It is hardest to lose what was never found

When I was a kid I used to cheat at Battleship sometimes. What I'd do is keep track of all the squares my opponent guessed and keep moving my ships around to the remaining empty spaces. You'd be surprised how many misses it would take to eliminate every group of five contiguous squares, to just the extent my brothers and friends were surprised at how many rounds it would take to get that first hit on my aircraft carrier.

I am trying to tell a story whose moral is this: it is much harder to let go of something that doesn't exist than something that does. Things that actually exist have edges and locations. Ghosts cling to every cell and will take up residence in any space they can find. Made up things are even harder to sink than that tiny little destroyer I'd keep moving around until I'd win.

No place, like home

I moved a lot as a kid. Rather than write a confusing paragraph, let me summarize with an unordered list.

• Born in Akron Ohio.
  
• Moved to Madrid, Spain in 3rd grade.
  
• Moved back to the Akron area (Bath, OH: childhood home of Jeffrey Dahmer!) after a year and a half.
  
• Moved to suburban Chicago for half a year or so in fifth grade.
  
• Back to Akron.
  
• Moved to Des Moines, IA in 9th grade.
  
• Moved to suburban Minneapolis, MN (pretty close to Prince's house) in 11th grade.
  
• Off to school in Galesburg IL.
  
• To St. Louis in 1999.
  

Moving a lot as a kid has its developmental perks. You learn how to get attention, you learn how to make friends pretty quick, you maybe learn how much people everywhere are the same and so you rise above most parochial attitudes, you learn that place never matters as much as people, you learn that people talk funny in different places, but that you will also talk funny if you live there even a few months, you learn to cut ties when you need to, you learn to re-invent yourself when you have to, you learn to get by without friends when you got none, which probably means you got pretty good at something like music or writing or drawing.

Sometimes I feel like moving a lot made me have some superpowers as compared to people who didn't: I can interact with people without a lifetime of personal history weighing us down, I can bridge social gaps that are invisible to me as an outsider, I can meet and understand people outside their cultural context, I can see what makes people great cut across place in ways that are hard to understand for those with firmer roots in their home soil.

Moving a lot as a kid also has some downsides. You develop a certain rhythm to your grasp of things-- every so often it feels like time to let go, even if it isn't. You sometimes have a hard time forming attachments. You often feel like an imposter. You start to have too many sports teams you consider "your team." You have a lot of trouble mattering to people the way the people they grew up with matter to them. You just don't seem to have clout. You sometimes envy people's sense of place. You are often cast in a role in which you have disrupted a garden of eden. There isn't a long enough time to live somewhere other than since birth to avoid a sort of mark, a mark which is generally ignored but often becomes important in times of crisis, when you are "put back in your place" of not-here.

Moving a lot has given me confused ideas of rootedness. Any claim I make to be "from" is usually based on fleeting memories and mythology. "From" just isn't a thing that I have the way more rooted people do. I swear to god sometimes this makes me feel like a ghost. As though wherever I might try to grow them, my ghostly roots would pass through the soil anyhow. I cannot move back X spaces and be "back home."

In a year or so I will have lived in St. Louis the longest I've ever lived somewhere. There was a time when I was convinced that living somewhere long enough would turn it into that kind of home I envied in people. Now I don't think that is true. But I don't mind too bad, because I have an idea of home that has worked for me since I was in high school, and it was cross-stitched against a white background, and in a frame, and hanging in the downstairs bathroom at some house or other, and it actually looked better than this one, but this was the only one I could find on the internet:

How I feel is how a butt feels

Man, I feel like twenty-six types and four sub-types of ass.

• I feel like a unique blend of domestic and imported butt.
  
• I feel like a towering stack of asses.
  
• I feel so much like ass that the ass I feel like feels like butt.
  
• Count the grains of sand on the shores of the mighty Pacific– so inumerable and diverse are the categories of ass that would contain my physical description.
  
• Mountains have been moved with less than the amount of ass and butt.
  
• Ass ass butt I feel like ass.
  
• Butt, and also ass, are what I feel like.
  
• I feel like ass.
  
• There are kinds of ass and butt that are good, but they are not the kinds of ass and butt that I feel like.
  
• The stack of asses that describes my feeling is so densely packed that it has become impossible to tell whether each contiguous pair of cheeks belongs to the same or to two different asses.
  
