Sunday, January 18, 2004
I've always thought that the most important thing in life, the key ingrediant to a full life, is experiance. I know, by contrasting a period in my life when I did absolutely nothing (before high-school graduation, playing computer games in my suburban home, sheltered from the world around me, numb to all) to this year and now (even though some would say I'm doing nothing now as well, this period in my life is so action packed, even when I'm doing nothing there's still a lot going on) that the only way to figure anything out, the only way to gain wisdom and to learn about life, is to experiance it. Travel is probably the best way to do this, because when you travel, every little thing you do is new and different if only because the setting has change and it's the first time you're doing it there. But the important thing is to try everything, to do everything you can before one day you die, the next everyone who remembers you dies, and the next the world ends and all remnants of your legacy burn away with it. Unless it's important to you to hide from the temptation to sin, you have to go out into the world, break from rutines and the way you've always done things to experiance life to its fullest.
And that's why drugs are great, because you can take a trip in the comfort of your own home.
In the hospital I received morphine derivitive pain meds whether I wanted them or not at first and then if I needed them or not, so that afterwards my addiction to oxycontin and percacet was driving me deeper into depression and insanity untill I eventually cracked, living by myself in Aloha, and thought I actually had to find the car part I was looking for in the RPG computer game Fallout.
Drugs can fuck you up. If you think about it, the human brain is a perfectly ordered chemical and electrical system, built by evolution to be the most powerfull thinking machine earthly nature has produced. Comparing it to the intricate and ordered workings of an ant hill, drugs are like taking a stick and poking the fuck out of it.
Drug abuse is worse, of course; constant use and dependancy (not just on drugs, too) can lead to catastrophic ends. I myself have crawled out of the pit that is addiction, but luckily I did so before too long so that my mind and body were still intact.
Of course, everyone knows this about drugs (though some don't pay enough attention to it). Some people think they know this so well, that they fear drugs like some H P Lovecraft-style soul obliterating monster, which I say is as counter productive as treating drugs like a harmless toy. Sure, it's better to stay away than it is to become addicted and die in a gutter, but drugs can offer something that no other thing can, the chance to experiance the world from an altered mental state.
This is not an ode to drugs, but a call for nay-sayers to recognize the possibility of their usefullness. Alcohol freed me from introversion, making me more social than I could ever force myself to be and taught me how easy it is to start a conversation with a complete stranger, pot has slowed down my thinking and forced my focus onto the minutae so that I was able to analyze the tiniest elements of human interaction better than possible while sober, mushrooms gave me a taste of every emotion my mind could muster and gave it to me all at once for a terrifying and hilarious experiance, meth (gave me the energy to write 30 pages of shit: energy does not equate quality!) kept me awake to a point long past the 60 hours of sleep deprivation that had been my previous (and unassisted) personal record and showed me what it really meant to be tired, extacy really does make you feel love, coke was pleasant but totally useless (if you want to stay awake, aderol is way better and I've had better body highs from spicy food) except for the lucid dreams I got that night from it, and robitussin was just fun and by the end of that trip you're really looking forward to stay sober for a long time.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
All things being equal, showering at a friend's house is like life. You stand there, paranoid from being naked in omeone elses home, striken with guilt at the possibility that the host may need to use the bathroom while taking the shower of the near future, overcome with thankfullness for the opportunity to shower at all, and paralyzed in general by the lack of a national standard for showers. A single knob regulated the stream's force and heat. A red arrow curves down and to the right, a blue arrow curves down and to the left. Fairly straight forward.
You hold your hand under a blast of icey water, wondering how it can be that the home of a former OMSI director, can have such a shitty water heater, occasionally switching hands in case the other had grown so numb it wouldn't be able to notice a tempurature change.
Finally, you're tired of following directions to no avail, and you turn the knob to the left, the direction of the blue arrow. Suddenly there is pain, immediatly followed by steam. After another minute of experimentation which feels like an eternity of extremes, a medium is reached and a shower is enjoyed.
my gums bleed
Brushing my teeth in the shower was a time saving technique I picked up when learning to achieve the perfect amount of lateness in high school. After being forced to use shampoo for dry, limp hair (mine being the opposite), I perform the acts of oral hygeine that I have had so little time or inclination for in the recent past. I've been too busy doing nothing, too busy rushing to my next party, out of a busy host's way, or I've just been to obsessed with acting my part. I am borderline homeless, without merit, money, or motivation.
A refridgerator full of expired meats, cheeses, and lettuce. A collection of fine dining jelly's, jams, and preserves, at least 8 of which are at least 3 months beyond their printed sell-by date. Marionberry jam with apple brandy (2% alcohol, do not sell to minors) and Adams 100% natural peanutbutter (ingredients: peanuts, 1% salt) make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I feel I should pay 3 dollars for.
A fortune of art and a lifetime of prestegious awards clutter the white walls like porceline teddy bears and miniature olde tyme villages clutter the homes of the lower class wealthy. In the guest bedroom that is my campsite, a collection of masks stare at me as I type on stolen bandwidth. They represent the wealth and power of past cultures, even the ones made by art majors at Reed College. They represent the timeless persitance of a have/have-not system; even the tribes revered by liberals sobbing for a return to simple living, had their ranks of privaledged, their menial-task-specialists, and their outcasts.
such outcasts, beaten by a system now dedicated to filling us up, become full of being beaten. Couch surfing as I am, I see before me alternate futures of continued couch surfing, every month finding a different kind of nice young person who resents the system that, say, pays for their car and their punk CD collection, that person seeing in me the defiance that they sing along to, and living guiltily from their charity, myself as much as a fraud as them, their charity being a product the same as their multiple computers filled with pirated movies and expensive video games. OR I can get a life.
I had a life once. A bohemian haven, a nexus of socialite activity, the center for illicit operations in the NW, Coffee Time was my home away from home in better times, and became my home away from home away from home, when I was homeless. The kids there all zombies of the modern age, always chasing after alcohol, sometimes drugs, sometimes food, sometimes love. Always working to find something to enjoy, to enjoy as much as was healthy, and then to enjoy it until it made them dehydrated and caused headaches. Excess is the word of the day for this generation so dissolusioned it's dissolusioned with being dissolusioned. And the day never ends. Days are so similar to the ones before, gossip always includes an exchange like "when did this happen?" "I'm not sure... this morning? Yesterday? Last week? ...It doesn't matter."
Never have I been too disgusted to return to this place of gluttony, since I myself indulge in indulgence. Who hasn't seen a cat curled up in a little bowl by its food dish and sighed with envy of an easy life? Coffee Time is the food dish I curl up to. But this morning, I am afraid to go back.
I'm afraid because I know, when I go back, I have to talk to my girlfriend. Like myself, like everyone else, she is a glutton, but a glutton on denial. She fills herself up with nothing until she is totally empty, then fills the space with everything; alcohol, drugs, Coffee Time, love, hate, until she is so full she is angry, tired, and ready to purge it all again, hungry again to be safe from the world she is so full of. Perpetually in a state of one form or another of excess, we are a full generation. Right now I'm full of myself, full of life, hungry for quiet but also never full enough of communication. I made her angry and we have not since talked. As before, the resolution will come as quickly as it takes to realize there is no immediate problem at all, but I'm afraid all them same. Confrontation. For half a minute while we both sit there at coffee time... me: trying to make myself understood and make it understood that I believe I understand her, her: angry, forgiving, loving, annoyed, logical but emotionally stubborn all at once. I will break a sweat as a prepare myself, I will mumble half an apology which is a half-apology itself, and all will be well.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Everyone is crazy except me. More later
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
May 14 or something - Portland Coffee House on Belmont (in Portland, of course)
And so it begins, or rebegins. The rebeginning of my posting, of my typing, of my most cherished and polished of journals.
I just killed a very small yet dangerous looking bug and am reminded that scabies is going around.
But in the more important news, Portland is all well and good, but watch out for the crazies. The full story is more than just a story but a novel in the works. I, Bohemian, more than just the coming of age explanation of how I get to where I go, but a telling-it-how-it-is-for-some-people story, the some people in this case being the unemployed, aspiring artists struggling to get by just barely long enough to express, convey, and communicate, whatever it is that they want to express, convey, and communicate. It's a stereotypical bohemian lifestyle, like a beat generation without a catchy name for their generation, and without any one particular style or genre to encapsulate them. This, my, generation, standing too close to the blinding emptiness of Generation X, the generation that needed a name so badly, it's need defined it.
The generation just after Generation X, or whatever the hell I am... a crowd of "kids" between 18 and 23... We're working on things, we have projects in the works, and here at the coffee shops in Portland, we meet by chance and collaborate.
It rocks.
I am a god.
But I fear I will never write with the power that I did when I was oppressed by the military, work in general, and my personal quest of passive-aggressive self-destruction.
I barely make sence anymore.
Shit.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Once again, stuck in here, wasting money I don't have in a city that isn't mine. Seattle already digested me and rejected me from it's wet, concrete body, and yet I'm here, again. Posting. Why? I scream out to the world to acknowledge my existance, and it gives me the same nod everyone gives a bum as they walk by, pretending they have no change.
Powered by caffeine and bitterness, I have set out, seriously this time, to actually write something. It's shaping up to be a reinvention of the classic coming of age story, my nightmarish collection of insane anecdotes is. No one cares, and of course, neither do I. I write it for no one, and no one will see it. I'll probably burn it by accident when I get to 200 pages.
But despite everything, I feel happy. The only two explanations are that it's just the side effect of having felt so fucking unhappy just a few days ago, or that I've finally actually internalized my delcaration of true whateverness; "In all things whatever / the only thing that matters is that nothing matters / whatever exists will come to me and will be noteworthy if I notice" etc.
