UNREMITTING FAILURE

If We Had a Son

We'd send him alone into the forest, with a little hatchet, and tell him not to return without a dead rabbit.  He would undoubtedly hate us for this.  Not that it wouldn't be for his own good, his own good.  But he would be too young (we're talking age six here) to understand this.  Nor would it do much good to explain that our own father sent us into the forest at age six with a little hatchet telling us not to return without a dead rabbit, and that his father before him sent him into the forest at age six with a little hatchet telling him not to return without a dead rabbit, and so on. 

Every family has its traditions, our friend Bryon White's dad sent him into the forest without matches telling him not to return without a flaming branch.  The White family had more of a biblical bent than our family, whose traditions lean exclusively towards primitive savagery.   

If we had a daughter we would send her into the forest too, with a little bow and arrow, telling her not to return without the antlers of a mighty stag.  Girls are capable of more at that age, at every age actually, and before we forget we would also have to provide her with a little bone saw, perfect for her little hand, to saw the antlers off the stag's head.  Which she would return with proudly, her dress covered in stag's blood, and a wreath of wildflowers on her barbaric little head. 

Church Bells

When in a certain nervous frame of mind, we can't stand the sound of church bells.  The ancient timbre of them.  Like it's 19865.  They strike a chord of ancient panic in us; it's like they're tolling our doom.  We expect an ancient black carriage, drawn by two black horses, to approach.  It's all very John Donne.

In other moods they make us nostalgic for early childhood, that magical Wordsworthian time before anxiety stuck its fangs in us.  They make us think of St. Paul's Church on West King Street in Littlestown, with its cliche steeple and it's programmed bells that played what we now recognize as the opening of AC/DC's "All Night Long."  We would walk past that church, and imagine the people worshipping in it, and never once did it occur to us to wish we had a can of kerosene and some oily rags.  In short, we were innocent, and the sound of those bells reverberated in some deep place of peace within us.  And we still sometimes feel traces of that even today, when our nerves aren't jangling like they're being played by Django Reinhardt. 

Other times, like today, they just make us anxious.  There's one church on 16th Street that at noon on a Sunday strikes up a sustained chaotic din that seems to be a warning that Confederate troops are entering the city.  We can hear it the whole way from our apartment.  If we lived within a block of that church, we really would burn it down. 

The Shrimp of the Perverse

We like to talk about our dog Rudi, and how his antisocial tendencies make him a little hairy Stalin with a tail.  But the true rogue of our family pack is little Maddie, or as Mrs. UF likes to call her, The Shrimp of the Perverse.  There's the way she likes to lick the insides of our nostrils, for instance.  And the way she insists upon sleeping between Mrs. UF's legs at night, and growls every time Mrs UF tries to switch positions.  But what really gets our goat, as it's her leash we hold during evening walks, is her insistence upon crawling under cars in search of rats.  Except search isn't the right word, because if Maddie crawls beneath a car there IS a rat under it, and we have to pull for all we're worth to get her out from under there before she causes the rat to flee up our pants leg.  Maddie is a 100 percent ratter, whose sole commitment during walks is to flush out hiding rodents.  Since our threshold for rodents is zero, we spend the entire walk watching her like a hawk.  If she wants to root into shrubbery, you can bet there's a rat lurking in it.  Or even worse, two rats.  This should tell you something about the city we live in; namely that's it crammed with rats, both of the traditional four-legged and political two-legged varieties.  She also likes to howl at other dogs, and pursue them barking--that is until they turn around and confront her, at which point she wraps herself securely around our leg, whimpering.  She's a lot like we are: brave until confrontation. 

Not in Our Neighborhood

We like to deride bad public sculpture as much as the next guy, and pity the people who have to walk past it on a daily day.  But since this monstrosity--a metal rocker in an honest-to-God codpiece playing electric guitar--has appeared on 17th Street, we're one of those people.  We try to avert our eyes, but it's no use.  Here we have it, the worst piece of outdoor sculpture in the entire city of Washington DC--perhaps even the world--and where does it appear but within four blocks of our apartment.  So we can't help but somehow feel guilty by association.  But what are we supposed to do?  We can't tear it down without going to jail.  Which is where the sculptor should be, not us. 

