antilifequation

"she couldn't have just been a machine. could you love a machine?"

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:54:02 GMT

i'm putting a lot of thought into "resolving" to combat at least one of what i consider to be a crime of heinous nature while in costume this year. if it looks like i could fail, i may use the jewish or chinese new year. i'll look them up later. a gesture as dramatic as a new year's resolution seems appropriate; my internal level of personal drama has been particularly high lately. it doesn't reach far beyond the confines of my mind and person but that's enough to make me feel kinda dumb. i've felt on the verge of breakdown over the smallest of things, even going so far as to avoid the internet for fear of having to facelessly interact with people i know, people whose opinions i must have imagined could reach out and rend me asunder. petty and silly. i should quit doing that. i've wanted to talk about comics with nathaniel and missed an opportunity to do so by a full week. so then, nathaniel, i couldn't say why i've missed you. i've been nervous and somewhat indiligent about charging my cell if that's the number you've been trying. i'll call you tomorrow. later today, rather.
i have a number of things to feel good about: my car's fixed, i'm going to suffer the indignity of looking for work this week, and the aforementioned indignity will be less painful because jenn is coming with me. if i can keep myself out of the house and paid, i stand a much better chance of not continuing to hurt myself. i don't mean mutilation because i've only had one slip in ages. i'd just rather not live so anonymously and for such small things. but if i fail and don't have anything, jenn will always be able to keep me from turning to dust if i can at least attempt conversation. and the only person who was ever in love with me is probably moving back to the carolinas soon. that's another thing to make me not feel so fractured and far-flung. and i highly doubt that swear words or parliament cigarettes are going anywhere fast. i didn't even realize it until just now but the nasty, sweaty spectre of 2008 feels like it's getting further and further behind me. there is distance between me and the ugly, shallow, selfish things i said and did. it was a banner year for badness but it's really and truly in the past and it can't reach out to hurt me any more than i let it. there are fences between us now. if i do so good, i'll just pretend it never happened and risk the ignorance leading to the same old mistakes.

you're betraying me now even as we are talking.

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:26:42 GMT

freedom from this unbearable, unbelievable capacity fo mine for fucking up adn talking too long. that's what i want. my primary concern is to never let anyone i care about feel mad, sad, uncomfortable, or hurt over something i said or did. i strive so hard for this, SO HARD. it means everything to me. but i slip up and ramble too long and, despite my inetlligence, the cues to shut my cursed mouth don't ring in turn for me until i'm dug in and hating myself. i started sobbing as soon as i sat down in my car and i was sort of grateful to myself that i was able to contain it for that long. my whole body was wracked and i shook and cried for 15 minutes of my 25 minutes home. i feel so small and ashamed and i can't forgive myself for it i saw what it looked like for someone to feel disappointed in and angry with me. i stuttered and made very tepid eye contact and wrung my hands and pulled out clumps of hair i couldn't hold it all in.

loneliness+alienation+fear+despair+self worth÷mockery÷condemnation÷misunderstanding×guilt×shame×

