generica in the face of arcana

Welcome welcome I'm the carny barker from a little town called nowhere, and I think you might've been there before, with cold feet and a cold nose and eyes closed against the oblivion seeping from its half-eaved collapsible houses.
Now that my beard is gone, my thoughts are a bit more rampant, running a gamut of bullshit and signifying that Bigs' been encouraging, though his elocutional skill when it comes to insults is pretty much unsurpassable without a thesaurus, a mythology handbook and a pop-culture rag mag in hand. And my hands are either gripping the bar ("the ossified pube of Cleopatra herself, aspy and raspy on the morning's unfurling themselves like a standard flag Marx Marvelous wanted to take into battle" as Bigs once said; I'm going to have to start keeping a catalogue, or at least a tape recorder) or fluttering spasmodically to my naked, though florid-smelling, face. But the canvas on the gloves is fustian ("yo momma's prom dress from the Spanish inquisition was rougher than Dre Bly's career outside the backfield") and rarely consoles my nude jaw.
Bigs, of course, gives me a modicum of shit about it, and tries to coerce Lugsy into prattling too, but the man's as gentle as beakless mother hen free-ranging through April, though he does know how to wrestle an apology out of someone w/ a few apposite aspersions. We three've become somewhat of a team, which is natural considering we're always doing the runs together, but our dynamic's more fluid and unchecked, unlike Phoebe and whoever's obliged to be w/ her that specific night. Not that she's a bad person, but man she's got a tongue on her like an irradiated anaconda tearing the Amazon a few new tributaries. And she doesn't hold herself back. She paints it like she sees it ("that bitch thought Humanism was a diet"; "Leanardo'd envy her eyes for etching the starkest lineaments from a portrait muddled like the cesspool yo parents found you in") but uses a steel-wire intead of horsehair brush. Gerry made some passing remark under his breath as she was heading out, something about the merits of feminism for a woman like her (there'd been a prior argument, or really, more a confrontation, about smoke breaks) and she whirled around, her elbows and shoulders and every angle about her ("she's as voluptuous as a Calder mobile, but w/ more irrational axes pinwheeling about") poised and focus like a peregrine fixed on a crippled fieldmouse, and basically spat "and ain't it a good thing yer sister threaded you in here 'cuz her husband got mo' sway here than a bitch in heat?"
Bigs Lugsy and me, and Harry and Zeke, who were fumbling around in the back of the bay, but Phoebe said it loud enough the whole population of caterwauling cats just wiping the day from their whiskers took up her cadence a minute later, like to died. We looked like blowfish poked w/ sushi knives we were trying so hard not to bust out. We got on the road quick as a pissed sphinx ("fast as Dedalus pushing his nephew down the stairs 'cuz he was gonna get more patronage, the pussy of the Roman age" and somehow, he's never pedantic or sententious; I haven't yet, but I need to buy this man a beer b/c he's a rolodex of arcana).
Other than that, life's been a drunk junior at a house party, pretty easy, but a bit embarassing at times, and slopppy but that's more the job itself than anything else. The embarassment arises from just having to live at home still, where since I'm basically indisposed w/ gathering garbage and bringing the aroma of moribund restaurants and the streets' system of amor, I haven't been able to help out as much as I was before (though that's an overstatement). The Volvo's still obstreperous as a lycanthrope in gibbous throes, but she's easily assuaged w/ some tinkering w/ the spark plugs. A short fix, I know, b/c I think it's symptomatic of some faulty wires but there doesn't seem to be enough time for mom to drop her off for a few diagnostic days. Now that I'm getting some money though (and honestly, it's not too bad paying of a job; no tech salary stuff, but I can save a pile taller than Babel while living at home) I might be able to invest in a decent car. I dunno, it's all speculation, but this is the only place where I can do it, the blog that is, since if I were to get a car I'd want it to be a surprise for mom and Mel so I can't tell them, and I don't have friends outside of my colleagues, and I'm not really sure if I wanna bounce financial worries and soucis off of them.
I like the idea in principle though, Welcome Matt shoring up the family in times of need. We all need to feel needed, but not needy. Ugh, generic as Wal-Mart aspirin or a beardless man.
Welcome Matt out

