Author: Bukkhead

I'm the writer here.
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Suicide is Painless, My Ass

I made a mistake, and decided to join a Crossfit Gym. I believe “mistake” is the proper nomenclature, since people who are already fit don’t need to torture themselves further, and people who are not already fit would do better to take a cyanide pill.

But I did it, perhaps due to some sort of mid-life crisis thing. I’m 43. I don’t know if I’m old enough to have a mid-life crisis yet, but then, I was always an over achiever. I don’t much care for sports cars, I find people younger than my wife dull to speak to and the only ones who are better looking are artifacts of expert Photoshopping skills. Therefore I’m left, in this crisis, with reshaping my body. Hey, Play-Do’s easy to shape, and my body looks like it fell out of a Play-Do can, so this is the right thing to do, right?

So I did what any red-blooded American man with a beer belly and 2004 Kia Spectra would do: I got a Groupon. 15 classes for 40 dollars. What a bargain, right? That’s, what, less than 3 dollars per class? No. It’s 20 dollars per class because even though I am going to go back, it’s only so I can revenge-die on my instructor.

I admit I had some masochistic fantasies before I showed up. I imagined a 28 year-old blonde named Cynthia Killstrong in tight yoga pants and wrist-wraps shouting at me and a dozen other flabbies:

PICK UP THAT BARBELL!

PUT IT BACK DOWN!

PICK UP THAT BARBELL I SAID!

I SAID PUT IT BACK DOWN!

WHY IS THAT BARBELL ON THE FLOOR?

I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO PUT IT BACK DOWN!

I’m sure you can see the appeal, but it wasn’t like that at all.

First of all, there was a dog, a cute little thing, hanging out in the doorway, basking in the sun, Only later did I realize what that look on her face was saying, “Too bad you’ve got opposable thumbs. Those medicine balls aren’t going to pick up themselves. Sucker”

And the guy who runs the place, Dave, seemed like a decent guy. He took my Groupon without a second glance, handed me an iPad and had me sign a waiver. I’m not sure, but I think the fine print said something about Dave no being responsible for exploding lung syndrome, sudden heart failure, or spontaneous combustion.

But my point is, walking in, that was easy. And the people there were nice. And encouraging. You know what I’m saying? I was all so very seductive, which is the very definition of evil.

Actually, I think I can sum the whole experience up like this: the gym is in the gutted remains of an old DMV building. I am not making that up. I used to go there when I was feeling good about myself and needed to be brought back down to earth, as well as new tags for my Kia. Now it’s just a hollow shell. But still filled with pain.

We did some warm-up things, the usual low-impact exercises, like walking back and forth while kicking our legs above our heads. Apparently, what we were warming up was the nerve endings in our spines, to make us feel the pain better. We did some “grapevines,” which I did in an aerobics class once, so that triggered some nice, comforting PTSD. Then we grabbed barbells, balanced them on our shoulders, and did some squats.

Listen to me very closely: all those pictures you see of people doing squats with actual weights on their barbells? Photoshop. Has to be.

After our “warm-up,” Dave explained the Crossfit philosophy. We were going to do some exercises, and then weren’t going to do them again for months. We didn’t want our bodies to get used to any one set of movements, you see. By continuing to shock our systems every time we came to the gym, we were guaranteed to be in the maximum amount of pain every single day.

And then we did the “workout of the day,” which that day was “Wallballs and Burpees.” I know what you’re thinking—wasn’t that the name of a discontinued kids TV program from the 70s? No. Actually, it’s the name of the two devil-beasts Satan keeps next to him at all times. I think.

Burpees: crouch down, throw your legs back, do a push up, bring your legs back in, jump up in the air clap your hands. Sounds easy, right? I would laugh right now if I wasn’t hopped up on so many painkillers that the FBI has started a file on me just in case it has something to do with local Meth sales. I’m not sure what the hand clap is for. A sharp sound to reassure others you’re not dead, yet, maybe.

