Slow Drags

I light a cigarette for myself and one for you. I set yours down and puff on it every so often so it won't go out. I'm giving you just one, and for as long as it burns, you are here with me ...

"The Doors are the greatest band, period," you tell me, as you tap your feet so elegantly to "Riders On The Storm" and gaze off with a look of aimless purpose.

You protest to the local 11 o'clock news anchor as she reads off the latest horrible thing that happened to a child today, then you reorganize your pack of cigarettes on the center of the end table, with the lighter lined up symmetrically on top, before turning off the light and going to bed.

You tell me, "Goddamn, look at her figure. A thing of beauty." You humbly worship her womanhood, a pure discipleship that makes talking with women as natural as breathing in and out. You with your childish devotion and your childish love, fleeting like a child but whole like it, too.

You quote the classic television shows and the ex-presidents and the heavyweight boxers. You channel them, aligning your voice to your ear with the precise inflection and pitch and the tone and the understanding of not only how they say what they say but what they are feeling when they say it.

I tell you a truth. I support it with information. You make me feel it.

You tell me you love me.

Puff ...

You're living with us again, sharing my room with me. For six months, maybe, probably less.

Your cycle is as predictable as the alignment of your cigarette pack.

You make a go of a job. You watch the same television shows each night. You build a lillypad in your mind as the cold, dark, putrid, swirling waters splash around it, dampening your clothes, getting them wetter and wetter as you watch the warm sun that keeps you dry recede.

You distract yourself from the real distraction you want, then need, then do anything to have.

You leave, because you cannot stay. You spend the money you've saved (for your own place, your own car, your own dignity). You drink the cheapest booze, whatever stretches the money the farthest. Elegance and charm have no place here. You fall unconscious beneath a bridge. You say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

You're broken: Your ankle, your cheekbone, your spirit.

The bars force you back to your reality.

You're back again. Maybe you'll make it a year. Maybe this is the last new beginning.

Puff ...

I agree. "Bridge Over The River Kwai" is a masterpiece.

I can't help but watch you as you walk, one leg shorter than the other because of that drunken car wreck that left your sister's hotheaded boyfriend a vegetable.

Your gait is a testament to battle, a war within yourself against an unspeakable cruelty that turned faith into desperate hoping.

You wear your sunglasses on cloudy days. Yes, I do understand you. And I believe you. The sunlight still hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too.

Puff ...

We've talked about the loose-change organizer. What an interesting invention. It never actually measures the change out right, but it's at least a place to make you feel like your loose change is worth something, after all.

The house is yours. For a week. Your sister's in the hospital.. Your nephew (the one who's named after you) is going to the beach to drink Jack Daniels straight from the bottle and get in fights.

I know what's going to happen before I close the door, catching a glimpse of you sitting alone on the couch in a room darkened by the parallax of the setting sun.

I return, on crutches, with new enemies and new women who want to save me.

You're gone, but not entirely gone. I pick up the papers in the trash and see the 40 oz. bottles hidden beneath. I've come back early.

I go upstairs. The loose change is all gone.

So beneath you. The stealing, the lying, the cheap malt liquor.

Puff ...

One thing about you, Uncle Chris: For all of your failings, you always wanted me to think better of you.

You didn't want me to see the same things you saw, unless they were the good things.

When you came back again, I had left. I took my government education money and moved into university housing. The first thing you did with your money from your job bagging groceries is buy me a small refrigerator for my dorm room. You found a deal, and you wanted to find some way to pay me back, with interest for trust lost but never love.

Puff ...

Your cigarette's almost out, Uncle Chris. And no matter how much I'd like it to be another way, I have to tell you goodbye the way I had to tell you goodbye.

You're back. I shake your hand. I ask you to come to my wedding in a couple of months. All is forgiven between us after that night a few months ago.

You remember. I came home to find your sister crying. "Son, you have to make him leave. I can't do it anymore" You left in peace. You wouldn't do it any other way. Not with me there, not with me the one old enough now to demand.

