Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One through Nine - Softcover

Burian, Al

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604862203 ISBN 13: 9781604862201

Publisher: PM Press, 2010

Synopsis

Burn Collector compiles the first nine issues of Al Burian’s sporadically published and widely acclaimed personal zine. Beginning in the mid-nineties, Burian distributed his work through the tight-knit network of the DIY punk music scene. Burn Collector caught on because of its unusual content—in a scene rife with dogmatic political diatribes and bland record reviews, Burian presented his readers with humorous anecdotes, philosophical musings, and nuanced descriptions of odd locales and curious characters, taken mostly from outside of the punk milieu—and also because of the author’s narrative voice, which reflected the literary influences of Celine, Henry Miller, or even David Sedaris more than the influence of his contemporaries in the zine world. The writing in Burn Collector blueprinted a post-punk persona that was smart, strange, political but not correct, attached to subculture, but striving also for a connection to the world at large, and to the greater themes of human existence.

The book went through six printings, along the way garnering acclaim from readers, inspiring a film (Matt McCormick’s 2009, Some Days are Better than Others) and a major label album (Thrice’s 2003, The Artist in the Ambulance). More importantly, the book inspired readers to write and self-publish: to do it themselves, in the true punk spirit.

About this title

About the Author

Al Burian, born 1971 in New Hampshire (state motto: “live free or die”); grew up in North Carolina (state motto: “to be and not to seem”); was an iconoclastic character at an early age. In his early 20s he began touring incessantly with bands, simultaneously producing small-run photocopied pamphlets (“zines”). He has published two collections of his zine output, Burn Collector (2000) and Natural Disaster (2007), as well as a book of comics, Things Are Meaning Less (2003). He lives in Berlin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Burn Collector

Collected Stories from One through Nine

By Al Burian

PM Press

Copyright © 2010 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-220-1

CHAPTER 1

I'm unemployed. So I figure, why not stay up late? There's nothing quite like free time — out of a job and gorging yourself on that devalued commodity, ticking useless time; frittering away your existence in half-hour increments, on a sit-com or a magazine or staying out until all hours talking to no one about nothing. Hey, I got nowhere to be tomorrow. I don't have anything, actually, except an overabundance of time. Sometimes being unemployed is liberating, and sometimes it's debilitating. I've got the paralysis lately, stare blankly at the clock, make a phone call, go hang out.

Dave's dad died recently. He tries not to think about it. Dave is one of the few people I still know from college, but he doesn't like to talk about school, which is fine-1 don't like to talk about it either. We have plenty of other things to talk about, to distract him, like finding a house or playing guitar. We go out to a bar in a part of town where he won't see anyone he knows; it's a blue-collar, older-crowd type of place, and settling into a booth among the Coors posters and dart boards, with the din of drunken conversation buzzing around me, I can't believe this is me and not some kind of Saint Elmo's Fire movie I'm acting in. We marvel at the proliferation of mustaches-Portland is so over-run with hipsters now, you see bus-loads of them, packs of them everywhere, and I wonder how the mustachioed and hair sprayed patrons of this bar perceive that phenomenon. I noticed right off that there was an inordinately dense population of crazy people walking the streets here, and I wonder if to the outside eye the green hair and ill-fitting thrift-store clothes just makes it seem like the number of free-range insane people has shot up of late. As if on cue, a pack of skater twentysomethings stumbles in the door, boards under armpits, looking around sheepishly, sizing up the camp value of the establishment. "Wow, it's like there's so many of them that they just infiltrate every crevice," I say. "like cockroaches." "And everyone is lumping us in with them," Dave laments. It's true: thrift store sweaters and thick-rimmed retro-glasses, that's us. You get what you pay for.

