I’ve stopped walking a fine line, and it’s the price to be paid.

There is no reason that anybody except me would think that the following is funny:

For Whom The Buzz Tolls

When he got home from his job as a dickless mascot, he turned off all the lights and threw the only somewhat-fitting pair of pants he still had into the ensuite washing machine.

“These are the pants I was wearing,” he said. “I will need to remember them later.”

Later, when the Swiss Chalet Man comes: When the Swiss Chalet Man comes to bring the quarter-chicken dinner that will one day render these sad and final pants unfitting as well. The pants were a light blue jean-type, with ends that had been serrated by dragging too long against the pavement.

The fashion of rolling them up had returned, but only for capris.

There was a knock at the door. It was the Swiss Chalet Man. This man had a dark, solemn face and wore a red coat, and he felt shame at the certainty of their economic and vocational contrast.

“Even though I currently owe $16,736 to the Bank of Montreal.”

“Why have you said this?”

“Is that the Swiss Chalet you’ve brought me?”

“It is. You are not wearing pants.”

He surveyed the apartment. Beyond not wearing pants, the landscape of his abode was riddled with the containers of Swiss Chalet dinners from days and weeks in the past. The Swiss Chalet man looked at him simply.

“I’ve not yet had the chance,” he said. “Before you came, I was to have patrolled the dust-caked granite surfaces and unkempt beds that I neither cook nor fornicate in for the old containers that you know you have brought me. As you can see, everything has become riddled with them.”

“And your pants?”

“I had removed my pants expressly to clean the apartment,” he said. “I am not skilled or thin enough to pick up objects on the ground while wearing them.”

“You must have pyjamas.”

He gave no explanation.

Inside the discarded containers, the remaining bits of chicken sealed within them disintegrated slowly, safe from producing any pungent awareness of themselves.

“You, in this condo,” said the Swiss Chalet Man. “You’re just like the chicken.”

“If sitting on your hand and jerking off actually worked, I would do it,” he said. “And if it put me in a hospital, I would confess I had done it to a nurse my own age, and I would say, ‘You would have never loved me anyways.’”

He saw two shelves of his own DVDs that he could not remember why he did not steal over the internet. He wore a shirt with a tail made more for the tall than the big, realizing that without pants he now appeared to be wearing a sundress. He ran around the apartment, collecting containers with a contractor-sized garbage bag for outdoor use. The bags were from a bulk-sized box of them he had purchased years ago, not knowing at the time that he was not a man. He became exhausted and finally collapsed, taking a final garbage bag and crawling into it.

He laid on the floor. In the garbage bag.

“You want your food?”

“They say the suite next to the garbage chute is the worst in any building.”

“I have heard this.”

“But nobody making this estimation has any account of how convenient it is if you are a person who needs to utilize that chute without wearing any pants. All of the people who say this are real-estate agents who are dumb and sexy – people who never had any dreams to wash away in the first place. All they do is drop out of school once they get tired of it; then they get their picture taken for a business card and, before you know it, they are out there giving advice on what it takes to be a success. But they don’t know about anything but themselves.”

“Could this not be said of you?”

Outside the window he could see, with all the lights down, and with the wet hiss of the washer in the background, the distant buildings and apartments that were made of so much other hope. He crawled out of the garbage bag and sat down on the edge of his rectangular, cotton-filled mattress and thought of how much he would never be a part of.

“I am a big fat pussy,” he said.

The Swiss Chalet Man said nothing.

A Thin Veneer of Humanity Expressed Through The Kind of Bad Parenting That Nobody Can Afford to Think is That Bad Anymore

To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with the sweatshop hours at SK+G, nor its ultimate expression in the form of a guy who doesn’t get to see his own kids. I mean, this is the brave new world we’re all living in now, isn’t it? White-collar types everywhere are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Who can even remember if they saw their parents when they were kids? I don’t.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t your spouse’s responsibility to call you every five minutes and tell you to stop being awful and come home right away, but we all know that it probably doesn’t shake out to much if you do or you don’t.

I can’t even tell if the dark, shadowy look on the creative director’s wife was even that concerned – she may have just been extremely tan. My perception of this is totally Canadian, though.

Concessions to Bad and/or Confusing Management

Two creative directors who never work together and who clearly aren’t sympatico in any way are placed on the same project. Why? This is never explained.

