Tag Archives: relationships

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Dark

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This girl made me think. Why does that happen? There was a girl in Boston who made me think.
Sure I’m always thinking, but I’m usually thinking the same thing. Some variation of the same thing.

But in these two instances, all the lights in my head went on for a blinding few seconds. Then they went out with a hiss and I found myself on cold, damp, soft weird shit, just shivering there.

A neurotic mess: myself, but worse.

The first descent in darkness was interrupted with some real practical type shit. I got fired, so I had to find a job and make money fast and I’m no good at that. Working seven days a week saved me from suicide or enlightenment.

Then this most recent descent.

My inner life was cruising along at medium shitty, nice and comfy. Then I met her and the ride got bumpy. I thought, why these moments of transcendence, mixed with these hours of extreme neurosis and nausea?

I asked: why am I stuck in this marriage, why can’t I just do what I want, why don’t I ever do drugs or listen to music in the dark or jump off cliffs?

Then I found the answer to why I don’t do those things. It wasn’t because I’m married. It’s because I believe that life is stupid and pointless, and I believe that if it was designed, it was designed to fuck with me.

Ten years ago, when I found out Genesis didn’t really happen, I laughed and said, you’ll never fool me again, Culture. Society. White men in long robes. Fuck y’all. I bought a bottle of Chivas, like my new hero Hunter Thompson, and I went to fuckin town.

Ten years I believed in nothing. You don’t know! I said to everyone. You don’t know shit, none of you do because none of you can, and anyone that thinks they know anyone is deluding themselves. And more power to those assholes, because I’d love to be able to delude myself. But I couldn’t delude myself. I had seen the truth, and it was an abyss.

Ten years I worked in restaurants thinking that the reason I didn’t get out of it was that I wasn’t using my free time effectively.

Ten years and longer than that, I lied with abandon, fashioning a chameleon armor around my starving, angry soul to keep everything away, to keep alive in a world that couldn’t give a shit.

But how is it that these two girls broke in where others didn’t?

Probably something to do with sex and something else to do with my mother.

Gotta go, bitches. More later.

Spoiler alert: I still don’t believe, and I’m still married.

Click here to go to part two.

Fiction, Photography , , , 2 Comments

Our Last Night, You and I

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An unfinished building at night with glare from street lights.

Did you imagine you knew, did you think for any amount of time, did you, in all likelihood you did, at this point I’m being extra dramatic out of disbelief. You couldn’t have possibly known what the night meant, but you walked around with that dreadful camera taking low resolution pictures of everything like you were at some kind of a zoo.

An unfinished building at night with glare from street lights.Who does that? You do, you fucking psychopathic.

Asberger’s.

Poster child.

What.

Is wrong with you?

You know what? It doesn’t even matter what’s wrong with you, it really doesn’t…it so doesn’t matter because we’re done here. Just stay away, keep your weird shit out of my space so I can try to forget you exist.

And they were all like you that night. Because that’s what you do, infect people.

I don’t even know why I have to…

I don’t have to. Fuck it, fuck you, fuck your camera, you know what. Give me that fucking camera you sick…

Nevermind. Fuck it. What’s done is fucking done I don’t give a fuck I don’t take any of it back and at the same time I’m never going back and thanks, by the way, for ruining the night.

Not Fit for Public Consumption , , 2 Comments

Dry Skin Itch

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My skin itches like crazy all over the place and then I scratched my eye now I can’t even type I can’t hardly see shit. 

It just be dry as a Triscuit in the air around here.

My wife told me to floss when I came out of the bathroom too quickly and I couldn’t do it because it seemed so ridiculous and now she’s mad at me.

The cats are snoring and my stomach is churning with all the greasy chorizo. 

I didn’t drink much in preparation for writing something worthwhile tonight but she didn’t fall asleep and we watched Finding Dory in its entirety.

Now she’s flossing and it’s midnight and I’ve got to go to sleep. 

