…

Well, that was the plan three hours ago.   But things are still good, lest you think that I could throw away all my ambition in the time it takes to watch a Lord of the Rings film.  I got home and made my pasta and got my carrots out and I thought, okay, you’ve had a decent day all the way around.  You’ve had breakfast – cereal – you’ve had a frozen meal for lunch with some grapes and melons and now you’ll eat these dried apples, have some pasta, carrots, and some sugar free pudding and it won’t be HEALTH FOOD, per se…it won’t be the food someone would eat if they were radically trying to lose weight, but it will make me feel stronger about not eating the things I might be eating.  And so, that’s what we did.  I did.  Whatever.  At any rate, things coulda gone haywire.  Things coulda gone pear-shaped just for the sake of novelty, but they didn’t.   One of the guys that works upstairs brought down a box of chocolate bars to sell for his daughter’s kindergarten class and I bought one for a dollar and it is still, intact, sitting there on my desk, waiting for me to bequeath it upon some other soul.  I’ve told myself…if there is only one act left of good will towards better myself in my system…I want it to be not eating that candy bar.  Just because.  Nobody will know if I do.  Nobody will care.  But it’s my line in the proverbial sand for the moment.

And I wanted to exercise and I don’t know if I’m going to have time for that what with having to get up early tomorrow and my friends and I all watching the pretty devastating film Third Star and all of us psychically limping as a result.    We’ll see.

I just want to give myself a little bit of a helping hand by not throwing broken glass in my path to navigate.  I have enough troubles.  My co-workers want to set me up with a guy my age they saw in a magazine.    And maybe my sense of humor is a little fucked.  And tomorrow, you ridiculous creatures that read this blog, tomorrow has the chance to be worse so I have to hold on to those small measures I can take when I can take them.

It doesn’t take three hours to lose my ambition.  It doesn’t take three minutes.

I stand before you, more than anything else, a blade of grass in the wind.

I was here.  Just here. And I ate sensibly, I think.  A bit full up on apple rings again, but I consider the alternative, I consider even yesterday and I do think, okay, progress.  Some signs of an ability to pull back the reins a little bit and focus on the issue at hand which is never hunger…just a desire to get away from whatever thoughts and feelings are cropping up.

What I sometimes forget – no, always forget – is that when you deal with things that need to be dealt with (the fact that you’re sitting in the house alone is okay, it’s not your optimal choice, but you are okay in your own skin or the fact that you aren’t super fantastic at your instrument and you want to be because you have it in your head that if you somehow have an easily shared talent someone will see you as remarkable and pluck you up out of your dreary existence and bring you up to the stars where you belong even if you don’t have it set in your head that you’d be all that comfortable or excited about being up the stars – they’re fucking high – and you’d be much happier in reality with someone just being around and being nice every now and then, but the stars thing seems just as likely so that’s where your mind goes OR that some really weird things are going on with your hair and it is possibly symptomatic of something health-wise and you should probably look into that but you know you never will because if anything was wrong it would definitely be the fatal kind of wrong and you’d have to face the fact that your life was over without all these things that you really wanted to know about or really wanted to try or really wanted to experience for yourself without just investing in other people’s experiences and impressions or even worse that if you ARE dying, then,  technically there would be no excuse for not flinging yourself out there at every opportunity before your impending demise and you wouldn’t do that anyway so what does it matter – you have to deal with all of that, sure.

But, there are good things that crop up, like finding birthday checks from your grandmother and playing that g-c-d chord progression because it sounds nice to you and not because it’s perfect and beating that race in Assassin’s Creed because that’s what’s happening now.

You get the idea that if you just keep choosing, just keep running slap-dash into walls, keep falling off of basilicas and watchtowers that you’d learn something about balance.   But you don’t because life isn’t all that much different from a video game.  If you don’t die, you’ll stand up, dust yourself off, and climb back to the place you fell, under the assumption that this time, you’ll press the button in the right way and the programming will support your effort.

I think if I felt all the things I distracted myself from by eating, I could be an assassin.  I couldn’t leap on the tiled rooftops, but I could find my way to their doorstep, blade in hand.

And we’ll make our escape under the cover of black and gray umbrellas, out through the secret passage way and into the brisk, ozone-filled air.   All our troubles well forgotten.

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it?  To just skip out on all your responsibilities.  All your troubles.   Go off into the night free as a bird.  Not my luck, but sometimes I crave it.   And the worst part of it is that the only permanent cure is to face those responsibilities.