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 08:19:55 GMT

failure×judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side

i broke a bunch of plates at my house over not having a car to drive. it was dumb but my list of things i want to take back is already full so i'll live with it. i wonder, i wonder a lot about the final days or hours or moments of life. i was pretty sure i was dead the other night in a car, on a street, seated beside somebody i love. i thought about kat's knotty tummy-feeling that something bad was gonna happen to someone and then i was scared and then my mind went blank and then it came back. and i keep thinking about despair vs. satisfaction, the point in an elderly or otherwise dying person's life when they either look back with appreciation on all that they have learned and experienced or freak out thinking "holy fuck, i wasted my life!". because i have learned but not grown and observed but not participated and it's really got me at a crossroads or breaking point or some such thing. i don't so much have a life. i have some shred of a family and i have a scattered handful of really good friends and i have love in my life but living has started to remind me of all of my action figures and statues on the shelves and dusty: an impractical collection of things that i can't really use. i don't talk to a close friend, to my oldest friend, anymore because he's mad that i won't toss aside someone i love as a misguided show of loyalty to him. i already let some grubby little fingers worm their manipulative way into that relationship once and it was unpleasant. she gives me something i don't find in other people and so did he once, something more even than a connection to the past 11-12 years of my life. and there were rifts there that, yeah i could have prevented, but we just took our months apart and didn't mention it and i own my parts in being a shitty friend but man, i bit my tongue a lot of times, too. a shift from third-person to second-person seems apparent and inevitable so: why did you always push me to be someone i wasn't anymore? i'm glad i have these years and years of friendship to look back on, it's more than i have with anyone, but you always reminisced about how cool i was back then as though i had lost some vital part that was the whole reason you loved me in the first place. i wasn't cool in high school, man. i was sexist, immature, discourteous, bitter, socially inept, and miserable to be around. i know that i haven't conquered all of those things fully yet but some of them i have and others i've made great strides toward and i always wanted so bad for you to acknowledge it but you didn't and it left me feeling not good enough. i still don't know if it's because you haven't changed that much or because i haven't changed as much as i think. you say these things in public sometimes, totally out of the blue, like "hey pat, remember how emotionally abusive you were to your girls back in high school?" WHOA. the tone in which it's said is an amused irreverence, a not-quite-begrudging-enough respect. firstly, i have to disagree with that summation of events but let me also state that, even if accurate, that is something that should not be really be referenced in polite or impolite company. i had some pretty fucked-up "relationships" in high school and for all of my adult life. and i'm not exhibiting classic abuser symptoms in avowing that no, i was not abusive. the relationships i've had have been fucked up on both ends. i've never gone out of my way to degrade some poor girl as a show of my machismo and dominance, it's been more like me and some chick kept doing bad shit and saying bad shit to each other in an ever-escalating struggle to piss the other off enough to drive them away. the dynamic has deviated slightly over the years and there have been subtly nuanced changes but that's the basic gist of it. it's not been one-sided in any event and has really typically been a case of two bored, frustrated people taking out their frustrations on each other. not unlike most relationships i see, unfortunately. but however we differ in our view of those things, i have to say that i don't think you should look at my romantic failings as something humorous or even worthy of being brought up, unless it's between the two of us. another one you've brought up a bunch is some story, which i honestly don't remember but i'll have to take your word for, about me peeing in a drinking glass and then pouring it out and putting it back into the kitchen cabinet as some grotesque pee-tasting trap for my parents. i apologize to the world if i really did that but what in the wide world could have driven you to have shared that story ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS and TO GIRLS THAT I HAD JUST MET AND/OR WAS OBVIOUSLY INTERESTED IN? i feel like i'm coming off as bitter and angry and lavishing some attempt to take shots at you, sean northington (i'm growing weary of subtext and implied meaning, you've gotta understand), but i'm not. there are just these glaringly obvious things that i always felt like you should have seen and didn't and the silence just festered and i held it in because, for me, that's what you do for your friends. you hold some things in and let them slide because that's who they are and you expect that they must do the same for you at some point or another. i just don't feel like you ever did that for me. when you get a thorn in your paw about something, even unrelated to me, i know about it because you're snippy and sometimes you're mean and insensitive about what you say. that's something that everybody does but i try SO HARD not to ever hurt people with what i say. i really do. when i slip up, even if i feel like i unintentionally said something that could be taken contrary to how i meant it, i agonize about it for DAYS. i can't really come up with so many examples and i don't need to, this isn't a laundry list of my perception of your failings, nor is it a to-do list of things for you to change. maybe you won't ever talk to me again so who needs to change then? but let's just say like maybe last summer/fall (not the most recent one), you would get really, REALLY pissy about me and rachel babytalking lindsey's cat, but especially me. you would complain about it in a way that didn't befit its importance. same deal when you thought i was acting too effeminate and talking "like a fag". you were really rude about it a few times and i just didn't understand. i didn't see that i was acting that way aside from this drawn out hoarseness in my voice from having gotten very sick around that time and smoking too much. it did change how i talked but...not in a gay way? if there is such a thing? you seemed like it really got to you personally and i thought, fuck, what if i was gay? would my closest and oldest friend turn his back on me? it's not something i would lie about for a reaction but i half-wished i was gay back then just so i would know if you really were my friend. i'm not really down with masculinity, that's just me. i like my hair long and my jeans women's and makeup on my eyes if i feel like it that day. granted, i have a weird thing about sex now where i don't want to do it but that doesn't equate to a shift in sexuality. i don't think there's a thing wrong or unnatural in the world about being gay so, if i wanted a man i'd go out and get me one. it just felt weird to have you speak so sharply to me about it because unswerving machismo is what we always hated about the guys who were dicks to us in high school before you transferred and i started slamming weights everyday. i assimilated so that people wouldn't give me that look that indicated so clearly how little they wanted me at their school, you left so you could be yourself. and then years later things you would say, not frequently but from time to time, would make me feel like you preferred this old, painted-over version of me to the person i had grown into. sometimes you talk about it like those were our glory days, being hateful and hated and bitter and reveling in our place outside of the cool bubble. i don't even really think about those kids or those things anymore because they're not a part of who i am now and i don't begrudge them their prejudices as teenagers. i was a major prick in my own way back then, too. it seems like you hold on to so much of that angst still. you were mad when chris dunn was one of my customers and always urged me to dick him over (which would have fucked with my money at the time), seemingly because of an incident at appalachian several years before which, even by your own account, you and someone else provoked. i didn't get it, man. i still don't. hanging out with chris and stefan a little bit here and there didn't impinge on my friendship with you. i wasn't choosing them and tacitly rejecting you. they were never even close friends. they gave me money and i gave them something and sometimes we would hang out a little bit in the process. and the same kind of thing is why i'm writing this. i can't be made to choose between two conflicting parties, especially if i love both people. and i do. i love you. you've been the closest thing i have to a sibling for years upon years and you know me better than most people do because you've actually been there to see me change, not just heard a vague recollection of my life story. you don't always reference that or use the information in the way i would choose but you lived it with me. i envy that in the friends i have or make now. i'm left with this feeling of coming in halfway through the story and maybe they'll love me and maybe they'll remember me when i'm long gone from their life but i don't have that sense of time passed and life lived with them the way the rest of their group of friends does. you're the only person i have that with. i love jenn, too. i won't make apologies for it or inundate you with details you don't care about but the guarded feeling i get when you snipe at me out of the blue or that i have when i'm with anybody else in the world, like they're just waiting to see a piece of the real me so they can harangue me for it? i don't get that with her. i can be who i am and that's a person pretty similar to her. i won't defend her to you if i don't feel like it's not going to do any good, but i will defend my relationship with her. after everything i've lived through, one thing that's clear to me is that you can't make a bad choice out of love. it's more important than almost everything else. i never chose to turn my back on anyone. i felt like the choice was made for me. we've never talked about it but it was clear at a point. you wanted me to feel guilty about being her friend and i won't do that. you went on and on to me about it, i mean really trying to convince me that it was some kind of personal betrayal and a step in the direction of evil but it's neither of those things. i never wanted to feel that i had to keep it from you but your stance on the subject made it clear that i did and when you found out that me and her still hang out, you showed me i was right. there were other factors to me not really being around or in touch a month ago, too, my chest infection got really bad and i was hospitalized again, but that doesn't really matter to this. what is important is that you hear me when i say it's not personal and it's not a slight to you, no matter how it feels. i didn't choose her. i tried to avoid a situation where i would be literally forced to make a decision and i chose not to choose. because she didn't demand that from me. she and i were never really meant to stop talking anyhow; it was this whole dumb thing with phones and drugs and a silly trick of a person and then it wasn't an issue anymore because of how small the thing was. even in the brief time we didn't talk, i resented how you made me feel like i'd done this huge act of good in your eyes. it's never good when things don't work out between friends or more-than-friends. i think your resentment comes from elsewhere and it's tied up in this whole inability of yours to forgive and forget (at least forget). i'm not saying it's a failing but it affects you and i wish you could let go of some of it. you still talk so bitterly about rory and christy plyler and that whole thing and you encourage me to do the same but i've seen rory since then. we've hung out. i never brought it up because it was just a couple times, a few drinks at the bar or something, and i knew how you were likely to react. like i'd done something intentionally to hurt you. i don't care what he did anymore, or what that silly trick did. that was so long ago, i'm just sad that i lost a close friend over the whole thing. and, yeah, it was tied into this whole weird thing with YOUR chick and a dumb fight and all this other shit and it was nothing i wanted to have and hold anymore, so i set it free. i am in no position to advise anyone on any life matter. i've fucked up. i try and fail and learn and then do the same thing over again. you've seen it. i have learned, though, to not hold onto that kind of stuff because it holds on to me. if i ever want to be free or happy (and i'm certainly neither at this point in my life but i hope someday it'll be an and/or situation) i have to be free of resentment. i don't know if that's true for you, too, but i would suspect so. i think you'd feel better if you could. i can't give you lessons, i'm not perfect at it myself, but if you can take advice from a depressive, heroin-addiction-prone, irresponsible, and currently unkempt friend who really just wants the best for you: let it go. whatever any of us did, whatever was done to you or i in the past, it doesn't really matter anymore. it can't reach out and hurt us, at least not any more than we let it. you can control how you feel about things. you decide how important those old, bad things are in your life and whether or not you let them define you. this whole stupid, rambling thing is just how i feel without backspacing or editing myself and it was not an excuse to semi-publicly lay a bunch of faults at your feet or blame you for anything. i'm just tired of getting it wrong and maybe i do need to say these things to you sometimes like you had to say something to me when the drugs got bigger than me. maybe i'm not being the good friend i think i am when i just hold it inside and let it hurt me. it might just be a way to not have to feel bad about hurting someone else's feelings by telling them how they're hurting mine. i just don't want to get it wrong again. i'm tired of going back and forth, it's no good for anybody. if i was better at communicating with you, maybe i could have talked to you about how depressed and hopeless i was and maybe i wouldn't have scarred up my arms with big bubbles of filth residue. i wish i could have turned to friends but i didn't know how to and i was the most alone then and could have died alone, i guess. i want us to be able to talk about things unhindered and not keep them inside of ourselves where they can run wild. to not be ashamed like i was about fucking up on drugs and be able to approach one another before we do something careless to ourselves. i guess i'm more at risk of that than you. but anyway, that's what i want. that's what i want if you do.