We stick around for a little while longer. In the adjacent section of the bar, among the pool tables and video-poker games, a portly fifty-year old man is having a birthday party, carousing noisily with various friends and family members. Suddenly, a woman appears seemingly out of nowhere to begin stripping and lap-dancing in the birthday-boy's lap, which elicits hoots of unconditional approval from every single person in the bar. The birthday boy looks somewhat chagrinned, but then, what really is the couth way to handle a naked stranger gyrating in your lap while your loved ones hoot at you? In the time it takes me to process the scene and fully take in the weirdness of what is transpiring, Dave is out the door and sprinting down the street at a moderately brisk pace.

We take our business into another bar, this one with a dimly-lit dance-floor on which a few couples gyrate obscenely to the sound of a guy in a red tuxedo playing guitar solos over pre-recorded synthesizer versions of Top 40 hits. Dave and I have a pretty good laugh at this guy, a vapid chuckle at the same pop culture which Dave finds himself moments later once again lamenting that he can't fit in to, that he can't camouflage himself. I buy him a beer.

CHAPTER 2

I'm having trouble sleeping since I got back to Portland. After I drop Dave back off at home, I go for a walk in the cool of an early spring night, the first night of clear sky after months of rain in the town I have just arrived in. Watching radio towers blink in the distance, I think about the cooling towers of the Naragassett Power Company in Providence, RI and how I would watch them out of my window, trying to decipher the pattern of three lights which blinked on the towers, waiting around for them to blink in unison. I convinced myself that this was some kind of secret sign, and I told myself when I left that if I didn't see those lights blink in unison one more time before I left I was fucked. I did. So am I not fucked? Unfortunately, I am fucked just by the knowledge of that cooling tower, the inability to live a life without constant comparison. I saw a survey in a magazine at a friend's house and one of the questions was "true or false: the thing that would make me truly happy is impossible." Too much information tends to be my downfall.

I'm not tired and so, not knowing what else to do, I walk up the street to another bar. Two fifteen in the morning — west coast time, impossibly enough- seated in the back corner of the bar, not drinking, not socializing, just sitting, semi-catatonic. Five minutes until they kick me out. I have no idea why I'm here, in Portland. I guess there's something to be said for a place that can make you feel so intensely freaked out that you can't think or speak or sleep, that elicits such a strong chemical reaction in the synapses of my dumb-as-fuck head. Tectonic plate shifts in the crust of the earth have thrown the United States into a tilt, so that the west coast rests at the bottom of an incline, leading those with less than sturdy footing to go careening down the slope, landing haphazardly in the refuse pile of lost souls on the bottom coast. Everyone here is from somewhere else, eager to make conversation because they don't really know anyone either, yet, and no one likes to be asked the most pivotal of questions, so you learn eventually to not even ask. "So, why are you here?" "Oh, uhhh, you know....." they mumble, then turn the question back on you sharply, "why are YOU here?" "Tectonic plates," I say.

"Last call!" Jim, tending the bar tonight, good natured and boyishly cute in an off-putting way, the way you imagine child movie stars look later in life, comes around to ask me if I want anything. My head is down on the table. "Hey, are you OK?" he asks.

"Fine," I moan.

"You sure?" he pauses, hovering over me.

"Ugh. Yes. Fine."

"Really."

Jim contemplates my slack, lifeless limbs, my sprawled out, defeated form. "Look," he says, "come over to my house. Have a few beers. We'll have a good time. You'll feel better."

I look at the clock. Two twenty. I got lucky this time. Jim has unsuspectingly snatched me from the jaws of a horrible fate: I'm quite certain that, left to my own devices for the evening, the morning light would easily find me with a full beard, raving about the Nixon Watergate tapes and trying to sell balloon sculptures on Belmont street, a glazed, crazed vacant sheen over my eyeballs which nothing would ever again remove.

