The first eight months of 2003 were almost exactly the same as the last four months of 2002—slow and easy. Working at Co-Op was pretty chill. I had no bills to worry about and more or less got paid in CDs. I worked a lot during the school year, between the CD store and the tutoring place and taking classes. I drove to Alex's every night, too, so you got to figure an hour and a half commute. This is when I started writing a lot again. I was never stressed. Every night, I got to sleep right away.

The summer was nice, though maybe not quite as nice as the summer before. The wind down, from the time all the worries went away to the time when we moved to university, seemed to take forever. I remember during long shifts at the store I'd be in the back room, folding shirts and shrinkwrapping, really mundane and boring work, and I'd think to myself how there was only so much time left to dedicate to this, and then how I had had thought the exact same thought a week ago, which seemed like a minute ago. Every Sunday morning I would clean the outside of the store. As I swept up the leaves and cigarette butts I would let the Mission Hill theme play in my head, since it was new, then, and only on Sunday Nights. I'd go over to Alex's and as the theme played I'd think about time, how I could not believe it had been a full week since the last episode, how time seemed so painlessly slow, happily numb (lugubrious?), yet how it also was ripping by so fast. Then we moved, which took days, and that was that.

Waterloo seemed big. We had almost no money. Our apartment was too expensive. Alex and I would take walks, watch TV, and cook all of our own meals. School began and I dove right into it. I didn't realize at the time how little effort most English majors put into their studies. I actually read every page of every book I was assigned that semester—20 whole books in 16 weeks, no skipping or skimming. There was nothing else to do but work. It got dark and cold very early. Our whole area of town was quiet except for the moans, down the way, over by the truckstop, light like wind and sometimes heavy and clanky, like tinnitus. Those moans breathed, sometimes. We didn’t sleep enough. Alex worked at Subway. I kept reading. Didn't spend money. Didn't use the internet. Didn't write anything enjoyable. Read and studied.

I had been back to Clinton twice during the semester, and both times I was amazed at how dirty and depressing it was. There are things you just don't notice when you're around them all the time, and one of these things is the fact that Clinton is unliveable. There's the stench of it, as you all know, but that stench is more than a stench. It seeps into the people. Everyone there is dull and dead, and in order to seem alive they fill themselves with senseless rage.

Kelsy was doing better. Mom and Dad seemed fine. I never talked to any of my old friends. At Christmas I kind of exploded, since I'd been working too hard. That was back when I could still go on guiltless benders. (Oh, for a return to those simple times). I remember being mumbling, sobbing drunk, at Zach's, talking to Andrew about how we were the future and had promise, we could Do Things. That was stupid. It was the drugs talking. Zach and Melissa and Clint came up for New Years. Overall we had a hell of a time but Melissa was dressed like a goth and I remember we got treated poorly at Blockbuster video because of it. This was unremarkable aside from the fact that it had been so long since I had been treated poorly for no good reason, and it reminded me of what it was like in high school, in Clinton. We all felt broken and me and Alex talked about how broken everything was. My resolution was to read 50 books in 2004.

I've never been able to understand how any woman could support any war. Men, I can understand. We have bullshit notions of honor and dignity, we are more pathetically inclined to support murder if an authority figure tells us it might ultimately, in some vague way, protect our money and families. But women? Any woman? It's disgraceful.

There is no war without rape. The creation of a war zone is the creation of a rape zone. There has never been an exception to this rule. There never will be an exception to this rule. This doesn't get much coverage, no. Here in the US, the horrors of war are now primarily discussed in monetary terms. Sometimes, when discussing very bad, historical cases, we might mention death camps or some foreign leader's failure to distinguish between proper and improper human targets. But we don't really give a damn about the dead and the maimed. We don't care that much about soldiers. We don't care at all about the women they rape.

At the end of World War II, the invading Russian army raped at least 200 thousand German women. Once I heard a respectable, educated man say that this was deserved, seeing as the Nazis had started the war and all. This is popular logic among men; it's why Hiroshima was justified, why so much as attempting to discuss the firebombing of Dreseden can get you fired from a high school teaching position. Male logic is bent and vengeful. You might hear a woman say that killing hundreds of thousands of civilians is justified, but you'd probably never hear one say that raping hundreds of thousands of women are justified. On this point, women are more or less decent. They are also willfully ignorant, though. They don't think things through.

The worst, most horrific cases of rape are usually performed by invading armies. These armies consider women spoils of war, which they legally were until only a few decades ago. (This is something else that war does, explicitly: it turns women into property). The Japanese raped hundreds of thousands of Chinese women before killing them through mutilation. American soldiers in Vietnam regarded rape as Standard Operating Procedure, and tens of thousands of women were brutally raped by our very own soldiers.

The US military has, thankfully, recently bowed to UN and Amnesty International pressure and began an official anti-rape policy. Few incidents are reported, even fewer are followed up on, and fewer still result in any discipline, but at least the American military now holds to the general idea that rape is wrong. Believe it or not, that's a very substantial step. But even in the best circumstances, even naively assuming that an invading army behaves perfectly, war still produces rape. Discord produces rape. When people start getting killed for going out in the street, when the police leave and there are no leaders, women get raped in droves. There is no way to count the victims, especially in the middle east, since they are so ashamed. They only exist in droves.

I think part of the problem is that women don't quite realize how horrible men really are. They do, but mostly they don't. Many women are smart. Many more are conscientious and knowledgeable. But this is not a majority of women. A majority of women trust men, they do their best to prop up the male systems that encourage war and rape. They, like stupid men, buy into bullshit notions of honor and dignity. They see value in revenge and obedience, the more blind the better, and they respect and glorify the men who rape and create rape.

Writing about this is pointless. This is the same basic thing I have been writing about for years. Much more talented and intelligent people have written about it, too, but they have always been ignored. I just want to let all the women out there know that they are horrible if they have ever supported war. It's inexcusable. They have all done wrongs that will never be righted. They have all helped rape.

Two teenagers sit on a curb at the far edge of their high school's parking lot. They are talking about sex. They are a girl, Jessica, and a boy, Brandon, and their conservation is limited by several things. First, the two of them have only recently realized that it is possible for people to share a mutual sexual interest in one another. For the longest time they had assumed that sex was an act of compromise, somehow. They never quite knew how but it always seemed like one of things that leaves people dissatisfied.

Second, they have felt only inklings to the effect that someone might be sexually interested in them. This realization followed soon after the first, and although they both know that it's probably true it seems a little indecent, a little too perfect. What kind of pretentious jerk, Brandon wonders, could go around thinking people were attracted to him? Like most girls her age, Jessica thinks of sexual confidence as something negative.

