I remember, back in the summer of 1990 when Nick and I answered a newspaper ad stating, "DO YOU LIKE TO ROCK? COME WORK WITH HE MOST AWESOME PEOPLE AND MAKE up to $100/hr!!"

We get to the office in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, and it's all blinky lights, disco balls and loud, LOUD rock music. Some dude with long blonde hair and wearing a very crisp suit, jacked up on some kind of speed, pops out and says, "DUDES! IT'S TIME TO MAKE YOU RICH!"

What followed was a 2 day seminar on how to sell your shitty shit to people that didn't want your shit. Day 3 we were given cases filled with perfume knock-offs and were told to hit the streets. Literally. Nick and I decided to head down to Miami, Calle Ocho/Little Havana specifically, to peddle our wares. Not the wisest of moves.

We were not very good at the whole perfume vending thing. Imagine a fat and scruffy metalhead kid shambling up to you and saying something along the lines of, "hey lady, wanna smell pretty for cheap?"

After a week of this, together we had sold two bottles of perfume (that was $4 takehome, bitches!) We did receive several trade offers from various prostitutes, which we passed up. The next day, we called it quits and dumped the cases at the office.

The lesson? I am not a salesman.

me: flerp

11:24 PM have you vanished again?

AGAIN!

11:27 PM (he says grudgingly, with a delicate stutter, emphasizing the consonants the way a cow chews its cud, methodically, menacingly, intent on the grinding of all things, much less the cud, into a smooth, digestible paste that is evacuated with ease from a rectum akin to dry and fibrous movements, much like an old grandmother or a sour biscuit or an aged and forgotten symphony.)

10 minutes

11:38 PM me: the hours, the minutes, the seconds all drip drip drip away and there's no one to notice the passage, the staccato loss of immeasurable fluids, into the great dry maw of temporal circumlocution. No one but me, that is. Your status coldy flips, verdigris to ocherous, sick and lonely, indicating your deliberate absence. I sit, awaiting your return. Always, I gaze, always, I gaze, empty and longing for a friend's words, but I have no friend but the despair that lives within the joy of others. I sit, tragically happy in my tragedy fueled recursive despair.

not really. I'ma gonna go eat sum cherreeeeeeez

11:39 PM or not

maybe I'll just *peer*

you: *blink*

soooo new meds are kickass huh?

me: YOU ARE PEERING!

*PEER TO PEER*

11:40 PM new meds

I HAS ON MEDIKAYSHUNZ!

11:41 PM Yeah, it's cool

no death rash (yet)

I promise that if I get to the skin-sloughing stage, I'll get them to save it for you so you can have a tent

made out of me

11:42 PM then you can sleep. inside me. my hollowed out shell. literally

that's going to be A FUCKING SONG

you: *blink*

11:43 PM me: think N'sync: then you can sleep (ooh OOh oh), inside of me (whoa -oh -oh). my ha-allowed out shell..mmmmhmmm..literally

11:44 PM *sways*

you: *snarf*

silver linings

silver linings

these filthy trails leading up cold roads, littered with broken goals, set withered bones aching,
and even though these old bones are only withered in spirit, these old bones certainly are not faking
tomorrow looks as dark as today, and today isn't faring so terribly well.
In the grand scheme of things, things could have been so much better had i not let everything go to hell
So it sits twittering and skittering and flittering in dark passes
revolving and dissolving and evolving into masses
of useless murk and wretched dreams and stinging bees and vile things
nothing is hopeful, nothing is joyful, everything is wasted and nothing at all brings
the slightest glimmer of happiness sits on pale lips
But they are cracked and split form the whipping of whips
and it fails.

They changed you, deranged you, upended and defamed you
and you took it and tasted and tainted and wasted
like a good little boy, who'd done so terribly wrong,
your absence was clear as the clash of a gong
signaling change, signaling newness
but your issues are still issues to which there's no redress
so you flutter and fluster and wring your hands raw
just to come to the same outcome, just as you always saw

now tell me a new one, tell me so brightly
how you've learned to step so lightly
from inches to feet, from strife to life
extracting, replacing, repairing so politely
the damage is done, but the damage is gone
but the sun, the sun, the sun can't be wrong,
illuminating the cracks and filling the spaces
and caring sp gracefully to the gazing faces.

