Humidity Makes Me Think Of Madness. Makes Me Think Of The Heart Of Darkness Within You. C’mon. Show

Before

C’mon, brother. I see you there. I see you every day. This is gonna sound weird. What the fuck is up with you? Look, I know these times broke your brain when they started. They did that cold thing to me. Deep chill. That feeling you get deep inside you when every heart you got in every dimension breaks at the same god damn time. I think we’re in a crucial time, man. I felt it when the madness started. I always asked myself if I’d be able to hack it when the time came. Torches. Flags. You taught me to fight my own way. You told me I had my own way. Yo, I think maybe I can hack it. 

Look, man. I’m not compromised. You can still trust me. I just see things a little differently.

Whatever, man. Fine. Let’s fight. No. I fucking mean it, asshole. Don’t even think of going easy on me like you used to. Try to kill me. I’ll try to stop you.

I’m talking crazy? You’re the one that thinks I’m working for them. I saw something in you, man. No. Look at me. Look at me. Fucking look at me or I am gonna kick your ass. 

See, you don’t believe it. If you really thought you couldn’t trust me, you’d have me tied in knots and begging for it to stop. 

You think I’m on another level. Thing is, I’m on an even higher level than you think. Brother, I saw something in you. I saw it and I knew that’s what I wanted to be. That’s all I’m doing. 

Got nothing? Fine. You know you can always come find me. Love you. 

It’s hard to fake it when you can see the hallucinations of others who have far too much money and can identify said hallucinations as hallucinations. That is an awkward sentence and would make a terrible bumper sticker. 

People say, let’s run the government like a business and that’s basically the beginning of The Book of Revelation. 

Sick Dogs and Our Bad Conscience

I spent a bunch of time with a sick dog this weekend. I’ve known this dog since she was 8 months old and rowdy as hell. I really thought that she might die. I cried buckets. It looks like it isn’t this dog’s time though. As a result, my emotions are still pretty raw. I ain’t got tears to cry but I’ve still got plenty of feeling. 

Compassion that moves me to anger. Furious anger. Righteous anger. I don’t know what it is about the drive home from work that makes me think about all the big picture stuff. Big picture stuff? Shit. That’s so inadequate but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s burning anger about all the injustice that’s bigger than me. The injustice that happens while I watch a clock. It’s monstrous shit. It’s shit for The Hague. It’s shit that gets Meryl Streep Academy Awards for starring in fucking movies about it. It’s shit that grieves my fuckin’ spirit but at the end of the day doesn’t even really inconvenience me because of the accident of my birth. 

My country puts little brown children in concentration camps. They cry for their mommies and daddies. These facilities are often run for a profit and the guards go home, drink beer, watch the game on occasion and probably beat their wives and then promise to never ever do it again. They can do what they do and then they can go to Home Depot or Cabela’s and never give a second thought to what they are doing to earn a pay check. Banality of evil. They’re just doin’ their jobs. Maybe they’re all grim about it. Maybe they’re tormented. Maybe they lose sleep over it. I know some of ‘em enjoy it. They are having the time of their lives.

Yeah, immigration cops are bastards. It’s a popular thing in certain circles to say that all cops are bastards. I didn’t use to believe that but I’m starting to. I got a relative who is a deputy sheriff. I’ve watched him joke about running over protesters. I’ve seen his buddies mock African American Vernacular English. I’ve seen them drink a beer while rockin’ a Punisher skull on their chests. They’re bloodthirsty, suburban warrior fascists. They are the soldiers of this sad apocalypse. 

The enforcers of this shameful order are one thing but then there are the people on the sidelines. There are people who see the pictures of weeping children behind chain link fences and are thankful. They smile. They could not be happier. They are seein’ America become great again. They are seein’ people who are not like them suffer. They are watching a man who says the vile shit they say in their taverns and their country clubs in front of the whole nation proudly and without any shame at all. They got a man leading the country who has given permission for the demons that lurk inside them to run wild. 

I sit here at my desk and pound my keyboard and I got no idea what to do. I wish that I could tell you what to do. Tomorrow I’ll go back into work, the machine will grind on and I kinda hate myself because anything I might do or say is ineffectual in the face of this grave evil. 

Here’s what I’m going to do. It’s not much. All I can think to do right now at this moment is to tell you the truth as I see it. It is that bad. My country is engaged in a great evil. If there be a God and that God is just, he must punish us. I do not know if there is a god. I do know evil though. We’re seeing it. I don’t give a flying fuck about flags or anthems. I care about what’s true. 

God. Damn. It. 

I will never forgive the people who perpetrated these atrocities. As far as I am concerned, names like Trump, Miller, Sessions, Kelly and the whole Satanic cabal of them deserve to live in infamy. They should be hauled before a court and sentenced for crimes against humanity. 

This has hung in the home I grew up in for as long as I can remember.

Sundays, My Voice, Etc.

This is me trying again. 

This feels like trying to carry a depressed sumo wrestler on my shoulders. 

I want to say that I had something specific in my unremarkable, possibly second-hand head. I kinda do but see, I don’t really know how long I can really go on about it. 

