from there on out. You can’t really track people inside of that country, and I didn’t think it would be too smart to wander around with a photo of some white dude and expect some stranger to know the guy and not expect them to rob someone who was lost.

Instead I went to the local bar and bought a round for everyone inside. It was only three in the afternoon, but it didn’t stop the crowd from being thankful. I lit up a cigarette before the bartender stopped me and said “you can’t smoke in here, pal.” So I told him “my best friend just died.” He shook his head and said “You can have a drink on the house, but it doesn’t change the law.”

“But what if it did?” I asked. “What if people were so in tune with each other that they would forget the government and do the humane thing?”

“It’s a nice idea, but you’re pissing me off. My dad just died. Think of what I’m going through. I said I’ll get you a drink, but you still can’t smoke in here. It’s my job we’re talking about.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, you didn’t know.”

“How you holding up?”

“I’m okay, he was sick for a long time. It was inevitable I guess, but then again, what isn’t?”

“All I know is nothing” I said and took the whiskey he gave me before downing it. “Any chance you could play any Jefferson Airplane?”

“‘Somebody to love?’”

“‘Somebody to love.’”

“It’ll be up next.”

“Hey, I’ll also take another whiskey.” I paused a second. “Matter of fact, just keep them coming.”

Ocean Poetry

To the side of the road is a path that doesn't look like a path. The grass is matted as if the bodies of a thousand lovers had bedded down and huddled close together along the vegetative crease.

Run down it to the point where sand and foliage shake hands and lock fingers, where the two are both two and one. The sand crinkled underneath your toes and gives way to pressure, while the bent grass merely affirms your trajectory. The razor grass grows in patches. It whips your calves and thighs and leaves small precise incisions that heal but are not forgotten. Chase the heterogenous path up hills and down valleys, while preening bushes lie languid at your sides, denying the possibility of a future notion.

The ocean beckons at the end and as the trail gets treacherous and unstable, go forth to the noise of waves gently kissing damp sand. The crest of a sand dune will allow the visage of the deep, sublime in scale, implausible in volume.

Whisper your prayers to the mist gusting off the swells and listen for the ocean's eternal answer, the one it gave before you spoke, and the one it will continue to give when you are far away.

A Dog from Andalusia with a High Fever

IsIsIsIsIsIsIsIsIsIsIsIs

Does that look like a razor to you?

Cut the shapes from marble like Michelangelo

I’ll be Orpheus

And I’ll play my savage lyre to the savage dogs of the woods

They call me the pious piper

Though who can say why

The only things that follow me

Are beasts of the night

And the alabaster crumbles when I stare

The marble Gods of Pergamon

Will slip from their battle with the giants

And leave Gaia to the earth

My lyrical ballad is deceitful

And they are leaving their shells

Werewerewerewerewerewere

Are you going, T.S. Eliot?

For the dead are buried

The sailors bones in the belly of the whale

Are lunging towards Ninevah

And they call me the pious piper

Though who can say why

My lyre plays so sweetly

Can you hear the Atman cry?

I’m searching for Shangri-la

Atlantis and Valhalla

My feet cascade through ancient villages

But my eyes stay straight ahead

I already learned my lesson

Once

Top 10 Albums of 2011 (So Far)

1. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

2. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for my Halo

3. Destroyer - Kaputt

4. Davila 666 - Tan Bajo

5. Ty Segall - Goodbye Bread

6. Off! - First Four EP's

7. Yuck - Yuck

8. Cult of Youth - Cult of Youth

9. Tyler, the Creator - Goblin (Most of the album is just okay, but the standouts really stand out)

10. Sic Alps - Napa Asylum

Been a great year of music so far. Looks like it's going to continue the same.

Be Numb

Drink enough so you don’t care

And don’t see her everywhere

Feel her touch on your heart laid bare

Or whispers of her words in air

Drink enough so you don’t see

The time you shared supposedly

The happiness, the love, the glee

The names you carved around the tree

Drink enough so you don’t hear

Your thoughts of your mistakes and fear

The plops and sounds of joyous tears

Your once understood motives clear

Drink enough so you don’t care

And stumble home. Alone.

An Inspection into the Dangers of Society

R. Fuko

September 20, 2010

An Inspection into the Dangers of Society

An Introduction to Fuko

Feel it. The air, because that’s where it is. The water mixes with it spectacularly. It scatters itself across my face and body warmly like a mother’s embrace. For as long as I can remember the shower has been a source of comfort in my life: it’s a unique place and time for introspection and self-expression. You won’t hear my singing much anywhere else. I love my shower.

For those of you who are late in knowing me, here is what you need to know.

