ZZZZZZzzzzzz, by Rosicky Jones

Wednesday 7:30 pm

I light a cigarette, undo my tie, unbutton my dress shirt, and sit down in front of my computer.  I have been staring at the computer screen and randomly striking keys, hoping a column would develop. Nothing yet.  I’m ready for a break in this frustration so I log onto Spankwire.com and search for Sasha Grey vids.  Forty minutes later I had found the perfect video, or so I thought.  Ordinarily, masturbation alleviates my chronic writer’s block for a short period of time.  My muscles relax, my fingers regain dexterity, and a shit-ton of endorphins escape into my bloodstream.

Today was different.  My first moment of happiness all day was unceremoniously ruined.  An uncircumcised hook penis appeared on screen and ruined my session.  There should have been a warning.  I feel that it is within my consumer’s rights to be warned about Gentile performers, penises that radically curve to the left or the right, terrible boob jobs, GILFs, obesity, blood, and basically anything that Jenna Jameson would not have stood for.   Masturbating with a steady rhythm and then being shocked to the point of convulsion because of, say, a hideous plastic surgery scar or a Möbius strip-shaped penis is a terrible experience to have to endure.  I shut down Spankwire.
I log onto Pandora and chose Kid Cudi Radio over MGMT or Dean Martin.  I check my email, Facebook, ESPN, Huffington Post, make a corny joke on Twitter, and am ready to start on a column I need to have turned in by Friday.

Suzanne led me into the house with near-Napoleonic ardor and enthusiasm.  I was nervous, horny, and dizzy from the Red Stripe, Red Wine, Red Bull hell I inflicted on my stomach.  The room was full of a dozen people making out and fucking, and a weirdo in the corner watched it all while eating a bowl of spaghetti.  Suzanne sat me down on the couch and introduced me to her friend Katie.  My nervousness began to dissipate as the most wonderful night of my life unfolded.  The ensuing orgy could only be rivaled by one with even more participants.  Instead of eight girls there could have been twenty.  If Jesus had appeared and offered to grant me one wish, I would have asked for 20 more girls and Gus Johnson to do orgy play-by-play.

The orgy-corollary applies to March Madness.  Why not add 32 teams to something that is already amazing?  I mean, all the complaints about a 96-team tourney could be made about the 64-team tourney.

My phone rings.  It’s the ex-factor asking me to hang out.  Ugh, what to do, what to do?  I am not really feeling this NCAA article.  I fear that developing this NCAA-orgy comparison any further would develop into John Amaechi fantasy instead of a good column.  If you don’t like the 96-team tourney, then skip the first two days and your 64-team orgy will be ready for you – done and done.

I hop in the whip and pick up the ex-factor.  We’re getting back together after a five-month separation.  It’s weird identifying the new ticks and mannerisms of someone who only less than half a year ago you knew as well as you knew yourself.

“Ohh, so you’re a vegetarian now…”

“When did you start biting your bottom lip? That’s new…”

We may have broken up and reconciled too many times for this to ever work, but, to this day, she is still the only person my callous, calculating, nearly indomitable heart ever loved.  I may be the hardest, most gangsta muthafucka you’ve ever laid eyes on, a better-looking Rahm Emanuel, if you will, but with her I was just a biggity bitch.  We lay on the couch together while I happily pretend to enjoy watching 27 Dresses for the fourth time.  As corny as I was, there is almost nothing I would have rather been doing, especially writing a crap article about some bullshit I didn’t care about that maybe twenty people would read, and only three would actually enjoy.

Thursday 4:00 pm

I got in the ride and Ice Cube’s It Was a Good Day starts blaring.

Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God

I don’t know but today seems kinda odd

No barking from the dogs, no smog

And momma cooked a breakfast with no hog

The sun is shining in Detroit, my stereo’s playing a great song, and I have a fat twenty-dollar bill in my pocket – Ice Cube may be right.  I needed to get home and hammer out an article… But I decide to stop by the liquor store to pick up the universal cure for writer’s block:  Cigs and Booze.

Absolut Vodka, Marlboro Lights in a hard box, and some cranberry juice – grand total exceeding $20.00.  Something has to go.  I’ll tell you later which item I decide to return, just keep reading.  Foreshadowing!

As I pull into my driveway I see Pinky, one of my besties, sitting on my porch like a stray dog looking for some love.  I love this Canadian son-of-a-bitch, but I am not ready for him. I have to write.  In spite of our Affleck-Damon comradery level I kinda hate him.  He possesses two character traits I detest.

1-    He is an unrepentant drug user.  He is a drug tornado that takes down everything in its path.  God forbid you had anything important to do when he arrives – because he will make sure it doesn’t get done.  He is procrastination imprisoned by human flesh.  He is never drugless, and he is always high.  And worst of all, he never stops talking about the benefits of legalizing marijuana.  I have converted to a pro-marijuana legalization stance just so he won’t have anything to talk about anymore and shut the fuck up.

2- He is a Lipstick Liberal.  I coined this term for Pinky because like a lipstick lesbian, his act is just for show.  He has memorized some liberal catch-phrases, loves Rachel Maddow, and rocks a $200 designer Obama t-shirt cause he thinks it endears him to the ladies.  Around these aforementioned ladies he extols the virtues of “going green,” how Bush ruined the world, and why enormous corporate monoliths are evil.  It is all bullshit because he is not really a liberal: he drives an SUV, he is Canadian (so he never actually voted for Obama), and his dad is a Goddamned exec at one of the corporate monoliths he detests.

