living to kill yourself

pep talk

2009-11-10T00:35:00.002-05:00

i'm only writing this post

because i can't talk to anyone right now ...

it's partially because it's just, like,
late on a monday nite, and it's
partially because

alla the things i wanna say --

alla the things i SHOULD say --

i already didn't say
when i talked to the person
i shoulda said those things to

that i didn't.

i THINK
i conveyed them nonetheless;

or at least,
that person seemed to enable me to think
that i could perceive
that she was receiving
those things i would be saying

were this a different world,
and would either of us
be saying things

we would never really say.

you know what?
fuck this computer.
it's fucking with my typing,
and destroying my poetry.

so i quit. and fuck you.
if i can't be eloquent
about idiocy,

well, then,
i guess i'll be dead, then

no recess

2009-11-04T00:19:00.002-05:00

hey, who am i kidding, right?

no comments have appeared on this blog in quite a while.
perhaps because i haven't written much,
or perhaps because what i've written hasn't deserved a comment.

probably both.

i do have stories to tell, i'm just not telling them right now.
sometimes i don't prefer to talk,

and sometimes,
i don't prefer
to continue embarrassing myself
by my own accord

in a public forum,
albeit

allegedly anonymous.

i used to write poetry;
i don't write it any more ...
you can see why

les cochons sans poils

2009-09-19T01:24:00.002-05:00

see, yeah, that's, like, the best title
for a post about nothing at all,
composed while (quite currently)

listnen to "FINALLY FAMOUS"
by Trick Daddy, you know,
he's that that THUG from MIAMI

and really, now, i gotta ask ya!
where is it that - and on this
reckad right now, she said
"hold the fuck ON!"

-

well, yeah,

true true, i hear ya, man

-

but if you got that problem
you gotta fine yr way to solvem

-

yeah b-h, that a plural, i said it

and i ain't give this album credit

-

born a thug, still a thug, i getcha, TRICK

and yet i gotta warnya i think i'm gettin sick

-

it's them Ds, trick
and i wanna say that sh*t st*nx,

xcep that nexime gonna listen to

raekwon's sequel to th' cuban linx

my friends

2009-04-03T23:01:00.000-05:00

KRAFT* is sleeping, he's passed out on my couch
(he's here for the weekend 'cause he's tryna sell his house)

RENKA* is leaving; she's going overseas
(she won't be back stateside for 2 years, at least)

LEON* is in hiding; i mean he hasn't been seen
(he just might have some quar'l with the last-mentioned scene)

NINDA* didna show up and no one knew where she's
(and that's strange, considering such friends as these)

SAREB* is restless - she's ALL OVAH the HOUSE!
(she wants to know just when tha #@*%! she getsa killa mouse)

and
ILLBY* -
he'll be sittin here, in 'n' out the season

(puzzling out the dialogue
but probly not the reason)

*denotes special secret code!

(post AKA "these are people who [haven't] died [yet])

coolidge

2009-03-29T00:54:00.000-05:00

yeah, so i've got the sneaking suspicion that i just kinda suck as a person, and for the last several / 4-5 YEARS now ...

and i suppose this wouldn't bother me all too much, except that i try my damnedest

- and often through a concerted effort -

to be as selfless as possible; i mean, i do my UTMOST not to let my demands/requirements/needs/desires/envies/what-have-you ...

inhibit or influence

how i behave
(or ACT)

AND YET
here i stand:

petty,
self-indulgent;
lazy;
selfish, weak;

and always either
in denial
or defiance

(is it a Disease?)

while never knowing

REALLY

what it IS ...

Or
what the hell you're talking about

certain stars

2009-03-26T17:24:00.001-05:00

just a brief, sad note here, really, to mark the untimely death (age 43) of John Brittain, of complications following what was purportedly to be minor heart surgery, this past ... monday? a regular contributor to and member of any number of baseball websites and other media outlets, his passion, insight, wit and well-directed rancor will be sorely missed.

i hereby join the rest of the Primates in saying - or, perhaps, praying -

"Best Regards,

John"

TV party

2008-10-10T20:27:00.004-05:00

(shit,
i haven't already used that,
have i?)

i'm at my brother's
'cause he has cable
so we can watch this sox-rays tilt.

drinkin some beerce,
smokin some rope,
lissnen to some tunes,

yeah,

nothing much has changed in my life,
has it?

the other brother's coming over,
too.

game over

2008-10-10T20:05:00.003-05:00

hey, everybody!

so ... the phillies went up 2 games to none
on the dodgers a little while ago,
and i'm pleased.

(they were my pick, and ...)

right now, matsuzaka has walked the bases full
in the first
against the "tampa bay" rays.

all year long, he's done this
and for the most part

he's been successful.

aaaaaand ...
he gets the ground ball,

and gets out of it.

god.

(still dead)

i'm affected

2007-05-24T00:19:00.000-05:00

hey, just dropping a short note to let you-all know
i'm still alive ...

coupla things on my mind:

1. had dinner 'n' drinks 'n' talk with the divine miss d. this evening,
and boy, did i need that. i haven't felt that relaxed, that at ease,
in a long time. she remains my very favoritest person that isn't
one of my two brothers. (thanks, lady! you rule.)

2. i'm listening to the ramones. the ramones just might be
the greatest american band ever. walking home tonight, before
the gracious act performed by the incredible michael p.
(he saw me walking and decided to give me a lift home,
though it was way out of his way),
i was singing "danny says" out loud on the streets
of ToRmEnt ...

3. why can't the indians beat the G-DD-MN royals? huh?

4. sad news last night at the parish hall: trotsky, our beloved little kittycat, became discorporated.
by which i mean, she's dead. sucks. sucks bad. we love you and miss you,
little trotsky ...

yeah, that's it for now. i'll be back soon, i promise.
(i hope)

don't blame me if you die tonight

2007-04-23T19:55:00.000-05:00

hey ... howdy there!

you wanna know what it's been like?

i've been too depressed (and drunk)
to update my blog
about being depressed (and drunk)!

yeah, i guess that's saying something ...

had a shitty day today;
felt 'off' all day today;
rode the bus with a scowl on my face
and a feeling of hate in my heart

(which i hate;
i hate feeling hate in my heart).

came home, found
she who is known worldwide
as the most amazing kitten fake —

she who fuckt up me arms last night,
at some point,
which i barely remember

(i bear the scars)

even as i suppose
she was just HYPED
since she'd brung home that snake —

and also found some mail

from shandi,

and it's still making me smile.

(really!)

okay, okay, okay,
yeah yeah, sure,

the booze 'n' drugs
probably are involved, also —

but on this day,

when k 'n' k
are spending their first day
with their new little one,

should i really be so angry
at life,

the universe,
and everything?

perchance not.

the alternate title for this post
was to have been

"everybody wants to rule the world."

maybe that'll be the next one ...

and yes,

i know
i'm just
angry with myself ...

you bet we've got something personal against you!

2007-04-16T21:06:00.000-05:00

sorry we haven't talked much lately ...

i've been in the bunker.

finally think i'm getting my finances straightened out,
still too drunk too much of the time,
and got a LOT to say about my interactions

with women,

and maybe that's my (your) cue
this time around.

(god, it's been more'n a MONTH!)

let me just say this for now:

you have stories coming to you,
many stories,

even if the details of said stories
i might have to conjure up
from the depths of my imagination ...

still, they'll be there, they will, i swear.

i will attempt
to whip into a pastiche
my many impressions

from the past moon.

tribe looks good, don't it?

no such thing

2007-03-12T22:48:00.000-05:00

howdy, y'all.

look, i gotta say a few things here.

you see this blog's title, right?
unless your brain "works" the way mine does,
it might not seem so funny, i suppose.

maybe it might seem "disarming" or "straightforward";
but maybe "bleak" or "disturbing" is a better word.

whichever. whatever.

the point is,
as i've said before,
this is my version of therapy.

why am i writing this?
why am i repeating this?

comedian richard jeni apparently killed himself
on my 34th birthday
(two days ago).

i don't know if that means anything to anyone —

hell, he was sort of an in-joke with some folks i know,
you know, code for a bad idea gone wrong,
you know, he had this failed UPN show called platypus man —

but the guy could be pretty damn funny.

and it's definitely hackneyed to say so,
but part of the reason he could be so funny
was because you (i) could tell he knew
that a lot of what he was saying
wasn't really funny at all,

but that one (he) (i)
had to find a way to cope with
all of the BS we (you) (he) (i) —

yeah, you get it.

i honestly only remember him
for his showtime special
"boy from new york city,"

from, dear "g-d,"
1990,
but i'll never forget

three of the bits.

there was the guy who goes to the gym for the first time,
and because he doesn't know any better,
feels invincible,
as though he can just keep lifting.
jeni impersonates this guy
talking to the well-meaning club personnel:

jeni: "you're gonna have to buy some more weights."
trainer: "you'd better take it easy, sir."
jeni: "hmph. fag."

the next morning, of course,
jeni's character can barely move,
and calls the club for help in his agony.

they tell him they're busy buying more weights.

okay, okay, that doesn't read funny.
but it was funny,

not only because it's so easy to make that mistake,
but because jeni was puncturing his ego
for his audience's pleasure
the way the talented comic can.

yeah, yeah, yeah, i know, whatever —

that's a bargain-basement way
to sociologize comedy —

and don't you love this postliterate age, anyway? —

but it strikes me
because that is a particularly vulnerable form
of therapy.

(jeni famously mocked therapeusis later in his career,
portraying a football referee who uses a timeout
to address the multitudes of fans
as a way to redress his grievances.)

anyway, one of the last bits in the aforementioned show
concerned a young black teenager working at mcdonald's
airing his grievances over his employment.

but that's not so important;
the linchpin of the show was his dissertation
on why listening to the radio is bad for you

following a painful breakup.

he observed that all one would hear
on the radio
following a painful breakup

would be an endless parade
of

"nothing but get-in-the-bath-and-slit-your-wrists
love songs,"

although he continued to describe said parade
in about 13 increasingly morbid ways.

is that the first thing i thought of
when i heard the news?

not really;
actually, that's the one thing
i've always identified with the guy.

"nothing but drive-your-truck-off-a-goddamn-cliff
love songs."

(this post sucks, huh?)

you know
(you know?),
i only SERIOUSLY thought about
killing myself
twice in my life.

the first time, i was 19;
the second time, i was 23.

in each case, when i told a dear friend
a short while following each crisis,
man, i got an earful.

the first time,
a certain "retart" got frantically upset
and exclaimed "matt! for god's sake,
just call me! it doesn't matter when it is!
jesus christ!"

and so forth.

the second time, well,
hell, that was a person
who's about the major reason
i would never do it.

but he expressed it better,
even if it basically amounted to
"if you did that,
i'd never talk to you again."

now, stop for a minute.
because that's enough, right?

well, it was for me.

and goddamn but i'm lucky to have that.

and i guess a lot of people don't have even that much.

like richard jeni, apparently.

oh, and?
yeah, i cried.

and i will close by saying —

and don't you love this postliterate age, anyway? —

if you have the opportunity,
hug a depressed person you know
and remind him or her that you love him or her.

and try to get him or her to talk.
take him or her out somewhere.

don't try to cheer him or her up!
no, don't do that;
just let him or her know you care,

all right?

because this could be someone you know,
and this could be someone you love,
and you might really miss this person.

thomas hobbes famously
depicted the "life of man"
as

"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

so it is for many.

try to alleviate some of that
for someone
if you can.

and if you're one of us (me),
well,
hey, welcome to the blog!
you might "like" it!

let's move on ...

nothing on my mind

2007-03-11T22:40:00.000-05:00

well, THAT'S not true, of course;
as usual, i have too much of the wrong shit
running 'round in my head.

but i wanted to drop a brief line to y'all
to tell any of youse who are baseball fans
that you should check out
curt schilling's blog
at

38pitches.com

(too lazy right now to create a link, sorry!)

(too unconcerned, even, to punctuate correctly!)

it's a pretty fascinating,
and very open,
insider's account
of the baseball life;

it's like ball four,
only in, like, "real time."

if you're one of my non- or antisports readers,
never you mind;

i'll post some of my other ruminations
in the next day or so, all right?

abnormal

2007-03-09T20:36:00.000-05:00

yeah, i'm blogging on a friday night;
what of it?

fuck you, anyway.

see, the thing about me is:
i'm boring.

"matt, i don't think you're boring at all,"
remarked a lady friend of mine
one night at the bar
after i'd made the above statement.

"well, no, I don't think i'm boring as a person,"
i responded,
"i mean i'm 'boring' in the sense that
i don't need to be entertained, you know?
i can just stay at home and hang around;
i don't need to go out to have fun,
and for most people —

let's say i met a girl —

that's not so appealing.
but i'd rather just hang out."

i guess that's a hard concept to explicate
to a person with whom
or in whom's company
one either goes out for a few drinks
at this bar or that one
or gathers at somebody's abode
to watch a movie
and have a few drinks.

but i'm confronted by it again tonight.
although it's due to history
more than chemistry,
i think,
even if at this point
one informs the other.

so here i sit, brews on hand,
tobacco, and the dregs (wink-wink),
baseball on the radio,
and i type this.

and i suppose i'm content ... enough.

all that other stuff?
external, external.

(breathe in,
breathe out.)

i against osbourne

2007-03-08T22:45:00.000-05:00

it's all true, every word of it; i swear it, it's true!

god, what the hell am i doing?

it's true:

i should have left you in sri lanka,
working the desk at that sex hotel ...

and for christ's sake, why ISN'T —

oh, wait, bob hope died —

well, then,

why am i still here?

i didn't even have the vaudeville career ...

god damn job

2007-03-08T21:12:00.000-05:00

yeah, i need one; so what else is new?

i was informed this morning that my résumé is
"quite impressive."

needless to say, i didn't get the position
that had demanded receipt of said résumé ―

why should i?

as usual, i'm "overqualified" for the position.

(not to mention, a bit long in the tooth.)

well, shit, i just want to work at this point.

you wouldn't think that'd be so much to ask for,
would you?

would you?

(i mean, i really don't know.)

all i know is i turn 34 on saturday,
and i guess i have to find it amusing
that i'm still so freakin' bad
at being a responsible adult.

but in light of other things i'm thinking,
i'll just summarize by saying
that i'm tired of all this.

i'm tired of being poor;
i'm tired of being broke;
i'm tired of being a fool.

i'm tired of dreams i don't realize,
and i'm tired of those i control.

i'm tired of listening to everyone's words,
as i'm tired of all of my own,

and i'm sick of the fact
that even this act
turns into
another bad poem.

when will i (l)earn?
why haven't i (l)earned?
why must i dangle,
again,
from this rope?

hey, i just
realized
what you may have
surmised:

don't write

with aceyalone.

(but you may want to pick up
magnificent city,
his rekkid with rjd2)

now, if you'll excuse me,
i must return to
beating my head

against the wall ...

realization

2007-03-04T02:01:00.000-05:00

god, i owe y'all some posts ... sorry.

listened to the indians play the tigers on The Big One
~~this~~ yesterday afternoon,
and it was awesome.
(tribe won, 11-2.)

they're playing again ~~tomorrow~~ today.
at chain o' lakes.
(~~today~~ yesterday was at joker marchant.)

thank you, baseball, thank you!

and 'thank you' also to you 'others,'

you might know
who
you might be —

soon come happy,
all right?

& more soon ...

something i learned today

2007-02-06T23:51:00.000-05:00

(i actually learned nothing today.)

but i wanted to share this with you:
it's a music opinion piece/review
i wrote back when i worked for

that paper i worked for.

(needless to say, it didn't see publication.)

i have a lot of these ...
and i like them,
really, i do!

Ain't No Making It
The kids are all fucked

By Matt Damn K.

Like wow, man, I'm confused. This isn't what i was expecting.
       I was expecting some tuneless hardcore punk, the likes of 1986's Immaculate Deception: "Mengele" (a staple); Tylenol poisoning (remember that?); some sort of politics, i'm sure; and could you ever forget that Dr. Seuss rap? That was some funny shit — "I do not like them, Sam-I-Am!" — almost unparalleled in the realm of goofing on yourself and your genre. Tommy Christ never matched that the whole rest of his career. The follow-up was even more unlistenable than Fearless Iranians From Hell, and then, because it had become the late-'80s, they went all metal and called themselves "Scatterbrain."
       Remember that shit? "Hey, dude, don't call me dude?" I thought that was funny, too, but that's 'cause I say "dude" a lot and everybody thinks I should move to the beach and be a surfer, in the manner which my lazy, stoned ass would demand, and my older brother was one of those ridiculous hair-farmer guys with no taste in either music or chicks who hung out at the mall — you remember that, too, don't you? I mean, it's pretty much the same now, except the boys all have no hair, but a lot of tattoos and jewelry, and the girls are all showing off their wares in public, and maybe Scatterbrain foresaw that with their Mozart takeoff that whined "I don't wanna go DOWN WITH THE SHIP!"
       That was even funnier than Anthrax! The band, that is; and it was funnier than "Surfin' Mozart" by the Mr. T Experience and "Surfin' Cow" by the Dead Milkmen put together, funnier than even all those stupid teens smoking Camels and Reds and thinking they were all grown up.
       But I have no idea what this record is all about — I figured the PJ's-looking cover art was part of the gag, but these guys went way left-field. I mean, this is an actual rap record! Southern rap! How the hell could these guys have ... oh, shit, I'm an idiot. This IS a Southern rap record! And I had been thinking about Ludichrist!
       Never mind them! This record's funny, too. And I hope kids really like it, kids like the one on my street whose mom shouts up at the second-floor window of the drug house on the corner when her not-quite-15-year-old-daughter's up there. (That's where she goes whenever mom's not home, with her friend that's already had a baby.) I don't know for sure what they're doing up there — maybe it's just drugs — but I do know those girls (those children) ain't going anywhere good, not now and probably never, the way they walk their barely pubescent asses down the street all day in their too-tight jeans. (The other day, I heard this response to an "I love you!" catcall: "Lick my clit!")
       Unfortunately, the record in question — Word of Mouf by Ludacris, is boring. Were it fun, as was last year's megahit Back for the First Time, maybe the kids would enjoy its bubblegum baby crunk and understand that it's fun to giggle about the good stuff you've got coming to you. Instead, it's a letdown, as everything else is, and all you've got to look forward to is bills and babies — since we raise our kids to think life's about paying for stuff and having it, or maybe the reverse — so why wait until you understand anything? It's easy enough, spelled out everywhere as it is for you at any time: take it off, get it up, get it on and wait on the glamorous life.
       (Everybody lives the glamorous life around here.)
       Just like those 14-year-olds that killed their baby 'cause they didn't know what to do with it. Track seven on Mouf is called "Growing Pains." So there ya go.
       In closing, since Ludacris clearly wants to make rap that's light fun, like rap music was when it started in those disco-toasting days: Skiddilee-be-bop, we rock, and Scooby-Doo — guess what, America? I hate you.

yeah, can't believe that one didn't get printed.

and yes, i AM listening to bigdrillcar right now,
thankyouverymuch.

next post: prince at the "super bowl,"

and whate'er else i've been doing or thinking or whatever,
a'ight?

eight days a week

2007-02-06T23:29:00.000-05:00

if you're reading this on wednesday,
february 7th
(my brothers' mother's 63rd birthday),

"pitchers and catchers" report
to "spring training"
in eight days.

well, "hallelujah!"

hadda pay my electric bill today,
as i'd just noticed
they're threatening to cut me off.

hoo boy, am i irresponsible.
and poor.

hoo boy, am i poor.

(guess i should probably "work" more.)

thought the highlight of
"super bowl XLI"
was prince's halftime show,
especially as
his, um, enhanced
silhouette image
basically told the viewing audience
to, well,
fuck off —

and why haven't i read more about this? —

but in actuality,
me being me,
the highlight just may have been

my cousin's
little kittycat, "gus."

i will be posting a screed
about prince's halftime performance,
hopefully soon,
and i guess i gotta lotta other stuff
i should also mention.

so stay tuned,
if you're of a mind, a'ight?

oh, and,
just for the record,
kitten face continues to insist
on going outside,
weather be damned.

she is SO BORED.
virtual hibernation ain't enough.

i'm listening to mos def's
"true magic" rekkid,
and it's half-assed,
yes,

but, honestly?
that's all right with me,
okay?

i have a secret
and you know my secret, too,
but i won't tell you

the beat goes on

2007-01-25T01:02:00.000-05:00

(man, how have i not used that title before?)

okay, first things fucking last:

let's talk tribe!

as things stand right now,
the projected everyday lineups
for our beloved cleveland indians
for the 2007 campaign
allegedly will be:

(against RHP)
1. CF grady sizemore
2. RF trot nixon
3. DH travis hafner
4. C victor martinez
5. LF david dellucci
6. 1B casey blake
7. SS jhonny peralta
8. 3B andy marte
9. 2B josh barfield

(against LHP)
1. sizemore
2. LF jason michaels
3. pronk
4. martinez
5. RF blake
6. peralta
7. 1B ryan garko
8. marte
9. barfield

my first note is that it is going to take me too long
to remember that the new second-sacker's name is "josh,"
as i keep thinking "jesse."

my next thought is that as little as i'm sold on
jason michaels batting second in the lineup,
i'm REALLY unsure about trot nixon doing so.

and then i feel i must point out
that martinez will play first 30 or 40 games,
meaning shop-vac will be behind the plate;
and that blake may spell marte at third
occasionally or more than occasionally
depending on marte's play, but also might play
one of the corner outfield slots on those days.

oh, and nobody's sure where barfield's
really going to settle into the lineup.
(of course. why would the indians start a season
with a solid batting order? why start now?)

now, beyond the usual vexing questions —

which peralta will show up? can marte hit?
can garko field? can nixon stay healthy?
will pronk, for a change? blake, an anchor? —

what i wonder most
is who, pray tell, is comfortable
placing so much of the hopes for success
for this team
on the game-management skills
of eric wedge?

