Frantic Wednesday

A freelancer’s kitchen table, 2:10 p.m.

Thought I’d take this one available breath to welcome you to Wednesday. Right now it’s lunch and I’m at the mall, thumbing through the latest Vanity Fair (bondo-Madonna sexing up Mother Earth with her leather-smoothed curves) and inhaling the greasy cheese. This is my semi-respite from freelance demands, although, thanks to cellular technology, anyone can find me—and someone just did: my old boss/editor/Talk Like a Pirate Day founder John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur. He buzzed and buzzed while I watched my phone go vvvvvvm across the tabletop. He’s offering me a potential gig at a cannabis magazine in Corvallis. So whoop, I may not be freelance much longer but a gainfully employed chronicler of chronic.

Should I take it? I should at least check it out, right? Admittedly, my knowledge of the vegetation is minimal save a brief and active relationship with its flammability in the early ’90s, and even then my adventures weren’t exactly the stuff of legend. Once my fellow freaks and I, cross-legged in a downtown Albany room, lit and passed, lit and passed, until I coulda swore we were watching a very special episode of David Letterman that transcended the concept of time as we knew it. We lit up another night a few months later and I walked home, my buzz turning the color of Black Sabbath Vol. 4. I was so afraid the cops would stop me—in fact, I honestly thought they were rustling overhead in trees, desperate to nab my grimy ass once and for all—that I began concentrating on the center of the sidewalk, remembering the sage advice of an old swimming teacher who taught us how to backstroke in a straight line. When I reached my studio apartment, I was relieved until I realized I was hungry; being a perennially penniless bachelor, I had fuck-all in my cupboards and icebox except Thanksgiving gruel from three years earlier that I’d yet to toss. What to do? Easy enough: as a writer, I could create my own motive for going to the store. Within minutes I’d fabricated an entire plotline for the police and the 7-Eleven clerk who would otherwise intuit my mind’s outer-space sabbatical and do something fucked up, like have me arrested or banish me from the condiments like they did that one dude they found Hoovering jalapenos with a plastic spoon. Then, I struck upon the brilliant notion to document my speaking voice and practice my small-chatter delivery until I, as a passive listener on the playback, would be fooled into thinking I-me was sober as a council: Hello. How are you this evening? Heh heh. You too! After ten minutes, my verdict: I had no idea. I was just gonna have to chance it, which I did. And lemmetellya, friends, it’s been years since I’ve had a Cherry Coke and four raw ham-and-cheese Hot Pockets that tasted so delicious. The syrup kissed the cherries and made love to the cheese and caressed the pig and they all frolicked down my throat with siren ballads on their angel lips.

Outside of those two incidents, well, I used to sit in my bedroom and groove on Tone-Lōc’s “Cheeba Cheeba” (you know, the one that sampled Stevie’s “Maybe Your Baby” from Talking Book), the first song I remember of my Just Say No generation to strongly advocate the recreational puff. This was back when most local teenagers preferred the bottle-wet high, anyway: made you belch, barf, fight, fuck, dance, and hug. Why would Albany yearlings want to passively sit around and ponder life’s cosmic mysteries when there was vast shitkicker flatland to hell up?

I’m nine months into this freelance career, and I’m still not sure what to think. Earlier this month, a pair of Los Angeles saints—the very two women who hired me at Rhino in 2000, turns out—brought me aboard a new Internet venture, offering me a monthly retainer that easily whoa-hosses my rent. And somehow every month a byline offer comes through, thanks to friends in various vocations I’ve professionally known. I’m so blessed in that sense. There’s also the satisfaction of succeeding on your own name and reputation rather than in a larger entity’s impressive/oppressive shadow. But I’d really like to indulge in long-form journalism again, maybe some travel stories, something that requires weeks of coverage and research and sups on offbeat detail. At the same time I miss the rapport of an office, people to bounce ideas off of, the communal pursuit of a shared goal—the edification of the printed word—the idea that we all share Hell together. Outside of newspapers and cannabis joints, where am I gonna find that locally?

Hm. Maybe I’m a dishwasher with a future.

Dishwasher With a Past

Sometimes I indulge this fantasy: Dishwasher with a Past. Not of shame, but accomplishment. Every night I’d chip off the old gleam, scrubbing it to evanescence. Waitresses would whisper, “He used to be somebody, but he walked away,” while I, oblivious, sprayed entrée guts down drains and waited for the clock-out, when I could roll hovel-ward and drop my bones for some late-night TV, beer in hand and not a thought in my head. My gold and platinum records and journalism plaques would adorn some upstairs wall, and I’d show them to the occasional visitor. “Where did you get those?” he or she would gasp. “My other life,” I’d sigh beneath a wistful, faraway gaze. Naturally, there’d be follow-ups. “Don’t you ever miss it?” “Why’d you leave it all behind?” “What truly lives in those dishwater hands?” I’d respond the only way I could. “Hey,” I’d say. “Let’s go bowling.” So we would. Three games on a 12-pound ball. On my very last frame, I’d finally break 200 with a climactic turkey. Returning to a chorus of back-pats and steins aloft, I’d know I’d done the right thing. Because Dishwasher with a Past is an awesome bowler.