The Wayward Irregular

People, other humans, they’ve damn near ruined everything. Fox hunting, hard narcotics for a head cold, and the Ecto Cooler—the great things in life are slowly phasing out from our day-to-day, usually an order from some Fresca drinking slick-shaven-sally in a grey suit, something about safety or child labor laws. I’d come close, as I usually do. I was standing on my roof, clad in a trash-bag, one fist full of peanut butter, the other holding a shotgun, just me getting ready for the usual Tuesday night stuff. Then, the Old Gods intervened. “Matthew,” a thunderous voice commanded, eyes and a beard forming in the clouds. “Matthew, what troubles your soul?” “Besides low-calorie mayonnaise and Joss Whedon’s excuses?” I shot back. “The movies, cloud God. I can’t go to a movie theater anymore without pouring a Diet Coke on some pre-teen’s cellphone.” The cloud smiled, then vanished, leaving only a light towards the west and a whisper in my brain. “The Alamo Drafthouse,” the whisper beckoned with authority. “It’s, like, totally super badass.” Soon, my life was to be changed forever. I can’t attend the local theaters anymore, and this was a slow crawl of a decision. It started with the talking. I’m one of those folks who just can’t tone the stuff out. Every little whisper and slice of chit-chat pulls me kicking and screaming from the immersive experience I fished coins from that fountain to pay for. The cell phones are equally as bad, small lighthouses somewhere in the front row banging rays of color off of my corneas and killing my night vision or however the hell our eyes are supposed to work—something something, science. The first few times, I’d do “the glare,” the dramatic turn back over your shoulder to snag a little eye contact, something that says “Please close your fat mouth,” or “Stop kicking my seat with your fat feet,” or “You are really fat and you don’t belong here, fatty, I was teased in middle-school for my weight and so I’m taking it out on you and also I’m really sorry.” Failing that, it progressed to “shushing,” which worked about as well as drinking oven cleaner to avoid attending my nephew’s graduation. The last attempt was to use actual words with the trouble makers, which sometimes worked, but often resulted in teenagers throwing popcorn at me until I snapped, and then later I have to introduce myself to my neighbors in new and embarrassing ways. That was a crack at sexual assault, in case you missed it, one of the many reasons I’m still not published. The whole scene eventually drifted to my wife and I attempting to view new movies weeks after release on some odd Tuesday morning, anything to keep us away from other human beings. Then, nothing. We just stopped going to the theater. Instead, we simply waited for new releases to come out on iTunes, where we’d watch them struggle to play on an Apple TV, each few minutes of video in staccato with slow data buffering and my soppy tears. Then, I was turned on to the fancy world of reservable-movie seating. I don’t know a slicker way to describe the places, but they have several beautiful attributes in common. For one, you pick out your seats, online, like you’re reserving airline tickets but with less anxiety and regret, and it’s surprisingly cheap. For two, you sit in a large, now-reserved, comfortable seat. This also includes a little table, where wait-staff will bring you food and drink. It ranges from bar food to an attempt at fancy-cafe edibles, but there’s no standing in line while some haggard thing attempts to wrangle their larva into deciding on the chocolate, the gummy candy, or a 1950’s-strength slap in their dumb little stupid smart mouth. Third, the culture is different—these are my people, and in our kinship we understand that we are all here to watch and enjoy a movie, in a theater, and this does not involve leaning over every six minutes to casually explain the plot-lines of Kill Bill to a toddler.