Homeless, unemployed, a punk that choses to spend a portion of his last 200 bucks (which I don't really have, mind you, it's all (gasp) credit) on coffee and a pin from a punk shop (ooo, premonitions of things to come!) I find myself deep in a situation which would concern anyone. It's so concern-worthy that even relatively new friends say they are worried about me. But I am as undaunted as a comatose man is to an adjustment in his medication.
My life continues to be as crazy as the craziness that is the fact that it continues. A conversation with Barry, the homeless post-traumatic syndrome guy whose territory is by the ferrydocks, reveals to me that I am as insane as I always thought I wasn't. All the crazy shit he said, you see... it made sence.
And the scary part is that it doesn't scare me.
Sunday, November 17, 2002
My cellphone... I can never get over the effect loosing my first cellphone while travelling in California had on me. It really fucked me up, that paranoid dellusion where I thought I hadn't really lost it, that really I had been placed in a copy of reality, a version without that cellphone, or worse, that I myself was a copy. And then that premonition that my not having that cellphone would somehow cause me to die in about 5 years in Burbank.
These paranoid dellusions, if they are just dellusions, hit me hardest when I was sleep deprived, over caffeinated, and probably also a little malnurished. Maybe it's stress related.
I was in a pretty stressfull situation when I was still working at that damn place in Bremerton and I was in transition, getting ready to switch over from working in Records to Security. They had me shredding papers, and one day I realized I was shredding a huge record I'd worked so hard on, that I'd had to copy at least three times. I was sure my 'lost' cellphone had something to do with it, and my death in Burbank in about 5 years was also tied in somehow. I was about ready to kill the first person I saw, I was so damn convinced my supervisors were behind it all for some reason. I thank god I had the presence pof mind to calm myself down and not go completely insane.
The point, the reason I bring it up, is that the stress of my position right now is probably responcible for making me feel that way again. I love this Stephany girl, the reason I'm in Seattle again, making my old downtown hangout my hangout of the present.
She says she loves me. This is the best relationship or potential relationship I've ever had. But I can't be sure if she really loves me, I feel like she's only saying it because she isn't sure if she loves me yet, she doesn't want me to leave town, and she knows that telling me she loves me is the only way to get me to stay here.
Aside from that stressor, my psycho roomate in Portland... turns out my down-and-out lawyer friend has been calling some femal friends of mine and really freaking them out. One girl in particular, Angela, is the sweetest, most genuinely good person that I know right now. Her life has been unfairly rough, and on top of it all, he's been calling her late at night, convincing her that he's me, and telling her all kinds of shit, and most recently, threatening to rape her. She kept talking to him because she thought he was me, and though she was fucking pissed at me, she wanted so much to help me any way she could. When she found out it was really this guy...
the look on her face...
It fucking hurt. She doesn't deserve that, no one does, and I don't even deserve to have that face burned into my mind.
So now I'm here in Seattle, I have bno clue where I'm going or what I'm doing, and I'm freaking out again. Over-caffeinated, malnurished, sleep deprived, and I have to convince myself;
"No, this isn't Stephany's doing, she isn't an incarnation of the anti-christ, and she isn't my fucking savior either, she's just a girl, a mortal. And I'm not a god either, damnit, and I haven't had a personal conversation with god, either. Calm the hell down, have another smoke."
Friday, October 11, 2002
An ulcer
On my mind?
A tumor
In my soul?
I am the cancer with an ulcer, adrenaline washing over open sores
The energy, the fright; the passion, the pain
Post-teen angst with a chemical push
No use to complain, no need for drug stores
Everything I need is replaceable, everything I want is impossible
Acceptance is the key to take life’s rejection with a flush
“Hit hard, and don’t stop coming” An’then pump that ol’ stomach
May have taken too much
But the end is nigh.
Or the Nigh is End. No Thing will save the pre-dead
Plastic is the hope of the living, but the Nigh is End
All non-things make the things nothing
Plastic won’t help us now – a tool of redemption
Becomes a spork of damnation – the left hand of temptation
The last Thing to face our rejection
But on the Edge in Bremerton
“Life with Boeing, or as Jimbo?”
Either path is doom
Jimbo hands over a bottle of Quervo, quotes Plato, bums a smoke, makes a joke…
An office, shiney and clean, smells worse than Jimbo after a hard rain
So, a life of loss or a life lost?
Sitting on the edge in Bremerton, a life waiting to be made
Or a life in waiting, unmade – the making lies in madeness
But to be made is to be trapped. Or
A life like Jimbo’s, stasis on an edge
Endlessly possible or Endless possibilities
Hard to choose a set of hard choices
On edge in Bremerton
So a life in waiting, training for the next step of training, the next year of waiting?
Tired of waiting, waiting to not wait, training to DO
Training to stop training, to start more waiting
Fuck that. Rather be starving, waiting to be starving in NY or LA
Soaking all the rain, exposing open sores to the pain; a wanabe artist
Struggling for the sake of passion instead of training for the sake of money.
Monday, October 07, 2002
I’ve smoked so much in the last few days that it’s hurting my stomach. As I’m writing, I realize it might actually be the fact that I haven’t eaten more than a few slices of cold pizza in the last couple days, but I don’t care. Lack of food and hunger aren’t the same thing.
I’m hungry for life, and in a bucket-full of days, I’ll be out. Finally, the end of it all is right on top of me. I’ll miss my new job, as a receptionist and general office bitch/guru. I’ll miss the small-town atmosphere of this place, and the friends I’ve made here. But most of all I’ll miss the continuity and the safety of being trapped. As bad as I wanted out for so long, after getting 10 days notice that I finally got what I wanted, I don’t know how to feel. It’s been a convenient way to see who are my real friends; the real friends show some kind of concern or at least wonder about what I will be doing afterwards. The rest just give me a show of congratulations and continue the conversation. Angi, still pregnant, did that. I wanted to kill her. After all I went through over her and all she had to say is ‘yeah, I think you already told me.’ Fuck her.
Fuck all.
As it is now, I’ll be sitting on the other side of the gate on the 18th, wondering what the hell it is that I’m going to do. Not that it’s a bad thing. It will be like I just woke up in some other world, with my back to a wall and everything spread out in front of me. The choices I’ve made will effect me for the rest of my life, but the choices I make then on that day will have an even greater effect. Trying to imagine all the possibilities is impossible. It’s chaos. It’s good, but it’s a lot to handle, more than I’m used to.
I’m reminded of the time when I was living alone, living on Ramen and chocolate covered espresso beans, no form of entertainment except for a few messed up books, sleep experimentation, pain-med withdrawals, and my journal. The shit I wrote back then was incredible (at least in my memory). I don’t know.
Who am I writing this for, anyway? Not myself, that’s for damn sure. Not for Rinoa, who wouldn’t read a non sci-fi to save her life or for Jaci who I can’t believe really loved me. When I cut the umbilical cord tethering myself to my mother, I think I missed and also lost some part of myself, but I instinctually blame her… I don’t write it for her either, and I regret even telling her about it. Or maybe I like to make her worry.
No, I think I write it in case someone runs across it on the internet, by some crazy chance, and by some even crazier chance happens to be the kind of person to be curious about the kind of person on the other end of the blog. Maybe one day I’ll get an email, or a psycho phonecall (503 481 0211) with a compliment or an insult. That would be nice.
Whatever
Anyway, I don’t know what I’m doing, but it feels good. Like the few seconds right after I dislocate my shoulder and my body pumps me full of trippy, feel-good brain chemicals.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Yellow Jackets look like the new drug of choice. Soothing and uplifting like alcohol, energizing and empowering like caffeine. I’m letting my antidepressant prescription run out. It’s better this way.
They were driving me insane. One hour I would be as happy as I ever thought I could be, cleaning up the smoking area out of the kindness of my heart, helping people, introducing myself and making friends with total strangers. The next, I would be overcome with some kind of inner exhaustion, where I couldn’t bear to live another minute, all the while trapped in the body of a happy-go-lucky robot. Time would pass, and I would forget how imprisoned I was in false happiness.
But really I’ve been myself driving insane, back to the same state I was in after living alone and not leaving for 2 months. Never going outside, no TV, no phone, just some messed up books (heart of darkness, crime and punishment), a journal, chocolate covered espresso beans, ramen, starvation and sleep deprivation. Well no, I could never get that bad again…
The cycle I’ve mentioned before has to break. I went to Canada for an attempt at that. Drunk, dancing, having a good time, I ended up meeting a girl who, it so happens, lives in my area. We started talking and learned that we listen to the same music, read the same books, had similar life experiances, have similar outlooks on life. We talked for a good 6 hours, and it kept getting better. It sounds stupid, but after a few minutes talking to Katie and Jaci, it was all the same, and I knew there was something incredibly good going on. I guess that’s what they call chemistry.
I got her (Angelina’s) number. On the way back I was thinking about her, and consequently Jaci and Katie. I was scribbling mindless poetry, and without thinking about it, I started writing about how it was impossible. I stopped, and it hit me that I’ve been sabotaging everything good for myself. I stopped biting my nails and putting myself into situations where I could be hurt, but I was still killing myself emotionally, convincing myself that there was one thing that could make me happy and then standing in the way of that One Thing.
I let Katie get away, stopped writing to her, stopped emailing her. I turned Jacie away for reasons that were bad even when I could remember them. And now Angelina who’s number I lost, like it was a receipt for a Prodigy CD from Safeway, and it doesn’t make me nearly as angry as not having a tape player to play a punk mix a good friend made for me.
Tragedy is all well and good, but I’m going to let my physical self preservation instincts kick in this time, help them override the self preservation instinct of the person I have become. It’s going to be a tough fight.