This brings up point three: Brandon and Jessica are clean kids. Relatively clean. They feel ashamed when they masturbate, and so they don't fantasize about other people while doing it. They focus on themselves, on their sensations. Brandon does it only the shower, for fear of leaving behind any residue. Once he feigned an arm injury in order to hide a white spot—a toothpaste stain, it turned out—from his parents. Jessica washes her hands twice after masturbating. She's heard the people talking about the way it smells. She hasn't let her parents near her hands in years.

This is state of affairs is not Brandon or Jessica's fault. Their parents hide the pornography and refuse to order HBO. Neither of them have any interest in the internet, nor do they have any older friends or siblings who have clued them into the more blunt, physical aspects of sex. They both know about the process of intercourse in an abstract sense, but Brandon halfconsciously believes that it's possible to engage in vaginal penetration without taking your pants off (that's how it happens in movies, after all), and Jessica has not accepted the fact that something 5-8 inches long could be inserted all the way into her vagina, into the same hole she mistakenly believes she pees from. She knows that it can happen, but she hasn't accepted it. To her, sex is like the notion of death, or the eradication of humankind.

There are posters up all around campus, alongside basketball schedules and flyers for the school play. These posters are supposed to discourage rape. Probably correctly, the two think they know more about rape than they do about sex. They think they can picture it more concretely, more realistically. A speaker came during an assembly to tell them what rape was and what rape wasn't. "You ever hear 'no means yes,'" asked the speaker. No one had. No one reacted. Then he said "Well, that's just about as wrong as you can get." He was graphic in describing the effects of rape, what it does to its victims, how women and children can be scarred for the rest of their lives in ways that no teenager could possibly understand. The posters—half of them are in Spanish—show pictures of clean-cut pretty white and brown boys, their prim ladyfriends fuzzy in the background, and they have captions like "She said no, so I stopped" and "It's okay to wait." It has all struck Jessica as horribly patronizing. She hated the way the speaker misused slang, how he casually said "damn" and "crap," like they'd all think that was a big deal.

"Who needs a poster to tell them not to rape," she says. Brandon laughs. "It's, like, there's no posters telling us not to murder people."

"Yeah," says Brandon. "Like, what's going to happen? A guy's just about to rape a chick and then he stops and says 'naw, naw, the poster says this's bad.'"

While portraying the man who stops just short of rape, Brandon effects the voice of a generic black guy. The voice is high-pitched and ornamentally wavy, like a movie pimp who calls everyone "baby." Brandon uses it a lot, whenever he makes fun of someone who thinks or does something he considers stupid, and usually it makes Jessica laugh. Now her laughter seems far away, perfunctory, and she stares past Brandon's shoulder.

They both know what rape is. Rape is sex with scary music playing in the background. Rape is a woman twisting side to side, saying no at first and then giving up and thrashing her head around. Rape is when a woman's arms get held down and all you can see is the man's back. Jessica can't fit Brandon's stupid voice into that situation. Brandon can't, either.

"I heard," says Jessica, quickly, changing the pace and direction of the conversation for no reason whatsoever, as she is wont to do. "Matty Stevens?"

"Yeah?" A senior girl, big breasts, he's never spoken to her. Once she stretched forward, to grab something on top of a pop machine, and her shirt lifted up. She had moles on her ribs.

"She likes it when guys pretend to rape her."

"What?" He squeals a bit, the thought so surprises him.

"There was a guy on the football team, and she was drunk at a party, but they'd been sorta going together for a while."

"Uh huh."

"They go upstairs and start having sex. For the first time. And she starts yelling 'no, no, stop!.'" Jessica here does the high-pitched, ditzy voice she uses for stupid girls, and Brandon laughs. Jessica continues: "And so he jumped off her, totally freaked out. And she's like 'what, why did you stop?'"

"Oh man."

"Really. She's gross."

"Who would like that? It's like pretending to be killed."

"I don't know," said Jessica. The ellipses were implied. Ellipses are always implied, yes, but Brandon has to settle for an implication of the implication, the short lift at the end of know, a slight elongation of the ow. Jessica quickly turns the conversation to something else, and Brandon is too busy thinking about what she had just said to listen to the first few words, or maybe sentences, of what she is now saying:

"—This was from Ashley, and, like, there's a 200 percent chance she saw it in a movie and it didn't really happen, but whatever. I don't care if it's true or not—"

What didn't Jessica know? Matty does certain things, and she likes having things done to her. Simple enough. There's room for judgment, but it's simple enough. What didn't Jessica know about this? Did she only say she didn't know something that she actually knew? Or did she just not know? Brandon has to know, himself. He doesn't know why and he doesn't stop to ask himself why. He just needs to know. So he speaks over her, while she's still talking.

"What don't you know?"

Jessica is confused. Completely confused. She has no idea what he's saying.

"What?"

"Or, no—I'm sorry, I was thinking about something else. Who—who are you talking about?"

"Mallory Hensen. Ashley and her had to stay in the same room on the band trip to Washington."

"Yeah?"

"Everyone acts stupid on the trip, you know, especially the boys, but Mr. Larsen and Mrs. Dodd are right next to the freshman and sophomores, one on each end of the hall—"

"—No one watches the juniors and seniors?"

"They do, but not as close. I think. I don't know. Doesn't matter. They all ate, like, McDonald's or whatever on the bus, they had two fancy dinners, and this one night you get to go out and find your own food—"

Yes, they let you walk around Washington, around the hotel. The freshman boys, last year, bought a clown suit and poured fake blood on it. They left in the elevator and got in trouble. The police were called. Suspensions were doled out. The seniors, meanwhile, apparently had rooms to themselves. The teachers don't watch them as closely. Jessica starts laughing while she's talking: fast, chirpy, girllaughs. Brandon starts paying attention again. He looks Jessica right in the blue eyes. Her lips look like a heart, deep red like crushed berries.

"Cheerios, everywhere. When Mallory woke up—" stammering, she's laughing so hard. "She's like 'What happened! ' and Jessica just said 'You don't remember?' and Mallory cleaned them all up!"

Brandon laughs, deep and fake, from his fingers.

"Geez," he says.

"Yeah…" Jessica says. Firm ellipses. Now Brandon is allowed to come up with his own topic.

"Yeah," he says. Long pause. Then: "those posters are just really stupid."

"I know! And that guy who came in!"

"I hope Matty didn't hear."

"Yeah, really…"

Two cars drive past. One of them has a bad muffler and makes an uncomfortable scraping noise, the kind that rattles your teeth. It passes, finally. Jessica and Brandon both start talking at the same time. They laugh, customarily, and they offer each other the chance to speak, customarily. Jessica refuses much more sternly. Brandon has to rephrase what he was going to say, to think about before he says it. That ruins everything.

"I just—this is weird, I know. But, god, this is weird."

"What?" She seems worried.

"I mean it's stupid, it's not really important. But—I just, like, with Matty. Honestly, how could someone enjoy that?"

"I don't know."