(as you may know, i have little faith
in the game-management skills
of eric wedge.)

granted, the team seems to have a lot of flexibility.
on paper, and probably on the field,
it's going to score a lot of runs.

but will it score them when it needs them?
can wedge juggle his bench
and the 2.5 platoons (or more!)
effectively enough?

well, hell, i just don't know.
and that's just the offense/defense, mind you.
don't forget the bullpen.

in case you haven't been paying attention
(and unless you don't care),
the bullpen currently is slated to feature
some combination of the following suspects:

rafael betancourt
jason davis
matt miller
roberto hernandez
joe borowski
keith foulke
aaron fultz
jd martin
fernando cabrera

and/or, possibly,
fausto carmona

carmona is actually supposed to be the "sixth starter,"
which means he'll probably be starting
in buffalo, of course,
since this organization loves the yo-yo.

miller's a total question mark,
and could start the year in buffalo as well.

davis is the long man.
betancourt's a setup guy.
cabrera's a setup guy.
hernandez is a setup guy.
either borowski or foulke is the "closer";
the other will be a setup guy.
fultz is a matchup guy (a LOOGY).

and i don't know what jd martin is,
just as i don't know from whence he came.

i've never been comfortable with wedge's
handling of the bullpen, whether the 'pen
has been good or bad or downright awful,
so i don't have a good feeling
about this situation,
even as i must admit
i like the theory "sharpio" employed
in assembling it.

(granted, i don't like the way
the bullpen is employed
in today's game anyway.)

damn, that's a lot of questions
to answer in ~~spring training~~ april & may!

yeah, you see the problem.

oh, and garko only makes the roster
if someone proves to be the missing piece,
the utility guy who can play
second and third, but primarily short,
as there's little faith in jhonny.

i can't wait. you know.

my final note for now
concerns the rotation,
which i believe is going to be

Captain Cheeseburger sabathia
"the jake" westbrook
general lee ("ol' five-and-fly")
paul "to the wall" byrd

and
jeremy "still basically a rookie" sowers

more ifs!
IF sabathia is healthy, IF the infield defense can play,
IF lee can toughen up, IF byrd isn't done,
IF sowers is for real (and i think he is, personally),

well, that's a helluva rotation right there,
and stacked with lefties besides.

i'll give it a few months with sowers,
but i'm dying to see him succeed,
if only so i can give him a better nickname —

such as "whiskey" sowers (gets the job done)
or "amaretto" sowers (goes down so smooth!) —

and aren't ya glad
i ain't mentioned that
the club needs to re-sign

cc, westbrook and le pronque?

("say hey, say hey, say hey ...")

dreams

2007-01-22T03:05:00.000-05:00

okay, so i woke up sunday morning at 6 am
(more on that later),
puttered around for a while
and went back to bed.

one of the dreams i dreamt
(i hate dreaming)
featured me lying in bed, half awake,
watching a spider the size of a squirrel
scampering around the wall above my bed
spinning a web.

meanwhile, as two friends of mine
(don't recall who at this point)
sat in my bedroom discussing my life,
another spider almost completely succeeded
in walling me into my bed
with another web.

i woke up in real time
just as i was contemplating whether
i could dip under the web wall
before the squirrel-sized spider
dropped from the ceiling onto me.

um ... anybody out there
wanna interpret THAT one for me?
'cause i'm at a loss.

quick recap:

friday, as per a promise,
i called the crazy girl at 10 am
to try to persuade her to wake up
so i could accompany her to CSU
so she could look into graduate programs.

we left at almost 1 pm.

wow, CSU is difficult to navigate.

afterward, we got lunch,
and we got almost exactly the kind of lunch
we had been discussing
the need to avoid.

outside my house, i convinced her
to go to the show she wanted to go to,
cost be damned
(as it's irrelevant to her anyway),
and told her of my plans:

to attend the "sublime frequencies"
film screenings at the parish hall
with the divine ms. d and miss manners.

which was fantastic.
i preferred the first film;
my guests and most others
seemed to prefer the second;

but both were thought-provoking,
to say the least,
and i enjoyed the musics immensely.

i may discuss this more
in a future post.

saturday, i had coffee with that person
(oh, and toast)
and observed an amusing moment:

we were reading the newspaper
and i was talking about the upcoming indians campaign,
of course,
and eventually said,
"you're not even listening to me."

she admitted she wasn't.
then i found out she didn't even know
broussard and belliard, among others,
were no longer around —

and this despite the fact
she'd attended late-season games.

then she went sledding with a friend,
and i came home,
ostensibly to "finish" this transcription
i'm still not done with.

well, let's just say
the remainder of saturday involved
way too much drinking,
and a little more drinking,
and perhaps a little more drinking,

hence my awakening
at 6 am sunday morning
as referenced above.

sunday, i did actually work on the transcription,
and then watched the football.
bears-colts?

oh, okay, all right, whatever.

this post is a stopgap.
tune in tomorrow, hopefully,
and maybe i'll write about something besides
my stupid life.

i'm itching to do so.

world's on heroin

2007-01-19T00:32:00.000-05:00

well, it seems that way, anyway,
what with all these rumors,
surrounding me every day.

how do they get started?
i need some time to get away.

oh, nevermind.

look, about that last post,
sorry for being a whiny little pussy —

it ain't all like that.
all i'm trying to say to y'all

is that after years of research,

dr. sot has concluded
that the actual cause
of the cancer

is the rats themselves,

all right?

YOU connect the dots, champ.

"nothing gold can stay"
"they are who we thought they were"
"i know better now"

PS: yes, the above
is the best haiku yet featured herein,
and technically,

no,
i didn't write it.

don't dream it's over

2007-01-18T16:12:00.000-05:00

you know, if you think about it,
that title's close to a threat,
am i right?

hello, y'all; sorry for the gaps in the record.
i've basically pissed away the last week of my life
(again)

so here i sit,
trying to catch the deluge in a paper cup.

i am on the brink of accepting a teaching assignment
for tomorrow, harking back to how i began last spring,
taking a job for a friday knowing full well
i'd have the weekend to recover.

i'm not at all sure i'm "ready" to do so —

that's a problem with me, you know,
that i have to wait until i'm "ready"
to be able to do anything —

and yes, as of this moment, i will concede
that this is an exhibition of
passive-aggressive behavior
against myself —

and i will further concede
that this has fucked up
a whole hell of a lot
of things in my life
to this point —

and that's what i'm here to talk about today,
while i'm oh so very busy
not transcribing that interview
i'm supposed to have finished
by now.

i guess this post is for the three to five of you
who read this blog and know the full story
(or as much of it as anyone knows),
but i'm a bit troubled right now
about this ongoing renewed relationship
with that person
i don't like to refer to by name.

except for sunday,
we talked every day since last friday,
and got together a couple times,
to boot.

yesterday, i got her call in the early afternoon
(neither of us had been awake for very long,
despite what we'd planned)
and took the banana bread i'd baked
over to her place;

we had coffee, read the newspaper,
observed the kittens and so forth,
and then decided to "do something."

we went to the thrift store,
for no real reason,
and then wound up going to dinner,
of course.

(some of you may now be noting
that these activities are all we do
and all we have ever done.)

on the way to dinner, she mentioned this place
i'd told her about that i thought she'd like
that she might have been interesting in visiting
until i told her my friends would be there.

"well, THAT'S out," she intoned,
and there it began.

she does not like the fact
that my friends —

and two of the most important ones,
in particular —

do not like her
("they don't even know me!")
and are not at all thrilled
that i'm speaking to her again.

they are well within their rights,
of course,
given what they know
("since you HAVE to tell them EVERYTHING ..."),

and i find an intense irony in the fact
that she feels this way
despite the fact that her 1.5 friends
feel the same way
about her talking to me,

none of which is to mention the fact
that i am persona non grata
to her family,
to which she does not mention me,

and particularly to her father,
who if she did,
would probably ignore her
and get up and leave the room.

anyway, this gave her the room
to launch into one of the topics
we'd sorta agreed we couldn't talk about
just yet,

and boy howdy,
it wasn't pleasant.

allow me to present a few observations:

1. the girl does know me rather well, for better or worse
2. the girl has convinced herself that her accounts are correct
3. the girl has a blazing ball of disdain and hate toward me within her
4. the girl will not acknowledge the impact of her own actions
5. the girl wants to do whatever she wants, no questions asked, no repercussions
6. the girl is probably bad for me to be talking to and seeing so much
7. i'm a fucking idiot

okay, now that i've gotten that out of the way,
perhaps i've convinced a few of you
that i do at least know what i've gotten myself
into once again.

i mean, what could happen?
surely, nothing bad could come from
the collision of unfounded feelings on one side
and unrealized feelings on the other,
right?

the cumulative result of the conversation
was disheartening, to say the least,
and we rode home in silence,
with me on the verge of tears,
which eventually came to fruition.

she wanted to know, as we sat in front of my house,
what i was so upset about.

i didn't really tell her;
what would be the point?

but about a half-hour after i was inside,
she called me to tell me two
extremely important things:

neko case, to whom i introduced her, was coming to town,
and grumpy's was open again.

on the surface, and possibly far below it,
i'll grant you, this means nothing.

it was, however, one of the first and only times
in my admittedly hazy memory
that she'd ever deigned to notice
that she'd hurt me
and wanted to do something about it.

but i'd be willing to believe you could torture her
for hours
and she'd never be able to admit as such.

she's still miffed, by the way
(and yes, that's putting it lightly),
that i've let her know
that everyone i know
and some people i don't
think she's crazy.

this really, really bothers her.

i would find this amusing,
but i don't have the energy right now,
as i'm drinking this beer
this gloomy afternoon
in winter, finally.

i will cling to my notion
that she is mentally and emotionally unstable,
however,

as the only other reasonable alternative hypothesis
is that she just basically sucks.

and that would be too much for me to have to face
yet again, yet again, yet again.

(there's little point debating my sanity, after all.)

in conclusion, i guess the only thing i can say is
that maybe, just maybe, ms. manners is right
about one more thing about me

and that i do, indeed,
have terrible taste.

i don't really know what else to say,
which sucks, because i'd really like
to talk about this,
even if nobody wants to listen to me
talk about this
for even one moment more.

i'm recalling right now
something she exclaimed to me
last winter:

"i don't want you to think
you're going to get what you want
by being NICE to me!"

and as i sit here,
wondering what the hell i'm doing
and how to pull the blackness
outta my head
(or wherever it is that it's lodged),
i must wonder

what it is that i imagine i "want,"
anyway.

lord knows,
enough people have asked me that question
during this life of mine.

i usually answer the question
the same way, not completely in jest,
by quoting from a favorite band
(of course):

"a warm, safe place
and a little peace of mind."

sounds good, don't it?

i wish it were that simple!
not only to limit one's desires so,
but to achieve them.

that sounds profound, doesn't it?
that's where i should end this post.

unfortunately, i must note
for the official record

that she's pretending
not to know i'm interested in "more" from her

and i'm pretending
not to know that she is not interested in "more" from me.

and i will let my childhood friend
foghorn leghorn
sum up, for all of those confused,

why she and i are talking again,
and why we are apparently doomed
to the same dance of death
forever:

"two half-nothin's is a whole nothin'."

indeed.

well said, sir.

talk talk

2007-01-13T00:46:00.000-05:00

okay, faithful readers, i gotta tell ya somethin' ...

but first, let me recap my day,
as she who is known about town as the awe-inspiring
horrible face
bursts back into the apartment:

got up earlier'n i bin gettin' up,
and good thing,
as a pal stopped by afore noon
with the usual question.

"wanna get some coffee?" he asked.

"i was actually planning to go 'round the corner
to the diner that just recently re-opened,"
i mentioned.

"oh, the one with the chicken out front?"
he inquired.

chicken?
a cloo!

yeah, they gots a guy dressed as a chicken
and another dressed as 'pikachu,' i think,
either trying to lure in business
or scare it away ...

i hadn't known.

we trekked up there.
breakfast.
the décor is both new
and newly astounding.

(seriously. you gotta see it!)

(and seriously, the current caller on
coast to coast with george noory
on "westwood one" just made the following
statement:

"this is the best show i've ever heard ...
on the subject of the End Times ...")

i DID have "plans" for the day,
but a little after breakfast,
brougham no. 1 called and mentioned
he was stopping over,
with coffee.

he also brought beer.

oh, well.

my plans for the evening were set,
and here, audience, is where
the story begins ...

i was going to the divine miss d.'s
for food, movies, drink and the usual,
right?

this is what i did.

i didn't really talk to her
about my recent adventures
with mrs. krazy

(she who one reader correctly identified earlier
as "the former 'mrs. horrible'"),

much as i didn't mention to
TFMH mrs. krazy
when she called this afternoon

that those were my plans.

does this
MEAN
something?

comment away! i demand it.

it was a lovely evening, of course;
i brung a pizza, and we drank beers,
and watched the notorious bettie page,

and even went downstairs
so i could finally meet noah,
an incredibly cute and wonderful kittycat.

and what did we talk about?

well, how lucky we were to have such good friends
so that we could feel such intimacy and warmth
without having to deal with the bullsh*t
and all that bullsh*t
involved with, you know, dating

or whatever.

as per the usual,
of course.

and yes, i will myself comment upon that,
utilizing the verbiage of my good friend
cappadonna:

"'how you roll? lemmy see yo gold!'
'nah, fuck you.'"

(does that mean something?
no, nothing means anything;
absolutes are not)

hit

2007-01-10T23:10:00.000-05:00

oh, and that theme does cover
all too many things ...

yesterday, tuesday, i ... got drunk.
that's really pretty much it.
i blame others, of course.

today,
i inadvertently had a day with "mrs. horrible."
i called her a little after noon,
just to shoot the shit, really,
and left a brief voicemail message.

she called back a while later,
doin' nothin', lounging in bed,
talking to me and one of her cats
simultaneously.

we eventually decided to have coffee
and hit some thrift shops —

she needs a new winter coat, dammit —

so i delayed for a long while
and then took a newspaper over there
and we had coffee.

eventually, we left,
for to thrift,
which was largely a bust.

(at the second stop,
she did purchase a "burl ives' greatest hits"
cassette tape
for 32 cents, however.)

then we had dinner, of course,
and then traversed the west side
so she could get a cookie.

and we sat for a time at the lake,
and then i took her home.

me being me,
i felt melancholy;

there's effort involved here,
but little purposefulness,
so far as i can tell,
and it's mainly the story of two people
who don't do a whole hell of a lot
hanging out
'cause they don't do
a whole hell of a lot.

and maybe they miss the excuse,
i dunno.

anyway, i recently reread
the hoboken chicken emergency
by "d. manus pinkwater" —

yes, it's a children's book —

and i must admit,
it made me contemplate
part of my reality.

allow me to reference this fine work:

     "Chickens are very sensitive birds," Dr. Hsu told the mayor. "It is very easy to hurt their feelings. When their feelings are hurt, they become unpleasant, anti-social. A perfectly sweet chicken can become a bitter, destructive bird, if it feels that it is unwanted."

     "Do you think that Dirty Louise ..." the mayor began.

     "Refer to her as Henrietta," Dr. Hsu interrupted. "It will help you to think of her as a person, a misunderstood chicken, and a person."

and also:

     "I was coming to that," said Dr. Hsu. "First we have to get in touch with the Bobowicz family, and ask them if they are willing to give Henrietta another chance. If they agree, we will begin a campaign of publicity. We will encourage the citizens of Hoboken to have a friendly attitude toward chickens. We will ask them to wave and smile when they see Henrietta, instead of screaming, or calling the police, or throwing things at her. After a while, Henrietta may try to find Arthur again. If she does, she will be allowed to stay with him, like any normal two-hundred-and-sixty-six-pound pet chicken. The town of Hoboken will issue her a chicken license, and everything will return to normal."

     "It's worth a try," the mayor said.

i'm sure you see where i'm comin' from.

okay, matt, sure

look, i'm just getting my ducks in a row, all right?
surveying the landscape.
imaging.

that sort of thing.

it ain't no big deal;
i just would prefer to be clear-minded
for a change.

what about the beer, and the weed, then, matt?

uh ... the what, now?

nevermind that;
that ain't important.

i mean CLEARMINDED, dammit!
free of prejudice,
free of judgment,

free of pain and fear.

--end transmission--

filled up a 5-gallon jug for narcisso this evening;
their landlord is late on the water bill
and they ain't got none.

the kitten face is restless,
as all she's been doing these past few cold days
is sleeping, sleeping and sleeping.

no sub jobs yet,
but i got freelancing to do
and i'm not a fanatic about it.

as for tomorrow?
see: what happens tomorrow
we'll deal with it then

(snuck that one past ya!)

we're famous

2007-01-09T01:19:00.000-05:00

on monday, january 8,
the rock and roll hall of fame
announced its class of '07;

on tuesday, january 9,
the baseball hall of fame
will announce
its latest inductees.

and, yes,
the rock hall is now compleat.

one of the greatest experiences of my life
happened at the rock hall,
years ago
and i'm not entirely sure when, exactly —

but T la-rock was in town,
and she and stephe dk and i
ventured to that estimable venue
one afternoon ...

we viewed a documentary on 'the blues' —

and you know how me bros and i feel about these things, right? —

and for whatever reason,
after the screening,
as the audience filed out,

a middle-aged woman wearing a leather jacket
turned to stephe and declaimed,
"they didn't have any of your van halen!"

and we laugh about it to this very day,
ya dig.

well, the rock hall now does have
van halen,
and bully for the rock hall!

from the rock hall website
(no, really!):

"Metal heroes Van Halen have finally made the cut, and both Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth will be inducted, although one time front man Gary Cherone (who was left out of their 'Best Of Both Worlds' greatest hits) will not be included."

the baseball HOF, now, that's diff'rent.

cal ripken jr. and tony gwynn will be elected, certainly.
rich 'goose' gossage also stands a chance,

and that's about it.

ripken, gwynn, and maybe some wild card
is my guess.

(i'd vote gossage, personally.)

and, wow, OSU got stompled by florida
in the tostitos bcs 'national championship game,'

and nobody saw that coming.
a bit of a letdown for the denizens of this fair state,
far too many of whom
actually are feeling a letdown
due to this outcome.

me, i'm scanning the sub-system robot
for jobs i might accept.

tick-tock, tick-tock, tick ...

had coffee and kittens with (the former) mrs. horrible today,
by chance;
i've neglected to mention

(dear diary)

that she called me on satiddy
not to apologize
so we —

yeah, anyway, i went over there today
and we had coffee
and cinnamon rolls
(and kittens)

and she gave me a calendar
or two
'n' such,

and where in the hell was i?

i owe you a blog titled
"children of the revolution,"
probably ...

:

isn't it winter?
we've forgotten how to act
changes may beckon

here today, gone tomorrow

2007-01-05T23:58:00.000-05:00

yes, for those of you scoring at home,
it took slightly over a week
for things to return to the norm

between mrs. horrible
and myself

(fka "mr. horrible").

longtime followers of my chronicles
are no doubt dying for the details,
as there's no way in hell
anyone could guess
what the hell happened,

right?

/crickets

okay, i'll tell you!
since, oh, saturday, i'd been trying
to make some sort of plans
with that person.

one small problem with this thrust
was that she wasn't giving me any information
as to anything she might be interested in doing.

i tried prompts;
i tried suggestions;
i tried fishing;
nothing.

and thus we meandered until wednesday,
when i proposed we take advantage of
thursday's unseasonably warm weather
for an activity of some kind,
perhaps including "walking somewhere."

well, maybe, she offered ...
thursday's being the day of the week
she always hangs out with her friend.

(yes, you read that correctly.)

right, let me know, i reasonably responded.

thursday morning, she calls me
essentially to cancel
(if one can cancel something
that hasn't been scheduled),
as she'd just that morning heard from her friend,
and they'd be getting together for lunch,
and then they'd do, you know, whatever,
and she didn't know when she'd be getting home ...

well, call me when you get home
so we can plan something, i request.

she'd rather not.
why don't i just call her friday morning?
or she'll call me.

i repeat my preference that she call me
when she gets in.

spent the day cleaning the place,
and then met three of the crew
at a place in torment
i ain't visited before.

we had a nice time.

and i came home and drank some more beer,
and read some stuff about sports
on this robot at which i sit,

and the nice time ended shortly after 12:44,
which is when the phone rang.

in short, i made the mistake i always make:
i asked questions.

the first seemed innocuous enough:
what had she been doing?

(is that intrusive? i was just wondering.
i mean, when someone tells me she's
getting together with her friend for lunch
"around 2 pm" and she gets home around
2:30 am, i have to imagine activities
of some stripe were included.

then again, as i pointed out, most people
i know don't only see their friend
on the same day every week, so
what the hell do i know?)

"well, we didn't get together
'til between three and four," she began,

and there was lunch, a walk through
a landmarked area, the friend's house,
and then the cheap movie theater ...

where they saw two movies.
(sounds like fun, eh?
let me remind you, this individual
is nearly 30 years old.)

(her friend is 24, i believe.
and newly married!)

yes, i asked,
because i never learn,
and it was all downhill from there.

i did get to learn a wealth of new information,
mainly concerning things about me
she apparently despises —

new ones, i mean —

and so eventually i got to ask her again,
calmly, why in the hell
she wanted to talk to me at all.

see, i'm not quite sure i understand.

would you believe,
i didn't get an answer to that question?

instead, i got more denigration of my character,
followed by taunts and sneering
as she finally hung up.

when the phone was safely back in its place,
i kinda just looked at my computer screen,
feeling not much of anything
besides relief to be out of that conversation,
and i shrugged to myself
and finished my beer

and got up for another one.

you know, i'd discussed the situation
with ms. manners earlier in the evening,
musing that as the week dragged onward,
i had less and less of an idea
what on earth i was supposed to do with mrs. horrible,
in terms of getting together for some reason,
and much less of an idea
as to why.

a day after the incident, i must confess,
i'm no clearer on this concept.

but i think i'm a little clearer
about what mrs. horrible is seeking:
she wants me to treat her
the "same way" i treat
my "other friends."

no, really.

now, i don't know about you,
but i don't have to drag information
out of the majority of my friends,
and i'm fairly comfortable
i know who the majority of my friends are.

(you know, as "people.")

as well as how they might act in any given situation.
and what they're "about."
and what comprises their "values."

and so forth.

there's no tote board. there's no scorecard.
there's no equation for determining
what's "right" about these people.

but i know them, and i know what to expect from them.
and we can share things with each other.

et cetera
(et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
and in the midst of life we are in debt,
et cetera).

so, yeah, i can't quite see that.
and then there's all that other stuff.
i think mrs. horrible's expectations
are kinda ridiculous.