We walk over to Jim's house, which is strewn with debris-mostly bicycle parts, welded into grotesque and monstrous shapes, which clutter the living room menacingly. Moldy, brittle-paged Playboy magazines from the early sixties, stacks of which can be bought for a quarter from glazed-eyed vendors on Belmont, are strewn haphazardly about the coffee table. But drinking a couple of beers and having a good time is distracting, and I am grateful for this in an inexpressibly profound way, the simple kindness of picking someone up off the floor and telling them a couple of jokes or good stories. He tells me a good one about his all-time low point, a situation which occurred while hitch-hicking through Montana. "This guy picked me up," he relates, "and he was driving a hundred fifty miles an hour, smoking crack, and searching for some spot on the road where he'd dropped off a secret stash of cocaine a year and a half ago. I tell you, I'd never smoked crack before, and," he leans in, imparting the nugget of wisdom which nests at the center of his tale, "man, there is no lower feeling than coming down off of crack at a truck stop in Montana where you've just been dropped off and realizing you've just hitched a ride two hundred miles in the opposite direction from where you were heading."

"No, I imagine that's one of the great crushers," I nod.

"One of the all-time, most fantastic crushers," laughs Jim.

"See, man, that seems so terrible it almost seems good," I propose.

He shakes his head, still cackling, "No, it's just terrible."

I stumble home around five in the morning, to find the doors at Tedra's house all locked. I sit on the porch for a while, in darkness, watching the fat wedge of moon in the sky. After a while I get up and walk some more, and end up at Dunkin Donuts at six a.m. watching the sun slowly rising on yet another day. In the reflection of the window I look green and dishevelled, with sunken black holes for eye sockets and my hair sticking up absurdly in all directions. I can't help but grin foolishly at myself. Just the other morning I sat in this same Dunkin Donuts and watched a punker couple making out at the bus stop, oblivious to the bus passing by in their total rapture. I couldn't believe it. Staying up all night doesn't really mean anything, but still, when you see that old man sun start fucking up the sky with his red and gold rays you can't help but feel that you have accomplished something amazing, to arrive at this great moment, and maybe nowhere more so than Portland, which constantly seems to have the most amazing skies. This is one of Portland's main virtues- the sky drives you crazy, makes you feel small under its grandioseness, or makes you feel like the star of an opera. It's a multi-faceted sky, but always dramatic.

CHAPTER 3

Tedra finds me asleep on the porch as she leaves for work, "I guess if you're going to stay on the couch I should get you a key," she observes. I stumble in to wash my face and drink a cup of coffee. I have a job interview scheduled at the Kinko's copy center in Northeast. Unfortunately, I appear to be a shoo-in for the position, and this depresses me greatly.

I'm maneuvering a gargantuan blue dodge van (borrowed) through a snarl of mid-morning traffic, burning my mouth on my third cup of coffee and swearing. I've slept about two hours and the sense of sunrise serenity which had seemed to realign my world-view is eroding back into the grim desperation of a life out of control, a life which is moving of its own volition in directions I had not intended to go. All in all, it's sad to say, my work ethic is a sad and meager thing. I've often conjectured that I may well be the absolute worst worker on the face of the planet. If you think about it, why not me? It has to be someone. My career as a wrench in the gears of industry probably started as an academic interest my early exposure to economic theory resonated with the daily experience around me and I found myself dividing things along Marxist class lines, which added an air of righteousness to my extended breaks and stealing of pens. But truthfully, I think, what has always lain at the heart of my work ethic is an inability to face up to the concept of having a bad time. Look, if you're going to try to purchase hourly blocks of my valuable existence, I don't blame you for trying to get the best deal you can; how can you blame me for my part in the haggle? I'm just trying to maximize my own personal profitability by giving you the least amount of work for your dollar that I can. That's nothing but fair. The same corporations who decided it was more cost-effective to deal with the occasional law-suit occurring as a result of faulty Pintos which exploded on impact than to recall the cars and fix the problem- the same corporations who jip you out of those extra few sips of cola by making the bottom of the bottle concave- these captains of industry want to come down on me for being cost-efficient!? It's the height of hypocrisy.

In high school I worked in a movie theater and we used to go hide out in the theaters during shows to avoid cleaning up, or even sneak back to some employees' house who was unfortunate enough to live within sneaking distance of the strip mall, there to listen to records, read comic books and generally bask in the thrill of Fucking Around On The Clock. When, eventually, I was caught and called in to the manager's office, I was completely indignant.

