Bryan McMILLAN

collage by Larry SAWYER

Zen And The Art Of Self-Sabotage

At first, you were just sitting and thinking and smoking all day, not just watching your life go up in smoke rings towards the clouds, but in the hardcore introspective sense. There were days where you didn't say a word to anyone for hours at a time. This is what you're supposed to do, you tell your parents, as a human being. In time, in time, you'd say. You can't, you discover, just write a book because you've got nothing to do. And you've got too much to do, besides. One had to unlearn all the self-and-socially-destructive behavior encouraged by the loudspeakers of the land. That's what you'd do with an abundance of time, you say.

But, as the summer pressed on, the subtle pressure of small town Americana became too great to ignore, and meditation gave way to drinking beer in the backyard. "It's all a crock, a sham," you say. Your parents were looking at you like you were crazy. "It's designed for the children of the elite to float to the surface and then break through it. It works very well for them. Me, the most I can hope for is to expend all my energy and earning potential just to tread water."

"What is 'it?'" your mother would ask. "What's designed? By whom?"

And after a bit of back-and-forth like that, finally your Dad would say. "You can live here as long as you want, you know we'd never throw you out, but you're expected to work and hold down a job. Okay?"

You were only arguing on principle. After all, you'd been saying these things for years and if you stopped now, it was all for naught. Something was gleaming from the space you gave yourself--something unquantifiable, unmarketable, but something nonetheless important to you. That, you wouldn't back down from.

You cleaned up your act. You cut your hair and bought some nice clothes. You went and got yourself an interview for a full-time position with benefits, an office position at Rug Shampooing, Inc. You stood to make decent money, better than anything you'd had thus far, at least. You had visions of intricate equipment, suds billowing in plastic tubes, suction hoses, roving tanks of cleaning equipment, the scent of shampoo rising from multi-colored and patterned rugs in office buildings. You could almost see the 20th floor of a skyscraper, pushing a vacuum in-between the cubicles of high finance and power decisions, saying hello to the other doomed souls there at the odd hour.

But it didn't work out that way. They contracted out that stuff, you were told, like it was a big relief or something. It was Mr. Vesperidees who interviewed you. He said, "No, no, you won't be doing any of the actual cleaning. We need someone to organize the jobs we contract out and coordinate the jobs we bring in. Can you do that?"

"Sure I can do that. I ran the student employment office while I was at school."

Bryant is a business school near your parents' house. He nodded, saying, "Good, good."

Needless to say, you've never taken a business class in your life. And you certainly never ran a student employment office. But you didn't make the rules, you figure.

The phone rings. You answer while floating in the pool, listening to the sound of the trees and feeling the sun. It's Jerry, the Old Man at Rug Shampooing, Inc.

"Congratulations, kid, you got the job. You just have to fill out some paperwork and take a urinalysis."

Everyone you used to buy weed from has moved or gone back to school, so no worries.

"Bryant College, eh? My son goes to Bryant College. What year did you graduate?"

"A few years back," you say. The combination of the glittering late-afternoon sunlight and back-and-forth of the wind through the leaves hypnotizes.

"Small world," he says. "I'll ask him if he knows you. Okay, see you." He hangs up. You think he called from his cell phone. Probably sitting in traffic, you think, or speeding along. Probably doesn't use his blinker, either.

Your job entails organizing rug shampooing jobs for the people who own the company. You've only actually seen two other people, and you're not sure what tasks, exactly, they perform. There's Jerry, the Old Man. He seems to make the decisions. And there's the other guy, Mr. Vesperidees, he's more of your young-business-guy type. He tries to present a hip appearance, but you can tell it's all from a class he took on how to relate to people or from movies hip people got him to watch. You don't exactly trust people like this. He shows up once a week, to pick up the reports you prepare and see how you're doing. The reports take fifteen minutes to prepare, but you can stretch it out. Organizing the jobs takes even less time. Basically, you just answer the phone and check your email. And you're left to yourself in a small brick office building, a converted dentist's office, you're told. Thirty-five miles from home.

Your parents do not have an internet service provider, but of course, the office has a high-speed connection. At first you dabble, only a fifteen-minute stretch in the morning, maybe one in the afternoon. But you see it getting worse. The wealth of spectacle out there overwhelms. You get a credit card just to keep up.

