Not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing today. I mean I have an idea. I’m cleaning out my house of purples and lifting weights and playing my synth and working little by little on a short story and then later I’m driving down the highway to see my mom and dad. All those things are just distractions. All of life is just a distraction. A welcome distraction.
Been eating a lot of tuna. Not really on purpose. I order my groceries online and I guess I clicked the wrong button wrong. Tried to order ten cans but one hundred cans arrived palletized. One hundred cans of tuna winds up being a real workout. Just getting them up the stairs from the mail room. And then loading up the pantry and seeing the pantry shelving sag. I’m not complaining about it. I mean, I like tuna enough to order ten cans. Even giving some away, I’ll be fine for a while, more than a while, but I had to reinforce the shelving, the way it was sagging. I ordered the lumber online and when it showed up it wasn’t what I needed. I’d ordered two by fours and nails and a hammer but when those things got here, the lumber was dollhouse furniture-size, and so was the hammer. I hadn’t been paying attention to the dimensions. It looked like a hammer that a doll could hold. But I don’t have any dolls. I could have used a can of the tuna to drive one of those life-size real world nails, but there was nothing to drive a nail into.
So I stacked fifty cans of the tuna on the floor.
That’s been my lunch for a while. Before you tell me, I know I’m going to get mercury poisoning. Last Monday I had a can of tuna for breakfast. A can with my coffee at break. A can for lunch. And then a quick can before I left work for the day. I went home and fell asleep for a few hours. My wife woke me up, “Babe, babe, wake up, I made you something to eat.” I went out there and it was as tuna fish sandwich. So I ate that. She was saying that she hadn’t had a tuna fish sandwich in months and it tasted so good. She’d done a great job. Toast and romaine lettuce and a plump tomato and salt and pepper just right. It’s not good to complain when someone gifts you a gift.
There’s a pencil factory on the other side of town. I keep dreaming about going over there and working out some kind of arrangement. Maybe some kind of sponsorship. I’d like to sit down with the CEO, and I guess, the CFO, and I suppose the publicity person for the factory. I keep meaning to go over there and talk to these people. I think we could make a lot of money together. Let’s say from now on I did all my creative work with their pencils and their pencils only, and even this newsletter here, let’s say it was exclusively written with their pencils, and I talked that up and up and up and it became like a chief principal of my process. It could be very lucrative for them. Imagine, hundreds of thousands of young writers, switching overnight to their pencils. I’ve been daydreaming about getting my own signature series pencil. Every photo of me ever taken here on out, one of those signature series pencils in my hand. Things would change. You’d have to squint real hard to try and read my writing. It’d be blurry and faint, and my handwriting is really terrible and all those pink eraser marks smearing the page. But it’d be something different. Everything is getting old. I’ve got to go over there soon and meet with the pencil people.
What I need to do is repaint the electric blue room back to blue. I mean, I repainted it once. A shade I hadn’t wanted. The walls were marred up. Nail holes for paintings I’d lost. Spots I could see where I missed covering over the buttercup six years ago. I found the old paint cans in the back of the closet but the names of the shades of paint were gone from the can. Not that it mattered. I called the store that originally mixed the paint and they said the shades they’d had six years ago had all been retired. It was impossible to get those shades any longer. There had been a lawsuit and they’d had to start over from scratch. I thought the person on the phone was fucking around. So I went down there with the cans and the employees in the paint department showed me what they had. Dissimilar shades, nothing in the realm. I pointed to the computer, I wanted them to just scan the leftover paint on the inside of the lid and mix me up a gallon of what I’d brought. The clerk began to hyperventilate. The manager of the store came over with this giant folder. Inside was the court paperwork. He showed me right there, the case, and the result, the official scroll from the judge with his thumbprint and wild calligraphy. A booklet stapled to the scroll, photos of all the shades of paint that were now illegal. That electric blue I had was one of the most prominent illegal shades. I said I’d just go to another store. I’d take my business elsewhere. The manager took my wrist, he said he’d give me a coupon for sixty five percent off. He could give me a shade beneficial for the both of us. Wouldn’t I like a new beginning. I said that would’t work, I’d have to move all the furniture and I’d have to repaint the entire room. I just wanted to do touch up. The manager took my other wrist and said there was no such thing as touchup. The sun had faded my wall in ways that I hadn’t even noticed. It was very intense. The way he stared me in the eye. The way he pinned my wrists to the counter and all my knuckles cracked. The way the machine whirred and shook and mixed up my paint, the best paint they could offer. He’d thrown in a free roller. The roller was taller than me. It’d be impossible to cut in the fine details. Nevermind the moulding. Nor the floor. When I got back to the apartment I saw the shade was closer to lavender, or grape, or wisteria, or mallow. I swallowed my pride and doled the pigment out in indiscriminate swoops. Impossible to avoid even the ceiling. The entire window. A purple sky now. Then I stood in my purple room and had a pang of regret I’d ever let it get like this. So purple. Purple is a color for a wound, same as blue can be the color of a wound. But I supposed I’d get used to it.
