Note To Self

That sudden peace and drive safe was me be being lazy as fuck. 

God damn it.

Hi.

I'm the voice in the wildnerness.

I'm smart gone crazy.

I'm the prophet that's gonna pay

with his life

that lives in the hearts of those who wanted to live instead.

I lay in a semi-dark room and listen to Hulk Hogan's old walk-in theme "Real American."

This song is America.

"I am a real American. Fight for the rights of every man. I am a real American. Fight for what's right. Fight for your life."

If only.

I also scroll through the normie politics subreddit and people are wondering if we are one violent incident away from this country exploding like a Roman candle.

I see it.

Everything is so sinister and mean.

Sloop John B plays in my ear.

"This is worst trip I've ever been on."

We're on that trip, America.

I like when it accounts who aren't bots like my posts. It re-assures me there is life out there.

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

I had nothing so I typed the same word over and over and over again. That really didn’t get me anywhere. Seriously, all I accomplished was typing the word ‘fuck’ over and over again. That is all I have to show for it. Maybe that’s all I have to show for this entire day. A single word. 

Fuck. 

A word uttered when shit gets real. 

A word uttered just because.

A word she whispers when you’re doing it right. 

The last word before a sudden fade to black. 

A word when you got nothin’ but the rain, your sweat or your bones. 

A word that’s just way too motherfuckin’ honest 

for some people. 

Wanted: 

The people I can use it liberally with. 

---

Fuck. That was kinda lazy. 

Yo. I didn’t get too much of an intermission between crises. Sick dog and then corporate office warfare. Johnny on the spot with the duct tape, the kind words and the bullshit.  

The President

I’m going to tell you the truth. 

Not gonna put sugar or honey on it. 

It’s not that I disagree with the President or his policies. 

It’s not that he represents everything that is soulless and wrong. 

No. 

It’s that I fucking despise him. 

With everything in me.

I hate him. I don’t give a flying fuck about discourse or listening to or understanding the other side. If you are going to come to me with that, fuck you. I don’t care. We are past that. What has the fucking discourse ever gotten us? What has being respectable gotten us? 

You can tell me that I’m wrong in my hate. That’s fine. Maybe you’re concerned with the effect that such intense feeling has on my health. I mean, God bless you if you think that. Let me tell you, it’s hard to carry around, aight? 

See. I’m owning the hate. I’m not dressing it up in some pretty three piece suit and calling it something polite. Nah. This is me owning it. It’s ugly. It’s awful but I’m owning it. 

I go off sometimes. I fucking lose it. I lose my voice. I get told by people, “Oh. You’re so full of hate. Everybody hates him so much. It’s scary.” What the fuck?! WHAT THE FUCK?! What do you think he’s full of? Love? Hell no. If you are going to put on that stupid red hat, you do not get to play that card. That’s perverse. 

I suspect that I’m getting better at this. What is this? That would be writing. Pause. Scratch chin. Take sip of water. Get up and close the door. I sit with my feet up on the desk. My keyboard sits in my lap and I type away. 

It was one of those angry drives home. It was one of those drives home where I just got murder in my heart. I just got weaponized hate up in me. Anything I might possibly say is gonna be barely coherent. I’m gonna shout. I’m gonna keep shouting til I can’t anymore. I’ll be out of breath and none of it will be cathartic. I won’t feel better. I hate that kinda anger. I’m glad I didn’t do that today. It’s anger at the world and the people who run it. People talk about evil. They talk about people who do monstrous things. They talk about ‘em like they got glowing red eyes and how you can smell sulfur when they walk by. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who talked about the banality of evil. It’s these utterly unremarkable dudes like Scott Pruitt and Jeff Sessions who fuck up the world. They don’t look like monsters but what they do is monstrous. They get to manufacture a hellish reality for millions of people and then they probably go home and watch Blue Bloods or Chicago PD or something and then maybe their wife gives them a half-hearted hand job and then they are back at it the next day. That’s how they do. 

It’s good that I’m diligent at putting words to the page almost every single day but maybe I need to strive for more than that. I don’t know what exactly. I think the paragraph above had its moments. I fantasize about poetry and literary journalism. 

Making a living distracts me. Takes too much time, ya dig? Shit. That fucking game has us all by the nuts. 

I think to myself, “Where the fuck you going with this? Do you just want to stop? Chill the rest of the night?” 

I really do. 

I will actually. 

My world is nothing but mundane. I work. I worry about screwing up at work. Sometimes I study for an exam that baffles me and interests me little. I slouch at my desk and look busy. I anticipate terror that often times never comes. 