[see how calm it is?
i told you not to worry.
i've got this thing licked]

you just can't wait for the post
titled "terms of psychic warfare,"
can you?

piss me off

2007-01-05T01:28:00.000-05:00

yep, just had one o' them conversations
with mrs. horrible,
the horrible kind of conversation ...

look, all of you:

i ain't never gonna stop bein' me,
all right?

i'm gonna have standards,
and i'm gonna ask questions,

and i ain't gonna like nothin', neither,
all right?

(just clearing that up.)

and in keeping with the title,
nope,
ain't gon' happen.

you just go on bein' you, sweetheart!

i won't do this often,
and i haven't,
but here i must:

yeah, you can say what you will,
be how you are,
talk too loud and go too far;
you can hate who you hate —
hell, hate me, too! —
tell the same old lies 'til you believe they're true,
but today is the day that you will not ...

big tough connie was right, i tells ya ...

1st of tha month

2007-01-02T01:34:00.000-05:00

hey, it's 2007.

super.

woke up on the divine miss d's couch around 10,
went back to sleep; she got up around noon, so
i did, too. coffee. the other divine miss d
and a pal came up to join us. we watched the movie
hard candy, which was pretty good.

i thought it was well-written, which you may know
i don't think very often of things.
(such as that sentence i just wroten.)

watched part of the granddaddy of them all
with "bob" from upstairs,

and most of the tostitos fiesta bowl,
and the only reason i'm mentioning this
is because in the tostitos fiesta bowl,

boise state, seeking an undefeated season
from outside the scope of the bcs system,
tallied their final three (3) scores
with the hook-and-ladder,
a 'touch pass' to a lineman,

and the gotdam statue of liberty play.

yes, the statue of liberty play.

the one you've never seen anyone attempt;
that artifact of the olden days.

but the real purpose of this post
is to fulfill a musing from last nite's party:

i think —

especially in light of my newer revelations —

i should list the various crimes
with which i could have had mrs. horrible charged,
just so you know i "know what's up,"

and so i can "continue" to tell you
i know "what" i'm "doing."

assault/battery (~aggravated)
menacing/harassment/stalking
kidnaping

well, that's not such a long list,
is it?

what could go wrogn?

kitten face is touchy;
i was gone for nearly 24 hours.
she got tuna, however,
and isn't that enough?

(no, it's not.)

and as for the post title,
yeah, it's the second;
sue me.

ya did nae expect me to use "new year's day,"
didja?

it's:

the ceiling just fell —
it's a state of confusion!
what do you say, dear?

or:

don't (you) slander me
you're gonna miss me, baby
her time is her own

top of the pops

2006-12-29T01:21:00.000-05:00

sources of last 10 (ten)
post titles,
in diminishing order,

and not counting this one:

10. sword, dammit
   9. fIREHOSE, "ragin', full-on"
   8. dead milkmen, big lizard in my backyard
   7. hüsker dü, new day rising
   6. dead kennedys, bedtime for democracy
   5. th' motherscratchin' DIDJITS, hey judester
   4. c'mon, now!
   3. "big dipper"
   2. phil spector, darlene love ... new bomb turks?
   1. *

* chosen not only because it's all too fitting a title,
but on behalf of he who used to get these transmissions
as emails.

(oh, and as for the sources?
fuckin' sue me,
i'm 33.)

(which reminds me:
haiku is overdue!

hence,

contemporary?
i'm not sure of the meaning
what time is it now?)

about us

2006-12-28T23:35:00.000-05:00

(AKA the continuing stoooooooooory ... of a QUACK
who's Gone to the Dogs)

lundi, 25 decembre:

drank my face off. drove around a bunch
when i really shouldn't have.

that's pretty much the short and long of it.

mardi, 26 decembre:

had to run an errand in the morning;
and decided, to preserve my sanity,
to stop by what's-her-face's place

to inquire as to what i might could expect
from her
following this holiday thing.

we had coffee and played with the kittens
(of course)
and talked a bit more,
for another coupla hours,

and, though cautious,
it was all right.

she wanted to know if, basically,
i'd let her take me,
the following day,
to see the BARCELONA exhibit

currently on display at what used to be
the museum of art.

i agreed. i proposed 12:30 pm
for the engagement.

then i went home.

a pal called; he stopped by,
we talked and drank beers.
then i went to see the new lou reeds
ply their outrageous rock stylee.

late night, many beers ...

fun!

mercredi, 26 decembre:

she was late, of course, by almost 40 minutes.

when finally she picked me up,
i pointed out that such a habit
was a hallmark of passive-aggressive behavior.

"i've been told i exhibit that," she pronounced.

and we went and looked at art.
(too crowded by half.)

afterward, we realized we were hungry,
and underwent our usual vaudeville routine
in determining what we should do:

"what do you feel like?"

"food."

"what kind of food?"

"hot food ... what do you feel like?"

"food."

"well, what kind?"

"good food."

"what's 'good food'?"

"tasty food."

and so forth.

we both knew, i think, what each other would say,
and probably both knew where we'd wind up
as well.

that had been one of our biggest problems;
we had been in a serious rut.

so, anyway, we got pizza (and salad).
neither of us ate very much,
indubitably the result of

substandard living
lo these many, many months.

i felt more comfortable around her
than i had in a very, very, very long time.

she made me laugh uproariously,
almost uncontrollably,
at one point,
mentioning how she had to go to a wake
and the only pants she owned
were jeans.

i couldn't explain what was so funny,
and didn't even try.

now, listen:

yes, i'm extremely cognizant
of certain tactics
and certain manifestations,

and my memory holds fast the truth;

i know what i'm dealing with here.

and i guess all i can offer
is the observation that
that which one constructs
with one's own hands
is worth more than
that which falls into one's lap
(literally or figuratively)
or
that which one selects
from a shelf.

maybe.

could be i'm just a idiot.

one thing, though:
whatever happens from here on out
is irrelevant to me.

i done TOLDED youse,
i'm getting my life back,
and the project is well underway.

mine eyes still look toward june.

c'est la vie, vous savez quoi je dirais?

i'm looking forward to all sorts of possibilities.

so go listen to a bunch of songs grant hart wrote,
all right?

and rest assured,
meditations on this topic
are far from complete ...

christmas (baby please come home)

2006-12-28T15:47:00.000-05:00

vendredi, 22 decembre:

get home from work at a decent hour, finally,
and check for mail.

i'd received this pamphlet in the mail from pueblo, colorado,
addressed to bill jr. —

something about "the queers," aliens and soil —

envelope addressed in large, jagged writing
bearing a version of my name.

it also bore a US mail postmark
and it contained a christmas card,
the text of which read

Dear Matt and Kitten Face,
       So I finally understand the
joy of kittens (though sometimes I call them puppies.) I hope you
meant what you said about
a walk and coffee because I've
been looking forward to it and
we both deserve a happy Christmas-
time (without snow unfortunately.)
I'll see and talk to you soon.

Merry Christmas

           Love,
               Mrs. Horrible

(the card, perhaps unsurprisingly, featured cartoon kittens.)

(and it wasn't really signed "mrs. horrible.")

because i'm a jerk, i showed it to select friends
to garner their always amusing and informative opinions.

they were fairly unanimous: LOONY LOONY LOONY!

my favorite part was that she again ignored
the, you know, important parts
of what i'd told her, focusing instead
on what she wanted.

and i had a fine evening that ran late,
courtesy of one fine institution
and several wonderful friends.

samedi, 23 decembre:

went to work for a few hours in the afternoon,
mostly so little big bossman could outline
his agenda for the postchristmas season.

so it's back to catalogue editing and so forth
for me for now, a day or two a week here and there,
'til the easter catalogue's finished.

(school starts up again soon enough, though,
so i'll be back in the classroom taking bullets.)

around 11 pm or so, i strolled up to the sto'
for a six o' talls, and as i returned,
i saw a figure scurrying out of my driveway.

it was her, don't you know, presenting to me
a decorative gift tin (she has many)
filled with cookies she'd baked.

turns out i hadn't heard from her in the interim
few weeks because she assumed i'd
"just be mad at [her] anyway,"

so she figured she —

well, i obviously don't know WHAT she "figured" —

would ... bring me cookies, i guess.
she also mentioned that "santa"
had left something for me at her place,
and that i should come to get it
at some point, if not right then.

("why would 'santa' leave me something at your place?"
i wondered.

"he gets confused," she solemnly informed me.)

so i hadda do it, right?
i aksed her, point-blank,
what she wanted from me.

i pointed out that it's not as though
we were old pals who lived in different parts
of the country, and were taking advantage
of being in town for the holidays
to get together.

i mean, she lives 13.5 blocks west of me.

she grew frustrated
and, somewhat like a petulant child,
demanded to know how i kept missing the fact
that she "wanted [her] friend matt."

i pointed out that i'd want my pal [name]
as well, except that i hadn't seen that person
in a long time.

(i noted as well that whomever it had been
that showed up here last january
with a similar request hadn't been
that person.

i was succinct:
"i don't know who in the hell that was.")

so blah blah blah and cha-cha-cha,
an hour or so later she was heading back home,
and i'd told her i'd try to stop by the next evening,
giftmas eve, after whatever else was to occur
had been realized.

i believe she remained dubious.

and she'd thrown a monkeywrench into my drinking schedule,
so i found myself up a damn sight longer
into the morning
than i'd planned ...

dimanche, 24 decembre:

collected "giles cory" and went to the old homestead,
so's i could cash my cheque,
tried to jumpstart giles' car back at the hall,
and finally got hold of "the other one,"
and so giles and i headed to 7 thrills
in the early evening
for some giftmas eve hangin'.

eventually, it was time to take giles back
to the home of the champion avenue,
where he stay at with "cub reporter."

then to my house for a brief stop —

oops, wait, enoch and narciso beckon;
shit, that's a liquor drink!
(i sipped a bit to be polite, but i was
already feelin' the beers i'd done drank.)

and it had become time for my final stop.

she offered me a drink, or something to eat.
drink selections included beer.
i asked if she'd let me have a beer.

"if you only have ONE," she allowed.
(doesn't trust me!)

(i neglected to tell her about the
several-to-many i'd already had.
besides which, she clearly was
under the influence herself.

"what have YOU been drinking?" i wondered.

"wine," she responded. "and coffee.")

so we chatted for about two hours,
and for the first time ... well, ever,
she made some statements
or uttered utterances
that seemed to indicate
that not only was she willing to try to communicate,
but that she actually understood
a few things.

i'll admit, i was surprised,
and surprisingly pleased.

and i collected my gift from "santa":
two pairs of socks,
one featuring a nature scene
("they have ducks!" she emphasized,
as i'd initially missed them)
and the other, bats;

and a canister of tea,
the same exact kind —

wouldn't you know it? —

she'd given me many, many years ago
around the same time of year,
among the first things
she ever gave me.

not that that could be symbolism,
or coincidence,
or anything.

and there we were, together on Xmess morn,
just the two of us.

(well, and the 8-months kittens,
whom i call "wiggins" and "figgins"
and she calls
"boo bear" and "figgy,"
respectively.)

it was a tad odd, yes,
but strangely pleasant,

and it felt ... unfinished.

h:

"that ghost is loose," yes
how will i tell the ladies?
they're gonna kill me

more of the rest of the story
in the next post,
a little bit later ...

you're not patsy

2006-12-16T00:39:00.000-05:00

wow. whoa ...

i shouldn't be writing this, doing this;
i worked 66 hours this week,
i'm drunk/altered right now,

and whatever.

i didn't know what to do tonight.
a million things were happening.
i was tired as hell.

driving home, what i really wanted to do
was call the divine ms. d and see
if she might wanna grab some dinner or something.

well, i got home
and just a bit later the phone rang,
and my caller ID ID'd it as miss manners!

so i picked up.
she asked me how i was.

"i'm tired as HELL," i said, and i explained.
turns out she was inviting me to join her and the divine ms. d
for dinner and a silly event.

so we dined --

miss manners picked up the check,
as a holiday offering to her friends,
how nice! --

and we went to the silly event,
where i spotted HC and so forth,

and then we repaired to a bar
for --

no, really --

one drink.

(first time ever in my life!)

damn, i love 'em girls.
the divine miss d. picked up the tab at the bar.

i told 'em that was fitting,
as what i wanted to do for them --

the two of them --

for the holiday season
was treat them to brunch.

it's agreed!

i'm smiling.

for me.
i am free,
you see.

i can indulge freely now
in the remembrance of things past
without pain.

how nice for me!

but i must remember:

for my friend, for my friend,
friend, i tell you,
i am sending everything i have your way,
and i have a lot to say to you,
and i will call you tomorrow
and i want to remind you,
i'm here for you,
for whatever i can do,
in whatever capacity.

(you know who you are.)

[ladies love cool james
tomorrow was yesterday
try it, you'll like it]

fairytale of new york

2006-12-12T23:59:00.000-05:00

(you know the words.)

ah, yes, that title's appropriate
in so many ways ...

as i sit here with my girlfriends,
"kitten face" and "beer,"

i realize i should be sleeping.

because i'm gassed, dawg.

i done workededed 11.5 hrs. today,
and tha sh*t was intense.

and i drank waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much coffee.

and i'm exhausted,
but i legitimately feel happy right now;

all is well in my world.

(it's my mind.)

another long-lost pal found me on myspace as well.

her name?

shandi.

(if you get the joke,
phone in!
operators are standing by.)

[you will most likely
not know
about whom
i be talking.]

tonite it's

mark e. smith did it
"the real new fall album"
somehow it is good

under the christmas fish

2006-12-11T23:46:00.000-05:00

saturday nite, as i sat here @ the computer,
i thought it might be tuesday,
or friday.

last nite, sunday nite,
as i sat here @ the computer,
i thought it might be monday morning.

i knew tonite was monday nite
because i was trying to listen to
monday night football
on "westwood one,"

mostly unsuccessfully
(altho i didn't care).

the cavs game dominated the airwaves,
but i didn't listen to that
because i knew they were going to lose.

(okay, maybe i didn't know
they were going to lose,
but i felt that they would,
and for once,
my instincts were correct.
figures, right?
a negative outcome ... )

the point is,
it's xmess @ the monasry,
and i'm contemplating
trying to crack 70 hours this week.

(ain't gonna happen,
i ain't livin' well enough)

you know what?
i'm gonna make it, goddammit.

i'm taking my life back.

and i've even put the ball in motion
so that i must actually
grant petit cadeaux
to a few special friends
this annual-gift-day season.

why?

it's an excuse,
much the same as for
"napping" at friend's homes
during holiday-time parties,
which the BIG MAN and i
discussed earlier.

and hey,
you'll get this,
there ain't a ditch i can dig
too big
that i can't crawl out,

all right?

no haiku tonite, sorry.

but croon along!

jack frost roasting on an open fire ...
chestnuts, who the fuck wants those?
rows of houses that are all the same,
and folks just smoking mistletoe ...

you have your holiday, i'll have mine.

a commercial

2006-12-09T23:36:00.000-05:00

yeah, i got this problem
with déjà vu, right?

so i feel as though i've already used the above
as a title for a post,
even though i know i haven't —

the same way i'm always almost certain
i've left the coffeepot on
even though i've NEVER left the coffeepot on —

but at any rate,
the only reason i'm writing this
is to wonder why certain songs
have yet to be co-opted
by advertising.

i mean, ever since 1986 or so,
i've wondered why noone's borrowed
carly simon's "miss you like crazy"
to promote a meat product,
meat-related accessory,
or franchise offering.

think about it:

"and if you like gravy, if you like gravy ... "

i seriously think
this is a missed opportunity.

similarly:

heart's "these dreams."

lee, are you listening?
levi's?
um ... wrangler?

[cue music]

THESE ... JEANS ... go on when it's cold outside ...
every minute of my life, these jeans, they will proviiiiiide ...

you can't tell me that's not magic,
man.

aw, fukkkkkkkkkk,
i FERGOT,

y'ain't even need that no mo'!

kelly clarkson for ford, anyone?
(you know all the rest, yes?)

indirectly, i think ghostface was commenting
on this metaphenomenon
when he dropt "holla"
on the pretty toney album —

you know, that's the one
where he just raps over that delfonics song
instead of sampling it,
right?

the one where the f*cking song just plays
and he raps over it?

(it "blew my mind" when i first heard it
courtesy of garbs)

oh, that machine,
it took you away.

oh, fudgems!

[i feel contented
nothing matters anymore
i have escaped it]

[you mentioned candor
candor ends paranoia
you know who you are]

[gimme a dolla'
yo let me holla at you
i don't mean no harm]

if i told you

2006-12-08T23:47:00.000-05:00

so it's been about a week since mrs. krazy
tracked me down at the gas station,
and returned the bagsful of
everything-she'd-ever-given-me
that i'd returned
on september 1st, 2005;

a meeting at which i repeated to her
every last damn thing i'd ever said to her
and everything i wanted and needed her to know

(a conversation during which,
needless to say,
i realized she had no concepts
that could possibly engage
that about which i was speaking)

and what strikes me
is that i commanded
"think about what i said"
and mentioned how
if i didn't hear anything from her
in the intervening weeks,

well,

i'd be upset —

needless to say,
i haven't heard from her.

and thank you, world;
thank you, universe;
thank you very much,
forces i don't understand!

i am finally free.

anyone for tennis?

(i'll meet you somewhere
just you name the place and time
did i miss something?)

serrated edge

2006-12-08T23:23:00.000-05:00

met the crüe out tonite,

and the crüe tonite consisted of
miss manners, dr. N, c=c,
the dual ms. Ds, and the woman who lives in my backyard.

'twas for an art opening,
said "art" being photographic portraits —

oral surgeon by day,
photographer during the downtime he accrues
being an
oral surgeon by day —

and, yeah, okay,
i thought i had shook 'em,
but it turns out they were waiting for me;

and so we went to another art-based event,
and then cut to the chase,
to the bar,
for drinks
and drinks

and drinks.

for the bulk of the latter,
it was me and the 4 ladies;

how nice for me.

(use any inflection you desire!)

on the way home,
i caught "misty mountain hop"
on the classic rock

and freakin' blasted it,
howling along as best i could,
probably sounding as though
i was suffering.

i'm not suffering.
i'm not in pain.

came home and was greeted by
Cold Kitten Files,
as she-that-is had realized i was leaving again
when i left again
and took the opportunity to run and jump and play,

knowing full well
i wouldn't be back for a while.

and baby, it's COLD outside.

i could talk a lot more about this,
or any of many other topics,
or even expound about last weekend
and that preformance i done witnessed,

but even i get a bit tired
of the solipsism
sometimes.

and so:

dreams, don't defer them
those that have done better know
in 12 hours, work

it's winter, i'm feeling all right,
and life is life,
truth beauty,

and you can finish that up
any the hell way you prefer.

relatin' dudes to jazz

2006-12-06T22:45:00.000-05:00

yeah, some commenter over on the kissmesuzy
blogspot blog

wondered from whence might arise
the blog that dared
compare

nfl quarterbacks to types of marihuana.

well, okay:

Tha gOOd shiiiiiiiii

yeah, ya hear me, it's that shazbot that
after about a few puffs
you ain't know zachary where you BE at,

a bubble within which
everything is poetry,
and art,

and a symphony playing along every last nerve
in your body.

(you know, the typa isht
i rarely kemso, right?)

no, seriously,
you did nae really think
i might do this, didja?

(i swear,
my moms seemed offended earlier this evening
when i mentioned that i thought football was "boring.")

c'mon, now!

comparing running backs to madonna songs, now —

that i might do.

(my heart is full of love
this human life is precious
it's an accident)

stoned again

2006-12-06T21:50:00.000-05:00

hi there!

yeah, so yesterday's second post
had been intended to discuss
the consequences and repercussions
of this article i read
about how being "in love"
resembles states of psychosis
and how feeling "in love"
mirrors drug/alcohol addiction —

this was a scholarly article, mind you —

because i basically felt
all like
"yeah, no sh*t,"

because i bin thinkest thist
fo years!

well, okay, maybe not the "psychosis" part —

i gots my own issues with psychosis —

but shit yeah the chemical part.

i mean, like,
that's what's up with my current girlfriend,
beer,

like,

you know what i'm

i really do have a lot i want to say
about psychology and psychological states
and how they relate to your life and mines,

but i'm not brilliant enough right now
to explicate clearly
the incredibly important topics

i wish to explore.

cavaliers win it by four.

(i've learned the secret
again i've learned the secret
it's not what you have)

oh, and by the way,
the first entity that correctly identifies
the source of this post's title
wins

the premium beer
of his/her/its
choice,

no matter what.

(what's in a question?
oh yes, this is a statement.
— ejaculation — )

she's not there

2006-12-06T00:43:00.000-05:00

... and neither am i!

next post will have to wait ...

it's dark and hell is hot

2006-12-05T22:51:00.000-05:00

by "hell," of course, i'm referring to my life,
but tongue in cheek this time, actually,
because —

still, as of this writing, 10:51 pm,
mardi, 5 decembre, MMVI —

i'm not feeling that MY life is hell,
specifically.

but my furnace has finally been fixed,
and i cranked that mutha,
far past any temperature i'd ever really choose,
just because.

(i'm actually sorta uncomfortable right now
because it's too warm in here,
but i'm celebrating!)

i gots another post comin' up in a little bit,
but i wanna mention here
that part of the reason
i'm feeling ever so much better, thank you,
is you,
readers

and friends.

(and of course you, blog!)

my weekend was amusing, informative,
relevant and ... nice? is that a word?
it means something?

so, seriously, like, uh,
i'm back on it, a'ight?

(which, of course, means
not back on it ... still on it,
ya dig.)

oh!
i almost forgot!
fuck dmx and his remedial-ass flow!

("illiterate-type asshole, song's goin' gold,
no doubt, 'n' yo, watch a corny nigga fold")

i'm listenin' at ODB's posthumous
a son unique.

institutionalized*

2006-12-05T00:07:00.000-05:00

*alternate post title: "psychotherapy"

i neglected to mention that
the title of the last post
results from my arbitrary rule that
only the "classic rock" station
(or the sports network)
plays on my car radio.