do you know what i'm doing now? not using my windpipe.

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:52:49 GMT

i walked around wal-mart for a good ten minutes before i felt a draft and realized my genitals were displayed. i've been really lazy about laundry and going without boxers for 6 days and that's what happened. i forgot about my fly and my shit wasn't just visible, it was out. in a store. my car died permanently. i have a back-up but it's going to take time to get all the paperwork ready for it and fix it and my parents are as lazy as me so i'm extorting money and aid from them. i have dirt on them that can't really get out and they're such bums. i guess i should feel bad about it but i really don't. i realized the other night that you can die anywhere at all and no matter how much you love the person next to you, that kinda sucks. i'm tired of living with these human failures and damning myself to an inheritance of mediocrity. fuck my parents.

zur en ack

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:04:51 GMT

dr. hurt really and truly thomas wayne and off-panel "deaths" of bruce, jezebel jet, AND joker? the end of batman RIP is dreck. i never thought morrison would disappoint me like this but he has really shit in my mouth on this one. blatant sensationalism capable of making only the silliest of rubes gawk in awe and respect. i'll continue reading but i won't be happy about it.

well, i'm so spent. i'm so gone. i don't have a thing you want.

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:52:20 GMT

it's like a dessicant has been applied to my brain. mostly my friends have agreed that it's been a rough year. i never used to be so quiet. i'm not quiet around really close friends, not at all. but i can't think of a thing to say to people whom i don't know that well. i can get out a greeting and terse pleasantries but my tongue's so tied and i prefer to look at the ground over some awkward attempt at conversation. i feel that i've regressed to that person i was in my early teens. all of the anxiety and all the wrong defense mechanisms. the ones i had before this were working. it was maybe stopping drugs. or starting them again or stopping them again. it's dirty laundry i barely care to air because what is less fucking interesting than drug addiction? rehab shows on television used to be a guilty pleasure of mine but i have no stomach for them anymore. reality tv is really for stupid people. but at someone else's house, i did hear dr. drew remark on tv that the predilection for opiates comes from being in pain and i liked hearing him say it. it doesn't justify a thing but maybe there's a shred of honor in not wanting to JUST get fucked up. there are gaps and hollows in my mind and personality that i still don't know how to fill and i may never learn. it's small comfort if i am only able to say that i'm not filling them in with drugs. there is no nobility in shifting the focus of your life from using drugs to not using them. empty either way. i know where my talents and aptitudes lie, there just seems little meaning in using or developing them. that kind of commitment, the prospect of planning past today is unbearably tiresome right now. i like to think it's just right now, that i'm not broken in some mundane way. it feels like being dead. not the old standard "i feel dead inside", just that the only difference between me and a cadaver is that i still walk around and do stuff when i feel like it and the worms haven't found me yet. when my dad talks my ears off about finishing school or says in a roundabout way how disappointed i make him feel, i leave my body and i imagine myself as a rotten corpse. i see my face riddled with maggots and i just don't feel a thing. it's pleasant in the way that the gnawing feeling in your stomach is pleasant when you've gone far too long without sleep or food. some days, i don't feel a thing like this. i feel hopeful for the future, i even anticipate it. but it feels false. and those are just holidays from the rest of the time. when you feel down, you may as well have always felt that way.

this is something i really like, it is better with the illustrations meant to accompany it but it still works very well as prose:

"Mon Dernier Jour Avec Toi" (My Last Night With You)

From clumsy girl to boy set dreaming
Just barely touching separated
Stand in silence rooftar sleeping
City streets living walking scheming

Colorfade my vision from the sun too bright
Remembering what we did to each other
Thinking of you and my mind goes white
Brooklyn mornings and upstate nights

Driving in silence but I like it just fine
Turnpike thruway heading due north
Back to the city is it already that time?
Wrapped in smells of woodsmoke and life

Sharing the leaves
Caught in your hair
Sharing the words
Floating away

Sharing the silence
That brings us together
Back home to Brooklyn
Start of the week

Heavy feet walking subway stair stomping
Breath held tight against subway car heat

Your body feels light and your t-shirt back's sticking
You're here for a reason you can't just be leaving

Your heart may be free and your life is your own
Your soul is my soul clenched in my fist

Drifting apart won't find me alone
Moving away from standing still stone

Pinch me or hit me this can't be my life

I'm only twenty-eight and I slept at least nine

It's not the city or family that's wrong or not right
A lifetime of love and exploring and strife

Leaving with you

That I can deal with

Leaving as one

Too much like death

Meeting you later
Promise you'll be there

Your eyes feel like home

And that's all that I'll need

You're not in my thoughts more like in my blood
The warmth of your skin is my own private season

I know it takes courage I think that I could

Never be no, babe, I'm ready to go

From a rooftop in Brooklyn to sleepwalking on air

From twenty-eight years to my last night with you

Mon dernier avec toi and I'll be with you forever

-from Demo #12 by Brian Wood

rejoice!!! the white trashiness persists...