It’s a Sunday and those are tough. Sunday means Monday comin’. Feels like the day before the chair, ya dig? Thing about the chair though. Thing about Old Sparky is that it is a cure for Mondays, right? Yeah. I don’t know if it is. I got suspicions about what happens after death and I don’t really want to discuss them with you, okay? I’d rather discuss them with a naked woman in a room full of something like love on some night that’s way too warm and sticky, maybe on some day where there is nothing else to do. 

I guess it doesn’t have to be like that. It can be with someone who has somehow become like a brother or a sister to me. There are a few like that if I really take the time to think on that. You need that or else you’re like some inmate in solitary fixin’ to bang your head against the wall. 

A moment of silence for those in solitary. It breaks my heart that that happens to anyone. I don’t care how guilty they are. Fuck. Maybe it happened to me. Maybe it will happen to me. Maybe it happened to you. Maybe it will happen to you. 

I’m trying to make this weird. Is it working? Truth be told, I hope it fuckin’ is but if not, at least I tried. 

I haven’t really tried at this in awhile. Fuck. I don’t know if I’ve ever really tried. I lack discipline. I lack focus. No Mr. Miyagi or Yoda or Mickey Goldmill is gonna show me how to get focus. 

Life has a shape, ya dig? Well, mine does. That shape is a mess. I promise I will go into details on that mess and some of those details are not gonna make me look like a big, god damn hero. Thing about life is there are no big, god damn heroes. Just people. 

That mess though. My mess. The mess I’ve made. It’s been a whole lot worse. Maybe I’m making progress. 

What was on my mind is my voice when I do this thing. Lord knows I don’t talk like this but I don’t typically get the chance to talk about anything that actually matters if I’m gonna give the vocal chords a workout. I will confess to you though that I spend a lot of time concerning myself with whether this sounds vaguely cool. 

Shit. I’m 35. I have no business worrying about what’s cool.

Am I talking about my persona on the page? Yes. That’s me being clear.

Part of me thinks I’m just not really being authentic. I’m just stringing a bunch of words together that sound cool so people think I am some great soul. Some wise soul. Like, sometimes I think about shit hitting the fan for someone. Red alert. Barbarians are at the gates. Chips are down. Abandon all hope. That person going through that wishes I was there to tell them it might be okay, that I’ve seen beyond the veil and that there is absolutely no reason to be afraid. 

I mean, what the fuck is that? There’s mountains of ego there to be sure. I just hope that that isn’t all there is. 

What is it? Okay. There’s this desire to make someone go, “I kinda know what this weirdo is talking about here. I get it. Somehow I get it and I kinda felt something.” 

I can live with that. I think. 

It’s so cheesy 

cheesy like the orange fingers 

on a dateless wonder

but if I call you brother 

I mean it 

desperately 

like a cardboard sign SOS 

spotted on a freeway off-ramp.

In the night 

when the breeze is gentle 

can I tell ya how terribly strange 

this all is to me? 

can I tell ya how scared I was 

trippin’ on shrooms and that it was your 

voice that brought me back? 

Will ya come to me in the midnight hour 

with the knots you can’t untie? Will ya? 

Brain feels kinda smooth today. It always feels like it’s not quite firing on all cylinders on a Monday. 

Fuck Mondays. 

Yeah. I said “Fuck Mondays” but I don’t really feel it that viscerally at the moment. Nothing much happened really. Just dealt with minor problems here and there that I was able to fix fairly quickly. I got to spend my idle time at my desk listening to podcasts and reading. I’m about halfway through the book The Great Divide by Matt Taibbi. Maybe I can finish it by the end of the week. Been awhile since I actually finished a book. 

I’m flirting with the idea of cutting back on my gaming, specifically Rocket League. I’ve played Rocket League pretty much every single day since I got it some time last year. It’s a fun game but I think it distracts me too much. Yeah. You are reading about a 35 year old man talking about his need not to game so much. I find myself firing up Rocket League even when I don’t really have a desire to play that much. I guess it fills up time when I have absolutely nothing else that I could be doing. It stimulates my brain when I ain’t got shit else to stimulate it. I guess I want to see what happens if I try stimulating it with something else. 

I put in a call to a therapist I saw some time last year. He hasn’t called me back yet.

This navel gazing is getting old to me. I want to be writing about something else but I have no idea what. 

I’m fucking bored. 

I suppose I’m bound to catch a feeling about something this week. 

I am half-assing right now and not even lying about it. I am phoning this in. I don’t give a shit. 

Sup with you? You good? Did you daydream about sex or murder today? Did you fantasize about being some sorta hero? Did you cry today? Did you do anything to advance a criminal conspiracy today? 

This is a man throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. This is a man sitting cross-legged in a chair and trying to think. 

This feels like a fuckin’ homework assignment.

I don’t feel much of anything right now. 

I just am. I guess that’s okay. I mean, what’s the alternative? 

Been working almost 6 months. I have not held down a job for more than 6 months since 2012. If I make it beyond 6 months and I’m still employed, do I fucking win something? I’ve been thinking about that. What does that mean for me, if anything? 

Fuck. I tried.