- My name is Regimund Fuko.

- I am a critically-acclaimed and successful writer, having six books available to purchase at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. I honestly don’t care between the two. For convenience I go with Amazon.

- My wife died a few years ago. I loved her. I don’t think there’s going to be another woman for me and honestly I’m not looking. She is my muse for writing. Before, when she was alive, she gave me peace and inspiration. Now her memory disperses my sentiments among nostalgia, anger and maybe ultimately a little feeling of redemption.

- Two years ago I was diagnosed as going through a terrible Major Depressive episode in which I drowned myself in alcohol, cigarettes and writing. After self-diagnosing and getting my life together, I began practicing healthier habits and taking anti-depressants.

- My most recent book is about a Space Cowboy named Dream. It was published about a year and a half ago. I got a lot of inspiration from the anime series “Cowboy Bebop,” and even stole one of their taglines. They didn’t like it at first, but it ended up bolstering their sales anyway.

Every morning I wake up and shower. It’s my routine and it lets me decant, depressurize and begin my day with resolve and pleasance. The shower is the good part, and it used to be the only good part because it is there that I lose myself in nature. Some of my friends call that ironic. I tell them to fuck off. But I have things to enjoy and ways to enjoy things that may not have been as pleasant before. There’s a degree of autonomy the sun allows that helps facilitate my day: it’s a communicable notion of existence that ingratiates itself upon my mental faculties. Or so I’m led to believe. But the weather demonstrates a lot of properties that can be applied to reasons to wake up and sometimes the weather is all I need.

When I get out of my shower I always brush myself off with a towel. There was a song that came out about 8 years ago about getting dirt off of one’s shoulder and sometimes I think that the young African-American who sang it was talking about showering. Of course I’m kidding. That would not be politically correct. The point being that I take a shower to get literal dirt off of my shoulders and then use a towel to brush that off, like the song, which is of course not what the young African-American is not denoting. Rather, for him, it is both a statement of one’s position in life as well as a snazzy dance move. I think it used to be all the rage with the youth of this generation. Now it has descended into my own private joke.

When I look in the mirror I make sure that my teeth are clean in all aspects of the word, especially looking for stains on the back sides of my lower teeth. Sometimes I look into the mouths of people when they talk and they have terrible stains and it’s really bothersome. Earwax too. I really dislike earwax for some reason: it just seems like people really have no hygiene these days. The mirror generally shows a body that could be better and a face that could use shaving. Honestly, shaving is completely overrated. Today, however, I have to shave. I am, after all, a representative of myself and thus have to construe a level of professionalism when I am attending to people. I run my own publication house that makes all of its money off of my books, because those are the only books that it sells. I created it a long while ago, after my first novel. If you don’t remember, it got glowing reviews and was a national bestseller. Yes, of course. The Taoist Chainsaw. That one. I’ll admit, 1995 was a good year for me, at least in terms of my commercial success. God, the New York Times loved me.

Shaving doesn’t take that long, but it is annoying. It takes just enough time to be inconvenient. God, I’m White. I stumbled onto this blog called white whines that has a different whine from a White person each day and realized how many of those I had fallen into. “Oh wow, another ‘Wonderwall’ cover. Never heard that one before.” Insignificant, but still. I’ve already heard the Oasis version enough. And shaving is just another whine from a white person. The electric razor slides across my face like a lawn mower. That’s a rather apt metaphor. I leave half of my face unshaven and look in the mirror. My brown eyes gaze back and I start to smile and then I start to chuckle and before I know it I’m howling from my stomach because of this funny man staring with half a beard on his face. And so I compose myself and finish the job.

My lexapro sits on my sink. I take 5 mg in the morning and 5 at night, just to balance out when the effect really hits. I pull out the mirror from the wall (I have one of those mirrors that rests on a hinge and you can pull it out from the wall) and take my deodorant from its insides and apply it viciously to my underarms, pulling my lips together and making a quick inhaling noise as if I were undergoing a surgical procedure awake, maybe even mummification. I appreciate the small things in life.

From there I walk out of the bathroom and pick out a shirt and a pair of jeans. Can’t look too good for people. Have to retain some angst-ridden artistic visual from my tormented past. God, I’m funny. The shirt is red. The jeans are blue. I choose my checkered-vans for shoes. Hey even a middle-aged man can have some style, right? I hope I’m right.

