My roommate and a few of our mutual friends just monopolized the living room for 13 hours watching all the Lord of the Rings movies (extended versions) back to back. I only allowed it because they also made shephard's pie and brownies. Oh, and gave me pot.

But still. I feel a little unhinged, now. Like I've aged. Quickly.

At least I have this years Halloween costume.
Ho Baggins.
Leather miniskirt. Hairy feet.
And my BFF: T. Baggins.

Hobbit porn. This is the person I've become.

Current Mood: off kilter

New beginnings. Okay. I can get a handle on that. Sure. Except for the tiny problem that primarily involves my complete inability to grasp conclusions, to bring on the denoument. I apparently can't bear to let things go. I can't bear to watch something walk away.

It's never mattered how dentrimental, awful, mind numbing, terrifying that Something is. It's mine, just the same. I've branded it ... or maybe it's branded me. I stand hear lamenting about how I can't release it, but try not to dwell on the very real possibility that I'm the one in clutches. Not the other way around. A host of dead poets begging the question: truly, am I the master of my own destiny? I like to think so. But all these signs seem to live in the realm of other.

...


Dead poets, masters, realms. This is the bullshit I've been reduced to. Get out of the habit of purging your demons and apparently you get infected with the lame D&D bug. Fuck H.G. Wells. Fuck Dune. The whole concept of SciFi seems like so much masturbation. You will never be the last person on earth, OK? You're not that special. Just because you've got motor skills and opposable thumbs does not make you the goddamn messiah.

Wtf. What am I even talking about. I stopped knowing. I've almost stopped caring. Lunatic subterfuge, yeah? Zero obligation. But I'm always obligated to something, even if it's my own stupid head.

Current Mood: cranky

These minutes just stretch.

Been thinking on a few things. The fallacies in my approaches, the reasons why nothing I say, think, or do is interpreted quite the way I meant them. Considering what it is exactly I meant in the first place. My whys and whatfors.

Accepted truth: Despite former clinical, latex exterior; I am raw, bleeding, howling, and broken. I don't require anyone to understand that. I certainly do not require empathy, because I am learning that empathy is a falsity. This isn't said with any bitterness -- rather the opposite. No other human being on earth can empathize with anyone else -- your circumstances, ordeals, and situations were never, and can never be mine. Vice versa. They can be similar. But they can never be the same.

My actions, reactions, and mismoves. My regrets. My impotency. I will be selfish and state for the record that this darkness is entirely mine.

I don't require sympathy, or pity. I don't need suggestions, advice, or opinions. I don't need derision and anger. You can't fix me. You can't make me mad enough to shift.

I don't want to explain myself, or make justifications. I don't want to relive anything.

I need to stumble, fall, cut up my hands, scream & cry. Eventually I'll pull myself out. Eventually I won't need to chase normalcy. Eventually there will be an end.

I need you to distract me. I need you to forgive me. I need to know that you will be there waiting for me on the other side.

I need to not have to censor myself. I need to not have to worry about offending anyone, stepping on toes. I need to not be begged to crawl out of my shell only to have my agony rewarded with more of the same. I need you to not take it personally.

It's got nothing at all to do with you. I don't understand how you could possibly think that it does.

I'm okay with confronting my demons alone. It's all I've ever done. Don't say you want to go through it with me, and then grit your teeth and accuse me of being overdramatic when I force myself to try and tell you what it's like.

There was a reason I never said anything in the first place, and god bless you if you didn't just demonstrate it with flying colors.

It goes without saying.
I am writing this for you, and you will never have any idea.
You will never know, because you can't.

Current Mood: lucid

These moments of introspective mopiness occasionally become too much to bear. The cursor blinks in a maddening camaraderie with a digital clock that hasn't seen past midnight in months and I want to tear off my head and throw it in the corner like a wadded up mistake.

I've long since decided that the only appropriate modus vivendi is just trying to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B with as little dissonance as possible. There is a problem with this, she hastens to add.

Dissonance is what makes things interesting. Interesting in that masochistic rubber-necking flaming car wreck kind of way. The bottomless well of creativity is only accessible when there’s a speed bump on the path of least resistance. You will notice there was never a path of no resistance. Even the people who come up with classic metaphors try to be realistic.

(My reality can kick your reality's ass.)

Some people can get away with saying things about inanimate objects sighing in the dusty evening haze and still be taken seriously. I can't even talk about hallucinating the third rail bending beneath the weight of the wind (and it really happened, I swear) without feeling like a dork. A dork without a chin, waving to traffic.

Some people can't tell you where it hurts. Some people can't ever stop howling.

There are days when I all I want to do is deconstruct modern society in a clever and engaging way that will make people like me despite themselves. There are days when I think there are still people left who are actually interested in deconstructing modern society. There are days when I believe in the existence of people who don't classify themselves with an adjective ending in "-wing."

