Shooting myself in the foot with someone else's gun

I roll around in my queen sized bed alone. I just finished a book of poems given to me when I moved to Chicago. That was almost three years ago. I read the first half of the book sitting in a white lawn chair. It was a consecutive Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday two years ago. The valley, the new valley, was trying to melt me. I had no money; we had no money. I sat in that chair and watched the love of my life swim laps in the pool at the center of our little apartment complex. I was looking for work, she was looking for work, and swimming and reading kept us occupied until we filled out another application, took another wrong turn, got turned away. I almost worked as a dry cleaner. We screamed at each other. When we weren't fighting we smoked cigarettes and drank malt liquor. The cat ran around the apartment and people dove into their pool in China. Discontinued "chicken" patties were lunch and dinner. People called to check on me. My phone got turned off and we borrowed money. She swam and swam and swam. Some days I swam too. Others I just read. A series of events happened: fires, weddings, dances, fights, vacations, accidents and illnesses. Now there is this new room, with this new bed. It is too big. It could fit three lonely people in it comfortably. It chews people up and spits them out. If I didn't own it it would do the same to me. So I finish reading the poems, alone, in my way too fucking big bed. I might be losing more loves of my life. It feels like I am. People sit on the couch facing my bed and their eyes tell me things the rest of their bodies wont. I paint for them. I write for them. I get out of bed for them. They change. They go to work. They go to school. They move. They go to weddings. They go to funerals. And I have my own in this goddamn huge bed. I wonder how they spend their time when they aren't here. I wonder if they know my mind finds them in new cities and states, truly happy for the first time. I will be a stepping stone to greater things. Some of them will read this, most of them won't. There is no closure. There is no options. There is no choose your own adventure. There is nothing but this bed and some songs and jewelry and lessons and shit that gets left behind.

while the bills are piling up

I keep thinking about writing.

But I have nothing to say.

Everything is empty.

Except for my stomach.

It is full of booze.

I'll remain drunk and distracted until it matters, til I need to fix something.

The last few months turned out to be pretty hard. And I didn't handle them the way I expected to. A lot of my support systems didn't feel like showing up; or they just talked shit.

I'll stay here, in my corner of a valley, drinking, whatever, and trying to forget how I got railroaded by someone and left for dead by someone else.

How about this, for a middle road?

I'll go out, collect a bunch of stories, and someone can laugh, and someone can shake their head and someone else can scoff.

Perfect.

Fuck it.

The phantom message

I have been finding paint everywhere. On my chair, on my mouse and on my thumb. It is all different shades of blue. What this has to do with that, I am not sure. But this rogue paint keeps distracting me from the thoughts I want to put down.

Put down like a sick dog?

Yes. Definitely.

I am a fan of baptisms. These include the ones on little babies, who have no say, but usually cry. I enjoy the irony. This also includes my own baptism on Palm Sunday some fifteen years ago (at least). And it includes the multiple baptisms I have performed on myself, none of the religious or the sexual (zing!) nature.

See, I am a fan of rebirth. I am always looking out for some conversation, road sign or person that will disrupt my life so much that my only natural response is to baptize myself, hoping to come out better on the other side.

It has happened in an ocean.
It has happened in a tub.
It has happened in a shower.
It has happened with scissors and barber clippers.

I get too entirely wrapped up in shit that sometimes I need to shed whatever person/place/thing that is binding me to that moment.

Why all this? Why tonight? I thought everything is going great?

It is. But there are patterns of thinking, and they do not do me any good.

So I am giving them to you, internets, that you may do with them what you will. (That shall be the whole of the law)

As for me, I am taking a shower and leaving the thoughts and behaviors that I don't need anymore to circle the drain.

No more finger crossing.

When you could be here, you are slipping away...

Football season is almost over. That has to do with this, and it has to do with nothing. I have a heart full of things to say, a mouth full of things to discuss, a soul full of things to be ashamed of, but today is not those day. Today is the day for this...

I passed a funeral procession today. Well, almost.

The Peppers I spend my time these days is a lot like the Pepper's I used to spend my time. The one where I complained about facial hair and bosses and I made mixes to loose my job to. They are remarkably similar, at least in lay out.

Today, just before I got out, the small part of the restaurant was filled with people. They all knew each other, or at least knew of each other. And they all wore black.

There are specifics to this that I do not know. There are rumors about these people that I have heard, but this is neither the time or place to talk about why they were sitting together in an awkward combination at the Pepper's that employs me. I just know that, for the few hours on this Saturday, before the end of football season, they were united by something given to them by a man. He might have been a boy, he might have been a giant. We are all of these things at various times. But whatever this man was: boy, god, fuck-up, lover, cousin or friend; these people all thought it best to remember him on this Saturday. And I too, will remember him, in my own way.

I have been fortunate in not knowing the sting of death, personally, in these years I am stringing together. I feel like I have mentioned this before, in this place, but I am not sure. But this is what I have, for him, the gentlemen who probably left us too soon. The fucked up thing is that we don't know if it was too soon or too late...

30th street east was very close to the house I grew up in. On that street sat two landmarks that I have been thinking about all day, before the bad news, before the funeral, before I got out of bed. They were both places of death. Maybe someone died there, I am not sure, but they were dead. I knew this at seven, when I first walked through the desert to them, to figure out their geography, to make up a history that would suit them, now that they were almost gone. One was a large concrete silo/fireplace and some woodwork. It had to be a house, no, a home. There was a father, he worked to hard, and a mother, who loved to much, and one day it collapsed under its own weight. The same thing happened to my parents, but our house stood up, I saw it the other day. It freaked me out. The other place had a concrete pool that I used to try to skateboard in. There were problems everywhere. One, I was a horrible skateboarder. Two, there was dirt everywhere, and no lip. Some kid told me once that was where they kept their water, they didn't have a well. That seemed insane to me. Evaporation in the desert would have made any effort worthless. I guess it doesn't matter now. Why?

All of those places got torn down. The two I mentioned, the rest I didn't; they are all gone. They got replaced by track homes in the real estate boom. We all know that went bust, now those homes sit empty, and the places of desert life before it was a life are gone. No kid is going to wander out and find the remenants of a home from 90 years previous. Not like I did, but what is the actual difference. The places I held dear didn't mean to me what they meant to the people who lived in my favorite places to visit, and neither my home to them.

There was some point after high school, but before I became the person that I am most days of the week, that my father was in a funeral. It was a guy he worked with. The name escapes me, if I even knew it before he passed, but he is dead. My dad picked me up for something, I couldn't even tell you if I had to, I don't remember what it was. But in the car, a car I would later drive into the ground and get 600 dollars from the state from, was still a sticker in the window that said "procession". It was very strange to me that people had decided that mass producing a sticker for a funeral procession would be a great way to make money, but they did, and they did. This story doesn't seem to make much sense right now, but let me try to tie this all together...

Death doesn't show his face in my life that often. That makes me happy. But everything seems to fall to commerce. I was amazed at the number of people who showed up for this man's funeral. I am sure there were more than who showed up to Peppers, but they all seemed to care. And I think they all cried.

And that is all I want.

A lot of tear stained faces.

Because they will take EVERYTHING else away from us.

Everything.