Now THAT was one strong Thumb!

Okay, first of all I’m supposed to be inside the Placebo show and NOT here…where I am. It’s stupid really. I’m really starting to drift over from the steppes into the Crazy tundra! I’m running out of options here…more so, I’m running out of understanding.

Okay secondly, maybe I’m old or something but the opening act, Evaline, is it so wrong to want to see a band where the lead singer/electronic-cellist/xylophonist isn’t so messed up [read: fucked up] that the only time he could stand up is when he was standing on his mondo-huge Yamaha keyboard!? And seriously, if incoherent—or at best, innocuous—muffled-mumbling was a vocal styling than this guy was at the top of his craft. But seriously, unless he was seriously hypoglycemic and his pancreas was on hold with the IT-desk than please, have a cup of coffee and deal with it and come out and present your music—you are NOT Iggy Pop and your Edie Brickell-like, drum-/hakey-sack circle, dance styling looked a bit like something out of an mandatory AA entrance exam. Yeah, you’re right: I am old. Anyway, back to being “crazy”.

So, I’m not going to detail the method in which my crazy decided to manifest but suffice to say, there I was standing against a steel, cylindrical support beam with a visage of external absence and a cauldron of anguish boiling on the inside. So I was standing there and despite my previous declaration that crying wouldn’t due my current station any assistance, I found myself struggling to keep the ascending sorrow at bay and after the final tolerable swell passed, a rogue-wave crashed against me and I realized that I had spend at least five minutes shut off from the music—I just left, I had to. I was well passed joyless and it became obvious that I had subsequently crossed over into a haunted domicile. Just prior to the squall, I had found myself arranging a plan of resistance—if somewhat passive in nature—that was mortared in an exercise of patient disregard or civil-disobedience for the sulking albatross that had become this existentialist life I had so quietly, though aggressively, chosen. But it all was taken down like a doe-eyed seal-pup in the fixed-gaze torpor beneath the abject club soon to be smashing against my skull; as if all I had was a pleading look of reprieve—of lame desperation—it fell upon deaf eyes and a muted grace.

I was once become the most cunning of liars: I could display the most balletic of smiles—cheshired and hypnotic—all while I was walking tip-toed in the wet-dream sludge of a baneful fantasy, dripping warmly with the iridescent milk of my own conclusion. (I once proudly included the addendum to my hanging attempt, that I went to work the very next day--as if there was a choice--to no one’s notice of a presence of difference.) Now, I’ve somehow become a maudlin sanctuary for my own dreary devices. My eyes--if not washed in a brushstroke of a crestfallen grey—are glistened to a tearing azure. The sadness hangs like a stag’s head on a game-hunter’s wall (though happily unadorned with confetti & a birthday hat!)

I’m like an acquiescent man with a testicle pummeled by the thumb of a drunk, laughing god, which the man himself does not believe in. Maybe my sin is that I struggle: like there is a protohumanistic instinct in me that compels me to flop around like a bluegill on the bottom of a fishing boat, wired with the belief that if I flop hard enough that I’ll get out alive…

The concerts over now—seems though it has been because I see people that I saw inside the show. They’re smiling; it must have been a good show…unless they know how to lie like I did? No…I can spot that lie. They’re smiling for real if for no other reason than they were able to let the music in and escape whatever traps had been laid at their feet. These two wear their sadness on their garments and despite whatever internal suffering they wear like plumage, they still had fun.

So what’s wrong with me then…? Never mind, that was a rhetorical question. If you knew what I know than you’d know.

I wish I never knew…

“I felt a shock, it went through every limb! A chair! I’m fainting! All things swim!”

– from Faust by Goethe

A Life Lesson for the Inept (meaning me)

There are no do-overs. You have to know that before you learn that or it will just gut you like a barbecue sow!

Let’s try some math: If you spend your childhood enjoying life and then your Twenties trying desperately to end it and then you try to use your Thirties (futilely) hoping to undo what You yourself did…well, I can tell you—without the use of a calculator—that the answer is unequivocally, ZERO. That’s when the epiphany hits you like an unloved stepfather: You have wasted your life. (And this is why I had word-problems in school!)

Wait let me go back quickly to my twenties: It was a simple time. Well, it was for about 20-some hours before I lost my dad to diabetes (and his poor diet management). Simple enough—he was bleeding every ounce of esteem out of my already butchered chance for a discernible sense of accomplishment or manhood; he was a glacier that was carving me into a milquetoast fjord of a man. But that’s not what was the rust in me; no, that had already begun to grow. What started out at as a simple paternal anxiety burst into a cacophony of bison hooves powering their way into a fatal oblivion. Such was the dawn of my twenties and what started out back at seventeen as a earnest attempt to flee the wrath of my father evolved into a black leviathan of suffocating hurt. For that beast I cried; I bled myself—which turned into a parade of endorphins, emotional pain-satiation via physical pain inducement; then I downed pills (or tried to swallow too-many); I spun the barrel of a .38 to which, that battle was “won”/”lost”(depending on which odds Vegas would have put down); finally…in 1996 for a few (eternal) seconds on an August evening, I dangled below the strong arm of a willow-tree when then, the gravy-thick cough of desperation sibilated and spattered up from my clothes-line entangled neck. Much to my languor-laden mind my left-foot, with a thwarting sentience lifted my remaining hull from the near-profiting leviathan. I willfully complied even as tears bleated down my face like sheep ravaged by coyotes during the night. I walked slowly back to my apartment in utter dejection, knowing all too well that it was my last chance to go…at the very least, to leave on my own accord. I now belonged to my life and it would never be the other way around again.

