2000

It was like flying to Mars: we wanted to go, had no reason to go and made art about what it would be like to go. We let researchers hint at what could happen if we were to go and how these things could lead to a fundamental change in the way we thought about the universe.

The year 2000, we knew, was going to be a gigantic fucking deal.

I’d say a galactic gigantic fucking deal IF people wouldn’t have started talking about how 2000 wasn’t actually the real millennium. It should be celebrated in 2001, they said, because of Jesus, the Romans, shortwave radio…

But then, luckily, people found out their clocks might not work in 2000 and everyone focused on thinking about a cool name for that problem: Y2K. No one, of course, had any good reason to call it “Y2K” (as opposed to “a clock problem”), but it’s hard to convince people to live in bunkers or build up cults without giving them something sexy.

Y2K also sounded computer-y. It sounded like the fuse in the back of one of those warehouse-sized 1950s computers that answers story problems and/or makes quips in robot-speak. “Recommend abort phase. Do not allow for validity of enterprise. Perhaps operations could be recalculated if keyboard wasn’t sticky. “

Anyway, on New Year’s Eve 1999, you needed to be somewhere memorable in the event that we made it through the night.

Example: I was lucky enough to be at a mega-church youth group party where the only person I knew was a girl who invited me but left with an older guy to drink and get fingered. I think I had a brief fantasy about a disaster happening and me salvaging the night by saving the world.

But at midnight: Nothing. People just screamed, shuffled and talked about how baffled they were by the date.

2000? What? Crazy!!!

The next year, a few purists tried to have “real millennium” millennium parties. No one cared though because the number 2001 doesn’t look like the number 2000.

Positive

A Taiwanese woman asked me what my blood type was.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t know?” she said.

“A … A positive,” I said.

“Ha!” she said. “Of course you are. A positive. A positive! Perfect.”

“Perfect?” I said. “Why? What does that –”

“– You are an A positive. You are so an A positive. You’re like my husband.”

“Your husband?” I said. “What’s he like?”

“Him? Oh, you know. Detail oriented. Possessive.”

“Possessive?”

“But very sweet, like… very … I don’t know. Like you!”

“Oh. So he’s an A positive, too?”

“Yes. Yes yes. He’s an A positive. And so are you!”

“Right,” I said. “What’s your…”

“Type?”

“Yes.”

“O positive! Not an A. No. No no no. Can’t you tell?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “What’s an O positive–”

“–We are very outgoing and charming and fun and not afraid.”

“I can see that,” I said. “That’s fair.”

“Completely,” she said, “completely — completely completely completely different than A positives.”

Feely

I don’t know what to do when I’m alone in a room with a person I don’t want to talk to and that person who I’m alone in a room with makes an offensive comment about society.

“Yuck,” this guy who I was alone in a waiting room with last week said. “I’m really getting sick of this touchy-feely shit.”

This guy, a 1952-big-band-enthusiast-who-makes-large contributions-to-his-fraternity type, acted like he was making this comment to himself but, I will tell you fucking what, he said it in a way someone waiting for a ticket might say “looks like the line’s not moving too much.”

But I didn’t want to agree with him, because (1.) I didn’t want to get dragged into a conversation and (2.) he was watching news coverage of Enterprise, Alabama residents trying to help students from their local high school feel welcome at a building that would serve as a school until the community could repair the damage to their actual high school that was hit by a tornado. A tornado that killed eight students.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he added, “it’s a tragedy and everything. But come on.”

I tried to act preoccupied. However, that kind of thing only works if:

1.) You are at a distance where it’s conceivable you couldn’t hear the person who is talking

or

2.) You are in the room with at least one other person he could have been directing his comments toward

or

3.) You are able to use the explanation “Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you” if that person repeats the question and requests that you alone respond. Like, “So, what do you think of this situation, huh?”

I was 10 feet from the guy, so I ended up saying “uh-huh.” I told myself this was OK because it wasn’t like I was agreeing outright.

Yeah, I know.

And I know it’s like when a petty moralist will, for instance, consider himself not to be lying when he says, “No, I didn’t see anything bad happen” and will rest the truth of the statement on a literal interpretation of the word “see.”

Like:

-”Dude, why did you say you didn’t see those guys take my shit? I know you did.”

- “What? All right. Hey, fuck you. OK, look, I heard them go into your room and I saw the plans they drew up before they did it. Like I said, I didn’t see anything happen.”

Anyway, I just didn’t really want to talk to that one guy at all ever and I didn’t want to hear his point of view and I didn’t want to tell him mine because it wouldn’t have changed anything and if it did I wouldn’t care because, all around, he’d still be a fuckrod.

Kit

I.

My rear view mirror fell off three weeks ago and my dad’s a mechanic so I called him.

Two week ago, I went to the auto department in Wal-Mart. I asked the woman working to help me find the kind of repair kit Dad recommended because I couldn’t find it myself.

Last week, I looked at a diagram on the back of the package that showed how to use the product.

Yesterday, my dad reattached the mirror. I was home for the weekend.

II.

Wednesday, a police officer pulled me over for what he called “speeding and swerving all over the road.”

I told him I was very sorry. I also told him I was late for an appointment and had just finished shaving and was trying to look in the flip-down mirror to see if I had cut myself.