I’m like Mario on a descending platform with no real place to jump. I know where I shouldn’t be, just not where I need to go, and time is running out.
Got word, finally. 2 to 12 months drifted and morphed into 6 to 9 months, and now a definite year, at least, and with no hope.
Fuck hope.
But regardless of the hopelessness, I was determined to have a good time, and I did. Enjoying my new job at the front desk in security, afterwards treating my good friends to a meal, as if 70 bucks was nothing to me, and then experimenting with my prescription meds. 2 insomnia pills, 2 antidepressants, and a bottle of hard lemonade. Add an unattractive, annoying, unintelligent girl who only wants cock, and you have a night to be unintentionally remembered.
Oh well, it’s a good story. Too good for print, even… I take that back, it’s all bad
Coffee, smoke, and pain / Make it go away with a laugh? / fight the symptoms without a cause / give into the causes with pharmaceutical symptoms
Tuesday, September 03, 2002
My cravings are satiated after the first cigarette of the day and I even get a little bit of the nicotine high, but I still don’t get the calm I hope for. Citaloprams give me some kind of calm, but it’s just a band-aid, like the christian girl at a local coffee shop was telling me. She is always calm because she believes in god. I bet it doesn’t really feel much different than the citaloprams, though.
My irrational hatreds, paranoias, OCD-ish actions, and general nearly-to-tears funk, is not curbed by the citaloprams, just pushed away… not even to the back of my mind, just to the side, which pisses me off all the more, since I still feel all these things, but on the surface I feel compelled to giggle as I wake up, smile, and hum a ska tune.
fuck the christian girl, and her little god, too
Not hung over exactly, more like a post-drunkenness, dehydration-related affliction. The weekend hadn’t really fallen apart so much as just chaotically reorganizing itself into something different. I won’t get into it. Same story, different characters and plot, but still all the same.
20 years hasn’t brought me anything but the option for more. 5 years of passionate questing hasn’t helped me escape myself, no matter how far I go or who I become.
I tried writing Katie, but the letter she sent me back was just a line-for-line response to mine. No way to flow from that, and it was hard enough writing the first one. I tried calling Jacie, but I got a man’s voicemail. Scary. I don’t have enough energy to try harder at anything else.
So I wrote a little dittie, to be performed at open mic night one day. It sounds better if you know the tune, I swear. Actually, it straight up sucks, but I’d rather type out apologies than go to the trouble to get the mouse, highlight it, and delete it.
Twenty bucks and change won’t go far in this town
Old as dirt, soaked in mud from the Puget Sound
Last menthol in the first puddle of the week,
Sayin’ ‘the best things in life are free’
Only warn slippers carry me around
Glasses on the lookout for a beautiful deal
Looking past neon screams of ‘2 for 1, perfect steal!’
Distracted from facts, shouts are invisible behind the soft jingle
Of a chance, a promising find
Buried in psychosis, on a stack of twice-owned pain
But twenty bucks and change don’t get far in this town
The money is no good, no luck is just found
Ina convenience-store register, a journey ends in exchange
Distant hope for a bottle of lost time
Twenty bucks and change didn’t get far in this town
To the right a frumpy girl is flossing her teeth while laughing at a chain-email joke, to the left is a wall, but 20 minutes ago, to the left of me was this attractive-ish (waayyy too much makeup) girl about my age who was tragically typical of a girl who is only about my age. I was going to talk to her, but she did all the talking, and most of the talking for the other people around her, about this guy who won’t leave her alone. Who cares, really. If you don’t like him, why do you have to spend an entire smoke break talking about him? 19 year-olds are so lame.
there’s more to say but… whatever.
Monday, August 19, 2002
The left side of my head is a happy field of springtime flowers. The right side of my head is a single point of an endlessly speeding bullet, constantly in the process of explosively burrowing it’s molten led tip into my unsuspecting and fragile skull. Oh the horror.
But on the upside, the combined experience of a sugar crash, caffeine and nicotine withdrawals, along with the new feeling of an anti-depressant crash (or is it citalopram-specific? A good experiment for later) has provided me with a stroke of creatively selective memory. In a totally unexpected and useless flash, I remembered with fair quality a conversation I had while visiting Portland some time ago. I explained to a girl, who I would have had a crush on had I not been so high on conversation and dedicated to surpassing my obsession with my will, that I continued to live at the expense of good people who didn’t deserve to die.
My line of reasoning was this: every day a metric fuckload of people; who work out, don’t smoke or eat red meat, are celibate, look both ways before crossing the street, drive with a seat belt, ride bikes with helmets, generally take care of themselves, along with generally being good people… every day, a hell of a lot of those people die for no good reason at all. Struck dead by a freak lightning storm, a freak train accident, a freak swingset accident, a drunk driver, a blood-clot, a stray bullet. And every day, I am still alive. Me, who was a careless driver, who searches out situations that will kill me or at least cause pain, who is reckless in all things I can think to be reckless in and has had more near death experiences than most people my age. I continue to live even though sometimes I don’t want to, and thousands of people who do, continue to die. So, I don’t remember exactly how, but I came to the conclusion that I live at their expense, that somehow it is by their deaths that I live. Given laws of probabilities, every day a certain percentage of people have to die by freak accident, and every day when it isn’t me, it is because someone who really didn’t deserve it took my place.
It is from that conclusion that I take a sense of meaning as ammunition with me into the bleak Basement and Skatepark analogies of life. If there is any chance at some kind of underlying connectivity or even consciousness in the universe, then it must surely have some power over probabilities and I would therefor be continuing to live for some expressed purpose.
It could be to focus on my writing. Unfortunately, logic dictates that there’s a good chance that my purpose is to serve as a link in a chain of Butterfly Effect Events (I die, my death sends some people grieving, a funeral home makes just enough money to invest in some long-shot biotechnology, and cancer is cured).
Whatever
Monday, August 12, 2002
Enrique won’t leave me alone. He’s a great guy, I enjoy his company and am glad that he is a friend of mine, but he spends way too much time with me. I’m a victim of my own friendliness. I strove to be more extroverted, and now this guy is latched onto me like if he lets go, he’ll fall into some kind of bottomless pit. I’m starting to hate him. He’s in my room now, waiting for me.
Meanwhile, here in the computer room, is Angi. Some time ago, based on my Skatepark Analogy of Life (formerly the Skatepark Analogy of love), I asked Angi if we could update our friend relationship to something closer. I was repeating a mistake I had made many times, but I thought that this time might be different, or maybe I just wasn’t thinking, which is the point of the skatepark analogy. Anyway, she said ‘not yet’. We hang out, and I don’t anguish because I am comfortable with her, or because of the damn citaloprams. But even the anti-depressant high doesn’t cure loneliness, and they always wear off at the wrong time.
The benefit of citaloprams is that they’ve quashed (turns out ‘quashed’ is a real word; so says microsoft word spellchecker) my obsessiveness (the addition of ness makes ‘obsessive’ incorrect, also according to microsoft. Why didn’t anyone drop a plane on Bill Gates?).
Unfortunately the citaloprams don’t give me energy, they don’t reinforce my will, they don’t really help; they just prevent me from hurting myself. So I’m slow to respond to an apologetic email from the once and future Jaci, mail from Katie of San Jose fame, or an email from an anonymous girl who liked a picture of me on the internet I didn’t even know about… whatever.
I’d like to say that I can say Whatever because I am finally internalizing the grand conclusion I came to recently, that in order to be happy with what I have, I need to not want what I don’t have. (or as I put it before, ‘in all things, whatever.’) I don’t think it’s because I have Angi to worry about (because I don’t, really), or because I have more social distractions and citaloprams, but I could be full of myself. I believe strength of will is a weapon, and I have faith in my mastery of will to some degree, but even I can’t surpass my self preservation instinct far enough to cut myself deep.
It would be an interesting experiment to stop taking the pills (not that I take them regularly at all) and see how much I change my mind, prove to myself that I really do have a handle on my obsessiveness and that I’m not just cheating with pharmaceuticals. But they make me feel good, they’re free, and they don’t hurt, so why stop except to cause myself pain? And as I said before, I don’t really want to do that anymore…
Are these things making me stupid? My prose seems more jumbled and the topic more worthless. Maybe they’re just wearing off.
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
The sleeping pill intoxicated me more completely than alcohol ever has. I stumbled into the computer room, every nerve in my body screaming a death scream of total exhaustion, even my eyes were unable to cooperate with my simple commands, so that the few things that were in focus, I saw in triplicate. I could think coherently enough, but beyond that, I was useless.
But I stayed awake anyway, to spite myself and to converse with a friend of mine. I wasn't all too interested in the conversation (abortion, ick), but I was excited to meet someone who could actually talk to me without using ghetto slang and making sexual innuendo every 5 minutes. Serious conversation, regardless of the topic or my coherency, is a beautiful thing.
Staying awake for 6 hours after taking the sleeping pill was certainly an accomplishment, in my opinion, and a welcome end to the night. It was one of those nights that seemed to last for-fucking-ever; I had worked endlessly and tirelessly to combat boredom and it was still only 9pm. I was a nexus of OCD impulses, with nothing really to do. Finally having accepted the innevitablility of my room mate's messiness, I gave up, and even in my mindlessly supercharged state, did not clean. But it was too early for me to be tired, so I focused on writing.
Sitting there in the middle of the mess, a well lit eye in a hurricane of clothes and CDs, 3 half-written letters in front of me and some run-of-the-mill punk music compelling me, I looked around and saw just how alone I was. To fight boredom, and to ironically symbolize my rejection of dogmatic Christianity, I gave myself a tattoo of a cross. Then, in protest of the pharmaceutical institutions which would have us believe that they can solve our problems with pills, I took a sleeping pill prescribed to me for insomnia, and stayed awake for 6 hours, at which point I enjoyed the rousing conversation on abortion.
