Just Clearing My Head: April 2006

A Shot In The Arm.

Downstairs she sings and it's only occasionally muffled out by the lawnmower leveling the yard across the street and the children who belong to that very yard shouting the cryptic verses to some game that we probably wouldn't understand even if they explained it. It sounds like summer and I think about how if she were still at home I would probably be promising to take her for a drive to see how everything's in bloom. It would seem like a good idea while suggesting it, and the actuality of it would be impossible, an exercise in frustration. I have been trying to shore up my reserves to go and see her, but it has proved difficult. I still haven't made it over.

The burnt eggos are the only beloved memory that I have. I think she hated us when we were kids, I don't know why. I remember how badly I wanted to go to the hospital gift shop with her on her voluteer shift, how each and every single year I was still too young but would be old enough next year. When I was ten I wised up and stopped asking. I remember a family dinner when I was eighteen during which she turned the conversation toward when AJ and I were babies, how we would cry simply to spite her. I have gone over there so many times in the past several months, armed with pictures of bright and cheery things, in the hopes of blowing some of the cobwebs out of her soul. I even took Rugby over a few times. What I've realized is that these visits have always been made out of a sense of duty, and not out of any real kinship or desire to spend time with her. That maybe she thinks the cobwebs are the only thing she has, so why even think of getting rid of them? That is a hard thing to admit, but there it is. I really just don't like her all that much. I feel sorry for her. I think about how much she has tortured my mom since bubba died, and I start to feel a loathing that makes me grit my teeth. After this weekend my jaws are sore. And we're all family, so what the hell can you do? I hope that when we die the truth comes barrelling down at us out of some soft somewhere, so that she can finally understand something, finally give up all of the nagging self conciousness and self pity. So that she can finally maybe legitimately be happy.

A Day In The Life

Classical music. He shakes his ears and we head downstairs in a protest of groans and creaks and snapping joints. The ritual begins and it's out the door for him and coffee for me and a heater plugged into the wall to warm the room and my mood and the somnambulistic journey is near its end and the eight hours ahead of me loom pendulously like a hammer waiting to fall. Waiting to strike. It's who I am right now baby, back to it. Snapped out of those thoughts. The ride over. Back like a ton of bricks but it's morning pleasantries and the same papers begin their cyclic dance in and out and around and over and over again. Adderall. More coffee. Hello, hello, hello. To the end, to the end, to the end.

This route we're on. I'm floating and my drug is thoughts of the future. Lost in the occasional daydream. The question he asked me last week, was he serious? He waited until the edge was off and he asked it four times, all in slightly different ways. And what he proposed and the calculations to it all made me believe that he had been thinking of it for some time indeed. I will journey to the end consumed in sacred ground with you, these footprints we leave like whispers to each other after the lights are off, and a smile, and your warmth, this is the very definition. And I never thought it would sneak up like this.

Yes.

Good so far

evil so far

Hey look, it's me!

Our senior appointment didn't show up so we started screwing around with shit. This was a shot taken with a new soft focus filter that Ryan got for his digital. Kinda kewl. I think it'll make a nice addition to the arsenal, especially for those who like the whole "glamer shotz" thing, (there are a lot of them.)

I can't stop hearing Glen Danzig in my head today. You ever have one of those days when you feel like the blues are just chasing you around? I feel like I can't talk to people. Like there's just some fundamental disconnect. But more than that, I feel like I don't want to talk to people. Like maybe that's the disconnect. Like everyone is normal, and I'm crazy, because I can't dig the whole socializing thing. I mean, everybody says that. Everybody says they feel awkward in social situations and what not. It's not even that I feel awkward. I'm totally fine, I can even have conversations that don't stop and go with halting silences like rush hour traffic. I just hate it, and it bores me, and it exhausts me, and I have absolutely no interest in it. And I don't even operate under some haughty emo idea that everyone else is phony, or uninteresting, or not worth it anyway. I don't know. I have no idea how to elucidate what I mean. I'm just so damn tired of all the words, all of the "hey this is who I am/what I've done/here we are." What is that, anyway? It's good, it's what we should do. What else can you do? How else do you learn about people? I'm just so rat bastardly tired of it all. Of being alive, maybe. But that's not some opaquely veiled reference to a desire to end it all, or something equally romantic. My bones are just tired. Some days it is absolutely hard to be a human being. And that might be something totally singular.

I've been working on sketching a new tattoo, depicting the struggle between good and evil (for my mental state.) It will be a partial sleeve on my left arm. I showed it to Ryan and my supposition was cemented; both of the charicatures looked evil. But that's the thing, everything is everything. Ah, words! These failings of language. So far evil sort of looks like Nosferatu, but Nosferatu has a special place in my heart, so it's not entirely evil. The person/thing representing "good" is some type of angel, although she looks kind of like nosferatu too. But that's just it, entirely. Well, first of all it will be a cold day in hell before I get something like an actual angel tattooed to any part of my body. But there's nothing truely angelic to life anyway, in the haloed virginal cherub reckoning. When I'm low and in the gutter you'd better believe that I want Brody Dalle coming to pick me up, and not a blonde headed junior miss america with a gossamer robe. But what does it all mean, anyway? You can never define anything concretely in all of this craziness, your best friend today is sticking needles in your throat tomorrow and there is wickedness in the heart of every martyr. And so I offer you this page from the diary of a misanthrope.

A wink, and I'm gone.