Terrible

Dang.

Last night I was at Kroger, and on my way to the self checkout, there's a guy lying on the floor. I just saw his sneakers, sticking out from behind the chip rack. I couldn't believe it at first. It was like the time I walked into the bathroom when I worked at Dupont, and a guy had died in the stall. All I could see were his feet. I freaked out and thought I was back in time.

I kept walking though, but I stopped when I saw the whole guy, laid out with blood around his head. I thought to myself, what can I do, what can I do, what can I do, what can I do to help.

But there were already people around him, people who knew what to do. So I went to the self checkout thing and started bawling my stupid head off. Man was it embarrassing. Then the money wouldn't come out for my change, and I had to stand there while the machine blared, "PLEASE WAIT FOR ATTENDANT" over and over, with me standing there snotting up the place and crying like a little girl.

That was terrible. Just terrible!!!

A dream - alien mountain

A dream - alien landscape

I was on an alien planet, climbing a mountain to get a better view of the sunrise. Always wanting to be up higher, for a better view. That's me in real awake time. I never have a good view of the beautiful things.

I was climbing this alien mountain, and I could see the edge of the sky just beyond the summit brightening into this purplish-green color, and the bottoms of the clouds were just starting to light up in a strange, un-red cast. Totally alien. Seeing these things, I started panicking and scrambling to get to the top, because I thought that I was missing it.

When I finally reached the summit, I was just in time. Geez... how to describe a dream imagery that's so breathtakingly beautiful... no, that's an inferior couple of words. I'll have to use an unorthodox word to describe it, because it's simply indescribable, the beauty of it. It was deathly beautiful.

The details were like this... dang. Oh man. See, what I'm about to attempt to describe, it'll be like... like, or as if... it's like what I'm trying to relate, from my mind to yours, the memory of it... my attempt to describe that memory will be just a crude pencil sketch copy of God's final masterpiece.

But I'm compelled to try. The details were like this... I stood on a mountaintop of an alien world, and the first thing I did was to look down. Fog banks of snow rippled and rolled down the opposite side of the mountain, cast into sharp relief by the low morning light of the alien sun. These were like furrows of fog, but made of clouds of snow instead of water vapour. These banked furrows of snow-fog began to move lazily down into the valley as the morning heat nudged them out of their frozen and suspended state, and into languid motion.

With some effort I pulled my eyes upward and to my utter astonishment I saw, dominating at least a third of the far horizon and cast into a bluish haze with distance, this indescribably huge thing thrusting upward, as if a part of the planet had been peeled back and purposefully shaped into this mind-bogglingly enormous mountain. It was as if the planet had been run through with God's own spear, but instead of piercing all the way through, had instead pushed the land upward, forming this unnaturally steep escarpment with a peak so tall that it punched through the top of the atmosphere and projected into space. The alien sun was emerging from just behind the peak as I watched, and the light was reflecting off of my mountain and Illuminating the face of the distant one.

Intricate shapes cascaded down the sides of this far mountain; incredibly detailed patterns of colors and shadows that described vegetation and rocks and cliffs and stream runoffs and icy ledges, and all of it was cast into sharp relief. Everywhere there were different colors and shapes and patterns. Twisting around and through and following the lines of these patterns were bright banks of snow that reflected the light of morning. And as I looked upward and toward the summit, the Star was making its appearance, and it was as if the peak of the mountain had merged with an intolerably bright crown of orange fire, and runnels of it were streaming downward in rivers of molten gold.

It was so heart wrenchingly beautiful that I fell to my knees and looked away from it because I couldn't stand it.  As I looked down, I saw my brother Matt, climbing up the same way that I had come. "Hurry up, Matt, you have to see it before it disappears, hurry up, hurry up!"

When Matt reach the summit, we both turned to take in the view. But we were back on Earth, in a regular valley, by a regular lake, during a regular day. I was so disappointed that I wanted to cry. I was sure that there would never, ever be anything so beautiful on Earth.

