Altimore City

I am not a paranoid person, but I am a drinker. As a result of my drinking, I often exhibit traits of paranoia–I hear noises of uncertain origin that I associate with death, see flashes of light can only be of extra-terrestrial origin, feel little tremors that whisper warning of geological disaster (have you seen that Discovery Channel show about super-volcanoes? I mean, Jesus). So I’ve been called paranoid, but if that were true wouldn’t I do something more than pour another glass and pull the lever on the recliner I can’t afford but bought anyway?

The Japanese-looking man at Jerome’s Liquors who watches tapes of Korean-looking television on a TV/VCR behind bulletproof glass wondered aloud at me in a cloud of slaughtered English: How ca’ you be so sa’ whe’ errbody so happy? He turned the rotating (and also bulletproof) little carousel and delivered me my Popov. While I can’t imagine anything more pathetic than the man who sells me cheap liquor calling me sad, at least he didn’t insinuate I was paranoid. Better sad. But he had a fair point. In this so-called Golden Age, there isn’t much room for sadness.

I dashed across Preston street to avoid any other members of the alcoholic community that might be outside Dionysus and started up the alley. Of all the noises I’ve ever heard while drunk, the SHHPOPP’ing noise that suddenly and forcefully eminated from the center of the dark parking lot has never been one of them. So I stopped and looked at empty space. My eyes were doing that thing: blobs of color, semi-visible and erratic, flashing and zooming toward some single point in my pupil. I turned to keep walking, but for the first time in my experience, the blobs stayed behind. That shouldn’t happen. I turned back just in time to see a man calmly step out of nowhere, through the blobs and onto the parking lot. I blinked. The blobs were gone. The man wasn’t.

“You there!” he shouted, approaching me. Were I paranoid, I would have been terrified and ran. As a drunk, I stood there and stared; this important distinction that I am making should be clear now.

“Where am I?” he asked, lowering his voice as he neared.

“Mount Vernon,” I replied easily.

“Baltimore…listen: I am going to ask you a few strange but very simple questions. I want you to answer them quickly and honestly.”

“Sure.”

“What year is it?”

“2008.”

“What countries are we at war with?”

“Uh…none?”

“Not Pakistan? Or Iran or North Korea?”

“No.”

This seemed to excite him for some reason.

“Who is the President? What is his name?”

He had a hopefullness about him when he asked this question, and that endeared me to him. I liked this stranger, if only because the questions were so easy and the answers made him so happy. I can take credit for this, for helping another human being be happy.

“Al Gore.”

He raised his hands over his head in victory and breathlessly mumbled something about “it working.” He hugged me firmly, like men should hug each other, and started jogging then running up the alley. Like 50’s Doc Brown after he sends Marty back to the future. I found myself smiling, but after a few seconds the reasons got cloudy. Was I smiling because of that man, or because of “Back to the Future?” Regardless, I turned on my heels and quickly walked back to Jerome’s. I would buy something better tasting and smile straight through the glass at my either Japanese or Korean neighbor.

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Tagged drinking, sadness

It’s such a fucking disappointment. I saw a thing about MICA opening a new building over on the City Paper, and not only does its architecture look like something straight out of Tortuga-7, but it’s freaking called the Gateway. So I signed up for the the tour, since the website cheerfully tells you that this is going to be the only chance the public is going to get a look inside! The whole thing felt like it was being served up to me on a gilded plate. It was funny, writing the rsvp… my there-name is starting to feel more real than my home-name. It’s always one of those things that they warn you about, but of course you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late.

Well anyway, the actual tour was this past Sunday, and the crowd was more or less what you’d expect from a MICA thing minus the students. I felt a little out of place but whatever, that’s nothing new, and I dutifully followed along with the crowd as we walked through performance space A, studio space B, living space C. I can admit it seems like a nice place to be if you’re an art student but my dltracker didn’t ping once. I tried to lose the group by being so fascinated by the skyline view (again, actually pretty, which is almost impossible to do in Bmore) that I “didn’t notice everyone was moving on” but they were keeping an eye out for stragglers.

I went back to my place emptyhanded, no closer to home than I was six months ago. I’m trying not to get down about it, nobody wants to read some emo rant, nobody wants to hear it, either… Monday night, I bought a trio of cheapass bottles of wine to keep my mind off things. I don’t understand the obsession here over wine but I guess that’s working to my advantage.

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Tagged buildings, drinking, stranded

I’ve only seen a little anime, really popular things like Cowboy Bebop or Howl’s Moving Castle, so most of the costumes at Otakon went over my head. Still, when I ate lunch with a couple friends who were attending, I recognized the girl sitting at the table next to us as being dressed as Witch Hunter Robin.

I hate to write this but she was the worst of what you think of when you imagine a teenage anime fan: she had kind of dumpy body, an awkward nose, glasses that didn’t really suit her and the beginning of pimples sprinkled across her face. She was quiet, seemed like she saw things more than she was things, and what’s worse she had her mom tagging along. Her mom was snapping photos of everyone she could find in the bar who seemed remotely costumed. She even asked this pair of girls sitting in the corner to pose whose only qualification I could see was that one of them had dyed part of her hair bright purple.

The waiter brought an odd drink to the girl dressed as Robin, odd because she looked around 14 but the drink was in a martini glass, was bright green and had a pair of cherries hanging at its rim. Green the color of absinthe, not an appletini. They were carding everyone — even me, and I don’t look anywhere close to underage — so I didn’t understand how she could have swung it. But immediately she took a swig and grimaced. Something happened in that moment but I couldn’t say what, and her mother started to say something unkind but I didn’t want to eavesdrop, all of a sudden felt like I was starting to stare. So I stopped looking in her direction, focused on my Cobb salad sandwich, which was in itself a little strange but delicious. I think I’m at some stage in my life where I like avocado in any context.

Maybe twenty minutes later there was a nasty sounding crash — she had knocked over the glass and it had smashed all over the floor. Nasty glass fragments. But the girl — she had changed. Her eyes had grown larger, turned from brown to green, her complexion had cleared and the shape of her chin had altered itself. She was halfway Robin. I want to write that she had become beautiful, but she hadn’t.

People talk about the uncanny valley, where dolls become monstrous when they look very close to human, but aren’t quite. In our minds, the dolls become defective humans instead of imitations. This was like that but reversed — she was not a real human anymore nor something imaginary, and the tension between the two had turned her body into a nightmare.

I think she could feel everyone’s eyes on her because she leapt to her feet and stormed awkwardly out of the bar, nearly tripping over her own feet. Her mother looked around wildly trying to find a waiter, busboy, anybody who could clean up after this, but there was no one but herself who could do it.

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Tagged drinking, nerds, transformations