Firm? Was that a firm, literal, I don't know or a coy, hinting I don't know. Her face betrayed nothing. Her back went stiff, but she did that all the time. Her mom made her practice posture every day, even in middle school. She looked at him dead on with a firm, firm, unbent expression that might have an invitation, might have been a commination. It was probably confusion. If it was confusion, he could still back out. But what if it wasn't.

"I don't know either. And you don't know, obviously. You wouldn't know. But… you know…"

Obviously? Really? Now she was really confused. Or mad. Her head tilted down but her eyes stayed perfectly in place. There is nothing to say because there is nothing that he is trying to say—his feelings and intentions are wordless, beyond what are now the boundaries of his rational comprehension, and he, making a common mistake, is trying to figure them out. He wanted, when he started to speak about this, to get to the bottom of an inclination, catch some vapor with his hands, see some light beneath a door and tell a whole story, write a whole novel, from that just light. All that's clear now is the futility of this, his own helplessness, and the clear feeling that he has just caused a problem. He asks himself What is there? and the words scrape into him, make him tense up his calf muscles and grind his teeth. Jessica is scared. He has to talk before she does.

"I just, you know, I'm not a girl."

"Uh huh?"

"That's all."

Jessica sinks down. She forgets about her posture exercises and her sharp shoulders bend out past her knees. Her shoulders heave heavily, with shame. She is definitely confused. And angry. Mostly sad. Brandon panics the same panic he would feel after starting a grease fire. This is the first time he's made a girl his own age cry.

As for Jessica, she is so confused that it hurts, physically. When she was 12, early puberty and chubby, an older boy yelled at her at Dairy Queen and she grabbed at her small paunch. She pinched herself tight and thought of ripping off her own fat. She feels the same way now, with her whole body, with a vague essence that she thinks is somewhere in her body or else somewhere all throughout her body, and since she doesn’t know what it is or where it comes from she just wants to pull everything off. She wants to be bones.

Jessica starts full-on crying, with noise. Brandon does not know, she thinks to herself. She doesn't know, yes, but Brandon does not know. She doesn't consider any of the possible implications to what he just said. She gets a fast glimpse, an uncontrollable apercu, but she kicks it out without complication. Maybe he thinks girls like being raped. Maybe he thinks she wants to be held down, wants scary music to play while someone's back, his back, bobs up and down while she lay supine, too weak to scream. Maybe he thinks these things. Maybe. But she kicks them right out.

Brandon, flustered, moves stands and scoots towards Jessica. She doesn't move away. She doesn’t really know he's moved. He squats, like a catcher, right next to her, away from the curb. He rests his arm on her shoulder, moves his arm around her front so her rocky nub of a shoulder pops into his armpit. She smells like cinnamon potpourri and sweet and salty snacks, ornamental chocolate-dipped pretzel sticks that sit in a cup above the fireplace. His legs tingle. His penis moves. Just a little bit. It kicks to one side.

"Hey," he says.

"Yeah," she whines.

"I wish there was a box of Cheerios here I could just pour over myself, make you know how stupid I feel."

Jessica laughs through her tears. She keeps crying a little bit, but these are only aftershocks, the residual mess of other things that have happened that she might have cried over but didn't and is now letting out. Brandon tightens his grip. It is slight and nonsexual. She likes how he feels warm and se leans her head against his arm. They sit like that for a minute, for two minutes, until Jessica has completely stopped crying.

"Matty's weird," Jessica says.

"Yeah…"

"And a slut."

"…Yeah."

2002

I'm starting to rethink this project. When I sit down to write, I write _everything_ else before this. This was supposed to be done in a week and here we're only on 2002. The trouble is that it's hard to write a decade in review on a public forum like this, one that's populated by the same people who are being written about. This portraits are bound to be unflattering, if only because of the style of my writing. It's always been more fun to accentuate the negative than to come across as a bleating, weepy idiot by talking about the positive things positive people have done to you and for you. Thing is, the stuff I most remember from 2002 was all positive.

This was an edifying year. It began with a death hike. Incapable of engaging in normal courting rituals—which, from my observation, consisted at that time of staring at a woman's shoulders, asking her what bands she liked, and nodding and saying "awesome" no matter what she said—I remember trying to make Alex think I was some kind of extreme, romantic type. Romantically extreme, that is; not, like, I eat roses and cliff dive while singing love poetry. More like I do strange things that are harmless, fun, and (hopefully) charming. This wasn't an entirely false image of myself, I don't think, but for whatever reason I thought it was all I had to bank on.

One of those oh-so-charming wacky things I used to do was go on long hikes through the woods behind Eaglepoint Park. Eaglepoint rests on top of some tall, steep bluffs, I would drive past the old railroad tracks at the bottom of the bluffs, climb up the bluffs, and then walk through the woods and round about back down to my car. Simple, nice little pre-dating date idea. But what made it Xtreme was that it was exceptionally cold when we went on our hike, the ground was covered in snow and the park was closed.

It was Alex, Zach, Melissa, and Me. Zach refused to try climbing the bluff because his knees had been previously destroyed. We said Ok, we'll just climb up and head back down. Halfway up we realized this could not be done. The only way to get down would be to tumble down, to die. We had to make it to the top, which we barely did. I yelled down to Zach that this was too steep. He should wait in the car. We would walk alongside the bluff, back to where we were parked, and then walk down a nearby hill. It shouldn't have taken more than 15 minutes.

We got lost. The area alongside the bluff was impassable, thick with snow and dense trees. When it was dry and warm the area was still dangerous—there were patches of friable rocks that blew away in stiff winds and would send you in a 50-foot freefall. No problem, though. We could just make a small loop around the edge and then come back to our hill.

What I failed to realize was that all hills look pretty much the same when they are covered in snow. All the landmarks that I usually relied upon to get me through the woods around Eaglepoint were also covered in snow. And, to top everything off, the county had recently installed a bunch of tall electric fences since, unbeknownst to me, they were building an equestrian park (to make it so only rich people could enjoy the woods). We said very little to each other. I wanted to seem confident, like I knew what I was doing. The worst thing we could have possibly done was backtrack, I realized. Then I thought about backtracking, added up how much time we had already spent out in the cold, and I realized there was a small but realistic possibility that we could die.

Bear west, towards the highway. It was a long walk. I remember Alex running towards me and tackling me, playfully, and I had no idea what to make of it. Once we had figured out what to do, which took about an hour, it was two miles through woods and through the park before we got to the highway. Then three more miles down the highway, back to the car. There was wind and it was black. Every time we passed a marker for one tenth of a highway mile I would swear I could see the road where we would turn. Finally I actually did see it, and Zach was lying in the back seat of the car with the engine off, since I hadn't tossed him the keys.

