Rachel Kramer Bussel has tagged me for a meme. And who am I to deny her? So here goes:

1. I believe I may have written about this before, but in the second grade, I was apparently considered “special” and “gifted” after being asked to go to my elementary school on a very hot Saturday morning and participating in some tests that involved spatial dimensions, memory, and verbal skills. The man who tested me, upon seeing my results, began speaking to me in an extremely quiet and nurturing tone. I saw him speak to other adults, who likewise pointed to me. Frankly, now and then, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I will be the first to confess that I try to do my best, but that it often isn’t good enough to satisfy me. But this did permit me to enter into a GATE program, where I was bussed once a week to another school and encouraged to think and create. But since I was given nothing specific in the way of ideas or guidelines, since I didn’t have nearly as many books as some of the other richer, middle-class students had, I ended up getting an incredible crush on an older girl named Kristin, spending my time combating a horrible diffidence that crippled me for many years. But I did end up experiencing my first kiss — I don’t count the other pecks I received in preschool and kindergarten, which were more predicated upon “girls are icky” games in the schoolyard — after I gave her a box of After Eight mints that one of the men my mother had dated — a New Yorker, who tried to offer paternal advice to me over the phone — convinced my mother to spring for. The box of mints was six bucks. No small purchase back in those days.

2. As further evidence of my incongruous smarts, I ended up on a Knowledge Bowl team in seventh grade, where I was roundly ridiculed for my ratty clothes and how apparently stupid I was. It wasn’t my idea to be on the Knowledge Bowl. My English teacher, who was miffed when I once defended Stephen King’s virtues by stuttering my points in front of the class, had the idea of putting me on the team. I obliged him and I didn’t know why. We participated in the initial round by staring at a primitive computer terminal — a TRS-80, as I recall — that was linked to several other schools over what now seems the flimsiest of networks, but was then cutting edge. There were a few cases where I knew some obscure answer, although I felt tremendously dumb because my geography and science horrible. But I was very good at language, and remembering painters and musicians. And I saved the team from a defeat by offering a few eleventh-hour answers: both through this computer-based contest and during a later one, conducted live in front of parents and other kids. The other kids on the team — again, much richer and better dressed than me — still viewed me as a dork and a dumbass. For all I knew, they might have been right. But I did find a few other misfits who I got along with. In addition to introducing me to The Prisoner, a television series I still hold in high regard, they also taught me how to use a ten-sided die and encouraged me to do something called “DMing.” There, I invented a remarkably complex universe and tried to account for every conceivable choice that the other players would make, creating a document of what-ifs that was somewhere around thirty handwritten pages. (I also had a tendency to create fictitious countries, complete with economies and demographics. I submitted one such country, using a yeast concoction to generate three-dimensional mountains and carefully painting over it, to my history teacher.)

3. Other failed contests along these lines — my efforts debilitated by my unshakable shyness — included getting to the district spelling bee and, with three kids remaining, misspelling “leopard” by stuttering the O (“l…e…ooooooo…p…a..r…d”) because I was so nervous (I whispered “Whew!” into the mike after spelling a word correctly, where the whoosh from my lips would reverberate across the PA system); being invited to perform at a school district choir before puberty and hiding from everybody, until a kind dark-haired girl took an interest in me and told me what a great singer I was and that the choir needed me and somehow coaxed me onto stage; and, in ninth grade, getting very far in a school district speech contest, only to become very nervous because I had a crush on a redhaired girl named Stacey. But she was a Bush supporter in ’88 who hated my guts and was very resolute in letting me know it. (There was also a malicious, dark-haired Republican-in-training named Louis, who did everything in his powers to make my life miserable, including mocking my stutter, ridiculing my Marshall’s-purchased sweaters, and, in particular, not even permitting me to be a third-string class clown.)

4. Politically, I was a late bloomer. It was 1988, when a very tall senior named Chris, son of a very political man and a kind-hearted laidback guy who ran an underground newspaper (and asked me to write for it, which I did) and who showed me the ropes on how to light a theatrical play, asked me if I was liberal and made me understand what being a liberal entailed, that I realized I was an opinionated young progressive lout. I didn’t understand then why everybody was going after Tip O’Neill. And as soon as my liberalism was out, several hippie chicks in my drama class wanted to corrupt me. But I was too shy then to let them do this. I was, as I believe I have imputed in the previous paragraphs, a fool.

