.

My birthday was September 1, which I’m pretty sure is going to be the date that one day a clawed baboon is going to come out of the sky and fire-spit-bomb the entire town.

We kept getting updates, the whole football game, about Hurricane Irma — the mounting death toll, the evacuated Southern towns, and of course, the obligatory reporter who could barely keep his hat on while a guy in a straw Fedora walked his Pomeranian across the street. I felt like instead of five or 10-day weather forecasts, they should put out a 12-month forecast for some of these Southern towns: your house is gonna blow down in August or September.

On the TV, the little players would make runs or complete passes periodically and the room would erupt into a crushing caterwaul of screaming, “YEAH!” or “FU**!”

“Beer,” my friends would say, which was nickname. “Take another shot.”

And yeah, I’d take it. So Co. I was just on a master’s in English track and didn’t have too much reading to do yet.

Outside, a dude ran down the street with no shirt and a chest painted blue and gold, yelling at the top of his lungs. All my friends yelled back at him, pumping their arms and taking shots of So Co. Outside, the air stunk like trash, sweat and beer.

The next day, my roommate averted eyes when I walked out of my room to grab some Oreos out of the kitchen. I could almost FEEL the dread coming off of him, of the impending semester, in waves. He was undoubtedly thoroughly hammered and what’s more Notre Dame had lost 20-19 to Georgia, so he was sure to be pi**ed off. He was good natured so I wasn’t worried about him clocking me or throwing a plate at me or anything. He was the sensitive, nervous type though. I took my cookies into my room and reached for my bottle of Xanax another friend had loaned me. Might as well smoke some weed and put on some Allman Brothers, I thought. Tomorrow’s another day. And oh yeah, I have that reading to do.

The next night, a Monday, I was trying to read the first act of King Lear and I kept hearing yells and laughs, at full blast, from the living room. Also they were bumping Big Willie Style, which would have pi**ed me off even at a party, let alone on a school night.

I decided to go to the library, grab some coffee and get it done there, where, miraculously, the natives were exhibiting something resembling a civilization.

When I got back home later that night, my roommates had on Puff Daddy’s album No Way out and were playing Madden.

“Dudes,” I yelled. “Don’t you guys have any homework?”

“Yeah,” my roommate Mitch responded, “but 75% of our grade is bunched up in our final project, which isn’t due ’til the end of the semester. I think the proposal’s due in like nine weeks.”

I chuckled.

“Well,” I said. “Have fun on your vacation.”

The semester wore on — I had essays due, which admittedly I sort of spewed down with an inferior part of my brain between stoned listens to Rush’s live album Exit… Stage Left and a little Del than Funkee Homosapien. We’d scored some communal house black tar opium, on which we stocked up for the semester, and that made the music sink in real nice. I was having religious experiences all over the place. I sucked at video games anyway.

As far as I know my goon ball roommates got their proposals done — I remember them being all crotchety and ornery this one night and the lights were actually on. Then I saw them out partying the night before Thanksgiving — Donny could barely stand up, he’d done so many shots of Fireball. I was like, this guy’s been playing Gran Turismo and smoking weed the whole semester. What the he** is he escaping from? Eh, it’s their lives, I thought.

We got back from Thanksgiving break and all of a sudden the house was silent. I think my roommates realized their project was due in two weeks. I didn’t hear any of the former shouting or exaltation of sports — just some hush conversation and a lot of sighs. I think I counted 73 sighs the first Sunday night back.

I got my final essays done pretty early and then focused a little bit on my short story collection, which I was doing just for fun. I took a walk down to the Notre Dame library, which was two and a half miles away from IUSB, where we lived. There was snow on the ground but I had these giant boots I’d walk in. I went there, got my coffee and chill out listening to Led Zeppelin. The people were tense and anxious — not too addled but just very prompt, and kept to themselves, for the most part. The library was crowded with Asian people — couples and also Asian girls who walked really fast and had really expensive-looking clothes on.