You get home at dusk and watch PBS nature specials and wonder, if reincarnation was real, about your own previous lives. After watching an octopus special for about 45 minutes, you become convinced that you, too, once had a soft oval body and eight sucker-bearing arms and floated in wait for crabs and fish to eat. In the morning, you get to thinking of this again.

When, you wondered, were you born a human? What virtue had you acquired to be born so? To be born a human is infrequent. Picture a tortoise in the ocean rising to the surface off the coast of Maine. With its eyes closed, its head peeks out of its shell and rises into the middle of a small ring, discarded in the green and choppy waves. There, its head encircled inexplicably by the ring, is the likelihood and circumstance of being reborn a human being. The tortoise misses the ring at least a million times and pops up in another life all round the food chain. You have it lucky. You have plenty of time to think on the morning commute.

You drive home a different way each day. This gives you the illusion of variety. As the summer fades, you marvel at the New England landscape, the trees changing colors and covering hills in every direction. A month from now, the leaves will have fallen, and you'll forget the way everything looks right now. And when spring comes, you'll be amazed and in a good mood for weeks, thinking you've never seen so many colors, such lively green, before. That, you think, is a routine you can live with. The same from year to year but always different. Maybe it's not so bad having the same routine at work, you think. Plenty enough room for variety. The public radio station replaces your thoughts with a diverting recreation of a three-dimensional image.

You exit the highway and enter your hometown. You pass a kid walking home from the bus stop. He has a a dark green backpack, and his body is stretched awkwardly between the child he was and the brooding adult he wants to become. His expression is scornful, and he stares at you as you pass.

You used to walk home from the same bus stop, ten years previous. You thought you saw a rock in the road, and you went to kick it. But just as your foot ruptured the side, the sound of swarm unfurling rose up and over you. You sprinted away, faster than you've probably run since, all the way home, and you managed to stay ahead of them. Now, you wonder, what's the kid doing coming home after five o'clock?

At dinner that night, your father returns from the same job he's held as long as you've been alive. Your mother's prepared dinner, and you're all sitting down together. Your sister is there, as well. She, too, works full time. She likes it. To her, having her own income is tied up in unlearning centuries of job discrimination. For you, you realize, listening to her, it's the exact opposite.

"Working full-time serves only to distract me from the reality of centuries of elite and corporate oppression," you say, in-between mouthfuls of chicken and roasted potatoes with butter. You're doing a spot-on William Burroughs impersonation, but no one notices.

You zone. You think about the food on your plate once being alive, or attached to the earth. You take another bite, this time more slowly, more deliberately. You have one of those meta-aware moments, where you see yourself, eating and being eaten. It comes out of nowhere but hangs in front of you for a minute. It seems impossible to properly function if you forget we all eat and are eaten.

Your mother asks about your job. She's looking for some details to which she can relate, details with which she can remember being your age. "All in all," you tell her, "I'd rather be a pirate, live by the docks or on the sea with a knife at my side." You drain your wine glass.

That night after a particularly mind-numbing hour of network television, you think about pirates again. It must have been an awful job, in actuality. You think about adventure and history and the coming-into-being of America. A quote enters your mind as it grows hazy and approaches sleep, something from Jerry Rubin. "A society that outlaws adventure makes defying that society the only adventure."

That night, you dream of sabotaging the rug shampooing company. You join one of the cleaning crews and put a slow-acting corrosive in all of the shampoo and LSD in all the water coolers. You leave video cameras behind to record the chaos. You travel the country showing these videos to horrified audiences. People give you money to do this and say nice things about you at cocktail parties. The dream is at one of those cocktail parties; the rest of it is just kind of understood, like you do, in dreams. You are scrawling a poem on a napkin for which someone wants to spend a ridiculous amount of money.

The next morning, you download a picture of Arnold Schwarzeneggar in a mid-"Total Recall" roar and set it as the background for your monitor. Over the phone, you quote from foreign films, principally The Seventh Seal, to prospective clients. You're amazed at the chaos that ensues. People become confused. Business is actually lost. At first, you scramble to cover the ground, then become intrigued by the process of losing it. How can such a minor and inconsequential deviation from the expected derail the progress of mighty American business? It's only a matter of time, you suppose, before Mr. Vesperidees and the Old Man get wind of this and tighten the screws, but you feel the need to take advantage of the space and solitude of the office.