Oh, but how I was wrong. My brother and I began walking along the edge of the lake, and as we turned a corner of the valley, we were poleaxed by a view that rivaled the alien planet. A vast mountainscape, containing all of the colors of the Earth, and the purest, bluest sky surrounding it, with the sun shining down and Illuminating rows and rows of fog banks on the distant side of the lake, and those fog banks were rolling, too. They hovered above the surface of the water, creating a sharp delineation between the darkened, bluish undersides and their shining, silver top surfaces, and they rolled languidly, furrows of them, like the alien snow fog, and it was just as spectacular, just as spectacular.

Light orange

This morning I woke up bright and early at 5:30, because sleep is stupid, I think. By 6:30 I was sure... yup, sleep is stupid. So I got up and did what any other Navy Seal would do, I went outside, barefoot and in my underwear, for a brisk ten mile sprint to squeeze the last ergs of stupid sleep sissies from my tear ducts. It's totally tough to do that and it ain't crying. Just ask any Navy Seal. Anyway, all of that is beside the point.

Morning light is totally different than evening light, by the way. Anybody ever notice that?

After about five miles of full speed sprinting (about 20 mph, usually) my stomach started to cramp. Oh God, please, no no no no no no no no no no! And I had to stop sprinting, so I walked with my arms over my tummy like a little boy.

Something about early morning sunrise light is decidedly different than late evening sunset light. Morning light seems... clearer, somehow. Brighter than evening light from the same star at ten or fifteen degrees above the horizon. Morning light seems more orange, and evening light seems more red. Is that it? Doesn't morning light seem effortless, like it's traveling through clear crystal, and evening light more laboured, like it's moving sluggishly through water? You'd think there would be no difference between them, but there is, isn't there?

After a while I got pretty dadgum cold. It was like, forty degrees this morning, and I was sweaty from my sprint and barefoot and wearing just my boxers. Boy, was I a sorry sight, shuffling along shivering and holding my tummy like my guts were about to spill out onto the pavement. Some Seal I turned out to be. After a while the God, no's morphed into please God's, which morphed into Lord have mercy's, and that's where they stayed.

I looked up the morning light and evening light thing on teh interwub, and lots of people had noticed the same thing, but nobody offered a scientific explanation describing it as a physical phenomenon.

After a while I started to get really thirsty. Oh man, how awesome orange juice would be, thought I, even though I'd probably puke it up. Oh, how I wanted some orange juice. Then I spotted an honest to goodness orange on the ground, and just like that, my cramps went away, so I ate the orange. Dayum, was that a good orange.

Post title

I just realized something important, possibly. Don't believe what you read from someone else's point of experience, ever, if what you're reading is an ideal that makes you yearn for it. It's almost always a lie, however well intentioned or self ignorant.

Believe instead in the striving for the ideal, even though it's likely never ever been manifested, ever, and that the concrete truth is that it's forever and always going to be an impossible thing to attain, probably. The person who actually does that is an admirable liar, most likely. In my opinion. Maybe.

None of this that I just shat upon this electronic page is necessarily what I think or believe, it's just a thought that shunted into my brain station because I was doing life sums in my head. Just products and quotients. Not necessarily worthless, though, maybe, I think.

I guess what I'm actually saying is that it's ok to be the essence of a good hypocrite, and that an inspirational lie isn't necessarily based on a falsehood.

Wow, doesn't all of that sound fucking pretentious? Still, that doesn't lessen the value of it. If it sounds pretentious, it's probably because you're a prideful asshole holier than thou kind of dickwad with all kinds of head fucks running around in your skull.

That's ok though, it's totally normal to be like that! You can still even have a good heart, even with all of that.

Untitled

No, see. I do know why I hate myself.

Remember when I posted that thing, 'the truth about me?' That wasn't totally true. Not because I was lying, but because I just wasn't consciously aware of it not being true at the time. It was technically the truth then, but that's like somebody believing that the sun goes around the Earth. If they said that and believed it, they weren't lying, but it still wasn't the truth.

The real reason why I hate myself isn't just because 'I don't know.' It's because I've become a thing that consistently acts in discord to its own beliefs and values. Most of what I do every day just to keep my immediate state of mind outside of the suicide hole causes harm to people. Friends, family, acquaintances, associates and strangers. I'm not gonna point to specific instances because that would cause me more shame than I want to recognize at the moment.

