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Had a couple of those days last week: The curtain rod falls as I step from the shower. Toilet
chain’s loose so the bowl’s running. Nothing in the mailbox but glossy garbage and late fees. As I
plow the six miles to work through dry headwind, raw metal complaints leak from my bike. I’m twenty-
seven years old scrubbing UPS trucks every night, eking out a few extra bones in hopes of propelling
my wife and me through graduate school--for what? A guarantee? Yeah, of $40,000 in the hole.
Pedaling home with blistering wind at my back, feeling like Ichabod Crane, I witness a Lexus
split a prairie dog in half. Not a brake light. I steer close to look for life in the blackening stain.
I huff a cuss and lift my middle finger; not out of anger or sadness, though; I’m wan. I want to drool
tears from my mouth.
A forest fire burns apocalyptic white from Lefthand Canyon. We need rain. I’m taking everything
personally and don’t want to stop doing so, for that leaves me with only rationale. And rationale inevitably
leads to frustration, for my hopelessness is ultimately unfounded. So now I’m feeling even more hopeless
because my despair is unsubstantiated and, like any modern man, any Kierkegaard, my mind requires that
despair be justified.
At home my wife’s wedged into the side of our couch. Her eyes are wet. Her student teaching
is demanding sixty-hour weeks. She needs a sounding board. I’m bleeding under two fingernails and my
back is tender from scraping mud off the floorboards of truck No.103848, so excuse me while I scour the
grime from my palms and start dinner--“Hell yes, I’m listening, you know, but I’m also starving--”
Waiting for the water to boil, my mouth leaps open. Out of nowhere I stab her with, “You know
how long it’s been since we had sex?” My wife deflates. I overcook the noodles. She drifts over after
dinner, moving on me obligatorily, wearing her asexuality like wet clothes. These artificial movements
are time bombs. What we try to do to each other feels vulgar. We stop with mutual declarations of fatigue,
but her face reads of failure that stretches in every direction.
Up at 5:30 a.m. with muddy veins and knotted shoulders. We move through the kitchen like two
negatively charged magnets. I drop her at the bus stop. We kiss but under our lids we’re looking off
in the distance.
I’m late for class with no meter change. Two different convenience store clerks look at me
like I’m begging for their kidneys.
Let me tell you, I’d rather face a European soccer riot than try to find parking in Boulder,
but the skies crack open with rays of light and there’s a vacant space ten feet from my building. I
slide in--a shift of luck?--and feed all my coins to the meter.
But strolling out of class I can actually sense the parking ticket--BUMPER INTRUDING INTO ADJACENT
SPACE, $15.
I rip the ticket from my wiper, growling, “Fifteen bucks for seven inches! That’s ten more
trucks I gotta wash!” Three nearby sorority sisters give me their “whatever” looks; currents, ions,
chemical waves of tension jump between us; I want to simultaneously smash their heads together and have
them cradle me to their breasts in lullaby.
I return home starving but unable to eat. My angst has burned a white lentil into the center
of my tongue. I curl under a blanket on my couch. In the middle of the afternoon I fall asleep.
The doorbell wakes me half an hour before work. My neighbor stands holding a bagged newspaper.
“I’m leaving for a month, you mind collecting my paper?”
“Where you headed?” I muster.
“Oregon coast, you been up there?”
“That’s where my wife grew up.” I take the paper and plop on the couch, fighting to awaken.
Last summer Renee and I got word that we were both accepted to start grad school in the fall. To celebrate
the shift from hope to belief, we made a bed in the back of our pickup and did a massive, MasterCard-
subsidized loop from the redwoods of northern California, up the Pacific Coast Highway, ferried to Victoria,
twisted back down to Oregon, over to northern Idaho, Montana, Wyoming.… We slept in the blue haze of
beach parking lots. We woke to gulls and dew-dampened sleeping bags. We climbed a volcano, stripped
naked and waved at a buzzing Cessna. We tiptoed around tide pools; the micro-stadiums of Disney-colored
sea anemones closed their cold, velvety lips around our index fingers. We saw worlds of gargantuan flora,
so fertile, air tasting soil-thick like you could grow mushrooms on your back if you accidentally Rip-
Van-Winkled amongst the ferns.
Along the Puget Sound a geoduck spit in my crotch. Geoducks are monstrous, mud-burrowing clams
with super long, elephant-siphon necks allowing them to breathe through the sand. Four feet down and
they’re tapping fresh air. I walked over one as it dove, spitting groundwater, and man, it looked like
I pissed my pants.
I open my neighbor’s newspaper but the toilet starts running again. Removing the lid, I try
to manipulate the chain. It’s taking too long. I’m going to be late for work. I test flush to no avail.
When you’re caught up in impatience, you can’t seem to picture a world where tolerance exists; it’s like
when you’re feeling ill and you can’t remember what it’s like to feel well.
I visited my close friend Nelson in Poland this past summer. His bathroom was the size of
an elevator. The tub didn’t have a curtain and the faucet head was a length of garden hose. I had to
do yoga to get clean without dousing the whole room. The worst part though was that his washing machine
was butted up against his toilet. Unless you were Lieutenant Dan or Bilbo Baggins, you had to ride English
to take a dump. Then we found the thing wouldn’t flush. For the rest of the weekend Nelson and I were
bathing with no hands, one on the hose, one pinching the nose. We started looking forward to bath-time,
the sheer grotesqueness of it leaving us with an overwhelming sense of triumph. We laughed and laughed
and laughed.
Climbing on my bike and heading to work, my cranks start creaking right away, and, mentally,
I join in. The smoke from the Lefthand fire has smeared into our neighborhood. It chafes my throat.
Turning north, a headwind blasts me. Then a raindrop smacks my forehead. I laugh with a cry
in my voice. Wouldn’t you know it! My luck, eh? But then I’m confused, is this good luck or bad luck?
Isn’t this grand culmination of opposition good luck for my bad luck? Doesn’t this wind, this sore throat,
and this dying bike, lend my hopelessness more credence, rendering it more tangible? No. In fact, it
exposes my despair to perspective.
And suddenly I see that the only thing in this world that is concurrently rational and ethereal
is my perspective.
On my ride home I notice the rain has washed the road clean of blood. That’s all it takes.
Time to put my world back in Nelson’s bathroom.
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