(believe me, the worst two groups
that receive constant rotation
are boston and styx!)

so it was there, right?

and perhaps not coincidentally,
the eagles defeated the panthers
tonight on monday night football
on "westwood one."

(speaking of panthers,
the world's smallest is out,
doing whatever the hell it is she does.)

&

i sure hope that after this postgame tripe
and the "newsradio" update,
coast to coast comes on ...

those folks make me feel downright sane,
ya dig?

peaceful easy feeling

2006-12-04T23:48:00.000-05:00

ladies and gents,
it was 42 degrees in my apartment when i awoke this mornin'.

i didn't exactly leap out of my bedroll.

and i went to work,
testing my obsolete tires against the snow,

and i worked my 8.25 hrs.,
and came home,
worried about the magnificent kitten face
and hoping the furnace had been fixed.

hell 2 da naw.

when i arrived home, it was below 40
in my home,
and kitten was very vocal.

frantic. lonely.

and cold,

and confused.

and here's ... where the story ends
(do i even need to provide the

i didn't lose my temper
with my landlord,
and i accepted his tip, so
my oven is set to 325 degrees fahrenheit
and the door is ajar,

and the space heater is hummin',

and now it's nearly 60 degrees in the hovel.

it still will be a cold (morning),
but i offer this as evidence
that i have learned important lessons;

and that (and this is much more important)
i am learning how to utilize
what i've learned.

hey, you know something?

yeah, me too.

matt, what are you talking about?

i'm just sayin'.

(i'll get my life back
my life? oh, that's my living
i'm still living now)

[it needs translation?
ask me, i can handle it
this is what i do]

{try it, you'll like it
this culture is revolting
rules aren't my guidance}

&

thank you for reading
this is practice, you know that
i'll 'keep it real'

she's so cold

2006-12-04T02:22:00.001-05:00

yeah, so the kitten went out tonight at about
quarter of two (am),
and stayed out in the snow and the vicious
wind chill for about a half-hour.

why? i don't know.

but it's in the 40s in the house,
one can see one's breath,
so why not?

i had a lovely day today, albeit a strange one ...

got to ms. d's for brunch a little after 12;
we waited on our honored guest for about an hour
and then ate,
and drank our mimosas.

four girls and me.

conversation ranged from arts 'n' crafts
to interior decoration
to cooking hints,

and i remarked several times
that i must have been at the wrong party.

attended a soirée later
(hey, it was gonna be warm)
and got another free meal.

and good company.

so, despite the fact that mrs. krazy
tracked me down yet again

(it had been nearly 3 months this time)

i'm still feeling somewhat positive.

(though i should be, you know, sleeping.)

mrs. krazy either will never understand it,
or will never be able to do anything about it,
but in either case,
i swear,

this time?
it ain't gonna bring me down.

i'm ready to learn and grow.
anyone who'd like to come along,
you're welcome.

g-building

2006-11-30T23:20:00.000-05:00

tonight on "westwood one":

thursday nite (american) football:

bengals swat ravens, 13-7, i think.

i think this exposes the ravens' offense
more than it lauds the stripes' defense.

the remaining schedule, however,
suggests this doesn't matter,
at least as far as the AFCN is concerned.

BAL (9-3):

@ KC
vs. CLE
@ PIT
vs. BUF

CIN (7-5):

vs. OAK
@ IND
@ DEN
vs. PIT

now, which one finishes 10-6?

also on "westwood one" tonite, of course:

"coast to coast am with george noory."

some woman was just on discussing demon possession.
it sounded as though she were discussing bad relationships.
maybe it's just me.

speaking of which:

hey, unnamed person,
if i said some things i shouldn't have said
(and don't remember saying),
i hope it won't prove an obstacle,
because, really,
you know me better than that.

(i hope.)

shit,

the paranoids are after me.

(again.)

and lemmy tell ya,
i gots NO idear whut the kitten face
wants from me right now.

we've played the practice-bird game a few times.
she's sat in my lap and gotten petteded.
i done brushededed her, extensively.
she ripped up my arm.

she's still dissatisfied,
and querulous.

the female guest on "coast to coast"
just uttered the phrase
"hypnotic death."

(dude, they fuckin shredded in the '80s, dude.)

hey, anybody wanna get together this weekend?
i deserve a break today.

but on tha rill?
i'm feeling all right.
even felt happy recently, and more than once or twice.

said to my surrogate mom out at the monastery,
yesterday,
"i'm actually in a pretty good mood right now."

she was surprised.
"really?" she inquired.

"yeah, i don't know how in the hell that happened,"
i commented.

"me neither!" she observed.

i felt similarly today,
even if i was still a little too altered
when i awoke/drove/arrived,
and even if it was tiring,
and i need a break
from computers.

* wow, the kitten is restless *

and where in the hell was i?

"american hardcore" (the movie),
anyone?

cedar-lee?
hmm?

and because i don't imagine anyone i know
who reads this blog
would get the title of this post,

a clooooo!

"they'll be scrapin' yo cantaloupe
off the pavement
with yo wig split in half
and yo chest caved in."

and
due to popular demand,

a haiku:

it's getting cold out
broken, still, is my furnace
kitten: winter coat

or:

december the first
most detest chilly weather
it inspires me

no traffic

2006-11-27T22:03:00.000-05:00

i'll ask politely this time:

if you read this tripe,
might you take the trouble
to comment now and again?

(obviously, this isn't meant
for the five people who
comment frequently
or have commented more than once.
thanks, by the way.
yes, i know who you are,
and
yes, i'm somewhat amazed you keep reading!)

i know it's kinda a pain-in-the-ass;
and i don't mind if you stay "anonymous"

(actually, i kinda enjoy
trying to decipher who
the anonymities may be)

but any commentary
invariably strengthens
what i like to think of
as a
"dialogue."

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

[end soliloquy]

bonus haiku!

i worked nine hours
my head has throbbed all day long
it's not yet tuesday

replacement bonus haiku!

i regret a lot
i'm not what most people are
this isn't kansas

matt, your haiku sucks:

yes, yes, it is true
i will admit this problem
tomorrow is what?

dial 'm' for motherfucker

2006-11-27T21:37:00.000-05:00

i haven't featured a cat-related post in a while,
so allow me to comment
that i was discussing the feeding habits of my roommate,
she who is known worldwide as the world's silliest face,
with my (brothers') mother recently,

and she

(mom, that is, not kitten face)

provided me with some
(rare)
insight.

i had been explaining how
she who is known worldwide as the effervescent little horrible
refuses to eat her food until i've petted her sufficiently,
and also how she won't eat from "cat dish"
unless it's teeming full of
whatever the hell i feed her.

(currently, it's 9 lives.)

"mom" remarked that she's had/has cats that act the same,
and that she figured it was because they/it/he/she were worried
that if they/it/he/she emptied the bowl,

food might never appear again.

i had never thought of that.

interesting.

i'm listening to "monday night football"
on
"westwood one."

little bitch

2006-11-26T22:55:00.000-05:00

(i fully expect ONE of my readers to correctly identify
this blog-post title's source. you know who you are ... )

peyton manning is a little bitch.
i get so sick of watching this whiny prick gesticulate
all over the goddamned gridiron on sundays.

that was a legitimate interception by lito sheppard,
you ass,
a hell of an instinctual play,

so STFU and go grab some pine, son.

football is boring as hell.

had the browns "game" on earlier, yikes!

needless to say, moms had the good fortune to attend,
as she will next week against the chiefs.

and the ravens embarrassed the stillers.

i'm not sold on the ravens.

i guess pats-hosting-bears was the 2nd game,
and i guess the pats won.

ah, irrelevance.

i made it thru the holiday all right.
i feel 'better' than i have in a while.

i just gotta make it thru january, i figger,
and i might be able to rebuild something

here

in my 'life.'

i'll get there,

dammit.

i'm learning,
i think.

realization

2006-11-22T23:05:00.000-05:00

she wasn't thinking about me at all.

PS. yes, i've known this for a long time,
but i often have to remind myself. it still stings,
and it still infuriates me sometimes.

PPS. no, i didn't know this when i should have,
which perhaps was the reason at least one of my friends
said to me at some point, "you can't really
not have seen this coming."

PPPS. others said "it's your own fault"
and
"you got what you deserved."

PPPPS. kids: DON'T do drugs.

traces

2006-11-22T22:46:00.000-05:00

hey, it's "thanksgiving" soon!

(really soon.)

i guess i've had some enjoyable holidays
of this stripe.

not as a kid, mind you, god no.
during "college," though,
i had some nice and some amusing times
with family and friends of
friends and girlfriends.

that continued for a while after i
"earned" my "degree(s)," too.

and even recently, i enjoyed going to the zoo
on "thanksgiving" with mrs. horrible,
since the zoo is free on "thanksgiving."

hey, anyone wanna go to the zoo with me tomorrow?

tofurky, anyone?

anyone?

want to share the pumpkin pie
i get every year from an old friend's wife?

bueller?
bueller?

nah, farill, tho,
ma peeps,
i hope you enjoy your time tomorrow with whomever,
and thanks for being there for me,

and call me when it's all over,
we'll get drunk!

(i gotta be hungover to stomach my "job.")

love,
me.

iceman

2006-11-21T20:55:00.000-05:00

FUCKK, it's cold in here ...

seriously, it will soon be in the 40s in my apartment.
my right hand is becoming ineffectual,
so excuse my typing,
if necessary.

fuck the weather reports. tonight is way colder
than last night, regardless if tonight's forecast was for
lows "around 30" and last night's were for
"27."

i'm still barefoot, of course.

you know, people wonder why i'm still wearing my sandals,
and what can i say?

right now, it's a question of survival.
when it's around 50 inside,
you BETTER be able to handle the cold,
dig?

i believe this is one of the reasons
i rarely get sick:

i train for the cold.
it's in the 20s out, and i gotta walk up to the store?

fine. sandals, hat, flannel and sweatshirt
and i'm good.

50 in the morning, at home?

fuck it, i'm wearing shorts, since i slept in 'em.

aren't you cold? people ask me.

sometimes i answer:

"yeah! it's cold out."

most people don't know what to make of this.

neither do i!

hey, cold's just cold, man ...

i'm alive.

PS. the world's stupidest face is,
in fact,
outside.

"a [poetry]"

2006-11-20T20:13:00.000-05:00

i'm wearing a sweater, a flannel,
a warm hat and sandals.

it's in the thirties --
and i'm in my thirties!

what a coincidence!
now it makes sense.

i'm hittin' the bong,
except it's a "bowl" --

excuse me, a pipe ...

what was i talking about?

the starter on the furnace is broken,
it's fifty degrees in my apartment,
the kitten is getting ornery;
i'm enjoying HUGE SAVINGS on HEAT!

here's how the days go:
i work, i drink;
sometimes i eat something
and other times i drink.

i'm enjoying HUGE SAVINGS on FOOD!

the "government" took all my money,
and a collections had deemed it too funny
a chance to pass on
demands for a monthly surtax.

i'm wrecking my "health,"
accruing no "wealth,"
"unsure of" my stealth,

and, well, losing --

but the pain has subsided
and i've (finally) decided
that if i have to ride it,

i'll fight it.

can i get it back? can i make a stack?

[is filthy ever divine?
let's not be reflective]

the final gift from me to you --

believe you, me,
i know who's who --

is, yes, another
ineffectual
haiku:

today was a day
tomorrow hasn't happened
a, it equals a

alternate haiku ending:

november rain here
april is the cruelest month
always remember

P.S. i love you

2006-11-11T00:59:00.000-05:00

yeah, the thing i forgot to mention
is that i have been seriously considering
sending a copy of nilsson's
pandemonium shadow show
and aerial ballet

to that girl down there
in that place
because i think she'd enjoy it/them,

just as a nice gesture for the "holidays,"
not because i'd be trying to provoke anything.

that's just who i am, y'know?

i know it's a bad idea,
and that there ain't any kind of goddamned reason
i should really do that,

nor should even be considering it,

but

that's just who i am, y'know?

and goddammit, but i love this silly music ...

nothin' doin'

2006-11-11T00:11:00.000-05:00

i ain't really got a whole lot of anything
substantial
to say this evening,
but i will offer this:

after me brother and i failed to score weed tonight,
and he left,
i briefly teetered on the precipice of misery,

confronted with another friday night alone,
quiet, lonely,
sad, etc.,

but then i started reading about
HOT STOVE LEAGUE baseball shit on these internets,
and i felt almost contented.

and, of course, i've bin drinkinn;
done drankeded me dinner tonight, as was my plan,
and it's,
as the peoples say,
"all good" or a reasonable facsimile
at this point.

and i just got back from da sto',
where i saw julie!
who i'd seen, like, every day for, like,
nine years or so until recently,
and we had the following exchange:

"where you bin?" i axed her.

"on vacation," she replied.

i laughed.
"that's what i was gonna say next," i offered,
"you bin on vacation, or what?"

turns out she now works at me brother's "ghetto store,"
as he calls it,
out near his g-friend's homestead in "7 hills,"
and, yes,
she knows who he is.

high-larious.

she was wearing a sweet chargers throwback as well.

non sequitur :
the three (3) "records" i've listened to most lately
have been

harry nilsson's pandemonium shadow show and aerial ballet
(from '67 and '68),
snuff's snuffsaidbutgorblimeygovstonemeifhedidn'tthrowawobblerchachachachachachayou'regoinghomeinacosmicambience,
or whatever the hell its actual name is
(from, what? 1989?),
and
storm the studio by meat beat manifesto
(from i give up — okay, also 1989, i looked it up),

and i'm guessing that says about as much as it needs to,
eh?

i mean, what ELSE was i gonna do tonite?

go to a bar, or something?
hardly, what with the fack i gots fitty bucks to my name,
and could give a shit about skank, right?

nah, nah, shit's good enuff, i figger.

tomorrow night, i'm heading to the divine ms. m's
to eat her vegetarian chili (not a euphemism)
and watch, as she put it in her email earlier today,
"stupid movies,"

and that'll be as good as good gets —

meaning, of course, that i'll be satisfied with more fake dates
and not wonder why i haven't anything more exciting to do
on a saturday nite,

and also considering the fact that such occupations
almost always lower me further
once i realize that's the best i can hope for,
but

whatever, right?

*gearshift*

let me mention that she who is known universally
as the world's worst pet,
the universe's first and only and bestest
small, gray, furry piggy,
has taken it upon HERself to decide
that she and she alone is allowed
to DEMAND
when she should be fed tuna,
and that when i finally relented last night,
she eventually rewarded me for my obedience
by bringing me the wonderful gift
of a living birdie.

gee, thanks, queen kitten face!

*break*

dear diary: i'm lame!

seriously, though,
i received an important near-epiphany today,
and i appreciated it greatly,
and i hope it pays dividends.

what was it, you wonder?
maybe i'll tell you ... later!

the only other things i have to mention include
that one of the sites i troll on the superhyperglobalmeganet
featured a comment from an, er, commenter
to the effect that he hoped his ex would return some DVDs she'd borrowed,
and it reminded of the time when i wondered aloud
to my beloved long-lost ex what had happened to some of my CDs
and she just started laughing ...

turns out she'd tookened 'em,
and i never knew; i had no idear.

(and i'll never see 'em again.)

it forced a wry smile. i'll NEVER hold anything against that woman.
she was a gift from the universe,
one of the most major graces i've botched, honestly,
and i hope she's doing well and that she's happy
and that she's married to a good man and is satisfied
and has a little family to stoke.

(seriously.)

okay, and now i'm too drunque to share the rest of
the brilliance i'd planned to reveal,

and, hey, life's rough sometimes, all right?

try to cope.

thug holiday

2006-11-10T01:46:00.000-05:00

the following actually happened this evening:

i went up to tha sto' to get my superfluous beer,
and on my way home, saw three teens-or-pre-teens
wildin' their way down the street
along my pathway home.

yes, my spider-sense was tingling.

they halted at the corner as i approached.

i strode on.

as i passed them, one of them said something
unintelligible to me,
so i replied as i always do:

"nah."

he followed me.

"whu'd you say? whu'd you say, nigga? whu'd you say?"

i answered:

"i said, 'nah,'" i said.

"what's in yo pocket, nigga?" he demanded.

i turned toward him.

"do i really look like a 'nigga' to you?" i asked.

i'm not sure what he answered.

"what's in yo pocket, nigga?" he repeated.

"WHAT pocket?" i wondered.

"in yo pocket, nigga," he sensibly answered.

"ain't shit in my pocket," i declaimed to his face.

and then his two friends called him off,
and i walked on home,
up my porch, through my front door,
and back here.

ghetto city life, my friends,
ghetto city life.

my only regret is that i didn't have my boxcutter
in my back pocket,
as that woulda been a HELL of an answer
to his question ...

not listening

2006-11-08T23:05:00.000-05:00

warning: this will be a completely random post, a'ight?

FIRST: (my brothers') mom left me a voice message this afternoon
to tell me that the indians had traded hot-bat kevin kouzmanoff
and a (mostly minor-league) reliever i like, andrew brown,
to the padres for second baseman josh barfield.

i was actually sorta surprised mom got the scoop on me this time,
but it was pretty busy at work today,
so i hadn't the chance to scour the hot stove on the internets,
so whatever.

i gotta say, i think it was a pretty good deal by "sharpio,"
even if i'm not yet sold on the prospects of andy marte
as a major-league hitter.

and as i remarked to mom,
well,
now all they need is a bullpen
and one more outfielder who can hit.

(i amended it to "most of a bullpen.")

SECOND: the original working title of this post
was to be "i've had it," but lexy
has caught on to the fact that
i use early black flag song titles a little too often,
so i amended it.

and by the way, you,
i ALMOST titled it "rehearsals for retirement,"
as i titled one of my myspace blogs,
and i defy you to figure out
from whence that one comes.

(*hint*
it's not a song,
nor an album title ...)

so i chose this one instead,
mainly because i've been listening to this-here rekkid
for a few weeks,
and also because,
well,

i've HAD it.

i "voted" yesterday, you see,
and i "voted" after i had a phone conversation
with the IRS
and scraped the last few available dollars
from my now-frozen bank account
so that i might be able to keep myself in
beer and tobacco
until i next get paid
(monday, i hope).

yeah, this is HOW INCREDIBLY FUCKED
our country is right now.

follow me down:

i made $14,400 last year.

that's right, $14,400,
every last cent untaxed,
as i "earned" it as an, um, er,
"independent contractor."

when i filed my taxes in april,
the "government" determined that i
"owed" them
$2,600.

let's look at these numbers, shall we?

(speaking of which, my buddy enoch
stopped over last night to say hello
and to ask me what "shall" meant.
i explained it.
enoch and his brother narcisso
are two of the most important factors
in my having become a certificated teacher,
just so you know.)

take the number 14,400
and subtract from it
the number 2,600.

what do you get?

you get 11,800.

eleven thousand, eight hundred.

eleven thousand, eight hundred dollars
is what the goddamned GOVERNMENT
deems was necessary for me
to have survived on for the fiscal year
that ended prior to april of this year.

last time i checked,
the "poverty level" for a single person
rested at $9,800.

nine thousand, eight hundred dollars.

i'll let you draw your own conclusions.

as i discussed this matter with my "boss" today,
i mentioned how drastic and how frightening
it seemed to me
that the "government" was coming after ME,
that the "government" could dare take nearly
EVERY LAST PENNY I HAVE/HAD TO MY DAMN NAME
when i "owed" them so relatively little.

"they're searching the couch cushions"
was the way he put it.

and THERE'S your fucking "war," peoples.

yeah, it sucked for me personally;
it sucks for me personally;
but it sucks a lot more for what it portends.

we're a smoldering ruin of a nation right now.

you know this; you know you know this,
don't you?

don't you?

in a way, i guess it "helped" me,
because now, all i can do is shrug.
my situation is now so laughable
that i can't even worry about it.

and besides, it's given me the resolve
i sorely needed, to remember
that everything in this world —

everything worldly in this world, i mean —

is almost but not quite entirely bullshit
and i don't fucking need it.

and that prior to the 2008 elections,
i'm going underground,
whatever that might mean to my grandiose,
largely unrealizable dreams
of becoming a famous writer.

and i'm going to start that process
a helluva lot sooner than later
because, well,
i've HAD it,

dig?

THIRD: there i sat, there at "work" this morning,
feeling as though i was in a nearly psychotic state.

i've reconsidered this a bit,
after the correspondence i received from
a similarly troubled pal,
and as i drove home, realized
i have many moments that verge on
paranoid schizophrenia,
a state with which i've had experience
via several different characters
that have been involved in my life.

it's a heck of a ride, lemmy tell ya.

and it's been going on for 14 years,
on and off, ebbing and flowing,
but man alive,
has it been tough these past five months.

it's akin to jogging in quicksand,
to climbing a hill made of sand,

falling to the bottom of the bottomless pit,

or what-have-you.

i'll either "make it,"

or i "won't."

FOURTH: the elections can blow me.
here in fucking cleveland, we've succeeded in banning
public smoking, even though smoking/drinking
has built this city for years via the "sin tax,"
including via a proposition
on this VERY SAME BALLOT.

hey, all of you who voted for that?
go to hell and stay there, all right?

and i voted green party every chance i got.

and nothing's going to change.

and for everyone who's ecstatic that rumsfeld stepped down?
yeah, that's fucking terrific,
even if it's SIX FUCKING YEARS too late,

at the very least.

i mean, let's not forget we've got two years left of W.,
and the rest of our fucking lives NOT to recover
from his legacies.

i mean, sorry, i'm a dour guy,
and i don't mean to rain on your parade,
but
your enthusiasm right now
isn't even charming,

it's pathetic.

i quit.

okay, that's enough for now.
hey, there's a fascinating series running
on a st. louis cardinals site
featuring in-depth interviews
with various baseball personalities ...

the last two i've read
were with former oakland a's captain sal bando
(with whom my mom attended grade school in warrensville hts.)
and sharon hargrove,
wife of the human rain delay.

if you'd be interested in reading any of 'em —

they're pretty fascinating —

let me know in the comments,
and i'll provide the links.

and thanks for reading,
all five or so of you.