What stops me from fully condemning myself is this teeny thing that I'm sure of, and it's that I didn't start myself in this way. The original impetus for, not necessarily the source of, but the impetus for, me came from outside of me, I'm sure. Otherwise, it would have to be that I was born purposefully flawed, and that I'm supposed to be this thing that I hate. Naw.

Oh, those shitty little gob knobblers

Well, the motherfuckers strike again. Tonight.

Firstly, what am I doing? Am I, little ole' me, such a threat as to warrant all this attention? I'm not gesturing, or articulating, or being overt in any way. Is it the mere sight of my imposing physical existence, all 5' 7" and 150 lbs of me which advertises the imminent threat which triggers the 'drive-by' response in otherwise most likely normal kids with probably mostly positive morals?

Is it that I'm such an ubiquitous night-time presence? That such a teensy little man such as myself should get away with seizing the streets of Denton during the small hours, every night, with such impunity? Is it that I can lay claim to both the sidewalk AND the road when absolutely nobody else is using them? What, is it because I'm not bound by a speed limit? Or that I'm always on my phone in the school zones? Is it my prehensile hair? It's my prehensile hair, isn't it?

Whatever the specific reason, it must be because I represent a threat of some kind. A threat, or a disagreeance. Yeah, I said disagreeance.

And I know who it is that I'm threatening, or in a state of disagree dance with, too. I have a good idea, anyway. It's the young, male college freshman frat kid and/or good ole' country boy that drives the late model F150 and/or the Ram Charger and wears the popped collars and/or the brush poppers and uses way too much mousse, if this were the 80's. It's never the gangbangers, or the gutterpunks, or the hipsters, or the middle aged guys wearing the casual dress pants, or the working class Mexicans, or the homeless folks (who vary extremely widely in age), or the Pakistanis or the Chinese or the Indians or the Koreans or the Japanese or the cute girlies or the beautiful women or the Old Timers, or the stoners, junkies and freaks, or the little old ladies crossing the street, or the little kids who just haven't learned the hard lesson yet that forces upon us the requirement of having to give a flying fuck about everyday bullshit... it's not even the regular college kid who comes into the store and asks for the Camel Crush with headphones on.

It's entirely another type of kid. That is, they who consistently choose to insert themselves into my timeline in this specific manner. I'm sorry, but this is the word for who and what they are to me.

The motherfuckers.

That's them. That's my special name for them. I'm being honest when I say that I didn't consciously make the decision to call them that... and that it's a relatively new moniker. What it is, is that it's just the label that finally happened to them because they happened to me. What?

They feel threatened by me, because... somehow, somewhen, I must have demonstrated a serious potential to do some serious damage. Right? What other reason could there be? I mean, have I really pissed off that many customers that I've earned an entire demographics worth of enemies?  Schneriously??

So, yeah. That happened again tonight, and I of course went into Full Charge, Forward Volume, Knives Up, Wake Out The Neighborhood Mode, and as always the MF'ers drove away... fah fah away... as fast as they could, leaving me there and holding a big bag of pissed off.

Whatever. That happened two hours ago, so I ain't even really pissed off anymore. I do wish though, for once, that the mother f'ers would actually stop and back up. I don't care if I get curb stomped. I just want to tell 'em that wouldn't their mothers be proud.

Two kindsa people

People love to make a mess at the slurpee machine. That's gotta be the reason for it, right? For why it always looks like a snowman exploded in a food coloring factory over there? They do it for the pure joy of it. How lovely and nice! And it has to be for that reason, because otherwise, it would be because most people are lazy, inconsiderate, self-absorbed slobs.

I've worked here at the Smelvenelven for a lotta years and I've seen a lotta shenanigans perpetrated, and as a result of having witnessed so much constant shenaniganizing, I'm pretty dadgum sure that along the way I've discovered something pretty fundamental about people.

What it comes down to is this... before anything else, before you can describe people in any other way, there's a basic thing that comes before everything else. A foundation out of which all shenanigans get pulled. You wanna know what it is? Well, I'll tell ya. So here it is.

The thing is see, is that people come in two distinct flavors - those who knock on the bathroom door, and those who just barge right in. Do you see what I'm getting at? How that says the broadest, most fundamental thing about a persons mindset, and how everything he or she does, every behavior, will be expressed with that mindset at the root? D'ya GET IT?