I pick up my wallet and keys and phone and make my way out of the apartment. I’m still on the thirty-second floor. I’ve really adapted to it to tell you the truth because I’ve made a friend. His name is John Pinkerton and he lives in 1403. When he first introduced me to himself I thought he was odd, but he really is one of the nicest people I know and really exceedingly genuine, which is something that I don’t think is too prevalent nowadays. We grab a beer once a week and will go do things together just for shits and giggles. He’s a bit younger than me, but is very intelligent and for some reason unmarried. I’ll never really understand it. I mean, he’s not gay, but he just doesn’t really show any interest towards women. One of those people who just gets a lot of pleasure out of life. He actually really opened my eyes up to possibility. Him and Maria of course.

Honestly, I can get to work whenever I want. That means I can walk to work, which is something I usually do. It, like my shower, is an instance of my taking some solace and feeling the particles of nature move around me. Some days I take public transport all through the city just to feel it beat around me: there’s a BlackStar song called respiration and it starts out saying “Escuchela, la ciudad respirando,” meaning “Listen to her, the city breathing.” On public transportation you hear the echoing of the tracks reverberating off of the metal carcass of the urban serpent. That noise colors your perception of the city that passes you by. Or are you passing it by? I still haven’t made up my mind. The phenomenon isn’t the same when you walk. You can feel the city of course, but I think you get to feel the humans that make it up better and the construction around. Impatient cars scream to each other and humans walk and run and the crazies on the corner play drum patterns on buckets. When you walk you see all of this. That’s why I do it. To feel right about where I’m living.

A long time ago I ran away and no one really knew where I went. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather leave my whereabouts unexplained. I might explain it later, but you should know that I now understand that the American dream has been perverted and it’s not just American anymore: it’s” A Mexican” dream. Notice how there is only one letter of difference between the two? Like all things, it’s been outsourced.

The reason I bring this up is in relation to the paragraph before. You see, I could have stayed off and lived on my own away from society, but I thought I had some things to say and apparently the world thought so too when it finished listening to what I said in my books. But that’s a lousy excuse for a reason to stay away from the people you’ve grown up with and the people who really made a difference in your life. And when I look closer into the reasons behind everything, I don’t know why I came back. Recognition? I don’t think I’m that simple.

I used to look down on my employees because I thought they were all a bunch of money-grabbing two-faced professionals. Ivy-league or some top 100 school that gives them a license to wear their britches too tightly for the rest of their lives. Now I think the same thing, but I find it way funnier now that I think about how they latch onto me. Needless to say, I don’t have a huge publishing business or anything. It’s really only for my books, so we really only take up a few offices. There are currently seven people who work for me, not including the interns. And the interns liven up the place so much. Endless entertainment I swear to God. I have them do menial things for the majority, but you definitely get gems every once in a while.

There was one guy who always wore vests, and don’t get me wrong, I think vest day is the best day, but it never seemed to go along with the jacket that he wore, or it just somehow managed to look awkward. I didn’t point it out, but eventually one of the full-time staff members did and he got flustered and so he just stuck to common clothes. You see, I don’t require people to dress a certain way. I take the Google model. I never told him that I missed his vests, though, and sometimes I regret that. I thought they were great.

The reason I bring this up is to give you a better idea of how my office works. It’s a pretty free environment. I worked pretty hard to open up our company to innovation and to give us the best results, at least in the past few years. I have people who work for a purpose and I believe that people should be peers in any sort of company in order to do the best work. People can approach me with anything and likewise I can approach them. They, of course, still see me as a boss since I hand them their paycheck, but it’s different in that I expect them to tell me if I’m doing anything wrong. I have the ability to veto their suggestion, but that’s about it in all seriousness. So we only have a few offices. I made sure to station the company in a nice area so that my employees would enjoy going to work and now I’ve perfected that pretty well I think.

I spend my time there doing PR a lot or working on my new novel. I treat writing like a job because it is that. The best writers spend a certain amount of time writing every day and I try to do the same. I used to fuel my writing with alcohol and cigarettes and tears over my dead wife, but now I fuel it in better, more healthy and constructive ways. I spend my lunch hour in the gym on the first floor running or lifting. I always seem to do my best thinking when I run. It’s all clear, you know? Anyway, the different machines help me work off my nervous energy from my work.

And thus, my day goes by. Today, however, as I said earlier in my excuse for shaving, I am meeting an old acquaintance of mine. A lady by the name of Rose Li. We shared a time together, but it didn’t work out. Basically that is the story. This is before my wife, much before her. Maria obviously knew about Rose, and really had no issue with our being friends, but I had really lost touch with her in recent years. She always had a way about her. Her beauty being the thing that really ingratiates itself upon people, but it’s also a lot more than that because she had ability to morph into the person she thought best for the situation. I always found her really fascinating. She’s really intelligent but rather chameleon-like.