An email loaded with amorphous detail rings out in the morning, and by the afternoon, we will taste human flesh for the first time. Sometimes jobs are like this. Email is the fodder for corporate anarchy, some press release about our jobs written in newspeak, vague on detail and ripe for the scuttlebutt. Everyone imagines those who pen such things cackling as they type, one finger coyly twisting into their cheek as the missive speeds to a few thousand inboxes. The Masters™ are no fools—these things are not designed to root and rile—but we eat it up, we crave it like the needle. The inbox makes that little chiming sound, a wild email appears, and seconds later I am wearing a spiky leather Mad Max costume and running down some poor family on my motorcycle for an expired can of tomatoes. Things have escalated. The morning started with coffee and small-talk about the weather, but by 2pm, the savages have painted symbols in blood on the walls, and I cannot identify what is slowly twirling over the sticky-note bonfire. Not all of us have come unprepared, however. As I read the tricky emails from on-high, I lower my Bane mask and inhale its chemicals, strengthened by it, empowered by its intentions. “You think the corporate world is your ally? You merely adopted the khaki socks and the Starbucks. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn’t see true email until I was already a man. By then, it was nothing to me, but a career.” Let us be afraid and jump to conclusions, goddammit! Worried bodies bob and weave in and out of the offices, struggling to hear what’s been heard by someone who heard a thing who heard a thing. Something smells rancid and delicious out in the open sun, so every dog under the prairie starts to pop their head out and squeak. Get it? I used prairie dogs as a loose metaphor because I am so terribly clever. One question, then more: “What have you heard?” “What does ‘restructuring’ mean?” “I heard that half of us will be fired.” “Really? I heard that we’re to be hunted on an island off the coast of Argentina.” “I heard that we are to now worship the Demon-King Pazuzu, and we are to prepare our bodies for the harvest.” “Yup. I heard the same thing, and that we have to pay for our own break-room sodas.” “It’s probably true. Someone told me that someone told them that they over heard that we’re all going to have to get those blood plugs installed over our heart, like in Dune.” Things have escalated. Early in the morning it’s all smiles and small talk, the kind you practice on each other, the kind you never use anywhere else in your life. The culture is adopted—it has to be—you cannot expect to bring your own flavor to the place. If everyone wears jeans on Friday, you are going to wear jeans. If everyone says “hello” in the hallway, every time, then you are going to say “hello.” If everyone participates in some archaic devilry mentioned in whispers as “the skin ritual,” then you are going to buy cocoa butter, learn the ins-and-outs of a wild pig, and be ready to learn Aramaic. You work here now, get fucking comfy. It turns dark when someone a few pay grades higher than you starts shooting out emails light on detail and heavy with innuendo. I don’t like it any more than the next, but I chose this life. I spent years inside the walls of the white collar world and its boring-ass carpet patterns, and I then Gladiator-ed my way to freedom. I spent years wandering the outside world, trying to find my place in it all as a grownup human. While I was able to make it work for a bit, eventually I carved “Matthew Was Here” into a support beam, kicked the chair, and fell back into “the life.” I wanted the politics, the red tape, the water cooler, and the words that aren’t used anywhere else. At home or with friends I do not speak like this, but at work, I will bust out the “strategy,” the “cooperative process,” and the “let’s touch base,” like it was my job. Well, yeah, it is.

I had known it for years, but Christmas morning in 1993 cemented my presumptions: my parents were terrible liars. I believe I had spent the first few hours of the night in my bed, feigning sleep, but at least six or seven of them were spent on the toilet staring at my red digital watch, desperately trying to avoid suicide. By my late teens I had already stopped with the whole anticipation thing on Christmas eve, sleeping like a baby until my brother woke me up to come witness the tree. However, in my pre-teens and those first one or two years of actual and for-reals puberty, I really couldn’t catch a wink or a Z or anything that would help the time pass any faster. In December of 1990 I had been caught trying to sneak down the stairs for a peek at what turned out to be a fully functional Castle Grayskull. It could’ve been our loud stairs, the fact that I was 10 years old and as wise as a pair of pee-stained Underoos, or perhaps my mother was simply clairvoyant—either way, the woman was standing at the bottom of the steps with her hands on her hips, casting a dark and terrible figure into the night. With a voice like molten hate and murdered kings, she commanded for me to return to my bed, before she, “let the crows eat my eyes.” So, in 1993, unable to feign sleep, venture downstairs, or keep it together in the dark of my bedroom, I dropped trou