5. 1988 was also the year in which something I wrote was actually performed. It wasn’t much — a play called Inspired Lunacy: Or I Think This is a Big Mistake — very much modeled on Douglas Adams, the Three Stooges, and the Marx Brothers. Two other guys helped write this: a short guy named Chris and a guy named Eric who everybody hated. I deliberately took the third credit, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I shamelessly lifted gags that I had seen pulled off in other mediums. But what I learned with this play was that the humor I came up — which, with the exceptions of a few kind teachers and students, I thought pretty crappy — generated laughter, but that the stuff I stole didn’t. This encouraged me to go into crazier areas, such as a literal adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” a few years later, which set the murderous events over a suburban teenage party. I wrote and starred in that fifteen-minute theatrical piece, but it was the first time I had seen my material directed by somebody else. The director was extremely ambitious, using crazed gel lighting. In my bedroom, I practiced my murderous fall for hours so that it would be fairly convincing, angering the family (“How dare you make that noise!”) with my many thumps. The idea of my theatrical adaptation was to present something comical and end it with something startling and sad. I think this was my way of communicating the unpleasant domestic situation to my classmates.

6. Only a few years after the Poe hijinks, I spent far too many hours examining Buster Keaton’s moves on grainy VHS tapes and second-hand DVDs, trying to fall like him. When girlfriends asked where my bruises came from, I never offered an answer. I was not as shy as I had been as a kid, but I was still ashamed of who I was.

7. One of my favorite bars in my twenties was a neighborhood dive called Kelly’s Bar and No Grill (later turned into Pittsburgh’s Pub under new ownership). I’d spend hours there listening to conversations because I learned fairly quickly that the place was where former convicts would go in and get set up. It was sometimes a rough place. (I once witnessed a knife fight there, which, in my youthful folly and idealism, I actually attempted to stop. Thankfully, I was not stabbed.) But I learned more about people just by sitting there during happy hour and listening. I often went alone. But then friends discovered the place and we played darts. By then the riff-raff had dissembled. And it became a pleasant, but fairly run-of-the-mill dive.

8. My skin thickened considerably when I worked for a particular mean attorney. His personal remarks and observations were often extremely vicious, but I began to see how utterly absurd they were and they melted off my Teflon shell. So I have to thank him tremendously for toughening me up. He also inspired the Businessman character in my 2004 play, Wrestling an Alligator.

Anyway, time to pass the meme on. Here are the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And here are the people I pass this onto (only eight? So unfair!):

Jeff Bryant

Sarah Weinman

Mark Sarvas

Tayari Jones

Jason Boog

Levi Asher

SJ of I, Asshole

Shauna of What’s New Pussycat

I am half-awake and in need of resurrection. Head crushing, by no means crucified, from scant sleep, I head to one of my Sunday breakfast haunts, seeing flocks of families acknowledging an altogether different notion of rebirth. Mine is more prosaic and can be executed the other 364 days of the year. One of the problems with being without religion is that there are no cues. There is no atheist church, but one finds community in other ways.

There are many nonoverlapping sights that catch my attention: The new waitress who presumably fits the bill of “two years’ experience” that was registered on the help wanted sign, now gone. I don’t know if she fudged her years, but I suspect she has. She is pleasant enough, but she is inexpert at replenishing coffee. I still tip her well. Her jeans slip down her waist, forming a sharp hyperbolic ellipse that reveals the beginnings of a paunch and the top portion of an oval tattoo close to vulva. Hyperbolic curve revealing hidden hyperbolic curve clipped by the denim demarcating line. With its wholesome-debauched dichotomy, it reminds me of the Beriln Wall. But this exhibitionism is commonplace in my neighborhood and it doesn’t faze me.

I can certainly empathize with the confused and bushy-haired young man who is being vetted by his girlfriend’s parents. He didn’t get the memo that it was Easter either. His blue bandanna holds back unruly shocks of brown hair which disappear behind his blue sweatshirt. The other three people at his table are dressed like the families, which is to say suited, and they have signaled this disparity by shifting their posteriors to the left of the booth, all bunched in solidarity against this man’s sartorial indiscretion. Shirtsleeves or dressing down simply aren’t options here and I wonder if someone is going to arrest me for wearing yesterday’s denim shirt or failing to shave or not remembering the miracle of the nailed man on the cross. I’m certainly not cross towards any of these believers.

The table that draws my attention, and I am curious and observant because I failed to bring a book, is a father with two children. The father is moribund, suffusing strawberry jam in a sad and solitary way. His son and daughter are happy, frequently leaving the table to run circles around an aquarium just across the tiles. Papa does not share their zeal, but he has spiffed up his son, who is also besuited and well-groomed. Papa is dressed in a crisp blue blazer and a burgundy shirt and a smart tie blending in like Cézanne. He is in his mid-forties, the remains of his hair closely cropped. The balding is now at an end for him. I wonder if I will look like him in a decade or so when my hair eventually goes. I am wondering if he has the kids because his ex-wife forgot to pick them up. I am wondering if he was burned by someone or whether he is just hungry or disguising his sadness by appearing here with his brood. Perhaps the diner permits him to escape or saves him the labor of cooking eggs, potatos and bacon in that proud male manner that I have employed for women who wake up with me on a Sunday morning. Perhaps he needs a woman to swing his skillet. His children do not notice his loneliness. The waitress may not have two years’ experience, but she is expert enough to pick up on social cues and leaves the man to find a quiet paternal bonding with his children.

