we never tried so it never began i
needed you to say whether or not i should have been
working harder or if you wanted me or if you did not
listen to something louder
and find tongue and hinges and peel the skin back
your muscles our muscles like toys beneath the surface
red one pumps black mass sold
everything you own but signed your name into it all
towering As and a disconnected g that doesn’t raise any questions
we all grew up loving dinosaurs
so why are we so surprised when other monsters that roamed
these streets are gone now too still with only the courtesy of fossils
to prove that they existed
to prove that there was anything before
sharp resonating notes to guide me through an idiot’s pain

a dozen or so wrinkled papers are yellowing on walls and commemorate moments long gone
to do today: find new memories, or craft them with your hands, like clay
figure shit out, maybe not once and for all, but to an extent, maybe just for today and tomorrow, and then begin to approach it with a wider concept of action
consider doing this another way and consider letting good things come and consider what you haven’t yet and consider more effective ways to combat anxiety and consider impending losses with no gains in sight and consider being present –
that felt nice didn’t it –
consider drinks
consider dinners
consider talking about the books you really do want to read
consider design and regeneration and consider ripping off your friends and heroes and hope they get a kick out of it, because otherwise you’ve been doing this all wrong
it all gets better and it all gets worse you just hope she doesn’t mind and you can’t believe that maybe she doesn’t
that is impressive
i once scribbled in the margins ‘we create place over time’ and if i was right like i hope i am what i have to do next might not be so hard

I’ve never much cared for family gatherings, in part because we have such a pitifully small family, but also because they’re usually boring as all hell. On top of that, dad’s Aunt Greta is a bad gift-giver and a worse cook, his Uncle Henry is annoying and can never refrain from telling me his weirdo Vietnam stories, and their house is always freezing. Family’s family, mom tells me every year, often with a slight hint of comic exasperation. I know, mom.

The trip was dull like all the others have been and the New Jersey and Maryland scenery was monotonous, but keeping up the “holiday cheer” act is worth it if it’ll keep everybody off my back. Mom’s easily sated by the semblance of contentedness; if everybody’s smiling then she can smile, too, and she likes that. There was a lot of smiling in that car. I kept my head down, drew for a bit, kept my music low so that I could hear if mom or dad wanted to talk to or about me, and so that I wouldn’t have to answer any questions regarding what it is about Slayer that appeals to me.

I was distressed to see Aunt Greta waiting outside on the porch, unsmiling, as we pulled into the driveway of her suburban ranch-style house. She approached the car and started talking as soon as we opened the doors. “It’s over!” she insisted. She was on the edge of hysterics and she spoke rapidly and loudly. “Henry’s cheating on me I just know it I can’t stay here NOT ANYMORE and if that son of a bitch wants some dumb little blond WHORE then he can just take her!”

Dad gestured for mom to help Aunt Greta, and said, “Sit down Greta, I’ll go talk to him.” I thought I saw him roll his eyes as he opened the front door and I wanted to grab him by the jacket and ask him, If you don’t care about dealing with this then what do you care about anymore? If this woman helped you through a rough childhood, then why wouldn’t you want to return the favor? Why are you being an asshole? He wouldn’t have any good answers, though, and if, somehow, he did, he probably wouldn’t share them because he’s never quite what you need him to be. He’s a fine enough father, sure, but he sucks at being a dad; just like he’s a capable spouse but a poor husband; just like he’s little more than an instructor, rather than a real and memorable teacher. I wanted to grab him by his fucking face and try to explain that he is inferior and that his life hasn’t quite worked out the way he wanted it to because he’s never taken the steps necessary to get it there. He stops where he’s comfortable and lets everything come to him and then acts surprised and depressed when it all falls apart.

Not ten minutes after dad walked into the house, Uncle Henry walked out, holding a suitcase in one hand and his dusty old hat in the other. He looked a little like a cliché Depression-era bum: scraggly grey-and-brown beard and tired brown eyes, jacket with patches on the elbows over a wrinkled and stain-ridden collared shirt, khaki slacks too loose on his waist still resting too far above his loafered feet. He looked as if he might head off down the street and try to find a freight train to hop, but instead he just got into his rusty blue Buick Skylark and left without saying a word. Dad stepped back on to the porch as Uncle Henry rode away.

Tension was high, but mom was the first to pipe up. “What did he say, Harrison?”