Eventually, these things will collapse around me and I will know only abject confusion. The walls I claw are the walls I erected. Whether or not I think of my potential to move as a box with 5 sides and mirror is irrelevant. All these inches and all this stasis is a direct product of every Wednesday night I chose to forego the universe and concentrate on how to perfect being alone.

It's a science. Like buying sunglasses or handling tech support.

Still. The fan blades spin and I sit. Sighing. Waiting. Wincing. Wanting.

Current Mood: pensive

The Other Woman.

Her job is to rub shoulders, be understanding to the point of concussion and ask for nothing. Tossed peanuts become emerald moments of time and it goes without saying that she'll refer to the wife with a sisterly love so she can stay where she is and take what she can get.

Some of the most passionate forbidden sex she'll ever have will whisper fool thoughts in her head, but an hour later when she's watching Judge Judy alone and the sheets are dry, she'll remember it's never been about the sex anyway. It never is.

The Poor Man's version of Couples Therapy via lame self-help books never works, so you take a little break from the alcoholic love story that's always like an endless looped tape of distrust, anger, hope and denial, spliced with occasional good sex and touches of honesty. Your woman immediately takes up with Another Woman who'd be been circling around with a bald head for some amount of time. Your body isn't even cold yet.

Later, she will do the country song thing, go on her knees and try to convince you "it didn't mean a thing," but you will have finally have had enough of playing whiny trailer park wife bitching about all the drinking. The role will get so boring you'll barely be able to keep your eyes open. In truth, you will be too much of a diva to play Wild Kingdom and fight over the carcass of a lover. She will seem defiled somehow. Maybe it's the Mediterranean blood flowing through your veins, but you think you want a woman who doesn't sacrifice her honor or her underwear so easily. Someone a little more expensive.

Well, whatever, your heart will ache horribly just the same and you'll have to admit that you didn't really believe in this butterfly-let-it-go, free-love-hippie-lesbian thing no matter how hard you’ve tried to seem so modern and detached. And how many other "it didn't mean a thing" moments had there been? It’d be an accident you even knew of that one. She will have a special way of bending the truth around like a paper clip and fastening you to what you want to believe.

But no matter: You'll be getting in touch with your inner matador and dreaming of killing the hovering bald woman in front of a cheering audience.

Stamp your feet in the dirt, kick up a cloud of dust, and with a flourish of your arm in the air, yell:

"How dare she covet my co-dependent relationship! She must die!"

--------
You know that in order to get away with killing this flying bald woman in the name of honor, you'd have to lure her to Argentina or Brazil. But it's not a matador's job to lure flying bald women to Latin America, so you'll give up the idea of thrusting arrows into her neck as just compensation for defiling your woman. Everything else in your life will be going too well for you to seriously contemplate going to jail on a prosaic murder charge.
--------

Irony.

Irony is not just something that happens in cleverly penned turn-of-the-century novels. No. Irony is thrown at us by Vertigo Gremlins laughing at us from the sidelines of life, and the mere anticipation of irony could humble us so much that we'd go out of our way to help little old ladies cross the street. Christ, we'd fucking wait for them.

All this to say that your little matador heart will be badly crushed like Mexican tin and you will start waking up to a numbing glass of Spanish wine. After all, you're not the one with the drinking problem, are you? Then at some point you'll move next door to a liquor store and make Jack Kerouac look like a happy gym teacher. You will smoke three packs a day, and in a matter of weeks you will have to have the local butcher shop perform surgery on your cancerous throat (see what happens with no national health care?). By the time you crawl into an AA meeting, you will have to press one of those vibrating voice boxes on your throat to say "Hi, my name is Jane, and I'm an alcoholic."

You see, abusing oneself is often easier than getting up and changing the channel.
-------------
That aside.

I have never had a life-changing experience. I don't think I'm the type. People disappear for six months and come back in flowy pants with a new outlook on life. Where before lived only ennui-fringed social conscience, well, now things are just like one long hot fuck with Buddha. They are stopping, smelling the roses, saying please and thank you, and smiling all the time.

I don't get it. Change is gradual. You are supposed to trudge along in some vague cloud of ambient dissonance getting fed up with the dire fucking stagnancy that has become your existence before opening a journal from 1998 and realizing that, while the run-on sentences have remained the same, Who You Are is no longer etched in stone. Then you start thinking that maybe you’ll be able to ride the wave all the way in front of the proverbial mirror and still come out alright. Still be able to save the princess before the credits roll. Or something.

Then you spend the rest of your life waxing nostalgic, because the old days are always prefixed with the word "good" and the new ones aren’t even worth a descriptive adjective. And then the ironic segue fairy reminds you that eventually these deemed lacking new days will be old, and you’ll start wishing for them back, and then you get really depressed.

And then. Well, and then.
-------------


View Master Flashback.

I was looking through my new view master. It was the new red kind with rounded corners.

So smooth. So sensual. So red.

I inserted a Winne The Pooh slide and held it up to my face:

I saw a big oak tree with a door, and through the door I could see the edges of a wooden spiral staircase, and an old trunk off to one side.

