Innocent Abroad

Recently I undertook the monumental task of driving from San Diego to somewhere north of Seattle and back in roughly four days– and despite gas prices, Oregon cops, awkward reunions, dodgy motels, and a heat so oppressive even Jesus would have been soaking his robe in wine coolers and wearing it as a turban, it was a rather pleasant trip. But I saw something in the great state of Washingtion that gave me pause, and the more I ponder it, the greater my cause for alarm.

Washington is a sedate place, at the least the immediate acres to either side of I-5, and with the exception of a small tract of Seattle proper has very little traffic. Still, carpool lanes quite frequently expand the road to three or four lanes, which my companion and I found very useful—and then I began seeing the signs, posted every two or three miles over a large portion of the state.

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Minor details in a minor key—Bandoleros throwing chubby young women over their shoulders; the view of Africa from a balcony; the longest of nights, darkest of days; months by the pool. I look and look, but never see your face. If decorative bottles and tins of pills were currency we would be rich, you and me—our golden bodies in a constant stage of merger, avoidance, repetition, healing. If silence was a drug we would have been Venus-bound from birth. These eyes never stop searching, devouring features and landscapes—the brain struggles to keep pace, dedicated to the act of remembering. These arms, long exhausted from reaching, have atrophied and died but the hands still keep a sullen vigil, making notes the first Wednesday of every third month concerning how little has changed in the atmosphere. Poison is still poison, after all. A mile is still a body of water. Three drinks is still catharsis. I must have taken two hundred pictures of the Eiffel tower and felt no closer to Paris, no closer to home, no closer to the way your smiling mouth constricts a straw, no closer to Heaven, or Jesus, or Lindsey—lost somewhere in the mountains of Italy or the desert just outside Las Vegas. It’s ugly, and we’re no strangers to the concept, knowing it never matters how a story began so long as you control the ending. What we’re left with is a cowboy hat and bi-annual beer, a nervous tic, another half-dozen equally worthless lovers. What we’re left with is nothing we haven’t paid for—thirty thousand words and an unquenchable rage. Fill a bucket with pennies and you’re left with thousands of uncovered eyes, blind from birth. Tell someone you love ‘goodbye’ and ‘God bless’. Sit by her grave and write a brand new vernacular. Drive up and down the coast for ten years and tell me how the sun feels on your skin. I like the keeping in touch, if that can be said to be what this is.

Adam

I want to write you a letter but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. There’s something within me that has a tendency to twist and manipulate words. Another part easily misinterprets action and language. Another part never knows which direction is down yet screams for me to find my way to some arbitrary home. This is important because you need to understand that to understand me, or this letter.

I want to tell you that your energy is infectious— that when you enter a room I am infused with a vitality that’s disorienting. You shake with excitement or pleasure or anger and I want to be that catalyst. Your eyes are magic and I lose myself in them so I jest but rarely look. You seduce me with your influence and honesty, your simultaneous strength and fragility (we both know my history of tragic women), the way you dress and walk and dance. Tonight I have this intense desire to see you dance— to hear your heels click across a hard surface.

I need to tell you these things because I’m tired of letting fear keep me mute. I want your arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I want to fall asleep tonight with my fingers in your hair. I want to see your shape when stretched out on a bed: the perfect angles of arms and legs, the curve of your hips, a length of back in moonlight, the shadows thrown across one wall when you mount me. I’ve seen the cracks in your façade—woken in the early morning as you stir, kissing my hand and hugging it to your chest. I want to seep inside of those fissures, gently prodding everything within reach to understand what it really means to be inside of you.

You frustrate and confuse me, challenge and enrapture me. You’ve haunted me across oceans and train tracks, between drinks and during commercial breaks, before sex and after breakfast. You exist in such a special place within me but I doubt these words make sense in the way I’ve intended them. It’s not that I couldn’t love anyone else, or that I must have you. In this post post-modern world we’re not that intense. It’s simply that for tonight and all the nights I dare look forward to you will exist this way in my thoughts, and I want to exist similarly in yours. I want you to miss me when I’m gone and look forward, as I do, to honesty, comfort, companionship and love— in whatever form we find it, no matter where it takes us.

