Don't Trust Men Wearing Masks

I'm not as well-spoken as you remember me.

Having nothing to say, I said nothing a long time. Having nothing to say, I said an awful awful lot.

My shoulderblades used to brut out like coat hangers stuffed in a paper bag.

Among other western garments, I wore my welcome thin.

I've got no sure ear for the vaguaries of speech anymore.

"You talk like a bitch," my cool cousin said.

"You should know," I mumbled, squeaky.

I don’t remember the person I was before, when I was wild and outré, when a few drinks meant waking up in a field or a yard with my pants off and a stash of pocket cash feeling damp and guilty.

Remember when you used to go out drinking and have to pull your friends out of the toilet every Thursday, Friday, and alternating Saturday nights? I was your friends!

My karma smells like the black rings of old stale picnic Oreo cookies.

Sometimes I think that my penis shares attributes with every male character in the Bible, including God.

I've gotten fat and happy which was fine but recently I stopped being happy.

I can't be the only guy grateful for at least a pillow-girlfriend. Can I?

People were witty and funny and charming. Everyone had a truly good time, dancing well, laughing. Some were sitting around inside, others in the moon-drenched half-light of the fire escape. I was alone, intelligent and speechless, confessing my soul to an inkblotch notebook ashamed, accepted by all and yet rejected by my own self.

Blogs are not just for emo kids, Evanescence fans and Russians. That is not this. This is this. I am not me. I am me.

I like to read history books about Russian Wars as if they were psychological thrillers chronicling the factions of my mind.

My sister drives a Buick. Le Sabre.

I like to wake up at 2 am feeling mad and delirious, tasting my succulent dream candy.

I like that online blog pages are sorted calendrically. It makes me feel like a hot drink. Getting better down near the bottom.

What happened a week ago? A year ago, today?

"Oh yeah we've got those," she said smiling matronly as I pointed, squinting to the bright grimy laminated menu. Ready to cry at the slightest vibration. She scribbled on.

I was so fucked up I couldn't even recite the alphabet, let alone remember it!

Like everybody, I just want to get high, once in a while.

The real world is over-saturated with the internet lately. The internet is over-saturated with reality. Where are the ostracized webnerds of yesteryear?

You know those 80 year old men who make the news when they wander off alone in the dark and are discovered miles away from their apartments in Southside trailer parks trying to buy nickel hotdogs from the friendly sketch Mexican ice cream man? That was me at 19.

The smell of the river water air and pine needles sharp. Somewhere yelling, laughter, screaming, running, a radio playing somewhere. If someone had just told me...

I write letters with a flourish of immediacy and then send them just as fast, festering only later in the terror that there is a huge messy person I have inside me always hemming and hawing and when I say too much of anything he gets out and poisons everything.

I've mostly given up on trying to get into bed with women. I wouldn't mind if they took some of my poetry into bed with them though. Or on vacation. Preferably to a Carribean resort.

How's it going, by the way, with you and what's-his-name?

If someone had just warned me that I would wake up one day in a parking lot in Grand Rapids or in the back of a white conversion van on the road to Battle Creek, or Normal, or Bend, or Waukegan, bumping around in a void, there is a window but no sky, no ground, still the rain falls in streaks and I do not pull the blanket farther up around me though it is warm and makes me wish I were back in the womb I came from so far away, because it is also wrapped around her...

Don't you ever want to get born again?

The voice in my head rubs me the wrong way.

"You talk like a bitch," he said.

I said nothing. I tried to think of something else.

It took me many years to realize how difficult I am to live or work with.

My heroes in high school were the guys who could describe in graphic detail the finer secrets of female anatomy from first hand experience.

"What do you mean her lips dangle? She has great lips, a great smile!"

They disregard me smugly. I put on mask.

I woke up from a nap dream. You were in it. It was raining all outside my square apartment. Outside the city was wilderness. Birds swooped down, eating seeds.

I am convinced that I was convinced that mystery is more seductive than truth.

I'm not so sure any more.

