Coxcomb Red, Viper Black

Suiting up at 7:00 AM: Long, underwear, jeans, knee-high thermal socks, skating shoes, long underwear shirt, polyester polo shirt, nose-high neck gaiter, hoodie with broken zipper, windbreaker, tiny gloves (others disappeared early this season), hat real low, headphones, backpackbag. Double check all of them, open breach, seal breach, turn on Brazilian psychedelics music, go to bus stop 15 minutes away.

Layering, sealing all the exposed skin, and loading the bag goes a lot easier if I think of it as getting ready for the space adventure I always wanted to have. It's a lot like the airplane-with-food-going-into-your-mouth-because-you're-a-fussy-baby trick, sugarcoating your responsibilities (eating shit out of bottles and enduring witches-tit cold to go to German class) in an exciting narrative. It still works on me to this day.

I've always had a terrified fascination with space travel, space walking, and space living since I can remember. Until pretty recently, the thought of being explosively decompressed into the void and dying in a crazy way out there has been among my largest unreasonable fears. I have found out, though that it isn't that awful.

What is awful, however, is explosive decompression from pressures of about 9 atmospheres to 1 atmosphere. I've repopulated my nightmares with diving bells and diving suits in the place of space ships and space suits.

There is a lot to do before the year ends.



I could use some help.

Even still, I hate your boyfriend

It's hard believing in very little when a day like this comes and seems to be filled to its brim with portents. This included:

1. A dream of seeing a Back to the Future sequel that does not exist in Chicago, returning to the car and sitting in it a moment talking to my friend with me. The rest just involves caving in a crazed meth-man with a hammer I happened to have.

2. Lying on my back in the early morning hours after having spied half a foot of snow covering the world outside, contented in the isolation that the civilization-dampening blanket would provide, I spied something moving about the wall next to me. In the soft focus of my morning-eyes, it looked like an escaped eyebrow scurrying away from my face to find work warming a lip or in some billionaire's comb, but it was nothing as benign or impossible as that.

It was a few inches of hairy, hairy centipede.

Announcing to the world that there are centipedes around my bed may have ruined a lot of things for me, but it could just serve as a fair, ominous warning to the world.

Wrapping a steel hip flask up in tissue paper, I smashed that instigator of unreasonable fears and disgust into the second dimension. Sources report that I said something cool like "Better lay off the sauce!" or "You really strike a note with me... more specifically... B FLAT!", but nothing can be confirmed at this time.

3. I was stabbed in the foot by a ballpoint pen in a shirt pocket that was part of a shirt that was also on my floor. This could have been part one to some kind of genius vaudevillian set piece, but I missed the good china rack on my way falling down in the hallway and bleeding all around. It was a good way into my foot, but not bad enough to stop the walkin'. It has given me my second tattoo, a small black dot, on the arch of my foot. My mom did something similar when she was my age, but that involved a fountain pen and the hand and the color blue.

4. I bought candy for the first time in a long time and I just can't regulate the flow of Mike and Ikes into my mouth. Use my weakness on me, I'm everything I was committed to stop.


These don't mean a goddamn thing.