If I awake in the early morning—some day—at any distance in the future to find my arm hugged tightly to your chest, lips grazing my fingertips, I will have succeeded. Until that day, it’s just another day.

Adam

It’s World Cup time again, America. I know it’s hard to miss because you don’t really understand or like ‘soccer’– football to the other 95% of the world that could give a shit about Terrell Owens and Coors Light. But I do have a problem with the scant few moderately knowledgeable people that follow sporting events not authorized by ABC and the NFL—mainly because the vast majority of Americans lack the capacity to understand the spirit of the World Cup and instead lapse back into their partisan shells and decide to use the competition as some sort of springboard for their hackneyed agendas.

The politicization of sport has gone way too far. Every asshole who argued that Iran should be banned from the World Cup as a warning about the unacceptability of their nuclear ambitions should be fired out of a cannon into a brick wall suspended over a bed of nails. FIFA is not a god damn political organization, and neither is the Olympic Committee (thought they’ve tried to play the part before). These periodic international competitions are the world’s best chances to actually be brought together by the universality and utter neutrality of sport. You root for your team—you root against your team’s rivals—you root against whatever teams have the best chance of beating yours later on. Politics should play no part in the equation, and the pettiness shown by so many people (especially, I’m ashamed to say, Americans) utterly corrupts the beauty of the last major international sporting competition not completely overrun by commercialization.

80,000 German fans boo when Argentina subs Cambiasso for Riquelme in the 71st minute because they know a fresh defensive midfielder that late in the game doesn’t bode well for their team. Americans belie the fact that they know very little about soccer and even less about the true spirit of competition by saying ‘Gawd, France won? I hate France and I hope they lose!’…… What? Can you really be serious? France (the World Cup team) made the semi-finals and you hate France (their government’s stances and their ‘innate’ arrogance) so you hope France (the athletes that have nothing to do with any of that stuff) lose? Isn’t that along the same lines as saying ‘I hate the economic policies of the industrial West so I will kidnap and murder their humanitarian aid-workers’? For fuck’s sake people, confine your petty squabbling to the appropriate venue.

So Americans root against the Mexican team over immigration (because the better they do, the more Mexicans feel compelled to immigrate???), against France ostensibly over the thrashing they took in our press over their non-support of ‘Operation Iraqi Quagmire’, and against Iran because that’s the nation taking up most of the attention of our national press at the moment. But then Mexico plays Iran and flawed logic hits the fan because instead of thinking ‘which team will improve our chances of advancing?’ we’re stuck with ‘Uh oh, I can either root for illegal immigration or nuclear armament’. But maybe that’s predictable– Americans are notoriously uncompromising when it comes to their ‘ideals’, and having no knowledge of these teams or nations outside of vague political stances, it makes sense that they prefer to transfer the policies of governments nearly as bumbling and untrustworthy as their own onto the athletes of other countries. For many Americans the World Cup is not even about sport—it’s about that same errant string of patriotism that allows us to spend 1.5 billion dollars a week to have a 200,000 man camp-out in the desert (imagine all the marshmallows) while children’s eyes are disintegrating in central Africa from unclean water and countless blessed, holy, white Americans will go without food tonight.

If you’re worried about political issues, go vote. Elect politicians who will actually address your concerns in a constructive and non-reactionary way. But leave it out of international competition. The World Cup is one of the last bastions of sport for the sake of pride and sport, still immune (more or less) to the blatant commercialization that mars every homegrown athletic competition—no commercial breaks, no trading or buying players like cattle, and even a semblance of sportsmanship when an Italian player goes down and the Ukranians, behind by 3 goals, kick the ball out to give Italy a chance to collect their injured man. And best of all, no politics— do you think Portugal gives a shit about British policies when the game ends and they exchange jerseys and hug in the middle of the field like brothers? This is a real chance for international dialogue and unification— until the undiscerning eye of the venture capitalist sweeps across the competition and decides that every nation with a welfare state deserves to lose.

By all means America, get interested, get involved, call it football and root for your team— but if one more mother fucker bags on Zinedine Zidane for being a ‘cigarette-smoking, wine-swilling surrender-monkey’ I’m going to take a machete to their face.

And oh yeah, VIVA ITALIA!!!!

