Author: Matthew Eilar

Just a dude with a stereo, a computer, and a brain.

Bajofondo

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Wednesday

Long day at work. In the evening headed out to a birthday gathering at a bar for one of my school friends. I had a good time. Went to sleep watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Thursday

Shorter workday, but felt longer because we were shorthanded.

We were out for recess, and there is this girl, Marigold, a third-grader, that has near-potato levels of coordination and body strength. She is an avatar of childhood anxiety, and mostly quietly goes about her business like Eeyore. This recess, she decided that she was going to join the kids that like to sit on top of a monkey bars set that looks like this:

freestanding-360-circle-overhead-monkey-bars-Playground-Equipment-1367085899She was standing on the little ladder and trying to pull herself up, but she didn’t really have the strength, and she didn’t have enough practice at the monkey bars and wouldn’t trust her own footholds when she found them. She did this for like 50 minutes. At this point, some of the other kids were getting pointedly cruel to her because she was blocking the steps, and she was starting to feel excluded.

At the end of the hour, the next time that I passed by, she asked me for a boost. I usually just say no, but she was trying and struggling so much, I wanted her to have that feeling of victory. I gave her a boost up so that she could try and sit on the top.

Which turned out to be a huge mistake.

She wasn’t coordinated enough to find a good place to put her sitbones, so she ended up just straddling one of the bars which started to hurt her. This surprised her enough to make her remember that she has a severe fear of heights, and she started to have a panic attack meltdown, screaming at the top of her lungs for me to get her down.

I have some strength, but not enough to just lift her off of monkeybars that are 6 or 7 feet off the ground. Now I start to get a little anxious, because the last thing that I want is for her to fall off and hit her head on a pole on the way down. Most kids have a primal, animal self-preservation instinct that gives them greater strength and balance to get down, but I’ve seen Marigold faceplant into sand after being afraid to jump off of a 3 foot balance beam, so I’m starting to sweat.

Now, with the world’s worst timing, another kid that I’ve been working with a lot this week, Evan, comes over. Evan is a 4th grader with anger problems and the biggest streak of stubbornness I’ve ever seen. He loves to “little lawyer” to death (“Butthole is an inappropriate word to be saying around the club.” How is that inappropriate? But isn’t a bad word. Hole isn’t a bad word. I’m just saying “but” then “hole.” How is that against the rules?), has a really morbid sense of humor, and wants to join the military so that he can learn how to kill people. All that being said, he’s a very sweet kid, and often has a big heart.

This was the worst time for his sweetness to come out. He comes up to Marigold and starts screaming banal motivational phrases like “You can do it!” My only option was to get her to focus on me, get her breathing to slow, and tell her how to move so that she could get herself down, but the second Evan came over, she lost focus and started panicking again. That meant that I needed for Evan to just go away, but then he got butthurt that I wasn’t just praising him for doing a good deed. I had to put on my quiet Batman voice and say, really quietly, Evan, I asked you to go. You need to go away right now.

After getting her attention back on me again, I was able to help her hop down. Lest it seem otherwise, I have a lot of compassion for this girl. But after she was back on the ground, I knew I was going to think twice about helping another kid reach their goals. Too risky.

When I got home, I made some dinner, salad, butternut squash, potatoes.

After dinner, I headed out to an underground room on Belmont where some acquaintances were DJing house music. Out of an hour or so, I got about 10 self-consciousness free minutes of dancing, which isn’t a bad ratio for me. I dragged my roommate Natalie Colen out with me, Jesus Christ was there, and a bunch of people that I knew on sight at Reed. Small town.

Quiescence

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Monday

Monday morning was fine. I was able to get some painkillers, tums, and a couple of glasses of water down before bed, so no hangover. I don’t remember anything in particular about the morning, except for being a little irked because I had to get rid of some unsellable garbage by dumping it on Goodwill, and I feel bad about using my persuasive powers for evil.

Work went a little more smoothly than it had, because one of our summer staff people is working this week while she’s on spring break. I’ve been spending some of my little bits of downtime working on exercises from Code Academy, and I’m surprised at how much I’m learning about basic web design stuff that I always assumed was more complicated than it is.

When I got home, I made a nice dinner, and after eating a big meal, decided to take a nap. That nap lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

Tuesday

When I woke up around 4am Tuesday morning, I was pretty upset with myself for letting myself sleep so early. I decided to seize the moment, and got some housework done and went to the grocery store. I also paid some bills and by the time I went down for a nap before work, I was feeling pretty good about my morning and what I had gotten done.