When I got back home, the place was silent, which was how I knew if I made a noise somebody would go on an AK-47 shooting spree. I went back into my room. I’d got a bunch of e-mails from my mom about wanting to go sing Christmas carols at the old people’s home. I decided to pretend like I didn’t seem them. I did this even though, oddly, that sounded kind of fun. But I just opened up a Busch from my mini fridge and looked out the window. Four years later on this date, I’d wonder why I was depressed.

The end of finals week came and grades were starting to trickle in on the university website. One day Mitch walked in with a 12-er of Miller Lite and a bottle of Fireball.

“How goes it, chap?” I asked.

“Preh geh,” he answered, looking at the ground.

I didn’t even have to ask. They’d gotten their grades back.

The next morning, I wasn’t even sure who was left, or if everyone was hungover, or if a flying blade from a chainsaw were gonna come flying at me from across the room if I talked sh** about the Chicago Bulls. Plus I was kind of nervous about seeing my family on Christmas.

I went into a daze thinking about this and almost stepped on Donny’s foot when he stepped out of the shower. He shot me a glare like he’d never shot me before.

“My bad, dude,” I said, looking at the ground and proceeding in to take a pi**.

Then I remembered to ask him how his class went.

“Dude did you get your grade in K20 fun?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Uh, kinda disappointing. C on the project, C+ in the class.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well that’ll get you by.”

“Yeah,” said Donny, chuckling and running a hand through his hair. His hair really looked great.

In the next room over, Mitch could be heard exclamatorily explaining to his mom why he’d got a D in K 20 fun and had to retake it.

“IUSB IS HARD!”

When you’re inside of that thing,

Oozing your vapors out its catastrophic edges and

Thinking of it lasting in angry fortitude

After you’re dead

 

Well you kick and flail,

Speak in gibberish and

Make a helicopter with your shirt

Over your head

 

But now that metal thing outside of you

Has incurred some collateral damage,

Your lobster’s pinchers have

Turned

 

To a mixture of

What we all are and

You don’t want to hurt them because

You see your reflection in them too.

It’s basically just unreal, at this point. But it was last Friday, a week ago today, that I quit my job during a panic attack, attempting to talk with masked customers under a boisterous, crowded din, and all the basketball games got cancelled.

I think they’d already slated the NCAA’s to be played in gyms empty of fans, but I’d gone into a bar eager for at least one night of conference tournament action. Then there on my phone was the surreal sight of the word “Cancelled” next to every game on the schedule on espn.com. Sure enough, there was no basketball on any of the TV’s at Wings Etc.: they were still holding some golf tournament and on another TV I think I watched monster trucks for about two hours.

The bartender in there didn’t even look old enough to drink, but she had her routine down pat: friendly, knowledgeable service and little quips to certain patrons like “I’d never call YOU gentleman.” These bartenders sometimes are the cinematic epicenter of American culture. This one portly dude I always see at this other pub sat about four stools down from me, with a group, periodically pressing his face to his black girlfriend’s and making a giant farting noise with his mouth on it. For a while, it seemed like this precious world were still turning.

But now even the libraries are shut down: though I couldn’t get a card, sitting in there and reading the new book Smash! about Green Day and The Offspring seemed like something I could do that would make me feel like I were living life, to any extent. But now the March 28 date of the libraries reopening is starting to look even a little tenuous, with my hometown of South Bend, Indiana having been declared a state of emergency by the new mayor (whose name seems to matter at this point insofar as it’s not Pete Buttegeig anymore).

This past week has brought the funeral of my father, which to be clear was an undaunted event, save for maybe a couple people leaving an hour early to beat any travel madness. Then, it’s brought endless hours sitting on my bed, thankfully enjoying what was a free gift of hot spot Internet (I’m lucky enough to be living rent-free at my Mom’s right now), a video of Reggie Miller shooting threes contemporarily in an empty gym, an entrance into a contest for a signed Clyde Drexler poster, and a lot of staring out the window. And a lot of music doesn’t even seem to work anymore, like John Lennon’s “Imagine,” especially since that optimistic strutter emphasizes “sharing all the world,” which obviously we can’t do during this pandemic.