All-too-aware of my inability to articulate anything at all, I went back to my room and struggled to sit upright for another half hour. That's when it hit me, after re-reading the three letters I hadn't written the first parts of yet. I had some antidepressants which I'd never taken, either. A sober look at everything I had done in life up until then suggested that I should probably use them. I was not sober, however, and just took them because I was bored and wondered what they would do. I popped two, and fell asleep.
I dreamt a lot. I had fantastic dreams with semi-vivid breaks where I reveled at how great these dreams were and I hoped to god I would remember them. I didn't remember them, but I woke up with a smile.
The smile kept going, much to my surprise. I got up, giggled, and remembered that I had taken 2 of the 20mg citaloprams.
I tried to wallow in the sorrow that I should have felt because of my betrayal against myself and everything that I believed. I tried to feel shame or disgust, I tried to hate my room mate for the mess he generated, I tried as hard as I could to feel anything for myself, going so far as to say all the things I'd said to myself before, concerning my lack of female companionship, my inability to write, the imprisonment that is my current situation, or my epic failure in past social events. But I was happy.
At first I was excited at the idea of learning more about myself by observing what I do differently in such a state, but this was overshadowed by my agitation (intellectually only, since I was happy and only happy.) that I had cheated myself, worse than I'd cheated myself when I got the Playstation2. See, the two things that I've identified that really define who I am, are my search for love and my desire to write something meaningful, two things which I really strive for only because their result is happiness. With the pill, I got the only thing that motivated me to do anything, without doing anything.
It pissed me off, but in that permanently happy state, that only translated into some kind of weird energy. It wasn't motivation that got me dressed and got me a ride to the ferry docks and into Seattle. I don't know what it was.
I don’t know anymore, because now I put one foot in front of the other because it’s funny instead of because it might kill me.
Saturday, August 03, 2002
powered by Heartburn(tm)
My supervisor’s job was not hard to learn. There are things I can not do, but the things I am allowed to do, I do faster and more efficiently than she ever has. Today, with her gone, we managed to finish her job, working around her battle-zone of a desk, in record time. All of her administrative work completed, the last half of the day I spent awake and alert, but alert only to the sliver of light that came from the window, the window I could only ever really see when in her office, and can only catch hints of from my workstation.
I was thinking of the sunny, crisp day outside, with clouds racing under a bright blue sky, when something terrible caught my eye. A shiny dash hidden between two words, just over an underline, uncovered itself as an original above it slid into the copy machine. In the past, when I had seen this in the corner of my eye as I did then, or even when I had been staring right at it, I sat apathetically and uncaringly accepted the jam that was the consequence. But now, on instinct, my hand shot out and gently applied pressure to the uncovered paper, preventing it from being fed into the machine, stopping the copying process, and allowing me to gracefully remove the staple I had missed. It was then, in my moment of office-shitwork-glory, that I realized that I was wasting my time
I didn’t know what this realization was in reference to, however, so it meant nothing. I was just filled all of a sudden with a sense that I had wasted countless hours, that I could never recover the breath I’d sacrificed for the sake of bullshit. My chemical abuses assisting my funky mood, my body concluded the world was bunk, while my mind was left spinning.
Even though it was only 75 degrees outside, with a refreshing breeze, the temperature near my workstation would hop from 80 to 50, depending on the day, or the alignment of the planets, or the moods of whoever it is that controls the temperature. Just then I felt a sudden chill as one such hop was taking place. On command, the sliver of light from outside faded and was replaced by the now-stronger fluorescent light, and my workmate’s copy machine shut off, seemingly without reason.
Coincidences happen all the time. They are bound to happen eventually, as the laws of chance and probability explain. It was my workmate’s contention that the timing of these coincidences was some kind of fate or karma or extranatural thingy. Always the skeptic, I brushed her aside, as if she had just told me that everything happens in threes, or that lost souls walk among us and help or hinder us as part of their journey to the ultimate destination. But coincidences, like animals born with interesting mutations, are still cool. Like the reoccurrence of certain names in my life. For example; Jacky, Jacquelyn, and Jaci. Another example; Kaytee and now Kate (does Kathleen count? Then it would conveniently fit into the ‘everything happens in threes’ old wives tale, as well. Maybe not in this context… my Oedipus complex isn’t that bad.).
The temperature in the room had probably hit and stabilized at 54 by then. The department head walked by with the division head, talking quietly with a man carrying a hard-hat and a weird badge, all of them looking at the ceiling and pointing. The airconditioner, having done it’s job well for months straight, shut off with a loud cachunk, but the three of them did not lose a step, did not indicate in any way that they noticed that the noise that had droned on for months straight, was finally gone. In the face of silence, the ringing in my ears was deafening, and I had only the sounds of my workmate struggling with some kind of epic paper-jam to focus on. But without the dull roar of the air conditioner, and with the distraction of the hushed tones of 2 important people and 1 mysterious guy, I was helpless. I prepared another stack of papers for copy, selected 1 sided to 2 sided (collated; single, left – darkness x1.1 – paper tray 1, legal right), and with my hand on the machine, put my chin on my chest in defeat, and hit ‘print’.
It was then that I noticed a tiny spec of glitter on my leg. It’s been at least a couple months since my trip to San Jose and my nearly crippling defeat at the hands of Joanna, when I thankfully wandered into Kaytee, who had impulsively covered herself in body-glitter. But even though I do laundry about every week (more-so a fact of life than taxes) and shower about every day (too factual to even be thought of, a requirement for consideration as a fact of life), I still find specs of glitter every now and then, at totally random times.
Thinking of Kaytee, thinking of the coincidence that I had just been thinking of her when I noticed the spec of glitter, thinking of how she was important in helping me realize just how messed up my relationship with Joanna was, thinking of the bottled coffee a workmate handed to me just then as if to emphasize an unspoken point, I got up and walked to the breakroom. I would later find that it had been closed off for some reason no one would say, and by the time I got back, it would hit me that it was time for me to go home, but until then, my thoughts drifted to Kate, and other parallels in my life.
Just as with Kaytee, Kate (according to the good friend that is introducing us) is as interested in me as I am in her, a mutual attraction based mostly on surprise of our similarities and respect of our differences. And as Kaytee led me to realize my relationship with Joanna was an obsession and my love for her was a lie, Kate has been some kind of catalyst for the realization that my pursuit of love is an obsession and also a lie (perhaps it can be traced during a formative summer vacation which I spent with my eccentric uncle’s family, and a specific conversation about life where they mentioned loneliness. I remember distinctly that until that time, I had been angsty, but more or less happy and without ideation of love or a search for it). I see so much in her that I see in myself. Finding this younger, female version of me (I don’t really know her well enough to have a right to say that, but from what I do know, when I picture the rest to complete the mental image, that is what I see, and it is that image that unraveled me), looking into the mirror for the first time, in a way, I finally see (not just through deduction, but proof, in a precedence) that love is the worst thing I could find.
Then I went home, smoked, changed into some new clothes, refused to join friends on a trip to Vancouver, ate too much pizza, and went to sleep at 6pm
I wonder if I am especially susceptible to infections. Whatever. I still don’t take the pills they give me. Especially the little pink ones they say will make me feel better. Fuck them, I like feeling bad. It makes feeling good even better.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
In all her streetsmart wisdom, Angi declares that I’m only trying to look cool when I smoke, and tries to make fun of me for doing it.
She’s not stupid and she knows smoking is bad for her and yet she smoked anyway, for years, until not less than a week ago. My reason to start smoking seemed as good as any, but I never understood people who smoked, also not until less than a week ago.
I used to think that the idea of peer pressure was a stupid underestimation of today’s youth on the part of the older generations. Of course, I always thought of peer pressure lire it was portrayed in an after school special, or one of the NBC “The more you know” things. I always pictured big spikey-haired 13 year olds wearing dirty punk T-shirts, leaning over a slight-of-build younger and more clean cut kid with a teal and pink polo shirt, the bigger kids leering at the smaller kid until the smaller kid saved the day dramatically, showing tenacity in the face of adversity by stepping away from them and saying some new anti-drug catchphrase.
Even later on in highschool, my more realistic definition of peer pressure still put too much emphasis on the pressure part. I pictured kids doing things they didn’t want to do just because some bastard forced them, and I thought that anyone that would succumb to peer pressure instead of just telling the offender to fuck off, was just a pussy. But last week, hanging out with friends I’d made in the smoking area, I understood that the peer pressure that got Angi to start smoking, the same thing that was convincing me to continue smoking, was nothing so blatantly wrong or poorly acted.
The insidiousness of it is that peer pressure is not a concious act of the peers, and is barely even an act of pressure, since the people that start, sort of want to smoke anyway (yes, even though they know it may kill them, in the same way that I throw myself into dangerous situations even though they know of the risks; for me I get the thrill of being alive and a rush of adrenaline, for them they get the enjoyment of a unique social situation and the rush of nicotine). Peer pressure is just reinforcing the propaganda that was already implanted on them.
Even when it is popular to hate smoking, smokers, and the tobacco companies, in popular culture it is only the bad-guys who still smoke. But even then, popular culture is the agent of the tobacco propaganda machine (which I don’t really care about, just to set the record straight.). Bad guys in movies are inherently cool because they are the ultimate underdog. When you’re a lower-middle class suburban kid and the only evil you see is in the movies, after seeing so many movies and picking up the Hollywood patterns, you start to feel sorry for the antagonists, who are doomed from scene one, when they are established as the badguy. How could a kid in my situation not identify with the badguys to some extent? The mostly harmless, single minded obsession of the classic bad-guy seemed an admirable enough passion, and the bastard do-gooder always stood in their way, destroyed their lifelong ambitions in less than 2 hours, got the girl, and in the end was everyone’s hero. In the same manner of the popular kid crushing your sandcastle in the corner of your sandbox in the name of establishing some kind of elaborate game which includes everyone who wants to play, James Bond strolls in and sweeps away an evil empire, a life’s work, and a masterfully intricate plan, all with a sly grin and an erection.