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The Guilt Bomb

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Last night I went to a concert where different people got on stage and sang Nirvana songs. It was like they didn’t even like Nirvana, half of them. They didn’t even know the lyrics. It was pretty awful at first. And I had brought my wife along. We were out on a Saturday night together with a friend of mine. This hasn’t happened in years. I couldn’t believe it was happening, and then I couldn’t believe how bad it was. I told my wife to drink up, but she didn’t. I did, and I blacked out around three AM after another friend showed up with shots.

I woke up in the morning all disoriented and my wife told me that I was “fine with everyone else but mean to her”, which is apparently what I “always do”. Then I felt and now I feel horrible about the whole thing.

I know I wasn’t being mean to her before I blacked out, so whatever happened if it happened happened in the car home or at home.

I fell back asleep and woke up around the time I was supposed to be at work and she had done all the chores and made me coffee and put food in the fridge for the cats.

Then I felt even worse about it.

I guess we should just break up. I don’t know. I can’t handle this guilt. Always with the guilt guilt guilt Jesus Christ am I that bad?

I texted her to see what happened but she won’t tell me, which is perfect because that makes me feel even more guilty.

I almost suspect that’s her plan. Because I’m supposed to go out tonight, which I rarely do, and I was planning to get wild, but now I’ll probably try to keep it together and come home at a reasonable hour.

Oh well I don’t know. That’s what I get for trying to include her. I guess. I am immobilized by guilt and nausea.

Journal Type Shits , 10 Comments

Cactus Caterpillar…the Rest is Bullshit

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I picked up a shift today at work to try and stanch the gray green blood from flowing out of my bank account. How do you feel about that word stanch? “Stanch the bleeding” is the cliche.

Tomorrow is my day off, but I guess if someone offered I’d pick that up, too.

I am not writing so I am back in blissful do whatever anything mode. I am still thinking like a writer, though, and recording shit I see on the subways, so, somewhere in between.

I am working a lot on this man’s book, seeming to get nowhere. I have to learn how to create a web site so I can make this pretty complex thing for him and get paid.

I was going to write something better. I can feel my face coming through the back of my head.

So far it has been a good week. It has been terrible weather. It has been slipping and diving. I saw this kid push a full grown Dodge Charger out of the ice today by hisself because I didn’t want to help him. Well I did but then I thought the damn thing would catch some traction and back up right over his crazy ass. That’s when I was going out this morning to get milk for the coffee. We haven’t had milk in the house for four days or so, and I fucking love milk. But we were scraping the inside of the half and half container to lighten up the coffee but then today we didn’t have even enough to scrape. So I went out into the ice. And I got up mad early today at eight o’clock, mostly because my wife is having another heart attack about her paper, but not the same one this is the next one, or the next one, depending on whichever one you are thinking of. I am waiting to go to work to eat, and I’ve had two cups of weird coffee and I started doing pushups again which is probably why I am shaky and cringed up like a cactus caterpillar. That might be the first time I ever typed the word caterpillar.

Ok I’m out of here for now. January was the hot shit when taken from a cumulative standpoint, point of view. My old best friend who I used to dream he was dying in Afghanistan called me the other day and I returned his call yesterday. It was fun but that shit never ends well. We’ll be on the phone for two hours and then I’m like well I have to get to work and it’s dead silence on the other end like damn we ain’t talked in four months and now you going to leave it like this? I can’t fucking win, sometimes we talk for three hours. I think the solution is to call him like once a week, but I can’t look at a phone like that.

Woo fuck.

Journal Type Shits , , 3 Comments

Calm. Down.

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That’s too many isms. I am freaking the fuck out around here lately. I used to be really good with people and I think I still am outwardly, but I leave every interaction feeling a little disoriented. Sometimes a lot disoriented. I don’t know what it is. I can’t seem to relax around people. Maybe because I’m new in town?

Today I found out my schedule is going to go down to four days. Still five shifts but instead of 3 night shifts and 2 day shifts, it’s going to be the reverse. It’s great except that I have this expensive ass health care and I am broke now. God damn health care, too, because it seems like you just go to the doctor once a year and they don’t really do anything if you are healthy. I haven’t gone to the doctor in like ten years, though I did get free MRIs all the time when I lived in DC by participating in the National Institutes of Health studies, and I seem to be fine. Shit. Should have tried to keep that up.

