Friday, August 22, 2014

A Series of Unlikely Events

One was having another grand mal seizure.  This was from drinking.

I had done so well for half a year without drinking.  Then June hit. and everything hit at once, and I didn't care anymore.  I seriously didn't care at all anymore.  I tried to stay on the meds, but why?  We weren't going to be friends again.  When that became obvious even to my thick skull, I just gave up.  I'd lost my job, the one I loved, and all care for the world.  I kept trying to get back on the Zoloft but it didn't feel like before.

I look at my bookshelf that I haven't packed.  I should throw away the Nexus 7 packaging.  Why is it still there?  Sentimental.  Mrs. Peregrine's Home For Peucliar Children... why isn't it sold?  You finished it, I never did.  More and more I think after my cousin comes help move most of my stuff into storage for me, I should give up and move home and get a job at the factory Keith works at. 

Last night, I got a gmail alert.  "Ding."

"Your friend xxxxxx has recommended you for a job..."

And I clicked the link and read about the job.

And for the first time in months, I'm excited.  Years, even.  This job was practically created for me.  My friend knows it.

So I cut short the trip this weekend taking junk home to come back and put together a more appropriate demo.

My head is spinning right now about it.  It is a perfect job for me and my entire life would change.  And best of all, the things in the past would become that... the past.  No longer something I need to drag out of the tide and examine the contents of.

Sure, I'd have to say goodbye to family, but once a year I'd see them.  Besides, I can see what I saw in Dad two years ago in Mom... her age is changing her. I don't want to see that.  Keith will be better at dealing with her.  Heck, he almost talked me into the ambulance.  Just was a tad too mean about it.

Finishing up the demo and crossing my fingers.  Maybe a new life will start soon.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

But they keep dry clicking their revolvers at my head

I should preface this with I do not have suicidal thoughts.

But I do, in fact, think about my death a lot.

For example, if I had a stroke right now, packing shit up and stressing out, if I had a stroke right now, I'd die.  And nobody in the world would care.

My body would lie slumped over this laptop, drooling on the keyboard.  And a stroke would be a horrible way to die alone, being paralyzed and unable to call for help.  And then just knowing my mind would run through all my sins and would focus on myself.

And that's how they'd find me.  My little brother, probably.  Slumped over and half naked and decaying.

And nobody would miss me.  I'm part of nobody's life.  The funeral would be sparse.  Nobody would even leave flowers at my tombstone after the first year.

Makes me wonder why I bother going on.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Monday, August 11, 2014

fucking Robin Williams

I was all prepared to be ashen faced and sad about unemployment and being kicked to the curb yet again by everybody in life and then fucking Robin Williams has to go and kill himself and fuck up my shit.

I remember the Mork & Mindy card game we'd play at Roger Garret's house.  We brought it there for some reason.  Roger never wanted to play it, but he was always wanting to do his own thing (also dead now RIP).  It came with an egg for some reason, which was important to the game... my memory makes me think if you got the egg, you basically won the game.  The game was basically Uno, if I remember correctly.  We only played it because of the Mork connection.

It was Mork & Mindy that made me realize how much I did not like summer.  It was nearly 9 PM and I realized if I didn't go inside I'd miss the show... yet it was still sunlight out!  Fuck that!  Fuck you sunlight!  I'm watching Mork!

In the mid to late 80s, we of course could not afford to buy a VCR, but once in a while I saved up enough from mowing yards to rent one.  One of the first ones we rented was a Robin Williams stand-up hour, cocaine-fueled and high-energy, and pretty damn funny.  I was always good at choosing which movies to rent when we rented a VCR for the night... even now those movies hold up.

And now he's gone.  Mork is gone?  I guess it should have been expected, but honestly, we were expecting a heart attack from cocaine overdose, not suicide.  I guess, most of us, anyway.  The ones with depression probably expected something else.

Just not me.

Valerie

Just had a bit of a meltdown.

I'd put together my new demo and was writing emails for it to send to various folk, and realized I needed a quote from V FOR VENDETTA.  I'd forgotten that the quote wasn't included in the movie, and if I had remembered that anyway, I'd already packed up the novel, but I streamed the movie looking for the quote, and came up on Valerie's Letter.

As far as I am concerned, it is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction, ever.  I totally believed she was in a death camp, like Evey, and that she had written the letter to her just before dying. And when V revealed he hadn't written it, it broke my heart, because I believed that too.

I believed a fiction.  I've never done that.  The characters, so real in my head, how could they not be true?  But they weren't.  They were all just things made up in Alan Moore's demented head.  A head which also devoted over a dozen issues of a brilliant original comic Promethea to explaining all the levels of sex magic, so there's also that to consider.