Someone makes the shade I want on the underground, she says. When they read this newsletter, they’ll reach out, she says, smiling.
I had this app on my phone that generates a lifting program and each week it tells me how much weight to lift. Every time I do a workout, it knew to increase the weight for next week, for those specific moves. Usually just five pounds more for arms and back exercises, ten pounds more for leg exercises. An email had come in recently from the president of the HOA of my apartment building, banning this particular app from the property. They do tricky shit like that all the time, putting limitations on personal fitness programs because they want you to pay the extra fifty dollars a month to go down into the basement and use the cheesy exercise room they have set up with a feather duster and a twine jump rope. I had challenged the president on this ban. I don’t like my freedom limited. If I want to use a certain weight lifting app, I should be able. She came down to the apartment and showed me some grizzly photos. And some disturbing videos. I mean, the kind of thing that just make you want to quit life. Off yourself. Seems somebody on the fifth floor had plugged in their info into their app, what they thought their max bench press was. And you know how people are. They overestimate everything. This guy thought he could bench press two thousand pounds. He hadn’t had that much weight in his apartment, so he ordered it. The elevator straining as the delivery went up. Creaking and the cable stretching and thinning. And then unpacking all those cardboard boxes. And loading the bar. And the bar bent comically. His friend was filming. “Come on, you got this.” And the guy telling his friend that he didn’t want a spot. Just let him try to get it. And I cringed as the man in the video somehow lifted the bar off the stands and brought it down to his chest, and screaming, he pressed it cleanly up and got it back in the stands. He’d done it. Wow. Incredible. The problem was, the next week he tried to bench two thousand and five pounds and the hardwood floor gave out beneath the bench and the man and the bench and the two thousand and five pounds plummeted down and crushed the people on the fourth floor, who’d been sleeping in the bed.
I agreed with the president. I shouldn’t have this app on my phone. It’d killed three people and it’d gravely injured the friend who had been filming.
I held up my phone and she watched me delete the app. She took out a card from her wallet and handed it to. It was good for six free sessions with the twine jump rope and feather duster downstairs. I shook her hand and when she left I just downloaded the app again. I mean, I’m not going to push the limits of the human body. It’s just not something I’m interested in. If I wanted to move even three hundred pounds, I would call for a forklift, or at the very least, I would get a pallet jack.
Which brings me to the synthesizer—I’ve been having a lot of trouble with it lately. There are sixty one buttons and forty knobs. Not to mention thirty two keys. Everybody knows what the keys do. Press one and it plays a pitch. Simple enough. C through B. All the sharps and flats. Up in octaves, all that. The buttons are easy enough, they say what they do right beneath the button. Or at least the function had a name. When I was confused on the function of a button, I just opened up the user manual and there was the answer about that function. Pressing buttons is easy, I been doing it since I was a child. I had noticed early on that a friend of mine had come in and vandalized the synth, painted over the names of the functions and put things like “Younger” and “East” and “Albacore.” Okay. The knobs were really the problem. Even with the manual, I was finding if I moved any of the knobs, it effected the other knobs. You could turn one knob and it might be all right but as soon as you were tempted to turn a second knob, there was no going back. Let alone a third knob. Reason fled the room. Pitches undid themselves in torn gook. Oscillations run amuck into nonsense. Let alone the modulation wheel, I don’t even want to go there. I’d have to draw a map to get back to the original sound I had started from and that was difficult because I always drew these maps in pencil and the lines were so faint and blurry I could never make proper sense. What helped was rubber bands. I won’t elaborate. If you are serious about synthesis, get yourself a few hundred rubber bands.
I never do a nice job. I always make a mess of everything. I’ve made a perfect disaster here. At any time I could have stopped. But it always seemed I was doing good.
When I was repainting the room the wrong color, I got over zealous. I got out of control with the massive roller. Everything is now some legal purple unbroken. The synth is now violet, a shade in the realm of Barney the Dinosaur. I cannot read what any of the buttons do. I cannot get the knobs to work to begin with but now it’s even more difficult because they are also Barney the Dinosaur-ish. And the manual is this same color. Everything in this room is this ubiquitous color and I can’t make my way. Productivity impossible. The weight bench and doll-sized lumber and hammer and all my pencils and the can opener for the tunafish have blended in and become lost in the purple of the purple. Maybe it’s more of a mauve. And I cannot think my way or do my way out of this purple impasse. There used to be a way to make things work. You could call for help if you needed it. But now the phone is somewhere here too, thistle, or plum, or razzmic berry, and lost. They could not, would not enlighten me in the paint department, said the name of this shade was copyrighted and to even speak it to me would be a violation.
I think tomorrow is going to be a better day.
I’ll fill the dumpster with everything purple and then I’ll visit my parents with the car sagging and sparking, the trunk bent and barely able to click its latch. Seventy something cans of amethyst fish. They are newly retired and fixed on living on.
Yes!
👏❤️🎸🕺💪