yet another apocalypse

When the bombing started I was on the road in Nebraska. I stopped in at a bar and watched on TV as the bombs descended on Berlin and London. They fell slow and placid, looking like a swarm of giant fat black jellyfish that turned to bright orange flame when they landed on buildings and public squares. The other people in the bar stared blankly as panicked Europeans ran at and around the screen.

The response across America was hard to gauge. I stayed with friends in Nebraska, a family that lived on a compound in the middle of nowhere. One woman there was worried about her children, who her good-for-nothing ex-husband had shipped off to boarding school in England. She wondered if her children were still alive, if she should begin to mourn. I wondered how her ex managed to afford boarding school on the limited salary of an unemployed alcoholic.

I stopped off in a high-end mall on the way back to New York. The associates at the Nordstroms there seemed more upset about a new competitor who had taken over the bulk of the under-occupied mall at half their rent, drawing away their customers with fancy white pillars and warmly glowing display cases. But that was the result of another catastrophe, well on its way and nearly forgotten by the time this other situation arose.

Back in New York, we carefully moved the tomato plants from the roof into the bathroom, just in case. But I kept going to work. Everyone carried on almost like normal. The TV stopped getting an international feed. The military started up the draft again, but it was only to stop domestic violence, the potential looting and pillaging that one expects when it seems like the world is about to end.

At work I engaged in some emotional looting and pillaging. I'm not proud of it. But for some reason a few of us in the editorial department felt justified in going down to the production department and intimidating their staff. We acted all tough and entitled. We messed up paperwork, drew mustaches on design mock-ups, played around with people's computers. A supervisor came by and asked just what we thought we were doing, and we fled back upstairs, ashamed.

not the best day to play hookie

I skipped work to meet my friends for lunch in the East Village and buy some new soccer cleats. Lunch was great, but unfortunately an alien from an alternate dimension was also shopping for some new cleats. It ripped through the space-time fabric of 9th street on a Tuesday afternoon. All anyone could see anywhere were these giant purplish tentacles, which started grabbing shoes and people who looked like they might be good at soccer (apparently this was also a recruiting trip). Luckily, I'm not such a hot player these days, and I escaped with my shoes and headed over to Troy, Michigan to meet my friend Steve for a drink. He took me to this members-only hipster bar on Big Beaver. No one seemed happy to see me. No one there seemed that happy to see anyone, actually. There was a walk-in clinic next door, so I decided to go get some alien-related injuries checked out while I was there and then head back to work to at least put in an appearance.

wherever you go, there you are

After a big night out on the Upper West Side, I decided to walk home along the Hudson as the sun came up. I ended up at the Frying Pan, which is a bar on an old boat docked on a pier in Chelsea. Turns out the Frying Pan was hiring. The owner offered me $4 an hour to work as a deckhand, scrubbing the decks and generally keeping the place clean. If I did a good job, she said, I could be promoted to bartender when they pulled up anchor and went south for the winter. Despite already having a job with more responsibility and somewhat higher pay, I took the position.

I ended up spending a lot of time alone in the boat, which is as old and creepy as old creepy boats can be. Sometimes I heard voices, and would roam from room to room chasing after them, only to find myself alone in the captain's quarters, scared shitless. So I started inviting my friends to hang out there during the off-hours. One day, everyone I know in New York was chilling out on the lower deck, eating peanutbutter-filled pretzels, when suddenly we were somewhere else and other people entirely.

We called ourselves the Earthlings, and we were a group of twenty-somethings who had been stranded on an island on a far away planet ever since our plane crashed there when we were eight. We were the only survivors. We killed some of the local alien animals and made ourselves some pretty kickass costumes. Mine had a monkey head for a hood that made me look like that wise old monkey dude in the Lion King. All day we would roam through the jungle, looking for food and playing at being jungle animals. At night, we built a huge campfire and told stories about our home planet. There was one guy who was quieter than the rest of us and ostensibly the leader, and he would usually spend the evenings alone out on the beach, staring at the stars. He was the only one of us who had never given up hope of being rescued. He was also kind of hot.

One night the rest of us were lazing around the fire, picking anteater bones out of our teeth, when the hot leader guy came running up all excited. With his big grizzly bear headdress and his face lit up by the flames, he was pretty impressive. "Come quick!" he shouted, and we all chased him down to the beach, where millions of stars were racing across the sky and plunking themselves down in the water. "It's a sign!" he told us, and jumped into the alien sea. We had spent the last fifteen odd years being terrified of that water, and it had kept us from swimming across to another island only a few yards away. But if this guy was going, I was going, too. We all jumped in and paddled over to the other coast.