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:30:29 GMT

arrestinquiryweb.co.mecklenburg.nc.us/ArrestAndCharges.aspx

when you can't run, you crawl and when you can't crawl, when you can't do that...

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:33:16 GMT

you find someone to carry you. she was more radiant than i remembered, her hair suggested that she had scalped a black lady. well what about when there are only one set of footprints, those smallish ones with evidence of callouses marked in the sand there, an indication of more barefootedness than i could recommend with the tendency of people to smash bottles where they please?, i asked her. those were the times that i carried you, she informed me. and the overly large footprints? those with the telltale converse all-star tread, if they made converse all-stars for sasquatches (sasquatchi?)? where did those ones come from? those are the times that you carried me, she replied. and those vast tracts of emptiness with no footprints at all? those are the times we carried each other, she said. when we held hands and lifted off and proceeded to float six inches above the ground of a world that had hurt us too many times to be trusted. well, that all makes so much sense i said to her. but these greenish-brown puddles everywhere? oh, she said and laughed. those are the times we threw up. it was like they say, like no time had passed at all. something caught in my throat and burned in my eyes and i spent a lot of time after the hug just looking at my shoes and not speaking up because i didn't want my voice to break, i didn't want to fall to pieces. when i had swallowed hard and often enough to suppress that feeling, we sat on a washer/dryer set and talked like there was never a time when we didn't. see, there was a drug once and i guess it's a drug often associated with the word dragon. and there was a princess once who was really a dragon. and the boy wasn't a brave knight but a cowardly squire, and the drug and the dragonprincess, they got all tangled up inside him and threatened to rend his foundation until the squire himself collapsed. he was far from blameless because he chose them both and failed to walk away when it became clear that he should. and like all dragons, princessdragon had a forked tongue and, o, did she speak with it, spitting lies in the direction of each fork. those lies weren't refuted with the speed and earnestness they well should have been and all seemed lost because the REAL princess was driven away by both metaphoric dragons. well, all was NOT lost because, though she wasn't his princess in the sense that he would be her prince (a VIKING prince with long red hair would have that singular honor, a story for another day), she was the fair and just ruler of his land, his reminder that he did not walk alone in the world. the sun when he needed real warmth, not the false fire of the dragon winging its way through his circulatory system. with such an uncommon bond in a kingdom that, though splendid, had not even begun to reach its full potential, he saw that dragons of all sorts could be barred from both his real heart and his symbolic one. and the princessdragon spent like 24 hours in a dungeon of some kind, also a story for another day. the moral of the story is that some bonds are not made to be broken and hope is alive as long as we are and we should just keep carrying each other and caring for each other because we are both more valiant fighters than they would ever give us credit for and our happily ever afters would be nearly as happy if they didn't involve each other, forever and ever a-men. NOT THE END, JUST THE BEGINNING...

i'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 09:19:21 GMT

generosity: overrated. not that we should use our kindnesses for one another as an insurance policy to call up favors when we need them but when the things you do for others are never met in turn, it's easy to get frustrated. and it's easy to run down a mental inventory of things you've done for a friend when they are really letting you down. the people that you are close enough with or have done enough for to believe that surely they'll come through for you in this one small fashion when you really need it? fully capable of failing you as exquisitely as the rest. i'm trying not to be bitter and fighting a desire to recommit myself to helping only myself. i'm not whining or pouting about it but i need to write this down to remind myself that friends just won't help you out, no matter how much you deserve it. people get selfish when chemicals are involved. alas.

"go sob in your bed if life is twice as pretty once you're dead"

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:39:09 GMT

my coworker, adei, told me tonight that in a small mexican town very near the border, everything is run by cartels and the police have no power. in fact, they fear the cartels. it's something i've seen on tv, of course, along with corrupt mexican police assisting cartels in their cartel crimes, but he told me a very disturbing thing and it is as follows: cartels shoot people in the middle of the night and kill their babies and hollow out the babies and fill them with drugs and pretend they are asleep to smuggle the drugs into the country (and the baby looked at me!). i don't know how true this is but it made me wonder if i have ever put a drug into myself that came here in a hollow baby carcass and i felt awful just thinking about it. the coworker whom i went to great lengths to emotionally injure after our brief fling wherein i did not put out? it was the first time i have seen her since i barraged her with a flurry of rude, uncalled-for texts and she had the gall to treat our workplace as a civil truce ground. no mention was made of my behavior and she calmly asked me work-related questions in a reasonable tone. she did avoid eye contact like i asked but i'm not even sure she was respecting my wishes. she maybe just wants to avoid eye contact (i contact?! clever) because she made full emotional disconnect after realizing how little i ever cared for her. i didn't act like such a prick for no reason, dammit! i wanted a reaction, not the absence of one. i did notice some fucking VICIOUS bruises on her inner biceps, some real black and blues in the shape of fingers and their grip and my mind is still burning with curiosity but any bridge between us is burning as well so i couldn't and can't ask and just know and now i'll have to wonder. i sat with some cool kids from another restaurant at our bar and we all debated about it. i declared that she is gullible, naive, a pushover and the kind of person who would let a guy put his hands on her like that and shake the shit out of her. the two girls i was sitting with (one of whom is, o gods, very hot) said that they were bites but i don't think it's erotic or possible to bite the inner bicep that viciously from behind, which is how they thought it had happened. my unnecessary verbal abuse was as far as i went, i never tried smacking her around (that kind of shit really is just repulsive to me, believe or disbelieve) so i really don't know if she permits that nasty business. well, jar texted me while i was sitting with these chicks, asking about eating some fungus tomorrow and they both wanted me to let them know about it so maybe i'll front for them and ingratiate myself with new friends. i burn through certain ones quickly, it seems, so that would be good. also i'm going to see jenn tomorrow, long overdue. it's been days. and after lee and i entertained each other so well with a marathon phone call last night, i'm definitely going to try and see if he wants to join whatever kind of human person party i can assemble by the time he gets off work tomorrow. there are so many people i want to see, so much that needs to be done. i feel at the intersection of so many lives and choosing a path is getting so hard. i worry about a lot of folks, resent some folks for worrying about me. i intentionally worry others and have developed an unfortunate penchant for hurting feelings undeserving of cruelty. i'm still a person, though, and these are all just roadblocks on my way to becoming a real person. i've got my five senses and my humor's my sixth and i think i'll make it out with the majority of the six intact and that means no matter what, some things will be all right.