Dad had his right hand sunk deep in his pocket, and rested an old cigar box between his left hand and hip. He was looking up, watching a plane soar northward. I’d be willing to bet that he was thinking about where it took off from. “He came clean, admitted that he did sleep with another woman.” Aunt Greta lost it, completely broke down. “But…he said he didn’t mean to. ‘It was an accident,’ was how he put it.” He brought his eyes back down to the ground and sat in the seat next to his aunt. “He told me to give this to you.” He handed her the red and gold box and she set it in her lap and immediately opened the lid with her trembling fingers. For five seconds, she stared at its contents, and then she pushed it off and buried her head in her hands. I walked across the porch to where the box landed and picked it up. The lid had torn a bit at the hinge and inside was nothing more than an old Polaroid photograph of Aunt Greta standing in front of this house and waving at the photographer. In the strip underneath, somebody, presumably Uncle Henry, had written in now-faded black ink, It’s all yours.

Mom and dad helped Aunt Greta into the house so I stayed outside, staring at the picture. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. The paper was a little yellowed and the colors had paled. Aunt Greta looked young and her hair was brownish and she was grinning, showing all of her straight teeth. The front of the house, now a calming blue, was apparently a strange red-orange then. Dad walked out and stood next to me. “When did the house look like this?” I asked.

He took the box from my hands, lifted out the picture and said, “1981.” He closed the box and silently looked back up to the sky. Quietly, he told me, “That’s the year Uncle James died.”

“Who?”

“He was my mother’s and your great aunt’s brother. Died in a motorcycle accident that summer.” I was looking at him. He was still looking up. “This is from that spring. Easter weekend. The last time we were all together.” He placed the box back in my hands and walked inside and a cold wind blew into my face and I realized I was crying and I wanted to leave it all so badly and maybe meet my Great Uncle James.

don’t know why i hadn’t done it before, but this page now has all of my 35mm photographs.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/this_party_is_on_fire/

this features mostly the same photographs, but presented individually. maybe sometimes i’ll write something on there, too. maybe not, though.
http://philrudich.tumblr.com

What’s this song about, anyway?
I don’t know. It’s hard to say for sure. Probably fucking. Most songs are about fucking. This one probably isn’t any different.

I’ve got high hopes!
he said
Well cut that shit out, or you’re gonna be late for work.
she said

It was not a night for sleep. Of this much he was certain. Why else would he still be awake as the clock struck four in the morning, arguably the first hour after midnight that actually feels something like morning, even though it’s maybe the darkest, most lonely hour of the day. He tried, sure. He tossed and turned, like he supposed one is supposed to do when one’s body will not let the sleep come. Why do people do that anyway? he asked himself. Maybe to make themselves tired, I guess, he answered. Well, it doesn’t work for me, he concluded. The man was quite comfortable in just about any position he could think to lie in: on his left side, facing the blank wall beneath a few posters and tacked-up articles of ephemera that reminded him of home; on his back, staring through blackness at the white ceiling – Have I ever seen a ceiling that wasn’t white? he pondered quietly while on his back; on his right side, facing the rest of his sparsely decorated room, which he could not see, as he had turned off all the lights a few hours earlier, having assumed that he would be sleeping and not wanting to look at his possessions, which were currently arranged in a somewhat disorganized fashion throughout his bedroom; on his stomach, his face down, smothered in his pillow, which never fit quite as snugly into its blue cotton pillowcase as he would have liked; with his head at the foot of the bed and his feet at the head, hoping the change in orientation might shake him up enough to knock him right out, which he preferred to simply gaining a better view of his closet – or rather, where he knew his closet would still be if he were to sit up and turn on the light. Nothing came of any of it, though. Unsatisfied, he switched directions again, placing his head back at its titular bed position. He threw his comforter off, taking just the blue cotton bedsheet right up to his collarbone, holding it tight and holding his eyes shut even tighter. That never really works, he knew, but with his eyes closed he saw some interesting colors and patterns that made him think of a few different things, including how pleasing it would be to plug in his guitar and turn it up really loud and not have to worry about who would care, a delicious meal he had recently enjoyed with his parents, a video game he and his brother had loved when they were younger and still, in fact, held close to their hearts, despite never having the time to play it, and conversations that never happened with women he only vaguely and superficially knew, who he may never get to know any better, let alone see naked in an unprecedented instance of trust and blinding honesty. These basic things – his guitar, food, video games, youth, not having enough time, women, sex – dominated his thoughts at any given moment during his more productive, waking hours, but they seemed to echo even louder in his mind at this absurd hour. He opened his eyes, and was on his left side, was facing the wall again. He put his right hand against the wall, and it was smooth and white and chilled but not quite as cold as he had expected it to be, for some reason. Two thin bright threads of light traveled across the wall from in between the slats of the blinds that covered the window at the foot of his bed. They moved downward at a slight angle – probably about 19⁰, he estimated – and dissected his hand across the fingers, the lower beam just above his knuckles and the higher one across the fingertips. He imagined that the rays were actually red hot lasers shooting across the wall instead, imagined that the fingers of his right hand were bloodlessly separated from his body, imagined that he would be quite startled by this, and would try to pick up all the pieces of finger and put them on ice and go right to the hospital, like he’s seen on television. The imaginary laser game was one that he often played in his mind. It amused him. He wasn’t so sure why. He wanted to take a picture of his hand against the wall, the light so perfectly passing over it, but his camera was across the room, and it was far too dark for that, anyhow. Slowly, he pulled his hand from the wall, turned over on to his back, and then turned his body so that his legs hung off the bed. Sitting up and staring intently, he could faintly see the outline of his guitar leaning against the wall, next to the black milk crates that held his records. He coughed and sighed as he put his head in his lap. Using the muscles in his back, he pulled himself upright. He considered standing, but instead threw his legs back up on to the bed. He rested once more on his back, staring forward out the window, and a song drifted lightly through his mind that he would not remember when sunlight pouring in through the breaks in the shades woke him only a few hours later.