And today, Friday, March 20, another day of pi**-poor weather in Michigan and empty schools, bars and libraries, was the first day I really FELT the ghost of March Madness, an angry scepter scaling the walls of my room which holds a bunny ears antenna at attention, aghast in disbelief before its own indefinite earthly obliteration. Like I said, though, otherwise this experience is just unreal. The feelings aren’t even there, as these tulips outside my window hazard a maligned attempt at germination on the 38-degree, cloudy day. All I have is a bunch of left-brain memories, one of which will probably never leave me.

It was downtown Denver, 2006 and I was on my spring break from IU watching my Hoosiers take on San Diego St. in the first round at ESPN Zone, which at the time was probably my favorite bar on earth. There was this dude at the table over watching the game who I found a tad bit annoying, but who must have struck up a conversation with me in an amiable enough way, for which a lot of Coloradoans had a knack, actually. Somehow, we just got to talking endlessly: about basketball itself, about gambling and strategies surrounding it and everything else under the sun, our conversation getting at one point interrupted by this Californian asking me a question to which the dude I was talking to interjected “Don’t ever say anything to a dipsh**,” pointing straight at the subsequently tacit Californian. At one point the dude’s girlfriend would show up and he’d shove her barstool up against mine, as if he wanted me to make an impression on her. Then he’d do this amusing three-activity loop of kissing his girlfriend, initiating this goofy sort of flowery hippie dance around our area and staring at me while pointing at my beer, implicitly offering me another one (which I couldn’t accept ’cause I was driving). At another point he told me “You got a good head on ya.” And all my life I guess I’ve taken pride in the fact that I had such a good interaction in a bar watching March Madness, but this experience of having what I consider pretty much a national holiday taken away from me has made me realize how selfish and oafish I was to not recognize that it was HIM who just as much was gyroscope of true human spirit, something that definitely doesn’t come guaranteed all the time in everyday life.

I mean look: I don’t know why I’m saying all this. It’s just something that happened in my life. This is obviously hardly a time for “moral of the story” platitude. It’s a time when we’re all apprehensive, looking ahead to the future. But the NCAA basketball tournament had a power about it. It brought out the most robust personalities in humanity and the most spirited declarations, both good and bad. That night in that bar watching IU-San Diego St. was of a keen amount of poignancy, like the first time you hear “American Car” by Mike Doughty or taste cheesecake. And make no mistake: I’m still biting on it to this day.

In this day of death

It’s hard to believe

But the sun is out

On a Sunday

The sun never dies it only

Has good days and bad days

Like everybody else, it only

Wants your attention boundlessly

And eternally waiting on

Those darn clouds to dissipate so it can

Bang out its chords of progress

Nonetheless on this Sunday of death

I gloat at the women,

Remind them that men lead lives of honor,

Of glory,

 

Men fight battles,

Work long, hard days,

Sleep more wounded nights and

Daunt themselves with danger,

 

But how the women provide nice smiles

And simple nothings

To keep our minds off the harshness of the day

 

And how even this 40 year old woman

Lives life as if young and

Reflects my face, smiles and jokes

With a countenance so smooth

And eyes so clear and

 

How it’s almost like dying a death,

Like suffocation,

When the women leave and

You lose that for the night and

Later on, with the man in the house,

I will be adversarial.

 

A man needs space,

In life,

Or he needs a woman,

And when he needs a woman

He is setting himself up for heartbreak but

When he’s all alone in life,

Gets all his own things,

Looks to the sky with no laughter of another person near

And fetches all his meals alone,

He is equally setting himself up

For heartbreak,

Just the same.