"this is our country ..."

so i fucked up

2006-11-07T01:36:00.000-05:00

really, must i pay for "it" forever?

for that lifetime of bad choices?

(okay, realistically, 16 years or so
of bad choices)

oh, i must?

oh, okay, then ... no problem!

thoughts of the day:

is it better to get more actual REM sleep,
wherein i am plagued by images and ideas
that are further proof that my brain
and my life
are at cross purposes,
or would it be better still
to continue to drink until i'm dead
and never remember anything
so that i at least have that blackness
in which i can hide?

even though i'm,
you know,
dying?

whoa, yeaaaah, she was ALWAYS a lyin'-ass bitch!
and not worth it.

i feel strangely calm.
my head is alarmingly free of cognitive dissonance.
i can feel and almost act convincingly human.

woop woop WHEEP bloop frimp! praaaaaaaaaaaaah

to do tomorrow:

go for walk.
try to get rent from bank.
possibly buy food i won't eat.
buy drugs.

(hey, maybe you should --)

(hey, didnae youn ever finish --)

and there's always that new idear i got
for that next piece of fiction i might start
and not really get too far on. and i could
pencil that in for the part of the day
when i'm not

oh, i gotta get out the vote, too.

i'm voting against everything
except smoking.

next post:

my weekend recap,
or something else that sucks.

now, go love yourself.

thank you

2006-11-02T22:58:00.000-05:00

yes, thank you, all of you,
but especially the "you" who called me this afternoon
to tell me you were going to be having drinks
in my neighborhood,
you who answered my reply call an hour-and-a-half later
to inform me that you and another of my ladies
were heading to a different bar in my neighborhood,
so that i might come out
and meet-and-greet you.

it was lovely.

(for the unaware, yes,
i am in fact such a homo
that i am still a member in relatively good standing
of the "[defunct organization] ladies' social club,"
and though i often test the limits of
the rules of the organization,
i'm fairly certain i'm actually grandfathered in ... )

yea, it began, oddly enough,
around about the same time a few too many other things
began in this-here "life" of mine,
though we weren't aware of it at the time.

and a few scant years later,
when it was the four of us, bonding,
drinking and eating and drinking and talking
and drinking,
well,
it was the four of us;

and we somehow sat in similar stead.

i loved our club; we all did;
and how would one not,
in this modern age,
so be endeared to such a simulacrum?

but one had to leave,
and was reposited, not replaced.
and gradually, there were other members,
and it was no longer too certain
whether the key core remained.

yes, at times, it remained the four of us,
but demands dragged on;
it became more interchangeable.

do i miss what it was?
a little.
i guess i'm happier that some of my friends
have more friends now.

at any rate, i had a nice evening,
and that's more than good enough, really.

i love you all.

(end transmission)

someone keeps moving my chair

2006-10-30T00:54:00.000-05:00

almost forgot to mention
that it's been six or seven weeks
since i've heard from mrs. horrible.

maybe it's done.

maybe i just jinxed myself.

and maybe one day,
it just won't matter.

it's funny how much it cost me;
it's less funny how much i cost myself.

this, this i can change.

that?

that, i never could.

regrets? i've had a few ...

wreck-age

2006-10-29T23:55:00.000-05:00

all right, karma, listen up.

(you too, universe.)

i tried to do my part tonight.
when she who is known universally
as the incredible kitten face
brought home the latest casualty
of her autumn campaign —

to rid the neighborhood of all mice,
as an offering of appeasement or a threat to mother nature
about this upcoming winter season —

i placated her and commended her, of course,
but noticed that, as usual, the mousie was still alive.
(i wasn't sure how alive.)

well, after a snack of cat food and some water,
the world's most dangerous face went back outside,
and a few minutes later, i noticed that the mousie
had managed to get to its feet and seemed somewhat mobile.

i tried to capture it in a bag so i could take it back outside,
figuring that if it lived, it might make its escape,
reasoning that even though the bloodthirsty little face
would still be lurking about, the outdoors
is a mite more roomy and safe for a mouse
than, say, my apartment.

(in which, by the way, i today discovered
the corpse of a mouse i hadn't noticed before.
no, my apartment isn't that disorderly or unkempt;
she'd placed it in an obscure location.
and it probably hasn't been here for any longer'n
a day.)

she's on a rampage, i tell you —

five or six in the past week, and two in one night!

at any rate, although horrible face returned at one point,
i did manage to coax the mousie into the bag, and then
took the bag outside and discreetly placed it on the porch,
open end facing away into mystery and, potentially,
safety.

so i tried, man, i tried.

in other news, the browns hung on
for the win i correctly predicted
over the jets. the game sucked, of course.
chad pennington was horrible.
the final play was fitting. probably the right call,
but i'm glad i wasn't pulling for the jets.

also watched the bengals lose to the falcons.
that was a better game, i guess,
although it wasn't all that interesting
for such a close contest. vick looked good again.
the bengals defense has got problems.
glad i wasn't pulling for the bengals.

best game i watched today was the night game,
in which the cowboys trounced the panthers
on a night where the panthers really didn't play well
in any aspect of the game.
who would ever pull for the panthers?
what an unpredictable, inconsistent team.
tony romo's debut as starting QB for the 'boys
a rousing success, to boot.

man, football is boring. i can't believe i now
routinely watch three games every sunday.

this, again, became the focus of my sunday:

matt, you're a complete loser, i reminded myself.

and i conceded the point. really,
any analysis of the evidence
provides a clear result.

so i reflected on that reality for a while,
and i realized that although i may not be happy with it,
i knew a lot of this was coming,
or should have,
since i neither did a whole lot to prevent it
nor
tried hard enough to guarantee against it.

and that if i want things to be or to feel any better,
i have to accept that this is how things are
and work my way through it
even if i don't, can't or won't believe
that it'll really matter
in terms of what i think i'm lamenting.

i've made good choices and bad choices and worse choices;
i've felt bad and i've felt worse and i've felt better,
and sometimes even good;
i've won and i've lost,
and i've cheated;
and that reminds me, of course,
of the indelible words
of grantland rice:

"and when that one great scorer comes
to write against your name,
he marks not that you won or lost,
but how you played the game."

yeah, i guess i haven't played hard enough.

living hard? ain't hardly the same thing.

pinhead

2006-10-26T01:24:00.000-05:00

wow.

i just read an article about former major-league pitcher
sammy stewart
that i found following a link from the newsblog
over at the baseball think factory website.

sammy stewart's in prison;
he's a crackhead.

and you know, some of the comments posted about the article
are not too kind, or forgiving,
and they gave me pause ...

until i read the article, that is,
because that's when i started crying.

i know that when i was a younger man --

hell, when i was a boy --

i didn't understand how/why/when
a person could/would become an addict.

with the assurance of health and youth on my side,
it seemed stupid, and "stupid" was the only word that fit.

i now know it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that.

and i know that for most people
that point comes
where they just can't fucking take it anymore
and they HAVE to cut somebody loose
and say,
"look, this is bullshit,
and YOU look at YOU,
and leave me alone,"
and all that ...

but i guess i'm never going to get there.

sammy, i'm sorry, man,
and i hope you can find a new start.

just as i hope i may.

(no, i'm not a crackhead.)

(i'm a drunk.)

oh, we do lose sight, don't we?
oh, do we forget.

we believed in ourselves once, you and i;
we really had something.

we had youth and we had strength
and we had a future
and none of it mattered
because we hadn't enough perspective
to understand what was waiting
down the road.

and that was hardship.
that was failure;

those were hurdles
and roadblocks
and disasters
and mistakes,
and maybe a collapse or two
or five;

and, well,
we haven't even mentioned the really big stuff,
now have we?

those dreams that collapsed upon themselves,
those promises betrayed or forgotten,
and, oh, the treachery!

and the waste, the waste,
let's not forget the waste ...

the years of torture.

the stupidity.
the cupidity.

the ignorance,
the pride,
that devout belief that you were right.

um ... is there an editor in the house? oh, nevermind ...

yeah, this is where i get to,
reading about a former major-leaguer
who threw his life away for rock,
why do you ask?

sure, sure, i should be "sleeping"
so i can "get up" and "go to work,"
why do you ask?

no, i haven't opened the superfluous beer yet,
why do you ask?

i will close with a(n) haiku:

it was simple then
we strode along, almighty
and then it ended

okay, that sucked.
how's this?

it's two twenty-four
i'm thirty-three years old now
where did our love go?

oh, yeah, that's much better ...

TV party

2006-10-25T23:53:00.000-05:00

you'd think this'd be akin to my personal apocalypse,
game 4 of the world series being rained out,
but it really wasn't all that bad, somehow.

before i get into my rambling, unorganized
discursion about whatever's currently polluting my head,
however, i urge you,
my fellow citizens,
to read this:

Truthdig: reports: After Pat's Birthday

the above piece was written by kevin tillman,
brother of deceased army ranger and former arizona cardinals
defensive back pat tillman, with whom he joined the service
shortly after 9/11.

i don't know about you, or what your opinions really are,
but let me state mine plainly:

i come from a lower-class
and military-affiliated family;
although i was raised by a quasi-liberal mom
and a deeply conservative father,
and there was to be no question as to my path in life --

no, not this one, folks,
i was supposed to be, you know, successful --

well, let's just say that my dad
was named after general douglas macarthur,
courtesy of my navy grandfather,
and that not only are my uncles vets,
but so are my cousin,
stepdad and stepbrothers,
and, hell,
my father's mother's father
served in the polish army in WWI, to boot.

i was in college when the first gulf war started,
and as the great unknown was discussed
in that manner common to callow undergraduates,
most of my friends emphatically declared
THEY would shed no blood for oil, no sir.

and i, too, considered that "war" an absurd affront
to ethics, morality, our body politic,
the notions underwriting our supposedly democratic republic,
our standing in the eyes of the world
and all the rest of it.

but if called to serve,
well,
i'd've had to've gone and served.

i'm an american, you see,
and i've got a big damn mouth,
and until recently,
it was that qualifier there --

that i AM an american --

that made it possible for me
to mouth off as much and as often as possible as i wanted
about what i thought,
about what i felt,
and, well,
somebody's gotta fight for that.

what this nation ostensibly represented
once upon a time
meant and means that much to me.

that's why what's going on right now
is so very, very awful.

(to use a cliché as my assistance,
i'd say it used to be a matter of
putting one's money where one's mouth is,
and that now, i've personally got
neither the money nor the mouth,
thanks to our goddamned government.)

what are we now, we so-called americans?

what are we?
what is our legacy?
what, indeed, is our identity,
our nationality?

it currently is not anything
that should be protected
by any means necessary,
by the ultimate sacrifice.

what it's SUPPOSED to be,
now,
that's different.

and that's why action needs to be taken,
even at the risk of any of our
supposed creature comforts
and even of our lives.

tom paine, where are you now that we need you?

where have you gone, thomas jefferson?
our nation turns its lonely eyes to you ...

and so forth.

seriously, i urge you to delve into the work
keith olbermann's doing on/at msnbc;
it's worth it. mainstream media or not,
that guy is saying exactly what needs to be said,
and he is not mincing words.

let's not do that;
let's not just sit here/there/wherever
and continue to watch our nation die
at the hands of the fascists
that currently control it.

you know, come to think of it,
back during that murky era
when the first george bush was in charge,
i recall remarking on many occasions
that as bad as reagan had been,
GHW bush was worse;
that where reagan had been a disconnected,
nostalgic/nirvanic old fool,
the then-sitting president was, in fact,
evil.

the bush family legacy
has not disproved my thesis,
i'm afraid.

am i going anywhere with this, you wonder?
am i suggesting anything?

yes, yes, i am, again and again and again:

let's march. let's move. let's mass.

fuck it, working at my job
ain't getting me nowhere nohow,
you know?

how's yours doin' for ya?
and what's it gonna getcha
when there's nothin' left to get?

(just wonderin'.)

oh, and the post title
is due to the fact that i was driven
to write this possibly not-so-good piece
because there was no baseball,
but as i waited and waited to see
if the game was being called,
fox showed about 2 hours of the war at home
and then the "news,"
then seinfeld,
and followed all that up
with a bunch of other shit.

hey, look --

M*A*S*H is starting.

ironic!

number three

2006-10-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

so, world series game 3 was another great contest,
wasn't it?

scoreless for 3.5 innings,
and then the cards wind up with wilson and pujols
on second and third with no outs,
and then rolen walks,
so it's ronnie belliard --
batting fifth tonight, probably in an attempt
to get his swing in rhythm --
with the bases juiced, no one out,
and nate robertson facing doom.

sharp grounder to third,
inge makes the throw home,
one out,
bases still juiced ...

and edmonds with the two-run double.

and then robertson, as he has all this postseason,
wriggles out of it, getting the next two outs
on pop-ups.

it's still a game.

except that chris carpenter is unhittable tonight.

and then disaster strikes the detroit squad
in the bottom of the seventh.

zumaya, on the hill,
walks the first two batters --
always a bad sign --
but he gets the key comebacker ...

and he throws it away,
past brandon inge --

out of position at third --

and somehow preston wilson scores
all the way from first.

should zumaya have whirled and thrown to second,
for what could have been a sure double play?

well, maybe ...
but that's an errant throw waiting to happen.

then again, if he throws the ball into center field,
wilson doesn't score.

either way, it's another example of when errors matter most.
think about it:
the cardinals certainly haven't playing stellar defense;
hell, they'd had errors in five (5) straight postseason games!

but aside from the one game against the mets,
those errors haven't amounted to much.

for the tigers, though,
as in game one,
those errors have come at crucial times
and cost the team crucial runs.

and the redbirds go up, 4-0,
and i remark to robt.
(who may go back to jail tomorrow, for five months)
that the game is over.

and it is.

cards up, two (2) games to one (1).

(shouldn't have rushed that throw, joel!)

truth be told, this makes me look bad --
halleen chevrolet remarked to me last night
that i had correctly predicted the first two (2) games
thus far, what with the cards winning game 1
and the tigers taking game 2,
and it's true,
i actually did predict that correctly,
which is a rarity for me.

(that conversation took place a few hours before
i embarrassed myself and the reeds
by grabbing the mike during their lengthy opening jam
and improvising a number that was
most likely about the president.
thanks, beer and weed!)

[honestly, they didn't seem to mind,
and i did ask permission first.
and it did get them to play some, you know, songs,
so maybe it wasn't that awful overall.]

anyway, i'd guessed the tigers might pull out a win tonight,
but they didn't,
and i'm sticking with my opinion
that the cards can take tomorrow night's game
with suppan on the hill ...

if the game happens, that is,
as the forecast is for all-day rain in saint lou.

and depending on which bonderman shows up
for the detroiters.

man, i love baseball.

really.

anyway, i owe y'all some blogs
about depression,
suicide,
insomnia,
politics and culture,
and i'll try to catch up soon, a'ight?

stay tuned ...

stocktaking

2006-10-21T00:13:00.000-05:00

OK, the sources of the titles
of the past ten (10) blogs,
not counting this one,
which is a different one:

1. würm
2. RAMONES
3. uhh ... aerosmith
4. "they didn't have any of your van halen ... "
5. ministry
6. rocket from the crypt; yeah, i'm embarrassed ...
7. THe SMiTHS; nope, not embarrassed ...
8. blck flg
9. the EglEs (ick?)
10. SLAYER

death ride

2006-10-20T23:10:00.000-05:00

and you just KNOW i've been dying to use that
song title
for the name of a post in my blog, right?

you know that, don't you?

(i'll explain later, unless i "forget.")

FIRST: let me say i actually left my home tonight,
and "went out" somewhere ... to a one-night art opening,
with the wonderful ms. m,
and i even managed to have a good time!
talking to/hanging out with the wonderful ms. m
almost always makes me smile
and puts me in a good place,
and besides,
there were lotsa cute girls at this event,
and i noticed them noticing me,
and, well,
honestly/pathetically,
that's good enough for me right now,
all right?

and i've agreed to go to a party tomorrow
with some of my very good friends,
and i know i'll be seeing
my favorite fucking band
play in just a few days,
and holy hell, there i go,
with semi-social engagements planned
for three (3) out of four (4) days, and --

and where in the hell was i?

SECOND: i was just browsing the "news"
over at the baseball think factory,
and even left a rare comment
(i'm "30 seconds over tokyo" on that board),
and, seriously, if you're at all interested
in ratcheting up your hardball IQ --

T., ignore this part; K, you might be innarested --

then by all means, head over there
(the link lies under my "endorsed sites" sidebar)
and check out the "newsblog."

you won't be disappointed. sure, the world series will be over
in a week or less, but all that means
is that it's time
for HOT STOVE SEASON!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

okay, on to the DEATH RIDE:

i mean the world series, of course ...

(and i'd discuss why i used
this song title at this time,
but then i'd have to give away the name of the band
and that would spoil my game, wouldn't it?
since i'm still waiting for anyone out there
to try to enumerate/elucidate
from whence my blogposted titles come.)

tigers/cardinals. i'm excited for this.

starting rotations line up as follows:

game 1: justin verlander vs. anthony reyes
game 2: kenny rogers vs. jeff weaver
game 3: nate robertson vs. chris carpenter
game 4: jeremy bonderman vs. jeff suppan

now, i could get all in-depth on you --

but frankly, i've had too much to drink --

so let me say i think game 1 could be wild
and i wouldn't be surprised if the cards steal it;
and that i surmise the tigers will take game 2;
and that the tigers will take game 3 in san luis;
and that suppan just might confound los tigres in game four.

after that, well, i just don't "know" yet.

but the cardinals' pitching staff, such as it is,
matches up well with the tigers' bats ...
the redbirds' arms WILL fool those impatient bats.

sure, the cards can't hit detroit's starters,
but you saw that NLCS, didn't you?
didn't you?
they'll scratch a few across, and it will be close.

yeah, yeah, i know --
bench: tigers;
lineup: tigers;
rotation: tigers;
manager: tigers;
bullpen: edge: tigers;

but honestly, peeps,
don't count on a blowout.

this cardinals team makes no sense,
and this is the postseason --

and you're with me, charlie manson --

"no sense makes sense."

okay, i'm really just talkin' shit right now,
so let me close by saying:

A) the only players in this world series who are
older than me are STL's so taguchi, jim edmonds,
scott spiezio and "gary bennett," and DET's
todd jones and kenny rogers;

and

B) the other related-to-this-post's-title
i've been waiting to use
is
"i'm dead."

c'mon, SOMEONE, ANYONE,
take the challenge!

PS. hey, my old (he's pushin' 50) pal
michael stopped by tonight,
and we took a long walk and talked about some pressing issues
involving not only ourselves but some old friends,
and you know what?

i was really glad to see the guy.

i'm against it

2006-10-18T23:02:00.001-05:00

ladies and gentlemens,
um,
we are so fucked.

we no longer have the constitutional protections
that made our status as "US citizens"
so valuable.

follow this thread backward
(and remind yourself in the process
that you originally knew this guy
from ESPN):

countdown with keith olbermann

friends, romans, countrymen,
lend me your ears --

lend me your hearts, and your minds --

and find within yourself the courage
and the passion --

to mass as one
and to make the voice we yet have be heard,
that no matter the very real challenges that face us
as a nation,
that no matter the threats to our peace and security,
whether external or internal,
and that above all,
no matter what we may have to compromise in our personal lives,
we might strive to reclaim our nation

and the rights that define(d) it.

I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(emphasis added)

i said it during the so-called "energy crisis" of spring 2000 --

check the record, check the record, check the guy's track record --

and yes, indeed, that was four (4) or five (5) months before
the "event that changed 'america' forever" --

and i'll say it again:
we, the people, need to gather as many as we can
and build a goddamned TENT CITY on the capitol mall
and do our best to block, bar and flummox
the machinations on The HILL,
for as long as we can
and until these people understand
that they MUST accede to
the needs and the demands
of the people
of whom
this nation is comprised.

the "united states" is NOT a corporation.

it is you, and me, and him and her and them;
it is US.

nobody wanted to entertain the notion back then.
dining on rats 'n' rice, possibly, or being
arrested or tear-gassed or shot with rubber bullets
or shot with real bullets
didn't appeal to anyone.

(and doesn't it say a lot right there, right there
where i said that, that too many of the people
to whom i suggested this
feared what the government's forces' response
might be?)

(yes, yes,
it does!)

but i'm serious, you know.

and not merely to repeat old acts, but:

if you're reading this,
alberto gonzalez,
my name is matt damn kuchna
and i reside at
1906 west 45th street
in beautiful ohio city,
cleveland, motherfucker,
and tell your boss and his gang
that i'll never shut up.

dream on

2006-10-16T20:52:00.000-05:00

no baseball tonight -- another rainout,
and the forecast ain't too good for tomorrow,
thursday OR friday.

arizona cardinals are surprising the bears
14-0 in the first half.

i actually went to work today,
and managed to last 6.5 hours
of, let's see, i sent three or four official emails,
forwarded two official emails to bossman,
and received a few official emails ...

and that's about it. i doodled some,
endlessly shuffled the same stack of papers,
made repetitious and redundant notes
on some of those papers,
and surfed the internet,
sending a few personal emails along the way.

and lemmy tell ya, i did nae enjoy it.

[halfway thru the third quarter in phoenix,
it's 20-3, arizona.]

yeah, yeah, i know.

anyway, the "point" of this post
is to relate that at some point today,
i realized that i had a dream last night
that some female person with whom
i was apparently "involved" in some capacity
delivered unto us a child.

no, really. and in the dream, my mom said to me,
"congratulations," and though i expected her comment
to be a snide one --

we've got this rule in my family, courtesy of
(my brothers') mother, that we three sons
are not to marry or sire offspring --

i recall being wary in the dream,
because i couldn't tell what she
actually meant, whether she was honestly offering kudos
or not.

now, dreaming about having a baby
"usually represents a new beginning
or a new creation in (one's)life,"
so they say.

so if you recall my post of yesterday,
hey, maybe the remnants of my brain
are uniting to present their/its case.

we shall see, shall we not?

and maybe this merely is reflective
of the fact that i seriously think i should
tell bossman to take his job and shove it
and get mine ass back into the classroom.

or maybe it's something else.

sunday afternoon in the park

2006-10-15T21:51:00.000-05:00

yeah, take your pick:
i picked the superdome for the 1 pm iggles/saints tilt,
and it was heinz ketchup monument for the chiefs/stillers at 4,
and then on to the palace of anheuser-busch
for nlcs contest no. 4,
which turned into a laugher
so now it's "invesco field @ mile high stadium,"
and thank you very much,
"oriole park @ camden yards."

not any, you know, actual park.

i do make plans to go to the park,
usually with special k.,
but i rarely follow through.

