Little Charlie’s Travels

Before my wife and I brought a child into this world, we had Little Charlie.

Little Charlie is a small teddy bear. He appears to be of the Ursus maritimus species. My wife, Maria, nicked him in 2011 at a fiber optics convention she attended for work. He was one of the free giveaways at the General Photonics booth, which is embroidered on Little Charlie’s fuzzy chest. She feigned interest in their products just so she could get him. Maria brought him home around the time we started dating. She named him after Charlie Chaplin because she imagined him to be a rambunctious scamp. This is all noted in a short story I got published in Prairie Schooner.

For years, Little Charlie was like our pretend kid. Under the guise of our spirited little rascal, Maria would write me cutesy goofy notes and leave them on my backpack when I would wake up at her apartment before I would head home. In turn, I would slip notes from Little Charlie under the bathroom door when Maria was taking care of her business. I don’t know who started that, but it was a thing we did, and all the notes were in Little Charlie’s child-like scrawl with backwards Rs and misspellings (like “pikturs”). In our teddy bear epistolary, Maria was “mama” and I was “papa.”

The Barber (flash fiction)

photo by Phillip Pessar

It’s been three days since I’ve been sleeping on the floor of my barbershop. Laid out a sleeping bag and my pillow from home over the rubber mat I used to stand on all day. Never fucking thought I’d ever use it like a mattress. Or that I’d see the sun rise from my shop.

Janet kicked me out. Told me she doesn’t feel safe around me ‘cause of my boozing. All I’m doin’ is drinking and watching more TV than I probably should. It’s not like I’m getting tanked and goin’ out for a spin. Where the fuck could I even go? Everything’s closed up. Think she got tired of betting on me and seeing I’m not gonna pay out. Figured it’s time to cut her losses.

Few years back, the shop was doing good. I was raking in three hundred bucks whenever I opened. Got a nice leather armchair for the lobby and new checkerboard flooring to give it a vintage feel. In 2018, the local paper voted me the best barbershop in town. Almost all my clients were repeat customers. Everything was smooth going, but then my back gave out. Sciatica. All those years of working construction, going all out ‘cause I could back then. Now sometimes I can hardly walk or stand without pain shooting up my leg. Had to close up my shop until I got better. That’s when I lost a lot of customers.

(Nice Dream)

Chez Janou (Paris) by Guillermo Fdez

This morning I had a vision I didn’t want to wake from. I dreamt I stepped into a hipster-y Bay Area pizzeria for lunch. My subconscious applied the coronavirus filter: when I stepped into the small restaurant, I immediately peered around to see how many people were inside, how large the space was, and if people were wearing facial masks. And when the seater approached, I asked for a table and knew that I shouldn’t be in there because I have an unvaccinated child back home.

2021 First-Round NBA Playoff Predictions

Holy shit, the final game in the NBA’s new play-in tournament just went down at Chase Center, conjuring painful memories of another elimination game loss at home for my beloved Warriors, but now the NBA playoffs are upon us. This time around, I’m stealing a page from Zach Lowe’s excellent first-round playoff breakdown and grouping these series predictions by my level of interest starting with the series I am most excited about followed by the ones I don’t really give a shit about.

 

So let’s go.

Long Time Coming: My Top 10 Soundgarden songs

Since mid-March of the heinous year of 2020, I’ve been driving nearly every weekday with my wife and son to a home office at my in-laws’ house. As a result of this commute, we’re listening to the radio more often. When I have it tuned to the local hard rock station, songs from our high school epoch occasionally play, including classic hits from Soundgarden. When “Black Hole Sun,” “Fell on Black Days,” or “Outshined” plays, I still occasionally feel surprised to realize that I’m listening to a dead man. Chris Cornell was fifty-two when he died on May 18, 2017. He had outlived his troubled peers from that musical era, like Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Scott Weiland. I guess his sudden death in a hotel room in Detroit right after a show still stuns me.

I saw Soundgarden headline for Metallica at Lollapalooza in 1996. The band was promoting Down on the Upside, their final studio album before their 1997 breakup. At age seventeen, I was still in the infancy of my love for rock. I was familiar with their music—namely Superunknown—but I was incapable of grasping just how fucking awesome they were. I hadn’t lived enough, nor listened to enough other bands and musicians to understand what might and virtuosity they contained with guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron, bassist Ben Shepherd, and singer and songwriter Chris Cornell.

Pandemic Ride

 

There I was, standing in my closet, picking out a clean shirt and digging into a tote bag to find swim goggles for my first ride on public transportation since March. It was New Year’s Eve, 2020. My beloved in-laws—my angels throughout this pandemic—were grilling up steaks and chicken wings to mark the passing of this dreadful calendar year. Instead of staying home and waiting for my wife, Maria, and our son to return with leftovers, I thought it would be a righteous note to end the year by dining with them. No one else was coming to their house, and we were in each other’s COVID-19 bubble.

While I got dressed and ready, I had to pee twice. I also started to involuntarily cough. It had been a while since my nervous cough surfaced: the first weeks of the pandemic back in late March whenever I got ready for a weekly solo supermarket shopping trip.

What I Still Miss About My Pre-Covid-19 Life

A Dark Journey by Craig Cloutier

I still miss going to Sulphur Creek Nature Center with my wife, Maria, and our son, Miguelito.

I still miss our weekly father-and-son grocery store shopping trips.

I miss having father-and-son time because it rarely happens now that he’s become even more attached to my wife during this pandemic.

I still miss our libraries.

I miss seeing my nephew smile when I come over for a visit.