I haven’t eaten and I need to.  Not for distraction or escape

Tomorrow, I plan to rise and attack.  Laundry and scraping off down to the floorboards.  I want to get rid of half of everything, or at least a good few percentages.  I want to not have this huge weight of crap of clutter just dragging me down and keeping me tethered to its eventual, but ever kicked forward, removal.  I want to get to the future and not find all my crap there, staring at me, waiting for me.  It feels like you could sit at the cool table except for all these promises made to things in the past, kids that you aren’t even friends with anymore but you can’t abandon for some reason that no longer even makes sense.  It’s just a priority you hold onto until it’s been converted into this ironclad habit, an addiction.   It’s sad.  It’s tragic.  It’s not what I want.  I wonder why I always give in, even being aware like I am, of the reasons.

It would be great to be a better person.

All you can do is try in small ways and play the broken record one more time.   If we’re not done, it’s not time to stop.

Things it is good to remember when you know that you are offering the archive a really terrible post that changes nothing, commemorates nothing, salvages nothing, is hopeless and rude and makes you feel exhausted typing it not to mention trying to read it:

1. Global warming is real.  Snow spat and kissed the ground and melted away in less than an hour today.  Huzzah for chemicals destroying our ozone layer.    Huzzah for our race’s inevitable extinction.  I am safer and warmer now as a result.  Really, this is the global warming bubble that we’re sitting in right now, in the rosy, proto-spring glow of a future that will burn the flesh off the bones of our descendants.  If, that is, we descend.

2. It really only takes one good idea to set you off on the road you want to walk.

3.  Eventually, you will escape even if it means you get hit by an oncoming train when you forget to look both ways.  So cheer up.  It’s not actually hopeless.

4.  Everything sounds a bit more chipper accompanied by a ukulele.

5.  Or if that doesn’t work, there’s always ABBA.  Or a quick blow to the temple.  Or the last resort of the desperate, sarcasm.

I have a box of writing on my bed and I am desiring to create like a man on fire desires to be put out.  It is beyond want, or desire, or even need.  It is exigent.  It is breath.  It is happening even as we speak, or even as I type and you read for no matter when you arrive we are speaking to one another.  I am sharing and even in your silence, you are sharing back.

Things that are true.  I don’t like the idea of being friends with your girlfriend.  Truth be told, I’m beginning to hate you for giving me the opportunity.

I want to play my guitar and not explain myself to anyone.  I want the itch I cannot scratch to go away.    I want to write.

I want to have written.  I want to have played.  I want to have lost weight.  I want to have fallen in love.  I want to have changed.

It doesn’t work like that.  Did you know? Short sentences all the way to the finish line.  That’s how it works.  Both here and there, wherever there falls on the map.

It is Thursday night and my heart is getting cut up on my toe nails.  Oh well, I say, oh, well, the blood still pumps.   The eyes still blink and the pain doesn’t block the way the treadmill.  Nothing does.   I just want everyone to shut up.  All the vagaries of their sordid lives and their swelling happiness is dreadfully, onerously, perilously annoying to me right now.  Oh, I can’t take Kate Nash right now either.  Can she sing?  Can she not?  I’m leaning toward not and I usually like her, but I heard this cover of Seven Nation Army that she did and it was so failly that it almost hurts my eardrums.

Things I hate: an abridged list.

You.  This bra.  This silent house.  Everyone else getting what they want while I get to wait with a brick of salt.   The awkward shape of my guitar while sitting in bed.  Corners jetting out everywhere.  Old boxes of writing on my bed.   Every song in my ITunes.  All 3500+ of them.  The pain in my back that makes me think of death.  My lonely heart not being able to pretend it’s not lonely.    The feeling of your throat when you swallow it back.  Feeling like a hypocrite for wanting to be cosseted when my friends are in similar agonies and I cannot engage with their emotions.  Not being able to engage with anything.  Hope trailing away and turning brown with shame.   Unfollowings.  Pressure that never focuses into a headache.   Having let go because I couldn’t close my hands fast enough.   Being a step behind.  Facebook.   Spoons in places they shouldn’t be.  Rupert Graves being married with five children.  My cold, sick, toe-nail studded heart.  All the humor gone and frittered away.  The terrible assumptions I make about forever.

Sabra girl, time will cure me.

But what I have the time to do, when I give any care to it at all, it feels nice to start anew.  To start on anything.  Washed the pots and pans tonight which is a bit of a rare thing for me, but it needed doing and when I am at my best, I understand that either I have to do something or it isn’t going to be done and I have to live with the experience of it being undone.  That it’s not impossible to do one small thing with regard to my surroundings even if it feels like just one small thing is one  straw too many on this poor camel’s back.  And I bought groceries and cooked them and I have breakfast for tomorrow and lunch is fine, though dinner tomorrow might be with our meeting and I will have to take some care with myself. But then I have lunch settled for Friday, breakfast, too.  And dinner.  And that’s as far as the plan goes but as the plan is just to f0llow the plan I already laid out but chose to disregard because it’s not the usual manner of things.  I know what to do.  If I don’t do it, I live in the hoarders’ temple and worship the staidness, the rot, the inertia of a past that never was.