We meet at the old café, a place that breeds memory and desire. We used to come here and as usual, she’s early. Her comfortable demeanor, the well-positioned book on her table and the gravitated rim of her glasses rest a little lower on her nose so that she can read more comfortably. She is wearing a sundress that generously shows the best curves on her body. She looks up and smiles. “Hey Redgy.” Not even Maria called me that. It makes Rose unique.

“Evening. What are you reading?” I ask

“House of Mirth” she replies, smiling.

“Edith Wharton.”

“I haven’t yet finished it, but I looked up the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don’t know if I like how it’s going to end.”

“Goddammit Rose, the ending is always the best part. I don’t get how you can live with yourself. It ruins the thing if you do that.”

“Meh,” she offhanded. “It’s interesting because the main character is created tragically. Like her beauty is the thing that allows her into high society. And she wants it so bad, but she’s predisposed to fail. The book and story line. They seem like they are just there to exploit her.”

“Isn’t everything though? You put enough things that work together that they make things blatantly obvious. It’s what you do to get your point across. Just little things that may clue your reader into what you’re doing or even bold statements.”

“Yeah.” She pauses. “It’s just that it seems so cheap. Like Wharton crafts a character that is just made to demonstrate the failings of society, the weak points and the beliefs Lily has that really don’t let her have an escape.”

“Lily is the main character?”

“Yeah.”

We pause for a while. Rose flips the book to its back and looks at it for a second. And I find myself becoming infatuated with her. Just like always. Just all the little things she does that make herself excruciatingly desirable. And I wonder if I could invite her back to my place, for just a second, before I mentally castigate myself for even letting the thought slip into my head.

“I am her.” She says, insightfully.

“No you aren’t.” I say defensively. “Mind you, I haven’t read the book in an exceedingly long time, but regardless, I mean, you’ve done very well for yourself. You’re independent. You don’t rely on anyone. I mean, okay, you know I consider you a very elegant and beautiful specimen of a woman, but I mean, you think for yourself.”

She chuckled. “Redgy the charmer.” I had to laugh at that one too. “You are missing something. Different beliefs. Us women are raised differently now. I could have been her in that situation. You see the book only works because it is crafted as such.”

I cut in. “Yeah, fucking books. They’re so calculated. I should know.” Calculate, you bastard.

“At any rate, I like the book, I definitely do, but sometimes I just want it to stop. It is doing too much to Lily. It’s almost unbelievable.”

“Did you read my book about the space cowboy?”I say, changing the subject.

“I loved that book. Redgy, it’s true, you become more of a person with each book. I mean, it might be that I know you so well, but I could see your thought process in the book. The way you ended it. It was liberating for you, wasn’t it? It was you.”

It takes me a little while to answer because she’s right. When I was writing it, I had two options. The main character could have died, and it would have ended a better story, or the character could survive. And looking back on it, I made the right choice for myself. You see, I was the space cowboy. And I made him survive. And it was later that I realized what I had done. He saved me. It takes me a long time to respond to Rose. She’s always been so perceptive.

“Anyway, I brought it up because from the way you describe House of Mirth, I think my book was similar. You know, you create a story in order to demonstrate what you think about yourself and the things that affect you. And you want to shed light on the things around you so that’s what I think Wharton was doing. It’s what I did in my book. I wanted to show the ability to be able to survive. It’s an innately human thing that even with our technological advances and our medicine and everything else, we have it. And we’ll give up anything for it. And that’s why Jack survives at the end of Heaven.”

Rose looked down and then drew her attention back to me. “Because we persevere.”

“Yes! That’s it. Because the antiquated notion of Darwinism doesn’t apply anymore and we create our own natural selection with technology and advances and everything. That’s why. Because we don’t need science of biology, but merely a will.”

“And what about your trip?”

“What about it?”

“How does that fit in? You tried leave society, Redge. We all know it. You had your perseverance and your survival. What happened?”

“You know I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

Afterwards the café was filled with an ambiguous sentiment of nostalgia and that feeling you get when you read the last page of The Great Gatsby, with tides and boats and the past and how it catches up to you. The smell of coffee lingered in the air and the music played up and coming artists. Rose and I talked and caught up and of course, she was doing fine. I never doubted her.

When we said our goodbyes, I walked down the street and looked up. The sky had darkened since we entered the café. In the city you can’t see stars. You can’t see the universe existing beyond the gaze of your eyes. And it puts everything in perspective. That there’s absurdity and fiction and a whole lot of other stuff you’ll never know. So you make the best you can with what you’re given and sometimes it takes adventures, literal and figurative, and you curse everything and praise what’s left. And you find some truth that you hold onto, that you may or may not like, but it’s there. So you make due.

The truth is I was scared.