Sunday, November 29, 2015

Eat Your Heroes: The Ballad of Ray Hill 2

This is not the beginning. The beginning is here.

This is the middle.

Go. Begin at the beginning. That way, you’ll see the middle more clearly and anyway, the beginning’s the better bit.  

Here in the middle, we flash forward twenty years. Two decades since that dark parking lot with its red bricks and its singing nuns and by now there are two things I have learned.

First, Ray Hill made the world a better world. No question. The world is better for his having been here.

He’s a hero.

And second, you should never meet your heroes.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Meet Your Heroes: The Ballad of Ray Hill

This is a true story.

I haven’t always lived in Houston, you know. There was a time, many years ago, when I resided in a little Texas town known as Huntsville. Population 20,000, give or take.

This would have been back in about 1995. I was ten. Dad moved me and Antony up to this God-forsaken place so that he might attend Sam Houston State University, which didn’t work out as planned and then there we were. In Huntsville.

Now, Huntsville is exactly one hour due north of Houston and any way you slice it, it’s a town that is notable for one thing and only one thing: It is home to the world-famous Texas death chamber.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

The Crown Princess of Pareidolia

Alright, now think about this:

A triangle. A dating meme. It’s probably sexist; I don’t know. I can never keep up with that stuff.

And this triangle, at its corners, it says, “Smart,” “Sane,” “Good-looking.” At its center, it says, “You may pick two.”  The implication being, I suppose, that every woman is dumb, ugly, or insane.

Thus my warning about it probably being sexist.

But still, if we can accept, arguendo, our probably sexist triangle as holding some tiny grain of wisdom, a rule of thumb or kernel of truth, then I ask you: Where does that leave me?

Hmm?

It leaves me at a real disadvantage, that’s where.

It leaves me two corners shy of a full triangle.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Blog Seeds

I jot down ideas on little scraps of paper. On envelopes. Sales receipts. Business cards. The backs of checkbooks and in an endless trail of notebooks. Folders and coupons and wine bottle labels, covered! I fill flash drives and I email myself. Leave voicemails I never listen to.

The blog ideas pile up and up.

Out at Dana’s storage space, cleaning out my stuff, I see that most of what I own is my idea pads. There are stories and there are quotes and there are opening lines for things I never got around to writing.

Until now, I mean. Until this week. This is the week I’m finally going to get around to writing them.

It will go like this: For the next month, everything I post here will come from a single sheet of paper I covered in ideas back seven years ago.

I’ve got them all typed out below and I’ll change them into red after I use them. See?

Sunday, November 8, 2015

The Great Grim Reaper Challenge of 2015

I still remember the very moment when I became a Grim Reaper.

It was this past Thursday, November 5, at 8:45 PM, to be maybe more exact than is necessary. I had just run three miles and I was lying in my van in the Rice Stadium parking lot with my legs hanging out the back door, and I was listening to Jenny Hval’s Apocalypse, Girl, which was my favorite album in the whole world back in those days.

And all I wanted to do at that moment was to lie there and chill, listening to Jenny sing about Heaven and about wires and cunts, but my friend, Aesop, was in the front seat, smoking a joint and worrying about my dating life.

“I’m worried about your dating life,” he said.

“Don’t be,” I said. “I’m not.”

I wasn’t.