The reason why you felt low,

Generic, small and uneasy

Sitting in that room and

Professing yourself in a

Guileless and honest way might be that

That’s actually a hazardous condition —

Your fears were perfectly justified for their

Lack of umbrella under life’s noxious judgments,

“Success” being like a

Destination of frozen fog

Girls don’t like it when you have a beer gut

And girls don’t like it when you look around at everyone in the room

All the time

When you’re sitting in the computer lab

Not appearing to do much of anything

But girls go down deep

And they’re fishing for something

Within themselves

That is within you too

So don’t fucking worry about it anyway.

 

Plus,

You might miss something

If you don’t look at around at all the people

All the time

In the computer lab

When you’re not apparently doing

Much of anything at all.

I was walking around the library again, with apparent directionlessness. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but rather that there was nothing on the premises I didn’t want to do. I even liked looking out the window and at the fish tank in the kids’ section.

Something brought me over to the return counter and I returned the book in the drop box. The lady working behind the counter observed that I got to the counter before I left the drop box.

“You’re here before you left over there,” she remarked to me.

“Yup,” I replied. “I guess so.”

“Do you always do that, be two places at once, corporeally, as a way of reflecting the frenetic mania with which you walk around these premises?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said. “Pretty much.”

“Do you have any other superpowers?” she asked.

“Not that I can think of off the top of my head,” I answered.

“Do you have any capabilities whatsoever?” she then asked.

“It’s possible.”

“Are you even capable,” she then persisted, in interrogative, “of THAT, in a true sense?”

“Of what?” I asked.

“You know,” she said, kind of making a weird gesture with that hat.

My constitution felt flagged. With great ardor, I muscled out a shrug, as if unsure. All the things I wanted to do around the library were morphing and shifting in and out of themselves, as if suspended in a state of translucent ephemerality, hence theoretically adding to their appeal, but you usually have to sift a bit, no matter where you are, and where you are.

When you’re sitting there in the bar

Sometimes

It’ll seem like a world of possibilities is open

And it is

 

It is the decompressor

For the multitudinous populace as

 

It was even for this ferociously beautiful

Young girl of about 24 or 25.

 

She hung out for a little bit…

She seemed single and great and

I think her drug guru came for a little bit

(Weird since weed is now legal in Michigan)

 

But then she hugged him and was single again,

Sitting there in these high boots,

A sweater and black jeans, with

Lavender choruses of red hair

Falling

 

All over her head and

I swear a

 

Million times I almost struck up

A conversation but

It

 

Seemed that my blood was composed of a

Different substance entirely, that’s

How nervous I was, and I

Really had nothing to say anyway, and

 

Now I get home and

Reconvene, having also glimpsed

 

The bartender and

I know

That I made the right decision

In sitting there like a spinning top,

Knees bouncing, smiling and laughing

At the fat man and

Worshipping the god of the taciturn.

It’s right in the middle of town

Sports on the TV and

No attractive women anywhere,

 

So I think,

If ever there were a time

For getting down to brass tacks,

This would be it.

 

I order something very plebian,

A pint of Coors Light,

Tip well and sit there watching the Houston Rockets,

Getting a five-second death glare from a black dude

For reasons still unknown to yours truly.

 

Time passes over and

I’m pretty much rooting for everyone,

With a couple questions in mind

(Let’s just say it’s the type of bar where the tender cares that you’re looking for a digital convertor)

But mostly not looking at anyone.

 

The music seems pretty good,

Like a punk/emo version of Jawbox

So I remark to the main tender,

“This is pretty good music.”

 

He agrees and says,

“It’s his,”

Motioning to an overweight cook

With a beard and a Bone Thugs hat on.

 

I nod at him and

All of a sudden I’m back in my hometown

In mind, body and spirit,

As I’m privy to this sort of mystical, expressionless

Stare, on the part of the cook,

With no “Thank you,”

No mention of who the band is and no

Frivolity at the tender’s remark that

“He’s eccentric.”

 

He’s just the eccentric dude in the Bone Thugs hat,

To this day, I did

Nothing to dethrone him but

Stand a little bit miffed at the security of his ego and quite frankly

Suspect of the level of satisfaction proviso in such things.