In our world, we couldn’t see any future other than growing up to be a soviet spy, to oppose the good guys who always won. I never wanted to smoke, but smoking had always been an element of the badguy character that as a kid I wanted to be. I’m assuming I’m not the only kid who hoped every day he would wake up to a nuclear holocaust so life would be like a Mad Max movie, and I know I wasn’t the only kid to cry when the Soviet Union fell and it seemed that James Bond had finally really defeated the underdogs for all time.
So I don’t think it’s the peers who apply the pressure, they just reinforce the pressure applied by a society that inadvertently breeds a class of outcasts. In my case, peers had nothing to do with it, as I am smoking only for me. A good number of my friends here are in the medical profession, and I have it on good authority that nicotine is harder to quit than morphine. I want to experience life, and so I wanted to experience the worst my body could throw at me in the form of withdrawals, and at the same time test my strength of will.
So I smoked 3 packs in 3 days, along with a lot more before that (smoker training – the 1 pack per day event was my goal). It was a good test of will, I suppose, though I didn’t do it right. It’s much easier to quit anything if you haven’t been doing it for more than a few months. Despite the fact that I do have uniquely intense headaches and am unusually crabby, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to the symptoms of a real smoker. I slept through the worst of the effects yesterday, anyway.
I still can’t get Jaci on the phone. My intention wasn’t to break up with her, just to throw a reality check into the game. We’d been saying we loved each other and we’d never been within 100 miles of each other. I still want to see her and I still try calling her despite my astronomical phone bill, but never an answer. So, depressed over this and in an odd mood (even though I was crabby, the deluge of sunlight made me happy), when Angi asked to take me to Denny’s, just me and her, I agreed, and I instantly knew I was going to screw myself, just like I knew I was going to hurt myself when I started getting involved with Joanna, but suppressed that foreknowledge and plowed on.
Sitting across from her, listening to her talk, watching her mouth, her eyes, her hands as they fidget with a ring, I thought about how unsure I felt when I was telling a friend earlier that Angi and I would never work out together, and I thought about the mixed signals I got from her every now and then, and the time in the car when she mentioned how she’s learned that the right person for her was someone exactly like me. My Life Analogy fresh on my mind, and in my state of sleep deprivation and nicotine withdrawals, I thought about skateboarding and my
Skatepark of Love analogy.
See, skateboarding is the official sport of punk for a reason. It’s non-competitive, non-cooperative, but at the same time, it can be made to be those things – so it is already inherently chaotic, a pillar of punk philosophy. Also, there is an element of danger when you do not skate to your ability. Your skill will improve with practice, but it will improve by leaps and bounds if you are willing and able to try new things, to skate beyond your ability. When you do this, you are bound to make mistakes, and when you make mistakes, you get injured. Because of the correlation between skill and the passionate commitment required to drive someone to skate beyond their ability and injure themselves, injuries are like badges in the skater community.
So this passed my mind, and it dawned on me how few mistakes I’d made in the area of love, that I had so few injuries as badges because I’d spent so long ‘skating to my ability’ to refer to the Skatepark of Love analogy. So I forced myself to start talking. I prefaced myself by saying that it may be a mistake to say anything, and I asked if we had to continue to just be friends. Though she doesn’t really like the person she’s involved with, she’s still involved with someone, so she said “not yet.”
Thankfully straightforward and un-awkward, we changed the subject, finished our food and left. I went to sleep, and 3 hours later got up to get ready for my class.
A professional development class.
A full week from 0730 to 1600 in the company of washed out, older men and women, about a 20 minute ride away from home. The host is a surrealistic guy: overweigh, pink-tinted pilot glasses covering a majority of the small face of his that latched itself onto his dollup of a head. His small face seems stretched out over his doughy head, his thin sandy hair probably hiding the beginning of a zipper which extends down his back behind his Classic-80s pink short-sleeved dress shirt. When he stretches his face even more to form a smile and gestured so that I could see that he is missing the last 2 knuckles of his index finger, I questioned the possibility of his existence and genuinely wondered if maybe nothing was real.
My sleep deprivation, coinciding caffeine and nicotine withdrawals, the 55 degree chill despite the 90 degree weather outside, and my depressed state, made for a very interesting experience – the dreamlike horror of it all being greatly contributed to when he started talking. He started off by reminding us of the dress-code for the second time (by then, a day had already gone by), this time warning that those who were still in violation would have to go home and change during lunch. After that, I was gone to the world and everything just got more horrifically surreal. A cadre of dry-yet-go-getting speakers who were all saying something repetitive, uninteresting, and irrelevant to me, all sort of blurred into a The Most Boring Object In The World; a single, multi gendered being with many faces and voices, flashing in and out of existance due to the strobe-light effect that reality has when I’m in a constant state of falling asleep, but never actually getting anywhere.
4 hours later, the word ‘lunch’ is uttered. The world emerges to a higher level of clarity of existence. A 45 year old man sits with me and, based on the familiarity that apprently comes with being in the same class, starts talking to me. He mentions he has kids, and I ask how old they are. Beyond their age, I went on to learn that they are of some kind of godlike race which will surely conqure the earth if they are not destroyed. He was obviously obsessed with these kids like I can be about girls, only more disturbingly and blindly so. The more I learned about them, the more I wanted his kids and the family that spawned them to die. Soccar allstars since the beginning, drawing crowds of people just to see them. Straight As and Bs. The only problem is that they are so popular they get in trouble for talking too much in PE. I grew to hate his kids so much, I wanted him to stop talking about them before my hate grew so strong that inadvertently willed them out of existence.
Burrito finished, I had the urge to seek conclusion.
I ditched him and sought refuge in the comfort of a bathroom stall. I napped, and I thought. I remembered my extremist conclusion of a couple weeks ago and how quickly I’d opposed it. The search for love is more of a test of will to quit than morphine or nicotine. At one point during my own monologue I’d gone so far as to say that writing was actually the distracter, and that the search should be my driving goal. Before I went back to the class for another eternity of a few hours, I decided that the important thing was to -- at least in this area of my life -- to just let things happen, to let every go just as it has gone, but to stop worrying about it, just like I don’t worry about much anything else. This is the obvious conclusion, one I have reached in all other areas of my life, and considering that I strive for consistency and toward the eradication of hypocrisy (in myself), it only makes sense to conclude that, in all things, whatever.
Sunday, July 21, 2002
You wake up, and you see you're in what seems to be a basement. You don't know how you got there, though you're hurt and bruised so it probably involved a struggle. But beyond that, you can't remember anything before your waking up in that basement, and all you know is that you need to get out, because one look at the place and it's obvious that a lot of bad shit goes down in this place.
The floor and walls are lined with cardboard that's soaked with blood, covered in bits of flesh in various stages of decomposition and littered with bones and food at various stages of digestion. But as soon as you try and stand to make your way to the door in front of you, you realize that you're tied pretty well to a chair, and the chair is weighted, or maybe even bolted to the ground. That's when you're introduced to your new friend. He comes at you from behind, where you couldn't see. He's got a sharp knife, a lot of blood and bloodstains on him, and a creepy grin.
Now, all the signs are laid out, and it would seem obvious that there is no chance of getting out alive. But still, you have some choices at this point. You can yell and scream and hope that someone hears you, but if you're the kind of person who will do that, when he just sits and watches you and laughs a little, after awhile you'll figure that maybe if you just play his game and keep him happy, he won't hurt you. You know you're probably going to die, but that 'probably' is enough for most people to figure they can talk their way out of it. By doing that, you certainly prolong your death, though it doesn't make the time you spend in that basement any prettier.
On the other hand, since you know you have no chance of surviving, you can do whatever it is you can do to kick ass. Maybe play along a little and when he gets close, bite his ear. Maybe insult him and lower his self esteem a little before he kills you, or just simply kick and scream bloody murder. Hell, maybe you can actually get the ropes loose enough to get a hit on him a couple times before he jabs you in your jugular. You'll be dead, but at least it will have been quick, you would have died with dignity, and maybe even made him work for the murder.
And that's life. All signs point to the fact that you're going to die, but most people figure that the possibility still exists that they can play along and be let out, but no one ever gets out. I just don't understand it. I choose to kick the psycho bastard in the balls.
Sort of like what's-his-name's "I will not go quietly into the night" thing, only modernized, I guess.
Returned from Seattle. I wanted to call Jaci while I was on the ferry back, to patch things up dual facts of my rejection of the search for love and my thousand dollar phone bill (More like 2 easy payments of $517. Yeah. Fuck.) I ran into Jackie and MLE, faces of the past. Highly caffeinated, smoking myself sick, my buzz and the nice day kept my emotions highly volitile. I wrote a shitty and pointless story about a guy killing himself.
on the ride there, I thought about how my seach for love had been a driving obsession which was my excuse to breath air and avoid drowning myself, and how I needed to channel that wasted and self destructive passion into my writing, to make writing the One Goal which motivates me to allow my self preservation instinct to do what it has to do. I figured that if I did that, then the talent I keep being told I have would grow and I would be able to actually do something with it.
But on the ride back, I got a call from a friend and lied about meeting a cool girl and getting her phone number, and I thought about calling Jaci, and I thought about calling Sam just for the hell of it, and I thought about how painfull it was to have Jackie invite me to come back to her diner more often and to say goodbye to MLE as she was changing shifts. And then I thought about a girl who works at the Elliot Bay Book Company cafe. And then I realized that my obsession has gone way beyond anything I can just get rid of, it's not like a morphine addiction which I can just will myself through. It's like a condition or a learning disability which I have to work around.
