Boredom Diaries
Wedding Day.
There was a short bridge, a perfect arch over an inlet, a cement rainbow delivering us onto the island. The day before, a Royal Navy nuclear sub had beached itself on some rocks at low tide. The giant black pill, harboring enough TNT to engulf a medium sized city, left helpless after navigation gone wrong…. Continue reading
Cigar City.
‘It is worth the while to see your native village thus…as if you were a traveler passing through it.’ -Henry David Thoreau Ybor, a small sub city, more like a district within Tampa, has seen dozens of revivals over the past century. The initial renaissance, starting in 1902, gave it tenure as the cigar manufacturing… Continue reading
In Bloom.
Diagonally across the state of Florida is a small town called Fort Pierce. There, in the late 50’s, a group of African American artists taught themselves how to paint landscapes. Those landscapes would become famous representations of a part of Florida unique only to its southern, coastal geography well below the city I grew up… Continue reading
Prologue. Epilogue. The End.
In November of 2011, I took a short trip up to DC. Over the course of those three days, I caught up with an old friend who A. I never get to see quite enough, and B. has no clue how much he has positively affected me over the years. Throughout the late 90’s, our… Continue reading
Philos.
I hoped only for submission. The most viable move: to pin him down with my knees. To swing with both fists, using the ball of my palm, beating him against his arms and chest, but careful never to hit his face. When we fought, even within my own preemptive strike, I always maintained a code… Continue reading
An Exorcism.
I crept into the small opening in the rear of the fortress. Like a cloaca, this aluminum porthole, injecting, ejecting the kids who thought the end times were upon them. It seemed people grew up a lot faster in those days. Displaced into a surreal world where survival wasn’t a convenience. Marrying at eighteen, off… Continue reading
It Never Felt So Good To Lose.
Fuck off! I screamed. My voice penetrating the ‘boos’ that rained down upon me. A ticker tape parade of trash, half eaten hot dogs, tin foil, burger patties. Hoarse I was, from belching obscenities all afternoon, across the field at the opposing team’s parents. We’d just got our asses kicked. Last hit, extra innings, a… Continue reading
Peddling Snake Oil.
Under the unkept canopy of oaks and the winding maze of scrub palm, my grandmother would step up to pay the couple dollars for zoo entry. We’d walk by the cement pens inlaid into the Florida sugar sand, where lizards bask in the dirt, where alligators were separated from the rare Florida crocodile, and the… Continue reading
Fear And Loathing In Paradise.
I sit here in St. Petersburg. Two miles from the beach. Two miles from what some deem paradise. I sit at a desk, behind warehouse walls, in a factory manufacturing bike parts. Behind our building, a couple meters from my desk, sits a marina. One that specializes in the capturing of blue crabs. Cages stack… Continue reading
Lake Ness.
‘There’s Loch Lochy. There’s Loch Oich…like a pig. There’s Linnhy. The biggest, due southwest. And then this, here, Loch Ness.’ ‘Loch,’ I would learn from our bus driver, was Scottish Gaelic for lake. For years I thought the name connoted the magical. That mysterious void dropping to a depth of seven hundred and fifty five… Continue reading
Skeleton Church.
Some of the kids we met spoke six languages. Mainly while criss crossing Scandinavia, where education is lauded above most other things. English was on their communicatory laundry list. English, for the most part, the universal default. And for that, we were lucky. Until we dove deep into central Europe. Our white van enveloped by… Continue reading
Incompetent Thievery.
There were seven of us. Seven whiney ass Americans travelling across Central Europe. Whiney we were, compared to the punk kids, from lower income families spread across Slovenia, Czech Republic, Italy, and here, now, in Spain. Most of the kids we played to lived in squats, dumpster diving to feed themselves. Diving to conjure up… Continue reading