It is a story of true love.  Valerie will not give up her love, even after being betrayed.  I hate to say it, but I know the feeling.  I reject what people said about him.  I told myself they were trying to console me.  That they were trying to ease my pain.  They did not realize how much it hurt to hear such things... because if what they were saying was true, it meant I was the idiot.  I was the stupid and selfish person, too, waiting in the shadows for a love that would never return.

I don't know who you are. Or whether you're a man or a woman. I may never see you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.


Saturday, August 9, 2014

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank



Memory is not what you think it is.  

We think memory is like a video recording, collecting an exact record of what you saw and felt at the time the memory was created, but it is rarely just that.  It's also a collection of feelings that have changed since then, say towards a person, or desires of when something happened and what you wish had been said, instead of what really happened.  

This is why I always try to record my thoughts, somehow, of events as soon as they have happened, especially if they are important to me.  And even getting them written down, hoping they are unmolested by memory's delusions, they already are before they even leave my fingertips.  

I can say an ex treated me wrong, but there is just as likely a chance I mistreated him in much the same way I'm thinking he did me.  Obvious projection brought on by guilt, with a touch of immaturity... basically, "No I didn't, you did!"  And likely the same thing happens with my ex.  Either of them.

Being part-OCD as well as depression didn't help.  It made matters worse.

But still I look at old entries and I can at least recognize some truths.  I wasn't blind to my own faults... I wanted the people I cared about to recognize there was something wrong with me.  I  think, maybe, if they just said, "You need help," rather than "Stop doing this," that would have maybe been the best medicine.  Because "You need help" implies that they don't want to lose you... "Stop doing this" implies that they'd be glad to abandon you if you don't stop your behavior.

Well, not glad to, but willing to.  

But that's important to remember about memories, especially with people you were once close to.  Whatever drove you apart is likely shaping those memories.  One example is a close friend from back home who suddenly one day asked why I would hang out with my cousin.  At the time, I bristled at the question, and in fact stopped hanging out with that guy afterwards.  It was like he was saying I could do better than my cousin for a friend, and I did not appreciate that at all (he had said the same thing about others in high school, although not to me).

I avoided this friend through the years, which was easy to do as we grew up and apart, although once I started going back home more often over the years, we'd see each other.  One day I was talking about visiting my cousin and he asked how he'd been doing.  We had a good talk about Dave's stint in the army, and how he'd gotten married a few times and had kids.  This friend wasn't putting my cousin down, he just really didn't know anything about him.  

Suddenly I realized that all those years I'd been harboring a grudge based on what I thought was a snide remark the guy made, but he hadn't, it was just curious about my cousin, whom he really didn't know.  And my feelings tempered my memories of what he asked... I had been the asshole all along.

There are relationships I will never repair, partly because of my own stupidity and jealousy, but not just my own feelings.  Our memories are tempered and shaped by other experiences and are an amalgamation of this... knowing this helps, but not always, especially if the relationships are beyond repair.


Thursday, August 7, 2014

Ok that was mean.

I still get bitter, especially when I see things like "A perfect marriage is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other."  Because that's what we did, and we both did it, and it pisses me off to think of it.

We gave up.  You gave up hoping that I would get my act together.  I gave up because you were miserable and I'd rather not have you in my life than know I'm causing that misery.

If we'd tried, talked, we could have made it.  We could have been happy.

Then again I still would have been downsized, so maybe it doesn't matter in the end.  But it feels like it would've.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Muscleboy

...and this is a quote...

"I like  big bears to watch me flex my muscles and talk to me abut my guns and run their hands over them and all over my body then blow me while I flex."

I thanked him for his correspondence and closed the chat, saying I wasn't what he wanted.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

A History of Violence

A gun, in my mouth, and a trigger pulling, blowing out my brains.

That's the image that would haunt me before I got treated for depression.  It would just pop up in times of stress.  I knew something was wrong with me, but because I didn't actually have suicidal tendencies (aside from a few albums) I ignored it.  I thought it was just some kind of coping mechanism, which it was.  

Later, after getting treated, I realized that the gun wasn't in MY mouth.  The image that would flash across my mind didn't have a distinguishable face.  It was a vague picture... just a scene of violence that I wasn't related to.  Eventually I felt it was just a violent thought I had, since I was a pacifist and non-confrontational, but that doesn't mean I think that's the way to live life.  I just ... dunno.  It popped up like that.

That image has long ago faded.  The most recent violent image has been Betty, my car (not White Betty... I mean, we know she's white), being t-boned by a eighteen-wheeler at an intersection.  Again, I am not part of the image:  I'm not in the car, or if I am I do not see it.  I am not injured from the accident.  Just, a trucker t-bones Betty.  Maybe I'm hoping that happens so I can lose the debt of the car, since I'm jobless now.