"They're people. Deeply flawed, yes, but deeply human, too. And maybe that's saying the same thing."

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:52:23 GMT

a month has flown by quickly for me. i've been working a new job for that long and it's easy even when it's hard. they appreciate my work there, too, and that's a welcome change from most of the other jobs i've had in the last five years. my mind hasn't burned so badly or run its gears as ragged since i became less-than-gainfully employed again. late nights find me up with my mind churning but i don't so much need someone to calm that storm for right now. i was halfway-seeing someone from work pretty much since the day i started. my aim was to see how casual we could keep things and how long before i had to answer something like "what are we?" and it stayed casual and the questions did, too, but i'm pretty sure it's over now and "relief washes over me in an awesome wave". she's too nice and vulnerable for my feelings to ever even be stirred and really i'd rather not see how long it takes for me to hurt or disappoint her somehow. i already did both of those things to a pretty minor degree and i was lying about/withholding certain things from square one. this chick fit into one of my two types: someone interesting and venus flytrap-like enough for me to convince myself that sometimes it's okay to pick up scorpions only to behave all shocked and offended when stung or someone naive enough for my parlor trickery and who, intentionally on my part or not, will be the one pulling out the stinger. she would have ended up a grand stingee and i have had enough of that for several human lifetimes. i've been talking to my ex quite a bit about just those sorts of things. not really trying to retrace my missteps, learn from them, and commit to a relationship regimen change that would make dr. phil's redneck heart swell. i just miss her. i know that i was a fucking galaxy-class prick to her and that she would never have me back but i miss my friend. she was good to me and i never appreciated a bit of it. i just wanted company in the form of a human crutch while i wasn't looking for something more intriguing and lying to her about it. there were times that i tried but goddam if i don't have some weak flesh. it barely supports a spirit even so frail and unwilling as mine. she doesn't remind me of what a slut and self-deceiving asshole i am whenever there's a lull in conversation now, so that's something. she told me a few nights ago that she was glad it all happened, that i changed her life and not just in bad ways. not even just that she has positive outcomes and outlooks from the dreadful shit she had to go through to be my chick. something about that choked me up and i couldn't stay on the phone. we all do it and have it done to us, change other people's lives or have ours changed, for better or worse. a lot of times the worst changes bring about the best results in the long run. but it hurts so much that,eventually, all there is for us to do with those people whom we've changed and/or who have changed us is say goodbye. live in separate parts of the world, most likely, and die alone someday without the other knowing. i don't want it to be that way with us but i know that she can't be there for me like she was once and that i would be doing her a disservice by trying to retain a semblance of that. our lives are divided completely now and the most i can really hope for is a long-distance friend. i wish it weren't so and the only word that sums it up to me is "alas". i want to feel good about exposing to her what a cretin i am capable of being because she deserved to know and to make her choice to not be strung along by someone like that but i just can't rejoice for her. i wish i had it to do over again but no great change has occurred in me. i would fuck it up again. also, she was the only girl i'd felt comfortable fucking in the longest goddam time and now i still very much want to fuck as much and as many as possible so that i can feel good about myself but i have no libido really. that shit is totally out the door and i don't know if it's the prescription speed or lack of sleep or general disgust with myself but i can't seem to wake it back up. i can still admire female form, i can admire female form all damn day long, but not a creature is stirring, really. i should be sad but i'm not. i'm sad for what i've lost and what i've done, for my memories of the past and the threat of what the future may hold. i'm sad to be human and aware of all this, burdened with the onus of contemplating this sorrowful life until it's taken from me sooner than i'd like. i'm just sad for all the wrong reasons, for selfish and small ones, and don't even get me started on the ignoble shit i'm happy about.

"The spirit of the first Slayer tried to kill us in our dreams."