Wallballs: take a medicine ball (medicine in the sense that theses balls will cure you of that certain ailment called “not feeling extremely awful”) throw it up about eight feet against a wall, catch and drop down into a crouch, stand up and throw again. (I was careful of my wording there. I did not say “throw UP again” cause that’s a given.)

21 of each, then 15, then 9. It took me 8 minutes and 22 seconds. This is good, because now I know how it takes to die of combined heart lung and soul failure.

But here’s the worst part. There I am, trying to pull my intestines back into my mouth from where they had tried to escape my body. My skin all blotchy red from simultaneous oxygen deprivation and overload. My vision down to pinpricks. And then Dave walked over to me, with his dog by his side. And he gave me a fist bump. And he said nice job. And he said, “See you on Monday?”

And I said yes.

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5th of May, and Me No Burrito

fiction by Jason Edwards

Just a walk in the park. Not a metaphor. High cholesterol. I’m 53. Too young to die; too old to start something new. Still. Wife likes the time to herself. At least it’s a nice day. Stupid sodium.

Trash on the path. Piece of cardboard. And this is supposed to be the nice part of town. My doctor says “When I walk, I pick up trash. Stretches the back. Sitting is the new smoking.” Fine. My good deed. Earn an extra helping of couscous. What the hell is couscous.

“Anything helps.” That’s what the cardboard says. One of those homeless signs. They stand by the highway. A good reason to turn up the radio. But the nearest off ramp’s two miles from here. Like I said, the nice part of town.

And what’s that smell. That’s marker smell. This sign is fresh. But why is it here. Somebody wrote this only an hour ago. I’m like CSI right now with my deductions skills.

Maybe he sleeps in the park. And he makes a sign. And he walks to the highway. And then what. Does he buy a frozen burrito from the 7-11? One of those sodium bombs? Does he have high cholesterol?

Is he 53 like me? Is he too old to die, too young for hospice? My kid, he’s 23, he says, when you’re old enough to know you’re going to be dead someday, the rest of life is chasing distraction. Existential discomfort. Everything else is hospice.

I could go to 7-11. I could buy a burrito. I could find this guy. I could give it to him. Cinco de Mayo, I could say. That’s a good walk, four miles. Earn me more than couscous. Seriously, what the hell is it.

But he doesn’t have his sign. So how can he be at the highway. I’ll never find him.

There’s a trash can. Next to a park bench. I could leave the sign for him. But what if some other old geezer who doesn’t watch CSI finds it.

I guess the park is a little cleaner now. Still the nice part of town. I’ll sit on the new bench. If sitting is the new smoking, it’s time for a smoke break. More hospice. My kid’s kind of an asshole.

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The Mariners Lost Last Night

mariners capI can very much appreciate it if someone is not into sports. In and of themselves, most sports are pointless. They’re just entertainment, one choice in a slew of others—why watch a baseball game when one can watch one of a million TV shows on demand? Or read a book, or go for a walk, or sit in front of the computer and write a novel? And don’t get me started on how much those guys who throw a ball around for a few hours a day get paid. My point is: you’re not into sports? I get it, I accept it.

I used to be the same way, frankly, but for the past 10+ years I’ve lived in a city big enough to support a few major sports organization. And there’s an identity one has, living in a city, and rooting for the home team Not everyone in Seattle roots for the Mariners—we’re a fairly hipster town. But some of us do, and some of us do because we love where we live. Call it civic pride.

But the Mariners lost their second game of the season. No big deal though, right? It’s only game two out of a 162. And they won their first game! Still, if you’re not a sports fan, or if you’re not a baseball fan in particular, or if you don’t follow the Mariners, then you don’t know: already there’s rumblings.

When non baseball-fans think baseball, they think Yankees, maybe Red Sox, they think about the most recent world series winner (the San Francisco Giants). And, for the most part, these are winning teams. I’ll be blunt: they’re winners because they pay for the top talent.