It's like this. There are people who's natural inclination is to consider first how their actions might affect others, and there are those who's natural inclination is to think primarily of themselves, and who need to be reminded regularly that they do, in fact, share the world with other people.

The butter aisle

After work the other night I walked to wallyworld to purchase some conveniently packaged, life bestowing protein and carbohydrates. I had a drink or 3.14 beforehand of course, because doing that makes walking easier. More ENDURABLE and more INTERESTING, and less SHITTY.

When I got to the wallywhirle, I headed for the butter aisle, and as I was zeroing in on the specific butter that I wanted, and drawing a bead on it, I saw a young, pretty, by herself lady-woman-girl (I notice these things) vectoring in on the same butter. And, just as I imperceptibly crooked my noggin a little to acknowledge the new traffic in the butter aisle, the young-pretty-lady-that-probably-wanted-some-butter did an abrupt 90 degree turn away from the butter and toward the chicken.

Huh.

Do you think that maybe she just up and suddenly changed her mind about the butter and realized that it was chicken that she needed all along? No? Neither do I. I think that she was scared of me, and that she wanted to avoid an almost-close type of situation. Hell, it ain't a big deal... it happens all the time, and I mean All The Time. I just don't ever get used to it, is all. So what happened next was, these here words pooped out of my mouth...

"Sorry, I just need some butter and I'll be out of your way in half a second, sorry... I'm already gone, the butter sections all yours."

See what I mean about me being an inexcusable asshole? I can't help it. Actually, I probably could help it, but it would take practice and whatever. Anyway. So after converging with the butter margarine thing... whatever it was that I thought I needed. That thing. After I finally got there, I grabbed one of 'em and then wheeled my punk ass over to the egg section, feeling just a little discombobulated about the butter lady thing that had just happened.

Once I got to the egg section, I grabbed a six-pack of eggs (ain't it cool that eggs come in six-packs?) and opened it, so as to inspect it for cracks and greeblies, and as I was doing that, I was saying out loud in a conversational tone, just to myself, see? I was saying to myself, out loud...

"See, I'm a normal person too, like you. I know, I know... I'm a scary looking sumbitch, but I need eggs that ain't cracked, just like everybody else. I can't voodoo a cracked egg, you know."

And just as I finished saying that at full volume, thinking that I was relatively alone in the egg section, well, there was the butter lady from before, like... two feet away. Right there, see? RIGHT THERE!

Fuck.

You think I'm making this up? Nope. My life is a continuous, poorly written horror sit-com sci-fi wanna be dramatic series, which is always always always in the process and on the verge of being, but not quite, cancelled. And nobody watches it anyway.

INEXCUSABLE INFORMATION

CRITICAL UPDATE
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Today I made a discovery of multi-dimensional proportions and unparalleled magnitude. After several minutes of thoughtful contemplation, I have now realized that the widespread dissemination of this information could potentially lead to a paradigm shift of unprecedented scale, the repercussions of which would absolutely, likely be devastating to something or another... probably global civilization. Plus you, personally. Therefore, I strongly feel that my initial reticence toward unleashing this potential Planet Buster upon The Planet is thoroughly justified.

However...

If there's one thing I absolutely know that I have zero chance of misunderstanding about my own understanding of myself, plus the public, which includes myself, is that that misunderstanding would necessarily be the understanding of the public demand for the truth, and by 'the public', I mean of course, you, dear reader, and also myself. We demand the truth, don't we? We know we do. Allow us to demonstrate...

Try to think of a word that rhymes with truth that doesn't sound silly when spoken out loud, over and over.

See? You demand the truth, and nothing but the truth will do of course, and I know this about you. Now, I don't wanna be a party poop, but this next part pretty much has to come next.

It all started with a dream I had several months ago. In this dream I was at work, checking a never-ending line of customers. After each customer, I'd crumple up the receipt and toss it into the wastepaper basket behind me, but every time, it would miss and land on the floor or under the counter. This continued for an interminable amount of dream-time, until the mountain behind me finally collapsed upon my head and back, suffocating me and crushing me underneath an avalanche of used receipt paper.