So I have the checkbook balanced, the budget looked at with a rather shocking uptick in dining out.   That’ll do more to dissuade me from fucking around than anything else.  I could think of a ton of things to do with 300+ dollars a month.  That’s a metric ton of guacamole.   Which nobody likes that much.  I love guacamole.  But that’s not justifiable or sustainable.   It’s weird.  When I don’t know or take care, I don’t want to know, it scares me to start knowing what’s going on with my finances because I get the idea that I’ll just use that money in a whirlwind and it’ll somehow slip through my fingers if I’m aware of what I earn and how I spend it.  But when I start tracking – and of course this directly applies to my relationship with food – start tracking and dealing with the fact that there are limits, I feel so good.

I feel like I want to make good choices.  I want to do right, and yes, Miss Ohio, I want to do it right now, in this very moment and I want the gold star for doing it.

Anyway, that’s not all that interesting.  It’s true and it happened, but not so blog-worthy.  I thought I sort of hand something vaguely interesting to talk about, but now that the day has been spent, I would rather just crumble it up and throw it in the hamper and let the wash take care of it instead of prancing down a catwalk in forty-five minutes in the wear of the day.   Whatever grand beauty there was feels gone or at least distant.

So we’ll have to improvise.  The snow I feared last night did not show up to frazzle my driving in the morning and I bless whatever Mother of Nature or Father of Timing put that one together because my heart was much more at ease this morning as a result.  I am grateful for this small thing that might not matter to anyone, but mattered to me.  But the snow did turn up when we had a our giant meeting for people my age group.   A wet, spitty, ether haze of a sky which left me cold and a bit achey, but it, too, for all its apparent fury, didn’t settle and become anything.  Sort of like the event itself.

It was fine, don’t mistake me, and people came away happy and excited and it was a good meeting.  But it also made me realize how profoundly I do not relate to people my age.  How warily I look at anyone under forty.  How much I judge my peers and am sure they are judging me.  It’s sort of like high school isn’t a place, or an experience, but a shroud that cannot be pulled off no matter the heat and it always trips me up as I try to spin away.  I’m sure no one cares.  I’m sure everyone thinks I’m fine if they think of me at all.  I was just talking to this guy, my age, with a beard and kind eyes and he’s making this light joke and I know he’s got a girlfriend and I laugh and spin and trip away (in a metaphorical sense if you can follow this screed at all) because I can’t even visualize what he might think I’m thinking.   I want to be brave, meet his eyes, but I feel my eyes are radiating my heart and I can’t control my heart lately.  So all I can do is flee.

How terrible.  Truly.

Yesterday, I intimated that the big posts are the birthday posts, event posts, the threshold type of posts and that yesterday was leading up to something miraculous today.  Some revelation, some genius piece of writing, something evocative and human and deep that expresses my immortal soul.  Well, I don’t quite know how to get there from here.   Today has been great.   It has not been the stuff of legend, I’m afraid, even with Assassin’s Creed driving me forward and onward and upward into the aerie of some Italian city rooftops.   I am up there, to be sure, but it feels like I’m just up with the pigeons.

A light dusting of snow, the news website promises.  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  I could lose my lunch at least over a dusting of snow.  It’s that terrible a phobia, that stupid of one.  But I can’t go lay out the tarps for the twelve miles between here and there or institute some policy of targeted global warming, so what can be done?  Breath and sleep and gutting a few nearly incomprehensible Templar jerks, I guess.

Off and on I wonder about Facebook.  But on birthdays it is nice to have a swarm of people – even including people you have to question the motives of – all take a second to acknowledge your existence.   And the compliments are lovely, too.

And I do want to make apologies to all the Mamie Van Doren fans who found me this past week because I chose to title a post recently, I think Tuesday last week, Mamie Van Doren.  And while that may, to the outset, seem like a complete non-sequitur for what that post actually was about, it wasn’t really, because there was this whole anecdote about our trivia team name being Nun Reform School which was an actual game that my sisters and I played as children.  My older sister was the teacher (we didn’t really emphasize anything extraordinarily Catholic in this game) and she gave us lessons and we learned geography and read stories and answered little quizzes if I recall correctly, but we also had to learn to make our beds and pretend to behave lest we get demerits.   There was some chart of doing right and doing wrong and I remember how important I felt it was not to get any demerits.  Funny, how these silly things find reflexes in our future lives.  But I was explaining to my younger sister who didn’t have as clear a memory, that there was this MST3K movie Girls Town about a Nun Reform School for wild girls like Mamie Van Doren and her bullet bra and instantly, she took a shine to the name as a result.  I am a fan of Ms. Van Doren and that movie.  I don’t really have a great deal to say, but I think of all those stymied googlers out there thinking “Here’s a whole terrific page on Mamie Van Doren” only to find…hah, my terrible, wheedling voice poking them from across the internets.