You check your email every twenty minutes. Most of the friends that formerly cheered you on in unemployment send you forwarded jokes and appeals to conscience from their own respective office jobs.

Mr. Vesperidees pulls into the small parking lot behind the building. You take your feet off the desk.

He walks in and makes pleasant, well-seminar'd small talk. It comes up through this that you live at home. He asks why you haven't moved out. You mumble something about paying off college loans and saving money. He says he knows how it is and maintains good eye contact. He doesn't say anything about the Schwarzennegar picture on your monitor, but you know he sees it. He's filed it away for another time, when he may have to reprimand you and will need some evidence that you're not like everyone else.

When Mr. Vesperidees leaves, you receive a few more calls and end up leaving a little past 5 o'clock. You head into the city and and spend some money. You come home with new books and CDs, this lifestyle so seductive. You picture the millions of offices of the land and the tie-wearing, cup-pissing, clean-shaven multitudes that fill them. You're all leaving work at 5 o'clock and going into the cities to do what you've just done, the alcoholics shitfaced to blot out the shame of being a bunch of drunks sitting in traffic. A car honks at you, and you move on.

You dream you're backstage at an Oasis show. Equipment is being moved in every direction. Profanity is hurled back and forth, all with a British accent. You see Noel Gallagher sitting atop an amplifier. He looks upset..

"Liam's gone," he says. "Blew his throat out. Nostrils full of coke anyway, know what I mean? Means I have to sing the show meself."

"Noel," you say, "give me this one. I can do Liam's songs. The crowd'll never know."

"Yeah, let him do it," chimes in Alan, the drummer. He's beating his sticks on a guitar case in tune with the radio, "Let's give him a shot."

"Watch it, that's me brother," Noel says. He flicks his head to me. "You know the songs?"

"Right, then," he stands up and straps on his guitar. "I'll sing mine and you do our kid's. Remember, people don't come to see Oasis jump around the stage. Let 'em see another band if they want barking monkeys. Just sing your bit. Right?"

Fookin' 'ell, right. You follow the boys out on stage, and the crowd jumps to its feet and screams. A thousand lights go off at once. You get a look from Noel that tells you not to blow it, that everything is riding on this. The stage shakes from the stomping of one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand feet. You fold your hands behind my back and start swearing and slurring into the microphone. The crowd goes wild.

You hit snooze. The rock show diminishes, counterpoint to the day about to begin. It almost feels like you're watching it happen to someone else.

You read that exercise staves off depression, so you start to jog. You're curious as to how far you can run now that you've quit smoking. And just to generally do something after work rather than buy more and more things. You run by the waterfall every other night on a five mile jog around town. You see three younger versions of yourself stepping out of a car and shuffling down the trail, to sit beside the water and smoke and dream and bullshit with each other. Seeing them makes you frustrated. You wonder what's happened to America, to yourself. So many important things to think about, and what do we do? You ask this to anyone who will listen, particularly to strangers at the bar that you've begun hitting up on the way home from work on Fridays.

Your paychecks keep coming and coming, and you buy more Buddhism books. Finally, after an exhaustive search which takes you an entire afternoon at work, you find the book you're looking for, Shantideva's Engaging in the Bodhisattva's Way. You order it with your credit card.

You have several framed Arnold pictures up now. You cut up a Nike ad and paste "Arbeit Macht Frei" directly above the distinctive, whip-like swoosh. Mr. Vesperidees pays you a visit on the sixth week of your employment there. You can tell by his disapproving eye as he walks into the room that today is the day he puts into practice his "discipline the employee" seminar.

"Some of our clients have mentioned to me that you're not following the phone script we sent you," he says. "Would you say this is accurate?"

"Is there something wrong with it? Would you like to bring up any problems you may have with it?"

"It's not the script," you say. Maybe he's an all right guy, and you can talk sincerely with him. "As a rough guide, it's fine. It's just the monotony of doing the same thing over and over. It undermines my ability to effectively execute tasks."

"Well, when you change the script, you're showing disrespect to all the people who worked on it. Including me. I spent a little time on that, you know."