Ever since then, and until just a few hours ago, I've been living that nightmare at work each day, hundreds of times a day, with my ever mounting anxiety continuing to mount, like that ever mounting mountain of receipts... and like that mountain, I fully expected my sanity to collapse very soon, instantly transforming me into a pile of wet, gibbering idiot.

Today my fears were finally realized, as just a few hours ago I was blithely tossing a crumpled up piece of receipt paper directly through the unoccupied space immediately to the left of the wastepaper basket. At that moment my sanity choose to finally and unexpectedly collapse, just like I knew it would, and for a few seconds I really was a pile of wet, gibbering idiot.

However... I wasn't just any idiot, wet or gibbering or otherwise. I was an idiot savant! Oh, the memory of such glorious terror, of knowing the sheer slobbering genius of retarded brilliance, of witnessing the pristine potential of an unfettered moron, of experiencing the animalistic, bowel evacuating horror of undiminished, soul crushing understanding, and at the same time, fully realizing that it was the spasming shittle of pure genius which was violently evacuating my nether regions!

What seemed like several seconds of that was in actuality only a couple of seconds, and afterward, and to my own chagrin, I emerged from that temporary fugue state, slack-jawed and drooling, to the baffled regard of a customer who was waiting patiently for his receipt... the very receipt which, only seconds before, had elicited the cavalcade of synaptic effluvium from my embradtled brain. I told the customer that there wasn't no way that I was gonna dig around for that stupid piece of receipt paper, and that he couldn't make me do it either, and after that I lay me down to sleep.

Now comes the piebaldism. The moment of revelation. Here goes. What it was that I realized today, Rosario, was that those bunched up and crumpled little bits and pieces of receipt paper aren't aerodynamic, AT ALL. In fact, they're the exact opposite of aerodynamic, so that when you toss 'em, the result is just barely, but not quite, pure chaos. They just do whatever and go wherever, which is usually but also always NOT where or what you wanted them to go or do.

Finally, everybody knows...

Don't you feel dumb and sleepy now. Here comes the end.

A dream - old mixed with the... less old

I'm living in Pittsburg again and driving home from class on Dukes Chapel Road. I'm almost to the house, and as I'm pulling into the driveway, I can see that a note has been stuck to the front door. I step onto the porch, and upon approaching the door, I discover that it's not just one note, but several. A stack of old, familiar love notes that I'd written to someone once, and had long since forgotten about.

I pull them off of the door and go inside. As I'm flipping through them, my heart starts to thump in my chest as I realize that the reverse sides of all the notes have new writing on them. The handwriting is unfamiliar though, and as I try to focus on it, it gets blurry and I can't read it.

For a moment I'm confused by the unfamiliar handwriting, and I can't remember who it was that should be making my heart go pitter-patter like this. At first I think that it's Erica, since I'm at the old house on Dukes Chapel Road, but then I realize that over twenty years have gone since then.

I pass by the door to my bedroom several times as I'm puttering about the house, squinting at the old notes with the new handwriting. Finally I look up to see that my bedroom door is open just a crack, and that a tall sliver of yellow light is shining where the edge of the door meets the frame. I'm suddenly very afraid to open that door, because I know that I didn't leave the light on, and I'm sure that I had closed it earlier.

Then the door opens, and Leah is standing there. She's dressed in the same clothes that she was wearing when I laid eyes on her for the first time... a brown, floor length skirt decorated with flowers and paisleys and a thin, dark green button up sweater with long sleeves and a pair of sandal shoes, with her hair pulled back into a kind of bunched up pony tail.

The surprise and the sudden realization feels like a solid blow to my midsection, and I fall backwards and hit the wooden floor, hard. As I'm sitting there on my ass, stunned, I look up and I can see Leah's silhouetted form standing in the doorway, surrounded by a nimbus of light emanating from the room behind her. I raise my forearm in an attempt to shield my eyes from the bright, disorienting glare.

Then she takes a step toward me and leans forward, effectively blocking the light, and I can see her face clearly as she smiles and reaches for my hand to help me to my feet.

America, the... cute, I guess.