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:30:11 GMT

i dream so inoften now. perhaps it has to do with how little i sleep. how little i sleep may have to do with the prescription amphetamines or with going to bed very drunk. last night, though, i dreamt that several of my teeth were very loose. i kept touching them to see how loose they were and was horrified at the prospect of losing permanent teeth. it was very distressing. unable to reach my parents to ask them for help getting to a dentist and fed up with waiting, i just plucked out a handful. i ran around hiding my mouth from people (the setting of the dream has faded as has the cast; the place was unfamiliar but the people were not, i do remember that) with my hand full of my own teeth, which had black decay all around the bottoms. my head still felt hazy when i woke up at 7:34 am (which means that i slept about two and one half hours) and relief did not instantly wash over me as it should have. gradually, i realized that none of my non-wisdom teeth were missing but i missed out on that content feeling that one gets when he realizes the nightmare didn't follow him back to the waking world. my worst dreams are the exceedingly blissful ones. there is little more crushing than realizing that your wildest dreams have come false. when i was in bad kid wilderness camp, i always dreamed of being back home with my friends and that they had not moved on without me. the hollowness i would feel when i woke up and understood made me feel so nauseous that i could not eat and was often threatened with being restrained in a straitjacket and tube-fed past reasonable limits. they knew how averse i was to being overweight and assured me that the overfeeding, combined with the physical stagnancy of existing in a straitjacket, would make me a fatty in no time. i would eat but the food felt so horrible moving down my throat when my stomach didn't want it. i credit my experiences there with my ongoing eating and sleeping problems. when i do sleep enough to have nightmares, they are mostly of being back there. last night's dream, however, is meant to represent powerlessness. that's the most popular definition, anyway. toothlessness makes one unable even to chew and eat food, bite, rend meat, and drastically alters one's speech. christians apparently see tooth loss dreams as a symbol of having strayed from god and placing your faith in the works of man. fine by me. a greek definition is that the dream foretells the serious illness or death of a close friend or family member. my mom's brother had some kind of heart and/or brain surgery yesterday but we've never been very close. weird though, as i typed that i remembered part of my dream where i called my mother on her cell phone but my uncle answered instead. i think that my dream did represent a feeling of ineffectiveness. i have tried to make amends lately, to a degree. behaviors that have led me to feelings of guilt are being excised from my life. i am trying to do really well at my new job and i have done so far. i won't get paid until friday or saturday but it's been about a month since i worked and i blew any money i had saved, so i am really eager to not be broke anymore. but i worry that nothing is ever enough. i am still working a fairly menial job and i'm almost 25. i have an associate's degree in english that i've never even bothered to ask for physical proof of. i just met all my requirements and took all the classes and never followed up on a thing. my future is uncertain. and when i do feel certain of the future, i suspect that it will be filled with mediocrity at best, misery at worst. my efforts to make amends, to be a better friend and a better person, these also feel so futile. i am trying to be nice, for once. i always got off on that fuck-everybody attitude, the pride of disbelonging. i still stray toward that. i still ponder getting lost in drugs and sexual malice. engaging in brutality with no good reason. the thoughts aren't mine; i think these things because there is some bullshit [sub]standard that i have been coerced by my narrow view of the world to believe i should aspire to. i choke on all this acrid bitterness. i want to like first, hate later (and even then, only if given reason) based simply on the fact that we are all human beings. but it is a hell of a struggle to reserve judgment and act only after thinking. my italian genes don't give me an inherent right to hotheadedness. my teeth fell out because i feel guilty and helpless. i have called names, betrayed, lied, gossiped with evil aims, and been deficient in my humanity. i am trying so hard to hold on to empathy. and it works sometimes. last night, all i could think about was that two people are having an infinitely harder time than myself right now and there's nothing i can do to help. because it's not my place and i barely know them and i've never even been able to help myself. it makes me weary of the future that life will always be filled with people you can't help, no matter how badly you want to. i wish i was atlas. or superman. to take on the burdens of the world and its denizens, to sacrifice your own happiness or even your life to salvage this life for others, those things are noble. being noble is something i fear i will never be accused of.

"Guess what I just found out? Looks like I'm not as toothless as you thought, sweetheart."