Adam

I

As I look out the window this morning
I see your faces in newly pressed snow,
sheets of ice on the barn door,
patterns of fog on the windshield.
I see shades of your eyes in burned-out stoplights,
urging me forward, forcing me to stop.

II

Let’s get one thing settled: I know it was your fault too.
I just painstakingly take the blame because it’s more compact then;
aerodynamic. I become sleek with guilt, hurtling obsessively onward.
It never mattered if we shared the ending or what came after—
That is for me to cherish and ponder, regret and demolish,
Reconstruct until it makes sense, resembles a reality I can understand.

III

I know that besides death there is no ending,
And even then we can’t be sure. I know that we all need, want, crave—
We’ve all sat on sofas and listened to lesbian mothers
Cry with their children. I know now that nothing is guaranteed,
Not even the prospect of a perfect memory,
so I’m going to write everything I remember about you:

IV

You were stunning, placid, peaceful.
You were thoughtful and well read, tragic to a degree.
As the lowest common denominator, we were intense.
I fed you pasta dishes and desserts, drank beer or wine,
(orange juice in the days before I had this monster sedated.)
I worshipped your body, if only for a night—
became violently angry if only internally.
I missed you whether I wrote a novel about it
or dreamed of burning your house down again and again.

V

I have wanted to kill every single one of you.

VI

To be quite honest, I’m glad you left.
If you hadn’t I would have forced you to leave, or left myself–
any conceivable end so long as the ending was tragic. Tragedy
makes us feel alive, and in that respect I owe my life to you–
But let’s not be melodramatic. At some point we must accept
that we are who we are and whatever it was about me
that you hated so much, I still do it:
I’m still passive aggressive. I still bite my fingernails.
I still eat out constantly. I still have trouble getting out of bed.
I still don’t like to have sex with a condom. I still love writing,
laughing and Grazianos more than I will ever love you.

I still drink.

VII

But I don’t believe in crying foul, maligning, disdaining—not anymore,
because where would you be without me? Who would have shown you
what not to do: made the dopiest of new lovers
Carey Grant by comparison? From me you gleaned freedom and guilt,
a love for boxed wine and mixtapes.
Leaving gave you fear and self-loathing, tiny yellow birds,
new ways to masochise, violent altercations in the car.
Your leaving allowed me candor, passion, fire.
My faceless anger bloomed, enabled by your apathy and disdain.
Your leaving prompted my greatest excavations and I’ll admit
its better this way, just don’t pretend that I welcomed your leaving—
I would have shattered a thousand windshields to make you stay.

VIII

I guess the point is that there is no point.
You are my internal debtors, outward anxieties,
IRS agents, fondest memories, best, worst or non-existent lays.
You are my chewed-on slippers and the dog that refused to fetch them.
You are in every god damn song I have ever heard
and every piece I have ever written, composing syllables
and sonnets within me, fusing together bits of glorious memory,
delete-able as my parents flesh.

IX

One day I will die
and your children will notice that faraway look in your eyes
and you’ll try to explain
but they’ll just roll their eyes and tell a friend
’some guy died’
like it never really mattered.

Adam

For the past four weeks I’ve been obsessed with music. I haven’t slept much. I haven’t eaten much. Surprisingly, I haven’t drank (too) much either. Honestly, I’ve just listened to music. This recent obsession coincided with a deeply troubling existential funk that arose like a wide, black cloud as a reaction to several things: my anxiety over Bloom’s anxiety; Gourevitch’s sobbingly sad account; the 45-second flowering and apparent death of a very meaningful professional opportunity, and the inevitable cranial bruising that results from prolonged contact with a blunt object, brick wall, immovable attitude, or entrenched emotional position. Compounding and eclipsing this is concern over my own perceived diminishing health (both physically and mentally) which I attribute to the sudden acute awareness of living an utterly meaningless life in a savage and inarticulately uncaring modern world so blinded by the light from split atoms and Sex In The City reruns that it refuses to face its own insurmountable insignificance.

