Author: substitute

nope

mute inglorious motowns

My friends and I are neurotic in mostly the same way. We’re all terrible egotists with big problems. Therefore we proclaim things to each other, tell each other our stories, cut each other off to achieve the aforementioned, give unwanted advice to each other, and resent advice and story-telling and egotism and interruption in each other. We go to a coffeehouse and ingest caffeine and enhance our ADHD related neurologic problems and talk over each other, louder and louder.

My own reaction to this is self-loathing. I go home still buzzing from the caffeine and conversation and then replay it all and hate myself. Telling repetitive stories like a drunk old man, interrupting, barking at people for interrupting me, giving unsolicited opinions on others’ lives, ignoring or fighting their opinions of mine.

Excuse me, I have to brush a bug off my chest.

To add to this, socializing always gets tangled up with my problems with sex, so that I’m constantly meeting or seeing or talking to someone I’m attracted to but have no confidence to approach even if it’s somehow possible. I’m so much older than everyone I meet that I feel both predatory and pathetic even thinking about it, and the friends I could reasonably have interest in are all attached anyway. Strangers I just ogle like the other disasters on the patio. It’s Guilt Without Sex, redux.

There is now another bug on my leg. I don’t like summer so much, what with the bugs.

In sum I need to socialize and hate it. And inevitably I end up feeling spent and dead inside, and angry at everyone, and angry at myself, and then I go home and stare at the ceiling and think: Jesus Christ. I’m almost forty and I’m still thirteen. This has sucked for a really, really long time.

And then I slide into sleep and dream of travel-related anxieties.

A day in an R. Crumb cartoon

I was at the local high-class liquor store yesterday. As I was browsing about looking at all the weird stuff (they have every kind of libation ever made including the dutch egg liqueur and fig flavored vodka), a young woman walked by. She was about 20 and had a knockout body, legs up to here. Her costume was: cashmere sweater off one shoulder; pleated miniskirt; pink leg-warmers over high heels.

I froze. Was this 1982? Could I be back in high school? Was it even legal for me to be buying liquor? No, no, this is 2004. What the hey. What the WHO.

An older man maybe in his sixties was standing next to me, a gnarled fellow with the deep tan of the outdoor worker. He looked at me, I looked at him.

“Wow,” I said. “That was different. I really don’t know what to say.”

He grinned wolfishly and raised his eyebrows. “Show me your PUSSY!” he barked.

Poem (annotated).

My herring1 burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But oh my friends
But oh my friends
It is a fucking FISH on FIRE!2

1Originally was “barracuda”, changed to fit meter to “snapper”, finally settled on “herring”.

2Second revision added capital letters.

This poem was written in September, 2004 and was apparently inspired by an internet chat about the uses of fish oil for illumination.

the crime fighting dog

Permanent teenagers, we’re stuck in the web of childhood pretending to be grownups. I’m a fireman, I’m a policeman, I’m a president. The army men fight our battles for us. The faucets spell out coffee, tea, lemonade, pee.

Pop music ate philosophy and shat out talk radio.

The Enlightenment is about half reversed.

I stood on the deck and preached and all the sailors listened and the wind sang through the lines and the wood creaked and everyone, everyone was saved and happy.

Here’s your real world, on the hollow point of a bullet.

The original title of 1984 was 1948. It all already happened, whatever you think is going on. Look up at night and see the ancient light still pouring out of stars.

Before Abraham was, He is.

Got any gum?