Turns out it was New Hampshire, and we ended up in some WASPy coastal town where everyone had a North Face fleece and a spaniel. The locals gave us some funny looks, but they were too polite to say anything, so we ended up in some bookstore cafe drinking coffee and looking at all the dogs and their big floppy ears, trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

applicants

I went on a job interview. The office was in a poorly lit motel room attached to a well-lit rustic bar. My interview was with the president of the company. We sat on opposite sides of one of the double beds in the room and discussed the job requirements. I think some reference I made to Battlestar went over well, because he bounced over to my side of the bed, but I was sitting right on the edge and we both rolled right off. I squawked, rather unprofessionally, and struggled to pull myself upright on the floor. That signaled the end of the interview.

They ushered in the next interviewee as I gathered my things and squeezed past him to get out the door. The rest of the company's employees were gathered in the kitchenette off the main room, and they burst out laughing as I dashed out. I could really use a drink.

Luckily, the bartender in the attached bar was just opening up, so I bellied up and asked for some lemonade. He was pissed off, and complained for hours about kids these days while I waited for my drink. Eventually I gave up and left to meet my roommates.

They were gathered near a pond outside my old high school, trying to solve a math problem. "If we solve this problem," Erik said, "the princess will pass her class and will love us forever." I offered to help, but Erik quickly figured it out. I mean, the assignment was to find the area of a hexagon---it wasn't that hard. We just figured out different variables for the area and circumference, then asked the princess to think of her favorite thing in the whole world, write it on a piece of paper, and put it in an envelope. Somehow that was the answer.

barbeque ghosts

I finally went to Dinosaur BBQ up by Columbia, only to find it had been infested by ghosts. Twisty white wisps of ghostiness twisted up from the roof instead of delicious-smelling barbeque smoke. We took some pictures. On the screen of Joyce's digital camera, the ghosts looked past us with empty stares.

So we decided not to get barbeque.

Instead, we attended a happy hour I'd organized for young publishing professionals. There was a pretty good turn out.

Exes and Drunks

One of my exes tried to rekindle the old flame, but I apparently was having none of it. I told him we should just be friends, and he told me he could do better anyway. So he went off in a huff to the Brazilian supermodel he had waiting in the wings, and I went off to find my friends Kelly and Todd. They were on their way to check out the swim club they had just joined.

It turned out the pool was in the middle of a dive bar in a sketchy part of town. As we splashed around in the surprisingly clean yet small pool, old drunk men leered at us from the barstools. They seemed really upset that the swim club was encroaching on their establishment. It was a bad scene. The gentrification around here is really getting out of hand.

adventures, babysitting, swamp

There's this big swamp right by the Hudson River in New York. At one end, there's a dock where people desperately try to get on boats and emigrate to the other side. Jersey, I guess. Things must really be bad in New York. There's also an outdoor bar at one end of the swamp, with tree stumps for chairs and vines all over the place, where I spent hours with two friends from work trying to find something good on the jukebox.

We'd just about given up when we met this guy who writes for an adventure magazine. Their thing is to profile crazy adventurers by taking the whole staff and reliving entire journeys. Every month, the publisher and the writers and the copy editors and the sales team and the intern would all take off for a remote locale, climbing Mount Everest in t-shirts, crossing the Pacific in a dinky little raft. This month they were living in the swamp, which is full of snakes and alligators in the wet bit in the middle. This guy had just walked/swam across, and he looked terrible. We all felt bad for him and bought him drinks.

Later that day I had to babysit these two kids, a little girl and a little boy. I'm not sure where I got them. I had a feeling they were my niece and nephew, but that didn't seem quite right. These kids HATED each other. They were constantly fighting over who was better. The little boy was a lot like the guy who swam across the swamp. The little girl was a lot like me.

A bar is no place for small children, and I had to get back to work anyway. So I took the kids with me to the office. They immediately started to complain to my boss about all the horrible things they had done to each other. The boy pushed the girl into the swamp. The girl gave the boy cooties and played Hootie and the Blowfish on the jukebox. I began to think maybe these terrors belonged to my boss after all. I wanted to lock them in a room with a movie so I could get some peace and quiet. Does that mean I'm going to be a bad parent one day? I did take the girl to the bathroom to wash her hands, holding her over the sink so she could reach and making sure she used enough soap. Who knows what she got on her hands in that swamp?

From my office there's this great view of the swamp, a big green-blue bowl cutting into the landscape. Across the river, a giant sandbar juts out into the water. It looks like Jersey City created it as a parking lot, because it's covered with cars. From here, it doesn't look too hard to just walk across the barely submerged sand. I'd be in New Jersey in no time.