“Sir,” I said. “Sir.”

“All right,” he said, bringing back my license and expired car insurance. “Try to drive safe and … try checking your shaving later.”

III.

This is what my car looks like: white, chubby, American.

Also:

• It is a 1991 Ford Tempo with a maroon interior.
• One of my side mirrors is a spare-parts replacement, so it is a different shape than the other one.
• The red Australian dirt rust on the outside is creeping up the doors like water in a fish bowl.

My parents had me take a picture of the Tempo so my uncle, who gave me the car, could have a laugh about how shitty it’s gotten.

IV.

Paranoid as I am, I don’t feel worried about driving without car insurance. This is, of course, the exact wrong reaction to have. Everyone should have car insurance, especially if you’re a bad drivers.

And I’m a bad driver.

“But I’ve gotten better,” I say.

Really, I’m kind of hoping someone will steal/fuck up my car. I could get money for a new car. Then, I would have a new car worth something and might have a legitimate concern about people trying to steal/fuck it up.

Last month, someone did steal the car kit CD player from under the driver’s seat. You could see the disc spinning on it because it had a little window on top.

Without that, the only other thing of value in my car might be the bottles of oil my dad uses when he checks the oil. When I come home on some weekends.

Beth

I went to junior high with a girl named Beth who had almost the same last name as me.

It was my last name, plus the letter “S.”

“Hey,” someone might say, excited by the idea that they might have discovered a fact. “Are you and Beth related?”

“No,” I would say. “She has an ‘S’ on the end of her name.”

And here’s where people got suspicious. They would give a look and say “Really, not at all?” like just because our names were similar, that might mean we were half-related.

But we weren’t, which was good. (1.) Beth’s dad was divorcing Beth’s mom to have sex with another woman. (2.) Beth’s mom was the junior high computer teacher, so Beth couldn’t do anything without her mom knowing.

Also, women teachers gossiped about Beth’s family all the time because they told each other they were concerned.

Her went to a charismatic church and loved Jesus, they said, such a shame.

Another reason not to be related to Beth in a small evangelical school: her younger brother was gay to the point of seeming British.

Beth, however, was not homosexual. In fact, my friend Jeremy Fitch maintains to this day that he touched her breast for several minutes in the seventh grade. To be fair, I think he’s lying, though I think she would have let him if he would have given it a few more weeks.

Right or wrong, people believed it. There was already a rumor that his hand draped over her shoulder once to the point of touching her clothed nipple.

I saw it, too.

But I tried not to act impressed. After all, I had touched my first clothed breast several months before that. The boob-owner went on to be a fat whore, however, so denied it for years after that. Only when a girl who knew the boob-owner said, “Did you ever even fucking care about me?” at a New Year’s Eve party, did the boob-touching come out, along with a slew of other confessions.

Anyway, Beth went on to marry Thomas, a junior high friend of mine who also had a mushroom/”skateboard” hair cut during those years. Thomas, like Beth, had a strained home life. His mother had crooked teeth and his father was a suicidal missionary. He had a mean dog, too.

Also, Beth lived at a house three blocks from mine for five years after we stopped going to school together and I never went over to see her once.

Juice

Bourbon has started tasting like apple juice to me and I don’t know what that means.

Wait, yes I do. It means I’m a fucking alcoholic. (Note: I said that in a half-joking way, so it it doesn’t count.)

Here’s another idea, both bourbon and apple juice have the same base ingredient, which gives them a similar flavor. It’s like how deep-fried pickles and deep-fried gizzards taste the same.

All right, if I understand the distillation process correctly, and I don’t, the sugar floating around in the oak barrel turns into alcohol or eats away the stuff that is trying to dissolve the alcohol or fertilizes fish eggs with a mighty bow. Or something. My dad said the alcohol turns back into sugar in your body, so, however sugar is involved, my justification for drinking liquor over beer is dumb.

Whatever, you know I look good, Dad.

I really don’t think I have to make an argument about apple juice being all sugar, except possibly to Past Me. Past Me got told a few years ago that apple juice was a fruit juice like Orange Crush was a fruit juice because it is not fruit juice at all most of the time.

“Oh yeah,” a friend said when I told him about it. “My brother used to drink apple juice all the time. Man, he got so fat.”

That’s all right, I like super-real apple juice better than regular apple juice anyway. “What the hell is super-real apple juice?” you might say. REVELATION: It’s called cider, fuckers.

And I’ll tell you what, the world/I need a store that sells seasonal drinks all year round. Cider, eggnog, glogg. The whole deal.

The world/I also need a store that puts their freshest milk closer to the front of the freezer. This way, I won’t have to move old-ass milk out of the way to get to stuff that will be good five days from now. Look, I feel guilty when the store employees are back there stocking the fridge, like, “What in the fuck is that sack-tissue doing? Ugh, we’ll never sell all this old milk that no one wants at this rate.”
But let me ask you this, as gross as drinking human milk would be, is it really that much grosser than drinking the substance that comes from the teat of a cow? OK, that’s a stupid analogy because I just thought about how we eat stuff from animals all the time and not from people.

Hmm, I just realized someone could convince me men can produce milk.