Monday, December 3rd, 2007
Half Sane & Waiting to Die: Wow, Great Falafel

Jair is over and there’s a stale lingering remorse in the room as we search the internet for the menus to local area restaurants, knowing nothing will ever truly sate us. The conversation moves awkwardly, as it often does whenever me and Jair try to decide upon a course of action. We discuss the pros and cons of one restaurant, sighing when we realize we should probably just order from “The Sub.” After that a different restaurant is argued over, the two of us shortly getting into a punching fight on my bed before almost dialing “The Sub,” then giving up in frustration. An hour later and we’re in the lobby of Domino’s Pizza eating food we’ve obtained from Pioneer Valley Pizza, me chatting up coworkers about nothing and occasionally refilling my white plastic Dixie cup from the nearby bottle of Sprite. There’s a party in Northampton we were planning on attending, mostly for the sake of doing anything. Though neither of us really wants to go, and are wishing we had a better plan.

“We should go to Boston” Jair figures, polishing off the tail-end of a large steak and cheese sub with everything on it. I’m about to protest when I realize it’s the first good idea we’ve had all night. When picking up a twelve pack of beer and driving an hour and a half to Boston in the freezing cold is the first good idea you’ve heard in awhile, you’ve got to act on it. Otherwise, you might eventually become a reasonable person. And no one wants that.

No one.

The choice in vehicles comes down to Jair’s truck which is horribly cramped but features a cd-player, or my car which is spacious but offers little other than a broken tape deck and a driver’s side window that doesn’t roll up anymore, a sheet of plastic sloppily duct-taped in its vacancy. The sound of wind hitting plastic sheeting at 65 mph is appropriately similar to the sound of a ghost screaming. Somehow though, we end up in my beater of a 1994 Toyota Camry and speed off into the night, screaming out the lyrics to the Christmas songs on the radio. For some reason I’m strangely entranced with the world as we drive, staring at houses off beyond the trees and wondering about the lives going on inside. There’s an odd melancholy when I think of this, of all these people I’ll never know, of all these places I’ll never see. I think back to something I wrote once, about a semi-autobiographical main character who felt roughly the same. “Most people aren’t worth meeting anyhow” he had said. It’s weird taking your own advice. For now, it was enough

Jair has told me that Eddy and Rosie’s apartment in Cambridge is some sort of beautiful thing. Arriving through the back entrance I must admit that the design decision to fill every inch of floor and countertop with empty bottles of alcohol is a quaint one. Eddy and Eddy’s Sister (who hates being called that) are righteous about their right to be slobs.

The Mythical Pula Family Apartment

I don’t question it, plopping down on a futon and listening Rosie talk about the fourteen page research paper she has due on Wednesday, that she keeps almost jokingly offering me one hundred United States dollars to write for her. I almost consider it, but sadly have my own multitude of papers and responsibilities to deal with. I will later shirk all of them to write this article here, though I will not feel guilty about it. Eddy tells me about an idea he had for my site, a video where he’ll play the part of a infomercial salesman whose pitch is “Your Brain is a Shelf… ORGANIZE IT.” He continues by extolling the virtues of color-coding sections of your brain into shelves, and placing what he calls “mental data packets” atop those shelves. Rosie will then claim she’s already made ten thousand dollars while fucking the pool boy for the last three minutes. We laugh at that one.

As my comrades chat, I’m attempting to contact faithful northnowhere.com staff member (and regular non-contributor) Eugene to tell him to find somebody else to play Santa tomorrow. It’s a long story involving an article that will be written later, though as I receive busy signal after busy signal I already know what tomorrow morning holds. A confused and angry Eugene looking for me. I hate knowing the future and being powerless to stop it. It’s enough to make me forget how upset I am for not brining any sort of blanket for myself. I ignore the ants scampering about the floor, and try my best to curl up on the futon with a thin mattress cover as Jair recounts the story of a coworker who got trapped in a mulch spreader and cut to pieces. That night I dream of the book of photos from Nicaragua Eddy has by the futon, realizing that as resistance fighters throw Pepsi bottles full of burning gasoline at one another, the best I can manage is to come down to Boston on a whim and take pictures for a website no one visits. Hopefully when the gasoline all runs out the global riots will give everyone a chance to be a hero. I’d better buy a gun while I still can.

The next morning a confused and angry Eugene calls up looking for Santa. I figure being in Boston is a good enough excuse for me not being able to run down to the mall and strap on a beard. There’s a part of me that knows I’ve boned both me and him, and very well may get us both fired or something, but I’m honestly too damn complacent to worry about the consequences. Boston awaits me, and I’m ready to embrace it with open arms. After a shower in Eddy’s small bathroom, I’m forced to dry myself with a roll of paper towels, laughing at the package of “Adult Wipes” sitting atop the toilet. Soon we’re bundled up for the approaching winter, venturing out into the cold with a certain undeserved bravado. And so our adventure begins.