The rest of the day went. I’ve been having really boring days recently.

Standard

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Sunday ended up being uncharacteristically fun. I woke up and finally got a chance to catch up with Luke Skywalker. We got breakfast at the Waffle Window on Alberta, which was nice and fine and served a delicious champagne-and-lambic breakfast cocktail to start the day off right.

I spent the later afternoon in the backyard, writing and listening to the new Jose Gonzales album, Vestiges & Claws. I’m not generally a fan of singer songwriter, guy with a guitar music, but I really like his voice and interesting but sturdy guitar work. That video above makes me want to punch him, though. There’s a weird religion/gospel fetishization thing going on in European music right now that is bizarre and sinister to me. I’d love for a better writer than me to connect some of those dots because it’s a trend that’s been happening for a little while now.

Later in the afternoon, Luke and I had discussed going out and getting drinks. I had been wanting to get a little drunk somewhere for a couple of weeks, and it just hadn’t felt right. I’ve become a lot more selective about when and where and with whom I get drunk with, and for various reasons, I hadn’t felt comfortable. Luke then left, and I wasn’t quite sure what her plan was but I was so into the idea of going out that I reached out to another friend to go out with.

That’s how I ended up spending like four hours at an eastside bar called The Standard. I was hanging out with my friend Hunter Thompson, and like every time we hang out, we spent most of the time bitching about work and complaining about online dating. After a couple hours, Luke and her boyfriend joined us, and we all went out to another bar for some food and shuffleboard. By that point, I was well drunk, but having a good time.

As soon as I got home, the next-day blues started to hit me. I’m very susceptible to bluesy feelings of having no more good brain chemicals left. All sorts of substances, and sometimes even just a really fun day can make me feel it. Even though I was starting to get hungover, I was able to keep presence of mind enough to remember not to replay tapes in my head about what I had done and pick everything apart until there were no good memories left, and I remember waking up around 3am and falling asleep to a lovingkindness meditation. (I started with myself, which is backwards, and (hilariously to me the next day) my “enemy” was the writer Eve Ensler, who I had heard interviewed on a podcast and who had annoyed the shit out of me.) When I woke up this morning, I had mostly shaken it all off, and was able to just get ready to meet the day. I think another time, certainly other times when I’ve been more depressed, the sheer amount of vice-y fun I had would have been enough to make me feel ashamed of myself and guilty and like I didn’t deserve the fun the next morning.

Nono

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Friday

I spent the morning working with J Lo to clean out the kitchen at our facility. We got approval to get the kitchen remodeled, and it’s been a nightmare for as long as I’ve worked there, and I didn’t want to feel guilty if there was some horrendous shit in the cabinets and there was some kind of inspection. Later in the morning, we went to Wal-Mart to pick up a furniture donation, and it was nice to get some car time to talk casually and informally.

I shared that I had had a moment this week where I was helping a kid with social skills while at the same time being so aware of how I should take my own advice and connect the dots in my own life. There is a boy named Josiah, around 9 or 10, that I work with. He has a brother that’s older than him by only around a year. These two boys bring a cloud of wild and positive energy wherever they go, bouncing off the walls but with such good spirits that you want to let them enjoy themselves. Josiah’s parents work hard and work a lot. A lot of families in Camas are really into sports and dads take a lot of time to coach their kids and work on early sports skills. I don’t think Josiah or his brother have a lot of that time, and so they rarely join in the more formal sports games on the playground, the boys that self-organize into football or soccer or basketball games.

I was working in the gym on Wednesday, and I saw Josiah hanging around the periphery of the basketball game that was in progress. Josiah wanted to join in, but was really unsure of himself. He kept calling out to some of the kids he knew that were playing, and asking for permission to join and play. These kids would look towards him, but they were mostly focused on the game and just kind of shrugged. I could see that Jacob was reading that look as rejection, and he came over to me very upset and saying that the kids playing were excluding him. I helped him see that these kids were not excluding him, that from their perspective, anybody could join and and come and play just by playing, and no one person in the game could give the permission he was looking for. I told him that the only way to join in was to go after the ball every time, to play when he got possession.