I blame my parents. How the hell could I develope healthy relationship building skills from observing my parents? "What;s wrong honey?" "Nothing, why does something have to be wrong." "Lets go to the mall and read for 7 hours!" "OK!"
Whatever. Attempting to be creative and suppressing my obsession has made me stupid. I can only pray for a terrorist bombing...
Friday, July 19, 2002
I have unovered the secret of the non-broken space, and utilized it to create an indent, thusly:
So I was hanging out with my good friend the pregnant girl. The way we act and talk to eachother, one would assume we were married. Some days we will be asked how long we've been seeing eachother, or how I feel about becoming a father. We enjoy eachother's company and we do nice things for eachother and we can talk to eachother, but we can't be very open with eachother and we really have nothing in common. She would prefer to talk about fast food while listening to Em And Em or that "it's getting hot in here, so take of all your clothes" song while I would prefer to talk about the implications of increased military spending on geo-political stability while listening to punk, or Tiger Army (Tiger Army never DIIIIIIEEEEE). It's hard enough for her to actually sit still long enough to actually talk, whereas I live for the thrill of conversation. It's my only fucking hobby.
Thursday, July 18, 2002
Even people that exist solely as an opposition to everything that I hold dear have a contribution to make to my life – someone we will call Mitch is a classic case of this.
Now, it’s not that I don’t like him, it’s just that he defends everything I oppose, and hypocritically opposes everything I steadfastly defend. (that’s too harsh. I have a hard time refraining from harshness since there was a time I was jealous of him. I am not the same person I was, and not being the same kind of person, I am no longer jealous of the same kinds of things, such as guys with girlfriends. After feeling that way for so long, it’s hard to stop) For example, it became known in conversation that he was not opposed to Starbucks, corporations, or the capitalist system as a whole. Being on the left wing of not-caring, having so recently cared deeply about such things, and having a love for intelligent conversation, I defended my typically socialist-bent liberalism. In the exchange that followed, he brought up a point that commanded some consideration.
Starbucks may be a huge corporation which thrives on the carcasses of hard working, independent, community founded and owned coffee places. But the individual franchises are community owned, employ local kids, bring money to local economies, and have encouraged an increased appeal for coffee places in general.
On instinct, I argued. I refused to accept anything that suggested an element of wholesomeness to Starbucks, the evil knight of the corrupt and hateful corporate oligarchy. I didn’t want to be wrong, but his logic was sound and his argument well founded. My refusal to support Starbucks is not revolutionary or even very helpful in the grand scheme of things. In the end, everything will be the same, regardless if I righteously steal a truckload of Starbucks supplies, or donate hundreds of dollars to their insidious cause.
At one time I used to say that someone who has a car and who is a vegetarian for social, spiritual, ecological, moral, or health reasons, was a hypocrite [Friday, April 19]. I used to say (motivated by my good-natured jealousy of a vegetarian friend who had two cars) that the automotive industry defied every value that was supported by vegetarianism – displacing hundreds of species with the factories, the mines for the raw materials, the oil pumps, and indirectly with the millions of miles of asphalt (road, parkinglots) that are slowly replacing every natural environment.
Despite my motivation, this is true. The public transit guru has better karma than the vegetarian, in my worthless opinion. But when I overlook the motivation that drove me to that point, I acknowledge that vegetarianism is still a respectable practice, one which I hold in high regard. Like choosing to take the bus, or growing your own food, making your own clothes, spiking a doomed tree, stealing from corporations, opposing Starbucks, or bombing the captains of industry (for the last time, I’m not the Unibomber, I swear!).
The point, the realization, is the fact that if a vegetarian owns and uses a car, that does not make them a hypocrite. By being a member of society, especially a productive one, we all contribute at least a little bit, and at least indirectly, to every cause that we hate. Anti-smokers buy foods made by Phillip-Morrison owned companies, anti-racists eat at Denny’s, anti-deforestation people eat Golden State Foods products, anti-capitalism people buy Rage Against The Machine patches… More power to those who strive for consistency, but the point needs to be stressed. It’s not the choice to buy Garden Burger instead of steak, it’s the choice. The small efforts in the face of the unshiftable paradigm. The fight. The more we can do to contribute toward the greater good, the better, but not with the expectancy of revolutionary change, but with the satisfaction of at least having done something.
I’ve thought about the worthlessness of everything I believed in before [Tuesday, April 16 and Thursday, May 16]. A more reasonable person would have considered this grounds for something more drastic than a webpage or 40 shots of espresso [Monday, April 08]. But luckily that was all I did, so that I would be here today to come to the decision that, especially considering the analogy that I try to live by [to be elaborated upon (holy shit, I talk about it all the time and I haven’t written it out here?)], the struggle is the only thing that matters. Love is a welcome distraction [Thursday, April 11], on the same scale as playstation2 [Wednesday, June 05]. But they leave me uncreative and unproductive, and though I’ve experienced the illusion of happiness with love, the good feeling is addictive and fleeting, leaving me in painful withdrawals when it is gone. This pain may be an obstacle toward some kind of ultimate goal like The Most Fabulous Object In The World, ala Time Bandits, but given recent evidence, and since pain in all other cases is a warning, the obvious conclusion is that I reject the futile and obsessive search for female companionship and focus on the one thing that I have determined time and again [Friday, May 31] that actually matters.
Maybe I’m giving up, like I did when I got the playstation2. Maybe I'm just overreacting (I have considered this conclusion before, to one degree or another, though I've never gone so far to promote the idea to 'conclusion' status). Maybe I should call Jaci now that I got my phone working… Jaci, who appreciates me, who likes me, who may actually love me (or is obsessed with me, perhaps? I’ve only put serious thought into the difference in the last few months), who has all the qualities that I am attracted to without being already attached or lesbian, who is funny, smart, interesting, generally fun to talk to, but who I’ve never seen. Maybe I should just take the damn pills I'm prescribed, and go to sleep.
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
On the bus, bound for Portland. I didn’t know that was where I was going until I ended up going there. My bag was above me and Home was ahead of me, so that was just the way it was going to be. I was going home.
At first I was angry at myself. Years ago, when I was crossing the Burnside bridge on the MAX light rail, and I was watching the heart of Portland over the starry Willamette river be obscured by its own buildings, I swore I wouldn’t see Portland again for another 5 years, that it would never again be my home and that it would never hurt me like I had let it hurt me before.
So when I was standing in the Greyhound station, weary from a full day at work, deciding on where to go, I was angry that the only place for me to go was Portland. But when I was acclimating myself to the Greyhound seats and social life, I was excited like I was excited about buying a Playstation even though it meant a certain kind of death for me. Good or bad, my 4 days in Portland were going to be eventful, they were going to have meaning and an effect on my life. Even though I suspected I was going to come away from the whole thing hating life, I knew I would be a better person for it.
I was on my way toward whatever it was that was waiting for me, and I knew I only had 4 hours to figure out what I was doing when I got there, and only 2 if I wanted to catch people on the phone before they went to sleep. That wasn’t too much of a problem, most of the numbers in my book connected me to people I could expect to be awake (at least the people who I could expect to remember me would probably be awake. (I’m quick to make friends, but rarely in my life have I had more than a few friends close enough to keep in touch with or even get their contact info. (Except for girls, who always got preferential treatment. My address book once consisted mostly of the numbers of female friends whose company I enjoyed but probably wouldn’t hang out with me, and now most of the numbers just put me on the line with their parents or old room-mates.))).
On the bus, I was accosted by a friendly bastard who genuinely wanted to help me. He obviously considered himself some kind of “playa’” and wanted to take me under his wing when he overheard me trying to get a hold of old friends. This guy sitting next to me assumed that I had been involved (his emphasis, not mine (not that I would have liked to be involved with most of these girls, but in all cases they were just friends)) with all these girls and he wanted to help me, by suggesting ways of wording simple phrases (“dude, say that you really miss her, not that you just want to hang out with her”). His mainstream-ness irked and intimidated me, and my string of failures was making me incredibly self-conscious next to his bottomless well of testosterone, so I was driven past the point of almost calling a girl who hated me, and I actually called her. Luckily, I only reached her father, whose voice immediately reminded me of how stupid I was.
Fueled with a desperation to not be desperate, I called everyone who might have anything to do with me, with success ranging on the negative side of the scale. The numbers that were still active connected me either to only a (though still nice) 45 minute conversation, or answering machine, and then gambled on the people who would at least agree to see me once before I died. At that point I was sure that my trip was doomed to be depressing, destined to be negatively eventful.
I didn’t know if I could handle coming home after so long to an empty bus depot. I knew I would have to do something dramatic in protest against the world that created me for no reason, despite my protests after the fact. Exactly what it was I would do when I got to the bus depot only to find a horrible after-midnight emptiness and with no place to go, was unknown but terrifying and exciting. Would I start a fight with a random person, or go on a manic prowl for someone in particular? I’d always wondered how far I could get a Greyhound bus before I was run off a road… I was thinking about the logistics of my long awaited bus-jacking when Jake called.
Jake, I think I’ve explained, is me, sortof. He’s me if I had been raised by a pastor and a psychiatrist, while dealing with an extremely messed up body chemistry, and a healthy affection for adderol. He called me because he heard I was coming, he got the exact time I was going to arrive, and he arranged his group of friends to come with him and meet me at the terminal, a couple of them holding a speedily but artfully crafted sign with my name on it. I arrived, I saw, I was relieved and flattered, and the epic began.
