Chelsea Fagan

She would be the girl you dread going out with on weekends, as you know the night will invariably end with her in tears, vomiting as you drag her, shoeless, into the passenger seat of your car.

Bruno Mars would get friendzoned into oblivion by every girl he even looked at too long. He just thinks you so beautiful, damnit, and he wants to take care of you and make you feel like the princess you are.

“Do you have any ideaaaaaa how stupidddd it makes you lookkkkkk when you writeeee like thisssss? It reads like some feminine combination of Drunk Jeff Goldblum and Parseltongue.”

And though looking back, we can both admit that the guy was so completely lackluster, at the time, we would have each given a kidney to have him to ourselves. We lost any semblance of dignity for the attention of a guy with a goatee. We have to live with that for the rest of our lives.

You learn the procedures, you become familiar with how the different coffee tastes and what it mixes well with. It’s not some magical set of spells and incantations that you learn over high-moon ceremonies as you sacrifice a chicken with your shift manager–it’s making god damn espresso.

It’s no secret that women and bathrooms have a special relationship. We like to go in groups, stay in there for about two rainy seasons, and often come out  an entirely different person.

With the many warm little clusters of people huddling together around tall buildings, the “cities” that dot our landscape like a misshapen constellation, it’s sometimes hard to understand why absolutely none of them are interesting or relevant. None of them, that is, except New York City.

I will freely admit, I try my best to use proper spelling and grammar on the internet, even in the fetid swamp waters of comment forums. I like to, in general, feel as though I’m writing in a generally articulate way. However, it should be stated that doing so does not, by any means, make me smart.

How are you? How’s puberty? Hitting you pretty hard I guess… yeah, braces, rough. Girls aren’t as smelly/ weird as they were last year, you kinda want to talk to them now, and you have a mouth full of metal and a face full of acne. I feel that.

So you’ve decided to use drugs. Okay, not “use.” “Using” drugs sounds like something a lesion-covered hobo does in a dumpster. You “do” drugs. Sometimes. Hey, it’s cool, no judgment here. I’m not your dad or anything, I can hang. And don’t worry, no matter what your drug of choice, there is a simple, foolproof justification at the ready–provided you know it.

There was no note left, but those close to him have come forward non-commitally indicating that the show, his impending divorce, the accusations of abuse that were being thrown around, and severe financial problems were probably the causes.

There is a desire, perhaps even a need, to get rid of all evidence that we were ever stupid enough to indulge the kind of emotions that would leave us bitter and depressed. We may have played the fool once, but never again. Our precious space will be taken up with photos of summer camp and summer flings that ended too soon.

Depardieu began shouting, “I want to piss! I want to piss!” in front of the crowded passengers. In her attempts to assuage the actor, according to one passenger, the air hostess informed him, gently, “I’m sorry, sir, the facilities are locked, there is nothing I can do to help you right now.”

But there must have been a you before this you that exists now, there must have been a part of you somewhere that danced, that smiled, that lived in some way aside from vicariously through your children and the people on your TV.

Being raised an atheist gives you something of a desire to find spirituality wherever you can. There is this part of the human brain, it seems, that just needs to believe in something. Perhaps it’s simply fear of death, perhaps it’s something more profound, but either way–it’s there.

As I write this, I’m listening to Alan Jackson and tapping my feet to the sound of the happy little fiddle that seems to just squeak “Hey, y’all!” in nearly every country song it’s featured in. It’s always been one of my favorite sounds, and is featured prominently in that lovely genre of music that seems to serve as the sonic punching-bag for the modern intellectual…

I wish I knew how they do it–all those cool people who just seem to let the frustrations and injustices of life roll off their backs like well-dressed ducks. I wish I knew the secret ingredient to not wasting a single moment of their lives on what feels like righteous indignation, but is really more along the lines of childish foot-stamping…

Working  70+ hours a week at such a prestigious job has the maddening effect of enabling you to buy anything your heart desires and leaving you no time left to use it. This is the point at which rich people begin buying things with no purpose, such as horrendous modern art for their sterile, immense apartments.