Watch me, and listen and hope is abound.
Break the rules, reject the fools and beat your own path to your own door. Follow your own.

10 years ago today I claimed my independence.
But I did it badly and I hurt you more than necessary and I am so very sorry for that.
Sometimes I wonder where we would be today if I hadn't ended it.
Sometimes I wonder of the effect of solitude on my memory.

Not every moment is missed, but I miss you in moments.

I just can't believe he's dead. It keeps hitting me in waves.

editorial

In some respects, this is becoming more of a traditional blog as opposed to the repository of reluctant writings as was my original intent. I'm not entirely happy with this fact, but I don't have the energy to start yet another blog, and I need to vent this stuff.

I suppose there's no better place than reluctant.

The recent spate of celebrity deaths

While some part of me hopes that this is just a mass Darwinian shedding of useless Western pop culture, making way for a new and enlightened society of thoughtful and intelligent humans, I have to remember that banality keeps our minds from being overtaxed and overheated by the truly mindless day to day psychological trauma that evolution has done a piss poor job of rectifying (stoopit hoomans!). It's either pop culture or giant heat sinks on our foreheads, and I've got a wimpy neck.

Remembering Nick - Part 1

Nick was my best friend in high school. We had a falling out, and hadn't spoken since 1993. I found out recently that he passed away in 2005. It's been 16 years since we've talked, but he's always been a frequent visitor to my thoughts. I want to record here as many memories of him that I can remember.

Nick was my introduction to the world of Metal. In February 1989, within days of us becoming friends, he made me copies of a couple of Metallica tapes. I remember listening to them and thinking, "I have no idea what they're saying, but it's awesome!"

In our senior year of high school, Nick drove me to school every day after I moved to another part of town that took me outside of the range of school buses. He didn't have to. He would greet me every single morning with a "dude, we're gonna be so fucking late". A couple of smokes and a lot of thrash later, we would try sneaking into our 1st period class together (Mass Media). We were lucky to have a teacher who didn't hate us too much.

We used to work on that old green VW Bug of his. The thing barely had a floor. Actually, there was a huge hold in the floor, making for a precarious ride as a passenger (but it tossing cigs easy - poof! right through he floor!)

The car didn't have a stereo, but Nick had this cheap little tape player that we would scream out our metal tapes in. Metallica, Megadeth, SLayer, Anthrax, Testament - these were our staples, our sustenance. Blaring metal up and down the roads of COral Springs, finger-horns pumping, heads banging, lyrics squealed from tobacco tainted throats. We were the prototypical Wayne and Garth years before Wayne and Garth.

Nick and I learned early in our friendship that we were both unrepentant pyromaniacs and would (safely) set fire to things every chance we got.
The Bug requred a few shots of starting fluid to the carburetor to, well, start. This stuff is just pure ether and amazingly flammable. One night, we had the brilliant idea of spraying the bottoms of our shoes and lighting them on fire. Here we are, two crazy bastards dancing in the street, feet aflame, dancing about and leaving a path of fiery footprints behind us.

I would often get out of my last class earlier than Nick. We would all meet by his car: Nick's younger brother, Tony, his girlfriend, Kim and our mutual friend Rene. Oft-times, the car would be nowhere to be found because I would have moved it. I would pick up the car by the back bumper and drag it across the parking lot. I would always be greeted with a huge smile and a, "where's my car, asshole?"

Once when Nick and his brother Tony was over at my house, I was in my mother's room having an argument. When I came back to my room, the guys had taken all the crap on my floor and arranged it into a giant pentagram. This is why we were best friends. I forgot all about the argument, and we headed out to rock the streets.

notes

There is an afterlife. Each memory recalled spawns an entirely new lifespan and you exist withan that bubble of thought. Life is just a conglomeration of bubbles of thought.

To achieve immortality, live well enough to be remembered well.

Rainy day rambling from inconvient spaces

Burning is just a momentary feeling. You play you pay, that's just how
it goes, but the difficulty lies in choosing the games properly.