We got in and started up the heater. The car didn't move, though, since I had parked it under a tree, on top of a patch of snow-covered ice that was as thick as a pond. I got out. The car was an old rear wheel drive roadster, and my back tires were actually in someone else's treads. A big truck must have torn out of here months ago, when it was muddy, and then their treads filled up with water and froze. It was one in a million that I would have parked perfectly there, and we were absolutely stuck. No amount of pushing could budge us, but we still tried. We even put the floor mats underneath the tires, which tore them to shreds and made an awful smell.

Alex and I left the car to search for nearby houses. It was Super Bowl Sunday, the first one the Patriots won, and so we figured most people would be home watching the game. Houses are spaced far apart, outside of town and near the woods, and although we kept seeing lit TVs through windows, no one would answer their door. Normally I'd get angry at a time like that. Anger keeps you warm. The car heater had warmed my hands and feet but my blood and my bones were still cold, and nothing but booze or anger could have warmed them. Still, I kept cool. Kept up a happy exterior. We approached a house with an open door and video game noises coming from the screen porch. There was a big dog outside and Alex wanted to walk away. I said no, confident and friendly, and the dog turned out to be old and sweet.

AAA came and towed us out. Alex enjoyed it. We started formally dating exactly one week later.

I have few clear memories aside from that day. Valentine's was wonderful. I parked in a field alongside Alex's house, because I had shown up too early, and I remember listening to Yo La Tengo's and feeling peaceful, physically, like I would never have to clench my fists again. The whole rest of the year is a happy blur, without context or narrative. Once, in a bar in late Februrary, I remember talking to a big drunk Mexican guy about how excited I was for the Cubs, since they won 88 games the year before and were sure to improve this year. I said that Todd Hundley was going to have a bounceback season, and I've never been more wrong about anything ever. The Cubs were horrible but I listened to them all year, and I listened to the guys on WSCR talking about them all year. Most of my time was spent at Alex's home in Rock Falls, where the furniture kept disappearing and neither of us cared. I had cigarettes, an SNES, a DVD player and a radio.

My birthday was great. Everyone came over but no one got too loud or violent. We drank Heineken and girls had Skyy Blue and we listened to "Neon Golden" by the Notwist, over and over again. Dad stopped by Alex's house and dropped off a bag of CDs. I have never been less worried about things than I was that day.

Trace moved away late that summer, leaving me effectively friendless in Clinton. I started working at Co-Op records, and I more or less got paid in CDs. I would drive to Alex's 4 or 5 nights a week and sleep on her floor, then I'd get up early, drive to community college, tutor, work at the record store, and drive back to her place. It was the happiest time of my life.

Bad things were happening to other people. My sister was having problems. Maybe I should mention these things but I'm not going to. I don't want to. This was a good year.

Not too many memories here. There was of course the day that freedom was born, but that didn't come for nine months. New Year's Eve was in Cedar Rapids, at Zach and Emily's, and I remember we got there just as the countdown was taking place. As for the actual night of celebration, I have no memories. I remember driving with Shannon Lundeen to the first day of community college and listening to Blonde on Blond on the way. Shannon complained about the music until "Rainy Day Women Number 12 & 35" ("Everybody Must Get Stoned") started up. Then I remember signing up for classes that day, the day when everything got started.

Maybe—oh, I know what it is. I do have memories from early 2001, but I'm ashamed of them! That's it.

Here's a nice one: one night me and John and Shannon and Trace bought a bunch of balls from Wal-Mart. They were hollow plastic balls, multicolored, the same as the ones they put in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese's. We drove out to Dusty's house and unlocked his car with a screwdriver (a diary key would have worked) and loaded it up with balls and silly string. He drove to work with balls flying out of his car.

We were supposed to deny everything. He was supposed to think that sometime, perhaps long ago, he angered either a clown or someone who eventually became a clown, and now it was time for that clown's revenge. This was only the first of several attacks that were to get increasingly more intricate and weird. Cream pies would be delivered to his house with terrifying messages hidden in their tins. Red foam rubber noses would find their way beneath his bed, into his medicine cabinet. They would be flecked with blood. Popped balloons would be left on his doorstep with notes attached reading "You're next. (This was a balloon-man)." Of course, I was the one planning all of this. That I managed to devise such a brilliant prank without realizing that my other friends would snitch on me is a testament to many of my most prominent character flaws.

This was after I had been fired from the gas station for stealing and was earning my living selling drugs and working one night a week as a delivery driver for Moe's Pizza. The job was ridiculously slow. On a good night I would have 6 deliveries in an 7-hour shift. On a bad night, zero. Mostly, I sat in the back room and read while nothing else happened. I read a film textbook and started writing a script. I also read Fitzgerald, James Agee, more Brautigan (so much Brautigan), Kafka, and Flannery O'Connor. It was a wonderful time. It had been weeks since I had tried, unsuccessfully, to play up the clown gag before giving up, when I realized that Trace had told Dusty.

One afternoon in early February Trace stopped by my house to tell me that the pizza place was planning on offering me a job waiting tables. He advised me not to take it but was wishywashy when I asked him why not. It seemed like the best thing that could have reasonably happened to me. I could stop doing illegal things for money, for one, and it also seemed like fairly simple work I could do in the company of my friends. The hourly pay wasn't great, but it was all under the table and when tips were included it was actually a pretty good gig.

The waitress I was replacing was known all throughout Clinton as the girl who was on Montel Williams after being twice impregnated by her brother. The owners treated her poorly, but I chalked this up to a combination of quaint, old-world misogyny and the fact that she was the kind of person whose stupidity is so intense it actually enrages most people, the kind of person who walks into walls and lampposts and nods whenever anyone speaks. Honestly, after being knocked up by her brother the first time wouldn't you think she would have started on birth control?

What followed was very much like what I've read it was like to work on a Peckinpaw movie, only instead of producing great cinema we were selling low-grade pizzas to white trash. The pay was alright, considering, but nothing else was alright. Business continued to be dead and the owner was going through some very severe personal and family problems that I probably shouldn't write about. To me, right now, thinking back spitefully, these were very funny problems. But I'll leave them out.

The owner/operator was a grump, then. And those who know me will tell you right away that my personality is not conducive to the service industry. The entertaining extremes of the 10 months or so I spent as a waiter really can't be captured in a format like this, but please trust me when I say I am not the kind of person who should wait tables. I don't like being treated poorly, especially by idiots. I understand if Festus had a bad day and snapped at me once, but those who consistently were assholes or else did not tip were punished in disgusting, horrible ways. The managers never knew of this, of course; they were angry because they thought I was stealing from them. Once, the afternoon after working a late night, I came in and started up with kitchen duties. The owner's brother, who was also the head chef, pulled me aside and pointed to four folded napkins that were laying on the counter. "What are these," he asked. "Napkins?" He snapped, "Do not pretend to be stupid," he said. Then he talked about how he found these perfectly good napkins in the trash, that I had thrown them away after a customer hadn't used them. He said that this was same as stealing from him. He didn't say it was wasteful—he said it was theft. He thought that I was being malicious in throwing away a cent's worth of paper napkins that were only partially soiled.

