Cody Peace Adams lives in NYC and is just beginning his masters at NYU for creative writing (WHUT WHUT!). I read Cody’s blog on a regular basis, and you can too: THERMOS H. CHRIST. If anyone who reads this thought pyramidroming was just for silly girly girls, well, they wuz WRONG. Life is a brutal fuck, but at least we’re not in outer space among the Klingons, Arcturians, Zaranites and Aaamazzarites… cuz those breeds are fierce.
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
by Cody Peace Adams
Another summer in New York has rolled around. Again, I am unemployed. Last summer had a certain derelict romance to it, smoking cigarettes out of my bathroom window in my underwear while drinking a beer before 3. It was like rolling down a steep hill littered with malt liquor bottles. But this summer has hit the bottom of the hill and slid out onto a frozen lake littered with malt liquor bottles, scrambling about in circles on its hands and knees.
Not helping matters was the soul-molesting year of employment between my periods of living on the dole. My eyes are ruined from staring at a computer screen for eight or nine hours a day. And what do I have to show for it? Several styleless articles on sustainable architecture published in a small-circulation trade magazine at a company that’s probably going under. And though I was basically staring at the wall of a cubicle the entire time, another previously unknown perversion of the office environment has become known to me: I became used to being around people every day, even in the sickening and superficial fashion of the modern workplace. Plunged back into the scintillating garbage fire of my detached life, all of the many people I don’t or used to know loom large in my sickly vacuity.
Basically, my mental well-being was thrown down in the sawdust and shit-kicked by a bar full of mean cowboys. The first few weeks after the job ended were glorious. Gloriously drunk. I quickly ran through the money I was supposed to be living on until school starts in the fall. Several setbacks and vanishing income sources greatly exacerbated this problem. I was broke last summer, but this time around it’s approached Angela’s Ashes territory. Unlike the hand-to-mouth unemployment check poverty of last year, utter destitution is not at all romantic or exciting. I’ve skipped food for days at a time (mostly to make room for liquor and cigarette money), stopped taking the subway, and started spending time at the public library again. I was saved for a period of four days by the discovery of a $20 Starbucks giftcard, with which I purchased miserable little sandwiches that I ate out back. I could not afford to do laundry, and my hygiene has undeniably suffered, though you can’t rape the willing in that regard.
At around the same time, my new roommate discovered an even newer roommate: bedbugs! I have lived with an irrational fear of this brand of vermin since moving to New York, even while gradually ratifying a mental peace treaty with the cockroaches. He found one crawling on his bed. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t actually a bed bug, but perhaps instead some benign form of tick, flea, or lice. The next night dashed this naive hope when I awoke at 4 AM to find a bed bug crawling next to me and a telltale line of welts on my arm. This touched off a four day period in which I did not sleep, shivering in the heat and twitching at the scarcest movement or shadow in my peripheral vision. I went inch by inch through my entire room. A single bed bug was discovered on my box spring. I gutted it like a fish and left it slumped against a tree. I taped plastic sheeting over my electrical outlet, tore everything of my walls, covered my mattress in an extremely uncomfortable and costly protective covering (it feels like sleeping on the outside of a diaper), and plastic bagged all of my clothing. I sprinkled a wicka protection circle of boric acid around my bed. My room now looks like an insane asylum for a patient with a contagious skin disease. This soothed me, and I began to be able to sleep again. A week later I was watching The Wrath of Kahn and shortly after the part with the monster earwigs I glanced over and saw a bedbug skittering around on the couch next to me. Although this was the most action I had gotten in months, I nonetheless had to destroy it. More sleepless nights ensued, but I eventually relaxed again. Then my roommate found three or four more in his box spring. Earlier steps were repeated. Defenses were lowered. Several days ago my roommate found another one on his bed, crawling around as free as you please. I have given up. Everything in the apartment will be burnt in a holy fire when I leave.
Other deleterious events: I received a severe, severe sunburn on a bankrupt trip to Cape Cod, and still haven’t recovered. On the first night of the same trip I somehow became delirious, wandered outside, and tried to sleep in the sand at 5 AM. The failure to realize said ambition led to a furious determination to walk along the surf until I collapsed, leaving my friends to forever wonder what happened to me. (This urge gradually abated.) Upon taking a routine drug test before participating in a top-dollar medical experiment testing anti-depressants, I tested positive for methadone. I explained that I have not taken synthetic heroin or burn-victim pain medication. Their accusative stares and subsequent dismissal leads me to conclude that they did not believe me. This was depressing. (An ill-timed ‘jazz cigarette’ also showed up, but that was no big deal.) My freshly ‘ex’ girlfriend abruptly stopped talking to me. Paranoid fantasies and self-value problems ensued. I got drunk and emailed everyone I’ve ever dated. (This did not take long.) My former workplace stiffed me on paying for a freelance video I produced or them. I projectile vomited on a driveway in Staten Island. A long-planned return trip to Oregon to see my brother for the first time in three years fell through, because I did not have any money. I had to sell all of my video games. After reading a book on the subject, I diagnosed myself with adult ADD and realized that this my well be the font of most of my personal problems, including and especially the spontaneous machinations I employed to break up with my girlfriend, which I have since bitterly, bitterly regretted, in the way that a sad clown immediately regrets every monkeyshine. Like all true epiphanies, this realization has only made it, and the backbreaking load of all of my other failures, that much worse. Ironically enough, this is a symptom, referred to as ADD post traumatic stress syndrome in the literature.
