The Floss-Effect

I was never a flosser. I always knew it was something I was supposed to be doing, but also, I always knew that I just wasn't going to do it. And so I didn't. The closest I came to being a regular flosser was my first year in Chile, but that was only motivated by my lack of faith in the local population of dentists and even with that I spent the second year floss-free. It just didn't matter to me. It just wasn't worth it.

And then, I don't know why, really, but I met this girl, and she seemed like someone I should be better for. Oddly enough, "better" took the form of someone-who-flosses. And I flossed. And for years, now, I've continued to floss, even after she's come and gone.

From one moment to the next we're different people, but perhaps it is relationships, even the transitory relationships that never quite make it off the ground, that change us the most.

I'm on the lookout now for someone that will turn me into a regular car-washer. Any takers?

As I write this I'm beginning to wonder if I've ever had the floss-effect on someone. It's an awkward question to ask: when we dated did it make you a better person? Maybe it's safer to modify it: how did our dating make you a different person?

Was it worth it?

I'd settle for turning someone into a Tarantino fan.

I [heart] T-shirts, number six

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

(photo by D. Butcher)

Failing Flailing

Last Monday I turned in the last two papers of my undergraduate career. Now, all I want to do is watch old episodes of Daria and ride my bicycle.

Has higher education failed me or have I failed it?

Fiction: Nine Minutes, part one

“Oh, I have a vibrator that color.”

I’m not even kidding; these are the things that she’d say. As if they weren’t supposed to drive me to distraction.

And we’d walk. For miles. For miles and miles we’d walk and walk and look at the buildings and the posters on the walls. There was nothing particularly romantic about the dirty brick. There was nothing very suggestive about the stained flyers. But I loved it. Every moment. I loved it and I loved the morning and the air and the moment. The air was alternately cool and clammy. The sounds were jarring and happy and busy. Car horns and outbursts of conversation and startled buses. People looked through us and walked around us, their minds on their destinations, their phones in their ears.

She was pointing at the obnoxiously pink block letters of a ratty poster glued to the side of a whitewashed warehouse.

LIVE!
THE SCENTED NIPPLE,
WITH BRITT’S CLITS
AND FURST BLUD
THURSDAY,
NOVEMBER 17,
9 O’CLOCK
AT BAD JAZZ,
9TH AND 9TH

She hugged my shoulder and pulled me along, through the crowd around the bus stop and past the newspaper stand, and then it was goodbye and see you tomorrow and take care and no kiss but a wink and I waved.

***

I should buy a car.

Every morning the thought crosses my mind. Every morning my phone buzzes and jumps and generally scares the shit out of me from underneath my pillow and I frantically push buttons until the awful get-the-fuck-out-of-bed song stops and I can go back to sleep for nine more minutes, thinking about getting a car as I slowly surrender my shocked and brittle conscious back to the soft, blurred edges and indistinct faces of people from school and work and home and school and I’m asleep.

Nine minutes later I’m all over it all over again and I should get a car and get out of bed but not yet and nine minutes after that I actually get up. And out. Of bed.

The tile is freezing on the floor in the bathroom.

I hate brushing my teeth. Maybe more than anything. Taking a shower is routine, but brushing my teeth never sinks into the framework of the morning.

“I love brushing my teeth. No flossing. But my toothbrush is my best friend. After you.” She’s such a liar.

Her hair is blowing into my face so I keep my mouth shut but it might be too late. I can feel it on my lips. We’re walking down the street in the shadow of brick buildings and the smell of exhaust everywhere, staining the morning, staining the flyers, staining our lungs. The wind is tugging at the flyers, tugging at my jacket, flattening my hood against the back of my head. But maybe it’s just the busses coming and going.

THURSDAY

She’s pointing at one of the posters, saying something that belongs in my ear alone right out loud, “…that color.” One sad corner of the poster pulls away, sticky, from the wall, covering part of the garish announcement.

We walk and walk and walk and say goodbye. Waving.

Moving On

Unlike some people I know, not only did I used to be really into the Dave Matthews Band, but I'll admit it. I'll admit it and I still really, really like their first three albums. And listen to them. Really.

(I'm still in love with Phish, too. Get over it.)

Yesterday, in fact, I was listening to some tracks off of Crash, when it occurred to me that the only thing more ironic than Dave singing "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," is that he's not singing it ironically.

It's so much easier to criticize something when you're no longer in love with it.

A Super Market in Salt Lake City

Today I was at the grocery store with my parents because I'm the most pathetic 25-years-old man alive. My mother and I were walking down an aisle when it occurred to me that my father had fallen behind somewhere along the line. I back-tracked along our progress through the store when I found him in the deli section with two packages of hot dogs in his hands, hefting them.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I can't decide which one to get," he said, his eyes never leaving the packages. "This one is bun-sized, but these are thicker; I can't tell which one weighs more."

It had happened: before my very eyes, in the middle of Dan's, my dad had become an old man.