Here's a neat anecdote that's entertaining: there was an 18-year-old kid with autism who used to always come in with two gigantically fat women. They would sing karaoke. When the fat girls would sing they would have to move the microphone away from their mouths on every rest, or else the whole audience could hear them wheezing. The three of them would show up at 6, when karaoke started, and leave around 11, when it ended. They would order a basket of fries (for about a buck fifty) and squeal out the Grease soundtrack for 5 hours. They never tipped. Their bill would come to 1.90 and they'd demand the dime back. All night, they would demand I refill their pitcher of tap water. They'd be snippy with me if I took too long.

On your average weekend we had that going on. Loud, horrible singing all night. Uppity white trash, gaunt meth-addled men and squealing children and their wives, who were either gigantic or as hard as diamonds. The kids would have broad palettes, like they were out of Victorian-era comic strips, since all of them had fetal alcohol syndrome. After a certain hour I was the only waiter left and was also in charge of bussing, hosting, and doing dishes. I have one angry Iranian man scolding me for throwing away forks, and another one calling me an idiot because two customers complained that I had mixed up their draws of Bud and Miller on the way from the bar to their table. The owner's personal problems increased, and he got angrier and more paranoid. On one slow weekday he came into the kitchen and mumbled at me for 15 minutes about how he knew I was stealing from him, ruining his business, and as soon as he caught me in the act I would go straight to prison. I kept denying it. He kept saying "I know, I know you are stealing. I know, I know you are stealing."

It wasn't that bad, really, I guess. Not when compared to some other jobs. But it did suck pretty hard, and nothing else seemed to happen. I'd work until midnight Thursday-Saturday, do community college work the rest of time, and on weekend evenings we would all go out to Country Kitchen, after the pizza place had closed, and I'd drink so much coffee that I would start feeling tired. I quit in the middle of the summer and started doing sorting and processing at my dad's store.

We saw Radiohead in Chicago in August. It was great. Beta Band opened. The stage was small and surrounded by buildings. People could look out their windows and watch the show. Within the next four months I drove to Chicago five more times, to see concerts. There's nothing extraordinary that can be said about concerts that's not been said a thousand times, but I remember that Radiohead show being the last time that me and the old crew felt really together, high as kites. The memory isn't interesting but it's there and it's important.

That fall was 9/11. I had fallen asleep wearing headphones, with Godspeed You Black Emperors! "F#A# (infinity)" on repeat. Around 8:30 my mom rushed into my room to scream the United States is under terrorist attack!" I took a shower, dressed, and drove to community college. Everyone was standing in the halls look at TVs. Me and Trace drove to Tampico, where we sat in Richard's garage and listened to people's cordless phone conversations through a high-powered police scanner. None of them were talking about the attacks. Donna came home from worked and complained that Maury Povich wasn't on. I asked Richard if this was the biggest thing ever, bigger even than the Kennedy assassination, and he didn’t hesitate before saying yes.

I had been moderately politically aware in high school, much more so than your average student but still it wasn't like I was reading books or anything. Near the end of high school I had consciously tried to adopt mindset of acceptance. This came from the influence of Trace, I think, since for some reason Trace thought his father was a beacon of wisdom. In actuality his father was a beaten down factory worker of the "unions and gays are what's killing this country" stripe, the kind of person who loves nothing more than fucking himself over. Anyhow, this was what I bought into near the end of high school. There was an online personality test that asked you to agree or disagree with the notion that making peace with the system was a sign of adulthood. I clicked "yes."

Thankfully, the 2000 election had remedied this poison and sent me straight back to the excessive, combative left. 9/11 was jarring. That evening, there was an online poll that said something like "Do you have full faith in president Bush to handle this situation" and after sitting for a long time I clicked "I don't know," pitting myself a few dozen others against 98% percent of all respondents, who had without hesitation chosen "yes." I remember forming some shameful opinions, briefly. Once I pictured a satisfactory response to the attacks as being one in which we killed as many (brown) civilians as had been killed in the WTC. By November this had all passed.

I'm leaving things out, I know. Dusty was gone, I think. In the fall he went to live in Iowa City with John. We visited a couple of times and all John and Dusty did was sit in the lobby of their dorm building and play hearts. In this summer I spent a lot of time at Zach's, mostly drinking and yelling. He was dating Melissa then and was happy. Andrew was always having some kind of girl crisis. I still broke stuff when I was angry. In the fall I would drink rum and take Vicoden at Richard's. The Blackhawks were pretty good that year (for the last time in 7 years, it turned out), and on New Year's Eve Eric Daze scored a goal with 6 seconds left in overtime. The game was on the radio all the way to Zach's, and no one was home when I got there so I watched it all by myself. Everyone came in right as I was yelling, and Alex was with them.

Decade in review: 2000

Of all the years I can clearly remember, this one has the most distinctly demarcated seasons. New Years was memorable only in that so little happened. I worked at a gas station from 4 until 11:30 and the old lady who worked with me was a decent human being so she let me sneak into the cooler and drink some Zima. This was Y2k, remember, and a lot of stupid people thought we were all going to die, and so everyone in town—teachers, the elderly, midgets—they all came in and all were wasted. After I got off work I rushed to the nearby houses of friends and acquaintances but could find no party. I watched the countdown by myself, and even though I knew it was a tape delay from New York I felt strangely let down that no fires started, no aliens landed, nothing blew up. Dejected, I walked three miles home and watched 2001 with my father.

In late January (most dates are guesses) a young man was beaten with a baseball bat during school hours, at lunch, right behind my friend Trace's seat. The day before, a Monday, some druggie kid told me that some bad business had gone down over the weekend—some party, some people from out of town. Some kid who no one really knew got drunk and threw up on a bed. He was kicked out of the party, understandably, and came back several hours later, with friends, when almost no one was still there, and they beat the shit out of some people with tire irons and clubs. One guy had his legs broken. Horrible, but whatever. Bad things happen to idiots. I got called into the principal's office and waspumped for information. The principal was round, bald, and sweaty, and he said there were some bad things afoot, some very bad things. My honest appraisal of the situation was that nothing was going to happen, and when I told him that he smiled and let me go.

Back to the next day, Tuesday: it wasn't all that brutal of a beating, really. The kid who did it landed maybe two hits, danced around a bit, and was then tackled by a gigantic teacher. I went back to class and had forgotten about until the day was over and there were news vans all over the parking lot. My mom picked me up, and she was with an older lady who was a friend of hers and they asked what was going on. "I dunno," I said. Then, "ohh, oh actually it's probably because some kid got beat with a baseball bat at lunch."

