Potatoes Steam the Sinfully Blasphemous Bungee Cord

Lurge is one of those Gen-Y kids, all bleach-blonde hair spikes, odd piercings and not-nearly- abstract-enough tattoos. But his looks are the least off-putting thing about him. It's one thing to look scary - especially to someone like me, teetering on the precipise of middle age - it's a whole other thing to actually be sacry - to anyone at any age. And when I say scary I don't mean like the kind of scary you get from some freakazoid on a reality TV show. I mean the kinda scary you take home with you that keeps you from sleeping and peeing and stuff. I mean really fucking scary.

I know it's the height of underachievement to be a 40-something short order cook. Not that this isnt' a good job for a newly arrived immigrant without papers, but I have papers, three of them showing my educational achievements at major universities. And, no, I didn't buy them off the interenet or at a flea market. I paid for them with $60,000 in student loans that at this wage rate I won't pay off until well after retirement age. Of course writing about my situation only makes things worse. At work I can measure my daily achievements by the 22 dozen eggs I cook. But sitting down to chronicle the aggregate meaninglessness of 20 years of grease, sweat and fears is not positive therapy.

Lurge thinks I'm the coolest person he's ever met. He's in awe of my ability to deny the cycle of earn and spend insanity so many of my peers are trapped in. I tell him my condition is purely accidental and not in anyway part of a grand life scheme or trend-bucking philosophy. Somehow my desperation is invisible to him. Somehow he continues to celebrate my, how does he say it, "liberationist determination?" This sounds vaguely like some mid-20th-century heuristic I studied in quest of my PhD, though I can't, at this great temporal distance and intellectual atrophy, put my finger on who might have been responsible for this bit of wisdom, so I give credit to Lurge.

It's nice to have a fan. Everyone wants to be awesome to someone. Perhaps it's my desire to be awesome to someone a little closer to my erstwhile peer group that is disappointing. Eightteen-year-old videogame junkies seem like an easy group to impress unless your in an opposable thumb coordination contest.

<> So as I spend shift after shift clogging the arteries of truck drivers and answering Lurge's nearly unintelligible queries about life at my age, the reality of my life at my age becomes more dismal and depressing. I could become what he believes me to be, an incredibly brave and grounded-in-reality liberation determinist, but boy would that require some serious attitudinal adjuistment. And when you're as mired in masochistic introspection as I am it's nearly impossible to determine which attitudes need adjusting first. Liberation is a luxury I can't figure out how to afford.

Well, after about six months of dour responses to his sincere inquiries, Lurge blows my mind. No, he didn't put LSD in my coffee. Yes, he did give me the key to life fulfillment. Just like that. In the blink of an eye. Without my even being aware of what was happening this scrawny lamebrain presented me with a puzzle that I feel certain will unleash my full human potential once I unlock its mystery.

As we were leaving work last Saturday, Lurge invites me over to his Mom's house to this new game he's playing with a bunch of Scandinavian kids over the internet. I'd never really thought about Lurge having a home of any kind. He seems to just appear out of the dark each morning to immediately begin his inquisition. Nine hours later he's gone just as quickly. So, this particular morning I think 'Why not check out Lurge's place? I can skip Sally Jesse, Rosie and Jerry once."

I drive Lurge to Fontana, a fairly disreputable industrial suburb known mostly for the amazing variety of after-market auto parts manufactured there. The house is small but tidy and identical to the three hundred or so houses we pass in the subdivision. No one else is home. Lurge's bedroom is startlingly tidy, the walls covered in In-Sync, Brittney Spears, and Los Angeles Lakers posters. In the corner next to a large window is the computer. Lurge starts up the machine and logs on to the interenet. While he's busily rousting competitors halfway around the globe he explains the general rules of internet gaming and the subculture it has spawned. Well at least he's not out shooting heroin like I imagined all kids his age doing.

There is a knock at his bedroom door. His Mom enters the room carrying two bowls of steamed potatoes. Normally I don't eat potatoes. At my age, the starch turns immediately to tummy fat, but I didn't want to be rude. Afterall how strange must it seem to her that a strange, middle-aged guy is in her son's bedroom with the door closed.

<>
After his Mom leaves, and at the very moment I take my first bite of steamed potatoes the start-up screen of the game appears on the monitor: "The Sinfully Blasphemous Bungee Cord." That's an odd name for a game.

A Melon Screams Briskly in a Friendly Las Vegas

“Fourteen. Fuck! Do I stand, hit, split, double down?”

<>Back home he would have known what to do. There the scale was easier to read.

Here a global artifice is crammed into four square miles. You’d think that would make the whole thing comprehendible. But you’d be wrong. Bookended by shrines to terrorist culture and centered around celebrations of old-European treachery, this whole place stinks. But the drinks are free. And he needs as many free drinks as he can get.

Unwinding. Whoopin it up. Cuttin loose. As long as he avoids actual decadence everything will be okay.

<>“Sherry’s sweet, you know. She’s great with the kids, a great cook. But sometimes you just have to look the devil in the face.” The dealer deals himself a nine - fifteen showing and flashes an automatonic smile. “Sherry’s one of those…..yeah I’ll have another Jack and Coke. Thanks, Hon. You know what I mean, don’t you?” Four, seven, jack and a two for the dealer.

“Business is a little slow, but the networking’s been good. You remember Steve Pardee from Tuscaloosa? Yeah, the guy who sells the Christian garden tools. His booth is hoppin’ and he’s sending people my way. We’re meeting up tonight for dinner. He’s expanding his catalog. I think I can talk him into a consignment. Okay. I know it’s time for the kids to get to bed. Kiss ‘em for me. I love you, too. Good night.”