Maybe this is the last new beginning. Your face doesn't say it's so. Good luck to you. See you in a couple of months.

Puff ... puff ... puff ... The cigarette's out ...

"Son, I need to tell you something."

And I know.

"Chris died."

Along the banks of a dirty creek under a bridge of the K-Mart parking lot. Desperately trying to inject the phenobarbital given at the onset of a seizure.

Not found for days mid-July sun. Wallet sealed in a plastic bag from the smell.

Two weeks before my wedding.

All alone.

Find the cheapest place to cremate the body: "You do realize, sir, that this is an African-American funeral home."

Shop the garden stores for an urn. Listen to a brother beg to have his name left out of the obituary. Call the newspaper to tell them not to write about a homeless man in the story about a "body found." Call him "an electrician," his latest go at a job.

"Into this world we're thrown ... like a dog without a bone ... an actor out on loan ..."

I listen to the song.

I channel it.

The soft rolling of the organ keys. The thunder and rain.

I can feel the despair.

The faithless hoping.

Wanting to believe in a phantom, wanting to give something I don't have.

Crickets Chirping

Maybe someone more adept at pop cultural conundrums can answer this for me:

Why is it that Jon Stewart can be consistently funny, never faltering, four days a week?

Yet the incredibly overrated Weekend Update on "Saturday Night Live" regularly leaves uncomfortable silences (or worse, a faint smattering of laughter where you can only hear one woman trying to be into it) for millions to endure as they lay on their couches thinking they should stay up to watch this just because?

The fake news on "SNL" fell off in the '90s and found a resurgence with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon a few years back. Now, it's Amy Pohler and Seth Myers and it just isn't remotely funny to me.

This is supposed to be the premier comedy outlet for satire of contemporary culture ... and this is the best they can do?

They have a whole week to do this. Jon Stewart has a day most days and a three-day weekend for Monday to figure out how to make us laugh. And he does it just about every time.

Although, I do have to say ... I LOVE LASER CATS!

Seven Years

Hope left here a while ago, and filling the void an apathy that spreads like cancer.

Not just an absence of hope apathy, but an aggressive apathy, worn like a tarnished badge of honor.

Hope left when the Wal-Mart opened and the drug store closed, the one with the ice cream that came out best when you ran the scooper under the water faucet.

When the TG&Y store (the place where my grandfather would take me to get a toy even if I wasn't good) fell apart.

When fielding a baseball in the outfield grass became a dangerous gamble on whether the rocky soil would send it unexpectedly hurdling into your cheek bone.

When the truck-assembly plant sold false hope for a desperate town, only to leave as quickly as it came and force those who wanted to keep their jobs to move up North.

When maggots were eating out the floating carcass of a fish that couldn't quite agree with the town park's toxic water.

When the mill village was a place to work and build a childhood, not marinate in your own juices and wait out the fruitless days for a government check and destroy a thousand childhoods.

This is my hometown. Or at least the place I would come live every now and then with my grandparents when I had nowhere else to go.

In November of 2000, the state of South Carolina voted on whether or not we should have a state-run "education" lottery.

Going on seven years now.

Seven years.

There is nothing to take its place on this billboard. No new businesses. No reason to waste money convincing people to spend money they don't have. There's nothing else that needs to be shouted to anyone -- except, maybe, that even though the lottery is a reality, please, don't try to buy hope through it.

Today -- just a block or two down the street from the sun-bleached, desperate plea to vote against the tax on the poor and desperate and the apathetic and lazy -- is the gas station where the poor and desperate and the apathetic and lazy hover outside the doorway. Feverishly scratching their pennies across a piece of paper that offers a chance -- if only a chance -- at the good fortune that has left this place.

Beers and cigarettes are sold in singles.

And meanwhile, the accompanying, equally desperate plea to simply just wear a condom goes unheard.

Breeding apathy.

!!!!!!!

I have a problem with exclamation points.

They have to be one of the most overused and unnecessary tools in the English language.