My other job, who a couple weeks ago said they were going to see about bringing me back in for a couple shifts, they haven’t said anything and I don’t really want to go work there, but I do have a foot in the door already there so it’s slightly more enticing then trying to start somewhere else.

The upside is that I have Sundays off, so my wife and I will have a day off together every week.

I have been super jumpy all day. Well, except for this morning, when I rode the train in a modified fetal position. I got into the seat and literally hugged my backpack and buried my face in it. I didn’t exactly feel like a terrified child, but I felt like doing that so maybe I was just in denial that I felt that way. I was all depressed and shit and then I got a coffee with espresso in it and drank that shit all at once before starting work. It worked ok at first, in fact the whole shift was fine. In the end, though, I just feel off and crazy.

I waited on this table of dudes my age that were apparently in the fashion industry and they were saying fuck this and fuck that and I was at first thinking oh, cool someone who curses as much as I do. But for some reason it started to seem weird and then I started to think less of these guys. I think it had something to do with their clothes and what they were actually talking about, I don’t know exactly. By the end of their lunch I was thinking these mother fuckers should stop cursing so much.

I am listening to Rob Zombie and writing so I am starting to feel better. I thought that I might. But I wish I knew why I got so crazy in the first place. Why am I feeling so anxious out in the world? I hope I’m not becoming agoraphobic.

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Exit Strategy

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My little brother and I just crip-walked through the Marcy Projects. He’s on crutches after totaling my parents’ 2002 Chevy Malibu in a no-headlight night race on a back road in my hometown. We got accosted by a guy telling us how he was laid up for a week with two broken ribs. He got a settlement of $9000 and his building had to install a new stairway. He used the money to put two comfort girls up in a hotel room for a week. He called the experience his “fantasy island.”

I was glad Little Brother got the chance to interact with an old lecherous drunk with a penchant for repetitive storytelling here in Brooklyn. One skill that everyone who aspires to end up not hating humanity when they die should learn is the art of exiting a conversation. Specifically the art of exiting a boring conversation between yourself and a closet megalomaniac who possesses the eye of the ancient mariner.

Little Brother did well in this regard once the old bastard told him for the third time that he didn’t care to know our opinions on his decision to cheat on his wife. Little Brother pretended to see some friends in the distance. An ancient, overused and crude tactic, but effective once in a while. I myself have an arsenal of escape plans ranging from the subtle (successive 3-inch backward step) to the extreme (faking sarcoidosis).

However, neither of us were a match for Brother-in-Law, who uses a time honored three pronged offense: guilt, intimidation, and insincere self-deprecation. Luckily my sister came through in the clutch and harangued her husband from afar with incessant texts concerning his whereabouts, complete with pictures of his sad-faced spawn.

Apparently, Wife and Sister had some troubles of their own while I was away at work last night. My good friend is a deep thinker and a slow talker and allegedly using these tools to hold them hostage over dinner. He asked a litany of questions that had to do with Wife’s recent foray into the world of food policy vis-a-vis grad school, forcing them to consider the ugly implications of the food they were planning on enjoying.

Nothing goes to plan in a world filled with boorish yahoos, and we’re all boorish yahoos. Especially you.

Existential Something or Other Zen Type Shit, Not Fit for Public Consumption , , , , , 2 Comments

Good Morning Heartache, What’s New?

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It’s the entire horn section of the once great Chickasaw Falls marching band outside playing the collected works of Miles Davis’s hapless widow (who, claiming to be possessed by the spirit of her late husband, refused to stop composing polka choruses until she dropped dead twelve long days after Davis’s own tragic death). It’s that at nine in the morning on a sad Tuesday in Brooklyn.

When a friend comes to town for only a short time and you don’t have a real career and you don’t have kids, you put your life on hold until they leave. If your friend is at all interested in your life, you have some time to think about the damn thing with a little more perspective than usual.

