My "Cringe" Offering, part one

I was listening to "Weekend Edition" on MPR this morning, and there was a story about something called "Cringe Nights" at a bar in Brooklyn, NY. The Cringe Movement got started by a lady named Sarah Brown (http://queserasera.org/cringe.html), and the gist is that people go to this bar with their journals from when they were teenagers and sign up for times to go up and read parts of them to the crowd. Horror and hilarity ensues.

Being a horrifying teenager myself at one point, I was immediately drawn to the concept. Air out your "deepest" insights as an adolescent for laughs and empathy. Dig it. I immediately went to the plastic storage container in the closet in my back bedroom and dug out my journals. Submitted for your approval (or derision) here is an entry dated July 28th, 1996, with all of its logical inconsistencies and leaps in time intact. I would be 17 years old when I wrote this:



I sit in a tiny alcove off the main hallway. There is room here for two, but I am alone, facing the wall. The hallway is dark because it is summer, and the only light comes from the four vending machines against the wall. They hum, and it is the only noise I hear. I am alone, and my thoughts are my company.

"It smells like rain," he said, and I looked about me. True enough, the sky was gray. The flowers looked more fresh after their shower, and the water droplets were beaded on the windshield of the Escort. But it didn't smell like rain to me, which is a good, clean, healing scent. It smelled like wet asphalt, which strangles the earth.

I put my feet up onto the seat facing me and run my fingers across the smooth surface of the table. My pinky finger hits a ridge in the smoothness, a ripple in time, a chip in an otherwise perfectly manicured fingernail. I trace the words with my fingers as I look down at them thoughtfully. They read, "Fuck you."

We walk across the Arial Lift Bridge in Canal Park. It is warm out, summer, and I am feeling strange. My subconscious knows this beginning is wrong, but necessary. It knows I'm in trouble. I know I'm in trouble. But when has that ever mattered? He has picked me a small flower off of a bush and hands it to me shyly. I try to tuck it behind my ear, but it won't stay. I can't make it stay.

Why would someone write "Fuck you" on a table like this, I think idly. They were probably just angry. But at who? Me, personally? No. Probably the whole world. But the whole world won't see this. He probably meant to write "Fuck every single person that just so happens to sit at this table even though, chances are that I don't know a single one of them and they don't really deserve to read this shit." Yeah, that's probably what he meant to write, just figured that his hand would get too tired. So he kept it nice and simple-like. Generic. "Fuck you." Real simple.

I'm standing in the shower, the hot spray hitting my back. My shower walls are real strange, like green and white swirls. Sometimes when I'm in there, I can make out shapes of things in the swirls. A snarling bear, a screaming man. I never see birds or flowers or smiling babies. I wonder why.

I stand up and stretch, forgetting the obscene words yet holding them in the back of my mind. I am drawn to the humming machines and stand in front of them, silently looking them over. I dig in the pocket of my Dickies and pull out some change, dropping it into the slot. I am wearing a cat t-shirt I got in Japan, too, and my brown sandals I found in a motel room. I think idly that this is the outfit I want to be buried in as I take my soda from the machine. It suddenly dawns on me that pop machines are a lot like relationships. In some machines, soda costs 75 cents and is a rip-off. You give too much and get too little. At Wal-Mart, you can get Sam's Choice soda for a quarter. You think it's a great deal 'til you taste it, and it rots. You give too little and it seems real great, but it just sucks. So you go around, in constant search for the perfect 55 cent pop machine. Just like relationships. Wierd.

I hear footsteps coming from down the hallway and look up. A guy with long hair walks by. He catches my eye, and for a split second I can see a pop machine that says "55 cents" on it. Then I look down, and he is already halfway down the hall.

Glancing down at my soda, I crack it open and take a gulp. I start heading in the opposite direction as the guy with the dude length, and wonder what my mother is doing.

Stopping to tie my shoe, I set the half-empty soda on the ground. And I paid 65 cents for you, I think. I stand up and walk on. The soda is left behind to fend for itself. It's just something you gotta do sometimes. It's just like writing "Fuck you" on a table. It's just like being forced to buy a pop from Wal-mart. It's just stuff that life makes you do. Life is wierd that way.

You made it to the end! Congratulations. Yep, that's a little horrifying... it's nothing compared to the poetry that I found, though. Perhaps I'll treat you to that at some point, if I get the courage.