The Mariners, finally, have started paying for top talent. Thanks to a loophole in the MLB profit-sharing rules, they had an extra 190 million to spend on guys like Nelson Cruz and Robinson Cunoe. The talk through all of spring training has been: the Mariners are the team to watch this year.

And that’s saying something, as the Mariners have not been to the playoffs since 2001. Last year, they were literally one-game away from making the playoffs. The very idea that the Mariners could be playing in October is a bit apocalyptic. People who live in Seattle, who have civic pride, who identify with the Mariners—all of us are tired of, but used to, our team losing.

Which is why, despite the season being only 1.2345679 percent complete (that’s the real number- baseball’s all about esoteric stats) we’re all a little anxious at this point. Yes, the Mariners won their first game (thanks in no small part to our Cy Young award-winning pitcher) but we got no production in that game from that new 190 million dollar talent we brought in. And none again last night. Are we doomed?

Another team people think about when they think baseball is the Cubs. The perennial losers. The last time the Cubs were in the world series, the Mariners weren’t even a team yet. Heck, the first MLB team Seattle ever had, the Pilots, wasn’t even a team yet. The Cubs have been to the World Series six times in the last 100 years and lost every time.

Is that to be Seattle’s fate? We lost last night—it’s really hard to think about anything else.

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Three Songs That Are Important To Me

Writing about music is very difficult. That’s a plain, vague, throw-away kind of sentence, hardly very evocative, and truly representative of most writing about music. Liking, which is to say, judging music is just too subjective. Asking people what kind of music they like is a fairly intimate question: asking them to name their favorite band or song is downright invasive. At least it can seem to be. Responses usually give no real insight into the person being asked. At best, they’ll tell you, “I like all kinds of music.”

Sitting here and writing about three songs that are important to me is going to be tough. Especially since my tastes run to songs without words, so there’s no interpreting what a song “says,” to me. Nor do I attach any kind of significance to life events and the music that accompanied them. (Why not? See above: subjectivity.) Seriously, you’re getting more about me from the fact that I’m writing this at all than you are from what it is I’m actually saying.

Three songs that are important to me, then: Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto no. 20,’ Tool’s ‘Right in Two,’ and ‘Zombie Harem’ by Daikaiju. I really don’t think I can tell you why they’re important. I just now that I need them to be available to me and they’ve become like old friends, songs I can count on if I need to count on anything at all.

carlsbad sunsetThe Mozart Piano Concerto no. 20 is in D minor, a key for brooding, but an active brooding, a stomping through darkened streets kind of brooding, heavy coat and fog and a frown turned sneer turned snarl. It starts off with the orchestra setting the main tone and theme, and then the piano comes in gentle and quiet, building to a fury and then backing off again. The second movement is like the coming of a storm, building and building and finally crashing down around you, only to calm down at the end and leaving you in sunlight. Sunlight, you see, the third movement, playing in D major, all of the D minor demons exorcised and the world bright once again.

Tool is a band from Los Angeles, and have been around for 20+ years. This is a band that defies description: call them “prog rock,” and the hard-rock fans shake their head, call them “hard rock”; and the math boys curl their upper lips. ‘Right in Two’ starts with just guitars and bass playing stunted arpeggios, in 3/4 time. 3/4 develop into 11/4, and as the song progresses, as the drums come in, the time signature continues to evolve. The song gets more complex, layers instrumentation on top of more time changes, until a final rush of tightly controlled fury. This is one of my favorite songs to listen to when I’m running.

