Read Online American Spirit: A Novel by Dan Kennedy - Free Book Online
Authors: Dan Kennedy
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returns it in a gentle drop back down. There is a magazine about yachting, which won’t be coming in handy at the moment. There’s a small cluster of paperbacks underneath it, though. A shot in the dark, since the yacht rag is covering the stack. Matthew painfully groans one last bend to investigate and takes something yellow and white, medium in size, paperback, and free.
Back in the Bavarian Motor Ward, Matthew reviews the schedule of other classes offered at this ashram of self-improvement. No matter how awkward, soft, and gentle, he cannot afford many more fights, so the choice of what class to investigate next is a weighty one in that regard. Financial planning class is out of the question, this precarious bridge between steady employment and whatever comes next is precarious, and discussing solvency in a classroom environment is fraught with too much potential for tension and discourse and more physical confrontation. Photography seems like torture, to capture these days in pictures flies precisely in the face of whatever comfort denial and beer bring. But crafting! Crafts are the perfect everyone’s-a-winner-just-for-trying environment. There can be some more meditating once things finish cooling down, but it won’t be this week. And so, crafting it is. On Friday. Two days to kill, but days have been dropping like flies.
The keys go into the ignition and the beeps are issued from the dash, and before music can distract him, before aplan can be laid, it seems the so-called fistfight has knocked something loose—one word,
territorial.
It falls from the brain and right down into the center of the chest where it causes a deep wince of regret. New Time Media was basically in the business of promoting benign pop music, decent cable television programming, and semi-bankrupt magazines that convince people they aren’t skinny enough or happy enough. The doors to the place should’ve been large, thick wooden doors with quotes from Greek myths or early philosophers that might assuage one’s guilt for doing this business. The long corridor to Matthew’s office was a calcified artery of framed magazine covers and platinum album awards; sixteen million copies of a song about the trials of love sung by a seventeen-year-old girl with fake breasts who has never had a boyfriend; ten million albums sold by a white kid from San Diego who raps like his favorite rappers from the Bronx and South Central. One of the first magazines to convince men that they need to have twenty-eight-inch waists, wax their chests and backs, and buy jeans that cost two weeks’ salary of what average Americans make on average. You’re welcome, ladies. That’s why each morning involved clearing such stiff security, in case every woman in the world decided to come rushing into the building at once with knives and guns to even the score with the people who made men into hairless, skinny little boys who spend more money on clothes than their girlfriends or wives. And on that Friday—the Friday when the doctor told him something was wrong but they weren’t sure what, on that Friday when he had toconvince a doctor that he hadn’t been, unbeknownst to himself, kicked in the nuts a few times, the Friday that has only been referred to as the Incident—Matthew made his way down the artery of trophies and to his office door. There are tests that will come back, there will be scopes and scans and X-rays that will yield clues, but suffice it to say, this is the first day of the rest of his life. At the door to his office, his assistant told him there were no phone calls except one.
“Office Services called and said they had a couple more questions for you about the smell you were complaining about.”
“Oh. It’s fine now. It kind of took care of itself somehow.”
“Are you sure? Because they can just…”
“I’m going to take care of it right now. I figured out how. But thanks for the message; thanks for taking it, and no calls or visitors while
Back in the Bavarian Motor Ward, Matthew reviews the schedule of other classes offered at this ashram of self-improvement. No matter how awkward, soft, and gentle, he cannot afford many more fights, so the choice of what class to investigate next is a weighty one in that regard. Financial planning class is out of the question, this precarious bridge between steady employment and whatever comes next is precarious, and discussing solvency in a classroom environment is fraught with too much potential for tension and discourse and more physical confrontation. Photography seems like torture, to capture these days in pictures flies precisely in the face of whatever comfort denial and beer bring. But crafting! Crafts are the perfect everyone’s-a-winner-just-for-trying environment. There can be some more meditating once things finish cooling down, but it won’t be this week. And so, crafting it is. On Friday. Two days to kill, but days have been dropping like flies.
The keys go into the ignition and the beeps are issued from the dash, and before music can distract him, before aplan can be laid, it seems the so-called fistfight has knocked something loose—one word,
territorial.
It falls from the brain and right down into the center of the chest where it causes a deep wince of regret. New Time Media was basically in the business of promoting benign pop music, decent cable television programming, and semi-bankrupt magazines that convince people they aren’t skinny enough or happy enough. The doors to the place should’ve been large, thick wooden doors with quotes from Greek myths or early philosophers that might assuage one’s guilt for doing this business. The long corridor to Matthew’s office was a calcified artery of framed magazine covers and platinum album awards; sixteen million copies of a song about the trials of love sung by a seventeen-year-old girl with fake breasts who has never had a boyfriend; ten million albums sold by a white kid from San Diego who raps like his favorite rappers from the Bronx and South Central. One of the first magazines to convince men that they need to have twenty-eight-inch waists, wax their chests and backs, and buy jeans that cost two weeks’ salary of what average Americans make on average. You’re welcome, ladies. That’s why each morning involved clearing such stiff security, in case every woman in the world decided to come rushing into the building at once with knives and guns to even the score with the people who made men into hairless, skinny little boys who spend more money on clothes than their girlfriends or wives. And on that Friday—the Friday when the doctor told him something was wrong but they weren’t sure what, on that Friday when he had toconvince a doctor that he hadn’t been, unbeknownst to himself, kicked in the nuts a few times, the Friday that has only been referred to as the Incident—Matthew made his way down the artery of trophies and to his office door. There are tests that will come back, there will be scopes and scans and X-rays that will yield clues, but suffice it to say, this is the first day of the rest of his life. At the door to his office, his assistant told him there were no phone calls except one.
“Office Services called and said they had a couple more questions for you about the smell you were complaining about.”
“Oh. It’s fine now. It kind of took care of itself somehow.”
“Are you sure? Because they can just…”
“I’m going to take care of it right now. I figured out how. But thanks for the message; thanks for taking it, and no calls or visitors while
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