I was walking North on Fulton and I heard that hawk sound. You know, the hawk sound? The one that goes with the purple mountains majesty, and the soaring heights and the vast expanse of glorious natural fundament, and the tired Indian on the tired horse and all that stuff? You know, the hawk sound. It goes... let's see. Kinda like a, it's a, uh... kind of a screeeAAA...ch...uh. With a sort of raspy thing on the end of it. Geez, it's in all the movies and commercials.

Anyway, that sound. So I stopped, cocked my ear, and said, "Do that again!"

And it did it again, and I used my built in sonar to determine the direction from which it... what's the correct word... Uh, absorbed in reverse, deabsorbed, and I looked in that direction, and there was this little bird about three inches long sitting on this thing under a thing.

Well, I shouldn't have to tell you that I was just about ready to get severely pissed off, but I didn't yet, so I looked at that bird and said, "Do it again, I dare you."

And it opened its stupid little beak and went scrEEEaaa...fyunch...click...ch.

So. That's it then, I guess. It ain't a hawk that makes that sound. It's this puny little... SQUAB. Thanks, SQUAB, for taking a tremendous SQUAT on forty years of hardwired memories.

You're welcome.

Ooooooh CRAP I just figured out one of the level-ups in real life! I'll go ahead and tell everybody for free, because I'm just that kinda guy.

What it is, is when you're cleaning up your compartment, or your domicile, or abode, or asylum, castle, special dump, memorable hell hole, where you hang your stupid hipster hat, whatever you call it, when you're doing that, here's what you gotta remember to do.

All you gotta do is start at the front near the front door, and work yourself forcibly through the trash and toward the back, cleaning and wiping and sweeping and smoking and stuff all the while, and then!

Then, once you've reached the back, near the bathroom, and all of the flotsam and jetsam and flora and fauna and detritus and toxic waste is all pushed up close together into that one space, all you gotta do after that is to keep throwing little bits of whatev into it, until it becomes so dense that you get a quantum singularity some day, and all the crap that's shoved in there gets sucked away into the eleventh dimension. Then you're finally done.

First though - and this is the most important part, and you can't just skip it, because it's required in order for the whole thing to work - first you have to have been awake for a long long long long long long long long time, because otherwise you won't get realistic hallucinations, and it won't be convincing, and you won't believe none of it really happened at all.

Shokinaw!

See that? The picture? More often than not, that's what makes me go ass-over-teakettle when I'm walking and minding my own beeswaxiness. I'll give a brief description of what it's like to encounter that thing in the picture:

Ok.

It's dark out, and I'm walking on the sidewalk (when there is a sidewalk, otherwise it's either in somebody's yard, or right in the big-ass middle of the road), just tooling along, listening to music or typing up some kind of crap like this, or filling up my brain crevices with words and pictures from teh interwub, when suddenly, and without warning...

AMBUSH! SNEAK ATTACK! SHOKINAW!

Suddenly my steady stridely impetus is violently interrupted! I find myself without forward leg support, and my cerebellum goes into overdrive, commanding the other leg to HURRY UP, HURRY UP, HURRY UP! while at the same time, activating the OMCS (override manual control sequence) procedure for my arms, forcing both of them to enact violent pinwheeling counter-rotations! An emergency application of centripetal force as a brutal attempt to absorb the unexpected and violent downward/forward momentum of the core personage! Blatant chaos ensues, as Order and Entropy grapple for control of the application of Pure And Unaligned Motive Energy!

Whew. Luckily I caught myself this time, because my cerebellum kicks ass, just like my immune system.

So... Does that sound exciting? Dramatic? Does the description capture the 'Holy Crap, All Balls Out, One-And-A-Half Second Struggle For Control', describing the brief but furious battle between the Dark side and the Light? The fight to keep me, myself, I, from doing a violent and abrupt faceplant on the concrete sidewalk, likely resulting in yet another broken hand/phone combo?

I hope it came across that way, because that's the only reason why I took that picture and typed up all of this crap and put it online.

That dog, again.

I'm walking to Kroger with headphones on, oblivious, and a brown wind goes tearing by and brushes my leg. This startles the craptaculations out of me at first, for almost exactly one second, and then I see this brown, long legged dog gallivanting clumsily ahead of me. I bust out laughing, but I can't hear myself because of the headphones.