Daikaiju is a surf-guitar band out of Huntsville Alabama. This is the new generation of surf-guitar, the hard-rock kind that takes the old reverb, cranks it way up, and runs around the stage, getting fans tangled up in the guitar cords. (That’s both an aural metaphor and literal description: their stage antics are as wild and crazy as their guitar licks). For all its craziness, ‘Zombie Harem’ more or less follows a kind of minuet format. Riff A, development, Riff B, repeat; middle section; repeat Riff A and B. As simple as it is, it nevertheless fills you up. It’s all energy. It’s sweat and thirst; you can’t help but play air guitar along with it. Which I do, pretty much everytime, even if I’m out running and it comes on my iPod, even if I’m three miles overdo for a stop—I have to run even faster when it comes on.

~~~

As writing exercises go, let me say this: I wrote way more than I thought I would, here. And I feel like I wrote hardly anything at all. Ah well. At least I’m writing. Maybe that’s a take-away here: if music is just good because it simply is, then writing can just be as well.

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Nothing Much to Do in Hawaii

You stop the car and the Hawaii heat comes back because there’s no more driving breeze. You can feel it in your bones. Even if you’re only in your (early!) forties, you can see why old people move to places like Miami and Arizona. Why not Hawaii? The long flight? The disappointingly drab view from the airplane window when the plane is landing? Waiting in line for what seems like hours at the car rental place? The really bad radio stations, driving around the edge of Kuia, from airport to vacation rental?

outdoor-showerEverything is bright, so bright you don’t notice the out-door shower. Later in the week you’ll take Instagram photos from inside that shower, of the nearby flowers and distant mountains. But for now you just want to haul your bags inside and have a beer. The house is green. Not a real-estate, easy-to-sell green, but an almost garish green. Three years later, writing down a description of the place for a writing-course blog entry, you’ll think: monopoly house green.

It’s not a big house, but it’s big enough. A back door leading into the kitchen. A rickety table, something from the seventies. Well trod linoleum. A squat fridge; your fridge at home is an enormous, brushed-stainless-steel behemoth, but this one’s short enough to see the top, where you can set your bag of groceries. Some sweet onion potato chips, a few cans of spam, more than one six-pack. 11 of 12 bottles go into the fridge; the other goes in your hand.

The kitchen window with the view of the beach a few blocks away. The next room, a sitting area, large, overstuffed couches that would be miserable in this heat. Because it’s stifling in here. You glance at one bedroom with its tiny bed. Pass the cramped bathroom. Step outside onto the porch, two rocking chairs, a card table, more view of beach.

And then the breeze arrives, gentle, like it wants to ask you a question. You sit down in one of the rocking chairs, open the beer, and drain half of it. You ask yourself, where else would you want to be right now? You’re not even sure if any other place on earth exists right now.

The breeze moves around, makes the grass in front of the green house wave, plays in the distant palm trees. The sun’s getting ready to think about setting, but content for the moment to loll in the sky. Deep blue, probably goes on forever.

You notice your beer is empty, so you stand up. Notice how the screen door creeks when you open it. The floorboards, too, as you walk into the kitchen. Grab another beer. This house is starting to feel like your threadbare Hawaiian shirt (had it for 10 years) and your easy-fit cargo shorts. Where did your shoes go? Nevermind. Grab a book from the shelf of vacation-left-behinds next to the door. Something with guns and intrigue and romance. Stuff you don’t really have in your life.

But you’ve got that beer, that breeze, that rocking chair. That’s really all you need. All you want, too. So turn to page one. You’re going to be here for a while.

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Freewriting Exercise

1:08 PM. Here it is day one of this writing course thing and I’ve already failed. Instead of free writing for twenty minutes, I wrote a thousand words about my first Crossfit experience. Oh well. Maybe I’ll clean it up and publish it later. For now, I guess I get to start over.

