Whoa man I missed some time there, missed some posts there I apologize.
It was crazy the weekend and I didn’t have a free moment. I went home and tried to observe my family. It was utter insanity what went on there and how I was able to ignore it for years. I don’t know how I’ll get the strength to confront it.
Then I saw Tool yesterday. I’ll tell you about it later.
What am I even fucking doing today? I don’t know, y’all. I been trying to make this shit more readable, but I don’t even give a fuck right now. I’m sitting in bed with cat hair all over me. I got this hoodie from American Giant or something like that.
Morgan left the house to go out and play basketball. I didn’t see it coming but I’m ready for this dude to be out of my house. I remember when I lived with my other brother, and that got bad enough I think and he had his own room. This dude is just living in the living room. Playing the newest Kid Cudi album while we’re looking for a place for him to live. Took up all morning again. Then I’m washing mad dishes. I don’t even give a fuck about washing dishes these days. I’m all about it. Not like the old days. But damn. Life is off kilter.
It doesn’t even really matter, I guess.
I’m trying to help him pay all his bills and shit on time. Looks like I’m going to have to figure out which bills can wait after all. He can’t make money fast enough. Shit I’m sleepy, too. I’m bout to take a nap, fuck it. Least I can go to work refreshed.
“It’s so chill,” said the girl. But it’s different now.
My little brother, Morgan, came to live here the other day. He almost went to prison but instead they just charged him a hundred bucks. I thought it was some kind of marijuana charge but it seems like it was something to do with driving without a registration or something like that. I got him a job at the restaurant. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing but most of the people there don’t so why not.
He got here yesterday and I brought him home to drop off his stuff and then I brought him to work. I dropped him off. The bar manager was like, don’t you want to stay a while? Don’t you want to come back and hang out after his shift? I said no and then looked away. She kind of laughed. That was easy.
He’s a quiet kind of guy. I don’t really know him too well.
Dad wants to know if Obama was good at basketball. Mom wants to talk about the ‘aporkalypse’. Brother wants to talk about Rousseau. Anderson Cooper wants to talk about imminent nuclear war.
I went home and told some truths. It felt better than I thought it would. I haven’t started on the really big deceptions, or even the kind of big ones, but I am encouraged.
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Cousin It.”
Families are all weird for sure and I know this one guy who’s family is way weirder than mine and he is my brother-in-law so now he’s my family, too. He is an outlandish motherfucker who used to drive tanks in Afghanistan and also climbed ladders straight up four or twenty stories high and used to race family cars against cops and burners on the highways and never get caught and he had a V6 Camaro and took the muffler off to prove it.
He can’t be in the room with a conversation unless he rocks himself back and forth into a vegetative state or unless he’s controlling the conversation, it just depends on if there are stronger personalities as to which of those he’ll choose. If there’s no one to shut him down he’ll talk and talk about how he doesn’t want to interrupt you and wants you to talk to everyone else and you shouldn’t talk to him because he knows you have a better life than him and you should enjoy it. Then he’ll get a phone call and I’ll start talking to my sister like I came there to do and then he’ll wave us down and put the phone on speaker and say, “I want you guys to hear this! Listen!” and I’m only there for an hour or so to talk to my sister I haven’t seen in a long time and that’s how the whole thing goes and he’ll say, “Well I’m really glad you two got to catch up she really enjoys talking to you.”
He’s managed to take over the whole family, actually. When he’s not there we talk about how crazy he is and what he did this time and when he is there he talks about how crazy he is and what he did this time and a hundred other times and how no one understands the right way to do anything and that time he went to the city and honked at mother fuckers while drinking out of a warm two liter gas station brand soda he found under the seat the other day.
He came in here the other day and told a story loud enough for the whole building to hear and one part of it was him yelling three times, “I do NOT love you!” Ha! Crazy ass.
Reality, in the metaphorical sense, in the sense that reality is everything undesirable about your otherwise good life, is back today like an old dying Aunt with no friends who just wants a few quarters for the slots. The last wave of inspiration has subsided, tonight I go back to work, the smell of coffee is negated by the smell of a full trashcan, the inbox is full of emails with bold underlined capitalized bullshit, and the guy who cut my hair last night somehow fucked it up. From now on I’m just getting that shit shaved. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking asking for some kind of ridiculous shit like short on the sides and messy on top. Yeah it’s a fucking mess now. Good fucking job.
