Slouching toward extinction

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16 September 2012

Salt Lake City is quiet on Sundays. The streets are slow and the sun is warm, but beginning to lose its power to the coolness of autumn. The residents of the LDS capital are shopping, indoors with family at church or in cute coffee shops and Whole Foods.

I go to brunch with GF and her brother, Adamantium. GF and I drive to the University of Utah dorms to pick up Adamantium and drive back down to Caffé Niche on 300 South and 800 West. We walk in with the hopes of eating on the patio, yet the patio is full. The hostess with the braid tells us we may have to wait for a table. She explains there is a table by the window, but it is having a “fly situation” at the moment. Due to her further explanation, I am able quickly to dismiss two possible scenarios: (A) The table is having issues zipping up its blue jeans and is too embarrassed or ill-prepared for company. (B) The table is experiencing the height of 1990s cool, yet that acme of awesome has landed it into some sort of kerfuffle, similar to the ones Kid N Play frequently found themselves in. The truth is the simpler version: (C) Several flies of the insect variety buzz around the table. I excuse myself to the restroom in which the reggae music is loud. I return to find a suitable table is ready. We sit, look at the menu and prepare to order.

Throughout brunch, I realize the patrons and restaurant staff are too cool for me. I am resigned to perpetual unfashionability. I cannot hang with hipsters in tucked in black shirts, hipsters with tattoos that have deep meaning and are lyrics from Bon Iver songs, hipsters with thrift store ensembles nicer than anything I own. I am getting too old to matter or fit, not that I ever have found myself comfortable in any setting. I am the gorilla in the midst of glamorous gibbons.

I am becoming irrelevant and anachronistic. GF and I listen to the radio while driving because she prefers the radio and I frequently commandeer the musical choices, which almost never include music found on popular radio. (This statement is not to imply I have any sort of taste, but to highlight the fact that I prefer intolerable music that causes indigestion and has no appeal whatsoever. I am a difficult person to be around.) GF tunes the dial to the “oldies” station. We hear Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” both of which are admonishing us to refrain from quitting (at least until we get enough). These are now oldies? When I was younger, oldies were songs from the 1960s and 1970s, but I suppose we made the leap to the 1980s as the distant past sometime in the last 10 years. Instead of paying attention, I was busy slouching toward extinction.

We are now in our apartment after dropping Adamantium at the dorms and after I purchase a pumpkin spice latte at Whole Foods. While GF does work, I listen to “Armagideon Time” by The Clash and “Sitting Still” by REM. I suppose the songs are fitting for my mood, as I am reaching my personal Armageddon of appositeness. I am sitting still, refusing to upgrade my many-years-old flip phone, thinking that human connection can still exist via email, phone call and letter and postcard writing.

I am the oldies station tuned to only for a second of rosy nostalgia. I am quickly switched in favour of glitzy, ADD rock and Autotuned technopop. I am the post-apocalyptic curmudgeon in self-exile.

-JPR

[Typed on my MacBook Pro, posted on my online blog and promoted via Twitter.]

Before sunrise

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13 September 2012

I awake at 5:15 am today. GF prepares to go to Snowbird for work and I hitch a ride, currently unable to spend $4.70 for a roundtrip ride on TRAX.

We get in the car and pull out of our building’s parking garage into darkness punctuated with the lights of industry: warehouse exterior lights, streetlights, headlights and taillights, traffic lights. The world is starting its arbitrary shift change from night to day.

I feel completely comfortable. I tolerate the daylight hours everyday, but desperately crave the darkness. The wee hours of the morning or the dark after sundown.

The I-15 is shockingly busy at this time of day. The interstate has a magic sheen from the combination of highway lights, automobile lights and the slowly discernible sunlight. The mountains rest calmly in the background, all purple shadows.

GF drops me off at Bakery and Brews, a coffee shop specializing in South American food. The coffee shop is 1/4 mile from where I work. I am able to purchase a coffee and homemade empanada thanks to a rewards card and the owner allowing me to pay him in nickels and dimes. I want everyone in Murray and Salt Lake City to visit Bakery and Brews at least once to try the homemade soup, clam chowder (on Fridays), empanadas, pastries or sandwiches. You can also purchase nutritional supplements if you desire. I have yet to purchase said items, as you can probably tell when you see my unsightly physique ambling along sidewalks.