I really need to write.  But Pinky is in my living room rolling a blunt on one of my stray doctoral applications while proudly regaling me with a story about an 18-year-old girl he fucked without a condom.  In spite of all his faults, he is always at the ready with the stickiest of the icky and a thoroughly entertaining condom-free sex story.  I busted open the laptop hoping to develop one of my hypotheses into a column.  Then I hear him inviting two girls to my place.  I grab his B-Berry and put the kibosh on Amy Whats-Her-Name and Big-Tittied Lori coming over.  I try to explain to Captain Pinky that I am caught in relationship limbo and smushing Big-Tittied Lori again would be far from kosher.  His response:  “Don’t worry about your old lady… this isn’t cheating, yo.  You already fucked Lori, no?

I can’t write with this degenerate sitting on my couch aspiring to destroy my life.  I shut down the comp. and turn on my PS3 and we play FIFA for approximately three hours.  After completing our third seven game series and our second blunt Pinky got up, gave me a dirty look, grabbed an unopened bag of pretzels along with the 60 cents on my coffee table, three of my cigs, and walked out without saying a word.  I hate him.

Thursday 7:45 pm

I am lit–-too stoned to write, but sober enough to still give a shit.  I contemplate paying one of the best living writers (and my occasional drinking buddy), Michael V. Gibson, to ghost write a David Foster Wallace-y piece of literary magic.  But the $13 left in my savings account quickly deters my plagiaristic fantasies.

I begin to read my last column hoping for a modicum of inspiration, but all it did was further quell my desire to write.  I realize how inferior it is.  There are sentences that even a week later seemed incomplete or superfluous.  I begin to question what tiny bit of ability I actually had.  I begin to question my desire to write.  I actually start to understand why my book, Sex Rules (A Double Entendre): For Men, was sitting in a literary agent’s desk collecting dust instead of royalties.  My depression, neuroses, psychoses, all began to escalate dangerously close to the J.D. Salinger zone.  So I reach for another cig and open up the PDF file of the only good thing I’ve ever written.

It’s my grad school thesis.  My prof said it was the greatest deliverable she has ever read in her 20 years of teaching.  I love it.  I have actually masturbated while reading it. It’s a shame that I will never reach that level again.  All my writing since has been an attempt to recapture that magic.  A druggie chasing the first high.  Once the drug euphoria dissipates, regret materializes, followed by calculation – What do I have to do to get high again?  Writing is the same.  You get the taste of writing something you are thrilled with, and all you want is that feeling again.  We are addicts.  A druggie’s thoughts are always running away, imagining mew methods to steal, screw, lie, or fight their way to a hit.  Same with a writer.  They are always thinking of new angles, ways to restructure a pesky sentence, or a better word to use for love than “love.”  There is a reason that every writer I have ever met has a pen and paper at their bedside, a notepad or a voice recorder with them at all times – because chasing that sweet fleeting high transcends all else.

Friday 3:15 am

I need to be up in five hours.  I just arrived home from the bar and should be sleeping off my inebriation.  Yet I am sitting in front of my computer determining whether my night out had a column’s worth of jokes and plot.  I could write an article about my night, comparing the 21^st century courtship process to the writings of Laquer.  I could apply Laquer’s one-sex model hypothesis to a present day Detroit bar.  I believe that the one-sex model is a more accurate depiction of male-female relations than the two-sex model.  I could feel my brain juice percolating.  I am going to write a column dissecting my interaction with generic bar slut #1 and generic bar slut #2 within the situational context of the one-sex model.  This could work.

I knew tonight would be a good night so I threw on a condom before leaving my apartment.  Yeah, shit was that serious.  I had to make sure I was geared up in case Salma Hayek emerged from behind a bush with a chloroform-drenched rag and Radio Flyer Wagon to take me to a back alley and divorce me from my virginity.

We were in my car driving towards the best bar in the D – which is as good as the worst bar in L.A – when a smoke show pulled up next to us.  Naturally, the group of arrogant self-loving, self-proclaimed studs inhabiting my car became meek, avoiding all eye contact or sudden movements, while sneaking looks out the corners of their eyes at the hot girl next to us.  As soon as the light turned green and she pulled away from my antifreeze-leaking 4-cylinder Tempo, did my posse regain their bravado and begin espousing on the debauchery that would ensue if they had the chance to talk to the hot girl in the car.

I maintained my cool, and, instead of making the next right to our destination, I followed her a bit.  She put pedal to metal and pulled away-I think she could smell the vinegar emanating from a car full of douchebags.  I couldn’t keep up, but I didn’t want to lose her.  So I did what any sane gentleman would do: I wrote down her license plate number.  I don’t plan on stalking her; I wouldn’t even know what to do with the number.  All I knew was that she was license plate hot.

Blurg!  This is crap already.  It makes me come off kinda crazy.  I can see the allegorical connection I was approaching between my interaction with skeets and the one-sex model of male-female relations.  But it is already convoluted.  I should have known how stupid it was to try and develop an entertaining and informative tale around the stupidity of me and my shit friends.  Anecdotes are used in support, not as the backbone of work.

Friday 5:15 am

I stir my vodka-water cocktail as a lit cigarette competes with the bags under my eyes in a game of “who can hang lower.”  Oh yeah, the cranberry juice was the casualty of my poverty at the party store, not a real tough decision in retrospect.  I stared at a Word doc littered with the bodies of articles that didn’t make it.  Writing is such a lonely and challenging endeavor.  And the loneliness and challenge is compounded by my current inability to develop entertaining and engaging prose.  I hate this, I hate the writing process, but I keep typing, I have no clue what I’m trying to say, or what may materialize on my page, I should go to bed, but I can’t stop chasing the high, it feels too good.

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