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:23:40 GMT

i am sixteen years old with 5 days to go until i'll never be denied entry to an r-rated film at any cinema lame enough to check on shit like that. my mind swells with possibilities. i've been seeing this girl a couple of years younger than me and earlier in the night we made out drunk at some nature center or park or something in the south park area. in all of our groping and cloudy-minded fumbling, she dropped a ring given to her by her parents as a confirmation gift and we couldn't find it drunk and in the dark, even with the help of the friends (also drunk) who were with us. it doesn't matter that i made the shallowest attempt at slitting my left wrist earlier in the summer. it doesn't matter that they kicked me out of school and i spend my days drinking and tearing up my parents' house. what matters is that, after my best friend of the moment and i dropped this girl and her friend off at her house, we took my car, still drunk, back to the park or nature center or whatever and i found the ring when it caught a glint from the moon. i can't wait to give it to her and for her to be mine because i may be jaded and a budding lush and incapable of meaningful human relationships but i am still young and nothing's yet made me seriously doubt that some things have the potential to last forever. my friend sleeps in my bed with me even though i sleep naked and neither of us (as far as i know) is gay. the booze i've been drinking all night helps me shut my body and brain off. it's a welcome occurrence because i want to call this girl in the morning and let her know that i have something for her and when can i see her? the sound that awakens me isn't so strange, just a jiggling doorknob. i always lock my door. still, it swings open and two strangers enter my room. big, burly guy with a beard, probably 6'2", white, mid to late 40's. bulldyke-looking woman. short, squat, about the same age as the man, reddish brown hair. my friend is even more startled than i am and it's my room. they're from a transport service they say and they're here to take me to a place where i can get help. if i had just talked with my parents and therapist and agreed to go, i would have had more say in my treatment, they tell me, but now i'm going whether i like it or not. put on some clothes the man tells me and i do so while the bulldyke averts her eyes. my mind is on the .38 special under my bed while i pull on my boxers and this asshole doesn't have the decency to look away. he and his associate appear to be unarmed so i could probably get the drop on them, if only i hadn't foolishly left it unloaded. they are probably familiar with disarming techniques but i'm still tempted to push my luck. even an empty gun could perhaps spook them enough for me to run run run, anyfuckingwhere. if it was loaded, i could probably claim that i killed them out of self-defense, despite the fact that they identified themselves and stated their purpose. they are adult strangers in a teenager's room. my parents would take the heat for my possession of a firearm that really belongs to my dad. the man tells me to remove my earrings and the wind just goes out of my sails. i still see myself killing him, just blowing his heart or his guts or his brains right through the back of his body and all over his agape partner and my walls. but i just struggle to free the captive beads from my earrings, regretting the fact that they will probably close up in a matter of hours with how fresh they are. the man asks me if i'm going to give him any shit and need to be handcuffed or if i can behave myself. i ask why i would tell him if i planned to misbehave. he kind of laughs and grunts and tells me to come with him. my friend isn't in my room any longer. i never saw him leave but somewhere between the shock and the exquisite nausea, he slipped by me. a real friend would come back with ammo. i'll share a similar sentiment with him during a heated verbal battle a few months after i see him next, which is closer to a year than not. i don't move and the man just grabs me by the crook of my elbow and pulls me through the house i grew up in and never should have come back to the night previous. the cable box in our living room shows that it's 6:42 am. my parents wait with solemn faces in our living room and the man whispers to ask me if i'd like to tell them goodbye. i scoff audibly, make my most furious face and refuse to meet their eyes as i'm dragged out of my house and into the unknown. who's going to give her the ring back?
it's march 2, 1997. the most exciting thing to happen recently is the rerelease of the star wars trilogy in theaters. i don't really enjoy the movies so much as the hype surrounding them. i should be in school but i'm halfway between charlotte and pleasant garden, a small town outside greensboro. i'm in the passenger seat of my mother's van. she just drags me on her every stupid errand, trying to warp me with too much time spent in her company. she's malicious, callous and petty. i've known this intuitively since i was too young to have thoughts like that. today's errand is traveling to my grandparents' house so that we can watch my grandfather die of his lung cancer. i'm in that awkward phase. geeky clothes that i, for some reason, insist on buying several sizes too large. long hair that neither of my parents cares enough to tell me would look much better with the ends straightened. chubby because i'm 13 and this phase is lasting longer than it should. i don't care enough to watch what i eat or exercise because i'm just so fucking sad all the time and stressed from having to deal with my mother's mood swings and general insanity. i care about myself so little that i tell her to stop at taco bell. i guess i'm hungry for the filth they sell there but more than that, i want the star wars game pieces on the sides of the drink cups. they have character faces and names on them and they all stick onto a game board, like the monopoly ones popularized at mcdonald's. my game board is filled in all prize categories with all but one character. i'm smart enough to realize that the missing characters are the rare ones that i have virtually no chance of ever discovering in my abhorrent meal but there is so little in my life at this point that i fantasize vividly about finding darth vader's game piece and winning a car or whatever shit they were giving out. the first taco bell we stop at is out of the game pieces, to my dismay and disgust. i eat my food, crestfallen. i bitch and moan to go to another one. it akes us way out of our way to track down a second taco bell and my mom keeps whining that she wants to get to the house that she grew up in quickly, "before anything happens". like some shriveled old man taking his last breath is an expensive and well-choreographed fireworks show or the trailers before a movie. they've got the game pieces at the second taco bell, though of course none are the ones i need in order to give my life meaning. i eat again, not quite so down. my mom indulges in her repellent habit of singling out pieces of her hair from the top of her head between her thumb and index finger and then pulling them out one by one. i've seen her do this thousands of times, from both the passenger seat and the driver's seat. she does it when she's reading books on long trips and while driving. it's impossible to judge her mental state from the gesture, unfortunate because, in the house i grew up in, you need constantly to look for signs of the matriarch's mood. we have one of those ancient car phones sitting in an overlarge console between the two seats. it rings. my mom tells me to answer it and it's my dad telling me that he feels awful and doesn't know how to tell my mom that her dad has just died. we're about 5 minutes from the house where he has just discorporated. i think about what a weak and pathetic person my dad is to ask me for advice when she's sitting right next to me and there's only so much i can say in code. besides, he's an adult and has had people close to him die before whereas this is the first person i've known that has died and we're not all that close besides. i just hand my mom the phone and she spouts out some dramatic shit because she loves to hear herself talk and says things you would expect from a lifetime movie. "oh thank god, thank god he's not in pain anymore", she babbles, trying to look as frantic as possible. i fully expect that my preventing her from being there at the exact moment of her father's death, my robbing her of the odor of his shit and piss soaking through the sheets as he likely fought for breath and convulsed, will be a point of contention between us for a lifetime. a petty stone for her to sling in unrelated arguments for years to come. time will tell me that i'm right and no matter how often she attempts to use it against me, i'll never feel bad about it. we get to the house and my mom runs inside to participate in some foul, dramatic gesture with her foul, dramatic twin and other foul, dramatic sisters. i am told later that they wait for my grandparents' methodist minister to arrive and they all hold the corpse's hands and body while the clergyman speaks some empty words over the cadaver. but at the moment, there is just me in the yard and my cousin, amber, hanging by her arms from a tree branch. she's not crying, either. i think we both liked the guy alright but he was old and old people die. when our eyes meet, for some reason, i just burst out in laughter and relief washes over me and we never talk about that or why it happened.