and sat in the bathroom for seven hours, staring at my watch and sweating like I’d placed a bomb somewhere in my house. So, the thing about my folks and their inability to pull a ruse on a pair of pubescent nutbars—my brother and I—yeah, that didn’t roll like they’d planned. I’ve written before about how we were as poor as an empty bucket, so while our folks made a great show with dozens of wrapped boxes under the tree, we had always experienced my mother’s bullshit sobbing preamble of, “Christmas is going to be slim this year.” Yet, each year, we awoke to find an unhinged Roman orgy of presents under the tree, each one a new mind blowing shimmer from Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase. They liked to have us unwrap the things in a particular order, too, and we were happy to oblige, slowly working to whatever grand finale they had planned—a new bicycle, a Red Ryder BB Gun, (yes, really), and for me, the best gifts possible: new video games. By Christmas of 1993, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had been out and about for a couple of years, and in America, the thing cost roughly a bazillion dollars, which meant the sons of the blue collars had to wait until the thing came down from, “Haha, you’re poor,” prices to, “a sharp stick in the ribcage,” prices. We were roaring through our gifts, wading in a pool of brightly colored wrapping and tripping out on endorphins, when we were directed to unwrap two oddly shaped little packages. The gifts were games, Super Nintendo games, and the reason this was an attempted ruse was because we did not own a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. My game was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, arguably the greatest Zelda game ever created, right up there next to Ocarina of Time. My brother’s game was Street Fighter II, a legend in its own right, and while my brother wasn’t terribly obsessed with video games, Street Fighter became a well beloved staple in our home. As soon as we witnessed the cartridges, my brother and I shot each other a knowing look. “Oh no,” muttered my mother, “are those not the right games?” The very second my brother and I unwrapped these video game cartridges, we knew there was a fully functional Super Nintendo set up somewhere in the house, plugged in and ready for molestation. Thankful for the bounty and in no mood to disappoint my mother, we nodded our heads. “It’s okay Mom,” we sheepishly replied, “but they’re Super Nintendo games. We have a regular Nintendo.” My mother frowned. “Well then,” she said, “just put them in the other room and I’ll exchange them later.” We moseyed into the other room, and there it was,

They’ve made it legal out here in the Rockies to commune with the skunk, every one of us now buckling into the hand-basket and punching in for armageddon. We emerge from our homes in an astonished buzz, the future has finally arrived, and its rung in by hippies wearing tuxedo t-shirts, silently clinking wedding spoons against the bong and demanding ovation. Forever the gateway to terrible things, weed is now above board and on the regular out here, and nobody has a fleeting whistle on how the whole thing will pan out. However the electorate saw fit to tally things, the last throes of the violently appalled and terribly misinformed have been kicked back into the pits, the majority of Colorado inhabitants taking up their brooms and shooing anyone who looks too clear-headed, or anyone who cannot quickly answer the appropriate amounts of Frank Zappa trivia. An angry man holding a sweeper points the bristles at a tourist, “Why did Dot Records claim to reject his music?” The tourist, sweating visibly, straightens his tie and shakes his head. “Uh, I don’t know, they... uh... they didn’t like him?” “Wrong, goddammit!” the angry man screams. “They said his music had no commercial potential! Get out of my state!” These are the ways now in the mile high city, a name befitting the town that always was. I don’t know how we got it done, the weed thing. For years now we’ve had marijuana dispensaries littered across the city, and while the whole scene has been a federal no-no, the state has made no secret of the places. The idea—from whatever pale and thin surface it was originally scribbled upon—was to get people their “medicine,” the chemo patient, people with difficult to manage pain, folks with migraines, and whomever else willing to pay two bills to a pseudo-doctor for The Card. The game was always afoot, however. The nonsense doctrines that kept the ganja as an illicit thing were never on solid ground, no facts or reports with any science involved backed the reasoning, so the hypothetical granite box that we’ve kept the eventual sale of weed locked inside just kept cracking, dripping out hippies and tie-die bandanas. Yes—that was sloppy—but I know you get me, dammit. The dispensaries never attempted to approach the game with any tact, every other building flatly advertising its product with little hint at what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of a clean respectful air of the medical professional, every retail bud store just put out some gaunt, over-tanned, and malnourished late 50’s stoner in a lawn chair, dreadlocks last washed sometime during the Reagan administration. His