What would the man blog about. There was a lot to chose from. The world was dying and new people were being born every quarter second. The sky outside his window was a lazy grayscale watercolor. A black plastic bag was stuck in the clawlike branches of the elm outside his window. His tire(s) had a slow leak(s). His day job was a mine field of cat shit, dead fish, falling sparks. He could not get his midi drum machine to communicate with the computer but there was a way some way. What was a worthy enough subject to ponder. He could pick up the phone and call Michael or Michael or Michael, he owed each of them a phone call. Maybe in speaking to the three Michaels he would come upon the shape of this blog. Or maybe the delay would help him figure out the subject of the blog. Because he was always one great blog post away from a retreat to French Polynesia. There are no poisonous snakes or insects in Bora Bora and there are no poisonous snakes or insects in Jersey City, NJ, so either way the man was safe. There’s no letter ‘B’ in Tahitian so when the first Europeans came over and looked to rob the island, they misunderstood the locals. It’s Pora Pora meaning ‘first born’ and not Bora Bora, which is just a fucking typo. He would like to be swept away to all the paradisal typos of the world. Briefly. Yesterday he was standing in a muddy swatch, just at the edge of the flood, at the bottom of a butane sphere he’d been repairing for months. The sphere had been drained of two million gallons of liquid explosives and his crew was installing new structural components on the sphere to make it earthquake proof. Leg to leg. Never know when the big one is going to hit the tri-state area. Wherever you are in the world, what are the chances that you are in some tri-state area. Nineteen percent or so. Or if you are religious it could be you are somewhere between heaven and hell and purgatory. Your life, the fourth state. Which of course could be stuffed full of earthly delight if you won the lottery. Ah there it was, no need to phone any of the Michaels or wake his wife up and ask her what to blog about. He could just write about earthly delight. But that was hard. Anymore all he could delight in was his apartment. It was too cold to be outside and revel in the miracle of the sun or the blissful kiss of fine-tempered breezes. She wanted to go on a two hour walk down the hill to the place that had the heat lamps and you could get a grilled cheese sandwich and a jack and coke. Actually, excuse him, one hour walk downhill and one hour walk back uphill. This weekend he kind of just wanted to take a forty eight hour hot shower. His guts were half-froze and it would have been nice to thaw them out. He had been wearing two pairs of socks to work. A regular pair and then the thickest tactical navy seal socks money could buy over top of them. The boots barely fit with all that sock action. Regular underwear and then two pairs of thermal underwear on top of that. Hands in his pockets and no matter where he stood he was in the shadow of the sphere. But it was fine now, the radiator next to the man’s desk was singing and he was drinking hot coffee. The black plastic bag, shredded and dancing in the wind—what a stupid sight. A pirate flag for some mice missing the skull and cross bones. The man puts on his insulated slippers and in a moment of weakness he googles the island with the turquoise water and does the calculations that it is summer there on the other side of the world. Friday at work, he was standing in the shadow of the butane spheres, listening to Cinnamon Girl on headphones, and shivering. Seagulls were walking across a shallow brown lake beside the work site, pulling dead fish out of the muck. He watched them for an hour or so. Little white dinosaurs. T-Rexes, he easily imagined. Oh to be a fly on the wall when those super lizards ruled the earth. Flies back then were probably two hundred pounds and when they whizzed by the palm fronds shook like they do for modern helicopters. Someone was arc gouging on top of the sphere and the sparks were shooting into a hole at the top. An arc gouge is the closest thing to a light saber that we got here in our meager reality. You put a carbon rod in the holder and when you touch grounded steel it is zapped away in a flash of heat and light. Compressed air hooked to the holder shoots the sparks where you choose. The guy up top was shooting the sparks down into the empty sphere. Sometimes the seagulls would look up from the muck, startled by the sound of that electric ripping, the hiss of the compressed air. The man with the blog heard Hello Cowgirl in the Sand. Sparks rained down sixty feet into the empty sphere and once in a while one spark would make its way out of a disconnected nozzle so the man in the high visibility vest would see a lone orange spark drift out of the nozzle like the first snowflake falling so gentle. He had a charged fire hose and it was his job to keep the whole tri-state ares from exploding. He consulted the four gas monitor. LELs copacetic. The usual firewatch was off repairing a fence someone had crashed their car through during that dusting of actual snow. Luke Skywalker is in violation, you know. He needs to have safety glasses on, at the least. Double eye protection would be best. After work, when the man gets to his car he sees the rear tire is half flat so he drives over to the convenience store and buys his wife a bag of chips and asks the man behind the counter for a bunch of quarters. Asking this he feels like a kid again, when arcades ruled the earth. He takes the quarters to the machine and fills the tire back up. It has a slow leak. Maybe this will be the subject of the blog. The tire with the slow leak that he cannot find. People might like to read about that. It could be a metaphor for trying to make something work that just cannot be made to work. He had had the tire off the car on New Year’s Day. Looking closely at it. No nail in tread. No slice. No gash. He had sprayed a soapy solution all over the tire and valve stem and looked for bubbles. No bubbles. Maybe people would get excited about a bubble blog. The kiddie pool was dragged out of his father’s garage and set upon the driveway and he stood with his father looking down at his tire floating in this plastic kiddie pool. They stood for a long time with hooded sweatshirt hoods up and saw no bubbles. They flipped the tire and looked again and saw no bubbles. The slow leak defied them. His father was a beautiful man. Some people could see it. His father knew how to fix garbage trucks and all kinds of other dilemmas. The dogs were up in the window looking down at the man and his father as they shivered in the shadows. Runt dogs. A Maltese and a Boston Terrier. Yapping. What they saw was their play pool invaded by a giant black donut. These were the dogs of summer trapped inside for winter with their summer world inaccessible and their winter reality devastating. The convenience store was between a highway and a tiny airport. He watched a prop plane land on the strip. The man disconnected the air chuck from his tire and put it back on the hook. There was still two minutes the compressor would run and at that moment a young guy was walking down the side of the highway and he called over, “Hey, two minutes, free air.” The guy just waved. They could not see each other’s faces because they were both wearing surgical masks. So the smiling man could not see if the walking man was smiling or if he was blank faced or if he was scoffing. The man got in his car and drove the opposite way down the highway. He could pull into the tire shop and they could look at the tire but he doubted they would find the leak so then he would have to pay $150 for a new one to be put on the rim. It would be better to just let the slow leak continue because then he would have an excuse to stop and buy his wife potato chips again on Monday on the way home then. But the tire in the trunk of the car had a slow leak too. He realized he had forgotten to fill that with air. Those extra two minutes could have been used for that and usually he did use it for that but now he had forgotten. So there was a chance that he could go out to his car the next morning and find the slow leak tire on the car was flat and then opening the trunk he might discover the slow leak spare in the trunk was also flat. Of course he was supposed to put a new tire on the spare in the trunk but that would be $150 too. He should just take the car in and have them do both tires at the same time. Maybe there would even be a deal. Well, unrealistic. They wanted to give you a deal for four new tires. Buy three and get one free. He needed five tires. Two for sure and then the other three real soon. But they were playing the lottery at work and it seemed like a terrible idea to buy tires now. You had to have faith that you were going to win the lottery and tomorrow you could leave the grayscale world where you needed five new tires. Didn’t want to jinx anything. He drove past the tire shop and when he got home with her potato chips she said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“Oh wow, what is it?”