i'm with another cousin, sarah, at her family's house in wilmington. i have been four for a couple of months and she just turned four. she's the daughter of my mom's twin and we don't look much alike aside from the dark hair but our moms always tell a joke that, even at four, i can tell is lame. the joke goes: we decided we wanted twins but didn't want to have to take care of two babies at once so we each had one. no one's sides ache when this joke is spoken aloud, not the first time they hear it or the fourtieth. sarah and i have always gotten along famously and about 14 years later, we will actually develop similarly destructive drug habits at about the same time. she will overcome hers and become a nurse. my mom will tell me about how much my cousin is making to try and goad me into feeling bad about my poverty and lack of general accomplishment. twins, indeed. but on this morning, we just watch cinderella on vhs several times in a row. i'm embarrassed to admit how much i am enjoying the movie and keep assuring her that i'll sit with her through it again, if she wants to watch it. but i make sure to point out that i don't care for it. after lunch, our moms are still drinking on the back porch so we go upstairs and rub naked barbies against naked kens in the barnyard of a toy farm. we construct poorly plotted stories about who the dolls are and why they do what they do to one another but we are too young to know really and primarily we just enjoy rubbing the genital-, rectum- and nipple-free dolls together. sarah gasps and tells me she just remembered something cool. i hold her hand and we both run into her parents' bedroom where we each struggle with one half of a set of hinged closet doors. she digs in the back right corner until she produces a pair of what she says are called "playboy magazines". i can't read the cover aside from the word "boy" and i don't know what the hell this magazine is all about but that all goes out the window when i see two fully nude women atop motorcycles and another woman wearing only a santa hat. there is a strange, electrical feeling rushing all over my body, though i notice a concentration in my penis. it is erect, small as it is and for years i will be mystified to hear of other boys receiving their first hard-on at 8 or even 10 years old. i've had one before, just never in direct connection with anything sexual. my sister and mother tell stories about my flexing my cock through my diaper at 2. my time with playboy magazine is tragically brief as sarah and i are caught red-handed by our tipsy moms. they don't punish us or even scold us, they just laugh at what we've gotten into. i just keep thinking about how i can't wait to see, touch, and taste boobs for what i think will be the first time. i'm still in the dark about the fact that i was breastfed and, even when i find out, i'll still be too young to be revolted at the incestuousness of the act. i keep thinking about breasts for years and years and it is common in the capotosto household for one of my parents or my older sister to tell me to quit playing with myself.
it's halloween and i've just turned twelve. i don't dress up because my confidence and self-esteem are so low just being myself that i shudder to think how i'll be judged if i attempt to temporarily become something or someone else. i have this girlfriend, krystal, whom i've made out with (poorly) a number of times. she lives in a trailer park in york, south carolina and i see her very rarely. but this halloween party is at a mutual friend's house in the country and centers around hay rides and some bullshit haunted woods tour and because it's so far out in the sticks and because halloween is supposedly such a big deal for us young folks, krystal will be there. when i see her, she is distant and won't talk to me. i have this strange idea that maybe it's because i'm not in costume and she is but the thought gets more ludicrous by the second. she sends her fat trailer park friend, brandy, to tell me that krystal isn't sure about me because i never call her or see her. i don't call, i explain, because my mom sits on her fat ass eating ice cream and either looking at the internet (this is, i believe, 1995 so of course we have dial-up and it ties up the phone) or talking about nonsense on the phone and cackling like some fairy tale hag. and i don't come see her, i tell brandy, because i'm fucking 12 and she lives 40 minutes from me. krystal's almost 15 so i suggest she should just chill the fuck out for a few months and deal with it until she has a learner's permit and can drive illegally on it. then we can hang out. brandy walks around the side of the house and presumably relays the message to krystal because she comes around the side of the house seconds later, takes me by the hand and leads me inside. she steers me toward a dark, deserted room and tells me to sit down on the couch. she closes the door we came in through which would leave us in darkness if a tv in the room wasn't playing a vhs of halloween 2. she disappears into a connected bathroom and i hear water running, then stopping, then the dull whisper of a towel being removed from the towel rack and used. when she comes back out, she's removed the green witch makeup she had been wearing, though i can still see pale green streaks on her neck. the witch hat is gone too, i can see it on the bathroom floor behind her. she pulls off the black witch robe, too skillfully and seductively to be believed for someone so young and inexperienced. she's wearing light blue jeans and a dark blue sweater. she straddles me on my lap, facing me, which i've seen enough cinemax to know is how a lapdance is given. we make out for a while, with her usual maneuver of forcing her tongue as far and as forcefully to the back of my mouth as she can manage. not much later in life, i'll discover that this is poor technique but i'm just glad to be doing something that feels adult. because i assume i'll never see her again and because i've been waiting for it since my first glimpse of a naked female, i thrust both hands up her shirt with positively no finesse and bend both wrists so i can jam my hands into her bra. my body and cock feel like they're on fire. her tits are pretty big for 14, i'd say a 34c with what i know now, and they are much firmer than i imagined tits would be. i thought they'd be like water balloons filled with that slime shit. nickelodeon's brand was called gak. the breasts are slick with sweat, which excites me because it's fucking october and any perspiration she has worked up can be attributed only to me. she has a few tiny bumps in the crevice between her tits, something i only remember later. the most thrilling part is not what i'm doing to her, but the fact that she is letting me. i want to stop making out so that i can concentrate on my hands and her tits but i don't want to have to talk to her or look her in the eye. i don't know her very well. i abuse her nipples in amateur fashion for i'm-not-sure-how-long and then she breaks away from our sloppy kiss to tell me that she's nervous someone will walk in and we should go outside with everyone else. i go along with it because i've gotten what i wanted and there are plenty more boobs in the world to fondle. just after getting outside, i notice that i'm shaking violently. i try to mask it but everyone asks what's wrong. i tell them that it is an adrenal disorder and i have to go do some pushups. i assume, probably correctly, that it's some nervous tic, some backup of sexual energy connected to my first skin-to-skin contact with a girl's breasts. it subsides after about fifteen minutes and everyone keeps asking about it but i just shrug it off. krystal and i hold hands and walk around together, not really talking. when my parents pull up a few hours later, i kiss krystal goodnight and promise to call. i see her a handful of times after that but we never speak again. years later, a mutual friend (later the 6th or 7th person i ever fucked) tells me that she doesn't want to get involved with me like that because i had hurt krystal's feelings and she knows about it. she also retells krystal's version of the feeling-up but in her account, we left the room because i started unbuckling my pants and she wasn't having that. no such thing happened but i just laugh and admit to it anyway. about a year after i squeezed on krystal's tits and likely left her with sore nipples, i lose my virginity at myrtle beach to a friend of my cousin. it is terrible sex but she and i are both too green to know that, thank the gods.
it's october, eleven days after my birthday. i'm nineteen and i'm sitting on the back porch steps of my newly ex-girlfriend's parents' house. she broke up with me on the phone hours earlier, citing a desire to see her girlfriends more and my increasing instability and insanity. i begged to come over and talk to her and she said okay but it took a lot of pestering and a massive loss of dignity on my part. she tells me that she never loved me, that even when i was mad at her i would still fuck her and that meant she was getting used. i tell her she's a dumb slut and sixteen and what does she know about love and can't she see how much i love her. but while i'm saying all this, i'm trying to remember which of her friends have curfews so i can call one and fuck them on my way home. she certainly doesn't seem to be budging and i don't want to get myself off. aside from all this, it does hurt. my ego probably hurts the worst but i have some deeply buried affection for the girl, genuinely, and i keep remembering the time we've spent together and thinking how it was all a waste. she just can't have feelings for someone who has been as mean to her as i have, she says. anything she felt, i killed. overbearing, controlling, possessive, half-crazy. she's surprised i never hit her. the look in my eyes when she says this makes her retract her statement and her apology is honest. she knows i have a deep aversion to that. it's not the kind of crazy i am. she wants to know why, even if she felt something for me still, she would let me have an important place in her life when i abuse myself the way i do. she's watched me shear open my arm to the bone with an exacto knife. do cocaine until my nose just won't stop bleeding and i have to heat a coat hanger and cauterize it myself. run us both off the road because i'm too drunk to see. none of what i'm saying back is stored in my long-term memory, apparently. just what she says. my despair grows as i realize that i'm really not convincing her this time. no chance of talking my way out of it. after all the ways and times i made her cum, she's really just going to dismiss me. i ask for a kiss as i'm leaving and it feels so pathetic. she gives me a quick peck on the mouth and i can tell how much she doesn't want to do it. this is the worst and first time my heart is broken and i decide right then and there that i'll never get hurt this badly again. my eyes are actually starting to leak tears at this point and i am shocked. i never cry. and i never thought i really cared. i turn and look back at her through her screen door, not even bothering to somehow mask my tears, and i say in this weak voice that disgusts me as it leaves my throat, "but i found your ring for you". no response and the heavy wooden door slams. i drive home totally recklessly and i listen to saves the day's "can't slow down". i spend two weeks drinking heavily and not shaving. then she wants to come over and i fuck her in the ass not long after she gets there and we never get back together but we fuck each other for another 7 months before she fucks my best friend and all my wishes start to be for them both to burn and die in torment.