------ ENTRY ------ Date: 2014-04-01 Words: 959 Minutes: 15 I have to pee. I have to wash my hands. I may have to poop soon. Possibly, I might even want a little bit to puke. For you see, I have a disease. It is that I ate jalapeno-flavored chips like a sonofabitch last evening, and topped it off with a glass of cheap wine, and the achey-chilly-poopy-pukey bug has been making the rounds, as they say, in my house of late, and thus and so it is that I find myself here, perched atop this shifting mound of false preparations and paltry defense mechanisms, marshmallow-boobed and shuffling, just waiting for the ravages of invisible creatures to work their way through what's left of my so-called body. But I don't just go home and curl up, which is what I really want to do. I want to make my excuses, collect my sympathy laced with suspicion, shuck and jive the way you have to do when you do this, and make aching noises as I perambulate across the parking fucking lot to my so-called car. I then would prefer to put the car into reverso, scoot backwards like a retarded crawfish out of the safety of "my" parking space, slice through neutrality into FORWARD, MARCH!! and manipulate that vehicular microcosm along the veins and insinuations of civilized so-called society's network of crude communications until I physically, myself by this time a veritable bag of barf, a festering sac, a tissue blob with a meat computer, am able to hurl myself towards the vertical plank I like to call a "door." Thenupon, the plaintive screams of my bowels becoming ever louder, I would open said hinged membrane of civilized so-called privacy, and allow my flopsy mopsy legs to cart my chunky monkey carcass over to the little room where we hoomans lahk ta poop. And I would sit there and revel in the heightened resonance of absolute necessity. No doubt about it, friends, there is something pure and transcendent about a good poop sesh. Can you doubt it? How about the way the time echoes against the late afternoon sunlight barking in the window, how about the way the time spent in the bathroom is most sublimely free of guilt; it brings mild pain, absolving discomfiture just sharp enough to pay your dues. You really have something to do, right now, in the moment, and nothing's going to come between you and it. Gravity, for once, is on your side. Celebrate! Make clean yourself, devoid yourself of noxious waste. Make it somebody else's problem, hey? Give yourself a break. Take your time. Read. Look on your phone. Whatever. Take a little "me" time, right? GO ahead, you've earned it. You earned the right to poop by basically becoming a voracious omnivore. In voracious omnivore society. You fit right in. The poop slides right out. Things, my friend, things, whatever you want to call them, THINGs, they are in balance at least for this little broken coiled-up private steaming quiet time to call your own. EN- JOY! Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? So much stuff going on, and so little of it is the real THING, the THING that matters. THINGTHINGTHINGTHING. THINGS you're not supposed to say. Like, for instance, and to make this legit you have to type it each time, no cut and paste: Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber. That is a strangely, might I even say surprisingly cumbersome (ha ha get it) word to type. It was definitely not on the list of words that would get a nice surprise bonus out of the way they happened to make typewriters back in the day. Go math. Things pop up all the time around here. Have you ever noticed that? Like you can just be walking down the hallway, minding your own so-called business, cradling your coffee cup in your salty paw, just a shufflin down the corridor, you know, goin back to class like a good old boy, when all of a sudden an interaction with a human pops up out of the background ether of everything that isn't exactly your full point-sourced consciousness at that moment. In short, another person talks to you, and for some reason you're obligated to respond. You have a conversation, and it is fraught with political and personal significance, and the whole time, and this is the funny part, the whole time you have to stand there and pretend you're basically sane, and more or less in control, though many parts of you are fibrillating and your hair is quietly screaming and you're rather more grubby than you'd really want anyone to intimately realize, nevertheless you have to, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, act natural. And she's I guess your boss or whatever at least for now, which adds a whole new piece to the improvised drama, and something about the small fine wrinkles around the corners of her mouth you realize you find incredibly hot, okay, wow, where'd that come from, didn't know you could still feel that about another actual real genuine non-demoniac non-fantasized human actual being, did you? Well, you can. And you opened up your goofy face just long enough to see an echo of that opening in her elegant, eloquent face, and you'd like to think you saw, behind the scrim of civilized control, behind the well-paid, coiffed sophistication, an actual smile. A young, a childlike, an ever so slightly tinged with just a little relief, an inaudible instantaneous laugh that never quite got born. But like a