I didn’t call it Nun Reform School because I think somewhere in the archives there is a post called that.

Well.  Happy Birthday!

So it was Sunday and there was sleep and rising and baths and getting myself sorted and my face painted and then, very quickly, it was time for my birthday lunch.   I was pretty delighted that I was able to maintain my calm given what my birthday looked like last year – I will do my best to go back and link it here so that the contrast is apparent – and last year, I was OTR, I was crying uncontrollably, unconsolably even as I was aware of how stupid and unimportant my tears were and I was making promises in my head about the new year and the new person and I was just a frenzy of anguish.  This is not an uncommon event.   Birthdays, though maybe even not everyone in my family would know this, are the best chance I have to become a maenad.   To feast and gad about in adoration and love of everyone and then the epic-ness of the day gets in my head, the sense of what the day should be or should portend or where I should be at that deadline of a day wallops me and I get punch-drunk.  I curl up within and let everything sour and everything break my heart a thousand times and I become accusatory and really terrible.   I think my family doesn’t know this because it’s so internal.  I don’t want them to find me ungrateful so I just spend the day needling myself and needling them and it’s such a horrible way to spend a day celebrating the fact that you’re alive and still have potential and reason to take in air.

And today, because it wasn’t so bound up in the birthday requirements, was lovely.  We had a great lunch – my father who rarely sees reason to leave the house save for work and couponing it up at the grocery store, came and enjoyed himself – my sister’s boyfriend and she came and were pleasant to be around.   We had Chinese food which was excellent.  I was given gift cards which I will glory in spending.  I had a good experience.  And just like the man said, I value that over things.  I don’t care about the rest of it, really.

Tomorrow will turn up and there won’t be any particular magic and nothing will rise from the dead and catch me by the throat by the virtue of it being the year of the dragon or the sun returning to the same spot it was at 28 years ago.  No return of Saturn that I can spot.  No heart bestowed upon me, meeting me in the dark.

But I have love, nonetheless.  I have a guitar.  I have stories in my head.  I have so much more than I can even say.

Distracting gimmick post due up for you today.

Nothing like a hot steam shovel to get you going in the morning.

I am well, you needn’t worry your little head about anything else.  And I mailed my package, so you certainly needn’t find yourself staying awake tonight to wring your hands over that.  And I’ve got the other thing covered, so we can turn our thoughts to other arenas.  Like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – one I haven’t seen before – Robot versus the Aztec Mummy.   Which is just as one might hope.  Hilarious and stupid and distracting.

There was that.  And I am suddenly, a few hours and slices of pizza later, slowed down to a snail’s pace.  I don’t know what to say, what to do, I want to play some games and move on to tomorrow.  But the law’s the law – even though I invented the law – so I have to hurry further into the ever encroaching darkness and try and outrace the parade.

How did the day go?  The day went swimmingly.  I walked about and made stupid jokes and we went to this Japanese restaurant that had very weird rules about who could sit where and how many and this couple came in and wanted to sit in a booth but their waitress had to apologize three times about how much she would get in trouble if she let them sit at a booth in case of a lunch rush and the tone of her voice made you think that there was some manager in back who would beat the shit out of her if she touched one of those reserved table signs.  But the guy kept pushing it, even though they turned the table around so they could both sit on one side.  Like he thought it was a stupid rule, which I don’t know – I’m not in the food industry, I don’t know if they have a rush if everyone would complain worse about having to sit at those roundabout bar circle things where they’re served from the center when they’re in a group of three or more.  Finally he relented and I calmed down and picked at my teriyaki chicken and my sister had the most gigantic bowl of ramen I’ve ever seen in my life, filled with hardboiled eggs and kitchen sinks and all sorts of bizarre things.  Then it was off to the races and to the strange world of big box stores in the middle of a Saturday.

And I returned home tired, but not insensible, and glad I went.  Mostly because my best intentions would hardly get me dressed.  And I wanted to be out in the world, seeing faces even if it’s not proper to stare.  I do not think it’s healthy to spend whole days indoors all the time, you start to think crazy things.  So I’ve spent the last hour and a half with my friends who are remarkable and dear and I’m watching Mass Effect trailers and I’m happy that I’m celebrating my birthday tomorrow.  Kind of will keep the real day just for me.