(i think it took three-four months
for the first time to happen.)

"maybe someday, things will go your way ..."

that'd be nice. the park's gonna look real cool
real soon, and i'd like to be there, a-strolling
through the sea of leaves, hands in pockets,
breath a-steaming out, shuffling, musing,
talking, walking,
that sort of thing.

[wow, carlos beltran just went deep again.
that guy's gonna hafta start traveling incognito
in the city of st. lou.]

so, anyway, yeah, i crashed out last week.
possibly the worst i've ever felt.
maybe it was for the best,
because it seems to have ebbed a bit --
enough, at least, that i feel as though
i just may be able to function
in some sense, and sooner than later.

and by the way, at least one reader of this blog
has requested that i stop writing about baseball
so much, which i found rather amusing.
some of youse weirdos apparently get something
out of this dark, forbidding place
i currently call my virtual home.

such as, no doubt, entertaining stories
about my cat! it's cold outside, and my heater
ain't work, so the door is closed more often'n
not, and kitten shape is already driving me
bonkers by wanting to come in and go out and
come in and go out and go out and come in and
so every 20-30 minutes or so,
there's the superface, hanging on the screen door
in a manner befitting a monkey.

i open the door, she drops to the porch
and scoots in, complaining.

when she warms up, and gets bored,
it's back to the door to scratch at the jamb,
and i have to get up and let her out again.

i have approximately 4.5 months of this
to appreciate. and she's also getting into
her winter state of feistiness, to which
i must respond by letting her attack
my hand and forearms,
in lieu of her desired prey,
by which i mean, of course,
"anything smaller than her that's moving."

i'll try to have some more interesting stuff
in here soon, yes.

so what?

2006-10-13T23:37:00.000-05:00

notes from another day of baseball:

first of all, i managed not to go to work again,
making this past week a particular low point
(or highlight, i suppose, depending how you look at it).

i won't go into details, because although at least
one-third of this-here blog
is, in fact, an embarassment of riches
concerning my tussling with depression,
i realize that's not really something
about which most people
really want to read.

i WILL say that since last friday,
when i sat at "work" thinking,
"when i get home tonight, i'm going to kill myself,"
until this evening, when i told my long-distance
baseball friend that i was feeling
"sad and scared, and i don't know what to do anymore,"
i haven't been having a very good time.
or a functional one.

case in point:
i wanted to write a blog about terrell owens,
because although i have long considered him
a supreme example of a truly annoying human being,
the interview with him that i read this past week
really made me think.
seriously,
this wealthy professional athlete
knows what it's like to spend one's, um, "downtime"
sitting alone in his house in the dark.
i feel strangely empathetic.
shit, everyone knows the saying that
"money can't buy happiness,"
but as i'm usually impoverished,
i've often imagined that if i had a little breathing room,
i'd probably be able to make myself feel a little better.

what in the hell can help the TOs of the world,
i can't imagine. so hey, terrell, if you wanna talk,
send me an email. talking always helps, my dude.

(speaking of which, thank you, long-distance baseball friend;
i feel a lot better after "watching the game with you."
and i'm super happy you still talk to me even after
i'm a big jerk to you when i've reached the point where
the beer lets the scary killer clown out of my head.)

blah blah blah. on to the baseball!

game one:

tigers 3, a's 0, and the a's looked pretty defeated
as this one wrapped up, with their two hits standing out
on the scoreboard. they sorta looked as though they were
all thinking, "shit, we can't play these guys," and that's
usually a pretty bad sign. 2004 probably won't repeat
itself, you know? but really, having to go with scutaro
and jiminez up the middle has been a problem -- they've
been out of position, they aren't communicating, jiminez
isn't doing anything well, and if you're not hitting at all,
you gotta play some defense. harden pitched pretty well
after some early wildness, but unfortunately for the oakland
nine, that early wildness equated to two of the three tigers
runs. and also please note that craig monroe cranked another
one. yes, detroit has been getting pretty consistently
great pitching, but monroe's been getting the job done
every night. good matchup tomorrow, danny haren up against
bonderman, and i'm starting to feel bad for a's
fans. making the playoffs every year and losing in the
playoffs every year without ever getting to the big game
has gotta be pretty disappointing.

so, you know, boo hoo hoo. life's rough sometimes.

game two:
cards 9, mets 6, and it's all willie randolph's fault.

because he brought in his "closer," billy wagner,
in to pitch the top of the ninth with the score tied
at 6. listen, willie, seriously -- although the "closer"
is the most completely overhyped "position" in baseball,
you may have noticed something. in the roughly two decades
since they ruined baseball with this "closer" shit,
um, it's kinda become this, you know, part of the culture,
and the players have grown up with a particular mindset
related to it. including, you know, that it's incredibly
fucking difficult to get three outs when the team
you represent is holding a lead of three runs or less.
and part of this culture and mindset, for some reason or other,
involves depending on various levels of specialization
to the degree that if you use these guys in positions
they're unaccustomed to, they just can't function.
think about it: setup guys are setup guys, closers are
closers, and so forth. but you, willie, you ...
you brought in your closer for the ninth, with the score tied.
and what happened?
well, first he gave up a home run to so taguchi,
the geriatric japanese import who swings such a hot bat
that he only managed 67 homers in japan,
where the parks are smaller. (i mean, did you see that swing?
that was not a home run swing.) and then your closer
continued to screw around, culminating in scott spiezio's
second big hit of the night. you know when scott spiezio's
last two big hits were, willie? 2002, that's when.
seriously.
now, granted, you'd used roughly 113 relievers in the game
already, but i actually said to long-distance baseball friend
as the ninth started that that was a tactical error.

willie, i don't get paid the big bucks to manage a baseball team,
but i knew that. shouldn't you have known that? you're managing
in the playoffs, willie, try to remember that.
follow the rules. and the rules, ever since your foe in the
other dugout ruined baseball nearly 20 years ago,
are that you have a fucking closer for a reason,
and you must deploy your fucking closer in his narrowly
defined role. you must only use a closer to protect a slim lead
late in a game, and never for any other reason
or in any other circumstance. that's what your setup men
and other relievers are for -- to get the game, with a slim lead,
to your closer.

so you "managed" to lose a game for your squad
on a night when the opposing team's only talented starter
brought his "z" game to the table. and gave up
9 runs to a team whose best hitter isn't hitting,
and which features approximately 1.8 other good hitters.

and the rest of your pitching rotation
features the doubtful steve trachsel,
a guy who's pitching so badly the PIRATES jettisoned him (perez),
and, um, nobody else except for that 39-year-old guy
who pitched, um, yesterday.

willie, willie, willie.
you're gonna hafta do better than that, guy.

tomorrow:
early game (OAK @ DET) -- good pitching, elimination game;
late game (NYM @ STL) -- no pitching whatsoever, game 3.

don't forget to watch. not only does tommy lasorda
demand it in his blustery dementia, but you wouldn't
wanna miss all those car and cellphone commercials.

heads are gonna roll

2006-10-11T22:35:00.000-05:00

"if we can make 'em roll ... "

i declared to myself that the oakland athletics' season
ended tonight in the bottom of the eighth inning
when fernando rodney struck out the side,
making chavez, payton and swisher
look absolutely overmatched
and foolish.

and then granderson homered in the top of the ninth.

game, set, match, tigers.

(don't ever use me as your betting parameter.)

random observations about tonight's game would include
marveling at milton bradley's first home run --
damn, what a swing, that was brutal --
and wondering what the hell is going on
with oakland's defense.

chavez and jiminez have been butchers in the field.
they picked a bad time.

my only other note is that i personally witnessed
the first major league start of
tonight's starter for the tigers,
justin verlander.

it was july 4, 2005, the last indians game i attended
with mrs. horrible.

i had predicted that, verlander being a flamethrower
making his first-ever major league start,
the potent indians' offense would tattoo him.

they did. and i believe it was during this game that
josh bard, currently the padres' backup catcher,
hit a ball all the way to the wall but was held to a single
because he is so incredibly slow.

and scot elarton threw a complete game for the tribe.
that made me really happy.

later, of course, i would have time to reflect
that the clues were there for me that day and evening
that mrs. horrible was being even more horrible
than i even could have imagined.

i missed them at the time.

at any rate, the tigers are going to the WS.

and i'm on their side, personally.

and if you haven't noticed,
craig monroe has been their playoffs MVP thus far.

william, it was really nothing

2006-10-11T00:30:00.000-05:00

i mean, it's game one, just game one, of the LCS,
so despite the fact you beat the opposing squad's
putative best pitcher, and with your putative
fourth starter, to boot,
there's no reason to get so fired up about it
as to write

"tyger! tyger! burning bright
in the forest of the night,
what immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry"

or some such. let's get some perspective, all right?
sure, the athletics' best chance resided within
a game 1 win, with zito subduing you detroiters'
anxious bats, and that didn't happen --

and, yeah, maybe it seemed tonight that oakland,
as a team, collectively forgot how to play defense --

and maybe oaktown's offense, suspect to begin with,
showed its true colors by getting men on base
but failing to get them home --

but that's no reason to get cocky, is it, detroit?

i mean, estaban loiaza's pitching tomorrow!

so don't let those four GIDPs bother you, athletics,
and don't worry that your staff ace
got seeing-eyed to death,
along with giving up those home runs,
and don't get all hung up on the fact that you managed
to have two on, no out, against robertson in the fourth
and two on, no out, against robertson in the fiff,
and failed to score, all right?

you're in good shape, you're in good shape.

you only have to face verlander,
rogers,
and bonderman
in the next three games.

clocked in

2006-10-09T22:26:00.000-05:00

yeah, i didn't go to work today.

i made the decision last "night."

it was, basically, "fuck that,
i'm not going out there tomorrow."

i didn't call in, either.

granted, i don't HAVE to "go to work,"
because, technically, i don't really have
a "job,"
but there's still this arrangement wherein
i'm supposed to go to this place
to do this dumb shit i gotta do
and touch the puppet head,

and the guy who issues me paychecks
for my valuable skills
and my valuable time
sorta, you know, expects me to show up
at some point during the average "workday."

he's ...
tolerant of my ...
vicissitudes,

so i usually go,
and sometimes i even show up "on time,"
which is to say "at 9 am,"
that fucking ridiculous, arbitrary and outmoded
hour at which, for some fucking reason,
"people" are supposed to show up
"at work"
in what is often inexplicably considered
"the real world."

when in actual fact,
i should be a teaching substitute,
as that's, you know,
good for me and my tenuous mental health,
but instead i'm
pledging my fealty
to the owner of this company
and to the "company" itself,
out of a sense of obligation,
even as the owner of this company
and the "company" itself
often neglects to consider my welfare.

(it's an EXTREMELY small company
most of the year,
by the way,
and i have at times in the past
been the only employee.)

so, yeah, i'm still "me,"
but i guess the upside of that
is that i retain the right
and the freedom
to just call the whole deal off
whenever the fuck i want.

everybody wins!

one of those nights

2006-10-09T00:57:00.000-05:00

been drinkin' since halftime of the browns' game.
if you're counting, that's nearly 12 hours.
still don't feel drunk "enough."

seriously considering telling "work"
in the "morning"
to "go to hell," and i might,
except for the "telling" part,
because i just don't "give a shit"

"anymore."

oh, and for some ungodly reason,
i've had the eurythmics' song
"would i lie to you?"
stuck in my head for over a week now.

seriously.

mandatory suicide

2006-09-21T01:04:00.000-05:00

hey there! it's been a while ... sorry.

no, i haven't given in to the tendency
the title of this blog suggests -- i've been busy!

'n' shit. 'r whatever.

yeah, anyway, i'll fill you in, my reader( ),
with all the wonders blooming in my head,
but not quite yet. instead,
i'd like to take this opportunity
to present one of my outtahand
theoretical and quasi-"political"
rants.

follow me:
former NHL player Mike Danton,
last of the St. Louis Blues,
currently is serving
a seven-and-a-half-year sentence
in federal prison
for conspiracy to commit murder.

of his agent,
david frost.

from cba.ca:

"In Aug. 2006, Ontario police charged Frost with 12 counts of sexual exploitation
and one count of assault involving seven teenagers - four males and three females between the ages of 14 and 16.

The arrest followed a two-year investigation initiated after complaints were received."

uh, ummmm ... i'm just sayin', but, ummmm ...
okay, murder is wrong and bad,
and conspiracy to commit murder is bad and wrong,
but, uh,
shouldn't mike danton's case
be reexamined,
given this development?

you know, my moms
has long believed and evinced her belief
that in certain cases,
logic might dictate that crimes of passion
be dismissed as not prosecutable.

i'm not entirely sure i agree with her,
though i certainly should (!),
but i think this circumstance
is a bit different.

some things? SOME things?
with some things, the urge to kill
just may be understandable
and thus excusable.

but one must ask:

would mike danton want to kill just anyone?

is this just suggestive circumstantial evidence?

well, i dunno.
but it's certainly an interesting topic.

PS. i'm too drunk/lazy/stoned/stupid to infuse this post
with enough interesting/snarky links, but i promise i'll do it ...
later. so check back in. won't you?

"make it fucked up"

2006-08-27T21:39:00.000-05:00

so for about two-three weeks now,
as i browse this file-sharing network
from which i get music
(shhhhhhh!),
i keep seeing the debut LP from paris hilton,
and i've almost downloaded it several times now.

there's no punchline. i mean, can you imagine
what that could even be?

the other record i have to fight myself
not to download, by the way,
is slowly we rot by obituary.

out-bloody-rageous

2006-08-25T11:04:00.000-05:00

just a quick note to register my extreme disappointment with something ...
forbes recently ranked the "drunkest cities in america"
and my fair city of cleveland
ONLY RANKED SEVENTH!

i demand a recount. milwaukee? sure, sure. st. paul? okay, maybe.
columbus? austin? chicago?
listen, people ... c'bus is a college town, as is austin.
that may involve heavy drinking, but that's part-time, short-term drinking.
chicago has too many people for the average indulgence to be that high.

this dwindling hamlet of >400,000, however,
boasts a populace within which a huge portion of that overall number
are basically fulltime, professional sots.

somebody needs to do a new survey.
oh, and for what it's worth, pittsburgh,
a city very much like our own,
finished eighth ...

day(s) late, dollar(s) short

2006-08-24T20:11:00.000-05:00

all right, all right, so maybe i didn't exactly
write the follow-up to fanatics
"later" that "evening" ... uh, sorry, i been, um ... "busy," all right.

i will address it now. if you followed the first link i provided in that post,
you will have found another link, to an article in the nation addressing yet more
curiosities about how right-wing ~~pigeons~~ hawks continuously try
to drum up more support for their fucking international disaster.

and i don't intend to knock the athletes who were affected emotionally
by this smarmy charade. hell, if you or i were confronted by scarred-for-life veterans of the bush administration's
totally unconscionable, fucking evil war,
i bet we'd have a hard time not feeling badly ourselves.
that's some difficult sh*t to countenance; and not only can i dig that,
i really can, as an american, feel it tugging at me deep inside.

and as for the fatigues-sporting set, who's to say what they're thinking?
it might not reveal blind support; it might really be an attempt
to demonstrate real solidarity with fellow citizens -- many of whom are
around the age of some of the athletes considered in the article in question -- who are constantly imperiled, constantly in harm's way, at the behest of a conceited, closed-minded motherfucker and his
immoral gang of ruthless henchmen, and
to no possible positive end whatsoever, to boot.

i am an american, and i care deeply about
the course of this nation; and the right-wingers and the red-staters
should in a perfect world -- which this one is obviously fucking not --
have to countenance that i know what i'm talking about and that
my opinion matters, and that that opinion consists largely of the belief
that those blind, conceited fools
are not only endangering our future under the guise
of "safeguarding" it,
but that they are bankrupting us in so doing,
and that no matter how deeply they stick their collective head in the sand --
or up their collective ass, as it were --
they should look around and see what life is like
for the many, many, many millions of american citizens
and other laborers living here
who weren't lucky enough or evil enough
to be one of their fat, pampered lot.

so when a rich young athlete such as the man mentioned
in that post from the other day is willing to make as bold a statement as
"it would have made me feel ashamed, angered and saddened that this soldier was blinded at the service of a war we shouldn’t have been in in the first place,"
i seriously have to wonder
where everybody else's voice has gone.

what, is your life too freakin' good
to want to challenge this completely imbalanced arrangement?

i seriously doubt it.

why have so many of this generation and those both
older and younger than us
ceded our rights?

i don't know, but i have a strong hunch
that social engineering has something to do with it.

that's grist for yet another post ... sometime later, of course.
(let's say mañana, and leave it at that.)

PS. sorry for the cursing and general lack of eloquence here.
this topic makes me very angry, and no matter what critics of
colloquial language ever have said to me, i still think that
blue language can express certain emotions or situations
better than polite, precise terminology.

facts about cats

2006-08-22T03:20:00.000-05:00

yeah, i thought i was done for the night,
but it just occurred to me
that i gave the kitten the remains of a chicken breast
that my insane upstairs neighbor gave to me
as part of a dinner platter
when she passed through my apartment
to go back upstairs after her roommate
scared her friend off,
me earning food earmarked for others
by default,
and, well,
not a trace of it remains.

she who is known worldwide as the unstoppable kitten face
ate the whole damn thing,
and i mean the whole damn thing,
bones and all.

no scraps. no leavings.
truly,
there is no "there" there.

seriously, if she weren't a four- or five-pound cat,
i'd be afraid for my life.

i love my world's-smallest-panther buddy;
she's the bestest.

where are the fuckers?

2006-08-22T03:01:00.000-05:00

hey --

if you're reading this crap,
could you occasionally drop a comment?

i don't care if it's to tell me i suck,
that my blog sucks,
that i should shut up,
that my baseball analysis is wrongheaded,
that my politics are queer,
or if you just want to deliver a recipe
for a jerk pork sandwich,
just say something, all right?

or else don't -- whatever.
that's still smurfy.

fanatics

2006-08-22T01:52:00.000-05:00

oh, this is just great.

sitting here at the computer, not sleeping,
reading endless pages of minutiae largely about the world of sports,
i remembered i hadn't visited can't stop the bleeding in a day or two,
and since i knew it would be chock-full of info
and that i could waste some more of my life perusing it,
i went there and found a life-affirming story.

as a sports fan and as a citizen of the US,
i loved this. it gave me hope, people, hope.

check it out -- you may not believe your eyes.
and once again, i wonder:
why are we not in the streets?
why are we so complacent?
why are we letting this continue?

i will post a lengthy screed about everything
this story made me think about
tomorrow evening.

PS. obviously, the "hope" i speak of
is courtesy of the courage of etan thomas.
yeah, this link is a little old, but it's still inspiring.
especially as i spend so much time on this thing
and still find this stuff so late.
it's out there, people;
let's do something with it ...

punch me harder

2006-08-22T00:36:00.000-05:00

okay, seriously now,
the toronto blue jays are having a decent season,
with long-shot chances of capturing the AL wild card
(which isn't going to happen),
and they may have to fire their manager
before the season ends.

because, apparently, the man is a lunatic.
last month, after jays' third baseman
shea hillenbrand --
who doesn't seem all that cool --
wrote some rather ill-advised comments
on a clubhouse message board
(things on the order of "play for your paycheck"
and "this ship is sinking," which he claimed were "jokes"),
the club's manager, john gibbons,
challenged him to a fight in front of the assembled team.

hillenbrand declined the offer to throw down.
he did not play in that evening's contest,
was summarily DFA'd,
and now plays for the san francisco geriatrics.

public opinion at the time
held that although hillenbrand is a clubhouse cancer,
gibbons handled the situation poorly,
and many wondered how things would play out
the remainder of the season in toronto.

GM jp ricciardi has his hands full, i'll tell ya.

see, during monday night's action, a 12-10 loss to the A's,
gibbons went to the mound to remove starter
theodore roosevelt "ted" lilly,
after lilly allowed seven runs in the frame,
pulling the A's to within one.

lilly, perhaps feeling that allowing seven earned runs
in two-and-a-third innings was insufficient reason
to replace him on the hill
(not sure i'm with you there, ted),
apparently got into a verbal altercation with the skipper
and refused to give him the baseball.

(by the way, i'm not linking to any stories about this,
because they're either on big corporate sites
to which i'd prefer not to link, or said links
are readily available elsewhere, such as on some of the sites
linked to in the sidebar here in happyland.)

needless to say, this pair of geniuses continued to argue.
from what i gather, lilly, after leaving the field of play,
headed up the runway to the clubhouse,
and gibbons steamed after him, confronted him,
shoved him and,
with the majority of the team looking on --
yes, during game action, the players left the dugout
to witness a confrontation between a pitcher
and the manager of the team --

well, he challenged him to a fight, of course;
it's the man's style.

nobody has as of yet reported what actually occurred next,
but many sources have reported that blue jays manager john gibbons
was next seen with a bloody nose.

seriously.

you know,
i just don't see this relationship working out long-term.

it's one thing to assert control of your charges.
it must be difficult, dealing with me-first jerks like hillenbrand
and a guy who doesn't want to come out of a game
even if he's obviously just throwing BP.

but, um, shit, i dunno ...
i'm not 100 percent sure, but challenging anybody who defies you
to a fight --
especially when you're, you know, in charge --
doesn't seem to be the most recommendable strategery.

i mean, that really takes "asshole boss" syndrome
to the extreme!

"thank you for your service to this company, mr. gibbons,
and i sincerely hope you enjoy your next position,
selling those used cars."