Hmmm. A staircase that went up and a closed trunk. Maybe, just maybe, there was porridge in the trunk. I wanted in there. I wanted so badly to walk up that perfect balsa staircase and into the three-dimensionality of this immaculate view master claymation world.

There was never any view master trash, nor any view-master pain.

I craved this world, and immediately felt my stomach lurch and my soul shrivel like a very sick raisin.

Maybe Rudolph and the Heat Miser would be there, patiently waiting for me on a styrofoam iceberg, and we could glide over to the island of misfit toys, and give the gay Charlie-In-The-Box a t-shirt with a pink triangle on it. It won't say "silence equals death" because there isn’t any AIDS in this secretion-free world.

I will be Christopher Robin's lover, and blow in his Claymation ear. (whoooooosh)

I will say to him: "Hey – I want/need/love you, and I'm going to do awful things to your mouth and ram my playdough tongue down your dusty throat."

He will love me for dominating him and sigh in my arms. Then we'll go have crazed claymation sex in the magic porridge trunk because:

a) it is fun, and
b) we are unlubricated. we are clay.

But in my twenty-three year old heart, I knew there was no way to safely enter the view master land of claymation. And this impossibilty nearly caused me to toss my head back, shriek and throw my body down my ghetto pine stairs.

But I didn't. No. Because I knew Christopher Robin was gay anyway.

You don’t remember Paris, hun, but it remembers you ...

The moon falls like lace here, and I think of all the things we never said. I think of where we could be, could have been, the things we could have done, if only, if only. I think of the first time we said goodbye, me in bare feet and the rain beginning to mist the pavement. I adored the way the streetlight fell onto you. I fell onto you, too, and into and through. And there was no another. I've tried not to reach ends, to find conclusions, to remain in this space. I thought there was a time for solidarity. I thought waiting (drifting, essentially, towards dénouement) was some foundation, however aqueous. My misguided need for closure has led me here. A farce I understood too late was smoke & mirrors. The initial realization of futility was all the closure anyone could ask for. It's true, actually. I was/am/was/am too myopic. I rely too heavily on memory and vice. And I can't even right anything because there were no wrongs.

It wasn't an issue of missing anything while my head was turned. It wasn't an issue of traveling in fate's blind spot. There are no meant to bes, and obviously no given happily to anyone's ever after. I could say my hands were tied, but I'd be lying. I was afraid. I am still afraid. It has taken me six months to understand. And still things feel so muted.

Listen. I'm sorry. I’m sorry for the tacitness, and I'm sorry for being deluded enough to expect the impossible. I'm not bitter, not anymore, and I'm not regretful. The outcome was not your fault. It wasn't mine either. It's been long enough for me to see through the white anger, the noise, the need to blame something. I will always wish it was something more, but I no longer feel like it wasn't enough.

Current Mood: hopeful

The stomping ground I whore for my Worth Nothing musings has evidently been rammed with some kind of figurative semi. This feels like a cheap respite. An aging prostitute with brittle platinum hair and hallow cheeks and sunken eyes. Then again, that might actually have some intrigue. So forget that analogy.

This is decidedly intrigue...less. Like another dark musty bar that thinks it can make up for watered down whiskey with plastic grapes and faux atmosphere. Yeah. We like that one.

LiveJournal is my own personal Hand of Glory, circa Exquisite Corpse. See. Looking around here makes me think of trashy Poppy Z Brite novels. But what I do care? No one reads this tripe. Yet everyone reads Poppy's tripe. Huh. Maybe if I lived a glittered life of stripping and gourmet candy making, teenage girls in badly applied eyeliner would think I was worth listening to.

That all sounds bitter, somehow. I'm not bitter - not about that, anyway. My bitterness is derived from things slightly more substantial. I have honed an indefectible ennui-fringed existence. With just enough jaded cynicism. Just enough sarcasm. Just enough. Just enough, I tell myself. But when I look in the mirror, it looks like something's missing. Find me someone who knows when to stop. We're all so wrapped up in creating perfection that our labored efforts turn excessive and perfection is left hanging in the dust on I-95 wondering why the fuck we kept driving.

My life is composed of instances of sneering at signs that say "If you lived here, you'd be home by now."

I'm just the kind of person who can make it from Maine to Miami and never realize that everything I ever wanted was back in Delaware. (That's all metaphorical. I don't think I could find edible lunch in Delaware, much less everything I ever wanted.) But fuck it. Once you're in Miami, you get dazzled and overwhelmed with glamour and glitz. It doesn't strike you that it's too much; excessive, until you're partied out and hungover and crying on the shoulders of all the nameless bimbos you just fistfucked in succession. Saying over and over again I wanna go home.

So back to Maine. To start all over again. And that green road sign welcoming me to Delaware blurs past again and again. Always in my blind spot. Always showing up just when I bend my head to turn the volume up or light my cigarette. Fucking Delaware, man.

And would you believe it? I don't even drive.

Current Mood: anxious