Perhaps predictably I have turned to music for solace, and through this funk I have listened to music virtually non-stop, craving the relative sincerity of recorded thoughts of warmth, hope, or at least depression roughly the same size and shape as my own. That these sounds of pure, ecstatic, life-affirming expression are created by machines in a studio and transmitted electronically to my auditory cavities is a wonder of love and faith that has buoyed me immeasurably as I survey the blighted landscape of possibility which seemed so wide a matter of months ago, with snow in my hair and a foreign hand in my own. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about music, contemplating the mixtape and the ‘life we have lost in living… the wisdom we have lost in knowledge.’ It makes me pine for the days when mixtapes were necessarily an art form, when the amount of time and energy necessary to make one actually meant something. Of course, not every mixtape made twenty years ago was a labor of love (we’re not all Rob Gordon, after all) but it’s beyond argument that easily transferable, arrangeable, and burnable digital audio files have taken the quality bar on mixtapes down considerably.

It was into this artistic milieu that I ventured, attempting to do something conceptual with the mixtape that I’d never done before. To showcase the sheer dexterity and endless possibilities of personal mixes, I decided to create two autonomous tapes for two young women for whom I feel very differently: One to a girl that might describe me as nothing more than a ‘deeply cared for failure’ after a brilliant crash from the heights of possibility to the inimitable struggle to remember each others birthday every year, and the other to a girl I’ve never actually met before (an odd undertaking in and of itself). The catch was that I wanted to use the same artists for both tapes to show how any style or band can be used to different affects when placed carefully in the context of a mix. But a problem arose: at what point did the quality of the mix supplant the aforementioned rules of conduct? If I found a song that was perfect for one tape and could find no suitable corollary for the other, would I sacrifice a great song for a less perfect one in order to maintain the rigidity of the rules? Would it be permissible to put the same song on both tapes? If one is attempting to show how the same artists can create different moods with different songs, how could you ignore a song universal enough to fit multiple moods? In the end I decided the mixes themselves were the proper end, and any red tape existed solely for my own creative and experimental purposes, so I settled on a compromise of two flex artists per mix with the understanding that the same song was acceptable as long as it didn’t become a front for my own infernal laziness.

It took me two weeks and more hours than I’ll ever admit, but hastened by a personal deadline of a Wednesday birthday lunch meeting (which I was promptly stood up for—stood up be an ex???), they were completed. So without further ado, I share them with you:

#1 ‘My Little Heart Attack’ For Elizabeth on her 21st birthday

01. Islands – Jogging Gorgeous Summer
02. Mountain Goats – Dance Music
03. Decemberists – Engine Driver
04. Okkervil River – Song Of Our So-Called Friend
05. Joni Mitchell – See You Sometime
06. The Streets – Dry Your Eyes
07. Jack The Original – It’s Okay
08. Elected – It Was Love
09. Elliott Smith – Someone I Used To Know
10. Deseparecidos – Man And Wife, The Latter (Damaged Goods)
11. Hidden In Plain View – Garden Statement
12. Jack’s Mannequin - Rescued
13. Rocky Votolato – Suicide Medicine
14. Rainer Maria – Terrified
15. Carissa’s Weird - Yours Truly, Ugly Valentine
16. Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous

#2 ‘Sing Me Something: The Kahlua-Fudge Brownie Mixtape’ For Kaitlin

01. Jack The Original – Sing Me Something
02. Elected – Would You Leave With Me
03. Mountain Goats – Dance Music
04. The Streets – Could Well Be In
05. Deseparecidos – Man And Wife, The Former (Financial Planning)
06. Joni Mitchell – People’s Parties
07. Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy
08. Rocky Votolato – Portland Is Leaving
09. Jack’s Mannequin – Miss Delaney
10. Elliott Smith – No Name #1
11. Teitur – You’re The Ocean
12. Jason Robert Brown – I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You
13. Rilo Kiley – The Absence Of God
14. Hidden In Plain View – Halcyon Daze
15. Decemberists – Of Angels and Angles
16. Rainer Maria – Clear & True

Was it a success? I don’t know for sure yet. Undoubtedly I completed the tapes in roughly the way I wanted, but I think the bigger question is: where does one go from here? Do I try this again with two more people and switch it up again to test myself and the limits of expression even more? More people? The mixtape EP project? I don’t know, and this is what I love about music, and when you get right down to it, about life. The possibilities are infinite, and while that can be a crippling proposition to the psychologically fragile, it truly is the spark that makes this life worth living.