PS. apropos of nothing, former indians closer bob wickman
is now 9-for-9 in save situations with the atlanta braves,
and still boasts an ERA of 0.00

hamas wins, peace loses

2006-08-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

the above title is the philosophy, the slogan,
the anthem -- and, indeed,
the raison d'être --
of the new band of which i am
but one ridiculous part.

yes, we are called "hamas."
no, you will not "enjoy" what we "do,"
unless, of course, you are the type of person
who appreciates the beauty that can be contained within
fistfuls of hideous noise.

we first played together last thursday -- august 17.

our first public performance allegedly will occur
on wednesday, august 23, at The Church
in the cleveland neighborhood of Torment (aka Tremart).

my role in this group is to approximate a drummer.
what i bring to the table is the ability to vary randomly
between three or four beats, the capacity to play the same damn thing
for a mind-numbing duration, an utter lack of discretion
as to when i might alter these patterns, and a propensity for
freaking the fuck out and just bashing on the damn skins
in a manner presumably not dissimilar to that of a chimpanzee.

meanwhile, the two guitar players will be largely ignoring each other,
one emitting shards of blistering electric mayhem
and the other doing his level best to emulate
non-guitar sounds. we also have a bass player,
but have yet to play with him.

(remember, the show's on wednesday!)

oh, this will be a blast, you can be sure.

granted, the complete extemporaneity of the idea charms me,
as i'm a veteran of such affairs,
and i'm also fairly impressed with the idea
that we, as an entity,
obviously just don't give a fuck
about notions such as propriety, talent, songs,
taste, appeal or what-have-you.

a brief history of some other historical musical
disasters with which i have been involved:

1. pimpin' for god, a one-off performance of
amazingly inept proportions back in '95, consisting of three idiots
who had played together twice (the show was our third time)
ruining seven songs, among which were included such masterful notions as cover versions of johnny cougar's "crumblin' down,"
guns n' roses' "sweet child o' mine," a song my brother wrote
("foriegn land" [sic]) and the classic campfire singalong
"the song that never ends." oh, and the theme music from
something called emmet otter's jug-band christmas,
of which i had no prior knowledge. i "sang" and "played guitar,"
it was totally retarded and, no doubt, amusing, and, why yes,
i do have it on tape. wanna hear it?

oh, i should mention that the drummer in the aforementioned trainwreck
is now the bass player in a new group,
as well as that the bass player in the same debacle --
a rhodes scholar, by the way --
is now apparently a playwright.

2. any performance by flux up 10 %, 1998-200?, the less said about
that the better; if you missed it, you missed it --
hey, life's rough sometimes. we were an "improv" group.
(in this case, "improv" = "really high on drugs")

3. random dumas band (pronounced "dumbass band,"
if you don't remember -- i was "dumbass") performance from
hadda be summer of '98 since that's pretty much the onliest fucking time we even existed ...so, stephe and i both briefly worked
at the same fucked-up, what was it? a cabinet display builders'
shop? (you know, with "baker.") i didn't last but two-three weeks
as i remember, as i had this problem with little things
such as showing up on time. but i distinctly recall stephe and i
one day making fliers for a show we found out that day we
were playing that night, attending kreamy 'lectric santa,
the result of -- no, really! -- a scheduling screwup.
(our dude had the wrong month.)

somehow, some people showed up. we played on the floor.
i was drunk on colt .45 and needed the walls to help me stand up.
one of three performances for which
muthafukkin' strayzie bone* praised me.
(that's high praise, for those who don't know.)

oh, and then there was that night at the invisible city
when, after the three bands who were supposed to play had finished
(no, i have no idea whatsoever who they were, why do you ask?),
bobby convinced us that we were gonna play.

and we did. that night, brief set though we played,
we achieved our finest-ever version of "kaczynski."
and no lie, heads were bobbing amongst all them drunks.

(no tapes exist of "kaczynski.")

4. walls of malm. christ, i have no idea when this one took place.
i'll guess '99, but i really don't know. 2K? some help?
(hey, by the way, i really fucked my head up
looking around the speak in tongues site,
and you can do the same if you follow the link
in item no. 5 immediately below ... ****)

yeah, s.i.t.

(huh, whaddya know, i can refer to some of
the biggest sources of damage in my life
strictly with initials! SIT, UD** , et cetera ...)

don't know who-all even played, neither, but i *think*
i distinctly remember there were 8 of us. me, kretsch,
stephe, peffer, and you-got-me, doing some sort of
timing-driven orchestration of random noise
as devised by brian straw.

the bastard. during the flux years,
i mean when we were a quartet,
he and i kept discussing this idea.
i tried it once with the group,
but my attempts at disjunct symphonics
didn't quite catch on.

and then he arranged this.
glad to be invited. played drums.
fell off drum stool at conclusion of my contribution.

(hey, if anybody's got this on tape, lemmy know.)

5. bull shit. probably my best-ever concept, in theory
if not in execution, bull shit (okay, you already get the joke,
right? "bull shit is two fuckin' words" -- a canard lost on most --
and, of course, "everybody loves bull shit"!) played
one really good show, that being a benefit for
ralph nader's 2000 presidential campaign at speak in tongues,
and one disastrous show during which i got so frustrated that i
quit on my own band mid-set. what's odd is that we "rehearsed"
four times for the first show, and three times for the second,
and the songs certainly weren't any more difficult to learn
(fuck, i wrote 'em, after all), but one member of the group
didn't really seem to give a shit the second time, so it just ...
didn't work. come to think of it, the songs were more complicated
the first time. you try covering the archers of loaf
("fabricoh") and pulling it off. we did, thank you very much.

6. go fuck yourself. i think we "rehearsed" three times
before we played, and although we were better those three times
than we were during the show, i actually thought we did a pretty
good job, especially during the "go fuck yourself" quasi-theme song.
(bands, in my opinion, should always have theme songs.)
maybe my britney spears t-shirt helped.
oh, yeah, i have this on tape, too, by the way ... somewhere.
wanna hear it?
(no, you don't.)

stay tuned for my report on disaster no. 7. ***
um ... by the way, anybody "holdin'"? i'm all out,
and i got a show to play ...

PS. i forgot the big new plaid performance
in which i participated back in i'm guessin' '94
at that university i attended. mr. new lou reeds himself flew out, and don and justin and i rehearsed with him for a few hours
and then ate some sandwiches
and whiled away the day, and then later that same night,
we did the damn thang. hey, guess what?
that's on tape, too.
the auteur in question probably wouldn't let you hear it, though.

* the others were the final snarkout boys show
with bisybackson and somebody else ("final" meaning
"besides that one 'reunion' set we played maybe 8 months later)
and the nader benefit performance referenced in no.5 above ****

** [later]

*** actually, no. 9 or 10 if you're counting ****

**** i've edited this post roughly 134,005 times *****

***** no more notes

more beer

2006-08-20T23:49:00.000-05:00

sure, sure, i threatened to make the "next post"
about my "new band,"
but i thought it germane to mention that
as i sat here working my way through ms. 12-pack
(my girlfriend),
i looked at the clock, realized it was almost midnite
on a sunday,
and got in the chariot to procure a 40,
"just in case"
i wasn't gonna wind up drunk enough
from the contents of ms. 12-pack.

yeah, i do this EVERY NIGHT.
well, it's usually not a 12-pack.
weekdays, it's the usual sixer of tall beers,
and then the 40.

cheers! bottoms up! prosit! na zdrowie!
go fuck yourself!

you know, i said to this girl i was hanging out with
once upon a time
that if i kept up this pace,
i wasn't going to live for very much longer.

she responded, "i know,"
and we just kept drinking ...

hey, what's the name of this blog again?

van lingle mungo

2006-08-20T22:00:00.000-05:00

it's sunday night as i type this;
the indians played this afternoon.
they put them a whuppin' on some devil rays,
winning 9-4 behind 7 strong innings
from jake westbrook, two excruciatingly slow
innings from fernando cabrera and rafael betancourt,
and an offensive onslaught capped by
jhonny peralta's first career grand slam.
pronk and garko went deep as well.

but whatever -- the point of me mentioning that
is that as evening rolled around, i found myself
potentially bereft of my best friend, radio baseball.
sure, the captains were playing and the action was available
on AM 850, and although i have gotten so desperate at times
as to listen to minor-league broadcasts, tonight
i opted to try to locate the espn sunday night baseball game,
which was game four of the lopsided yankees-red sox weekend.

allegedly, cleveland has a new espn affiliate,
but, well, i couldn't find it. par for the course
'round these parts, i must say, especially when i did manage
to dial in a fuzzy, ebbing broadcast from the affiliate
in chicago, i think.

now, had i the services of my once-beloved transistor radio,
i might have been all right -- even if i lost that signal,
i can usually find a game from pittsburgh's station
or toronto's
and i've gotten others at times as well.
but my once-beloved transistor radio needs some minor repair,
which i can't (of course) afford to effect as yet,
so i was depending on the box, which is nowhere near as effective
at garnering foreign signals as the transistor.

(the shelving of the transistor is in some ways a good thing,
since without it, i am less apt to think about
ms. rhymes-with-witch. but it does make the attainment
of alien baseball a more thorny proposition.)

eventually, i lost the signal, and since i was sitting here
behind the computer, only realized after about 25 minutes
that i was listening to nothing but white noise.

(the fact that i didn't really notice that,
or that it didn't bother me,
eloquently says more than i could write effectively
on even my best day
about my relationship with sound particles audibly colliding.
it should also ably warn you about the impending disaster
that is going to be the public inauguration of
the new band i'm in, which i will mention ... soon enough.
the latter phrase can probably be best translated as
"in the next post.")

so then i was stuck with sunday night football on nbc.

okay. i grew up here in cleveland. my parents liked sports.
dad was more of a baseball guy, really, but he followed the browns,
and paid cursory attention to the cavaliers.
mom loves baseball, but i think she likes football more*,
and, as do many, now pays more-than-cursory attention
to the cavaliers because of that LBJ guy.

*seriously, my dad had one of his three league-bowling nights
on mondays, and my mom enjoyed this because, as she put it,
"i can watch monday night football in peace."**

**sorry for sticking these notes right in the middle
of this thing; i know that's tacky and ugly and disruptive,
but i don't know how long i'm going to ramble and they just
wouldn't have worked at the end of a longish post.

so, despite the quiddities attendant to life as the middle child,
i grew up loving baseball and football,
along with paying cursory attention to the cavaliers.

now, the indians are going nowhere, although the prospects
fascinate me, and this summer can just go straight to hell
and stay there as far as i'm concerned, and i did admittedly
have a nice time on friday watching the browns-lions tussle
with an old friend, but for christ's sweet sake, man,
it's freaking august, i'm not ready to be able to pay attention
to football -- especially the preseason variety --
and, i dunno, it just doesn't captivate me the way baseball does.

yeah, i know. my general stance and the belief system
i endorse makes my love of professional sports
more than a little hypocritical -- maybe even more so
than the tobacco i chainsmoke the entire time i'm awake
and the beer i consume in alarmingly escalating quantities
every goddamn day.

baseball, however, is the nearest approximation
of existentialism
that can be produced by people performing roles
in any organized manner,
besides, perhaps, waiting for godot.
and i think that's why it resonates so deeply with me.

there's no clock
it has rules and logic, neither of which often matter
it goes on seemingly forever
to best understand it, one has to lend themselves to a myriad of abstractions, none of which tend to translate perfectly to any actual results
much of the process of excelling at it
is almost completely psychological, and all of the rest
is more or less raw physical ability combined with training,
aside from the vast portion of it
that is sheer, dumb luck --
all of the above considered apart from
who has the most money
when it's over, and the winner has won,
everyone goes home and it doesn't mean a damn thing
the next time anyone takes the field
much of the time, nothing seems to be happening

and so forth.

baseball is an epic poem. it's a doctoral dissertation,
or at least a master's thesis. it is akin to the formation
of the layers of the earth's crust, the conversion of once-living matter
into coal, the accumulation of rings in the growth of
a humongous tree.

football, by way of contrast, is an action movie.
it's watching pornography in fast-forward.
it's as subtle as trench warfare, a phrase often invoked
(in times of peace)
in describing it.
it's that holographic star wars chess
one shouldn't play with chewbacca.
it is, as thomas hobbes in part famously described life,
"nasty, brutish, and short."

don't infer too much from that last statement, football fan.
remember, the transitive property often lends itself
to no more than syllogism.

more about ryan garko later ...

cartoon

2006-08-20T21:14:00.000-05:00

a few words from the 1980s:

"I have seen these closing doors;
I’ve woke up on this floor before,
picked it apart for hours and hours and hours
of turning, tossing
and looking and listening
to you and all the fucked-up things you do ... "

thanks, 1980s!

hey, anyone who actually reads this shazbot,
"sorry" i ain't posted nothin' in a week.
i know, it's hard for you to get by without
reading more of my brilliantly written
bitchin' and whinin' about my stupid life,
so as long as i can keep from getting too drunk too fast
this evening, i'll try to add several new gems
that may not contain quite so much
pissin' and moanin'.

although i will start with this:
inmates report to the cleveland "schools" starting thursday,
but as of this very moment, i will not potentially
be the man in charge of ignoring the chaos that ensues
whenever a substitute teacher steps in the room and admits,
"yeah, i'm the sub."

this is "because" although i filled out my certificate-renewal form
and forked over my $12 fee on or before june 12,
the remarkable employees either downtown
or the reputable administrators in columbus
either f'd up admirably
or just haven't gotten around to it yet.

not that i have a problem with that --
except for one small thing.

such as direly needing to make money,
a problem i allegedly accounted for
for at least nine months of the year
last winter when i breezed through the absurdly simplistic
process of being appointed a substitute teacher
by the cleveland municipal school district.

and although i haven't yet girded myself quite enough
to be thoroughly looking forward to reestablishing
my status as cmsd bullet-catcher
(i mean, it's been a tough summer;
i'm not at my peak just yet),
i was rather depending on the fact that the position
pays well enough for a relatively short workday,
along with the fact that,
oh, i don't know,
i need to make some fucking money,
a skill at which i possess so little acumen
that i'm sitting here on august 20
with nowhere near enough money to pay my rent for next month.

i'd actually started scraping out my brain enough recently
to have started thinking that i might be able to sometime soon
imagine seeing the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel,
but this news, combined with this morning's usual bout
with the DTs,
has me once again agreeing with either jc fogerty
(that said light is "nothing but a burglar's torch")
or that stupid band from the '90s
(that it's an oncoming train).

yeah, i'm a drug-addled sot,
and the cleveland schools trust me with children.
that tells you all you need to know, really.
hey, w, i've got your Highly Qualified Teachers
and your No Child Left Behind* right here.

seriously, though, this current problem sucks.
besides the income, a quaint construct with which
i'd like to be reunited, being a sub
actually made me feel pretty good about myself,
which almost nothing else on
this godforsake shithole you call "earth"
has had the capacity to do in any sort of sustainable sense.

why, hello, ms. 12-pack! thank god you've come home with me.
do you wanna, like, hang out 'n' stuff?
at least when i "put you down," you don't mind,
since that's what you're here for!

/frank admission

*besides the roughly 60 percent of the children
who will, in fact, be left quite behind

it's catching up

2006-08-14T06:16:00.000-05:00

why hello, insomnia, my decades-long companion!
i hadn't seen you coming!

what's that you say?
oh, yes, well, i suppose i AM usually too drunk
to hang out with you a whole lot these days.

but seriously ... how'd you get in here?
how'd you know tonight/this morning/whatever
was your opportunity?

you were watching through my bedroom window,
and climbed in to hide while i brushed my teeth?

wow, that's really unsettling, dude.
what the fuck is up with that?

yeah, okay, fine -- i know you wanted to hang out.
i get it. but you can't, like, stalk me and spy on me
and freakin' break into my apartment just because --

look, i don't care if you "miss" me, dude!
maybe i don't really wanna hang out with you
so much anymore. did that occur to you?

yeah, that doesn't surprise me. you never cared what i needed.
you didn't care about all those times i had to go to work
and i was lying there staring at the time creeping away on my clock,
thinking, like, "shit! only two possible hours of sleep left!"
and flailing around helplessly in bed trying to find the
magical position that would allow me, finally, to drift off.
you've never had to deal with that sort of panic and anxiety,
have you? of course not! you LOVE panic and anxiety!
you get off on that shit!

no, i'm not going to calm down! i haven't gotten any fucking sleep!
"it's not your fault" -- oh, whatever. that's ridiculous.
you haven't changed a bit. you're still callous and manipulative
and ... and ... you're just full of shit, man. how can you possibly --

don't fucking interrupt me! how can you possibly --

shut up! shut up! i'm trying to ask --

howcanyoupossiblypretendyoudon'tknowwhyi'mupset?
really, how is that possible?

how is that possible?

how is that possible?

okay, look, i've had it. i want you to go. just, just ...
just get the hell out of here, i mean it.

go. go. GO. GO. I SAID GO!

what-what-what-what do you mean "you're not going"?
this is my fucking house! get out of here!
don't sit down on the couch! the door is right there, you asshole!

okay. fine. sit there on the fucking couch. go right ahead.
i'll show you. yeah, i'll show you.
i've still got some fucking beer left!

yeah, that's right, that's right, asshole.
we'll see how long you stick around now.

yeah, sure, go ahead -- watch TV, i don't care.

i apologize

2006-08-14T02:21:00.000-05:00

to anyone reading this blog, for subjecting you to this.

to my friends, for my ongoing hopelessness and general uselessness.

to that girl, for my vitriol and for failing her.

and to the others i have hurt.

my hubris is not so great that i can't step back far enough
from it to see things clearly, you see. and clearly, it is not
an unwarranted claim that i can be a hateful, hurtful being
closer to an ogre than a man.

i know i share the blame. hell, of all the boyfriend-girlfriend
relationships i've ever had, only one could not be charitably
classified as a disaster, and, you know, uh, that one ended, too.

which may explain why i'm not in one now, and also why
most days it feels as though i may never experience such a thing
ever again. (well, that, and everything else you might read
on this page.)

hell, most days, i think that's for the best --
for me and for womankind in general.

yeah, so anyway, for anyone offended or embarrassed or irked
by anything i write herein, look, i said i was sorry, man!

this blog is the expression or extension of my existentialism,
i guess, an arduous grasping after truth and a sense of purpose.
(fellow travelers will recognize the quixotic therein, since,
of course, no such things can be found. so for anyone wondering
why i describe my dasein [sorry] elsewhere as "nihilism,"
well, there you have it. go look in the mirror.)

it's also my therapy. so i'm sorry if this shit splatters
when i dump it out of my head, all right?

you know, i apologize so often that a friend of mine
once threatened to punch me if she ever heard me say
"i'm sorry" ever again.

my response?

"i'm sorry," of course.

(i don't remember whether she actually punched me.)

as for the real reason for this post:
i know it doesn't make any sense, all right?

let me put it this way:
say i'm a fungus, all right?
but however i came to be, in whatever soil-challenged area
i inhabit (let's say it's on a tree branch),
i found myself combined with a photobiont of some sort --
a cyanobacterium, an alga
(or, hell, maybe i'm the photobiont; it's kind of hard to tell) --
right you are, i'm a lichen!
and there i am, living in symbiosis.
now, whether fungus or photobiont, given the right conditions,
i could live alone. but these are specialized conditions
in which i live; my partner and i depend on each other,
even if science is a little unsure exactly how or why
our purported mutualism functions.
then one day, depending on which component i am,
i realize that not only is the other one missing,
but someone or something took the fucking tree away, too.
now i'm not a lichen anymore.
and as a matter of fact, if i'm the fungus,
well,
now i'm dead.

that clears it up, right?

and the moral of this story is:
there is no moral of this story.
it's but a tiny chapter in that "tale told by an idiot."

yeah, yeah, i know i just quoted something 400 years old
that says, essentially, there is no truth to be found.
now excuse me, i've got to go find my horse, rocinante.

can i say

2006-08-13T19:41:00.000-05:00

i'm not responding to that letter i rec'd
(posted in " nothin' ")
in real time, but i feel the need to address it here.

bear with me, all right?

"listen, you, maybe if anything you had to tell me
at this point wouldn't primarily consist of
'here, let me tell you all the ways in which i lied to you
and misrepresented myself and wasn't the person i claimed i was
and, furthermore, acted as a selfish asshole bitch
who never in her life gave anyone else's feelings any consideration,
and who ALSO fucked with your life and your head ruthlessly
because i couldn't bear to not have you in my grasp --
even though i couldn't admit any such thing --
until such point as i decided to just chuck my whole
contrived personality
into the cuyahoga river and become someone else entirely,
after which point i was still never going to be able
to be honest about anything about myself,
and, in fact, continue to act as though i was beyond reproach
and a good person, to boot, all the while
continuing to belittle and insult you
and, yes, deliberately returning again and again to insure
that i was having some sort of effect on you,
negative or positive,
without a single thought as to whether this might be construed
as monstrous behavior,
because, frankly, i don't think about anything but myself,'

well,
maybe then i'd be willing to listen.

otherwise, honey darlin',
i risk the results of my schadenfreude
by hoping to whatever gods there may be
that you are even more miserable than myself.

at least i'm still me and i still have a consistent personality,
repulsive though it may be at times.

will you EVER know who the fuck you even are,
huh?

nice fucking costume, by the way.
nice sense of aesthetics.

you stole five fucking years of my life.
FIVE.
and i still haven't recovered, and that is a goddamn shame.

you were NEVER worth
the misguided faith i placed in you,
and you know what?

that reminds me why i never have been a person of faith.

do yourself a favor
and stay far the fuck away from me,
because if you come around here at the wrong time,
i'll wind up in prison.

oh, and
'try not to suck any dick on your way through the parking lot,'
okay?

and no, i'm not even done yet.
i will flash back to my college years and my college friends
and add:

'hey, fuck you.
god don't like ugly.'

enjoy the rest of your mediocre
and assuredly friendless
existence on this shithole we call earth,
all right?

you were the biggest mistake i've ever made --
and yeah, that's really saying something --
as well as the biggest disappointment
of my entire fucking life.

i tried harder than anyone ever should try
to get you to understand what life is about,
and i sacrificed my own happiness
in the attempt to help you grow as a person,
and you shat all over everything.

as martin briley sang, 'you aren't worth the salt in my tears,'
and there have been many tears.

worst of all, you haven't learned a goddamn thing.

thanks, also, for making it impossible for me
to date anybody else while you were around,
even though you have acknowledged
that you were not ready to be with anybody,
leaving me with little choice,
even as you eventually decided to be a complete asshole
and fuck somebody you barely knew.

i really appreciate that, pal.
i mean, that really shows some ... initiative, or something.

following from that,
i guess i can only reference, in conclusion,
a line of brilliance from another long-lost pal
by saying,
'i'm going to tell you something about you and something about me:
you suck,
and i hate you.' "

note: yeah, that's why i'm not gonna actually respond, dig?

love kills

2006-08-12T22:19:00.000-05:00

so i'm sitting here at my computer this evening,
listening to the indians game, browsing stupid crap
on the internets, and lamenting the fact that
i can't afford to go out and not have fun with my friends
ak tha klug,
and suddenly the door opens and slams
and she who is known universally as the
all-powerful and infamous kitten face
bursts in with a prize clutched in her powerful jaws.