Lonely, ugly men sometimes need things specifically for themselves, and when they do, those things are often acquired with an acute awareness of their own loneliness and ugliness. Sidney Tobin was such a man. A lonely, ugly man neck-deep in despair and forever caught up in his own shortcomings, of which he had so many. He was not a fat man, necessarily, but was beleaguered by many of the features of a fat man: short, stubby fingers and arms devoid of any visible muscle tone; flabby pectoral muscles resting above a slightly protruding but very round belly; weak and stumpy-looking legs attached to small and chubby feet. His shoulders might be somewhat broad if he was not constantly hunched over, his neck crooked at a peculiar angle so that he could stare at his brown prescription shoes rather than make eye contact with anybody he might encounter on the street.

His face, which was, in his mind, his best feature, was perhaps the most unspectacular of all. It didn’t seem to fit on his stout five-foot-five-inch tall body. Compared to the rest of him, it was just a little too long and a little too wide. His ears were small and dainty, his teeth, situated in a small mouth with tight, thin lips, were mostly straight and yellowed, his nose was large but with no other defining characteristics, save for the vaguely stylish wire-frame glasses that sat on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were about the average size that one expects eyes to be, but they were beady and dark, startling on their own, maybe, but not so menacing when observed along with the rest of him. That fact may very well hold true for every part of Sydney’s ugly body. His hair was thinning and oily, and no woman loved him.

It was a summer afternoon late in July, and Sydney was reading the classifieds section of The Canton Cannon, his preferred local newspaper. He did this often, vainly hoping for a “SWF PREFERS SWM WITH LOVE HANDLES,” or a simple “SWF FOR SWM LOOKING FOR GOOD TIME,” or even a “SWF BORED WILL TAKE ANYTHING.” Nothing greater than that would be necessary to satisfy his weak imagination. That afternoon, however, something even more interesting caught his eye: “UGLY TIMESHARES: Six NEW no-good CONDOS in FLORIDA / CHEAP / CALL NOW to lease / LEAVE TOMORROW!!!” Stunned by the ad’s simple phrasing and blunt honesty, Sydney did just that, calling immediately, and signing the papers via fax.

He packed his tattered, old clothes into a battered leather suitcase that his father, a much more handsome man, had left him after his death, and took the first flight to Tampa the next morning. The timeshare was not in Tampa proper, so he rented a car, and drove south for about forty-five minutes to Concertina, an unattractive and sparsely populated town situated comfortably on some land near a swamp.

The condominium that Sydney would reside in for a week was indeed an ugly one. Painted orange stucco on the outside, cracked and worn pastel-colored paints covering the walls on the inside, outdated and generally broken fixtures and appliances in many of the rooms, and beat-up, stained flower-print furniture in the bedroom and living room. He walked through the house to the patio, which was decorated with nothing but a rusted railing and a filthy plastic deck chair. It overlooked an ugly wooded nothingness. Sydney felt at peace.