• The butts also do not smell good.
  
• Imagine a world in which there are up to twelve times as many butts as people.
  
• I feel like a butt that got shoved up inside of an asshole which itself is afloat upon a body of water I do not trust.
  
• Strangely my own ass feels fine. It is the only part of me that does not feel like it is ass at all. It is the ass that is no ass.
  
• The shape of my feelings is the shape drawn by a skilled artist rendering a line drawing of a pair of asses.
  
• In my stomach there is a family reunion. It is the family reunion of the Ass family. The Ass family is a large family and they are rude.
  
• It is my understanding that through a complicated system of inumerable pullies and levers, one man could move the heap of asses one inch in one minute.
  
• Take all the pants in all the lands of this great world, and still you will fall short of covering even half the asses I feel like.
  

I guess what I'm trying to say is I love my softball team.

love

I love the people I swam with and got arrested with. I'd say all in all my time in the holding cell was kind of like going to a party that wasn't great, wasn't shitty, but was out of beer and was just kind of OK. Oh also the kind of party where someone had apparently puked in the bathroom before you got there.

I love the police officers who arrested us. They thought it was hilarious. Even the one who was an asshole at least got made fun of by the other ones. One of them tried to convince the pool proprieter to let us off with tickets, as is customary in such situations. When asked if we'd get busted for open containers as well, one of them facetiously said for all he knew, the beer and whiskey containers on the table had been there all day. One of them consoled me on the pitiable male to female ratio of this particular skinny-dipping outing (it was 9 to 2 when the police arrived). I'm sure they also get angry and act like dicks, but also eat ceral and brush their teeth.

I love the bitchy-ass desk workers of the justice center. They probably don't get paid enough. They are a pain in my own and probably most people's asses. That is their job. But I love them. I imagine they go home sometimes and eat food, or read books, or pet their dogs.

I love the proprieter of the pool where I got arrested. He probably felt it was his duty to have us arrested. He probably even felt bad about it. He probably does things like eat, watch TV, feel feelings, hug people, and drive places.

Burt Bacharach told us that what the world needs now is love. That was a while ago, but I imagine it is still true. It's easy to love your friends and your lovers and your family and your favorite people. I don't know that there was ever any lack of that sort of love. It is hard to love the petty bitch at the service counter, or the know-it-all dickhead security guard, or the stupid-as-fuck asshole who is tailgating you, or the self-righteous fuckface bitch on TV. It's way harder, but I'm pretty sure that's the kind of love that people like Burt Bacharach, J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey), and Jesus (Matthew 5:43-48) were talking about.

I love you!

i'm sorry, dogs and cats I love

I lied. I was in a pissy mood and I took it out on you, dogs and cats. I like plenty of both of you kinds of animals. I guess the thing is I hold you to the same standards as a human. If you are a dog or cat and you are a dick, then I will probably think you're a dick and not like you. If you are a dog or cat and you are cool, I will think you're cool and I will like you. I will love you, even. I love a cat named Cooper, for instance, and I love a dog named Bua. I love them. I admit it. I loved a dog named Rufus who died. I cried when Rufus died. I lied. He died. I cried. I'm sorry I lied. I love you.

don't think ill of me...

...but I'm pretty sure I just plain don't really like dogs, or cats. It takes such a big heart to be a man, to be a man who tries to love and to be open to love. My heart isn't big enough to let some annoying-ass non-human creatures get all up in my face in there, especially when they also make me sneeze. No, I ain't gonna kick 'em, but no, I ain't gonna love 'em. Especially when they're dicks, too. Fuck an animal who's a dick.

Don't think ill of me. I love you.

love

I am in love with salami sandwiches-- sopressata, miracle whip, Swiss cheese, and lettuce on Italian sesame-seed crust bread.

I am in love with Maria Sharapova. Seriously, Maria, let's stop this charade. Call me. I love you.

I am in love with Morton Feldman's second string quartet. The whole thing.


Figure 12: Awww, don't cry, Maria. Here, let me fix you a salami sandwich, we can share it while we listen to Morton Feldman together.