"oh, no!" i exclaimed. "what do you have?"

it looked huge.
and since the last "toy" she brought home was
a BAT, i was a little worried.

well, it was some sort of bird.
i'd like to tell you what kind of bird, but i'm not at all certain,
because after she killed it --
i saw it die, lying on its back, wings spasming in its death throes --
and again, as i've said before elsewhere,
i'm pretty sure this might be bad karma --
she ate most of it.

all that's left is a basic avian carcass,
minus viscera. what remains is lying on my beloved
46-year-old boy scouts knapsack, right behind me
as i type this.

after she finished snacking, she drank some water
and immediately bolted back outside.

hey, at least this time, she didn't take a break
from eating her catch to eat some of her cat food.

she did that the last time she ate a bird
(a sparrow, her preferred prey)
and it kind of creeped me out, frankly.

i need drugs

2006-08-12T01:51:00.000-05:00

lexapro
vicodin
xanax
adderall
effexor
zoloft
paxil
wellbutrin
neurontin
lipitor
vioxx
valium
naproxin
ambien
celebrex
soma
prozac
cipro
ativan
nexium
ultram
zocor
klonopin
seroquel
ritalin
augmentin
viagra
zyrtec
synthroid
phentermine
plavix
prilosec
allegra
lithium
abilify
levitra
flomax
endocet
zantac
fentanyl
claritin
tricor

marijuana
crack
cocaine
heroin
alcohol
nicotine
LSD
"x"
dmt
stp
methamphetamine

sugar

mcdonald's
burger king
white castle
kfc
denny's

anheuser-busch
miller brewing co.
GLBC
guinness & co.
coors.com

cnn
msnbc
espn
aol
myspace.com
gawker.com
fleshbot.com
youtube.com

LOL!

fake contest

2006-08-11T23:41:00.000-05:00

have you grasped the shtick yet?
most of the titles of the posts herein
are either song titles, song lyrics,
or transpositions of song titles or song lyrics.

i dare ya -- try naming 'em.

The Royal We will periodically quiz you thusly.

highest percentage of right answers wins ...

(wait for it, you know it's coming)

BEER! WONDERFUL BEER!

(or the drug of your choice)

hey! don't cheat, neither ...
kids wanna know

"the liar lies, and then the liar lies again"

2006-08-11T23:00:00.000-05:00

that liar is me, ladies and gents ...
in "death disco," i claimed "the next post will be 'fun,'"
and obviously, now, that "next" post
wasn't.

"funny," in a sense, perhaps; but certainly not "fun."

so:

man, tonight's indians game ended in a thrilling manner,
didn't it? DIDN'T IT? if you don't follow the regional sports team,
maybe you don't know. (well, actually, you probably don't know,
and additionally, you most likely don't care.)

but it was thrilling. one out, bases juiced,
bottom of the ninth, trailing 3-1 to the lowly royals squad
that has for some reason owned "our" asses most of this season ...
with grady "g-more" sizemore at the bat.

and struggling royals closer ambiorix burgos on the hill
for the KC nine.

and that, despite more of manager eric "AAAA" wedge's
questionable strategery. (NOT pinch-hitting for ramon "banjo" vazquez?
pinch-hitting yet again for untested-in-a-lost-season-purported-
cornerstone-rookie andy marte, and with aaron boone, yet, he who
possesses not only a gigantic hole in his swing but also questionable
plate judgment?)

sizemore, of course, is one of the team's two or three best hitters,
without question. still, he had been mired in an rbi slump --
just one in his last 15 games. (he also had the team's last
game-ending, "walkoff" hit, sometime back in may, i believe.)

first pitch. ball one. second pitch. fouled off. 1-1.
i believe it was the next offering that sizemore smoked to
the base of the wall in left, and tom "maximum volume" hamilton
provided a most memorable call on The Flagship:
"garko scores! vazquez scores! here comes boone! indians win!

it gave me goosebumps. (c'mon, you're reading this blog, right?
you know i have no life ... shit, i'm writing this at midnight
on a friday, for christ's sweet sake!)

now, i haven't blogged about the indians all season.
it's not because plenty of fodder hasn't existed; oh, it's been there.
i just didn't have the motivation, due to ... uh ...
continental drift. yeah.

so let me go on record here to say that i, for one,
have thoroughly enjoyed this baseball campaign, although this
locale's squad, highly touted in the preseason as a contender,
has been anything but.

why, you may ask? well, for one thing, baseball, to me,
is about much more than winning and losing. as i told my
pal frank one day over lunch, look, i'm just grateful that
baseball's there for me almost every night for over six months
of the year. i don't care that much about the regional team's
fortunes -- hell, i'm a native clevelander, why should i? --
nearly as much as i care that there's a regional team.
"if they left town and i didn't have a team to follow,"
i pointed out, "then i'd have a problem."

and this year has at least been completely fascinating,
for a variety of reasons. first, the sucking. whoa, what the hell happened?
this team won, what, 93 games last year?
second, the inevitable second- and third-guessing
of every available bit of minutiae involved, but especially
the relative wisdom and competence of gm mark "sharpio" shapiro
and the aforementioned "wedgie." (no, seriously, they call him that.)
third, the rampant roster turnover and all the wonderful,
wonderful (and also rampant) speculation that attends such.

yeah, i'll say it, i'm a complete baseball nerd.
no, i'm nowhere near as bad as some of the people who post on
or write for some of the blogs this blog links to,
but i'm ... pretty obsessive. the brinksmanship is fantastic.
(for me. can i point out again that i have NO life?)

and here we sit, mid-august, long since over, no shouting necessary,
and the tribe's lineup features names such as

"mighty joe" inglett (currently slightly injured)
andy "this is why we traded coco crisp" marte
shin-soo "big league" choo
ryan "gark the shark" garko
hector "back for the third time" luna
ramon "i'm not a major-league-caliber ballplayer" vazquez (one post, two nicknames!)
kelly "shop vac" shoppach
jeremy "the rotation now features three southpaws" sowers
fausto "blown save" carmona (okay, that's uncool, sorry)
jason "out of options" davis
"franklin gutierrez"

and so forth. how could you NOT love this?
this is the future unfolding; this is hope; this is tomorrow's dream;
this, truly, is next year.

for a cleveland sports fan, there is nothing more pure.

and for the nihilist in me, well, hell,
this insignificant thing -- *ahem* a losing proposition --
makes me ... what's that word? it describes an emotional state
that's the opposite of pain, misery, despondency, etc.? c'mon,
i know there's gotta be a word for it ... dammit, i'm blanking.

somebody help me out, all right?

" nothin' " (?) *

2006-08-11T21:09:00.000-05:00

rec'd 8/11/06 @10 pm

As much as I loved certain things about ^you my fear
of you, The damage you are capable of doing me
both physically and emotionally, over rides any willingness
I had to be your partner in life. Sometimes I
foolishly believe that by being friends with you I could
at least be a part of the wonderful Things about
you. Unfortun#ately, I will always be in harms
way no matter what way #### or on what
level we are supposed to be relating. I have
never felt and will never feel safe voicing
my ##### opinions to you. I always have to fear
your reaction. This leaves me feeling vulnerable,
sad, and not able to be open with you. Believe it
or not. I value ##### my life more than
wanting to be hurt, or worse by The hands of
anyone, especially someone I only ever wanted
Kindness, compassion and love from. We both
deserve to find people ## who will love and
cherish us and never intenionally put us in
harms way. We both crossed lines we
shouldn't have long ago and it would be
impossible for me to say That I trust my life
in your hands. My opi#nion of myself is
---more important to me than any negative
Thing you have to say. I know that I am a good,
intelligent, loving human being who is capable of
so much more than she has accomplished so far.
I deserve someone who believes in me, and life, and
happiness, and love, and friendship, and beauty, and trust

(sic)

* alternate post titles:

"this wound will never heal" **

"and then i died" ***

** though, strangely, it feels as though the above
note might serve as a pretty good bandage. i mean,
those of you privy to the details of this sad, stupid
story**** are probably choking to death on the hideous
irony of the above. comment away!

*** which, as some of you know, is baseball slang
for being cut, "sent down," DFA'd, what have you ...

**** for those who haven't been, or aren't, the person from whom
i rec'd the above once tried to hit me with her
car, and among the many amusing things she's said
to me lurks the statement, "i hope you have AIDS!" *****

***** yeah, i'm just totally fucking with you
with this ridiculous string of, um, "notes" ...

death disco

2006-08-10T22:04:00.000-05:00

hey, that's not an accurate title, by the way ...
i'm actually not in a bad way right now.

so to explain: lester bangs wrote a phenomenal piece
about pil's second edition (you know, "metal box")
in which he discussed some song from the group's
first record -- i could get off my ass and find out
which one, but i'm too f'in lazy, ya dig --
and called it something on the order of
"one of the best arguments against suicide
i've ever heard." he continued to say that he
played it for a friend of his who'd "actually
attempted suicide" a coupla times and asked this friend
if he could relate. as he wrote it, the friend
laughed somewhat hysterically and replied, "sure,
who couldn't?"

and that's why i'm writing this.
this message is "to all my friends!"
(both real-world friends
and those who are still mainly cyberfriends)

look, peeps, i know it's been real fucking difficult
dealing with me lately. and i ain't gonna name names
this time, since y'all know who you be, but --
and i cannot stress this enough --

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
you have put up with my dour ass;
you for the most part have not abandoned me;
you are always there for me;
you are my fucking rock and i feel as though
i could never repay you enough for the support
and the love
and the strength
and the help
and the PATIENCE
(i cannot stress enough your patience)
y'all have granted me during this (latest)
dark, difficult time.

i love you all. and i promise you --
i promise you --
one day, and hopefully sooner than later,
i'll be better again,
i'll be back to being the "good" me,
and we will laugh all the way to the ...
um ...
well, probably not the bank, obviously ...
um ...
okay,
let's just say "the bar."

next post will be "fun," i swear.

sotto voce:
my best mental vibes out to my buddy who's hurtin',
and xtra special thanks to dr.N
as well as those rock cats who always brang "it,"
plus a smile to my face ...

crossing the rubicon -- again

2006-08-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

whoa, holy hell, shitfire 'n' all that --
i haven't even yet read this entire article
or chased down its links, but any of y'all
who are at all interested in global conspiracy,
politrix, and/or the "war that will last our
lifetimes" would be well-advised to follow
me down this rabbithole:
informed comment: war on lebanon planned for at least a year

frankly, i'm too drunk right now to follow up,
but i do have a topic for the "global americana institute"
to explore, which is the obvious preparedness of
hezbollah to deal with this threat, plan, whatever-you-call-it.

once again, i marvel at the ostrichlike tendencies of
our so-called government here (not to mention its allies),
never imagining what might transpire in a region
so clearly crucial to its interests.

what, exactly, do you suppose these clowns are thinking about?

oh, and by the way, i found this article by following a link from:
miblog weighs a ton

NB: i don't care if any of the above is inaccurate or just plain wrong.
we need to be igniting this dialogue!

"cleveland would be in syria"

2006-08-07T18:24:00.000-05:00

yes, that statement actually appeared in the local "newspaper"
today. does it really need any contextual clues to make it
seem more pertinent? (or, as my horoscope one day read at some point
last fall, "you may not be getting a clear picture.
does it really matter?")

oh, all right, i'll tell you. no, it wasn't any sort of
purportedly amusing, "things could be worse" attempt at humor,
though i wouldn't put such a concept past the geniuses
who comprise our local media; rather, it was part of a
somewhat puzzling graphic, the intent of which was to
underscore the dynamic relations currently at play in
the fractious mideast. (said graphic was an outline of
the state of ohio overlaid upon a map of israel, lebanon et al.)

it would indubitably be asinine to point out that
no matter how flawed any of our lives as americans may be,
we sure are lucky that we don't have to deal with
anything remotely akin to what is going on in that region
right now -- and by "right now," understand, i mean
"for most if not all of the past 60 years." (a corollary
which means, of course, that by "is," i also mean "has been" in
the precedent phrase.)

so, yeah, i just said it anyway, because the situation itself
is so asinine. i really feel for the people of lebanon.
not just because i've made some great lebanese friends in
my life, although i have, but also because their decades-long
experience has been nothing but horror. not unlike many other
states in the region, theirs is essentially a riven nation.
in the north, they have what is presented as some sort of
representative governance. the south is its own animal,
controlled and managed largely by hezbollah. also not unlike
other states in the region, this arrangement by and large
has been peaceable enough within their borders, at least among
their own people.

but with the presence of first the PLO, and later hezbollah,
within those borders, well, the lebanese people have had to
endure a lot of external pressure. there's israel, of course,
the ongoing scourge of any hope for peace in the region.

NOTE: yes, i mean that exactly as it is written.
you got a problem with that? without the presence of the
state of israel, what seemingly amounts to a simple majority
of the region's inhabitants would be free to establish a
theocratic islamic state ... which would probably involve
internecine struggles between sects, dramatic skirmishes based
around availability of resources, and the elimination of
the kurds, eventually. but that would be their own problem,
not a headache and a threat to the rest of the world -- which,
in case you're not scoring at home, is precisely the current
situation over there.

FURTHERMORE: i'm not necessarily saying i think this would
be the best-case scenario -- i mean, i'm sure there are plenty of
egyptians and jordanians who might protest, as well as perennial
wild card turkey (not to mention the kurds) -- but let's face it,
people, this is what you get with your globalism. and let's face,
also, that the reason this idea has been met with such opposition
is that a unified, theocratic islamic state would be a powerful,
powerful bloc, much more so than, say, the european union. yes,
there are many troubling human-rights aspects lurking behind this
notion. such is the nature of fundamentalism. i mean, if the
bible belt portions of america were to try to establish their own
state-within-a-state, how much different do you think it would
look? i mean, without the burqa. what would be your choice if you
were a more liberal person living in such a region? you'd probably
move somewhere else. or else you'd succumb. life ain't pretty.

anyway, the citizens of southern lebanon are being bombed all
to hell on a regular basis right now. israel is officially
apologetic about the civilian deaths -- which account for, um,
MOST OF THEM -- but that position is specious at best. rocket
strikes do not affect hezbollah fighters in underground bunkers.
they do affect ordinary lebanese trying to live their
lives in hell. apparently, to israel, the old tactic of just
leveling vast regions of another nation is considered a tried-
and-true method of turning the tide. eventually, perhaps. but
the real reason behind this bloodshed is that more than anything
else, israel does not want to get involved in any sort of protracted
ground war with hezbollah. hell, they recently ceased such activities
after about 20 years of trying to gain a foothold! (which is not to
mention that the ongoing morass in iraq is a pretty good example
of how not to engage one's "enemy.")

well, what about israeli citizens, you ask? yes, they, too, are
suffering casualties from hezbollah's somewhat surprising rocket
attacks deep within their borders. at the risk of sounding too
cavalier or insensitive, all i can say to that is, well, sorry.
you're the gorilla in the room, and that is that. look around you.
which of these things is not like the other? it's you, israel.
and of course that means it's us, too. us. the US. the allies and
partners of the only powerful democracy in the region.

remember, democracy is what's only right and natural for everyone.
king george II says so. which must be why so much ... peace ...
is being waged these days. seriously, now, the only reasonable
explanation for this resistance to the islamic theocracy model
points in just one direction. (hint: it's not oil. they'll still
sell us their oil.) it's the imminent destruction of the state
of israel. any "moral" or "ethical" justifications are complete
and utter bullshit. that, or a new, globalist imperialism.
that is all.

okay, yeah, that's simplifying things rather radically, i'll admit.
plenty of other factors are involved. they all reduce to power,
influence and money, however. the world has changed; the world is
changing. at some point, we all need some leaders who will have
the foresight and the depth to be able to transition along with them.
we/you/whoever cannot continue to try to live in this world
without understanding the need for adapting new models.

and THAT is why the US is running scared. we're not ready.
we are weakened, and we are weakening. and the current state of
affairs is, essentially, a call to arms. it is long past the time
to replace our outmoded leadership with younger, more pliable
minds who understand these principles. otherwise, all we will
see and experience is a perpetual state of warfare ... worldwide.

oh, and by the way, fuck your bible, fuck your qu'ran, and
fuck your torah. fuck the "holy land." just ... fuck you.
we have too many, much bigger problems to deal with here to
continuously have to worry about that crap -- such as population
control, the goddamned global economy, sustainable living
and global warming, to name but a few. we really, really need
some repositioning.

FINAL NOTE: i realize there are many conflicts and disconnects
within lines of my above reasoning. it's rather thorny. feedback
always appreciated. as i said, it is long past the time for newer
minds to hash out these problems.

imitation of life

2006-08-07T18:14:00.000-05:00

instructions:

in large glass bowl, combine 1 part chronic depression,
1 part severe drinking problem,
2 parts ex-gfs with crippling personality disorders,
a dash of drug abuse,
and a jigger of sporadic, shitty jobs.

add block of debt.
garnish with living in cleveland, if possible.
do not stir.

place uncovered glass bowl in refrigerator.
ignore it completely until refrigerator produces seepage.
clean out refrigerator.
take glass bowl and contents
and throw the fucking thing away.

tossin' seeds

2006-07-30T17:28:00.000-05:00

bake 'em away, mac:

"i draw the lines here from now on,
and the picture's already drawn,
and this movie goes on too long,
and this coffee is a little too strong
and i think that i'm running on ...
yeah, i guess that i'm runnin'."

i'm not a quitter.
(ask my lungs, or my liver.)
i've always been especially bad at quitting people.

well, except for when i just up and split, or disappear,
or change my name and go underground, or simply don't get in touch
with anyone for years and years.

i mean in my personal life, yo.
relationships long past their sell-by date languish,
festering on and on and on,
until nobody left standing understands what the hell
the story was even supposed to be in the first place.

that sort of thing.

now i've bade adieu several times
in a relatively short period of time,
and i wish i could report that this has been a positive experience,
a catalyst for growth, for the gaining of needed strength and pluck,
but it's mostly sucked.

and my bleeding sissy heart still resists.
it fights me every step of the way.

it forgives you. yes, even you -- and even you!

it wants it all back.
it takes it all back.
it gives it all up.
it tries to forget.
it forgets.

this is what keeps me awake at night.
well, that, and the fact that at this point,
i have no friggin' idea how anything's ever going to change.

it's been noted -- i'm trapped by nostalgia.
i know this is useless, dismal and pathetic.
(it may even be bathetic.)
i've tried to discourse on this very topic in some "fiction,"
in which i basically took myself to task for being,
well,
a "sucker."

other milestones obtain:
i haven't had sex in 10 months and nearly two weeks,
by months now the longest drought of my sexually active life
(16 years);
and i've been sober maybe four times since september 21, 2005.

most money in my bank account since i started it last summer:
a little over 3 grand.

lowest:
a dollar something

recent lowest:
$27.25, 10 days ago

currently:
don't know. won't look.

next post: more about "milestones" (stream-of-consciousness),
or something about lebanon,
and there's always ...
baseball!

living to kill yourself

2006-07-30T16:00:00.000-05:00

last summer, i experienced an epiphany.

i hadn't asked for it; it was forced upon me after i found myself abandoned
by an everyday companion for most of many years.

and there i sat, suffering, and i described thusly my plight to a pal:

"i'm not enjoying this process -- working a job i can't stand
just to support a lifestyle i'm not enjoying."

the friend (okay, it was my brother) nodded sagely in agreement.

now, this revelation in itself shouldn't have been too surprising,
as i have conscientiously avoided the "rat race" for almost
100 percent of my life, but i suppose it took me aback
because i hadn't thought it could happen to me ... again.

look, i've had jobs; i've had plenty of jobs. i've had bad jobs
and bad-paying jobs and thankless jobs and better-paying jobs;
and i've run my own business and i've worked for small businesses;
and i've been my own boss or i've acted as though i was, regardless of
who may have been titularly in charge;
i've taken jobs no one would ever want to work;
and i've even experienced brief periods of beautiful solvency.

(that latter did more harm than good, but that's a story for a different post.)

what i never understood was that if one's vocation
wasn't crucially important to the world, its functionality, and its populace,
then why in the hell would anyone knock his or her own ass out
with some sort of labor, merely to exchange its (usually minimal) rewards
for products or services -- yea, a "lifestyle" -- without which most people
would, in fact, be better off.

sure, sure, this is mainly because i hit the "future loser" trifecta:
existential by nature since a very young age, i realized as a preteen
that i was a "punk rocker," and i majored in philosophy (and english)
in "college."

to justify my inane existence, i wrote a bunch of songs about my views.

probably my favorite lyric, and unquestionably one of the better ones
that ever emanated from my pen, came from a postpunk number
with the clever title "protest song":

"they're gonna try and [sic] keep you down, my struggling friend,
and taunt you with the things they'll say you need to win;
we've been enslaved forever and
their gold shines truly dully when
it's payment meant to satisfy demands of all the tortured lives
conforming to the corporate supply.
and if you want to break their chains,
refuse to let them keep you smiling
with concessions you regard as gain."

(one of many reasons i retired from rock, yes.)

so let's just say i wasn't prepared, last summer,
to suddenly find out that i was fucking miserable.
and that part of the reason was my complete lack of future prospects.
shit, i thought, this "getting older" shit is for shit.
and i began the arduous process of trying to change all that.
with the help of more beer than most people could imagine
a human being could imbibe and still, by most available data,
be "living."

hence my new blog.
more details later ...