Our Stalwart Adventurers

We get sandwiches at the sandwich shop where everybody apparently knows Eddy by name because he eats there so goddamn often. We obtain two Reuben Sandwiches (Rosie and I), a Tuna Melt (Jair) and a Grilled Cheese with Bacon (Eddy). Shortly after we sit everyone is soon comically reaching across plates to sample everyone else’s sandwich, us realizing with dismay that if we had all gotten different sandwiches and cut them into fours, we could’ve each had four unique individually portioned taste experiences. The revelation isn’t enough to keep us from the streets however, and we soon make our way back out into the cold. Eddy and Rosie live in Cambridge, which is a short walk across the bridge into the city. I pass affluent college students in fashionable academic sweaters that inspire both twinges of jealousy and a seething unspoken hatred.

My only reprieve is to see Eddy unabashedly running up to these strangers and taking their pictures without any sort of query on his part as to whether such an action is ok with them. Eddy’s photography professors used to love him, until they realized that his honest and beautiful street photography often contained many of the same themes, usually angry and surprised Bostonians snarling as Eddy takes their picture without permission. Eddy recalls a professor calling him a “Photo Bully.” I want to get him some article of clothing with that stitched into it for him as a present. Perhaps a vest or something. Point is he does what he does and he does it because its there for him to take. He later relates to us a story about a lecture given at his school by a professional photographer, who explained his stance on this style of photography. Basically, he argued, if something spoke to him then it was his to take, and he had no reason to question somebody for the right to experience something. We joked about how that lecturer was likely a horrible, horrible rapist and laughed into the cold Boston air as is often the casual nature of youth.

We briefly stopped at a record store so Eddy could show me the bizarre album art of forgotten rockstar Orion, whose claim to fame was that he may or may not have been the recently deceased Elvis Presley in disguise. When Orion took his mask off on stage one night, he immediately became an unknown again. Almost tragic enough to forgive the fact that his whole act was about pretending to be an undead Elvis. Almost. Later we pass a fire station with a metal sign proclaiming that the place was a “Baby Safe Haven,” a place where people could leave their unwanted children there, assumedly to be indoctrinated into a life of firefighting.

Halfway across the bridge to Boston an arrow pointed back towards where we came, proclaiming that if we had been heading towards Cambridge, we’d be halfway to hell by now. Eddy could only agree with the assertion, cursing the same fashionable college brats we had run into earlier. On our way across the bridge we found ourselves being accosted by every manner of runner, jogger and bicyclist in the city, each trying to vein to properly maneuver through our phalanx of slow and lonely individuals. As one runner belted an “excuse me” before literally shoving his way past Rosie in his pursuit of a flawless run, we wondered what life would be like if everyone had rungs in their backs, so hurried runners could simply scamper over us and be on their way. When the next runner passed by, I tried to apologize for our lack of rungs. But he was already gone.

Once across the bridge, the city is ours to conquer. We waited a good ten minutes at a "Finagle a Bagel" location for someone to order a bagel so we could watch it be split in twain by their buzzsaw (we left in disgust as person after person ordered black coffee and nothing else). A store selling nothing but garden gnomes and unicorn statuettes inexplicably had a pair of tiny paper plates with the words “Welcome Neil Young” cryptically scrawled on them and posted alongside the walk up to the store. We considered going in, figuring Neil Young was maybe a closet garden gnome collector and was making a one day only appearance, though were too afraid of how horrible the store would be once inside. As we walked Eddy continued to take pictures of people, few of them saying anything, just looking surprised. Eddy’s photo bully nature slid when a man asked for a cigarette in return for the photo and he was only too quick to oblige. A bunch of people in red were handing out gigantic red canvas bags plastered with decals advertising ABC Family’s “25 Days of Christmas” programming block. My reluctance to be part of a marketing scheme did not however outweigh my excitement over obtaining a free bag, and the contents of my pockets soon found their way into it, as did the one dollar copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune I procured at a salvation army knowing I would likely never read it but also knowing that I wouldn’t mind owning a copy of Dune.

We’re in the park, discovering that if you point at squirrels they get confused and simply freeze up. This revelation leads to us literally spending the next twenty minutes pointing at squirrels and laughing as they look around in confusion at the group of strangers surrounding them. We see a falcon, who unfortunately does not freeze up when we point at him in tandem.