In the years following, it became clear to me (in abundance) what true corrosion had taken place. When you spend the better part of your days (as well as the entire meat of your nights) waiting, planning…hoping to die, you unknowingly override and disconnect some of the oldest wiring to have been comprised in living beings: the will to live. As far as I’ve been able to tell, unlike the stray pet that returns a decade later from working in a deli in Boca Raton, you never get it back. So, I’m now well into my thirties and I cannot find a place to live in my life. And it’s getting darker and darker. There is no longer a leviathan lurking like some Lovecraftian colossus in the depths of me. No, because I’ve become it. I am the Kraken.

And so I go about my life and I let love come and go because I know two things: I know that I’ll never be what they need me to be and I don’t know what I going to be able to be. One of the fascinating side-effects from all this is that, like with passion, pain brings a great wealth of creativity to me. I can feel it inside my chest when I sleep (if I can sleep). Its there and it’s wonderful! It better than having a woman in your bed because, though like a woman it often waits for you to reach over and put your fingers…put yourself…wholly inside of her—finding all the energy stuck inside and pulling it out into the world with a cathartic delight—but unlike someone you love, this feeling cannot reject you (for whatever reason)…it cannot be disappointed by you and your seemingly endless cavern of flaws, idiosyncrasies, or your stalwart immaturity. No, creativity is a lot like the semblance of a male fantasy: the woman who desires sex, who not only loves a minute assortment of the things that a man loves but finds no flaw in him liking the remaining oddities. [And I’m not talking about things like midget porn or other sexual deviations, hobbies or future Jon Waters film, however tolerable or legal] It’s the fantasy of being more than tolerated or having to pin a medal on someone because they have the messianic ability to overlook who you really are. But though Creativity--my sole mistress—is there beside me, my mind is broken and scattered like a chattering of starlings playing a game of freeze-tag; I cannot find a fluid focus nor a paved pathway allowing me the meager scraps of living that I’m supposed to subsist on.

I know, in essence that I died ten years ago. I felt its absence that night in August and I feel it to this day--ad nauseam. I call feel it when I wake up, when I talk to a beautiful woman; when I walk the remaining steps to work…I can feel it without pause, without silence. I am dead.

So my struggle this day (and will be tomorrow) is not living because I know that I no longer have a choice; my immortality is a sentence that has been handed down (however unjustly) to me. My wretched anguish is not that I will be alone: I know that (as long as women love passion) I will love—and be loved--many times over, though letting every one of them go; I can’t hold on any longer, nor should I…If I love them at all, I have to just let them go. The hurt is not from never being what I could have become because if I spent a moment considering that, I would surely be crushed. See, my ire comes but from one place: this fermented, fractured and filigree mind that I have. I cannot retain focus for even the tiniest of things and I cannot hold the line to my most desperate passions; the most enduring comforts hanging from my bough are tossed like leaves out of the ass of a diarrheic autumn.

So now, I'm like paralyzed flotsam and I can't find the direction of the sun. My Hope is being nibbled away like nigh-dozen toes dangling beneath the surface winto a cold lake and as well, my smile is peeling off, not even making an effort to hold on, as it relinquishes itself into the breeze. Perhaps the vestiges of Hope that are still clamouring around inside of me like ferreting organisms in a petri-dish are what will finally sneak some clandestine disease inside and then the rakes in my sundered fossil of a soul will finally pick through my gristle and guts and when they have finished gorging on my gravamen they will shit where I lay and leave me to finish feeding the flies, the worms and finally, in a fate to befit Carl Sandburg, the grass itself.

So now I am a prisoner to “in the meantime”. What do you do in the meantime when an errant bus will not kill you and a suitable affliction cannot find you? Well, I guess you go see Placebo tomorrow; you work on your tattoo sleeve; you go to work—though trying harding to be there “on time”; you work on acquiring a few future ex-girlfriends; you plan a trip to Seattle to see baseball game on your birthday (Go Twins!!). Mostly, you look in the mirror and you smile at the fucker on the other side: he’s the one that did this to you. His ineptness cost you so much promise and it cost you your salvation. And as bad as you want to just cry, you know that it’s not an option. You know that it’ll do no good because you’ll just have to wake up the next day and you’ll know that you were that much weaker than you were the day you didn’t cry.

I know that I’ll never be better. I know that I’ll just pack a lunch and to whatever Acolyte-fucker is up there enjoying this, I’ll show up for this game and when I get my chance, I’ll kick him in the chin and say thanks for the living!

The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever. - Herb Caen

Never open with a "dick" joke

"She met this man with a Cheshire grin
Whose heart was golden and his hands were thin
He was the most beautiful thing in her world

But she cried I don't love you"
- "Love Song" - Died Pretty

Today is a numb day. My head is clouded though only by vapour. There's no phalanx of hate and hurt shoving its way to the foreground; though, without the pain the words are more elusive, like a forest denizen sulking beneath the porch of his forest enclave...next to the dog, dying of heatstroke.

I don't know where this is going to go and I don't know how this is going to go. Maybe it'll be honest and maybe it'll protect the names of the innocent. Maybe I'll forget that I even have it and never write.

Anyway. This is the first entry; it's not meant to be a barometer of things to come. I don't even know what it means.

"...Is this your goal, your final needs,
Where dogs and vultures eat,
Committed still I turn to go. "
- A Means to an End - Joy Division