Jake and I started to talk. He asked me which one of the group he introduced me to was the most attractive. I indicated Courtney, he mentioned someone else, who I later learned he was infatuated with, but would never tell. He brought me up to date on his life, which included his relationship with this new group of friends, his liberation from his parents, and his addiction. He escaped his oppresive parents by laying it out to them that after he left, he was going to go to Nepal, and it could be the last time they ever saw him. Having more freedom, he had more time to hang out with his new friends, a group of open minded and slightly more messed up smart kids in the advanced classes of the old highschool. The only problem was the tension he caused, since the only thing he ever talked about was his addiction, unless he was on his drug at the time of conversation, in which case he was moving too fast to be understood by anyone, exploring all angles of all tangents in his head while they were still struggling to come to terms with his last point.
We got to Lisa’s house. His friends circled around Jake and I as we talked, and they watched as we addressed points and issues they didn’t realize existed, and destroyed them with the sheer force of our minds. Eventually they broke off into side conversations, which eventually wandered outside, while Jake, Courtney, and myself remained. I arrived in town on Thursday at 1 in the morning, and we talked until 1 on Friday night. The places we went were just the settings for the dialogue, because it stopped being a conversation at some point, and became something more like a discourse. It’s hard to remember exactly what we talked about… Time, we decided, moves a frame rates from our perspective, and while we were talking, it was moving 32 frames per second instead of 30 (or whatever, the point was that, because there seemed to be more content in the time, it felt almost as if it was longer, but not merely that, since at the same time it felt like the distance from the point that was 1am on Thursday was just minutes from the point that was 1am on Friday. Time seemed to be the ultimate truth, the only thing that was constant, even if it was different depending on which direction you looked at it.
We talked about truth. Jake hated the people who talked about the relativity of truth, that if everything could be true, that there could be no false; that one was necessary to provide contrast for the existence of the other. I maintained that everyone is right from their own points of view, that through the filters through which they view the world, they see the closest thing to Truth that is possible. The filters, we decided, were based on each person’s Basic Assumptions, which is what is at the source of any argument; the kernel of faith that will resist any logic, even in an unusually open mind. Some people enslaved themselves to an idea, using the self preservation instinct as a crutch, they take a basic assumption and they hide behind it, like kids that want so much to see the world, but resign themselves to go to college instead so that they can be a computer programmer like their parents (for example). People want to avoid risks at all times because they want to avoid consequences, but what they don’t seem to understand is that a risk is just that, and sometimes the risk is minimal. And even then, the consequences are overrated, that a consequence is only a consequence if you make it one- all this leading up to the fact that millions of people live their lives in needless, silly fear of Big Brother’s Big Brother, therefore giving the nonexistant being power over all.
It always comes back to the issue of will, that if someone is willing to question their own basic assumptions, then the points they assume will obviously be more correct, because they’ve been tested against others in an open field, while under fire. Everything always comes back to a question of willpower anyway, like our mutual friend Arron Cole, the guy who knew all he wanted to do in the world was to help people, so instead of going to college to learn how to take people’s money, he joined a volunteer organization that took mentally disabled people, took care of them, and showed them around the world. He had the strength of will to go against a decision he had made years ago with the ‘guidance’ of his well-meaning parents, and strengthened with the force of society. Yeah, it’s all about will. I realized that when I came to understand that the only thing preventing me from happiness in Highschool was the fact that I was an introvert, and I needed to be an extrovert.
“That’s my problem too.” Courtney said.
Jake and I had enjoyed her company as an observer, fueling us with her presence, but she rarely participated with ideas or information. Now it all made sense, and I fell in love with her. I identified with her struggle against herself for happiness, the search for the one thing holding her down, and the month long moment of realization that she seemed to be enduring, where she finally learned what it was she had to do, but was working on the strength to do it. With that identification, I loved her more than I loved myself, and I wanted nothing more than to hold her, show her all that I knew and learn from her all that I could, and we would live forever in peace and happiness. It was that easy, and I was blind to the fact that I’d felt exactly the same sense of destiny and fated love a hundred times before.
The next day, I went and talked to Megan. (was it a day? I got myself to a hotel after all of us agreed we were too exhausted to live, and I refreshed myself for another 48 hour period of wakefullness. With sleeping habits like that, days just don’t mean the same thing). Megan was an acquaintance from Highschool. Way back when I was going to school, I knew she was the kind of person I wanted to associate with, but she always seemed just a little bit beyond me, even though we were the same grade. When I finally had a chance to talk to her, decades of new experiences accumulated over the last couple years helped me be a little more comfortable, and a lot more impressive.
I was so happy by then, just being around her, having been around Jake, having that false connection with Courtney. Megan and I talked like Jake and I talked, only not so furtively, like we had to discover the meaning of life before it was to late. We talked about everything, even the things that didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, because in the end the only important thing is whether or not it’s interesting to both parties in the conversation. It was nice, and though I was happy, I was intelligent enough to decide that, since I had to go back on Sunday, the wise thing to do was to not tell Megan that I identified with her, that she was the reason I had been given life time and again, and that she would be the reason it was taken from me. I just told her it was too bad I was going to have to leave the city in awhile, and reiterated how much fun I’d been having. I did the right thing, though maybe the hug was a bad idea.
More stuff happened in near-chronological order. The fourth of July occurred at least once, complete with fireworks, running through a field of hay, pretending not to be disgusted with people, and finally retreating back to the sanctity of a conversational triad of Jake, myself, and Courtney. My sister also made an appearance, distracting Jake while I could focus on Courtney.
In retrospect, I suppose I could have made my intentions clear from the beginning. To Jake, I mentioned my attraction to Courtney, to which he immediately responded that I could get her if I only worked at it, that it would be a good experience for both of us, and wholesome fun. It seemed like I could will it to happen, like it was something she may already want. But I decided it would be a bad idea for the same reason it would be with Megan, even though I know now that Megan would have been a more desirable choice for me (Though I identified with Courtney’s struggle, I was more at ease with Megan’s victory over herself, and the struggle with life without struggle, and I think Megan was more at ease in general).
At some point, Jake and I became concerned with helping Courtney do what she wanted to do. We knew we were wrong, because the only thing that would work was her own determination. But we thought we might, in some way, be able to help her become the extrovert she’d said she wanted to become.
We both decided that she needed to be driven by anger, that once she was driven to do something she wouldn’t normally do in one area, she would be able to find the energy, passion, or will, to change things she ‘wanted’ to do into things that she ‘needed’ to do and therefore make them things that would happen.
We were all just sitting, staring each other down. I spit a piece of pineapple at Jake, which I’d been sucking on for hours. It stuck to his arm, and he spit a piece of gum at Courtney. On que, Courtney took the gum and put it in her mouth as Jake got the pineapple off his arm and put it in his. It was gross, but not enough. I demonstrated a willingness to do something not quite socially acceptable by dumping a glass of water into my pants. Jake yelled at her to provoke her to anger. He walked out on us. She turned to me.
“I’m just a pussy.” She said, pitifully smiling in self hatred.
“No, you’re not.” Always reassuring.
“I just suck.” She affirmed to herself, “I can’t do anything, even if I want to.”
“Damnit,” I said, and frustrated with her frustration, I poured water on her. Angry at this universally understood insult, she splashed water right back onto me. We left, and she carried a bag of ice, which she flung half-heartedly at Jake. When he mocked her again, she took a metal stick I was carrying and hit him in the leg with it. It was some kind of victory, and it made us happy for a time, drawing us out of a uniquely bad common-mood.
We tried drawing her out, giving her topics that she could rant on, issues that she could enlighten us on, something that we could disagree with and discuss until we found the heart of our disagreement, and finally agreed, such as with the issue of non-representational art.
And so we were in the car, Jake was getting ready to try and sleep off the worst of his withdrawals, and I suggested that if she wanted to be more extroverted, she should just talk about something.
“Okay,” she agreed, “but I need you to at least give me a topic.”
I thought about it. I didn’t want to choose a topic, but I could at least aid in choosing one. That didn’t seem too much like cheating, and didn’t put me on the spot.
“Anything that would normally be awkward,” I suggested, since among the three of us, we were totally open, and awkward supposedly did not exist. Awkward subjects being so often undiscussed, there surely must have been dozens of juicy topics to chose from.
“He wants to have sex with you.” Jake said. He then pulled himself and his sleeping bag onto the roof of the car, and slept.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to have sex with her, so much as I was just very much attracted to her. I was infatuated by her. I would have loved to kiss her and yes, I would have liked to have sex with her, but it was more that I just wanted me and her to be comfortable with acting as comfortable with each other as the feeling of our conversation suggested that we were.
Whatever.
Whatever, because I am too much like a brother for her.
I’ve heard this before, of course. Twice, making her my third Sister/Friend. I don’t want any more sisters. I barely want any more friends. I have Jaci, now, and I would be fine just having a friend that enjoyed talking to Jake and I. But because I had heard the brother thing before, it just seemed unreal. Not having slept since Friday morning, my lack of caffeine that day, and Jake’s assurance that she was attracted to me, led me to believe that I just had to put things a different way. But I didn’t want to push the subject, I didn’t want her to do something she didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to sound pitiful or needy, so I only mentioned it a couple more times, and in my hyper-sleepy state, came off as much more pitiful and needy.
On Sunday, my last day, Courtney did not return my two calls, and I suspect that she talked to Jake about me, (possibly calling me a jackass? Overhearing little bits of someone elses conversation, especially while not intentionally eavesdropping, I probably should forget anything I hear since it’s totally out of context… but I was freaking out about this, this one thing which I tend to freak out about, and I wondered. I still wonder). I asked if I ruined the Me/Jake/Courtney dynamic, and he was pretty sure I had.