This dog follows me almost the whole way, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes taking a side trail, but always coming back to just ahead of me. It's got a collar and tags, but my phone ran out of minutes yesterday. No, this here phone is just for Wi-Fi.

After about ten minutes of that dog, and about fifty yards ahead, I see this guy and this girl sitting in their car with the doors open. That dog tears off at warp speed, into that car, and ALL over those two kids and inside that car like a berserk thing. It's like that cartoon where everything becomes a chaotic blur of motion, with a foot or a paw or a leg or a hand or a head sticking out briefly and getting sucked back in again.

Just as I pass by the car, all three of 'em pop out at the same time, each one from a different door. I remove my headphones.

"Is that your dog?" Says I.

"NO!" Says they.

The truth about me.

The truth about me.

I'm 45 years old and can't quite believe it. I still feel like a kid, but a kid lost in time and separated from everyone, permanently and naturally. I've always been out of synch. If I could just trip over a cosmic string, I might could get jolted into the place where I should belong.

More truth about me.

When I hear music, I get emotional. That's normal, so everything's ok so far, but I feel ashamed when music makes me cry. I feel dirty and worthless. I feel like I need to cover myself up in every scrap of clothing I have, and get under the covers with the lights off, and hide from my emotional reaction.

More truth about me.

I am an addict. I'm not a heroin junkie, or an alcoholic, or a crackhead, or a psychonaut, or a tweaker. I'm addicted to anything that will give me some relief from the constant pain of just being, and whatever that chemical is, that's what I'm addicted to. I'm addicted to anything artificial that offers an escape from the sharp, abrasive edges and surfaces of the unsympathetic passage of time. Melodramatic, but true.

More truth about me.

I'd give my kidney to a stranger if they needed it. I'm one of the good guys. Maybe I'm kidding myself as the shadow of my purpose is cast against the stark, white and pure surface of the Truth... but in my mind, I believe that I am, at least a little, and I don't think that I'm insane.

Some more.

I'm a selfish bastard, and an angry, unforgiving asshole. I know this is true about myself, and the knowledge of it hurts, like knives cutting me all over. It don't hurt enough for me to make any kind of real effort to do anything about it though, because enduring it is easier than trying to get away from it or change it, because I'm lazy.

I used to get pleasure out of things like drawing, playing video games, playing guitar, washing dishes, taking care if myself, hell... drugs took all of that away from me. I don't know if it's permanent, but it seems that way. I still get pleasure out of reading though... man, I dunno what I'll do if that ever goes away.

More.

I'm afraid of everything. Everything. I always have been, and it's always been this way. There weren't no distressing, traumatic event that made it this way. Not one that I can remember, anyway.

I'm afraid, really afraid about what happens to the music in my head when I die.

I think about suicide all the time, but I'm too chickenshit to ever do it.

I put myself to sleep with violent thoughts. Like a lullaby.

I want to live, but I'm being killed by the beauty of the world. I realized that a couple of years ago. Isn't that weird? It's a conundrum.

I'm just a tad bit insane, and I'm not even trying to be funny. I know I said that I wasn't a few lines up, but when you're insane, it's easy to forget that. You know what I mean?

I hate myself. Hate hate hate myself. Why? I don't know why, really. I don't deserve to hate myself.

I've killed three people. There ain't no evidence for it, and nobody outside of myself would ever believe it or think that my reasons were legitimate, but I can't escape from it. My one, single life isn't worth three people. So, there it is.

I think I'm good looking, and that's the sole, precarious basis for my own self worth, so I decorate myself in ways that are off putting and repugnant.

I really, really really REALLY want to believe in God.

From what I understand, peace isn't something you ever actually attain... it's just something that you experience now and then. In short BURSTS.

I carry a grudge for a LONG TIME. Sorry... but only for mortal wounds and insults, k?

I'm gonna feel embarrassed about posting this after I've slept, and I know this now, but I'm still compelled to do it because I'm pathologically shy with a ginormous ego. Dang, that's gonna hurt.

I'm a sucker for pain, as long as I'm the one inflicting it on myself.

Even after all of that though... I really am one of the good guys, and I'm carrying the fire. I promise.

Oh... and I hope all of this is entertaining. Really, I do.

I hope that's enough.