The divorce can’t be recent. (Or is he a widower?) The children are too happy. And I really hope this man will display some kind of joy. Maybe he might smile, as I did, over the waitress’s oval tattoo. Or perhaps he considers himself too old for this puerile preening or he doesn’t want anyone to see his giddy dregs.

But it turns out that I am very wrong. For as the man walks in the distance to settle up, I see the slight upward curve of a smile. And I see him engage in minor flirtation with the waitress, channeling some young part that I had thought dead. I wonder if he has read my mind. As the pleasant din of early Marley delights the diners, the man begins dancing a twinkly two-step, one that he hasn’t employed since his days in the dance clubs. And I see now why the kids love him.

Twenty minutes after this man has disappeared, I pay my check. I be-bop as well, with decidedly more swings of the arms, in deference to this man’s giddy human spirit, wondering if anyone is watching me and hoping that my clumsy but pleasantly executed moves will inspire them to dance a demented jig for a day that is, as far as I’m concerned, too restrictive of the beatific human spirit.

I shot out of bed this morning at 3:30 AM and I haven’t been to bed since. This is saying something because I am a deep sleeper. I was woken this morning by a rat who scurried under my futon. The rat was about six inches in length — likely a Norway menace — and its slimy curlicue tail swirled about a foot away from my head. I have heard the rats (there are many of them) scurrying through some of my papers. I have heard them in the walls and it is just as scary as Lovecraft’s story. Where did they come from? They stormed my apartment in one parasitical burst.

I am now in a coffeehouse. The exterminators are coming this afternoon. I have no desire to return to my apartment, although I have been brave and did some work while keeping my legs under my ass. I have tried to do more work, but it has been to no avail. The exterminators tell me that it will take repeat visits to rid the apartment of this infestation, but that the vermin should be exterminated in about two to three weeks. They offer a 90 day warranty, which I find interesting, given that the service involves destroying rather than preserving something.

I did not expect this to happen to me. I am certainly not a heroin addict nor do I welcome squalor. I may be messy, but I am not a total slob. Certainly the apartment has been in worse shape than it is in right now and the rats did not come. I suspect that the rats were attracted by the recent bathroom leak. Sewage is their natural habitat. And there was a hole in my bathroom ceiling for several days. Put it together.

I know there is a hole behind one of my bookshelves, for that is where this morning’s rat came from. Thankfully, it did not give two shits about me, but I let out a considerable squeal and vowed to kill the bastard. Unfortunately, I was unarmed and, even if I had possessed a weapon, I had no wish to catch the bubonic plague. I know there is another hole somewhere in my closet and I have kept that door shut. I hear the rats scratching from behind the heater. Christ, how many of them are there?

I will be staying in a hotel tonight. I have cracked many rat jokes, but there is still something unshakably menacing about the vermin. These damn things copulate several times a year and produce a litter of twenty or more. There are more rats than humans on this planet.* I am operating off of two hours of sleep and am keeping myself awake with Americanos.

I look upon the exterminators as my private mercenaries, my comrades in arms. I know that we will defeat the bastards.

But if it’s quiet around here for a while, you now know why.

* — I have since learned that this is false. Blame my understandable anxieties here.

[UPDATE: The exterminator has arrived, sealed off openings, and laid down traps. Apparently, the mice were coming through openings in the garage, which have now been sealed. The remaining ten to twenty mice will die in the next seven days. There’s a funny story here for a future post. I talked with the guy for a while. But it will have to wait. Needless to say, I now have a deranged respect for exterminators.]

I turn 32 today, and I hate it. Not because I am concerned with aging or because I am ashamed of who I am. I’m proud of my achivements and I’m doing just fine. No, I hate this whole birthday thing because it causes my faith in other people to dwindle into near misanthropy — if only for a day. Like anything, it passes. In many ways, how one person acts around you on your birthday (treating you coldly or failing to even say hello when they know very well it’s your birthday and this damn knowledge has made the office rounds without your sanction) is a measure of how they view you as a human being. But I also realize that this is an inaccurate measure, that people are subject to personal whims, that they have lives and they’re doing the best they can, and that it is unfair for me to judge them based on one day. Further, who am I to expect anything from anyone? And who the hell am I to judge?