I fretted over this, I considered it a big deal, the loss of a good friend. But I’ve lost nothing, I would have gained only more dramatic pain. I drank some alcohol with Jake and walked around Portland waiting for my bus, alone for the first time in what seemed like years.
I had drunken epiphanies which I tried to jot down, but I couldn’t find a pen, paper, or my keys. I couldn’t even sit by anyone interesting enough to share my story with. I was filled with desperation. I called Jaci.
I told her that I now knew I would hurt her as I hurt myself, I knew that if I loved her as much as I thought I did, that if she became more to me than a tool of self destruction as women have always been for me, then I would surely hurt myself by hurting her. I told her that even though I love her so much when I’m on the phone with her and when I’m writing about her, when I’m alone or with Megan or Courtney, all I want is to marry them right away and end this epic drain on my creative energy, or die in a last ditch search for peace. I told her that I very nearly avoided deciding that the separation of genders was the only source of pain for me and by ceasing to acknowledge it and ignoring sexual attraction all together, was the only way for me to find happiness.
Kaytie emailed me while I was away. I think she was the first person to fall in love with me first, an infatuation as complete and idiotic as my “love” of practically any woman with a mind and a pleasant laugh. Jaci’s is more of an informed, critical love, I think; a love that breaks through quotation marks and does not require me on the phone or immediately in mind. I don't know.
I tried figuring out what the meaning of the whole weekend was. I could feel that there was a point, but it was like an arrowhead buried in my chest; I know where it is and how it hurts, but I still can’t really describe it beyond calling it sharp. In the mall, talking to Jake, I decided I should ignore girls altogether, that they are nothing but a tool of self-destruction, but that’s extreme and stupid. The next day I thought that maybe the whole thing just meant that I needed to stop worrying so much about nothing, that it’s just an example of me stressing about the little things.
Drunk with my mom’s alcohol, and depressed with my own repeated failure, I stumbled overdramatically into a Japanese restaurant. When I couldn’t get my parents to Portland to hang out with me while I waited for my bus, and when it was obvious that even the great ‘Jumbalaya’ Jake wasn’t going to turn right around just because I was lonely, I stood up, walked over to the counter, and demanded to be taken to their leader so I could join the Yakuza. The manager came, politely gave me a fortune cookie and asked me to leave. The fortune said Those who understand their folly are wise. I keep trying to understand the meaning of my weekend and my growing cadre of sisters, like Angie and now Courtney, but maybe I’m too close to the issue.
En total, the weekend was a good one, but the bus ride back, alone, wanting so much to talk to a girl I had made laugh while in line to get on the bus, I felt an emotional pain that made me forget about my dislocated shoulder. The bus ride was the punctuation which set the tone for the weekend, turning the moral of the story from “fight on, doomed little bastard” to “feel that rush? Ya only get that with pain or drugs.” I can’t really get more detailed than that.
Whatever.
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
Something is horribly wrong, but all is well. There is some quality in the All of my life that is not right, some kind of problem that sits unsolved among the huge collection of tied up loose ends, and that one problem is breeding more. A major problem, the first spawn of the first problem, is that I don't know what the problem is.
I suspect it's just brain chemicals, of which I have many. Maybe I have too much.
I used to have moodswings that would span the week, the old cycle of hope, worry, despair, perpetuated by Seattle, girls, and caffeine. But I gave up on the wet city when I got my last emotional kick in the head.
I did more than give up, I went and bought a playstation. I turned in all my values, my core beliefes, the practical side of my philosophies, so that I would not have to go through what I had gone through again. I traded despair for constant, mind-numbing, addictive drudgery, and I lost hope in the deal.
But all logic dictates that it shouldn't be a problem, because I found what I'd been looking for since I've been who I am, I found Jaci. Maybe it's the caffeine or maybe it's the brain chemicals, or maybe I should take all the pills I've been told to take, but it hasn't changed much. The moodswings make full circle in the span of a day now, regardless of how good or bad it is. I go from enjoying my job and my workmates and everything, to hating a certain kind of pen (along with everything else) with a passion, having to restrain myself from breaking it.
I'm feeling as weird as I was last year, only without the nifty medications.
Luck, coupled with the wonderfull american hollidays, coupled with time, coupled with my inherant kickassness, has detirmined that I will be able to GET OUT on the afternoon on the 3rd and BE OUT until the very early morning of the 8th. I want to go home, but at the same time I don't. When I left that place, I knew I wouldn't see it again for a long time, and I think I "knew" that for a reason. I may have a chance to force myself into a lot of awkward situations with a good friend and her family in Idaho. That may be a better option than home, where I won't be able to see much of the people I want to see, anyway.
Meanwhile, Jaci.
Sunday, June 30, 2002
But I could be wrong. Somehow, lately, I'm getting the impression that I'm being watched and followed.
Some higher powers have been at work against me for a long time, and I have a feeling that they have a hand in every development in every facet of my life. The miraculous recoveries from near deaths, the calculated timing of alarm clock malfunctions, the reaccuring theme of girls I am interested in turning out to be pregnant just a few weeks after I start making progress. I'm some kind of experiment. I don't think it matters that I know, since I'm writing this and not getting in trouble... I suspect that this site is also part of the experiment.
I think they want to see how I react to certain stressors. When they saw how I adapted to stress at work, they altered my love life, leading me to believe that there was a girl who loved me. When they had her leave me, and it seemed I may adapt even to that, they orchestrated a 'chance' meeting with a girl who just happened to be very interesting, and interested in me, but who just happens to live in another state and never seems quite able to leave. It's all been so very convenient and effective, it would be stupid to assume any other possibility. I detect a level of insincerity in everything everyone says, like they're hiding something. Everyone's always on their toes, always presenting me with a front. And now that guy is back.
This guy, he was shot running from the scene of some kind of crime. He's got a false tooth which he often forgets to put in, and when I met him, he had a tube in his nose which he would connect to an IV bag of liquid food 3 times a day and let it drain gently into his stomach. He's very friendly, but just not someone I want around. He left a few months ago to go to a review board in San Diego, but now he's back. It's all part of some kind of greater plan.
Whatever
I think I'm getting stressed out over a letter I was supposed to write last week but never did. I mean, I wrote it, but it's so fucking overdramatic, I don't know what to do.
Saturday, June 29, 2002
Nice guys do not always finish last, because the smart ones can alter the definition of first. --me
Loyal fans and readers of this great webrealm will surely have noticed a sharp decline in the frequency of posts. I've been distracted. I've been falling in love at least once every two days with a girl who I can't see.
Friday, June 21, 2002
WORK
Copy. Chat. Mostly chat. I've been adopted by a fellow worker. Still no luck in getting to meet her daughters, my new sisters.
Copy. Stop chatting, because one of the volunteers come in. Chat in hushed tones, because the volunteer is a perfect candidate for the Reality TV miniseries "son of rainman." The guy is really nice (especially to the person who isn't really there), wears latex gloves everywhere, and talks at an innapropriate level at all times (especially to the person who isn't really there).
And then this happened (over the course of a couple days. Days don't have much seperation for me anymore, sorry about the confusion.)
INT DAY (DAY BEFORE MEETING)
Hey, I can't go to the meeting tomorrow, I've got the day off.
WORKMATE2
I can't do it if you aren't here, someone has to be here!
ME (the hero)
Have no fear, self congradulatory, 8-hour-a-day-friends! I will attend the department meeting on your behalf!
WORKMATE1
Excelent idea! Address these issues, please
WORKMATE2
it will never work!
INT DAY (MEETING DAY)
...and that's all they wanted me to pass down to you guys.
OTHER WORKMATE (screaming)
May you die a thousand lingering deaths for the catastrophic dishonor you have commited against me, my family, and the spirits of my ancestors!
ME (confused, apologetic, semi-epilectic)
Um, s-sorry.
On an unrelated work note, my the recent 6 month condemnation has been replaced with a more recent 9 to 12 month condemnation. No notes of encouragement are necissary, though. I'm growing to enjoy my job and I'm satisfied with my life as it is. I guess.
END WORK
WEEKEND
Lots and lots of sleep. Didn't even go to Seattle, the last bastion of feedom in the post-apocalyptic water-world that is my life. I stayed home, until about noon, when I went and picked up a suit (a good way to waste a few months pay. I don't need the money for food, anyway) and went to an event.
The event was rife with ceremony, a serving of 'food', and when everything was over and everyone was done getting their powertrip by saying stuff they had someone write for them a month ago, they let the unimportant people, the people almost as unimportant as myself, have fun. There was alcohol and dancing, both of which I regretfully avoided.
At one point I built up the courage to get some of the alcohol, but I got scared away. I was standing there, painfully sober, dressed like satan trying to make a good impression, and I decided I would dance anyway.
It was funny. I stuck in there for 3 songs, just for the attention. I sucked, but it was funny enough to be worth it.
Afterwards we did nothing, but we did it with style.
Then I slept.
END WEEKEND
JACI
She really is leaving her not-quite abusive boyfriend. She is really going to move here. I am really going to see her and hang out with her.
I need to see her because I need someone here, but more importantly because the relationship is deflating, loosing it's passionate shimmer since I've never really liked phones to begin with and that's the only way I know her. On top of that, I'm just running out of things to say, and the bill isn't pretty, either.
A girl I met while dancing was sitting next to me earlier today. She crossed her legs and sat close enough to me in such a way as to make it so some part of her was touching me at all times. The friendly, group-chitchat conversation ended with a final thought on the weather, and we all went our seperate ways, after she gave me her email address. I forgot it promptly.
She told me I'm cute. I looked at her as she was walking away and the only thing I could think of was a long cement staircase. The connection is that their both an important ingrediant for lots of pain, tools of self mutilation.
Jaci better get here soon, for my sake.