The Famous Pula Family Squirrel Pointers in Action

Eddy shows me a kind of fucked up picture of two naked young boys wrestling, which looks exactly the way a bronze statue of two naked young boys wrestling shouldn't. Sometime later Eddy takes a picture of two lovers kissing and their assumed friend complains that it’s pretty fucked up to take someone’s photo without their permission. When Eddy responds with “Too late” the guy follows us for a good minute or so threatening to kill us. He says something about breaking a branch and beating us to death with it but we’re too busy laughing to really catch it.  By the subway entrance an old Chinese man throws huge hunks of bread to the pigeons, who fight over the pieces, the smaller less-confrontational ones occasionally pecking away at a discarded birthday cake. Eddy has a photo final, and must now leave us to spend the next few hours in a pitch-black darkroom trying to develop some film. He says to cope with the boredom him and the rest of the students in the darkroom assume false identities and personalities to propel their conversations in the dark. It’s kind of poetic almost, the idea that if we all lived in blackness we could be whomever we wanted and no one could argue otherwise. Eddy takes out his flask and surmises the personality of the day will likely be "rambling drunk." It sounds reasonable enough.

I apologize to the tiny Asian girl I’m forced to wedge against due to the narrowly designed seats on the subway, though she just laughs about it. To my right stands an Asian American man carrying a large poster board sign with some long rant about how governor Mitt Romney beat him up and stole his clothes and now the guy is on a hunger strike to protest. I honestly don’t really read it, though I take the man’s picture and flash him a thumbs up. He seems ok with the brief interaction.

In Harvard Square I visit the shitty basement comic store, becoming bored when I realize they don’t have anything I want and even if they did it would probably just be the same price it is anywhere else. However, I do force Rosie and Jair to go to the little Japanese anime and collectables store which is kind of a beautiful little place in its own right. The guy at the counter is saying something to a colleague about how all the teenage girls are apparently hot on buying up all the L merchandise they can get their hands on, something to which his friend just nods. I browse the insanely overpriced selection of import games and fight with the 2/10ths of me that really wants to buy the Mai Shiranui figure in a glass display case which is only $29.99 despite being of reasonable quality. At this point I just sigh and remark “Someday I’m going to have all the money I’ll ever need, and I’ll use it to buy myself toys.” The nearby Newbury Comics has all the Guided by Voices CDs I don’t have yet I don’t feel like taking the plunge and buying any of them. I browse the Japanese toys which look nicer on the boxes then they do in actuality, and examine the overpriced packs of Magic cards from horrible ten-year old sets like Homelands (4.99) and Ice Age (7.99) before realizing there’s nothing here for me. We briefly consider attempting to find Dave Noonan at the Adidas store where he walks around wearing fancy product and making customers feel less hip than himself, though we are cold and hungry, and it is time to head home.

There’s a legendary falafel joint that Eddy and Rosie frequent, legendary because it contains a t-shirt signed by one Ben Affleck which reads “Wow, Best Falafel – Ben Affleck.” We had gotten the wording wrong in our previous excursion around the city, and had been yelling “Wow! Great Falafel Ben Affleck!” at one another before actually arriving at the place and discovering our mistake. It’s still a good enough catchphrase that Eddy jokingly considered it for the title of his book, before realizing a stupid in-joke was maybe not the best way to break-out into the world of printed photography. We each ordered a lamb schwarma, whatever that is, and sat to take pictures with the mythical shirt. I could only imagine how it went down, Ben Affleck just wanting to eat his fucking food but the owner shoving a t-shirt in his face and poor Ben, who probably hadn’t even liked the falafel all that much, quickly signing it before dismissively handing it back. Back at Rosie’s apartment we ate the things to a backdrop of a Law and Order episode, the warm lamb in our stomachs an excellent counterpoint to McCoy’s rousing speech, which offered no reprieve for the elderly murderer on trial. It was still cold outside, cold and dark, though me and Jair gathered up our things and threw them into the back of the Camry, bidding farewell to Rosie and her fourteen page research paper.

It’s snowing now as we speed away from Boston, the world flying by as we sing along to the hard rock hits on radio, though we’re too wimpy to attempt the screaming portions of “Let The Bodies Hit The Floor.” Before we make it home we stop at Ocean State Job Lot, a store which sells nothing but the forgotten remnants of discontinued product lines. The “Crazy Frog” plush doll is pretty bad, though not as bad as the stunning assortment of books by L. Ron. Hubbard offered for sale. We browse the food section, which is about 80% jarred goods I would never consider buying. We laugh over the box of “thick and rough” oatmeal, which is probably the gayest brand slogan ever. “Jair buys some work gloves, a six-pack of Root Beer and little else.

Back on the road I remember the last trip to Boston with Jair. I was still in High School, waiting for life to start and not knowing if it ever would. As we traveled through these same backroads, Grand Funk Railroad had come on the radio, Mark Farner over and over repeating the lyric “I’m Getting Closer to my Home.” The mood was similar, us, two young confused individuals looking for something and not knowing what it was. Someday I would die, but for now I was alive. And as the snow fell all around us, I realized that was more than enough.