Is there ever anything really that important?

Maybe. But somehow I suspect that things aren't really as important as the use of ... four !!!! ... exclamation points would lead us to believe.

Think of the prototypical massively passive-aggressive office memo: You see "PLEASE DON'T TOUCH THIS PILE OF PAPER!!!!!!" and you know that this person is desperate. You know you've got this person right where you want him or (usually) her.

These things are a sure sign that someone isn't confident that they can communicate effectively enough to be taken seriously.

A few years back, I wrote a newspaper article about this very subject. One of the guys I talked with (an English professor of some sort, I can't exactly remember) likened the exclamation point to a bludgeoning device. It even resembles a club or bat that you would beat somebody with.

Of course, I've been told my feelings about this just prove that I'm a cold, distant, miserable human being. That these things oftentimes are the best way to communicate happiness and approval.

That someone thinks what you or what you have to say is important without having to write "And let me tell you, I really think this is an important thing for you and you are important to me."

So that leads to another question: Is there anything to be that excited about?

I think there is. And I like the people who are that excited, because they're happy, and happy people are good.

The problem I have is that I struggle to communicate heartfelt happiness through written communication. You know, I've got to play it cool. What's that thing about cleverness that someone said once? Something about a witticism is the death of a truth?

I kill truth every day.

I've really put myself in an awkward position because of this.

When I respond to an email, I struggle with how to end it. Not the words, but the punctuation.

If I'm writing back a heartfelt "thanks" for work someone has done for me, putting an exclamation point after it -- "Thanks!" -- would really communicate my appreciation. If I put a simple period after it -- "Thanks." -- it can come across as overly formal, pretentious, unfeeling and maybe even rude.

But the problem remains.

I'm just not a happy-exclamation-point kind of guy.

So my solution has been simple.

Put nothing at the end.

Emailer: Eric, good job. I got your paperwork in and I'll pass it along to the right person later today.

Eric: "Thanks"

But it's never that simple. Sometimes, there's this:

Emailer: I went ahead and put you down for those free tickets. I'll put them on my desk and you can pick them up whenever you want. You can also have sex with my wife anytime you want.

What do I say?

"Thanks."

"Thanks"

No?

OK, OK. Yes, it deserves it. Yes, I have a soul.

"Thanks!"

Continuity

You know how you just have that word or two you say differently than anyone else you know? It usually happens when you learned it solely from reading it.

Growing up, about all I read were comic books. I remember when my wife and I graduated college with journalism degrees and went to work at a newspaper together. She was a copy editor and I was a reporter.

I remember her telling me that I frequently used words and phrases that she had rarely heard. She seemed impressed with my vocabulary. And that was puzzling to her, because even when I was 23, I still read nothing but comic books.

I had always had focus problems growing up. I would read the same paragraph over and over, so I rarely read books. I got that problem fixed a couple of years ago and now find myself reading all the old classics that I neglected in school.

Whenever I hear people trash comic books and worry over their effect on young minds, I point to phrases like "test your mettle" and "drink a flagon of mead"-- and the fact that not only did I know what they meant, I knew how to spell all of them correctly.

No one uses those phrases, you say? Trust me, I've found a way.

Sure, there were useless terms like "reversing the polarity," which is a classic comic book phrase used to fix any problem that can't be easily explained -- unless, of course, you just reverse the polarity, in which case everything's explained.

Today, as I make a living in words, there are barely any noticeable traces of the medium I derived much of my vocabulary from. Most of it blends seamlessly.

Except for when I actually say some of these words.

Like the one that my wife likes to ridicule me for every time I say it.

It's the ever-present word in comic books used to describe how Superman can't be in Metropolis in "Action Comics #768" saving Lois when he's currently battling Brainiac in a parallel universe in "Adventures of Superman #159."

"Continuity."

Say it: "continue-ity."

Not: "kon-tuh-NU-ity."

Like how you would say "continuous."

Say it fast: "continue-ity."

See? "continue-ity."

Continuity.