Put away the coffee spoons, Eliot, I’m feeling better today.

Adam

Not futbol. And not even good old fashioned blue-blooded American Football where the lust for violence and competition outweighs commercial interest and helmets can be folded up and shoved into back pockets during time-outs. I’m talking about Football. Yes, that football—the kind we’ve come to know and love, where padding is now officially thicker than biceps, where commercial breaks are longer than possessions, where quarterbacks can’t be touched because it’s not profitable for franchises to spend fifty million dollars on a star so he can be Joe Theisman’d into oblivion or Stan Humphrie’d into early retirement.

I had the good fortune to watch this year’s Superbowl from The Netherlands (Go SBS6 Go!!!) and I was absolutely floored by one aspect of the broadcast. I guess I’m just American enough to associate major sporting events with corporate sponsorship, but I expected at least the international companies to get their spots broadcast overseas. But it wasn’t just that they didn’t show the newest million dollar Budweiser, Pepsi, and ING ads, but there was an absolute lack of commercial breaks.

Maybe that was hard to wrap your goal-oriented, corporatized, privatized, economized, ‘truth, justice and the American way’ tainted brains around so I will repeat– an absolute lack of commercial breaks. Instead, changes of possession and time outs were marked by interesting camera angles on the field, interviews with players, even introspectives on the Amsterdam Admirals and other European football teams. Maybe you’d call it stupid or naïve to ignore the obvious opportunity to offer thirty second spots for obscene amounts of money to sell more Crest White Strips and mutual fund opportunities that the Dutch neither want nor need, but I for one applauded the decision. For once, one network, in one nation, decided to focus on what was important—the game (remember the game? The shots of large men shifting around in-between Doritos spots? Yeah, that game.)

If nothing else it was refreshing to see a society with its head not quite so far up the dress of opportunity, its mirror-paneled shoes struggling to catch a glimpse of that sweet slit of profit. Granted, the Dutch don’t ordinarily give a shit about American sporting events, but enough so in this case that it was broadcast live on a major network. (FOX and NBC don’t cover Six Nations Rugby or Hurling, do they?)

Maybe it’s for the best though that no money changed hands in exchange for Gatorade ads because from what I understand it was a rather unexciting Super Bowl. I wouldn’t exactly know— the sign on the wall said “TV must be turned off at 1:00” and indeed it was, by a switch locked in a box somewhere behind a counter that no one had access to. I did see the first field goal, but in true showboating fashion the first 40 minutes of Super Bowl XL was consumed with spectacle and bullshit and Aaron Neville singing bad renditions of songs that stopped mattering years ago. Juxtaposed with no commercial breaks, it was just enough to seem really out of place and gaudy.

“What IS this shit?” One Danish girl asked me in perfect English.

“That’s the sweet stench of American excess, coming soon to a town near you.” I replied. She just sneered at me, snagging her box of Pall Mall’s and exiting the room. I guess sarcasm is the one true universal language.

Promoting love and tolerance (and corporate sponsorship) wherever and however I can (BUY A LEXUS, BITCHES!!!),

Adam

There is naïveté in everything we do in this life. As simple beings there are endless obstacles that block our path to enlightenment—trust or mistrust, good or bad memories, false hope, apathy, faith, fear. We prepare for nothing new, content to deconstruct and rehash the old under sad auspices of curiosity and perfectionism. These are the drives that make us crazy— that keep us on long, lonely drives in the middle of the night while rain assaults the windshield. One day I woke up and realized I had become attuned to psychiatrists who refuse to stop their own bad habits– empathetic, but only as empathetic as you would imagine a person to be when they don’t give a shit. I dug for so long that my hands hurt, constantly being dragged down by spite, malice, and sloth. Growing wings was a saving grace. The hole is shallower today, but a hole nonetheless.