He spent his week doing nothing particularly special or out of the ordinary. He read the local papers. He went for short walks. He watched television when it came through on an ancient black-and-white box with an antenna. Sydney did all of the things he would usually do, but here he felt special doing them. He considered, briefly, exploring Florida in his rental car, but chose instead to just buy cheap meals at a diner nearby. One night, he thought the cute waitress, who was without a doubt trapped in the area and desperate to escape and just working non-stop to make enough money to run away to The Big City, was making eyes at him, but just as he smiled back, her eyes drifted off behind him, to a much larger and well-proportioned man who, Sydney assumed, was her boyfriend. Sydney sipped his coffee, weakened with too much sugar and milk, and tried not to stare as they kissed passionately.

When his week was up, Sydney packed and cleaned up with no complaint and made it to the airport with time to spare. Back in Ohio, his apartment looked the same, just as he’d expected it to. Bills and junk mail were piled up in his mailbox. He made a note to call the man from the ad in the morning, so as to ensure that he could return next year. When Sydney called, the timeshare man said to him, “You signed the contract, didn’t you?”

“Mary, I feel terrible.” Mary was reading a fashion magazine. She did not hear me. She usually didn’t, but that hardly stopped me from moving in with her. Her utter ignorance of my existence didn’t stop me from getting down on one knee and proposing to her in a very expensive and popular Asian-fusion bistro. “Pass the soy sauce, please,” she said. “Did you drop something?” she asked when she realized I was kneeling on the floor and no longer sitting directly across from her. “Oh. Alright,” she replied. Mary is a bad person and I am a weak one. Together, we are perfect for one another because no other woman can stand my oversensitive mawkish bullshit and no other man will tolerate her disregard for life, human or otherwise, and her generally relentless self-centeredness. She really is awful. She is beautiful, but in a wholly artificial and unfascinating way. The kind of woman who you see on the street and turn your head to look at, but would never bother to talk to because in your heart you know you could do or already have done better. She often wears black. Her skin is a soft and luminous white. Her eyes are brown but usually appear black. She usually wears sunglasses anyway.

“Mary.” Repetition is sometimes effective. Not always. “Mary.” I am desperate for attention.
“Mary.”
“Mary.”

“Mary.”

“Mary.”

“…Yes, dear.” Her reply is a statement, as if I had asked a question of her. As if there would ever be anything that I could trust her for help with. She is essentially useless. She has no job, nor any need for one. An undisclosed out-of-court settlement brought her formerly unspectacular middle-class family into an absurd level of wealth. She was eleven when all of that money changed hands, from the estate of a disgraced American pop star to the bank accounts of a mother turned into a disfigured vegetable by the force of crashing through the windshield and slamming down face first on the asphalt; a father made paraplegic after the frame of the driver-side door sliced into his spine; and Mary’s misguided but well-intentioned aunt and uncle, her father’s brother and his wife, who were both saying how thrilled they were with the quality of their steaks when their tibias and ulnas and radiuses snapped and steel and glass cut into their flesh. Aunt Marie and Uncle James felt that since Mary’s parents were no longer able to truly care for her, they were obligated to step in and take care of their only niece. Unfortunately, their parenting skills were rather dull, and they fully believed that many, if not all, of Mary’s problems could be solved with money. That was nearly twenty years ago. All four of those people have been dead for some time, though I’m quite sure that their deaths had no impact on her well-being. Her financials, however, saw an incredible boost.

Mary told me drunkenly, in a moment of intense, unprecedented, and never-to-be-repeated candor towards the end of the party where we first met that she gave her first blowjob shortly after her thirteenth birthday to a man nearly twice her age, and that she regretted this, along with the majority of her teen-aged drug use and some of the sexual exploits. I then drunkenly confessed to her that I did not receive my first blowjob until I was twenty-one, and that I was pretty sure she regretted it because she would never take another one of my calls. Mary and I spent the rest of the night together. We went to her deceivingly modest apartment afterwards. I didn’t know then that she kept multiple apartments around New York City. Fully furnished. At that time, I lived in a three-room apartment in the Lower East Side with five other men. I owned almost nothing and had just been fired from my job at the local branch of the library for replying to a book request from a mother and her toddler son with a succinct “Fuck off.” It was the first time in at least a decade that something in my brain switched and made me want to hit someone for no good reason. I was frightened by this.

My life thus far had sucked. I figured some time with this horribly depressed but vaguely pretty woman would feel good. Life with Mary has never felt good, but at least it moves forward.