He seems proud of these efforts. Of all the things to create, you think. You reiterate that it's not the script, just the practice of doing the same thing, day in, day out. Thinking Vesperidees would like an example, you say, "It's like coke. You snort enough coke, pretty soon the buzz is gone and you're just going through the motions. You know?"

He fixes you with a narrow glare and straightens a bit. "I wouldn't know anything about that," he says.

Not that you would know or anything, you say. Seriously. But come on, what kind of business school he went to; didn't they have cocaine there for God's sake?

"Well, why don't you tell me. What did you study while you were at school?" He motions to the framed Arnold pictures. "What kind of business degree do you have, anyway?" He looks to the walls to see if you've framed and hung your degree anywhere.

"I've never taken a business class in my life," you say. "Mine was a liberal arts education. I basically learned about black, gay or feminist authors. And a little Shakespeare."

"No, not technically. But I did study film and French poetry, and that becomes a business unto itself. So it was like going to business school."

Of course, you've never read a French poem in your life. But the lie feels somehow closer to the truth.

Mr. Vesperidees squints at the defaced Nike ad. Something about it is troubling him, but he can't put the pieces together. He tells you to stick to the script when you're on the phone. "I can't say much about your decorating the office. I don't think the Old Man would like it very much. Most people just put up their families" He shakes his head and leaves.

You manage to forget about this completely and go home to a fine dinner of salad and sea scallops. When you go to work the following morning, Mr. Vesperidees calls at 9:45.

"You were late this morning," he says. "I called at 9:10, because I wanted to see if this might be happening."

You weren't, actually. You stayed in the parking lot for fifteen minutes to watch a particularly engrossing cloud formation, but you were there at precisely 8:54 AM. But what are you going to do, ramble on about getting lost in the clouds?

"I looked up what 'arbeit macht frei' means. Are you out of your fucking mind? You can't have Nazi quotations up at the office. What the hell were you thinking?"

You want to tell him about maintaining an awareness of the free play of signs and signifiers, of postmodernism, of drawing a parallel between it and the slogans of our own culture, of sneaker ads in particular, the purpose being to turn up the volume on the disturbing similarities of ideology. But again, what are you going to, ramble on? It would just make things worse.

"Nazi quotes? Good lord, that was given to me by a client. I thought it would be good morale for me here at the office. I'll take it down right away."

"And get rid of all those Schwarzennegar photos," he says. "This is a business. We can't have people coming into the office and seeing that. It's unprofessional."

In the six weeks you've been working at the office, not a single business call has been made in person. Mr. Vesperidees knows this. You feel that should be reflected in your decision to hang up anything "weird," you know? You check your email, and you find an email from the Old Man. It's succinct. "It has come to my attention that six weeks have elapsed, but no report of your urinalysis has been filed. Please report to the assigned company clinic, as stipulated in your paperwork, before work on Friday morning to submit to one."

You print it out and tape it to the side of your desk. At present, you've nothing to fear from a urinalysis, but at the same time, who needs clear-headedness to email all day? To enter numbers into little cells that add things up for you? You can understand jet pilots, people who work with precision microchips or volatile chemicals. But office workers? Tie jockeys?

You spend the day, to the sonic discomfort of each prospective client, talking in a French accent over the phone. You hope at least one of them will find this amusing, but it annoys them to the last. When you lock the place up that night, you already miss your job, despite everything.

You change your jogging route that night and run down a desolate road that encircles the reservoir. You normally think of nothing when you run and engage in a pleasant mind-quietness, but tonight you find yourself preoccupied with the woods. The early autumn wind blows through the branches, and the leaves shake and the dusk sunlight shimmers. Someday, you realize, and you can't stop your mind from cynically snapping as it will, this will be a supermarket.

A car pulls up, and Chris, an old friend from high school, gets out. He saw you jogging and followed you. You haven't seen him in years. You start to talk like you always used to. It feels like the past six years have just been a dream and here's you and Chris, just chatting it up, in-between days of going to school. You catch each other up on the acceptable points of the last few years. You make plans to meet for drinks for the next night.