only job: Flashing the peace sign and accidentally knocking over his beer all day. It is like they have embraced the Devil’s Lifestyle™ and revel in keeping the “squares” far from business, a tactic that’s worked never-times. I am terrified as I wheel my suburbs-mobile along the THC roadways, keeping the doors locked and gawking from the window, forever curious what the insides of these places smell like, forever wondering what the products cost, and forever coming up with phrases like “THC roadways” because I am so smugly clever. The passage of amendment “Cut The Shit, Weed is Fine” hasn’t gone over terribly well with everyone. Our governor spat out the now infamous and strangely empty line, “Don’t break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly,” a stretch that reeks of the kind of man who’s considered marijuana about as much as he’s considered washing carrots in the toilet. These are the people who see spiders without ever having a paranoid moment courtesy of the actual icky. They see or hear the word “marijuana,” and just throw up their palms in some sort of twisted jazz-hands, closing their eyes and shaking their heads saying, “Nope, nope, wrong, bad, nope,” and the accompanying dance steps resemble an overweight diabetic fumbling with a Snickers wrapper. Hickenlooper’s Cheetos line is a wisp of smoke though,

I held out my pillow case, and the old woman gripping a bag of “popcorn balls” demanded that I “show her a trick,” so I briefly considered kicking out her brittle knee and screaming “abracadabra” into her oversized hearing aid. This was not a time for nonsense. This was Halloween, and there was a simple exchange here, a transaction that both parties were privy to and I didn’t expect any delays in my busy evening out in the cold. You icy old crone! I had dressed up for this! My stocking cap ground the sharp plastic mask into my features, and to only further degrade the illusion of my costume, my puffy blue winter coat made short work of everything. What was so hard to understand here? I’m dressed like some sort of superhero—or whatever bizarre getup my mother constructed from a poorly understood lecture I’d given her on on the ins-and-outs of pastel attire. I’m about to venture into the cold night air to beg strangers for candy and hope that none of them answer the door shirtless or try to put their fingers in my mouth. Go get candy, come home not-raped. Easy stuff. Now, drop the popcorn balls into my Ghostbusters pillow case before I push you into the basement and rob your house. Halloween isn’t a time for impressing people with a costume, no, the costumes are simply designed as brief escapism and a way to show the other children how mega super awesome you are. I didn’t give a tinker’s damn if some goat-mask-wearing member of the LIONS club thought I was a dead ringer for Spiderman, I just wanted them to drop a fistful of whatever discount candy they’d remembered to buy on 2-for-1 when picking out scratch-game lottery tickets. I’m not trying to say there weren’t rules, however. Way back in the ancient times of the 1980’s, back when dinosaurs played cassette tapes and Flight of the Navigator was giving me weird nightmares, we still had a small amount of safety training from our collective parents when it came to Halloween and the activities therein. There were the easy-to-remember dictations, like, “Don’t ring the doorbell more than once,” and “Only smoke menthols.” The stricter rules only served to hamper the experience, like, “Don’t ask for more candy,” and “No butt stuff.” Even at our tender stupid childhood ages, we instinctively new better than to wander into a stranger’s home, but this didn’t stop roughly one in three people trying to invite us inside to drink hot cocoa or sit and watch videos of teenage girls screaming for the police. Parents hover more closely these days, and with the climate we live in, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Men are especially dangerous now though, each of us a potential deviant not to be trusted with anyone or anything, our gender now a towering phallic reminder that we are on this planet to abduct anyone and anything that doesn’t belong to us. This is why recently, when my car was approached by two little girls from the neighborhood, I locked the doors and screamed into my Burger King bag for them to please leave before I was arrested and sent to a “gonna get a shiv, gonna make a hole” prison. I was terrified of being followed to my door by these two girls, unaware that their attempts to, and I’m not making this up, “sell me a dirt cookie” was enough to get me fucking tased. When trick-or-treating, my brother and I had a pretty simple system worked out though. We’d enter the house on two conditions: 1.) The front door remained open, and 2.) “Are you crazy? I’m not going into your stupid house, now dump your whole candy dish into the pillow case or I’m going to extort you for money, you creepy shit.” As our parents weren’t always “eyes-on,” we ate whatever we could manage to moosh into our loud-holes with reckless abandon. On reflection, however, I’m not entirely clear on how reckless we really were. Sure, the folks had to run through our stash at the end of the evening to make sure there weren’t any razor-blades hidden inside of the candy,