We went to an estate sale where I bought an old, very heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder, like the kind Hunter Thompson used in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I took it over to my friend Matt's nice house and we listened to the tapes. Young girls sang "A Hard Day's Night." A middle-aged man with a Bing Crosby voice wished Christmas greetings to aunt so-and-so, said that being able to transmit your voice like this was a miracle, it was just like he was there. I was sober at the time but my mind was generally in a drug fog—that is, I made a lot of nice, oftentimes surprisingly perspicacious observations that a sober person would never be able to, but I was horrible at organizing or articulating them. I remember thinking about how precious these tapes were. These people were all probably dead, or dying, and this was it of them. Nothing else. Scraps of memories, maybe, but when it comes to memories voices are one of the first things people lose. We went out to get food and when we got back Matt's little brothers had recorded over the tape. They did what little kids do when they record their voices: they contorted their faces and tried to made throaty nonsense sounds in representation of those contortions. It was precious, too, I thought.

Our parents were worried that there would be some kind of retaliatory gang violence (maybe a whole army of kids was bats—and balls, maybe—oh god, there could be a whole team of them), so we got the next day off of school. I remember sleeping in Matt's room and it was dark, since it was a basement, but when I came up there was fresh snow and even though it was a dark, cold part of winter things were bleach white and the snow seemed warm.


Onto Spring: the springiest spring that ever sprung. I got my driver's license (even though I was a high school senior I was only 16). School was easy but I was working 38 hours a week at the gas station and doing too many drugs. Two main memories, here: the first is of me and Matt and Wes, whose last name I forget, and we were playing Laser Tag afterschool in a graveyard. It was wonderfully spring damp and smelled like green life and for the first time since I was 8 or 9 (and the last time ever, it turned out), I was having regular fun playing outdoors. There was a high ledge in this graveyard, a big hill that had been squared off and boxed in with concrete. It stood 12 feet off the ground. We dared Wes to jump off it, and he did.

Second memory, before the first one: the day I got my driver's license I drove to an overpass halfway between Clinton and Morrison. We'd driven under it at least 100 times, and ever since I was little I thought about what it would be like to park my car alongside it and walk up on top of it. That's what I did. It was covered in brown grass and smelled like tar.

Later that week, I drove Kelsy and Matt over to Sterling, Illinois, which at the time seemed like a mighty trek into a foreign land. We went to Richard's apartment and Zach was there, and Matt didn't like Zach because he wasn't cool enough. Me, Kelsy, and Matt watched a Pokemon VHS downstairs, alone, and then we left, and as we were leaving I walked over to Zach and told him a lie about how we had to leave because Kelsy wasn't feeling well. I felt horrible. It took an hour before I found my way out of town.

Around this time there was another cold snap. I turned my van into a giant hamster cage by filling the back with 200 pounds of cedar bedding. At lunch, stoners would pay 50 cents a pop to be driven around and treated like hamsters, which meant they smoked pot while I took corners real fast, hoping to tip us over. Later that week I got married, on a larf. What was going on was I had some seething mental problem that was only a problem because these unspeakable urges that still dwell inside me had no release, and so on occasion I would start a fire or wreck up a phone both or do something else fun like that. One of those things was I married a crazy girl, legally. I'm trying very hard but I can't even remember her face. What I do remember is going over to her house, with Michelle, and going through her medicine cabinets looking for something to steal. Inside she had a Sam's Club-sized bottle of Prozac, and "Prozac" was the only word on the bottle that was written in English. A week after our marriage she was institutionalized and I never bothered to figure out what happened to her after that. The night of our wedding, while under the influence of dangerous drugs, I tipped my van over while trying to scare my sister and her wiener friends. I made two 8th grade boys cry in fear and then I caught whooping cough standing out in the cold. The doctor was amazed since he thought whooping cough had been eradicated. But no, no it hadn't. I was a minor marvel.

In spite of (or maybe because of) these bursts of excitement, the spring was dull, rosy pink. Pink like those tulip bulb-shaped Christmas lights that people sometimes hang up around Valentines. The house always seemed clean. I was sleeping well.

Summer was a badtime. First there was 3rd shifts at the gas station, going over to Matt's abandoned house and drinking MD 20/20 straight from the bottle, throwing frisbees indoors and breaking things. Then Matt got kicked out of his own house and people moved in to my house. The house was too small but two more people moved in. Jay was manic and unorganized but at least he felt guilty about it, at times he'd try to clean up. Matt was something else. I don't think I've ever met a more genuinely selfish person, before or since. Thinking back on the things he said, the things he practiced saying and the things he said casually, in passing, I'm pretty sure he was a sociopath in the medical sense. (Maybe he's better now. Maybe I shouldn't write this.) He was a horrible human being, and I say that without any anger or malice. The point of this review is a sober assessment of this decade. I think. I'm trying to be sober because you forget things when you're drunk. He was horrible. There are many horrible things that I could write about but I won't, just suffice it to say that he was horrible.

Trace, ever the amateur psychologist, noticed that I had been feeling a little glum. I was working long hours and was not enrolled in college. My house was a pile of trash. Once, before working a second shift 7 hours after working a third shift, I made an idle threat: I was tired of picking up pop cans when I came home. Every day, I would come home and pick up a pornographic number of pop cans. There was also cigarette ash on my bed and all my cds were out of order and the people who lived there, the esteemed guests, kept playing Marilyn Manson riffs on their guitars when I was trying to read or sleep, but the pop cans were the most insufferable. Most of them were practically full. Anyhow, my threat was that if I came home and cleaned up more than 10 pop cans I would take whatever possessions of my guests were on my bed and throw them in the trash. Before leaving, I cleaned up all the pop cans in the house. The house was clear of pop cans. When I got back from an 8-hour shift, there were 27 pop cans scattered throughout the house. Screaming and flailing, I tried to pick up their guitars and smash them, but I was restrained. Everyone wondered what my problem was, why I was so uptight.

So Trace noticed this angst I was feeling and he decided to stage a little sit-down between me and my buds. Jay came in first. Trace asked us both to tell each other our problems were and then make nice. Jay was drunk or high and we ended up hugging. Then came Matt. Trace went through his calm therapist spiel and before I even got out my first sentence he put his hands over his ears (something he did fairly often) and started yelling until I stopped talking. Then he said that I had no right to say this to him. This was not my house, after all, but my parent's house. He was nothing but a guest in my parents house, just like me. This shocked Trace, though the only surprising thing about it, to me, was its bluntness. My anger wasn't new, then. My anger had been simmering long enough and my assessment of Matt had been clear enough that I knew what to do, which was nothing—or what appeared to be nothing and was actually speaking with a calmness that I knew what would find infuriating. He slammed the door to my room, which I suppose he figured was his room, and everything fell of my shelf. Trace stood up and said, comically, "welp, I'm leaving."

