By Gus Iversen

Bodega Doldrums is a collection of stories as colorful and varied as the products for sale in the narrow aisles of your local corner store. From a homeless person who attends the moon's wedding to a short odyssey involving a Hannah Montana boogie board, there are plenty of uncomfortable situations in this book that everyone involved would rather have missed.

the manta sector

my former co-worker once expressed something remarkable. I can’t remember what he said exactly but that was the beauty of him: you had to wade the innuendo of his words in order to suss out what possessed him to actually try and come across.

so you look back unable to recall what he had been talking about but profoundly wound up in what the conversation meant -- like a movie where the characters are more significant than the story line.

it had to do with professional ramblers such as train conductors, corporate seminar leaders and camping trip chaperones and how many of them had shown interest in space exploration. At that time it looked like everyone wanted to be an astronaut.

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when I look back on my career as an astronaut most of my memories are tinted with a foggy unrelenting inebriation. the boys and I, we used to get wasted out there in space. really tanked. it was graceless in that respect. we would wake up in the manta sector with nothing to take away our hangovers but a quick slug from any number of half empty bottles of captain morgan‘s NASA label. lifting our weightless, throbbing heads and blocking our eyes with playing cards whenever planet earth appeared on our alumizon transmitters.

lusting after disorientation; avoiding the subtlety, the creaking, the sadness, the style; bludgeoning ourselves without a wink of insanity. ready to take our place in the great cosmic graveyard like any other organism... out there in the manta sector of all places! clicking switches and turning important dials. peeling the holograms on our space suits and trying not to think about our wives.

in those days we had day-long ketchup eating contests and drew sex organs on each other’s foreheads. we made love to beautiful aliens and told them it was our way of shaking hands. we told their leaders that we were the kings of our planet and they plugged us into their genius machines. we had a lot of adventures out there but I just can’t look at it the same way in light of that conversation with my pathological liar friend; the whole memory of the thing has taken on an uncomfortable hue.

then there was that morning in 1987 when my mother dropped my sister and I off at the playground for kindergarten. we were the first kids to arrive and I believe it was my third day of kindergarten. the slide was covered in morning dew but I went down anyways and the fog was so dense you couldn’t see maybe five feet ahead of you. the chains suspending the swings gave off brownish orange rust stains and I saved a family of kittens from a rabid dog using self-taught karate. it’s an incredible thing to look back on. I think about that a lot. I can still remember what I was wearing.

you know, he and I were really a couple of jack asses. nobody else at oliver’s market liked us very much... one time we both pretended not to notice while a friend of his lifted a big rack of ribs from the meat department. I was in on it and played my part -- ultimately we both got fired. we laughed about it in the parking lot afterwards but we never saw each other again. there had never been much to say in the first place.

meaningful destruction is impossible without some sentimental gratitude for the thing that is being sacrificed; walking into the blackness with a sense of balance -- nothing exists on its own. it comes down to respecting the relationship between all things.

when you say it like that it just sounds obvious. there’s more to it than recognizing it. sometimes you have to work against it. you have to resist the urge, in good or bad company, to wrap your tongue methodically around a perpetual supply of leaves and twigs like the giraffes at the bronx zoo.