Love, Matt

I Hate Al & Dan; I Love the Future

I was watching the Cardinals game today and I just reached a point where I couldn't take it anymore. During an exciting game, Al and Dan (the FSN midwest announcers for the Cards) were just blabbering on about their T-shirts and their cats and shit. I hate them! I hate listening to them! It's all blabbering until something vaguely bad happens, then it's Dan bitching like a fifth-grade jilted boyfriend. Then it's Al saying something vaguely almost goofy and Dan acting like it was the weirdest thing ever, and totally sucking Al's cock over it for the next ten minutes. Fuck those guys. I mean, I'm sure they're nice people and I don't hate them as people, they are just fucking awful announcers. At the beginning of each game I pray to the gods that this thing will happen more where the audio feed gets fucked up and you only hear the sounds of the game without any announcers. Gods, please make this happen more than once in a blue moon. It is the most glorious. It is the most high. It is the most exalted. Baal, Crom, Jesus, Mormon, come to my aid. Make this happen.

The future has allowed me, through mlbtv, to understand how truly bad our announcers are. I have watched games from all over the league, and I'd say ours and the Diamondbacks' TV announcers are the very bottom of the barrel.

(Who's the best, you ask? Vin Scully. Joe Morgan and Jon Miller. Joe Buck even, and Tim McCarver. The dudes who do the WGN cubs games, I don't know their names.)

But the future, bless its little heart, has also allowed me to do this: I hooked up a little radio's headphone output into my computer, into Logic (an audio recording program), through about 10 seconds' worth of delay (the most I could get from a delay plug-in), then bussed through about half that delay over again to match FSN's unreasonably long broadcast delay, then through the living room stereo. This way I could mute out the TV and listen to our radio announcers, Mike Shannon (awesome) and John Rooney (fucking sucks hard, but at least better than Al & Dan), whose broadcast is in real time. Thank the gods for the future. Thank the gods for the one good announcer in this city. Thank the gods for computers. Also thank the gods for love, and for cute animals like platypusses and guinea pigs, and also thank the gods for the enduring miracle of the overtone series. That shit blows my mind. I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff. The world is full of things to be thankful for. Thank you.

Shitty Food For Shitty People Makes Good

Episode 12: My bros are in town

[start theme music]
[montage of the city skylines of San Francisco and Denver]
[stock footage of airplanes flying/landing]
[montage of St. Louis city scenes]
[clip of the Patterson-Gimlin sasquatch footage]
[extreme close-up on action figures being shot by BBs]
[end theme music]

---

1. Get your bros to come to town.
2. Go grocery shopping with them.
3. Try not to get in the way while they prepare:

-Salsiccia gnocchi & Italian bread
-Sausage gravy & biscuits
-Scrambled eggs & toast
-Various and sundry fine Belgian ales
-Premium bourbon

---

I think all my friends love my brothers more than they love me. Possibly because my brothers are the coolest dudes in the world, ever. I'll be thinking of them later on when I cook up some

Sausage-Gravy-Hot-Dog-ritos
-Have some leftover sausage gravy your bro made
-put it on a tortilla
-put a hot dog on there
-probably grate some cheddar cheese on there
-wrap it up and microwave it

This will taste good to you if you are filled with love. Are you filled with love? I am filled with love.

Maundy; Maudlin

Catholics, man. I asked some what Maundy Thursday was, and they said it was the thursday before Good Friday. That's like if you ask someone how a refrigerator works, and they tell you you open it and put stuff in it and close it.

I was watching this history channel show about Mary Magdalene, though, and how I guess people confuse that Mary with this other Mary who was a prostitute or something. I don't know, I was mostly paying attention to the hot Mary in the reenactment, see, there was one who was hot and one who wasn't.

Then I looked up "maudlin" because I got it confused with "maundy," plus it is one of those words I just never really got around to learning. Turns out "maudlin" comes from Mary Magdalene herself, her last name that is. Because maudlin means kind of oversentimental or tearful, and I guess when they used to paint Mary Magdalene they always caught her crying (also often topless) (rumor is she was a real fox) (historical art unfairly favors breast men, get me a time machine and a petition).


Figure 12: Mary Magdalene (note breasts and mawkish* sentimentality)




"Maundy," on the other hand, comes from the same sort of stuff as "mandate" (like a command, not like taking a dude to dinner and getting him drunk), because on Maundy Thursday Jesus said "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."

I'm not a religious man, but I do think that is Jesus' raddest commandment unto us, and the hardest one to keep.

I love you!


* "Mawkish" comes from a word for maggot! How about that?