Well, such a thing has happened to me these last two days. It is interesting that an entire life can seem so fraught with things to do and then one can decide to stop doing those things and experience no immediate consequences. I remember one time my little brother brought me an Xbox to play with and I put everything on hold (and, as I was planning a wedding and working two jobs there was a lot to put on hold) and even skipped meals and personal hygiene whenever I could (whenever my wife wouldn’t notice) to play that damn game. There was minor backlash after two weeks of being absorbed in that alternative reality, but not as much as i had imagined.

It makes me wonder if the stress I put on myself to “be productive” in day to day life is justified, healthy, or useful. I guess that depends on your definition of useful, and for me I guess I am still too immature to stop taking things to their philosophical nadir, and so my definition of useful is anything that makes me feel good right now (since we could die any second and even if we don’t the universe is expanding in all directions at once so anyway we are getting less and less prominent in the world and to begin with we weren’t even at the level of ants on a galactic leaf).

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Absent Minded Somnambulist

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I am sitting next to my front door (on the inside of my apartment) on a gray rug that I stole from an absent minded somnambulist. I am sitting here drinking a beer that I don’t particularly like and I am thinking about what I did today. Only I’m not thinking of events because I can’t remember them well enough to make sense of them. Instead, I am thinking about this moment and what does it mean to be a man in Nautilus brand sweat pants two sizes too big with frayed bottoms drinking a beer in the dark at one in the morning while my wife sleeps and my good friend reposes on the love seat with his feet over the side and his breathing slow and shallow and that’s what makes me think he is asleep, too.

The reason I can’t think of the things I did today is that I am not the person who did those things. Maybe half my cells have died and been replaced since then. My mind certainly can’t process the past in a satisfactory way. It skews even the present, but not as viciously as it does the past. The memories I have now are only a representation of the person I’ve become since those memories allegedly occurred.

Anyway, it’s kind of nice here, now that I think about it. The beer is not tasty but it is alcoholic and oftentimes that’s what matters.

(Just now, by the way, I think someone built an entire jungle gym right outside of my door and then dropped it down the stairs. Either that or Charles Bronson is escaping this building’s stairwell using only a tin sledgehammer and a baby’s rattle.)

It’s nice here and besides I have had a nice day. I didn’t expect it to end this way, but that’s okay.

See my friend came to visit me and I had to work. So I was away for eight and a half hours and they were thinking of coming out after I got off. But then I texted them at midnight to say what’s up and got no reply. Then I walk into a dark apartment and so it goes.

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I am so angry that I am going to say Fuck so many times

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These fucking assholes. God damn I try to be a fucking tranquil person and like mother fuckers but the truth is I fucking hate almost everyone. I can’t stop hating them because they’re fucking stupid fucks. Fuck them. God fucking damn it how I hate them almost all of them.

I was just now riding my bike home from a bar, and there were a bunch of people there who don’t give a fuck about anyone and they are mean to people, and they are also stupid and they suck. I hate almost all of them. But I was sitting next to someone that I really like a lot who I like even more the more I get to know them and we had a great time even though all these people who were not only self-absorbed the way that I am, they were self-absorbed without even realizing it. It’s like fucking George Patton said about General what’s his face in that movie, “I know I’m a prima donna! I admit it. I just wish he would!” Motherfuckers so damn stuck up their own ass they don’t even realize someone else is talking. They don’t even realize other people can talk. Fucking hell mother fuckers please shut up for a second.

And so we were having a great time, and then we left. And here my ass is riding the fuck home on a bike and I’m almost the fuck home, like three seconds away, and I catch a light, son of a bitch, and I stop and this mother fucker honks at me from behind.

Now I hate mother fucking bikers like they’re the god damn plague because they are. I thought when I got a bike everyone on a bike was on my team now. It’s us against the cars! We’re saving the earth and shit. Hell no, shit ain’t like that at all. Almost everyone on a bike is an asshole and act like you aren’t on a bike right the fuck next to them and can’t fucking bite their ear lobe off and cut you off actually cut you the fuck off while you’re on a fucking bike! And all kinds of malicious dumb shit that no one ever needs to do and they just fucking do it and why? Fuck knows why those fucks just do it. Because they’re fucking people, I guess, and I don’t know but people lately seem to be really fucking up my day.

