The Friday Five on Monday

Hey, apparently there is a livejournal community devoted to doing quizzes every Friday. People post five questions and then everybody answers them. It is pretty boring! Most of the questions are stupid and about food or sex or urination. And, sure, all those things are pretty much integral to a happy life and also happen to be, in that order, the ingredients of a great first date, but still, I don’t really want to be answering those kinds of questions on this site. As weird as it may seem, I do have standards for this site, and as such I will not just write anything — there will be no content about sex or urination! And very little about food. And also I try to use the words ‘cocksucker’ and ‘motherfucker’ only rarely, because that just seems like the right thing to do, now that some of my relatives are reading.

In any case, amongst all of the stupid quizzes, I found this one, which is pretty decent. I wish I had more to give you, honestly, but this month has been a crushing juggernaut of a piledriver, with each day being long. And also there have been twists and turns and new developments! As a result, I have very few ideas these days. Today I was driving home and saw a sign that said “Mechanic’s Wanted.” And I was pretty disgusted at first because, Jesus, if there is anything I hate as much as child slavery or Digimon, it is people who think you use an apostrophe to pluralize something. But then I realized that I can sort of empathize with the guy who made that sign: I bet he doesn’t have any ideas either. I bet he laboured for weeks, trying to think up a great idea for a sign that would attract Mechanics to this business but ultimately came up with nothing. So he stuck the sign up as is, using the fucking apostrophe because, well, he had the letter just lying around.

I totally understand him now. I’m almost there myself. But at least I have quizzes to fall back on.

10 years ago what did you think you would be doing now?

Man, I don’t know. What does any 12-year-old really think he’d end up? I had pretty warped views on the world. I remember thinking at night, while staring up at the glowing star stickers on my ceiling, that clearly I had grown up faster than everyone else. I had ideas, I had passions — I didn’t understand everyone else. And I thought this made me different, which is a pretty ridiculous notion, looking back. The only way to differentiate yourself as an adolescent is to feel similar to everyone else.

I remember wanting to get married. I remember really believing that I was ready to find love and settle down and be with that person forever. Which is entirely bizarre, I know. I don’t remember having a lot of specific career goals — those jumped around a lot, from video game designer to wrestling manager to sports journalist to rock star — but that love thing was entirely consistent. More than anything else, as a 12-year-old, I remember wanting to be in love.

Where do you think you will be in 5 years from now?

Oh man, I hope I don’t know. I’d like for it to be somewhere I can’t even predict, like maybe I’ll be at sea or living in a bubble as part of an anthropological study. I don’t really want to make any long-term goals as part of my 20s, aside from the obivous ones, like not dying and always having food to eat. And running water. I always want to have running water. I was thinking the other day about how much I appreciate running water. Long story short, I appreciate it a lot. I think it’s vital.

So in five years I want to be alive, with food, and running water. And I want to still be writing. Everything on top of that is up to the ages.

Do you live life one day at a time or look to the future?

So I’m thinking that maybe the guy who made the sign with the terrible grammar wasn’t such an uncreative guy with no ideas. Maybe I have him totally wrong. Maybe he’s one of those guys who attaches feelings to objects. And he’s making this sign — this sign for the Mechanics — and he’s putting the letters up on the sign only to look down and see the apostrophe at the bottom of the box, covered in a layer of dust. And it’s so small and so innocent — one-third the size of some of the other letters, small enough to get entirely lost under the torrent of Es, Ts, and Ss — and he never gets to use it. And he thinks about how that apostrophe never gets to be on the sign. How it always has to stay in the box. And how maybe, just maybe, it would be all right, just once, to eschew grammatical convention and let the apostrophe see the world.

And what a world. A world of gold and blue, sunlight reflected off chrome, right near the highway that never stops, catching glimpses of people of all sorts, hearing music out car windows, eventually humanity begins to make sense. And isn’t that worth being ungrammatical? Isn’t that worth the scorn from anal one-time English majors?

The answer, in my opinion, is no. But I bet the guy who made the sign feels differently.

In conclusion, I live my life a quarter mile at a time.

Do you wish you could go back in time and undo something in your life?

So I was thinking today, as I drove home, after I saw the sign, that I might be disappointed if I never hit rock bottom. I bet if I’m sixty years old and I never see rock bottom, I’ll look back at my life with some regret. Not because rock bottom is a good thing. Because I hear it sucks and tends to involve being strung out and making highly questionable decisions and perhaps, most gravely, not having running water, but, still, hitting rock bottom inspires great things in people, doesn’t it? You hit rock bottom and then you get better. I’d love to get better, and I’d hate to never see what kind of person I’d turn into after hitting rock bottom.

I’ve had my low points, though, I suppose. Some day I might write about them. It’s hard to regret anything, though, when you value where you are now, isn’t it? If I could go back, I’d do a lot of things differently, knowing what I do now, but I wouldn’t undo anything. Otherwise I’d lose out on what brought me here.

If you could send a message back in time and give a younger version of yourself some advice, what would it be?

I wonder if the sign guy hit rock bottom. Maybe this is his rock bottom, making terribly incorrect signs. I feel like that would be a good rock bottom for me, losing my grammatical knowledge and just throwing apostrophes around like a moron. If I was that, and also lost all access to running water, I think that would be rock bottom for me. I’d have trouble continuing on.

I’d tell a younger version of myself that everything is going to work out all right. That that whole thing about nerds in high school growing up to do pretty well and be pretty happy is mostly true. And then I’d tell him how to spell convenience, embarrassing and prerogative. Because I never really learned how to spell those words and still have to spellcheck every time I use them.

Two days left. You can probably guess what one of the days is going to be, but the other? Remains a mystery.

Enigmatically,
Matt