The problem extends to just how important a birthday is and how it ties into one’s ego. To celebrate one’s self or, to use a verb suggested to me this morning, “pamper” one’s self strikes me as a horrid act of solipsism. To assume that others should reschedule their lives around you is even more selfish. And I suppose I’m committing the ultimate act of selfishness by laying down these neuroses in writing. But I must be honest here.

Here is the cruel irony: I am embarassed by any attentions showered on me, but I do pine for it in some casual, picayune, and non-materialistic manner. The last time I attempted any kind of celebration with friends (a few years ago), I tried simply to meet for drinks in a pub. There was no need for anybody to bring gifts. Just a casual conversation. Perhaps a few “Happy birthday, Eds” thrown in for good measure. I figured this was a halfway house between lavish blowout and informal confab. A way for me to become comfortable with the idea of the birthday, which seemed to delight everyone else.

Nobody showed up. I felt about as insignificant as the fly crawling up my glass of Guinness.

So I have removed myself from the equation. But I’m not sure if this is the right approach either.

Because we are dealing with an issue where one’s status is raised or lowered in relation to how a birthday is celebrated, I dread the birthday’s assault on my steady internal barometer. A birthday enters the equation and it threatens to blow a strong gale against the steady sail I use to guide my course. The birthday is entirely different from the curve balls life throws you, which are generally not personally directed at you and don’t involve you and can be responded to with action and discipline.

Since my own attitude doesn’t subscribe to the whole “Hey, here’s a cake! It’s your day!” approach that seems to be the norm, I try to wiggle my way out by avoiding most of humanity. It’s probably a shitty thing to do, particularly when my friends are only being kind and are just doing their best to make me happy. And I certainly don’t welcome this passive approach on my part, which is somewhat cowardly and only continues to exacerbate the problem. I really want to conquer the birthday in the same way that I triumphed over my hesitations about Xmas by doing volunteer work instead of participating in that holiday’s abject consumerism. But I don’t know how to do it. Because the damn thing’s all about me.

I feel that when I reveal even modest impulses (“Can we go out for drinks? Can we go out for dinner?”) that I’m like that wretched kid in that old Twilight Zone episode who has powers over all of the adults around him and forces them to submit to his every desire. Shouldn’t social occasions happen because people simply want to meet each other?

I certainly don’t want to burden my friends with any feelings which suggest that I’m ungrateful. I don’t want to be some miserable beacon that they have to celebrate or reassure, even in a small way. I don’t like the fact that for twenty-four hours, I become this minor bundle of nerves because I’m so self-conscious.

Why do I still blush in my fucking thirties when people wish me happy birthday? I can handle damn near everything else. I’ve had stalkers and death threats. There is no end to the amount of vitriol I have received over the years. But I’ve always been able to laugh that all off and dwell upon the positive.

The birthday, alas, is cut of an altogether different cloth. And I wish I knew exactly why. I cried on my thirtieth birthday when my then girlfriend baked me a cake. When my now girlfriend sang me happy birthday to me on the phone this morning, I was embarassed to tell her know how much this meant. When emails poured in this morning from a few friends, I couldn’t even type in the word “Thanks.”

I don’t know what to do about any of this. But at least I know there’s tomorrow. I know that tomorrow I’ll be myself again, divested of the importance and the attention (or lack thereof).

The good news first, since, acerbic tendencies aside, I’m an optimist: Ami Greko is a goddess. I’ll say no more. It arrived today. Thank you thank you thank you, Ms. Greko. I will start reading it tomorrow and report back here when I’m finished.

The bad news: I had intended to offer more content and podcasts this week, but there have been, how shall we say it exactly, existential complications. My landlord, who is thankfully a hundredfold more responsive than either Michael Brown or George Bush, and I are still contending with the leak from hell, which has now sullied quite a few of my books with water damage. All of them, thankfully, are easily replacable, although I’ve had to place my collection of tomes published in the 19th century into the main room.

Apparently, just after I left for work this morning, the leak broke big, assuming Biblical proportions. The water in the bucket overflowed and my landlord discovered upon entry a capacious puddle extending down the hallway. Knowing of my bibliomania, he was kind enough to shift some of the bookpiles onto shelves. We’re going into the ceiling tomorrow. The source of the leak remains unknown. I suspect the bathroom will resemble Gene Hackman’s apartment at the end of The Conversation. But no matter. We will prevail against the dreaded water.

Such is the life of being an urban dweller and a renter.

What this means is that tomorrow’s LBC podcast may be delayed until the weekend. Then again, I may get it finished. We shall see.