“Yes, dear,” she tells me.

“I feel terrible. Really, very ill.”

“I just cleaned the kitchen.”

I doubted this. She hadn’t moved much today. “It looks very nice. I think I’m very sick.”

“You’re probably alright.”

“Should I go to the hospital?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Oh.”

“Have you checked the medicine cabinet. There might be some stomach stuff in there.”

“Alright, I’ll check now.”

“Can you get my lipstick out of there, too. I think you smudged it earlier.” I have not touched Mary’s lips all day.

“No problem, honey.” I walk towards the bathroom in the back of the large apartment, her Upper West Side abode. I asked her after we got engaged if she wouldn’t mind getting rid of a few of her apartments, figuring that since she’s only letting me live in one of them, maybe she wouldn’t need the rest. She heard me say that the first time.

“Stop it, JUST STOP IT alright?” She rarely raised her voice. Threatening her possessions will elicit such behavior.

“Okay, okay!…Stop what?”

“I just feel so trapped when you talk like that. Like you’re trying to hold me down. And that hurts.”

“I don’t want to hurt you…”

“Oh, honey. You don’t have to.”

“Okay.” We had sex that night. We have sex a lot of nights.

I open the medicine cabinet and survey the medicines. Aspirin. A few bottles of various vitamin supplements. A dozen or so orange pill bottles prescribed to Mary for conditions that I am sure do not afflict her. I peruse the orange bottles, but just take a handful of the aspirin. I close the cabinet and turn the light off before remembering that I needed to bring lipstick back to Mary. I open it again. There is not a single lipstick in there, but rather twenty or thirty. Several neatly placed rows of them, all different shades of red and purple and black and brown, even a few gaudy blues and greens hidden in the back row. I hover in front of the open door for five minutes, staring at the small black tubes. I want to destroy them all. Every one of them, one at a time. Her lips do not deserve to be bright, smooth, colorful, attractive. She does not deserve those lips. They are the lips of a good person. A wonderful person. A caring, smart, warm person. Mary should have small lips, disgusting dry bird lips not worth the effort it would take to steal a great kiss from them. I remove the cap from a tube of Blazing Burgundy and smear the product over my lips. When my lips are colored in, I run it over my face. I color the palms and back of my hands and laugh as I imitate Jesus Christ, hung up on a cross. I scribble an unreadable message on the bathroom mirror before walking out of the bathroom, past Mary, and into our bedroom, our cold and beige meaningless mess of a bedroom, where I carefully pull off my clothes and try on some of hers.

That night was the first that I ever wore women’s clothing.

In the morning I’m passed out on the bedroom floor, half under the bed that Mary and I share. My bare legs stick out. A shiny black dress with a frilly, lacy bottom covers me from the collarbone to midway down my thigh. I push myself out from under the dark wooden bed frame. I survey the scene from the floor. Lipstick smears all over the carpet hidden by the bed, but the rest of the floor seems pretty clean, save for a few scattered articles of clothing. I sit up on my knees and peek over the top of the bed. Mary is lying under a sheet, the comforter kicked to the foot of the bed. Her hair is a mess, her makeup rubbed off against the pillow. I pull the sheet down to see what she’s wearing, but she’s nude. I leave her uncovered and make my way into the kitchen to make coffee. I run my hands under warm water in the sink and watch the dark red pigments wash away down the drain. While the coffee brews, I go to the bathroom, curious the night’s exploits. I fully remember them, but still wonder what the aftermath looks like. In the bathroom there is nothing. No evidence of my evening, my exploration, my time as Christ. The mirror is perfectly clear and I’m ashamed that I can see myself with no impediment. I open the medicine cabinet. The lipsticks are still neatly lined up. Blazing Burgundy sits in the far left of the front row. Mocking me. Furious that my masterpiece would be so brazenly erased before the world could see, I march back through the apartment and into the bedroom, where I stand above the bed and don’t speak and stare at Mary’s long back, the curves of her shoulder blades at their perch atop her spine, the subtle rise of her hip accentuated by the position in which she lies, one leg over the other.
I take off my dress and lie down next to her. I kiss the back of Mary’s neck and leave a faint red mark that I do not wipe away. We sleep until noon and the coffee burns.

the time it takes to get from one star to another star…you need to travel at the speed of light. and us humans can’t even fathom the concept of that kind of time…’cause it’s really really really really really really really really fun…to think about taking a speed of light ride.