I threatened to move out if Matt didn't. Matt didn't, and no one forced him to, so I packed a bag and went to Tampico, where Zach said I could move in because Zach is a good person and a genuine friend. Me and him picked up Andew and we drove to Dixon, where Andrew impressed us all with his ability to play the arcade version of Excitebike. On the way home we played Karma Police on a long, dead road and I nearly killed us all.

Tampico was fine, just fine. I filled out an application at the Casey's and told my mom about it. What I didn't tell her was the only reference I put down was "the lord," and that on the application's "miscellaneous" form I went on a long rant about how I was planning on cleaning up that whole operation, but still the threat seemed like enough and Matt was asked to leave. The rest of the year was better but there were incidents. Me and Trace went to a party in Iowa City and I remember I didn't like the host so I drank straight from the keg, got my germs all over it. I punched a woman in the face and I was shocked at how completely I did not regret it (still don't). There was drugs and Richard Brautigan books. I had no idea what I was going to do.

It has been nearly 100 years since the International Maritime Organization declared it grammatically improper to use the pronoun “she” while referring to a ship. For 100 years, it has been in “its” best interest to swap the ship’s poop deck every day, instead of in “her” best interest. It might get lost in a strong wind and wind up taking you right into theline of enemy fire. She won’t. Likewise, all major style guides dictate quite clearly that referring to nations, ships, and machines with the use of feminine pronouns is verboten. I am by no means the kind of person who puts too much stock into the opinion of style guides, but this is one of the rare cases where I think the official propriety of a word is worth discussing, since the people who use feminine pronouns in such a way tend to do so with an air of fancypantishness, as if they're being real booksmart.

That this practice is insulting to women as a whole is arguable, but it is in my opinion in bad enough taste that I refuse to refer to countries and boats as women in the same way I refuse to call Carlos Mencia a spic, even if he himself has let it be known he has no problem with the term. I don’t care enough about the matter to enter into a debate about it; I do, however, find is personally offensive enough to avoid doing it myself (and to secretly think poorly of those who disagree with me). No, what bothers me about the strange, internet-based resurgence of using feminine pronouns to refer to inanimate objects is not that it’s probably sexist and certainly gauche. What bothers me about it is that it’s really fucking pretentious.

This is the definition of pretentiousness—you attach non-existent depth to something superficial, you think that something is advanced or intelligent when in actuality it only has the slightest gloss of depth or intelligence. When you, in reference to the U.S.’ need to bail out the auto industry, say that “it’s in her best interest to pony up the cash,” instead of “its in its [or our, if you’re an American] best interest to pony up the cash,” you come across as seeming very, sadly desperate to make yourself seem cultured. Here’s the thing, though, you’re some random asshole posting on facebook. You are not a bespectacled 19th century explorer. Performing this little linguistic trick makes you a cultured gentlemen in the same way that owning a bunch of swords makes you a ninja. Which to say, it doesn’t. It just makes interacting with you all the more uncomfortable. In the same way it’s kind of uncomfortable to listen to a stranger’s child tell you how they’re going to be Batman when they grow up, it’s uncomfortable to have to listen to you try and sound literate through incidental sexism.

Stop it.

There's a very nice smell that only comes from vacuumed-up popcorn. It's much nicer than regular popcorn. It's a little burnt, much less buttery. It smells clean and it feels clean, like warm, fluffy carpet pressing against bare feet. It's a nighttime smell, a leisurely smell, a smell of weekend evenings of my youth, friendless, watching television in one room and then another. It's a ballast point of a smell, a centering smell. All the senses you experience at certain points of your life become touchstones for that point or phase, and when that point or phase is when you're coming into being, entering or leaving puberty, these touchstones anchor your perceptions of all other phases and times. The good parts of your thirties will be measured against the good parts of your early and middle teens. Same with the bad, the alluring, the disgusting, and the indifferent.

The good—not having school for 48 or 24 more hours. Dark, usually. Cheap GE bulb lighting, and it always seems like the sun was going down early on those days when I didn't have school. It's cold here, winters last longer than the other seasons, and I usually sleep very late when nothing forces me to get up. Maybe Christmas lights softened things further. Maybe we kept things dim to blot out the clutter and the stains. Maybe I focused so strongly on that smell for the same reason I focused so strongly on other little things, not to lose sight of the big picture but to create for myself a new big picture made up a bunch of small, pleasant little pictures.

The TV in the living room was pretty big, for the time. There was a year or two when I had a recliner right up in front of it. I'd take a shower early on Friday nights and sit in the recliner and watch basketball or a movie and get warm feelings up my back and legs because there was nothing to do tomorrow, or the next day. Mondays then scared me the same way death does now. In the day I'd go into my parents' room, where the cable descrambler was located and the HBO and pay-per-view were free. The detail I focused on in there was the dark robitussin red of the LCD display that looked like a pair of dull 8s in the day and the eyes of a monster at night. My parents' dresser had an old smell that I would later realize was cheap wood and transplanted dust—if dust is moved from one area to another it smells different, almost nice. You have to be very careful not to disturb it. Frames on the wall from when me and Kelsy were very little or from when we lived in the big house on Pershing. The yellow metal glowed gold in the TV nightlight. The pictures were blotted out by the TV light but the frame around the glass glowed gold.

Jay was over one day, most of the day. Like me, he was there for TV. It was February, somewhat warm, and he and me and Kelsy started watching a Twilight Zone marathon around noon on a Saturday. (Do they remember this? No way they remember this. They didn't pay attention to these kinds of details. Their ballasts had passed and were yet to come, respectively. The things they tied themselves down to were different, much less pathetic). We watched all day and I complained when the first episode—the one about the bandaged woman who's beautiful but she's ugly, according to everyone around her, because her face doesn't look like shelf fungus—I complained when the episode ended differently than I had pictured it ending. I thought it finished right when the bandages came off, I thought the dee-do-deedo-dee-do-deedo music start right up and we cut to credits. The poignant part of the episode came afterwards, with a fungus-faced dictator talking on TV about how deviations from the norm will not be tolerated in fungusman society and a doctor telling the pretty lady about this kind of leper colony place they had set up where all the pretty people lived and fraternized with their own kind. I missed the poignant part because I was busy explaining to my only friend and my sister how the episode should have been. As I was saying this I remembered when Jay did the same thing the first time we rented a Cheech and Chong video and Cheech did not have a moustache and that disturbed how he pictured things unfolding so badly that he had to tell me how Cheech should have looked. I remembered thinking that was a wise and informed thing for Jay to say.

We left the house halfway through the marathon. We walked down the orange, bug-repellant lights of the old deserted Main Avenue, long before the resurgence of the shitty bars down there, back when it was just the dark and the cold and a handful of old people driving slowly, presumably towards their deaths. We looked in the boarded-up windows of Rapid Fire Video Games. The shelves were still up and the outside smelled like leaves rotting in a gutter. We made it to Eagle's and the gigantic retarded man who used to touch children's faces was there, and he said something to us about buying too much pop. When we got home, my dad tossed a Sega CD at me. It was Mortal Kombat. He had bought it from Rapid Fire, which had just closed. Then we watched Superdave and Duckman and Jay went home and I went to sleep.

