Don't Call It A Comeback

Morning blasts the windows lining Belmont Blvd., flashing the panes into a thousand runway lights, a suburban invitation to chaos and opportunity. I have been waiting, Martha; waiting weeks for a goddamn spark of inspiration. I wonder why the Universe keeps beating the hell out of my friends, driving the dinner dogs into mad frenzies over rawhide bones, the Congress getting nowhere in Washington, oblivious to any obvious conclusions.

Squinting back at it all, I slip on a pair of Air Force sunglasses and evacuate my bowels, heartily. The coffee is still warm in the French press and smoke permeates my fragile lung tissue. The back yard sun feels good on my bare chest. You could sweep all of these limbs and dead insects off the deck or just live your life, I reason. Three long moves into my catalogue of online Scrabble matches and suddenly I am 37, standing on my back deck, staring into a mobile device, clad only in sunglasses and a pair of patterned bikini briefs.

“Fuck it.” An hour later I am following Deakin through channels of furniture into the kitchen of his 80 year-old Tudor. His two children and three dogs are all gathered around Spiderman on a laptop, the kids eating sliced fruit, the dogs wagging and panting. “Davey, all I can say is, I’m alive.” A tattoo crawls over his deltoid like black ivy. Posting up behind the counter, he folds his arms and scrunches his shoulders. The turtle. “I’m just alive, you know? That’s all I can guarantee anybody at this very moment.” The smaller child lets fly a strawberry that lands on the floor about two feet from the closest dog. Deakin gives him a look. The kid raises his arms in triumph. “Fuck it!” screams the child.

Virgomama367, you dirty whore. My recent gaming successes have attracted a certain amount of attention in the online Scrabble community, the sort of acclaim that accompanies elevated win/loss ratios and the search engines that feed on them. I have been punching throats up to this point, handily discarding a series of anonymous guest players along with the jfreiberg51’s, the nmolgren’s and wurdkitten069’s of the world. These have been small triumphs, unseen by most, shots never heard round the world.

But virgomama367 is a different breed entirely. She attacks even my most ingenious 3-letter multi-word plays, birthing strange, Welsh-looking words, her disjointed consonants enveloping my vowels like a pair of Gypsy thighs. She refuses to take the bait of a juicy H laid in careful proximity to the Triple Word Score. She, most likely from the comfort of a well-organized cubicle in Nebraska, is currently beating me by 21 points. And then… HWYL. 42 points. What?

“Nice hat.” Tommy, now arranging himself in the chair across the table, is a pillar of my existence, six feet one inch of immaculate grooming. Eyebrowing the mobile device I have just tossed into a condiment caddy, he blows across the surface of his coffee. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Chicks are smarter,” I reply. “Always have been.” I register an approaching pair of milk-heavy breasts swaying in a pink tank top. “They are superior, evolved…” The mammaries come to rest at a table of children with sticky buns. “The givers of life. What have we got?”

“Disappointment,” smiles Tommy.

“Prostate cancer,” I counter.

“Erectile dysfunction.”

“I am officially switching my allegiance from Jelly Belly’s to Good n’ Plenty,” I say. “It’s the mature thing to do. It’s an age thing. We get older, we care more about definition, specificity, noticing the details.” At the table next to ours, a pack of Christian indie rockers in cut-off’s and fedoras join hands, bow heads and begin to pray. I continue, “Jelly Belly’s are clearly the adolescent choice: over a hundred different flavors, millions of potential combinations. These days, I can’t make it through a bag of Jelly Belly’s without feeling completely overwhelmed. It’s like a gang bang in my mouth.”

“Hmmm.”

“Good n’ Plenty, however, is the pursuit of purity. Two colors. One flavor.” The Christians break from their huddle and noisily tuck into their breakfasts. “Things like freshness, environment, even the quantity of consumption… yes, three Good n’ Plenty in your mouth at once is totally different than five, or one... The finer details are not overwhelmed by the total onslaught of artificial flavoring and sugar.”

“Good n’ Plenty: the Dao of Candy,” Tommy offers, his teeth gleaming.

“Jelly Belly’s remind me that the good times are fleeting. That I’m going to die.” Suddenly, I feel better. “Good n’ Plenty… well, the journey is endless.”

I was sitting in a restaurant today across a table from my former manager. At a particular lull in the conversation and menu perusal we both allowed our gazes to drift up to the television hanging over the adjacent bar. Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was giving a press conference of some sort. His halo seemed to have dimmed the slightest bit since the inauguration; his hair appeared to have been given the slightest bit of darkening. But his jaw was set with a new rigidity. He had a suppleness about him. He didn't just look presidential. He looked thoroughly consequential.

Early last year I fled New York and ended up staying with my father and his wife for a few months in Nashville. One of my favorite activities to share with my father during this time was the afternoon viewing of various political punditry available on digital cable. We would surf between the favorites, talk back to the television, argue and agree while consuming questionable quantities of Blue Bell ice cream. The election was swinging into high gear and there was plenty of steamy, fabricated discourse to digest.

Having not watched a lot of news programming in the years leading up to this, I would find myself occasionally hypnotized by the complexity of the swirling banners and embedded messages that constantly introduced the programs and surrounded the main frame of their broadcasts. When I was a child, my mother used to tell me that there were Satanic and otherwise hedonistic messages recorded backwards on the vinyl albums of rock bands. This was 25 years ago. The possibilities for subliminal mind control in this network cable swirl of pageantry made Led Zeppelin seem like the TeleTubbies.

Well, that was a heady time. Now, I have my own apartment again, but I do not own a television. So I was particularly struck today by the solemnity that seemed to surround President Obama's remarks. Even more, I was knocked out by the soundbyte primers that underlined his muted speech: "OBAMA TO SAVE ECONOMY AND ENVIRONMENT" is one that comes to mind.