Sometimes I manage to focus enough to read. I finished Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. I e-mailed the man. He wrote me back. He didn’t say much but I appreciate that he acknowledged an anonymous nobody like me. I learned a lot from that book. It did something to me. 

I came very close to angrily declaring to my therapist that communism will win. That was really the first time that I expressed candidly the role living in such a fucked up society has on the psyche. That is a huge part of this. This. What I’m doing here. What makes me cry. What fucks me against my will. What turns me into a homely yet charming robot who is programmed to provide you with excellent customer service today. What makes me do this. Trying to express without asking you for a credit card number first. 

That’s a huge part of the project. 

What do you do in the world when you just can’t shake something? 

Summer

I’m swimming through a world of thick oatmeal. I’m in oatmeal purgatory.

My deepest desire at the moment is a dim room and the feeling of bedsheets against my bare skin. I’ll take a whole week of that. In fact, get me three months or so of that. Just give me time and I’ll decide how to kill it. Mostly though, I just want to close my eyes and drift off. When I wake up, maybe I’ll feel like smiling. Maybe I’ll feel like life is okay.

I don’t think I ever quite adjusted to the lack of a summer vacation in adult life. It was a life saver. A soul saver. Was three months or so of nothing but damn did I need it.

I remember late nights. Staring at the ceiling. Chocolate milk on the nightstand. Art Bell’s voice on the AM radio gently interrogating a long haul trucker who has visions of how the apocalypse might go down. I remember the sound of the garage door opening. Dad home from the night shift.

I can remember my face illuminated by the pale glow of a computer monitor. Lights were off. Tapped gently on the keyboard so mom and dad had no idea I was awake. XXX lovin’ with strangers on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Some of ‘em come to me more than once. Yeah, I had online “things” with people who I never really knew back in the dial-up era. Like friends with benefits type stuff but instead of real life sex, it was just writing dirty stories together. I never ended up on an episode of Catfish: The TV Show. I’m thankful for that. That could have been way weirder.

I can remember getting dismissed from the last day of school. High school some time. Evangelical Christian school. The books say diabolical shit. The Great Depression was socialist propaganda. British rule was good for India cuz it exposed Indians to Christianity and many of them cast aside their false religion for the only savior that laid it all down for them. Nelson Mandela was a dirty commie. Satan basically ran the Catholic church. Bible teacher was a nice guy. I think his heart was in the right place. I think that to this very day. I remember when it was all done. No more schooling left so we all chilled and watched a movie about getting left behind after the rapture. So, I walked out of the school a free man. The sun was shining. Women wore sundresses. My mind kept wandering to the appearance of the Anti-Christ and 7 years of tribulation. I can kinda laugh now but that shit fucks with a kid.

I can remember a suburban megachurch. I can remember a youth pastor with swagger. Shit, I think he hangs out with Justin Bieber. I’m serious about that. I’ve seen pictures on Instagram. He spoke with a drawl despite not coming from anywhere near the south. He was obsessed with talking about sexual purity. I used to go midweek. Jesus power ballads and righteous suburban honeys I never said a word to. One night, his words cut deep. I had mad guilt. Mad guilt over being a human being. Mad guilt over filthy thoughts. Come forward and re-dedicate your life to Jesus Christ. I did. I responded to an altar call. I cried. I got taken in a back room. I got told to accept the baptism of the holy spirit. The evidence of that was speaking in tongues. It was supposed to come down on me and I would speak in tongues that were not my own. Some bald dude had his hand on my chest as he declared that I should let the spirit speak. I did not speak in tongues that night. I didn’t feel it. I had at least one person years after the fact admit to me that they faked speaking in tongues.

I’m sitting here in the office on a Monday. I’m tired. I keep sipping water and having to go to the bathroom. Maybe I should stop before someone thinks there is something wrong with me. I also keep getting up and just taking laps around the office.

I need mercy today. I need the world to play as nice as it can today. I feel like I don’t have ‘it.’ I don’t know what ‘it’ is. The best way I can describe ‘it’ is whatever you need to be in the world and not totally fucking lose it. That sense is always more acute on a Monday. As the week goes on, I feel it less and less. That’s how it goes most of the time anyway.

I do feel some satisfaction. I did the work of attempting to communicate the realities of my internal world. Just trying to do that is fulfilling. It occurs to me that I’m not only trying to communicate my internal reality to whoever might be reading this, I’m also attempting to describe it to myself.

I better get to trying to look busy. I better get to trying to look like I know what I’m doing.