So why was I fool enough to I think it was a good idea to start anew with something old? Why is everyone getting married or burying their hurt, pretending need away because change is harder than sleeping pills, sex, or ice cream? How did “can’t wait to see you” become “can’t see you” and “miss you” become “sorry I missed you”? Why am I going to lunch with long-distance lovers I’ll never have at arms length and coffee shops with women whose break-up etiquette is more atrocious than the Enola Gay’s? Why do I hide all day, ducking an intensity that pelts with me rocks whether I ignore or confront it? We misplace our anger and throw malfeasance at certain accents, certain archetypes, certain symbols of our own decay. We fear loss and danger and confusion. We speak of a need for clarity and truth without a desire for honesty. Truth is nothing but an affirmation of what we already know, and meanwhile days are collapsing into desktops and pillowcases. Meanwhile our chances are dissolving in the rain and we resign ourselves to wealthy architects, meaningless sex or bitter silence because love is the new four letter word— the emotional slur that keeps us disconnected and sitting on the feet of women we could have married if we weren’t raised to believe that everything in this world is for sale—even foresight.

We shouldn’t feel this way in the presence of so-called loved ones, constantly denigrated and exasperated, resentful to the point where our forks shake and our daughters hide in the church cellar because even animals know that doorways are safer than windowsills when the hurricane comes. This is the reality we flee for a few weeks at a time to tiny, faraway towns where our days are absorbed in contemplation and disbelief that it’s so much simpler to be on the road, not writing make up poems for missed birthdays, not straining silences where words existed 8,000 miles before. In a sign of our perpetual naïveté we actually believed that everything would be better when we returned, too sedated to see that ‘better’ comes from inside, if it comes at all, and until the entire city disperses for a season or two, the maelstrom will remain. You get better at ducking, but you never escape.

I love you all but you’re fucking insane, and you make me insane too.

Adam

Traveling alone in places where you can’t speak the language (even horribly Anglicized cities) very quickly teaches some invaluable lessons. First and foremost is that NOTHING ever works out the way you plan it. A trip to the museum, a quick walk to the park, meeting back at the hostel at 2pm, making curfew, catching trains, finding dinner– the most mundane activities have a tendency to become ridiculous endeavors because of a thousand variables, the least of which are differences in language, culture, geography, weather patterns, time zones, and public transportation.

The second thing you learn is that all these endlessly annoying problems that arise are OKAY. Within a couple weeks you accept the fact that nothing is ever as simple as it would appear, but those complications are what make for good stories and interesting situations. Everytime it seems that things couldn’t be better something fucked up is bound to happen, but conversely– from every fucked up situation something tolerable emerges– often something more vibrant and delightful than anything you could have planned. You learn to shrug it off and move on, almost hoping that the next adventure doesn’t work out either.

It was something I could only express with my eyes and posture– this inimitable yearning, the indecipherable need to walk foreign avenues alone. The white panel van in front of me featured a waving American flag and the words ‘Love It Or Leave’ emblazoned on the side, and for as cavalier and ridiculous as that sentiment remains, there is an element of truth there. (my car only featured a crude linedrawing of Bush playing the fiddle and the phrase ‘Rome Is Burning– What Are You Going To Do About It?’)

Over the past few months I’ve seen the faces under fluorsecent lights– harsh and unflattering. I’ve lost my patience, my temper, my resolve. I’ve become restless in this situtation, cynical about my nation, resentful of family and friends, bitter about my relationships– the feeling of falling further out of touch with everything I knew I was. I became short with my friends, mute with my parents, ignorant of my siblings, resentful of the women I loved and spiteful towards those who loved me.

I haven’t slept at all this November.

I finish almost nothing that I start.

Just being in that country with those people; with the pianos and computers, video games and parties, the exhausting routine of regularity, and the volume of my own thoughts kept my hands hanging slack at my sides, powerless. I couldn’t breathe. Physically, morally, emotionally, artistically and spiritually I was dying, and only my eyes and posture betrayed that fact.

I have brought ghosts with me that I will leave all over this god damn continent.

The difference was not anyone but me. I have become too complacent and comfortable in my idiotic routines. This has been a process a long time coming and true to form, I was ready to leave long before I did. Having simply completed the task of coming here, I feel better already.

I believe we don’t do nearly enough things that frighten us.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you were truly terrified?

I know the answer to that question, and the last thing to terrify me was the prospect of being alone. But once again marvelous distraction and apathy swept much of that fear away in time, robbing me of the lesson.

I’m learning it again here– learning that it truly is what you make of it.
I’m talking with strangers.
I’m drinking coffee.
I’m dealing with the cold and making up for lost time.

I’m terrified and I love it.

Adam