the worn paraphenelia of existence

So it's been nearly a week since my last post. Sorry to all you avid readers (Fremton and Reardon really, since I have a feeling my friends haven't been keeping up on my petty cogitations). But, now that I mention it to myself, and for some reason I haven't really done so up until now, where are my friends? I've been back from FL for almost three months now and they've been elusive as penitent arsonists in a town built on match factories. Granted, I'm a reticent motherfucker w/o the drop of whiskey or insult swimming through me, but I've made overtures that at least a syphillitic Beethoven wouldn't be disgusted by (Bigs sometimes brings headphones plugged into Bach sonatas or Dvorak concertos, not as easy to share as his flask, which is like Santa in an ice age, but it still makes its rounds as we ride and jostle along to Lugsy's minute swerves [he's got a soft spot for varmints and vermin big as a cesspool in a paper mill's ribcage]). I got a few responses, lame as bipartisanship, but overall Dave and Jimmy don't seem to want to reestablish contact, as if I were some errant satellite just off the orbital vector of Roanoke social scenery and the computational adjustments don't warrant the input of labor. I could say bitterness is the stem of this - the root being the inevitable dissolution high school won't allow and college barely stanches - since my ineffectual sojourn in sun-drenched locales, living near bombshells so active you need three inches of kevlar just to talk to them, was equivalent to me meeting Mao and persuading him to drop the Red façade while they stayed home and fulminated w/ McCarthy's cabal. In this simile history would bear me out, but in reality it will expose the skeleton of these snubs, since the flesh of my time in FL amounts to little more than a motheaten shroud.
And I think I might have an idea, actually. Before I left for FL, around late-July, I was seeing Maggie Nquyen off and on; she was like an oscillating fan and I was the sweating body too lazy to get up and change the setting, sweating profusely in an armchair, waiting vehemently for the gradual breeze to come sweeping over, all so I wouldn't have to move. She was the best friend of Jimmy's ex-girlfriend, Melanie Schwartz, or so it still seemed, though I'm about as astute as an autistic kid in Key Club when it comes to these. Jimmy and Mel left w/e they'd had in the gutter of Campbell St., outside of Awful Arthur's, after a dispute about his billiard's etiquette, which was really a dispute about her eyes' wandering tendencies, which was really a dispute about whether or not they had any motions to keep going through b/c theirs was a decoy relationship in the pond where all those other fish swim. Or some such metaphor, but either way, Jimmy, after three days of Jim Beam freedom, found the motions he'd stashed away somewhere, and went through them alone enough to think that they weren't motions anymore but actually self-inspired actions. He yearned and mooned and went lycanthropic on us when a skirt was short enough to remind him of Mel's knees (never those odd knobbled deals, he said) and we wouldn't follow the skirt through its tracks in conversation. He even went Cusackian, holding Dierks Bentley over his head hung into the lulls of his drawl, but to a closed curtain.
So when I hung out w/ Maggie in a social environment (Campbell and its general area) the proximity of her to Mel and the general tininess of Roanoke conspired to raise memories and possibilities in Jim-o's head. There was a specific instance where this went wrong, over Texas Toast and thin pints at Texas Tavern, but I don't remember what brought it on. Maggie was sitting next to me, wearing something pastel-y that kinda ate up the hardness in your eyes, and I was next to Jimmy who was next to Dave who was next to Katie Luger (no idea what she was doing there; a random Dave conquest if I ever saw one, and I have, and have had to 'clean up' after them, which, if you know Dave, involves finding her her intimates and consoling her enough to get her out of the house b/c Dave's already left six hours earlier to wander his endorphins away like unwanted puppies) who was next to Penny Drake; it was a circular table kinda deal, and we'd all gotten beer and some nibble-shit and Jim-o had his head on a swivel all evening, looking at each barstool like it was salivating, or at each window like it threatened him and Penny said something about expecting something and Jimmy didn't answer b/c he was staring down Deco lamp shade hanging over a trio of high school teachers (they had the aura like cowboys or Marines do) and Maggie said something snidely, cutely (I'm still waiting for a breeze but I don't know how to ask for it in winter) cutting and Jim-o snapped back like the lube on his ball-bearings drained out and snarled, said something out of Gran Torino and I put my hand real quick on his chest and he held my eyes like Christ's testicles and I held his like 6 year old IOUs and he got up and left.
We resolved it, him staring at the ground like a choirboy w/ fundraiser chocolate in his mouth, the next day, and I saw him sporadically the last week before I left, and he gave a fervent toast, fermented by nostalgia and strong gin, at my going away party, but w/ the near six months in between that and now I think he's convinced himself and Dave and Paul and Steve that the reason I put my hand over his heart wasn't for some sort of chivalric respect thing, but some deeper seated thing, or maybe that I never took them seriously and that's why I dipped to FL to try my hand in junk writing and fruit picking. I dunno, but it's something I'm just beginning to think about.
But either way, work is good, Phoebe's softened a bit (she's been smoking 3 instead of 2 and a half packs a day) and Gerry still runs the show like a dwarf in a two ring two bit circus touring Iowa in harvest season. Maybe Bigs can give me some insight. Maybe we could hang out, though we don't really do that, garbagemen that is; we don't really have time to hang out w/ anyone. Maybe I'm thinking way too much about this b/c all I've been thinking about is how to sort out the worn paraphanelia of daily existence.