A guy employs his boyfriend who doesn’t seem to have much in the way of insight into anything related to advertising and is continuously berated by his co-workers for it. Why? This is never explained.

An agency has deployed iMovie as its word processor. Why? This is never explained.

The President of an ad agency gathers hundreds of his staff to a party to congratulate them on their success in winning an account while the YouTube rapper who is actually the creative cornerstone of the entire campaign is not even flown in for cake. Why? This is never explained.

And I’ll tell you: These things never are.

The Decline of American Formality

Somewhere along the way, the American Businessman lost his way. Where there once were exotic leather briefcases, we then saw faux-leather briefcases. From faux-leather briefcases, we proceeded to canvas and nylon messenger bags. Then we lost the hats. Prior to any of this, I imagine American Businessmen just strapped Louis Vuitton trunks to the backs of elephants and had the staircases rebuilt as necessary. I speak of decline.

A decline, I’m afraid, that we see at its lowest point today: Today, we see American Businessmen bearing an accessory that even I find fashionably pitiful, and I am a person whose floor is 90% covered in golf shirts that no longer fit.

I am referring, of course, to the knapsack.

I do not care if you are five-hundred years old and pitching take-out to your own wife: Wearing a knapsack makes you look like you are going to summer camp. It cannot be a tool to assist you in the procurement of major accounts for your agency: It cannot be. You might as well hand out business cards from a hot pink fanny pack. Why are you willing to be seen with this thing?

The Pitch Will Be About The Pitch Because The Pitch is About The Pitch

In terms of sheer beauty and simplicity, I really feel like the ‘Trash Can’ idea was a lot cleaner and elegant than the SK+G idea. To be honest, I don’t even know what the SK+G idea was – ‘Waste Into Wow’, or something like that. Suffice to say it had way fewer legs and didn’t really mean anything at all.

But the stuff they built around it was a lot nicer – this is probably one place where the big agencies will consistently slaughter the small ones – and the way that The Ad Store introduced their idea was, in my opinion, all wrong. Crazy wrong. You don’t chuck it out and then show it off: You reveal it in the midst of something. You let it be the dramatic moment that it actually could have been.

It’s too bad, because with ‘Trash Can’, the client could have had a campaign that completely up-ended every negative thing people associate with garbage, casting it in a heroic light that offered a lot more possibilities than ‘HEY MAN WHATS UP UR GARBAGE IS TOTALLY POWER-TASTIC DUDE WOWWWWWWWWWWWW’

But, of course, that’s what young people are into nowadays, isn’t it? The extreme skateboarding and what-not.

Actually, I can’t believe how many skateboards I’m seeing around Toronto.

It’s not that I was ever un-thankful to any of these people; I just think all of them vastly overestimated the extent to which I don’t even possess the fundamental skills to make absolutely anything.

For example, I have the basic bachelor appliance setup: A George Foreman Grill, a rice maker / vegetable steamer, and a stove that has almost never been used. With these things, I can lay claim to having made grilled chicken, pasta, vegetables, and several other things.

But I do it wrong.

I don’t know how to get the broccoli heads to not end up like a sponge. I don’t know how to get the chicken to not be burnt on the outside. Some of the pasta strands seem to cook just fine, while others retain some kind of waterlogged, obnoxious rigidity. I feel like these are issues that should simply resolve with trial and error, but for me they never seem to. I use the microwave timer and will change the amount of time I do things by a minute in either direction, trying to land on a solid process, but it never seems to impact the outcome.

What am I supposed to do? Stand there for 15 minutes, supervising? I think what I can’t handle about cooking is the boredom. You just stand there? It seems unbelievable.

And yet if you look at, like, Italian ladies? In commercials? In those cases, that is exactly what they do.

Craziest of all, of course, is the idea that you do this every day for the rest of your life: That this is the toll for healthy eating and physical fitness.

And I wonder: Has anyone gone vegetarian simply for the sake of not having to cook? Can I just buy those tofu cubes and eat them straight out of the bag? I don’t know what’s going on.

Anyways, of everything I’m going to do, this is going to be the hardest one to do without any help.

But I gotta do it, and it starts today. Restaurants are a cornerstone of the grand illusion we live in. Short of raw lettuce, it honestly doesn’t matter where you go or what you order: All that shit is bad for you.