Free writing. I dunno. It’s not my thing? I don’t like this much self-reflection? So write something else then? Once upon a time there was a prince who lived in a great big castle, named Steve. The castle was named Steve, not the prince. Princes are rarely called Steve. Castles are also rarely called Steve too, but this one was.

Ugh, barf. Here’s the thing I know about why I’m no free writer—I have made more typos than usual. I make a lot of typos, I know, but I feel like I’ve hit backspace as much as I’ve hit space bar in the last few minutes.

I guess this is supposed to be a habit-making thing. If I can spend twenty minutes physically sitting in front of a physical keyboard and physically tap my physical fingers on the physical keys, then surely I can do that when the doing of that has another purpose. Feels like sitting on a bed and spinning my legs in the air so that I can run to the grocery store the next day.

1:13 PM Five minutes done, a quarter of the way there. Yippee Skippy. Speaking of grocery stores, and Skippy: we’re a Jif household. This is important. Long nights sitting on front the computer screen, browsing Reddit and eating peanut butter right out of the jar. Can’t do that with Skippy. Long nights fighting whatever the opposite of insomnia is. But not fatigue. Wanting to be an insomniac. Because then I could get things done.

As it is I get things done in the morning, before the wife wakes up. She’s a nine-hour-a-night-er, and I’m a 7.5-er, but I’m also an always-up-at-5-am-er. No good reason for it. Ugh, me me me. Let’s talk about something else. In two minutes we’ll talk about something else. I mean, I will. I mean write, not talk. About something else. Castle Steve. It’s the only castle in all of France made of wood! Yep, The Prince of Castle Steve is French. I’ve been to France. Twice. Paris twice, as well as parts of not-Paris. But mostly Paris.

It’s not as bad as people say. Parisians are no more rude than anybody anywhere are if you don’t come at them with entitlement and attitude.

1:18 PM Halfway done. This is a chore. I guess that’s the point. The Prince of Castle Steve doesn’t do chores. He doesn’t have to, of course, and even if he did have to do chores, he wouldn’t. Cause what’s the point? It’s not like the Princess of, um, what’s another word for Castle? Palace. Yes. It’s not like the Princess of Palace Cynthia is going to like him more or less than she already does or doesn’t just because he does or doesn’t do chores. Like, what’s he going to do, anyway? Fold clothes? He’s the freakin’ Prince of Castle Steve! He doesn’t know even know where the Laundry Room is!

I mean Royal Laundry room! Just now I went back and added “Royal” in front of “Laundry Room” and then I decided that since I’m free writing I shouldn’t edit, so I went back and un-edited my edit. And I’m pretty sure un-editing is still editing. Two wrongs, making a right. No one has to know. Except for me, who wrote this, who is writing this, and you, the unfortunate idiot who decided to read this screed. Back to TPoCS? Sure. In a minute. Cause that will be the 75% mark. Speaking of editing, am I allowed to go back and correct the typos I’m not catching on the fly? Well of course I am. Who’s going to stop me or punish me or tell me I am doing things wrong? I’m a 43 years-old-man, I’m not going to listen to anyone!

1:23. TPoCS doesn’t do chores, and truth be told, hasn’t ever met TPoPC, or even know if she exists. Nor does she know about him. Also, she does chores. No because she has to, but because we live in a sexist world and women always ended up suffering one way or another, especially in made-up worlds created by men. Which reminds me of something.

I have this memory of a few scenes from a movie where this nerdy type guy (Jeff Bridges) is at a formal party (tuxedos) and tells his friends that if his ex (Elle McPherson) arrives, not to let him go home with her, because she will just use him for sex. And of course she shows up, he leaves with her, and the next morning she is getting dressed and he asks if he can call her and she says, what would be the point of that?

You see? That’s like a male fantasy wrapped up tight in a swaddle of misogyny. I bring it up because I want to look up that movie and see if it was directed by Woody Allen. Because all of his movies are misogynistic. Woody Allen would totally want to produce that story of TPoCS and TPoPC, star-crossed lovers who have never met and never will.

Those chores TPoPC does? I don’t know. It’s 1:28. I get to be done now.

P.S. The Mirror Has Two Faces, directed by Barbara Streisand! Boy, was I wrong! Written by some French dudes though, so there’s that.