Can I just say now that spoken word poet Rich Ferguson is a great inspiration? Recently I wrote a rebellious poem-essay that I read at the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood and got freaky nervous because Ferguson showed up. OK, I would have been nervous anyway, but he was there looking like a poet gunslinger… Read more »
I’ve just moved.
Not just houses, but cities and entire lives. It’s exciting and new, a bit like the theme song from the Love Boat, but with no Gopher, no dancing girls and no stopover in Rio.
Bummer!
For posterity’s sake I kept a bit of a journal of my first week in San Francisco and have decided to share it as a peek into the inner sanctum of my life. I’d call you all voyeurs for reading, but in actuality I’m just a hideous narcissist who wants to show you photos of my closet.
ST. AUGUSTINE, FL-
I’ve spent most of my life in big cities. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And for some reason, I’ve always felt safe. I’m not sure why, because I’ve lived in some unsavory places. I’ve rented apartments in neighborhoods that people with college educations tend to avoid - neighborhoods populated by surly hookers who won’t take no for an answer and guys with swastikas carved into their necks and elderly women suffering from night terrors and a seething hatred of “negrahs”. But I never felt like any of them would ever kick down my door or accost me as I waited for the bus. They were just local color, and if you caught them at their creative peaks, pretty damn entertaining. Spend a leisurely Sunday morning at your local slum diner, munching on a rubbery omelet and listening to a man with an eyepatch explain to his waitress how the mayor is spending our tax dollars to create a doomsday laser, and you suddenly remember why you never bothered to get cable.
GLENSIDE, PA-
If you’ve never been to one of New Jersey’s fine beaches, I suggest throwing on any Springsteen album from the mid-80’s while reading this, and you’ll more or less get the vibe.
A few weeks ago I rented a house with my wife and two daughters in the gritty shore town of Wildwood, New Jersey.
Family vacation.
Americana.
We spent most mornings on the beach, and most evenings “walking the boards.” Wildwood’s boardwalk, the longest in New Jersey, is a mishmash of roller coasters, carnival barkers, bad tattoos, salt-water taffy, games of chance, loud tee-shirts, and hermit crabs.
And it turns out my two-year-old daughter NEEDS a hermit crab.
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE-
A birthday is a miserable God-forsaken thing unless you are seven years old with red velvet cake and a Slip and Slide.
I turned seven once, with red velvet cake and a Slip and Slide and I told my mother I wanted nothing at the party but girls and I am sure she felt I would either grow up to be a flaming homosexual or a whoremonger.
My birthday came around, a lazy overcast day with lots of young ladies from school, Katie Collie with her hair in pigtails, Sherri Murphy and Hott Bridgette Brock, Rebecca Anne Denny and some of their girlfriends even and then some boy cousins and a few neighbor guys showed up and my mother let Donald Aspern, a completely loud and irritating boy who stood too close when he talked, cut the cake.
SAN FRANCISCO-
Hello, my name is Zoë Brock and I am a hopelessly hopeful romantic.
Love and I have a long and sordid relationship. We’re stuck to each other with that cheap, tacky glue that never dries properly and gets hairs and other bits of icky dirt and effluvia stuck in it and ends up looking like a coughed up owl pellet, minus the skeletal bits. It’s horrible, trust me.
Sometimes I feel as if I live my life adhered to the cheap pulpy paper bound between the flowery covers of a Harlequin romance novel.
Sometimes I wonder if some sticky-fingered house-wife isn’t pouring over the sordid details of my love-life, swooning, moaning and gasping at the more elaborately descriptive paragraphs as she takes a break between episodes of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and ‘Days of Our Lives’.
SARASOTA, FL-
The global economy, like it or not, doesn’t like you. If you’ve acquired a job in a third world country, congratulations: You’re one step shy of a slave. If you’re an American, you can work, live and die at Walmart, which will soon offer funeral services next to the produce department. Are there, you Americans ask, no careers vouchsafed from the global suck? It depends. Do you possess sticktoitiveness and a can-do attitude? Are you a no-getter? Are you willing to take personal responsibility where you have none? Then the answer is, “Yes!.” Jobs await you, some already available, others waiting in the wings of hell. Love it or leave it, except you can’t afford to leave: Trust me, I tried. Here, then, is the future, and your opportunities within it. I have randomly numbered these jobs, for none are better than the others, though some are worse.
