Vox Nihilim

We finished our work early today. I think I like it here. Not right here, but you know...in this region. Right here is infested with feral cats, which I learned this morning come to the motel because a number of the permanent residents of this poorly soundproofed donkey-hole have taken to feeding all the strays that come by. Well word must have gotten out amongst the feline hordes, because brother, cat business here is boomin'.  Their presence and numbers amuse me. There's something about too many cats being anywhere that is inherently funny. And sure, maybe you want to make a racist Chinese restaurant joke... but I'm gonna have to shut you down. I've grown beyond that.

Some of my writing from a decade ago is problematic. If I were ever in danger of becoming famous, I would most certainly need to publicly apologize for it. It doesn't exactly "hold up" in the era of Me Too and sexual identity rights and millennial super-empathy, (I am not anti- any of those things. I'm pro- all of them...I beginning to believe they (millennials) have it right and we (Gen-X) had it wrong.)  I don't remember writing anything specifically unpalatable, but I am more than capable of charting the arc of my own ignorance and growth and I freely acknowledge that my thoughts back then were geared towards getting a laugh at the peril of my human decency. But the dick jokes? They were top-notch to be fair.

The rain is unexpected here and the drops throw flairs along the Christmas lights strung along San Benito street. People scurry along the sidewalks trying to outflank the unwelcome moisture falling on them. We watch from the warmth of the restaurant as the greeter smiles her brace-laden smile at us and expounds on how startled she was by the precipitation. She's beautiful and coltish and I know this is her first job because she's trying sooo hard. She's good in a way that older people are not. In ways I am not. I both love and hate her for this. She seats us and goes back behind her counter, watching the rain and waiting for her next guest. Hollister feels young, but maybe I'm just co-opting that from the eponymous retail chain. The fat haters. The one whose sizes stop around the 36" waist. We look at our phones and don't talk. He's older than me and we have little in common. We just work together. The silence is not uncomfortable. It's very professional. The pony girl scans the floor, catches my eye and smiles genuinely. Jesus Christ.

I wrote as a character called The Monster Apathy for a few years. I had a decent following. He was a bit of a twat to be honest. He was all the terrible things I saw in myself as a separated, unemployed man who had half-custody, a cat, and a small apartment that could have been cleaner. He was all my self-loathing turned up to 11 for comedic effect. I don't remember a lot of what I wrote...because I wrote a lot and am not super-remembry in general. I stumble upon some of it from time to time though and it still makes me laugh. Those blogs are locked down now, I think. Not meant for modern consumption. The tapestry they weave has some painful memories intertwined. There's a lot about that time in my life I'm still struggling to unpack. (Insert deflective dick joke here). Eventually, the Monster Apathy became this gonzo caricature of who he was when I started. I couldn't connect with him anymore because my life had improved. But I kept trying and failing to capture him. He died in 2012 sometime, I think. It was for the best, I'm sure.

The food comes and it's fine. We eat in silence. They have the big Christmas lights strung around the windows and they color the tableau of puddles in the gathering dark outside with their seasonal jest. We're eating early because we're both trying to stay on East Coast time. When he gets full, he starts making this sound like he's being strangled every time he swallows.  I must never marry this man for this certainly would be the quirksome trait that led to his early demise at my hand. I wonder what I do that would make him kill me? I think about that while he grunts his way through the last of his chicken. We trade not talking for taking turns spouting alternating facts about Hollister, California, taxes, motorcycles, and ...oh wait that's a conversation. I'm just being a capricous dick apparently.

Insert deflective dick joke again.

We drive back in the dark and I see lights up on the hills. People live up there. People waiting for Christmas. People wondering at the rain. People living lives I never contemplated before this moment. People who have never thought about my life as I rocket up the 101 back to Gilroy. That's okay. I'll think of them and wonder about them. I'll think of the greeter and her braces and her life and be glad for her. I'll start a new conversation with my painfully digesting partner. I'll try to be better.

I think that's what it's all about.

A lot of time has passed.

I'm talking specifically since the last time I chose to write anything online. But in a more nebulous sense, a lot of time has passed since I was a person who WOULD write anything online. I'm older now. The hot,flaky, insanity of writing private thoughts online is a phenomenon of the past.  I miss it.

I'm sitting here in my motel room, listening to the army of feral cats outside wail in asynchronous time with the hushed flumes of the cars hurtling down the nearby interstate. An outpost for the homeless has been built under the tree that rests on the precipice of a dried out gully. Their tarpaulins, and rags flap in the wind like banners on the walls of nothing. The cats swirl and spiral in eddies around the garbage cans. This is the Garlic capital of the world, and tonight I am its king.

When I first started blogging in 2007, I was very depressed. Untreated and clinical...not the fun kind. I came here alone and lonely, and wrote to draw the bile that had built up within from my nasty separation with my wife, and excise it into the dust like so much ill-advised rattlesnake venom in old Westerns. I eventually made friends online, and we built a little community, first on Myspace and then here.  It was very nice and it was precisely what I needed at the time. I was very silly. I wrote a lot of silly things. I behaved even sillier. I fell in love a few times. I hurt people. Others hurt me. It was a new life bloomed in the crater of the old one. It was like garlic. Strong and powerful and stinking and flavorful.

There is a small engine repair shop next door, The boards of the shop walls are dried and their paint is flaky and grey, like the peelings of sunburn to be rasped off. A hazard of lawnmowers congeal in clots throughout the alkali dust of the shoddily-fenced backyard. Rust and rust and rust peppering the ground in tumors beneath the untrimmed palms.  The cats roil through fence holes. In and out along their byways, always searching for food. The thin blue oil of a worklight spills across the dirt in a narrow cone, while the warm wind cradles the light twang of country music. On the breeze it is only a whisper, a secret, a melancholy wish for another place, or time, or girl, or chance... it's too subtle to tell which. It doesn't matter. The point is made.

I don't think I'm depressed anymore. My life has righted itself from the near disastrous toppling of a decade ago. There have been times when I felt lost since. When my father died. When I sat in the hotel in Chicago and wept for hours at the things I knew I had ruined. A few other times between the general positive uptick life has taken. I can't complain. I've figured myself out and come to terms with my mistakes and shortcomings. But I've never felt the urge to write until tonight. I don't even know why...I just CAN again.

Garlic capital of the world. Fucking weird, yo.