It made me think of the places in my own life where I feel on the periphery, waiting for that invitation to join in, when really the only action to take is to act. I’ve also been thinking of the kids that were already playing. None of them was particularly friendly to Josiah, and it would not have hurt them to find some way to bring him into the game. At the same time, I can’t bring myself to blame any of the kids for not knowing to take ownership of the whole game like that yet. I don’t think I have that kind of compassion yet for the people who are in the same position in relation to myself in my own life, in the things that I want to become a part of.

The rest of the day came and went. I texted around looking for evening plans, and decided to join Jesus Christ for dinner and hanging out with some of his friends. The plan was to go dancing, but by the time they were done pregaming, it was near midnight and just too late for me to start something like that, so I called it an early night and went to sleep.

Saturday

I spent the next day lazing. After waking up, I fucked around for a little bit, then went outside to catch some of the beautiful sun and start working on my lovely summer bronze. In the evening, I headed out with Jesus Christ to a Third Angle concert at the art museum of weird and difficult experimental classical music, and I was grateful to have him along as a a friend that’s also into shit like that. After a nightcap, I dropped him off and once again just headed in to get some sleep.

Nightmares

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Yesterday morning, I woke up and caught Luke Skywalker at the end of her workday. We caught up on the latest episode of Looking, which has been pretty good this season, although its pretty incredible to have show that’s been going for a season and a half and I still don’t know how to describe it in a sentence, or whether I think its any good.

I sent in the next step of my application to website-host-not-to-be-named. They asked for a weird “video interview,” and I jumped through their hoops, although I might have fucked it up by not wearing interview clothes. I really want to hear back from them, but I’ve done all I can for now.

One of my coworkers, Jennifer Lopez, just got a promotion to underboss at my site, and I’ve been doing my best to help my homegirl out. This week, this meant catching up on some useless busywork that is part of her job to collect and manage. We had one of those staff meetings to talk about doing the paperwork where no one can even engage with the fact that it’s all dumb and useless and worthless work, because that would just bring everybody down.

Work was fine. I’ve been a little sterner with some of the kids than I usually am, but as people around me have been promoted, I’m doing a little more assistant principal-y work. My moment of bliss for the day was seeing a 7-year old boy, Michael, come into the club with Groucho Marx glasses, and looking so cute because they are so large on his face.

After work, I grabbed a burger (I’ve been trying to stop paying for prepared food, but I was going from work to work and it felt like a treat yo’ self moment) and headed over to the Lloyd center, where I had signed up to be a participant in a consumer study on tobacco usage. It turned out to be a marketing through exposure thing for Swedish snus, and was basically an hour with the crowd of the worst people in the world. I try not to categorize people, but at some point, if it walks like a scumbag, talks about women like a scumbag, and smells like a scumbag, they’re probably scumbags. It was stupid and pointless, but at the end of the day it was only an hour and I walked out with some cash for my trouble.

When I got home, I felt restless and wasn’t sure quite what to do with myself. This has been happening a lot recently. I played some piano, and came up with a complete song skeleton. It’s been so long since I’ve come up with something so structurally complete, I feel like it would be a shame to let it go without trying to put some words onto it, but holy hell does even trying to create that way push all of my vulnerability buttons. Even to myself. Even in a song that I can promise myself I won’t show to anybody else. There’s like nowhere to go from that point, nowhere useful, so I’m going to work on the song this weekend and see what I can do with those feelings. As I said, a nutritionally balanced song appearing from the aether like that is too good an opportunity to throw away without even trying.

After that, I tried to watch a little of The Master, which I’ve been watching slowly in 20 minute chunks, but I couldn’t keep my attention on the movie (I’ve been obsessed with a Zynga game called Sevens) and in the end a new PT Anderson movie is too good to waste on half-attention, so I called it a night and went to bed…

…and then was up for another three hours watching Bar Rescue and Kitchen Nightmares. My tastes in reality TV can be strange even to myself, but I love these business rescue shows a lot because, like Hoarders or Intervention, the setting may be a bar or restaurant (or house or addiction clinic), but what the real subject matter is is human insecurity, brokenness, and fear. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, every well run kitchen is similar, but every dysfunctional kitchen is dysfunctional in its own particular way. Add in the fact that many restaurants are family businesses, and the potential for drama is potent and raw. All that being said, if I was going to be watching garbage TV, I’d rather watch new garbage TV and I need to give myself permission to be a little shittier and accept that some nights I’m not going to be up for Matt’s Auto-didactic Finishing School for Promising Boys and just blow off some steam.