<>“Sir, you’ll have to leave now. If you don’t leave now security will have to remove you.”

“Get the hell away from me.”

<>“Okay, buddy. Here we go. You can make this easy or hard. Which will it be?”

“Can I take my drink?”

“No, but you better get your jacket. It’s pouring outside.”

<>Too drunk to be embarrassed. The flashflood baptism rolled over him. “Jesus!!” the melon screams briskly in a friendly Las Vegas.

A Grandiose Trampoline Loiters Touchingly in Death Valley

<>So what? It's raining. Lloyd never let a little rain get to him. As for the 13 strange passengers he was chauffeuring on a tour of Death Valley, well, Lloyd didn't give a rat's ass about this particular crew of sniveling Japanese ne'er-do-wells. In fact, were this 10 years ago the tour would have been over 2 hours ago.

<>Back in ‘89 Lloyd could have paid his drinking buddy, Half-Wit Cherokee Shoeshine, three bucks to drop a couple of his extra-ornery scorpions at the Meteor Crater 45 stop, and one ouch later they'd've had 'em one helluva medivac carnival on their hands.
<>
As the "Death Valley Near Death Experience Tour" contract clearly states, "At such time as a near death experience, the definition of which shall be defined solely by the operator(s) of the Death Valley Near Death Experience Tour coach, is experienced by any member(s) of a Death Valley Near Death Experience Tour, all tour experiences, near-death or otherwise, shall immediately cease, and no refunds, full or partial, shall be offered by, or demanded from, the operators of Death Valley Near Death Experience Tours, their heirs, assigns or creditors."

<>Well, those were the days. Half-Wit's gone all Mormon Missionary and Lloyd's been left too his own devices so long he hardly gets a thrill out of exposing himself to an unsuspecting front seat passenger anymore. Life's gone from surreal to super-real in less time than it takes a desert rat do whatever it is desert rats do. Ah hell, things have become so predictable for Lloyd he's actually thinking of giving up his dream job and hopping the Ringling Brothers'-Barnum & Bailey's Circus train as it makes its annual "Greatest Show on Earth" wobble across the hottest place on the planet.And why not?

It wasn't so long ago that Lloyd's future shown like a heatdistorted jewel on the horizon. He was, after all, Chintzy, California's synchronized, underwater trampoline star. Was it his fault his father lost his job at the uranium reprocessing plant and couldn't afford to buy Lloyd a top-quality nose piece for the state finals?

<>How many times had Lloyd replayed that fateful day as he coaxed the decaying Super Shuttle cast-off through the miles of rocks, rocks and more rocks? Was it really so sad that he might never have the chance to turn the tables on the these mysterious eastern transients by spending two weeks trampling through Roppongi and ambling up Mount Fuji?

No.

Lloyd had created a place for himself. Built from the 'what-mighthave-beens' of his life. Festooned in year-round Christmas lights and plastic Halloween doo-dads. Lloyd's catapult to fame rests. A grandiose trampoline loiters touchingly in Death Valley.

Rainbow Stirs Briskly Noisy Maniac

It was one of those days where I could feel every photon that touched my skin, or passed through my cornea. I thought back to my favorite class in college. Perception. How is it that we are able to perceive the world around us? Converse and commiserate with our fellow man? Savor the pugilistic deliciousness of fetuccine putanesca? How indeed? It was one of those sublime surprises to find this course listed in the voluminous catalog. The professor, Dr. Spectacular, encouraged our outrageous speculation and the only indication that a student had stumbled outside the bounds of reason was a wheezy gutteral utterance he produced.

As I gained full consciousness I was momentarily startled to find myself stretched out under the nearly impenetrable canopy of one of West Hollywood's old Ficus trees. In the intervening 20 years since I had religiously attended Dr. Spectacular's class I had passed through several phases of my life with little more than fleeting notice. I was well prepared to grasp the nuances of lives I observed, but had developed almost no ability to objectively perceive the consequences of my own actions. I suppose this isn't such a rare occurance. But, here I was awakening from a deep slumber, outside, in a park, on a Thursday afternoon, and I was damp.

Now this would require some explanation.

It's one thing to nap in a public park. After all, there were many people in various states of repose all around me. It's an entirely different thing to assume that I am the only one who has no idea how or why I find myself in this place and in this condition, damp. And those pesky photons keep making me itch.

As I gather my belongings: book, newspaper, bottled water, walkman, sweater, picnic basket, bird seed, pajamas, assorted cutlery, frisbee, hoola-hoop, table saw, tennis ball, chess set, blanket, palm pilot, keys, cell phone, spare tire and blood-soaked umbrella it dawns on me that not only have I been mysteriously sleeping outside, but I am naked, and covered in a startlingly crimson rash.

How would Dr. Spectacular perceive this? Were my circles of confusion more confused than usual? Had my rods and cones been suddenly replaced by spheres and polygons? Had my cochlea been purloined? Where are the police?

Thursday is my favorite day the week, filled to overflowing with the promise of the quickly approaching days of rest. Thursday, as I perceive it, is the last opportunity of a work week where any actual work might be accomplished. Friday is for shit. Well that explains something.

A sudden breeze scoots through the ficus' branches and a

luxuriant cascade erupts all around me. Now I hear the gentle cooing of the neighborhood pigeons as they gaily splash in the

puddles formed on the sidewalk. Three toddlers gurgle happily as they toddle by tethered to the tail of a candy-striped cur.

And the itching becomes unbearable. I flash back to one of Dr. Spectacular's particularly enthralling lectures.

And now, I must scream.