You go home and stay up late watching movies on Bravo. You're not all that interested in them, but they are professionally made and aimed at a respectable audience in which you keep trying to count yourself. It feels forced and silly. When you sleep that night, you dream of Victorian England and shameful, repressed sexuality. The king of England is Arnold Schwarzennager, and he is very, very mad.

You get up early on Friday morning so you can make the urinalysis, but you end up falling asleep in the bathroom. Your mother wakes you by banging on the door. "Stop wasting water!" How you fell asleep you don't know, but you have a towel tucked under your head for a pillow and one draped over your body like a blanket. You turn the shower off and hurriedly get ready.

You skip the urinalysis and head right to work. At first you plan on just rescheduling it, but after turning on the computer to find a list of what is and is not acceptable office décor, thoughtfully pasted together from a dozen forwards and memos by Mr. Vesperidees, you start to pack your meager belongings. The decision to just up and leave is sudden, but you can't say you're surprised. As you're doing this, the phone rings, and you answer it.

"What the hell?" It's the Old Man. "You had an appointment at the clinic this morning. You missed it. Do you have an excuse?"

"The jig's up," you say. "I've been smoking crack and popping pills since little league. I'm a disgrace to the force. I'm all washed up."

"Now wait a minute, damn it," he says. "Don't think being a wise-ass will help you in any way. You've been on shaky ground lately, you know that? Skipping your appointment doesn't help your case any."

"I'm saying I'm quitting before you fire me for some inane reason or another," you feel a hot flicker of temper crease your forehead. You don't want to. You want to leave smooth as Steve McQueen. "What the hell does it matter? I'm not the droid you're looking for."

"You can't just quit! Who do you think we are? A two-week notice is a professional courtesy, kid. This is a professional operation."

You're not proud of yourself. You weren't planning on turning this job into a platform for politics or theater, and you certainly weren't planning on quitting via a dramatic phone conversation with the Old Man. You unplug the phone. At least this time you're leaving on your own terms. If you must burn bridges, set fire to them yourself, you say. You've survived this long without the blessings of the professional world, and maybe everyone's right, your future is squarely on another path.

You turn off the lights and lock the door. You hang your tie on the doorknob. It's a swirly, paisley pattern--very popular with the tie-wearing culture who defy single, solid colors. You get in your car and crank the classic rock station. You feel like making love, you scream to the world. It is apparently very important. After driving around aimlessly for about an hour, checking out the trees, which are still exploding all around you, fanning out along the sides of the road in fiery glory, you stop at the ATM, to get money for meeting up with Chris that night. You end up going to the bar about six hours early, ostensibly to order some food, but you start drinking. What else do you do when you walk out of a job? Here was another script you felt all right by.

By the time Chris arrives, you're drunk and surly. He can tell something's up but doesn't want to get into it. He orders a beer and starts knocking around the good old days. You snort. What's the point? Where do the good old days get you? He is visibly nonplussed by this perspective. He tells you a bit about how good it is to be out of school and in the working world.

"Is it what you wanted to?" he asks. "I mean, is it what you went to school for?"

You roll your eyes, "I know it's not the attitude we're supposed to have, but you tell me where it got me."

"Well, I went to a private school, sure, but I'm working a temp office job myself. It's just a beginning."

You try to make your voice like a Chinese loudspeaker, "Delay the over saturation of your work force. Provide endless jobs for overqualified college grads." You down the last of your beer and hiccup. "Don't you ever get depressed about it?"

Your conversation is thankfully interrupted by the beginning of the night's entertainment. A guy with long hair is playing radio songs in the corner of the bar. People are trying to talk over him. It's horrible. You feel embarrassed for the guy, for musicians in general. In a drunk and distracted state, you re-appraise your relationship with rock and roll. All of that freedom and attitude and youth transcending the bullshit of the world… maybe for the rock and rollers themselves, but it suddenly strikes you as utter bunk, a sedative for the disenfranchised minions of the world.

You shrug. You don't mean to be dumping this on Chris. You don't mean to be dumping this on anyone. At the end of the first set, Chris gets up to leave. Work in the morning, he says. "Even on a Saturday, eh?" you ask. He smiles. You go through the motion of making plans to see each other again, but you're vague on all the details. It reminds you of something, but you can't put your finger on it. You stay to the very end and sober up a bit, and you even help the long-haired guy bring his speakers out to the car. He offers to smoke you up, but you're too tired. It's a bummer, you tell him, because tonight would have been perfect for that, you feel.