Even I know that.

Above everything and anything I say here, please be seriously concerned about me only if I walk away from my Twitter account. It seems stupid, but it would mean in its own way that I had truly given up on any kind of public interaction.

Actually, it could be the opposite: Maybe give up is exactly what I need to do.

But what then? I never put that into place.

And man, I’m really blowing this blog out quick. At this rate, I’ll have weighed in on everything in my entire life by the end of the week.

But it’s more than just a responsibility. The best parts of literary fiction can make you feel and understand things about human nature that can’t be revealed in any other way. I sincerely believe that the English language is expressive on a level that is both unique and which goes beyond any other tool we have, short of life itself.

And even with life, the problem is that you only get to live your own.

The other good thing about reading more is that it will take up the time that I would otherwise spend doing other, much stupider things that I am nevertheless incredibly and sadly obsessed with.

Like the games.

Soon, I’m going to write something much longer than this about the games.

Unfortunately, the reason it wasn’t hard is because I’ve drifted completely apart from most of the people I know.

This isn’t really a bad thing, though. We’re all older now. Either you’ve gotten on with your life and you have somebody you are close to and are building something – a family, a future, whatever – or you’re really just doing nothing.

I mean, you could be alone and still have a satisfying life, but you would have to be very wealthy or talented. You’d have to be the type of person that even people who have significant others and families look at and say, “Well, they may seem desperately alone, but you can’t deny that they certainly have a perfectly valid reason for being so; why, just observe their body of work to date.”

Of course, they don’t actually say this: They just grunt and clean apple sauce off of something. But you know what I am saying.

There are exactly two types of valid human beings: People with love, and people with important and satisfying work.

That may seem excruciatingly narrow, but I ask you: What could you possibly be if you had neither of these things?

Here are a list of some types of people who think they are exempt from this but who will realize as they die that they are not:

• People who take a lot of tropical vacations
• People who are part of celibate religious orders
• People who spend their entire lives in grad school
• People who are always in a band
• People who drink a lot of wine at boring parties that they pretend are amazing

I know this blog seems like it is already turning out to be very depressing, but you are wrong and it is fine.

On one hand, I feel guilty about comparing the deviance of my lifestyle to a heroin addiction.

On the other hand, it seems impossible to reconcile the state of my existence with the idea that I am firmly in control of most of it.

And I know what Laura Lang is saying when she talks about being fully able to eat, sleep, work and know what is going on in the world. She isn’t bragging: She’s taking an account of her last stand in a situation where she feels completely encircled against anything beyond holding up that façade.

It’s life in the new middle-class, I guess: You burn out, but you don’t fade away.

But this isn’t about everyone – it’s about me. I’m a desensitized, overstimulated digital crack-head. I eat at restaurants non-stop. I don’t exercise. I haven’t had any kind of relationship in seven years. I play computer games that I fully realize are all exactly the same. I don’t relate to anything outside the glow of a monitor.

If I am not five feet away from an internet-connected computer or I am not wearing headphones plugged into a telephone or I am not in the company and character of brutal intoxication I literally do not know what to do in any moment. I will literally stand there like a robot that has lost its programming.

And yet, I always find that every time I try to do things differently, it falls apart.

The way I am has just been habituated into me so deeply, and for so long, that it never feels real to be somebody else.

I’ll be half a year or so into some mode of self-improvement and something will happen and it will be a reminder that I’m only capable of running from myself, of putting together some sort of synthetic normalcy; in the end, you are who you are, and in the words of D’Angelo Barksdale: What happened is what really happened.

But even though I have always failed, and have already lost a lot in terms of my health and my sanity and the happiness that I could have had, I am going to try again.

And this time, I’m going to write about it here. Maybe I can succeed if I make it all seem like more of an adventure than it really is. Maybe it’ll be different if I can find a way to feel like I’m helping some type of character I’m inventing on this page.

So, if you think that I could be a better person than I am, please feel free to join me on this blog as I document my attempts to excise enormous parts of my life and replace them with something better.

Basically, my process for this will be to create entries about things that I will stop doing, and also write entries about things that I should start doing.

I don’t see why it needs to be more complicated than that, but I will let it be if I am wrong.