I've had a brand new one these past few days.  This one, I am actually part of.  My cousin is there.  He is being supportive but I wish he wasn't.  We are in charge of a kid, not either of ours, who is a brat.  The kid shoots me, a wound I know will not be fatal but I still am going WTF KID.  I never see the gun but it shatters my right shoulderblade, almost perfectly into six pieces, except for one sliver.  For some reason that seems important in the vision.

Yeah that's all one image.  

Monday, August 4, 2014

crossposted from fb... Myra Breckenridge

Let me share how I, a guy who had an airshift at a classic rock station, discovered the truth about one of my favorite songs. The movie was MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. 1970, Racquel Welch, John Huston, Rex Reed. Myron (RR's character) undergoes a sex change and becomes Myra (RW), because of course Rex would look like Racquel after gender reassignment with 1970's era surgical technology, why not? Myra goes to Hollywood to take part ownership in her uncle's acting ranch, because those exist. At one point she basically rapes the naive but young southern stud under her tutelage with what I have to assume was a sizeable strap-on.

Yeah at that point I was also wondering why I was still watching it. Still, a product of it's time, strong in a feminism message and sexual identity... sigh. I mean, I guess. The thing is, even what I described was not the traumatic part of watching that movie.

The traumatic part was Mae West, who was still somehow alive at that point (I shouldn't have been surprised... she did "Sextette" with Alice eight years later), playing an acting scout. By which I mean she was some kind of hooker who exchanged acting jobs for sexual favors in her, what I assume was a, smelly office. (Hi Magnum P.I.!) And then she hosts some kind of soiree.. and here the mental anguish began.

And let me point out that at that point in her life, Mae West would have made Joan Rivers look like Anna Kendricks singing "Cups." Back in 1970, plastic surgery was not, apparently, to be taken lightly. So Mae West is *carried* a'la to be sacrificed by the tribe Jessica Lange gets captured by in King Kong (1976) in one of the most racist scenes I've EVER seen, sings a song basically about sexytime, and then breaks out into "Hard To Handle" while a bevy of African-Americans dance behind her, in a manner that was wrong even back then. OH. GOD. THIS HAPPENED. She was like Dolly Imhotep Parton preparing some kind of ritual sacrifice to the Elder Gods to keep herself young. I'm frankly surprised Tom Selleck wasn't wheeled onstage to have his heart cut out so she could bite from it and gain immortaliy.

So yeah, that's how I learned "Hard to Handle" wasn't a Black Crowe's original. Hoping I never find out the origin of "She Talks To Angels." Three tomatoes.

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Guardians


I can't believe how much I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy.

I read the original comic from the 70s, and it was your normal Marvel cosmic stuff.  Way too much exposition, loony characters that made no sense, but very creative.  This new group has nothing to do with that.  It seems based on characters created by Steve Englehart, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Bill Mantlo (ROM) and Keith Giffen, and others (probably Jim Starlin, bleah).  There was no reason to bring these characters, who had nothing in common except for the "Marvel cosmic" imprint together, aside from retaining the trademarks due to inactivity of use.  Which Marvel, like DC, is kind of notorious for... "Oh, I forgot how deadly The Spot could be," exclaimed Spider-man right before knocking him out and leaving him webbed up for the cops.

Anyway.

The movie was absolute fun.  I saw it with my little brother, who was the perfect audience for this movie... no knowledge of previous characters having any at all history in the Marvel Universe... I knew them all.  Star-Lord, a kind of cosmic Indiana Jones... Drax, who was born to kill Thanos... Gamorra, his adopted daughter and lethal assassin... Groot, the Monarch of Planet X... Rocket Raccoon, genetic freak...

(I owned the 1985 mini-series, and long ago sold it, I'm sure... looking at some sites online, that newsstand edition of the mini is worth about $1600 now, before the movie is a hit.  So, yeah.)

But the movie was good.  We laughed a lot.  In the bottom of my heart I knew I wasn't supposed to be watching it with Kelly.  That was a big failing of mine.  I've simply forgotten how to be social, even within work.  In Dallas I would go out all the time.  In Boston, less but at least sometimes I'd hang with friends.  And in Dayton, the one time we decided to go to the movies, The Amazing Spider-Man, with a Wednesday July 4th crowd, I balked when I saw the throng.  Just another thread undone.

Still, I had a good time at the movie and encourage everybody to see it, especially if you know nothing about it.  It works better that way, I think.  But I think the whole Collector thing and post-credits scene will go over most people's heads, although I just have to SPOILERS say, I'm glad they used the Steve Gerber version and not the George Lucas one (although some children of the 80s might argue that point... but they are wrong).

Also I have put on ten pounds this weekend, and this is the most I've eaten in weeks and it still wasn't that much... but I now realize I haven't gone potty since Wednesday.