Advertising

If you work in advertising, the only course of action available to you which will yield sufficient penance for the damage you’ve done to humanity is to take your own life. It’s really the only honorable option you have. A thoroughly sincere and apologetic suicide note, expressing understanding and regret for what you’ve done, will also help leverage people’s forgiveness. Art for the purpose of marketing is such a gross, depraved perversion that rapists and pedophiles look down their noses at the practitioners of this profession. What is an art director but a failed artist with no vision of his own? What is a copy writer but an uninspired writer with no ambition? These are people who are professionally full of shit, parading around in a pretense of creativity. If you can find fulfillment in that, you need to run outside into the real world and ask the first person you see for help. There is no doubt that that person will have a fuller, deeper understanding of the meaning of life than you do. Even if that person is a child, their advice will be worthwhile.

The Waitress

The waitress is beautiful and she hates me. It’s okay. I don’t blame her. I would hate me too. My wife thinks this is all too hilarious. She said it’s what I deserve for staring. The waitress isn’t even waiting on our table. Instead we’ve got some frat boy with a corny goatee. The stunning waitress is waiting on a nearby table but walks by frequently. Her uniform is comprised of a great deal of cloth, keeping her very concealed. It is, however, like an excited child who cannot keep a secret. It pulls tight, relaxes, and lays close across her figure, describing what lies beneath. It’s magnificent. She’s magnificent. She’s caught me looking twice and that’s sufficient to classify me as an asshole. Fair enough. I probably am. Doubtless she’s used to it. My chicken Marsala is here.

Hall Lake 1995

Two boys lived in my upper-middle-class neighborhood in derelict western Pennsylvania. It was a precarious little pocket of faux opulence, buried in the hills of nowhere. The boys were both about 15 – more or less my age. They were inseparable by virtue of geographic proximity, convenience, and love of mischief. They shared in minor vandalism, shoplifting and drinking.

Our neighborhood sat near a very small pond, which was called Hall Lake, in the same spirit of overestimation which had led people in this area to feel worldly and relevant. It was not a lake. It was a manmade byproduct of the land movers sculpting the neighborhood. Road construction in this area was frequent. One late summer evening, these two boys decided to steal one of the construction horses from the road. It was the kind with the circular blinking lights on top. They took it, ran down to the pond, and threw it in as far as they could. It only made it about ten feet. It wasn’t a very good throw. One of the neighbors saw the whole thing and took no action. It was such a pointless, uninspiring act of rebellion. Proportionate to its small size, the pond was also very shallow. It was no more than four feet deep at its deepest point. This played a big role in the accidental brilliance of their art. Given that the pond was so shallow, and that the blinking light was waterproof and battery powered, it continued to blink underwater in the pond for about the next two weeks. It could be seen from the road at night. The near shore of the pond blinked orange, like a miniature sunrise was about to be birthed from it. It was beautiful and powerfully evocative, like performance art.

Sometime In July, 1994

We fucked under the hot July sun, as god intended. Ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit and so humid you could have swum through the air. We did it whenever we could, wherever we could. That included the hot, humid woods behind our high school. I wasn’t especially skilled at it and needed all the practice I could get.

Ferns, sweat, cum, mosquitoes. Wearing sweat-soaked, grass-stained cotton clothes that would be washed by our mothers. Good kids. Good grades. Good families. She had been born with crooked legs. Bent slightly inward. As a young child the doctors had broken them and put them in braces to correct them. By the time she was a teenager, the time I met her, they were essentially straight. She was simply ever-so-slightly pigeon-toed, barely noticeable. By then, her legs were actually very muscular from running and they seemed to go on for miles. They looked especially good over her head, lying in the ferns that covered the hill just off the path through the woods. She also happened to be a hemophiliac, so she had to be on birth control pills or her periods would last forever. Thus we had no need for condoms. When we finished, my semen spilled out of her, into the leaves and soil. We walked back through all of the rusted, old, empty beer cans that littered those woods and talked about our future.

On numerous occasions, we screwed in her parents’ basement. We did this once or twice every weekend for the length of our relationship. Her parents were upstairs but generally left us alone, for whatever reason. I’m still not sure if they trusted me or just didn’t care. Regardless, on one summer day her period had just ended, and we assumed it was safe to do our thing. After we finished, I hurriedly pulled up my pants.

Later when I undressed to shower after the bike ride home, I noticed that the front of my underwear (tighty-whities) was blood-stained. Alarmed, I pulled the waistband forth to see what had happened. My dick looked like a blood sausage or a murder weapon, and I immediately started combing my memory of the day’s events, trying to determine when I had so grievously injured my dick. I inspected it thoroughly, looking for the injury that must certainly have produced all that blood. Then I realized the blood wasn’t mine. I knew where it had come from and I was relieved. At this point, though, a new problem immediately presented itself. How would I dispose of the blood-soaked underwear? I decided to just throw them in the hamper with the rest of my clothes. I’m not sure why I thought that would be a good idea, but that’s what I did. My mom must have washed them without noticing, and the blood must have come out. They found their way back into the clean laundry pile. Nothing was ever said.

Our senior year, we broke up. I believe that girl from my high school days has since finished her doctorate and is much happier and more successful than me. I recently heard from her, after a long period without contact. Apparently she lives down south somewhere. She’s an engineer of some sort doing quite well for herself.

Dave

My old friend Dave sat at the bar with me. It had been quite some time since we had seen each other - almost a year. We’ve been friends since we were eleven, or maybe twelve. I’m sure a lot has changed in the past 16 years, but I’m not sure what. We always talk about the same things. Though we look completely incompatible now, we’re still on the same page. We drank to everything. For that night, we owned the bar. Nothing could touch us.