“It’s on the table.”
He walked in the dining room and there was a box on the table. She was crunching her potato chips already and smiling. She’d poured him a lemon seltzer and he took his topmost layer of socks off. He took his lumberjack flannel off.
He said, “Some guy at work today asked me if I was a farmer.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He’s a little weird. He wanted to buy two dozen eggs from me.”
“Sell him some eggs.”
“I could yeah, I could take some from the fridge. Could sell him three dollars worth of eggs for twelve dollars. Say they are free range organic and magic too. This is the guy who runs the lottery pool. He’s a little soft in the head.”
The man took the photocopied sheet of paper out of his pocket and showed his wife his name on the list of guys in the pool.
She said, “There’s like a hundred people on this list. We’ll have to split it a hundred ways?”
“Sure, that’s right.”
“That sucks.”
“But now we got a hundred chances instead of one chance.”
“The odds won’t change. One in a three hundred million or a hundred in three hundred million. It’d be the same percent.”
“What percent?” He took a potato chip from her bag. Crunched. Salt and vinegar. He sat down at the dining room table and looked at the box, his gift. But he did not open it. He was waiting for her.
Now she was looking at her phone, fiddling with the calculator. “They’re both point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero three three percent.”
“So what do you want to spend your two hundred and fifty million on?”
“I love that black clamshell light.”
“That four hundred light, yeah.” She had all kinds of vintage ceramic figurines and lights around the apartment. Deers that glowed. They used to find them all the time at Englishtown flea market or at yard sales for a few bucks but now it was tougher because they went to eBay or antique shops so you had to put out lots of money for them. Which they didn’t. There wasn’t trinket money anymore. But all that could change tomorrow.
“Open the box,” she said.
He cut the tape with a butter knife. Inside was a green Carhartt jacket that was three times too large for him. It said XL but it was a flag of material. Really it was a 3XL coat or a 4XL coat. This had happened to him the following year. He had ordered a long sleeve T-shirt and it had arrived this size. He tried to give to a guy he worked with who was a beefy individual and who might fit into a shirt that huge and who might even look good in the shirt. But the coworker had gotten really offended when being presented with the shirt. Now here he was with this giant coat and he didn’t know what to do with it. They hung it on the door with the other wrong coats. He said he was sorry. She said, “They always get me on the internet.”
She’d ordered an ice cube tray recently and it had shown up to be an ice cube tray that was better suited for a doll house. He was thinking what he could sell to get the money to buy the clamshell light for her for Valentine’s Day. Maybe resell the ice cube tray for someone who had a dollhouse and the dolls needed icy beverages. Start there.
Night reclaimed the street. Night reclaimed the city. Night reclaimed the tri-state area and then half the earth. They put some records on and celebrated by candlelight and red LED heartlight. Somewhere in there they laughed and made plans and then went to bed. Dreams. Dreaming. Dreamed. Dreamt.
It was tomorrow all a sudden. But what will be the subject of the blog that will enrich his life and will enrich your life. The man got out of bed hungover and sat at his desk and thought of subjects while he looked out the window. There was so much to write about. But what was worthy. How does one pick. That black plastic bag from the liquor store was dancing wildly in the tree. He could open the window and knock the plastic bag out of the branches if he used a broom stick or more realistically, two broomsticks duct taped together. Pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk would think he was crazy. They would be right or half-right. Looking up they would see him leaning out and they would see the concentration on his face. They would note the exertion. Look at him. Look at this man. Look at him struggling. But he would be successful in removing the plastic bag. Yes he would. Look at the bag sailing away. That’s it. That’s what he’d do. That’s what the blog would be about. He got up and retrieved the broom. Then understanding his lack, he knocked on the neighbors door and asked to borrow theirs too.
nice work!
If I was stuck on a desert island, I'm pretty sure I could escape with two broomsticks duct taped together. But where would I find two broomsticks on a desert island? And don't they mean deserted island? Clearly there are very few islands that are deserts. It's kind of an oxymoron or strange juxtaposition: A desert in the middle of an ocean.