My games are the wrong games.

notes

Nihilism belongs to the animals. I'm not a true nihilist; I believe that a momentary value structure is critical to the progress of a species, even if that progress is only towards nothingness. We're aware of the content and condition of moments, so we need to assign them some positive value, otherwise, we're just caught in the nihilistic animalism of existing rather than experience moments and living. We are alive and we breathe in moments and exhale experience.

That said, we're still next to nothing when compared with just about anything else. But the fact that we CAN know that is awesome.

Wrapping myself in old, faded photographs, newly retouched and brightened, like a flag, like a blanket warming in the chill emptiness of time.
Threadbare, worn, I find new stitching and follow the flow

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in the sun on the lawn
Scully and the Tropicana cap
Snowball attack
The guilt associated with burning an ant with a magnifying glass
Ronald's dad, Evel Knevel and that motherfucking leather belt across our backs
Sunflowers
Showing Cheryl my weiner in 3rd grade
My mother dragging me to the car telling me that she's giving me up for adoption after CHeryl's sister tells my mom about the weiner incident
Cheryl kissing me on my 7th birthday
MS and the potato chip binge

Waking to your golden fields, too late for second chances,
clenching fists and eyes tightly shut, to preserve stolen glances,
etched into memory and found buried, as unsavory ivory carvings, the happenstance was horrific, but the deep result stains the present, and it cannot be transferred or sold, my little illicit idol in a land of no graven images.
I'll keep it, painful and troublesome as it may be. The currency that defines its value exists only in the countries of my heart, and while you are still legal tender here, counterfeiting is not a crime.

Delving into the long past with a scrutinizing eye

An accounting of the deep days of youth, a temporal, memorial and emotional sudoku; random moments defined by random moments and the challenge is to correlate, contextualize and find the defining strain that connects all points.

The odor of burnt hot dogs.
A campfire, tinfoil pouch, filled with vegetables and butter.
The Mighty Mouse bus
The computer and the red book with the black spine
The video camera that would be blinded by the light (Jennifer Clooney and I?)
Penny Baer for president.
The rooves and the nails and the falling
Chased by skeletons when taking out the trash
THE BULLDOZER and the moped
cinnamon toothpicks
erasers on skin
Dragonflies and rainbows


to be continued..

It's quickly approaching 4am and the open bedroom window beckons the sulking, staccato light from the mildly dysfunctional solitary streetlamp on the corner (with whom I half-halfheartedly commiserate; I'm feeling rather lonesome, dim and blinky myself, at the moment. You and me, Sr. Lamppost, poor us.). I am trapped in the waking world and visions of night's rest are but a bleak and tortured landscape.

O, deepest night, I pray you claim me before you've lost your grasp on the sky for the Sun is a brutal master, and while I will normally eagerly submit to its deliciously vicious lash, I fear to face that blazing flogging without a modicum of rest.

The rain's indecisive patter and the chill and moist wind come so close to lulling me into sweet beta wave machinations, but each moment I drift closer to my own internal, eternal sleep, I am jostled by deep rumblings of respiratory protest, screamed from tattered lungs, reflected by flooded sinuses, careening through the pulsing arch of pustular tonsils and tearing past lips worn from tissue's janitorial kiss.

Goddamned lungmonkeys. Tonight, you will have your way with me, but the morrow holds your suffering. Seriously. Tomorrow I Nyquil your asses back to the monolith.

Fondness makes the heart grow distant

Crazy

The worst curse is to be crazy and know it. It's not just watching the slow descent into madness, it's drowning in it, sucking it into your lungs, letting it overcome you, all the while, watching from a distance, the faithful observer, desperately scribbling in his journal, hoping to discover some clue as to how to out him out of the muck. But looking down at the paper, you realize that the pages are drenched and the ink is smudged because that drowning man is you. And you panic, and flail and sink even deeper. All the while, watching from a distance is the faithful observer, ad infinitum. Not even Ourobourus had it this bad.