NEW ORLEANS, LA -
Tomorrow morning, the construction company will arrive at our hundred-year-old home in mid-city New Orleans, and some strong men will move out shiny black kitchen appliances and the world’s heaviest television and truck them over to Common Ground where they’ll be used by Lower Nine families who are rebuilding after Katrina. Then the contractor will stage our house for what we hope will be a five-month renovation. Back in our new and updated kitchen just in time for Christmas dinner is what we’re hoping for but everyone I talk to tells me to multiply the months by 100%. Right now I don’t want to think about ten months and I’m going to err on the side of optimism and good ju ju because we haven’t started yet and already I want my house back.
LOS ANGELES-
By now you’ve probably realized that TheNervousBreakdown.com has undergone an overhaul. As we approach our second birthday on July 31st, it seems appropriate to launch a new and improved version of the site that reflects our growing maturity (?) and enhanced sense of possibility. In short, the beast is getting older…and hopefully a little bit wiser. But rest assured: The beast is no less ornery. And no less inappropriate in public.
Please feel free to browse around. Wander. Kick the tires.
Please excuse any glitches. These glitches are temporary, and we will be weeding them out in short order.
SAN ANTONIO, TX-
Fundamentals of Investing meets Tuesday nights in Room J113 at Sandra Day O’Connor High School on the east side.
Sandwiched between J111 (the scantly attended Build Your Own Drip Irrigation System) and J115 (the chockablock Flipping Properties Made Easy (despite the national housing downturn, Texas will post price gains in ‘08)), Room J113 is painted penitentiary gray except for the door and door frame, both of which are a shade I’ve heard my mother refer to as burnt sienna. Across the hall in J112 is a class tantalizingly titled Unintended Consequences.
MILTON, FL-
1. Why We Went
A couple of Fridays ago when I got home from work, my husband Kelly said, “Matt wants us to go tubing with him tomorrow.”
Matt is Kelly’s coworker. They’ve become friends
Until Matt, I’d never seen Kelly make a new friend before. I used to think it was because he was shy, or didn’t want new friends.
Now I realize it’s because he felt like crap pretty much the whole time we lived in Utah.
Kelly was never hot on living there. And after his son Kody moved out of state, he expressed his desire to leave regularly and emphatically. I was the one who insisted we stay so long.
Now I feel sort of guilty about that.
THE DEEP SOUTH-
It’s nearly midnight on Island Drive
lights in the trees
and all of heaven waits for me to breathe
standing on the pedals and coasting line to line
I am chased by the ghosts
the ghosts of Jesus and Evel Knievel
of cutter girls in Underdog pants
strobe lights and cotton candy
LOS ANGELES-
And here’s some more good news:
Jonathan Evison, contributor to TheNervousBreakdown.com, has just published his debut novel, All About Lulu, which comes to us from the fine people at Soft Skull Press in New York. The movie rights have sold, the buzz is building, and critics are calling it “a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man’s thwarted longing.”
In short, it’s a great story. And one worth sharing.
A few days ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with Mr. Evison about his recent life and times, and I’ve posted the transcript of our meandering conversation right here at TNB.
PARIS -
We’re walking together along the trail beside the river. After a late winter the low hills are still green and there are wildflowers even now. The air smells of sage and dust and pine and if you look north up Highway 75 you can see mountains capped with white.
We’re bare-chested wearing sandals and shorts. It’s my father’s birthday today. He’s fifty years old, six feet tall, thin. His dark curly hair has lightened from the sun. There are patches of grey at his temples.
I’m shorter than he is with dark hair on my legs and arms, hair that my father found unsettling when it first appeared at fourteen - a feature, which seemed to him impossible. It must have been a terrible reminder of time passing. How could this boy with the big brown eyes and the round cheeks be sprouting the body hair of a Sicilian?
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND-
“We already know that the world is far more complex, and strange, and beautiful than we thought.”
Albert Einstein once said that, but in the office where he conjured up the thesis of relativity (”thou shalt not involve one’s self in irrelevant ’stop n chats’ on the street, thou shalt not ask a man how his family is unless completely necessary, thou shalt not take your shoes off at a dinner party”), and routinely ordered his wife Mileva, by contract, to deliver “three meals a day” and to make sure that his desk was ‘for his use only’, the hapless enemy of Aryans could never predict that time cannot heal the gradual degeneration of beauty.
Right. And what has any of this got to do with mecaphilia, sexual attraction towards cars?