Revery

Boring day today, we're playing lots of online solitaire to prepare us for our imminent dotage and coming to a slow burn because the duplicitous game won't let us win.  We forewent our morning nap, taken at our desk, because we're tired of drooling on our shirts and then having to go to the bathroom to wash them off. 

Welcome to the high-stakes world of  government bureaucracy. 

What we really want to do is blog, like we're doing now, but the imp of the perverse who doesn't want us to blog is busy whispering in our ear, "Shut up, you poltroon, you have nothing to blog about." 

Which is true enough, our head's a garden of unruly shrubbery haunted by the ghost of a caretaker who once tended the flowers there.  The flowers are gone too.  The ghost caretaker's name is Letke, and we're not sure of his nationality.  He acts like a Balt, with his green face and restless hands that want to pluck and prune what is no longer there.  We try to have conversations with him, but can't understand a word he says.  He seems unhappy.  And who wouldn't be.  A gardener needs a garden, just as a pilot needs an airplane.  As for the pilot, he occasionally wanders into the garden in his WWI flying outfit as if looking for someone.  Perhaps a fiancee who died many decades ago.  His left hand is terribly burned, as we noticed the one time he took off the black leather glove he covers it with.  Occasionally he buzzes the garden in his aeroplane, and shouts "Huzzah!" over the roar of the engine. The cockpit is open to the wind, and his blue and white scarf trails behind him.  He is a dashing figure with ginger hair, the same exact color as the bobby who stops by occasionally, whistling and twirling his nightstick.  He is, presumably, keeping his eye on the Balt, or maybe he's just bored, who isn't bored in our garden? 

Anyway, it's a boring day today in the garden, even the Balt has the day off.  That is if he is a Balt.  He could be a Croat, or Ukranian, or merely a simpleton whose nonsensical utterances we mistake for a foreign language.  It sounds like a foreign language.  Sometimes he throws himself face down in the garden, and gnaws at the tufts of crabgrass with his teeth until his mouth is full of crabgrass and rich, fetid earth.  We avoid him them.  He is obviously in great pain, that or taking his lunch. 

Underground Man

We knew this would happen.

Fail to blog long enough, and horrible things begin to happen.  Take just now.  We actually picked up the phone to call the boss, to ask him if he had anything for us to do.  This moment marks the nadir of our career as a wage slave.  It has turned a world champion work-shirking bureaucrat into a pathetic eager beaver, actually ready to beg for more work please.  Soon we'll be saying things like, "I like to think of the job as a second home."

Once we were a tender sprog, and life seemed our oyster.  We would grow up to be a poetry-sprouting beatnik, joyously jobless and with a goatee that formed a perfect point.  Oh, the delusions of youth.  Instead of swinging a jug of burgundy at a poetry reading in San Francisco, we found ourselves sober and reliant upon a regular salary to keep us afloat financially.  In short, we failed, as most people do, to avoid the flail of boring normalcy. 

But at least we had our blog.  It was our fuck you to the world of nine to five, and to the whole mediocre creation that is known as the United States of America.  We could rail and rant and still get paid, by the man, for a job  he didn't even know we were doing.  We could let loose the dogs of futility, and spend tens of thousands of words failing to communicate what it feels like to live in our skin.  It was perfect.

But now we're reduced to this.  We all go under in the end, the better angels of our nature cursing the dying of the light, the lesser angels cursing the dawn that left us high and dry here in the first place.  None of it means anything, but we all need something to stake our lives on.  It's a paradox, and it's beautiful so long as that something doesn't get up and walk away.  Then you're truly fucked, and the world is as a place of perpetual darkness, and in your dreams you stand up and scream at your sleeping self to wake up, wake up, you're a frog and the water is slowly getting hotter. 