grief-taught mother on her tragic day, you got to hold it. Briefly. Once. As it lived and died its one moment on this earth, in your arms. Amen. ------ ENTRY ------ Date: 2014-04-03 Words: 821 Minutes: 12 And make my dream cum tru. It's hard to type and listen to lyrics because you just end up wanting to echo the lyrics. I didn't do this yesterday. I'm not doing it today. Just out of spite, I'm going to intentionally avoid going into anything deep. Because two things happened. One, I started seeing some really awesome things coming out of this. Two, I started getting that hemmorhoidal itch where you're like, oh shit, now I just realized that's happening and so I'm going to jinx it and it won't happen anymore. And three, I did say three things happened right? Three, I read "Who Am I This Time" by good old KVJ, and I realized that even if there are awesome things in there, it still doesn't mean I'm an actual accomplished craftsman or artist. Because just spewing out random awesomeness every day or so in an otherwise mundane year, that doesn't mean anything. A baby can do that. A baby poops too. It's a miracle. It doesn't mean you get paid or recognized or have any credentials or should be a teacher or anything. So in order to avoid getting all ratchetty and depressed about that, I'm going to keep doing this, the way the old guy in the Dylan Thomas thing kept doing his asthma mixture in his pipe, it's pleasure disguised as medicine. It's pleasure slightly ruined by having to wear a grass skirt of medicinality. Is what it is. And so therefore and but so don't buy one. And so therefore I am not going to dive into the deep end. I am deliberately obstinately and irritatingly avoiding talking about anything that matters. Because if I talk about anything that matters, I'll start thinking about the KV story again, and I'll get happy and sad and full and depressed and elated, and I'll want to rock out to Foghat some more. Which is what I'm doing. And I'll kind of wish I could just rock out and drink and make the kids laugh nervously with my old man rocking out weirdness. Which I guess I can do a little bit, but I'm not going to give in all the way to it, because I don't really do that these days because I have to have a little bit of continuity at the old job, ha ha, the old job. This is what, my 20th day working this job? And in a month and a half it'll go back to being easy and dumb again for a little while. Which I will enjoy and also kind of be griefy about. Because as much as I hate the responsibility, as much as I hate having to be the guy with the plan, I kind of like having a little bit of legitimacy and a fucking badge that has my picture on it, right above the word "STAFF." That's cool. Even if I know I'll have to give it back in a couple of months. What the fuck ever. EVERYBODY has to give their badge back sometime, eh? Whatever. Let's see how fast we can race to the finish. Remember those Pencil Flip Games®? Those were cool. I had a whole pantheon of games. I was a major game producer. I've been a lot of shit in my little gay imagination. Speaking of which. Time for a distraction. Wait. There are girls going up and down the stairs, and all of them are my daughters. I am a shabby king, a faded prince. I am the aging knight. I have proven my Darwinian worth, and yet I lack a certain, je ne sais quoi, how do you say in your country, Some of these old Foghat songs are more annoying than others. Okay, it's getting closer and closer to a dark sky with yellow stars. Okay, there's a river. There's always, there was always a river. He had a thing about rivers. Any time I start using that pronoun, hey do you remember when the feminine pronouns were what I was all about? I was telling a different kind of story then. I am a true bisexual. When I was young, I was oriented more towards the feminine, both in myself and in the objects of my fascination. Now I'm more interested in the generally anthropomorphic. But there is this great wide, roiling this dark blue this navy blue this Ford-Torino-Blue sea of the years in between. Mat's lost years. Paul identified my bad years. Those were my lost years. Those were the years of masculinity, but it got quashed and perverted by the pressures of necessity and irresponsible childbirth, I don't know how else to put it. There's got to a better way to put it though, I'll come back to that tomorrow. And then maybe next time I go to the LGBT center, maybe I'll remember why I wanted to go there in the first place. ------ ENTRY ------ Date: 2014-04-06 Words: 989 Minutes: 13 Mister three quarters, that's me. Now. It is the magical trinity of three out of four. Seven fifty is three fourths of one thousand. Forty-five minutes is three fourths of an hour. Six inches is three fourths of eight inches, as if I cared about all that anymore. The point is, the wait. What was the point? Oh yeah, the point is, it's a magical sweet spot of "good enough." An hour of homework was just really seeming overwhelming. It was really dogging me down. So I thought hey. I'll just do forty-five minutes a night. It's all about FINDING A WAY TO MAKE IT POSSIBLE. That's the thing. Even my camera is three quarters the size of a real camera. I like it. Whatever. This is all important, but not so important as to become the thing in itself. Because if I let that