On the drive home, you put your finger on it. The last time you saw Chris, the summer after high school, you had made him a mix tape and asked him what he thought of it. He said he loved it, best mix tape he ever got, but when you asked him about specific songs, he changed the subject and even poked fun at the fact that anyone would inquire about such things. Had that really been six years ago?
What songs had you put on it? And in what order?

The next night, while jogging your 5 mile loop, a cop stops you and asks all sorts of questions: Who are you? Where are you coming from? Where are you heading? Why are you out at night without a car? Where did you go to school? You field them all with calm factuality, no use making a stink of anything. Small-town cops, you rationalize, must suffer from feelings of inadequacy over having nothing to do. These feelings are re-enforced by television shows and movies, filling heads with dramatic tales of fraternal loyalty and badass crime-busting. You can relate to this. You remember skateboarding in the plaza your first year of high school and being constantly harassed, thinking then that it was the pinnacle of police state brutality, your own head, at the time, filled with lone rebels against the system and an uber-government of thought control enforcing obedience through its tentacles of law enforcement.

He asks to see your hands. You show them to him. He says, "Hmmm…" Both of you are now embarrassingly aware that you've doing nothing wrong. Overtly, at least. He gets into his prowler, bids you a condescending "good night" and drives away. You sit down on a tree stump and reflect on this encounter. You no longer have the long hair or extravagant dress that characterized earlier encounters with the law. And yet here you are, still being stopped and questioned. You decide to interpret this as a visitation, as a call to return to the lifestyle you once knew, one of marathon beer-drinking bouts and endless quests for marijuana. Jogging and full-time employment, after all, had landed you right back where you started.

Your parents take the news with their usual flamboyance, demanding to know what you're going to do. You placate them with placing-applications stories and looking for work woes. You pull your old Sega Genesis out of the closet and begin to play Risk for hours every day. The next Monday, you get a call from the Old Man who says that in accordance to the papers you signed, your last paycheck will be forfeited in absence of a two-to-four-week notification of departure. You suspected as much. You tell him he was the General Patton-type presence you always needed but never had.

"If men like you were running the show in 'Nam," you say, "you and I would be sitting down and sharing a Budweiser in good ol' Saigon, brother. Up the irons."

You terminate the connection without hanging up the phone. You close your eyes and place the phone against your head. Who is saying these things through your mouth? You hear Noel Gallagher singing on the radio. Where did it all go wrong?

Your behavior over the next week-and-a half is hardly exemplary. You endure many a pep talk from your parents and many a comparison to other young men of your age and earning power. Your mother has an endless supply of warehouse jobs in the area, all of which require drug-testing.

"No can do, Mom," you say. You're in your bathrobe and flipping between channels in the living room, having played Risk all morning.

"Just what are you taking that you don't want anyone to find out about?" she demands.

"That's not the point," you say. "Who's testing these money-property-power junkies? They're selling the ground from under unborn feet. You know?"

"I don't know," she says. "You have to put up with things you don't like if you plan on working."

"Just because everyone's so scared not to make money doesn't mean I can't make a stand against this," you wave your hand, "collective ridiculousness."

She leaves you be. You feel bad. Why are you saying these things to her? Why do you think these things? Your father tells you you're just tripping yourself up, and you agree with him. You feel for his position. Both of your parents grew up quite poor and managed themselves out of it to maintain your sister and you, to boot.

You're past the age of rebelling against them for the choices they made, but you feel, desperately, the window for collecting principles around yourself instead of more possessions is closing but still not quite closed. You're holding onto this. It seems like the only nobility here for the taking. You imagine that sure, sooner or later, you'll tire of all this, join the ranks of those who insist the only way to get ahead is to try one's damnedest to think like everyone else. But until then, there was all of this anti-your-position-unfairness-propaganda that exists out in the world--as re-enforced through these increasingly belligerent anti-pot ads making the rounds as you cable-flip - and someone had to do something.

Your indolent and usually-drunken presence is making everyone uncomfortable. This happens even when you're trying to be, relatively, normal, like a day-and-a-half ago. Your mother and sister were watching a soap opera, and you decided to join them. You haven't been home since.