And it almost feels like some middle school shit like listening to Nirvana, like oh my god no one else is cool no one understands me but fuck I understand that shit, I know I am the same as everyone else, I am a person. But why is it that no one else gives a fuck about me, or even tries to pretend. I try to pretend I give a fuck about people. I do a damn good job of pretending I give a fuck about someone, but everyone else, almost, is willing to fucking just run into mother fuckers on the street as if they are the only people on earth walking on a god damn street. They don’t even try to pretend.

But anyway, so I hate bikes and I know cars don’t like being behind bikes and shit, I mean fuck it sucks trying to drive around bikers, even nice ones, you wouldn’t know because you’re in a car and they’re not going to cut you off unless they’re super assholes and some of them are. So I understand, being behind a bike is a real bitch.

But fuck Jesus Christ it’s 1 o’clock in the god damn morning and I’m riding home in the right lane and the left lane is completely open and a mother fucker rolls up behind me and honks. Well guess the fuck what. We are both rolling up to a red fucking light. We can’t neither of us fucking go, you fucking bitch ass mother fucker behind me, so fuck you. And you’re fucking honking at me? Fuck you, I fucking hate you you piece of shit.

And they’re honking and you know what, I don’t even fucking hate them, I’m like, ah, they’re honking because when the light turns green they don’t want to be behind me. Fucking hell, I’d probably feel the same way, even though I wouldn’t fucking honk because I’d pretend to understand that this mother fucker on a bike was another human being with a family and desires and a penis or a vagina and some fucking hair on his head and we all got to get through this dumb shit together so why would I ever be like “Hey bitch I’m in a car so honk honk mother fucker.”

But nah, I understand, I don’t give a fuck, mother fuckers are honking.

Well what do you know but I hear, “Excuse me.”

I’m like, thinking oh this mother fucker just wants to know how to get to Dunkin Donuts or some shit.

Well it’s this old drunk bitch in the seat saying “Excuse me.”

And I’m like yeah I just served a bunch of you looking motherfuckers at the bar, and you all were assholes to me but it’s all good, I’ll tell you how to get to Dunkin Donuts, why would I withhold that information just because you happen to resemble a bunch of fucking people that I hate?

Well, this bitch says to me, “Excuse me. Excuse me,” and I nod and she says, “Please pay attention. Just pay attention, please.” As if to say that she really cares about me, and that I’m fucking up right now.

Oh fuck that really pissed me off. What a bitch! I was just riding home, the whole time I was thinking about this person that I was hanging out with and how we were having such a damn fun ass time and shit, and now she’s the only fucking thing that I can think of. “Please pay attention. Thank you.” Are you fucking kidding me you bitch! I fucking hate you! Who are you to say some shit like that, like I’m not fucking Genghis Khan out this bitch, like I won’t slice up your ventricles and saute them bitches to garnish my mushroom soup. Fuck you bitch I fucking hate you. I’m fucking riding home you bitch in a fucking minivan driven by your drunk cohort. You’re drunk bitch, get off the road, go sleep in a fucking lake. God I fucking hate you. God fucking damn it why can’t motherfuckers let another mother fucker live once in a while. Why go fucking other people’s whole fucking nights up. And yes I hate myself for letting one dumb bitch fuck up my whole night, but I can’t seem to change. I fucking hate the whole fucking world, except for some people who at least pretend to be nice.

Just fucking pretend, even if you hate everyone, just fucking pretend that you don’t. The worst thing is that these fucking fucks think that they are nice people. They walk around and say well I’m a nice person! The fuck you are. You are a fucking asshole who destroys days, and you know why you are, because you don’t realize that other fucking people exist. You never once think about other people. You fucks. I hate fucking hate you. God fucking damn it, and you know what I do to people I hate? I say nice things to them. I try to include them, to make their lives less fucked up because obviously no one likes them and they have no friends so their lives are a fucking tragedy and I try not to add to that. Do they do anything in return? Why yes, they do. They act a fucking fool and stick their dicks in my ass. Ah fuck I hate them so much that I want to stick my own dick in my ass and eat a cheeseburger and never see anyone ever again.