"Do you like your job, Al?" The manager began, rhetorically.

"Are you serious?" I yelled, "Hell NO! I've been working here a year and you only gave me that one measly raise a week before they raised the minimum wage anyway, so now I'm just back to working for the minimum! That's what you get when you pay people the minimum possible, man- you get the minimum work!"

Whether my compelling argument won the boss over or whether it was the sincerity of my convictions which reminded him of a younger, more idealistic managerial training school go-getter will remain one of those great unanswered historical questions. I did not get fired; I'd like to think perhaps in some small way my words touched my manager. In any case, he was caught embezzling ten thousand dollars two weeks later, and so I outlasted him.

It's hot as fuck in the speeding metal box and sweat is dripping from my brow, stinging my eyes. "Good God, what am I thinking? Who are these motherfuckers? What kind of robot drones would populate such a place of employment? Jesus!" I bark in impotent rage, swerving sharply as I careen into the Kinko's parking lot and slam the side of the gargantuan blue van into a Range Rover. There is a strangely pleasant tinkle of glass and the shrill whine of a car alarm.

"Whoops," I say.

That's the thing about not sleeping: one minute your head is a mass of jumbled contusions and confusions, the next moment everything is brought startlingly into focus and inflicts whiplash with its simplicity and truth. I stare into the widow of the copy store for one second, watching people mill about, cutting, pasting, collating, oblivious to the clamoring cacophony of the wounded Range Rover in the lot. Well, that's it then, a voice in my head calmly explains. Park the car. Write a note. Go in there. Interview. Get the job. Start working to pay off the car you just fucked up.

Or:

"Fuck all this," I realize, stepping on the gas and lumbering away. Back in the stream of traffic, the adrenalin surge of my daredevil escape from wage labor subsiding, and, looking in the rearview mirror to verify that no one seems to be following me waving fists or motioning me to pull over, a strange sense of apocalyptic joy overtakes me. No job, no home: equilibrium. It all adds up to zero in some sketchy arithmetic of rawness. I eat out of the bulk bins at Fred Meyer and drink what people give me when they find me near suicide, wandering the streets in the middle of the night. It's OK.....

I'm burning a bridge. It feels pretty good. If too many options is the problem, the solution seems fairly obvious. Now there's one spot on the map I will be too gimped out to ever show my face, one less sordid fate which can befall me. It's like sculpting in reverse; carving your destiny out of granite with randomly placed dynamite charges which detonate landslides, earthquakes, mass annihilation and upheaval, until the rubble clears and you look up to the face of the mountain and see that it's a bust. Either of George Washington, or the other kind of bust. Either way.

CHAPTER 4

Bright afternoon sun. Van rolls down the street conspicuously. Cops seem to be circling around, like lazy predators. Did someone catch my license plate? I pull over; best to stop driving. Put a quarter in a pay phone and dial. The other end rings, tinny, sounding transcontinental, and a few blocks away a telephone is ringing off the hook.

Kevin answers. "Hello?" Syrupy southern accent in my ear.

"Kevin!" I explode. "I've had a car accident!"

"Oh God," he gasps. "Are you okay?"

"Well. ... sure, yeah," I say.

"Where are you? Should I come pick you up?"

"Oh, no, It's really OK," I stammer. "I'm just kind of freaked out." I explain the circumstances.

"Is your car fucked up?" Kevin asks. I haven't even bothered to check. I let the receiver dangle, and walk around to the passenger side of the big blue bastard. There is a minor welt, a gouge in the paint and perhaps a small dent in the resale value.

I get back on the phone. "Man, where are you? Are you nearby? You should come on over here." Kevin suggests.

Right. Hide out for a while. Let the trail cool down.

"OK," I say.

Good old Kevin. Arriving at his doorstep, I find him sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette. He waves, smiles. "Howdy."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Burn Collector by Al Burian. Copyright © 2010 PM Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1604862203
• ISBN 13: 9781604862201
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 296