You had gotten up at 12:30 pm and were making coffee in the kitchen. Your sister was on her lunch break. Your mother had long since stopped paying attention to soap opera storylines but left them on out of a need for familiar noise in the background. Your sister, on the other hand, knew the storylines inside and out and insisted on discussing them in a "can you believe that this happened?" manner. So, you sat down with your coffee, thinking that by spending time with them, doing something they wanted to do, you'd show them you weren't the loser they might worry you're becoming, that for all your dumb-ass-ness and nonconformity you still had some familial affection behind your eccentricities.

Your sister was catching you up on the background of the scene when the trouble started. Apparently, the actress in the hospital bed had taken too many pills. You could tell this had happened before your sister told you because the camera had switched to a point of view shot and was going in and out of focus. Additionally, the actor addressing her had reverb on his voice. You're no simpleton when it comes to sophisticated tricks like these.

"You can really screw yourself up taking someone else's medication," said your mother. "It's no wonder she's sick."

And that's when you said, "Don't listen to her, sis. We're here only to experience ourselves. Take all the pills you want."

What happened next you're still trying to figure out. There was at first silence, which you took for granted, as you had never shared the same sense of humor. Then, you heard a sniffling. By the time you realized your sister was crying, she had fled the room, and your mother was standing over you, yelling about how worried your sister was, and how saying things like that was cruel and completely unnecessary. She was starting in on how disgusting you were becoming when you finally got up, and she was still yelling after you when you slammed the front door behind you.

You don't need anyone telling you how disgusting you were. You know perfectly well. Did they think you were totally out of it?
Now you sit in a convenience store parking lot, an opened beer between your legs. You listen to Yoko Ono's side of "Plastic Ono Band" for the hundredth time. A car pulls up beside you, depositing two older ladies who observe you and shake their heads.

"Evening, folks," you say, mistaking their scorn for polite acknowledgement. They pretend not to hear you and scurry away.

The car you're waiting for finally drives up. You roll down the window and turn to the driver. He shakes his head.

"Okay," you've heard this for a week straight so it comes as no surprise. But at least this guy had the decency to show up. Small town weed dealers have either a surprising degree of integrity about such things or none whatsoever. You know tomorrow is anything but definite. It feels good to know that. You tell him to call you at any rate.

You drive around for the rest of the night, singing along with radio songs and smoking cigarettes. The windows are rolled down; sparks fly everywhere. You cruise by the waterfall to see if anyone is hanging out there, but of course there isn't anyone at all. You park in front of your parents house, eventually, and kill the engine, leaving the stereo on. You close your eyes and lean your head back. The music meets in the center of your foggy head.

You're awakened by the sound of the newspaper delivery lady's station wagon roaring past. You sit up and look at the car clock. Your dad will be getting up for work in an hour. You have spilled beer in your lap. You must have passed out.

The station wagon pulls up beside you. She stares at you. You roll down the window.

She looks pissed at you. She's maybe twenty years older than you are. You wonder why she is delivering papers in the middle of the night. You want to tell her that you understand, that it's four in the morning and that you've no rational cause to be sleeping in a parked car in front of your house. But the words don't come. You mumble something about just falling asleep, sounding drunker than you actually are. She shakes her head and peels off. You smile. A woman her age just should not be laying rubber in front of your parents' house, not that anyone will believe it wasn't, somehow, related to you. You quietly enter the house and tiptoe to your bedroom. You close the door softly and undress. You see that on the bed, which your mother has apparently made, God bless her, is a copy of Engaging in the Bodhisattva's Way, which must have arrived sometime in your absence. You can't wait to read it tomorrow. Maybe this will be the one with the meaning you need. Maybe it will all mean something in the end. Maybe so and maybe not.

You lay in bed and listen to the chorus of crickets outside the window. You think about that tortoise rising to the surface of the ocean, not knowing of the ring, which threatens to encircle its head and the stupefying consequences that unfold from that fateful happenstance. You listen to the crickets and are sure of only one thing as you burrow into the folds of your blankets and surrender to dreams and sleep, that you were once one of them, chirping as they do, harmonizing with the other crickets, hopping about to avoid being eaten, and lulling all who listen to sleep.