I don’t think there’s really anything worth talking about now, especially since I can’t seem to even word the boring shit to be funny any more, so I might as well keep typing. At least I can get in a thousand words before getting bogged down in the mire. I’ll just resort to typing long cliches. I’m listening to an album of classical music called Mood Booster. I thought it would be a good idea. I started listening to The National at first and then I realized I was just going to type the lyrics over and over again if I didn’t stop.
Woo fuck, this is going to be tough shit. I do not feel in the least like writing. Ok, well, shit we’re a quarter of the way there now. Sometimes you just got to push on through, like Bob Marley said.
I been reading a lot about American History so I could write a book about a guy in America sometime. Maybe I was wrong to do that. I don’t think so, I’m just feeling like I was wrong about everything. It’s funny how much I don’t know about American history. I don’t know much of anything about American history, and it’s not that much history to even learn.
I don’t mind working, I guess, I mean I hate it, but it pays and that’s cool. I think I’ve worked everyone’s expectations down that I’m coming home for Thanksgiving or for any reason really. I love my family and I have one of the most loving families…or at least verbally loving families, I think maybe their actions say otherwise. My family is all about drama and shit and talking behind each other’s backs and putting on a good face and also full of expectations. No one expects you to do well in a career, they just want you to do well in your spiritual life, AKA go to church, pray, and get raptured in the next few days. And then they also want you to do Amway. Then you’d be good.
Shit, I just wish we could all sit around and chill when we see each other. But you can’t relax because they need you to be someone you’re not. Ah but that’s fine, because most people do. Nobody wants to talk about death all the time. Unless there’s a heaven afterwards, in which case my family would be happy to talk about it. But I guess the fact that they are my family makes me expect them to love me unconditionally. So I guess we all have our expectations.
I just want to move to Siberia and they can all stay here. It sucks because I want to see them but at the same time I never want to see them again. My grandmother is close to the end of her life and she never expected anybody to do anything but their “lessons”, which is what she called homework. She doesn’t think you’re a bad person as long as you’re not a bad person, whereas most of my family thinks you’re a bad person if you’re not Jesus Christ, and not just the real Jesus Christ but the rich one who hates gays and abortions.
Anyway, only three hundred words to go now. Ah, fuck, this sucks shit I feel like I’m cleaning a stubborn bathroom. How can I add something to your life today? I don’t know. What to I want to make you feel? Who are you? What emotion do I want to communicate? Boredom… I heard this song by The Doors on Other Voices. The guy was like, “I’m nervous I’m bored I’m stoned I’m ugly something something.” That was a good song. I bet he didn’t know what the hell to write about at that point.
Damn if I could just cut down some god damn trees around here. Even cleaning something doesn’t feel as productive as the idea of cutting down trees does. Like I could clean the apartment more and that does make me feel better about my life but that shit is just temporary. You clean something and then the next day you wake up and that shit is not clean any more, and then you start to believe that every day is a new day and you are just as wretched as you were the one before. You never make any progress. Like Chuck Klosterman said, every night things come together and I understand the world, and then morning comes and I don’t understand shit, and that’s why I hate mornings.
I like mornings, pretty much, sometimes, if I’m feeling good…alright so I liked one morning one time it was pretty good. Or the mornings of my childhood or the ones when I was in France the first time, but those are in my memory and probably didn’t happen at all like I remember and I probably hated them at the time. I guess the only thing to do is to trick yourself into thinking you were having a good time yesterday.
Well, there you go. Sorry about that, I guess, unless you liked it. I enjoyed it minimally. But I will try to remember that it was fun.
Last night there were just two of us on the bar and there were a thousand thirsty bastards. When it was all over we went out for a drink and a burger. I have rarely had a better time with someone that I thought I wouldn’t have a good time with. Some people really love cocktails, and not just drinking them, like me.
Then I came home and ate and wrote some dumb shit and took a shower and went to bed and had crazy ass dreams. A lot of them. I kept waking up and going back to sleep. Now it’s about one o’clock and I’m eating a bunch of rice and Filipino style “beef steak,” so says the label. GF’s mom made it.
I dreamed the my parents came to the house, they don’t know we’re living together, just out of the blue, as a surprise. And in the dream I thought to myself, ok, shit this is a total dream. It has to be. And it was just my dad and my sister out there. And then I realized it wasn’t a dream at all. And I knew all was fucked. And it took forever for me to finally wake up and realize it was a dream. And then I was like damn I knew it! Phew!