Afterwards, couplethree years later, I was writing a play. (Not a good one.) Jay came over, or was it Zach, one or the other. Maybe both had their own separate day and I combine the two when I remember them. We read through the play and walked to Eagle's, again, in the cold, and I remembered walking down a few years before and how little things had changed. For the first time, time seemed fast. I remember grabbing on to a thick streetlamp pole, it was buzzing, and telling the person I was with that we—meaning I—we should go on more walks like this, get out of the house more. It was disgusting how much time we could spend indoors doing nothing.


That was blurry enough, but all evenings after that blur together even more. I can't tell one phase from another, pre-puberty from puberty from post-puberty. There are some discrete chunks from 14-18, some Jell-O 1-2-3 confused waves blended together bleeded together from 19-21, and from 21 on everything's been whipped together in a thick grey paste. Much more significant things happen much more often, now, but there is no way of remembering them. Now there are scents and songs: I'll get goosebumps from certain brands of chips or I'll tear up when a particular Husker Du song is played, maybe a recalled vision from a second or two from that time will kinda float in back of me, not quite in sight but there, palpable, summer warmth or a winter black. These things are nothing like that Twlight Zone marathon, nothing like the first night I went on a walk and remembered the Twilight Zone marathon.

In an effor​t to make mysel​f a less lazy write​r (or less relia​nt on spell​check​,​ at least​)​,​ I have just bough​t an elect​ric typew​riter​.​ I know,​ I know:​ typew​riter​s are dumb,​ it's not like they have any pract​ical uses,​ every​thing​ that I type up on them will have to be re-​enter​ed in MS Word in order​ for me to do anyth​ing with it, etc. Thank​s for shoot​ing down my dream​s.​ You'​re a dick.​

Anyho​w,​ what I plan on doing​ with this here typew​riter​ is writi​ng a lette​r a day, every​ day, throu​ghout​ all of 2009.​ Even Chris​tmas and my Birth​day.​ This will hopef​ully help me maint​ain bette​r writi​ng habit​s.​ It will hopef​ully also be kind of inter​estin​g.​

Why am I posti​ng this as a bulle​tin?​ Why, becau​se I want to find peopl​e to who want lette​rs sent to them,​ that'​s why. This would​n'​t be very much fun if all I did was send lette​r to my girlf​riend​s and cats.​ If you send me your addre​ss,​ I'll send you at least​ one lette​r somet​ime in 2009.​ If you respo​nd to my lette​r,​ I'll respo​nd to your respo​nse.​ It'​ll be just like the olden​ times​.​

So pleas​e send me your addre​ss.​ If you have a subje​ct matte​r you would​ like to me to talk about​ in your lette​r,​ pleas​e make a note of it.

Hello Hoover High. This is Mr. Abbott. I would love to have a chance to speak to you all in person, but the school board has, wisely, decided to give you all this Friday off so you may deal with this tragedy at home. Lord knows that few of us would be able to have a productive day at school. Still, if you or anyone you know needs any personal assistance over the weekend, you are certainly encouraged to give me or your guidance counselor a call. We will, of course, offer counseling services all next week, and there will be plenty of time for discussion—discussion of feelings, fears, or worries. Whatever you want to talk about, we'll be here to listen.

There are a few things that I feel need to be addressed before the weekend. These things, I am sorry to say, are far too pertinent to far too great a percentage of our student body.

I know that there is a lot of different kinds of music out there. There's grunge, for instance. They had that I when I was young. There's also rap-metal. Or, look: You and I both know that I am not hip. I'm not here pretend that I'm Taylor Swift, or Marilyn Manson. (Obviously I'm neither!) I realize that there's a generation gap between us. That's why I want this to be a two-way communication. I'm gonna listen to you. And I'm gonna try to learn something from you. And in exchange for that, I'd like you guys to do the same for me.

Okay?

Now, we've all been very upset since… since Suzy… moved on, spiritually. Since her soul departed her body. We're all confused. Some of us are mad. We woke up, the day after, and we said to ourselves "Wow, we're really mad right now." And that's fine. It's good to let feelings out. So let them out, everybody. If you got feelings let them out right now, before you move on to the next paragraph.

Alright. And like I was saying, I know you guys listen to a lot of music out there that maybe doesn't have a positive message behind it. Lots of TV shows and movies are the same way. And maybe, maybe they give you guys the wrong idea about suicide. Maybe they make you think it's cool to kill yourself, that's all right, that it'll make all your pain go away and you'll never have to deal with anything any more. All the stresses that you guys are going through right now? Those are nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. When you get into college, and especially when you get older, boy are you going to be in for some pain. And there's no end to it but it death. Every morning there's something to worry about. Every night you got more things to worry about—the more you try dealing with the stuff you have going on in the morning, the more things you have to worry about at night. It's like pouring water on a grease fire and then the curtains start burning, too. You go to punch out the flames on the curtains and your fist goes through the window, tears you up real bad. So—so now, instead of having one little grease fire, you got a big fire and you only got one hand to put it out, and no matter how loud you scream for help no one will ever come to help you.

Every morning I wake up and I hurt. Physically. You will all get fat, you will all get ugly, and there will be no respite, no relief, if you ever think for a second that the world is a decent place or that your life is worth living it's because you are deluded and when you come out of your delusion to see the dismal reality dripping down around you it will be the most miserable thing you ever felt. Because of this, you will shut yourself off from the highs to guard against the lows. You will spend the majority of you life softened by alcohol, television or anti-depressants as everything about yourself, your family, and your world gets progressively worse. So, yeah, right now, in high school, if things are too tough for you then you might as well kill yourself. Right? Right?!?

But no. No, you shouldn't. The reason why is that suicide is bad. Okay? It's bad.

Think about it: if you kill yourself, do you know how many people you'd hurt? Your family, your teachers, your school mates. All the people who were mean to you will feel really guilty. You wouldn't to put them through that, would you? It makes a mess, too. Do you really want to make your mother, or—in Suzy's case, some poor Pizza Hut employee—have to clean that up? After everything else you've put your mother through, would you really want to do that to her?

What if you don't do it right? What if you survive? When you wake up, everyone is going to feel really sorry for you and treat you differently. You might have to miss school for weeks. Maybe even months, without any school, just sitting around and resting until you get better. You don't want that.

So—I, I don't know what… I don't know what you listen to, I don't watch the movies you watch. But I've been around, okay? I know that sometimes thing seem cool, but—have you ever seen Zoobas? We thought those were cool! Okay, it's fad. Just some dumb fad. But you know something? I could throw my zoobas out. I got some khakis, eventually. Suicide? That's forever.