Little Less than Drunk

I take society's rules and fuck them just like I will you after some moderately priced white wine at Applebee's. I'll take you there and wow you about sports only seen on ESPN3 and quote the more obscure Will Ferrell oeuvre. Some people search for that spark, well baby I'm the Chicago Fire, shrouded in mystery and out of control for a while. Just call me Trailer Park and Ride.

Saying that you are mourning yourself, your life, your decisions, seems almost like a ridiculous summary of a derivative film at this point. The polarity of death and life; a meaningful life outside of financial responsibility and on to the more tenuous and ambiguous nature of good or spiritual depth begins to seem like a folie a deux between a person and their fictional creator. To say you are only close to someone when you are hundreds of miles away lends a certain adolescent romance to our rapidly expanding remembrance of things distorted. And I dont know what else to expect from myself, a mere spectator in a deteriorating locale, the lone tourist in a burning building. A sense of urgency has never been a virtue of mine. I let things marinate until I am ready to discard or immolate them. The people I care about seem further and further away on this fanciful desert island of correspondence. This life of mere adequacy peppered with the unstable and the unattainable serves for a skewed road map to a destination I am not sure I want to visit, let alone surpass. I just want something to fill the years instead of quicksand and bursts of clarity before a stupor takes over and I forget everything I used to want.

A Town in the Distance

Farewells are in order.

A town that evoked Peter Pans and existential fans deserves a proper goodbye. A shack where cards were dealt and egos were dealt with. The fear was all around us, the loathing in the mirror. All the characters we met, invented, insulted, I thought I would make them a typewriter graveyard. You stole a dead woman's diary, and her blue dishes next door. We smoked to kill the time; to watch it leave with the smoke and the daylight. While you rarely listened, when you appeared with a Tarot card tattooed on your chest, I supposed I was somewhere in the ink. We were a treasury minting phrases and memes.

The sweat, the bikes, the whiskey, the smokes. We lived well. We observed the strange and the sycophantic. We committed crimes. Switchblades, narcotics, psychotics, the absurd panorama of the fore-granted, the theatrical and the fleeting. LSD, christmas lights, foursquare, beer by the case, piss, public pools, parents, parties, perversion. Each one deserving their own eulogy, let's call it a mass grave. Let's call it a pizza. Let's call it even. All of us were present, all of us gifted.

Sad to see the giant tranny who loved Electric Feel and Edie Sedgwick's wardrobe go. Sad to drink coffee alone. Can do without the sweaty scene hangouts with the accompanying photography, the Hep C positive guy who smoked crack on our porch, the bottom rung of bureaucratic employment. Will drink to the architects of this emotional fallout shelter, the shrapnel still on the battlefield.

This was the year of upheaval. There were the years of deconstruction both academic and personal. When you get your cliche card punched by the avant-gardians of a de rigueur aesthetic. Days that passed too quickly in a vacuum. The seal broken, out in the world we traveled. I told you once of a train that was leaving, where would you be when it stopped. Maybe our relationship was like gravity, this shared belief to keep things moving. Entropy is my new reality these days.

This was the year I would call the worst one yet. You were going to be the non-denominational version of a rehabilitation center for my attitude, and my ego. I thought I would grow and thrive, help you feel alive. For years now we have been passing cars on a one way street. Where are we going? It's been six years since we went our pilgrimage west. Our defining weekend, our shared zenith. I stared at a moon glazed in ale, at a night still and pale.

This was the year of it's not you, it's me. It is actually more minute and boring than that. It's now the year of knowing what I want, and knowing it isn't going to be easy. A new way to fail perhaps, but success has a way of surprising you. Our values were always different. I know I was your version of teenage rebellion. Your parents didnt like me. I didnt like anything.

We don't fit anymore. We can give this a stay of execution, but the outcome is going to be the same regardless. There is no governor to pardon this, there is no one who would want to.

Never look back.

It's a Sad Salvation

I was listening to Sufjan Stevens' "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." recently. I hadn't listened to it in a while, because it is disturbing, like Tori Amos' song about rape. But hearing it again, I thought back to the first time I heard it and I could remember it well. It is in a rental car in Seattle, on a quest to find Lake Washington and the greenhouse where Kurt Cobain took his life. I was so freaked out hearing that song on the radio, but also impressed. Growing up in a training wheels town, Seattle was the first place I saw where all the small town "artists", misfits, intellectuals, addicts with vision, can go. These big cities filled with soy drinks and literate cyclists. We all get to an age where we decide if we care more about safe schools or decriminalized drugs, or both I guess. A town where they show Almodovar and Waters for midnight shows.

You dont get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate

I watched Cecil B Demented, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Kissing Jessica Stein while drinking some Christmas tequila. It was really nice. This roommate thing is starting to feel like a 1950s divorce and it makes me think what if there was nothing there to begin with. I suppose this is the new found marathon viewing sessions. I'm going to make a picnic tomorrow and enjoy this weather and away from the never-ending Netflix queue of distraction from reality. In all likelihood, it will either rain, or I will be attacked by pelicans/mosquitos/the elderly.

Simplicity

Reading a short story, drinking a dirty chai, thinking about rights: personal, reproductive, Constitutional. I hate(d) my parents, say the f word way too much. I write letters to the past and have no hope for the future. I love my friends, my books, my solitude. Trying to fuck life into a cliche, not to let irony kill me. With too much time getting away from me, I have less and less to say. The form is taking and I am trying to fill up pages with characters and stories. I've learned a lot. I know nothing. They say the best way to find something is to stop looking, so is the best way to love something to stop caring?

Still a sucker for a big nose, long trench coat and a government paycheck.

Strange

I was typing in my blog address and 1st Internet Church came up. Which is strange because I was going to blog about religiousness and free will anyway. The nature and burden of choice, personal responsibility and cultural influences. I know, that shit sounds boring, but it was motivated by my roommate sounding like a neoconservative asshole last night and my head refusing to explode at the right time. And then my sister confessed she wanted to try to raise her kids with Jesus in their life. Um what... I thought my cool atheist punk rock influence would prevent this, but alas, no. I mean they have their whole lives to feel guilty and terrible about being alive, masturbating, falling in love. It is hard to keep up with the separation of dogma and fanaticism, so why taint a perfectly beautiful child with that? Granted, there could be a nice way to explain the atrocities of the Bible, I myself had a Children's version of the Bible and see how I turned out. I know the prayers to St. Francis, Serenity, Nicene Creed, Apostle's Creed, etc. I am just really irritated right now by Jeff and his bullshit Machiavellian economic endgame and his strong arm rhetoric. People are defined by choices, but don't bemoan being a white upper middle class male. You have everything and you don't have to make hard decisions.