Plumbing the depths, deeper and deeper I descend into the well, feet first and never touching a bottom that I know will chill me, numb me and siphon off every last bit of me that is me, so I claw at the walls, desperately trying to keep from reaching that bottomless end, but I'm not trying hard enough or even trying at all. Not me. This is not me.

When a star goes nova, it ceases to be the concept of a star, its existence continuing as constituent particles, now individualized to purpose.
When a person dies, they cease to be the concept of a human.

I am disappointed in the very nature of existence.

misremebered K

your mouth has lived far too long within me.
my lip stained blood quickens when I think,
boils when I remember, and cools when I'm longing.
Your eyes still reach for me, if only in my head. I saw such wonder, but so quickly they turned to a prison, containing me in your verdigrised irises.
I made no conscious choice; the heart has its own volatile volition. and the heart caused suffering.

And we died together, by inches, our legs untangling, our fingers falling loose, our eyes drifting until we said goodbye, and even one last kiss had no resuscitative power.
But I remember how your lips stained my blood, even though that old blood has long been washed away.

notes

(when things become as they are, it's like seeing through an oily lens. every process slows. my thoughts creep; i can almost feel the neurons struggling down their pathways, as if the dendrites have gone limp and the core struggles by will alone (but the neurons ARE the will, so there's nothing but pure chemistry to convey them along, anyway, so it's a futile and fruitless game trying to anthropomorphousize my brain cells))

(I need to swim out from under this weight(in all dimensions)) else I'll be trapped again and fall deeper. Again. I cannot allow that.)

Despair is as fleeting as joy,
the trick is to remember that it can only sting for so long
and to forget that it only feels good for so long.

failure is a tool

staccato bursts of unanswered questions swirling through my cavernous and hollow head, each fly looking for some sugar to consume, to feed and grow upon, but the flies lie still and starve; there's no sustenance in the cerebral death valley. It takes more than supply drops, the entire ecosystem needs revamping.
These once fertile fields have been laid to waste by the decay of unused ability. The ground has lay fallow for too long, you can sow no seeds, but there is nowhere to go, and sitting and starving is growing so old.
But this emotional and psychological decay, this mind death serves more than just as a venue of sorrow, it feeds the humus, and the fields, if tended correctly, will become fertile again.

the echoes ringing through the hollow man are attenuated by the viscosity of his flailing and failing emotions,
a bitter brew, seething and simmering, a demi-glace of despair and desperation,
but even this ichor, when held to the sun, refracts the light,
and even from the bottom of the pan,
hope is visible,
even if that star is but a bitter memory.

the old days were the gold days

i'm no seer, no scryer, peering into murk, fishing for the future, prying into the dark with heavily gloved fingers, straining for impossibly transferable detail, but i am an invader, a sapper, tunneling beneath you, desperate to penetrate, willfully encroaching upon your sacred grounds, skulking about, after your treasure, knowing full well that all of your jewels are but reflections, waiting to be disturbed so as to ripple away.
My lack of foresight tells me that every thing turns out with the idiot grin and the blank, doe stare and the vacuous laugh and the hollow ringing of your heart, and my lack of foresight shows me that I can get deep inside and stay awhile, becoming a prisoner to your platitudes, becoming dependant on your spoiled milk because I will eventually lose the taste for clean and healthy living.
In the end it will all have been worth it; it's another lesson learned, another chapter scrawled in my bloody ink into my dark codex, forever locked away and forever remembered.

until the next time.

madness seeps into the concrete sidewalk,
pathways saturated with tears and fears that make the surface
slick and unmanageable.
Somehow, we'll make it through,
but every eye and every mote goes unnoticed until tread upon
so cruelly.
I pray that today you wear your comfy slippers,
as I'm on the verge and the cracks are showing,
and my humors are weeping and seeping away,
word by word and drop by drop

my skin, my skin, is sinking in
and revealing the flesh and exposing the sin
that doesn't exist, not without but within
this sacred temple, behind this wicked grin,
not of joy, but the rictus of my chagrin,
i'm losing ground and starting to drown
but I am satisfied with the fact that there's no thorns and no crown.

this is exposed like a peel not a wound, to be consumed rather than abused.