And then we were playing some kind of game where the prizes were magnums of champagne, and it was a drinking game on a huge bus that was driving somewhere, I don’t know where. And I was handing the prizes out but also playing, and then this slick mother fucker got on and started asking if people were making all the profit they wanted to. And he told me just get him something to drink.
Then I was dreaming that I had to take GF’s sister to my grandmother’s because she was living on her on nearby to them but she didn’t know how to take care of herself or eat, and then we spent the night there but I was worried I had left something on at home.
Anyway none of the dreams were very good. That is all.
Bluddy drum. Sittin up in this bitch just waiting for GF to get back. It’s weird because I know she won’t get back for a while but I know when she comes in I’m going to have to stop writing for a while so I didn’t want to get on a roll and then have to stop. And now I’m getting sleepy and I’m reading other blogs and drinking more wine and starting to feel like I’m just procrastinating writing. I was thinking for a while after I wrote The Essay that I might not put it on a new blog because this blog is where it’s at, why start a new one? Here’s where the fun stuff is. But I do want to reach a wider audience with the posts that I actually put time into. Or rather just force myself to stay on topic instead of writing whatever the hell I feel like. I mean it’s the most awesome thing in the world that I can be entertaining to other bloggers. I’d also like to write other kinds of things too…or at least have written them I suppose. Well I feel like it’s a big learning experience the whole thing. I feel like I’m learning so much that I forgot at least half of it. Or maybe I’m just experiencing things and not learning them. Shit I don’t know.
For instance, my mom said on the phone when I thought I was doing the right thing and giving her a call, well she said things weren’t going well with all the other kids because they weren’t doing the Christian things and they were all unruly and it was driving her mad. Well for one thing she has three teenage boys at once so how could she help but be absolutely crazy, but then throw in the high expectations that everyone will be God fearing and so on, especially at that age. And then she throws in that she might be coming up in the middle of the month and she might want to stay with me. Well that won’t be good at all because she thinks GF still lives in Washington DC. But with the blog and all and being open and honest and saying whatever the hell I want all the time even saying shit I never thought I’d say about anything…well I feel like it’s ridiculous to not be honest with people. But I can’t be honest with my parents. It’s not about them loving me or not, because they can’t help but love me. But for all they’ve been through with my brothers saying to their face that they don’t believe in God, well they don’t seem to have grown to be able to really accept that, and so to take away basically the last hope they can hold onto, well shit I can’t do that at all. And yet what am I going to do if she comes up here? GF isn’t going to go hiding because she really hates that and she’s already told her Catholic parents so I’m pretty much fucked. And beyond that, I can’t even be honest with real friends. I can only be honest when people have no idea who I am so there really aren’t any consequences. Hell it’s getting harder every day for me to continue to be honest on here the more I get to know ya’ll. I guess I just think deep down where I can’t automatically turn it off that everyone hates me…or that what I have to say is not valid…or that my existence is inconvenient. Sheeit. Well so now I’ve got to figure out what to do if she comes up here. Last time when they tried to visit me in DC I had to say I got kicked out of the apartment basically, and to continue that story ridiculously for over a year, which means I had to make up all kinds of stuff about where I was living, living on the streets, things my fake roommates did. And I’m still doing that now and the bad part is I forget one of my roommate’s names. I can’t remember if I told them it was Omir or Omar.
I think I’d rather just disappear and never hear from my parents again than have them know who I really am. They are sad that I left town and live so far away, but I tell them over and over again that they wouldn’t be happy with me if I had stuck around. They have hinted at knowing that I’m “immoral,” but they have no idea the extent of this shit. I always thought that parents basically know anything you’re doing. But they don’t, they really don’t. Sometimes they ask me roundabout if I believe in God and stuff, but they won’t ask me directly because they know deep down that some shit is not right, and they don’t want to take the lid off that pressure cooker. They know they don’t want to know. But then they do some shit like this and ask to come up and visit. Which makes me think they really don’t know shit. But then even my brothers don’t know GF lives up here. And it’s pretty bad because come wedding day some shit’s going to get real awkward real fast. But at least her parents and mine aren’t the type of people to mix. Rich Semi-Liberal Catholics vs. Poor Extreme Evangelical Conservative Christians. Ah shit. It’s a real conundrum.
It’s these kinds of stupid ass things that I have to think about sometimes and it ruins everything. I have to stop thinking about it and push it away and focus on the moment, and I’m really good at doing that. I’ll enjoy the fuck out of every day from here to there and then when that day comes it will still be there waiting for me and I’ll have done nothing to stop it. Shit. Fuck it.
Anyone's Ghost 