happen, it will implode. It will self-destruct. And I will again be worse than imperfect. I will be a perfect goddamned self-deceptive fool, the fool who has convinced himself (even though he hasn't really, but he's just really good at PRETENDING) that he's the only one that's not a fool. You'd think even thinking that would set off about a million alarm bells. But that's just it. When you're thinking that, you don't realize you're thinking that. It's like being asleep. You don't realize you're dreaming either. Except sometimes you do. And then you can have some fucking fun. Megan is a really good writer. I don't know about Millie. I think Millie's still really derivative. But then I wouldn't really know because she plays it so CLOSE TO THE CHEST. What is it with her never wanting me (OR ANYONE ELSE?) to read what she types. Maybe she's just not ready. Maybe she has some kind of intuition that what she's doing is mechanical, is building basic skill building blocks up into some kind of thing that could be something she would want to show someone. Or maybe she's just embarrassed, I don't know. But Megan has showed me some stuff, and some stuff I looked at even though I said I wouldn't, and it is powerful and black and glistening. It is terse, genuinely poetic, and yes I don't mind saying it, devastating. I think she's a little depressed. I mean, no shit sherlock. But damn she's a good writer. Even though I know I'm supposed to be scared of the whole "is" thing. But whatever. Whatever it means, "is", she's doing it right now. She's been doing it. She has made words go into a certain order that makes a certain kind of rhythm and music in the brain of me, the reader. I believe I have enough in common with other readers that other people would think so too. I am not a palm tree on a lonely island. I am just another imperfect parent, only of course I tend to fear and feel that I'm a little worse than most because I'm poor and it's so hard to motivate myself to do work and stay focused and get jobs that would make me not poor. But I don't have to be poor in every area. And I don't have to be successful in every area. Tell you what. Let's shoot for about three quarters. If I can stay three quarters of the way focused about three quarters of the time and get about three quarters of the work done about three quarters perfect, then I'd say we could call it a day. I would be okay with that. And a house about three quarters as big as it probably should be or whatever. Look, I just don't want to fail them. I don't want us to be out on the street. I can't believe I've let that fear even into Megan's consciousness. But then again, I am giving myself too much credit. She would be able to tell if I was making pollyanna-style lies anyway. She has a keen sense of justice after all, and a suspicious mind. She is rather highly, if chaotically, empathic. So what's the point in lying? She already knows I'm no fucking superman. Lucky for us, she learned it about twenty years earlier than I learned it about my own dad. Okay. Pretty soon I gotta go get about three quarters of a good night's sleep. It's my magic number now. I'm digging it. I'm so down on myself but not, at the same time. It's going to be okay. I am still slightly haunted by last night's dream. You know, where I had created such a world, it was so real and astonishing and convincing that I had all but forgotton it was make-believe. Until I got too tall and grandiose. I tried to stand up on a hanging dais and proclaim myself god. Because it was my world. I thought I had woken up in the dream and that made me powerful. I roared out my dominion, and then the dais swayed, almost broke. I said, "I'm not going to do *that* again," and went about my business. But when I got back down into the warm places, the gentle folds and hills where my people were, where my nascent love had been, where the magic of the city and the sea had been encapsulated in the twinkling of a quirky strand of christmas lights, my heart was broken, because it was all gone. It was only blankets now, and the christmas lights worked perfectly, they blinked in perfect rhythm and cadence, flawlessly as advertised, but the magic was totally gone. In the folds of the blankets, nothing. The shepherds and the hills had disappeared. I was alone in a plain room. Again, I thought I had awoken from my dream, and I was devasted. Then I *really* woke up, and the whole experience became a story about a story. But wait. ------ ENTRY ------ Date: 2014-04-09 Words: 98 Minutes: 0 In a way, the "theme" of every story is, stories live inside you. You have to let them gestate in there from time to time. You have to let them impregnate you with themselves, and then birth themselves out of you, and then make other babies that impregnate you with themselves and themselves with you and this all sounds really way more gross and awkward than I think it really is. Maybe. Stories are parasites, viruses, but also symbiotes, little oxpeckers. They resist analysis but invite slow, very slow, glacially slow at times but also burning fast, lovemaking. ------ ENTRY ------ Date: 2014-04-10 Words: 30 Minutes: 0 yeah time travel sucks dude i keep leaving messages for myself but right when i receive them i get too scared to read them because there's somebody haunting my past test