 

That Human Beings Are Uninterested in the True Nature of Existence

Is demonstrated by television, where you will search in vain for the Fiasco Channel. 

National Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash Day

We're not a praying man, but every year on this day we pray that Ronnie Van Zant is in Heaven, and our old man is kicking his ass at poker.

SEX, THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

Well, we weren't laid off.  That's a relief.  Now we can return to spending our workdays exclusively dwelling on sex.  Today we turn 53, and at that age you'd think we'd have the whole sex conundrum under control.  Far from it.  We're like one of those monkeys at the zoo, compulsively masturbating for the crowd.  In our mind, mind you, in our mind.  Real sex is unfortunately out of the question, as we're sleeping with our wife but not having sex, and the thought of going out and pursuing a real sexual partner is too mind-boggling to contemplate.  "No, we can't go back to my place because the wife is in the bed" is not exactly one of the greatest inducements to romance that we've ever heard.  Besides, we're still in love with our wife, so we'd feel like we're cheating, even though the agreement we've come to includes dating other people.  We're roomies, like.  But we're more than roomies, so far as we're concerned, and as a result our stockpile of Cialis is totally going to waste.  Maybe we'll take one late tonight and walk around the apartment, batting things with our giant erection.  "Yeah, take that," we'll say, and then, quoting Henry Miller with delight, "It's like a piece of lead with wings on it!"  Anyway, we don't know how we got on this subject, we usually leave the intimate stuff on the cutting room floor. But we're caught on the horns of a dilemma, and envy the 1990s us who was free to pursue women until it hurt.  We weren't the savviest of fornicators, especially in the seduction department.  We asked this lesbian friend of our friend William if she'd have sex with us and her response, and this is a quote, was "Not if you were the last man on earth."  Basically, the woman was telling us she'd sooner have sex with Rush Limbaugh, and that hurt.  So we dated this cocktail waitress instead and she left our back all scratched up.  She'd just dig her nails into our back and let rip.  It was like being gouged by a wild boar.  We figured we could buy a kevlar vest or break up with her, and we chose the latter.  Besides, she was a wild drunk.  It was like watching a female version of us, the way she hit the bottle.  

Today is National Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash Day, and we celebrated by going to the dentist.  But it was painless and only cost $155 bucks, which is like a birthday present sort of.  Now we're at work and kneeling on our prayer rug, pointing in the direction of the Lynyrd Skynyrd crash site.  We're ululating, and our cube farm compatriots are looking confused.  Screw 'em.  Ronnie Van Zant was a rotten human being and a great man, and you can feel as free as you want to make fun of Free Bird but Lynyrd Skynyrd was still a great band, as close as to Waylon Jennings as rock ever got.  We would like to drink an entire bottle of Jack Daniels in his memory, but that would kind of be a minor violation of our rule about not drinking anything.  Damn sobriety, it so often stands in the way of doing the right thing. 

We would be remiss if we didn't mention that today is also the birthday of Ben Ricci, Unremitting Failure's official Littlestown branch correspondent.  His corrosive wit leaves us in awe, ditto his photographs of the back streets of Littlestown, which we sped down in our dad's orange and black gas company truck back in the day, looking for trouble. 

Yesterday in the Gym

There was a woman running on the treadmill with her mouth open.  Like wide, jaws stretched, open.  She looked like a sea fish scooping up plankton.  Or like us, as when frequently happens, we hear something that flabbergasts us, and we go all slack-jawed and look like a retarded person.  Anyway, obviously the woman has the right to run on the treadmill any way she wants.  If she wants to imitate a goldfish, that's her business.  It's not for us to mock her.  Especially since we frequently leap up to the pull up bar only to suddenly suffer the delusion that we're hanging 75 feet off the ground.  We hang on as long as we can, and let loose a scream of despair when we finally let go.  Imagine our relief when we abruptly land nine inches later.  We've been asked to stop this behavior, even threatened with expulsion.  This seems unfair to us.  Is it our fault if we have difficulty gauging heights?  And that the gym workers won't call the firemen with the net, even when we beg them to?