The sun is up now and I am trying not to be annoyed with it. Every day I wake up hoping this will be the day when the clouds take over and block the sun for 24 hours.

I will do well in the apocalypse. Unless the apocalypse includes a blood red sun, because I imagine that would be even more annoying.

-JPR

Back in Salt Lake City

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10 September 2012

I am listening to Suede by Suede. A TRAX train goes by and the scenery at the Gateway remains the same. Another TRAX train goes by in the opposite direction of the first. I assume the original train realised there would be no passengers aboard and just gave up. I hear you train. Sometimes, you just give up before you get too far.

Yet, with its persistent failures and disappointments life sometimes presents one with pleasantries:

-In Little America, WY, while eating indigestion-causing sandwiches, GF and I spot a “true” cowboy. He walks in wearing a cowboy hat, denim shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots. He walks to the bar, sits down and says, “I’ll have a large Coke to go.” I nearly fainted with the sudden infusion of seemingly-unforced Americana.

-In Fort Collins, CO, GF and I wake one morning to find two children staring at us. Soon their mom, my friend Elizabeth, falls on the air mattress and hugs me.

-GF and I order a “dynamite lunch” at Suehiro in Fort Collins. The dynamite turns out to be a sushi casserole dish. Delightful. We eat the lunch with friends.

-I have lunch with a former professor who I now consider a colleague and friend. Yet, I am still in awe of her. Probably always will be.

-GF and I decided to leave Fort Collins early, book a Days Inn room in Rawlins, WY and eat food from Burger King while watching Monster In Law. The front desk clerk is called Yaya and all of her fingernails are painted a different color.

-On the drive back to Salt Lake City, GF accepts my musical selection of No Doubt’s Return of Saturn. I just love to bathe in my old musical bathwater. (Forced? Who cares?)

Late night, Salt Lake City

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2 September 2012

I set a goal yesterday of getting some writing done and being productive.

Toward that end, I drink two cups of coffee after 10:00 PM and think that the creative juices will flow as I look out the window over the darkened Gateway shopping center. In the distance, over the power substation and Wing Nutz restaurant and Bureau of Land Management building, glows the persistent red neon of the Red Lion Hotel. We seem to be the only ones awake, the Red Lion neon and I. The Z Tejas sign flicks off. One car passes. It looks like the same one that passed five minutes ago. Is the driver lost? Are they on drugs? Are they just looking for a good time, but too afraid to try their luck on a different block?

Sirens blare and dissolve into the distance. Surely, at least they know where they are going. They do not linger on one stretch of road trying to find purpose. They have a goal. Emergencies. They wait for something unsavory to happen and then charge forward. The rest of us are somnambulists, cruising the strip with heavy lids waiting for the lights to no longer turn green so that we know when to stop, when we’re home.

But we just drive and drive, wearing away the same familiar macadam, creating our own ruts and potholes and forgetting to avoid them later.

Yet, the routine hurts and comforts at the same time. The darkness promises comfort and sanctuary. The moon is a friend full of empathy.

Somewhere, there seems to be a mixed metaphor, but I’m not going to try and find it.

Guns

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21 July 2012

After an all-too-common shooting in our country, I feel the need to weigh in on how we can prevent mass murders in future.

There should be no guns or mass murder weapons. No one at all anywhere in the world should be able to have access to or build a gun.

Guns serve absolutely no purpose in this world besides ending life. As a proto-civilized society of humans, we will only develop further by disallowing any thing in our midst with the sole purpose of murder.

Conceal and carry permits frighten me to no end. I think that a person must have something a little bit off if they want to carry a gun on their person at all time. I don’t want to think about the person next to me at work, at school, at the state capitol, at a restaurant or anywhere with a live weapon tucked beneath their short-sleeve dress shirt (that one may be Utah specific).

The 2nd Amendment is an outdated code from a different time. We should take a hard, honest look at ourselves as a people and consider what it says about us that we would continue to codify the right to stockpile the ability to murder multitudes of our own while being unable to codify even the most basic human rights guarantees for minority groups, women and lower- and middle-income workers.

We’ve got it wrong. Give up your guns.

-JPR