But surely there must be an upshot! the reader says to himself. I did manage to watch all of Star Trek: The Original Series, which spurred to me write my finest passage yet:
“Star Trek is a show about: The infinite convoluted projections of the human heart, and the neverending capacity for man’s loneliness and longing to match chamber for chamber the plenitudes of space. The universe is populated by a bottomless well of twisted Edens, where populations chillingly accept the tyranny of artificial intelligences, the violation of physic rape, space madness, slavery of the soul, endless childhood, and every other form of scientific/ontological self-subjugation imaginable. Often crew members of the Enterprise feel the allure, and the always sensually conscious Kirk must reel them back in, even his top officers and closest friends, time and again, though he knows they would be happier. And every ancient race of super-sentient omnipotent beings, Dionysians, phantasmahorical apparations, beings of light and energy, and silicon monsters alike, are really better off for being extinguished.”
And later and drunker a probably not-so-great one:
“It couldn’t exists without cartoons.”
Anything else? Sort of. I managed to get back on a smaller amount of unemployment. So I won’t starve to death now. I’ve become comfortable wearing cut-off jeans shorts in public. I bought an awesome new phone that has an e-ink keypad that turns into a full keyboard at will, making texting a breeze. After almost two months of silence my beloved ex-girlfriend picked up at 3 AM, and called me back the next morning so I could remember what she said. She might see me some time; right now this is a minor miracle. I’ve listened to the Department of Eagles album 30 times to date.
So what lays in store next for Thermos H. Christ? If I can make it through the next three weeks without appearing on the nightly news, a debt-fueled fiction MFA at NYU, and a whole new group of people to alienate with my withering workshop critiques. And just maybe a few new friends! I’d feel better about it if I had written anything besides this blog in the last two years.
CODY’S TWITTER: @codypeaceadams
CODY PEACE ADAMS and the REAL MEANING of STAR TREK
Cody Peace Adams lives in NYC and is just beginning his masters at NYU for creative writing (WHUT WHUT!). I read Cody’s blog on a regular basis, and you can too: THERMOS H. CHRIST. If anyone who reads this thought pyramidroming was just for silly girly girls, well, they wuz WRONG. Life is a brutal fuck, but at least we’re not in outer space among the Klingons, Arcturians, Zaranites and Aaamazzarites… cuz those breeds are fierce.
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
by Cody Peace Adams
Another summer in New York has rolled around. Again, I am unemployed. Last summer had a certain derelict romance to it, smoking cigarettes out of my bathroom window in my underwear while drinking a beer before 3. It was like rolling down a steep hill littered with malt liquor bottles. But this summer has hit the bottom of the hill and slid out onto a frozen lake littered with malt liquor bottles, scrambling about in circles on its hands and knees.
Not helping matters was the soul-molesting year of employment between my periods of living on the dole. My eyes are ruined from staring at a computer screen for eight or nine hours a day. And what do I have to show for it? Several styleless articles on sustainable architecture published in a small-circulation trade magazine at a company that’s probably going under. And though I was basically staring at the wall of a cubicle the entire time, another previously unknown perversion of the office environment has become known to me: I became used to being around people every day, even in the sickening and superficial fashion of the modern workplace. Plunged back into the scintillating garbage fire of my detached life, all of the many people I don’t or used to know loom large in my sickly vacuity.
Basically, my mental well-being was thrown down in the sawdust and shit-kicked by a bar full of mean cowboys. The first few weeks after the job ended were glorious. Gloriously drunk. I quickly ran through the money I was supposed to be living on until school starts in the fall. Several setbacks and vanishing income sources greatly exacerbated this problem. I was broke last summer, but this time around it’s approached Angela’s Ashes territory. Unlike the hand-to-mouth unemployment check poverty of last year, utter destitution is not at all romantic or exciting. I’ve skipped food for days at a time (mostly to make room for liquor and cigarette money), stopped taking the subway, and started spending time at the public library again. I was saved for a period of four days by the discovery of a $20 Starbucks giftcard, with which I purchased miserable little sandwiches that I ate out back. I could not afford to do laundry, and my hygiene has undeniably suffered, though you can’t rape the willing in that regard.
At around the same time, my new roommate discovered an even newer roommate: bedbugs! I have lived with an irrational fear of this brand of vermin since moving to New York, even while gradually ratifying a mental peace treaty with the cockroaches. He found one crawling on his bed. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t actually a bed bug, but perhaps instead some benign form of tick, flea, or lice. The next night dashed this naive hope when I awoke at 4 AM to find a bed bug crawling next to me and a telltale line of welts on my arm. This touched off a four day period in which I did not sleep, shivering in the heat and twitching at the scarcest movement or shadow in my peripheral vision. I went inch by inch through my entire room. A single bed bug was discovered on my box spring. I gutted it like a fish and left it slumped against a tree. I taped plastic sheeting over my electrical outlet, tore everything of my walls, covered my mattress in an extremely uncomfortable and costly protective covering (it feels like sleeping on the outside of a diaper), and plastic bagged all of my clothing. I sprinkled a wicka protection circle of boric acid around my bed. My room now looks like an insane asylum for a patient with a contagious skin disease. This soothed me, and I began to be able to sleep again. A week later I was watching The Wrath of Kahn and shortly after the part with the monster earwigs I glanced over and saw a bedbug skittering around on the couch next to me. Although this was the most action I had gotten in months, I nonetheless had to destroy it. More sleepless nights ensued, but I eventually relaxed again. Then my roommate found three or four more in his box spring. Earlier steps were repeated. Defenses were lowered. Several days ago my roommate found another one on his bed, crawling around as free as you please. I have given up. Everything in the apartment will be burnt in a holy fire when I leave.
Other deleterious events: I received a severe, severe sunburn on a bankrupt trip to Cape Cod, and still haven’t recovered. On the first night of the same trip I somehow became delirious, wandered outside, and tried to sleep in the sand at 5 AM. The failure to realize said ambition led to a furious determination to walk along the surf until I collapsed, leaving my friends to forever wonder what happened to me. (This urge gradually abated.) Upon taking a routine drug test before participating in a top-dollar medical experiment testing anti-depressants, I tested positive for methadone. I explained that I have not taken synthetic heroin or burn-victim pain medication. Their accusative stares and subsequent dismissal leads me to conclude that they did not believe me. This was depressing. (An ill-timed ‘jazz cigarette’ also showed up, but that was no big deal.) My freshly ‘ex’ girlfriend abruptly stopped talking to me. Paranoid fantasies and self-value problems ensued. I got drunk and emailed everyone I’ve ever dated. (This did not take long.) My former workplace stiffed me on paying for a freelance video I produced or them. I projectile vomited on a driveway in Staten Island. A long-planned return trip to Oregon to see my brother for the first time in three years fell through, because I did not have any money. I had to sell all of my video games. After reading a book on the subject, I diagnosed myself with adult ADD and realized that this my well be the font of most of my personal problems, including and especially the spontaneous machinations I employed to break up with my girlfriend, which I have since bitterly, bitterly regretted, in the way that a sad clown immediately regrets every monkeyshine. Like all true epiphanies, this realization has only made it, and the backbreaking load of all of my other failures, that much worse. Ironically enough, this is a symptom, referred to as ADD post traumatic stress syndrome in the literature.
But surely there must be an upshot! the reader says to himself. I did manage to watch all of Star Trek: The Original Series, which spurred to me write my finest passage yet:
“Star Trek is a show about: The infinite convoluted projections of the human heart, and the neverending capacity for man’s loneliness and longing to match chamber for chamber the plenitudes of space. The universe is populated by a bottomless well of twisted Edens, where populations chillingly accept the tyranny of artificial intelligences, the violation of physic rape, space madness, slavery of the soul, endless childhood, and every other form of scientific/ontological self-subjugation imaginable. Often crew members of the Enterprise feel the allure, and the always sensually conscious Kirk must reel them back in, even his top officers and closest friends, time and again, though he knows they would be happier. And every ancient race of super-sentient omnipotent beings, Dionysians, phantasmahorical apparations, beings of light and energy, and silicon monsters alike, are really better off for being extinguished.”
And later and drunker a probably not-so-great one:
“It couldn’t exists without cartoons.”
Anything else? Sort of. I managed to get back on a smaller amount of unemployment. So I won’t starve to death now. I’ve become comfortable wearing cut-off jeans shorts in public. I bought an awesome new phone that has an e-ink keypad that turns into a full keyboard at will, making texting a breeze. After almost two months of silence my beloved ex-girlfriend picked up at 3 AM, and called me back the next morning so I could remember what she said. She might see me some time; right now this is a minor miracle. I’ve listened to the Department of Eagles album 30 times to date.
So what lays in store next for Thermos H. Christ? If I can make it through the next three weeks without appearing on the nightly news, a debt-fueled fiction MFA at NYU, and a whole new group of people to alienate with my withering workshop critiques. And just maybe a few new friends! I’d feel better about it if I had written anything besides this blog in the last two years.
CODY’S TWITTER: @codypeaceadams