Dread Pirate Masq'dm'n

I find it curiously fascinating how the older I get the narratives I construct to make sense of my life more and more tend to mirror the processes I use to construct a story. Or, in this case, a blog. I've been sitting on pieces of this puzzle for weeks now, trying to make sense of the shadow ambiguities of my topic, and then last night at 3AM a voicemail is left that puts the whole puzzle together. It is finished. It starts:

This is the worst part. No one ever tells me why.
They just stop answering my calls. Or
they stop answering my calls. Or
they stop y'know returning my messages
Or, or whatever and they don't say
"Listen, um, this isn't going to work out
because of ____ this," or
"Listen, you're just too
revolting---
---ly ugly,"
or something! I mean
just fucking tell me SOMETHING, you know?
God Dammit! Pisses me off. [sigh]
I mean, I would like to know what I did wrong.
That way I can not do it later
or I can say, "Listen
I'm sorry. Can I have another-
can I get a do-over?"

And if you buy into the notion I've been feeding you (and myself) for years that I am a victim, then you'll think that soundbyte was meant to encapsulate my own predicament, but right now it's not.

I used to believe that everyone leaves. I would brace myself for it early. In the midst of a kiss, mid-coitus, driving to her house on a cold day in February and I would prepare to be left. Everyone leaves so why spend time working on strategies to stay, t'would be wasteful spending. Why not instead bulwark the heart, I started to believe, which has damned up the walls of empathy in me, flooding all subsequent relationships with an ironic backfill; most people stay. I am the one who leaves.

There weren't so many ways for those girls to contact me as I have at my disposal now. They used to ignore my calls and texts. Now I find myself the bastard who ignores calls, texts, letters, emails, wallposts...

How is it that I have gradually become the villain? The villain who is so ultra-deluded that he thinks himself still a victim on the defensive, when in fact he has repeatedly, in the intervening years, offended and hurt lonely open hearts, much like his own before it was callous and starved insensate...

I couldn't find a way to say any of this. Then, suddenly, I found a way to say it. On Valentine's Day. Perhaps that was the ultimate trigger. The Greeting-Card Holiday prompts self-analysis revealing the reviled depths to which I alone have stooped, ruining any chances I've had at love and blaming everyone but the real culprit. Hey Cupid, draw back your bow, and thanks for putting all these thoughts so poignantly together for me today. I'll probably forget it all again in another week. Unfortunately, Valentine's Day is only once a year. (Never thought I'd ever say that!)

The Death of a dream, and the birth of a Pulchritudinous load of horseshit

We need not to be let alone.
We need to be really bothered once in a while.
How long is it since you were really bothered?
About something important,
about something real?
- Ray Bradbury

Some truths are better left subjective. I'm just putting that out there because I don't want you to be unrealistically expectant of what this story is going to accomplish, and by that I mean, I'm not going to try to expound on universal truths. For example, I'm not unbelievably talented and she wasn't incredibly beautiful but she told me I was the former and I believed she was the latter. It wasn't true for everyone, but we believed it anyway. I would at the light box from the window behind me in her wide limpid eyes and tell her what you would probably consider a lie. “You are incredibly beautiful.” And then I got a reward, we reinforced our subjective truths with little treats to make them easier to swallow. Sometimes she would laugh her embarrassed thank you laugh, which was electric to me. Other times she would give me a little peck kiss, too fast for me to reciprocate. When it was my turn to give her treats I would write her a little story, unless we were cuddling, and then I would tell her one on the fly. She was incredibly beautiful and I was unbelievably talented. Got it? Good. Because it wasn't until later that I met the woman who was actually the most beautiful girl in the world (unbelievably self-critical, in fact, but shh! That comes later.)

Just putting that out there.

The year was 2005 and I was kinda dating this girl who loved Ben Gibbard, whom she would call with unearned and disarmingly informal familiarity Benjamin Gibbard so I kinda loved Benjamin Gibbard also because A) I liked her B) The guy was hipster cool and C) it was one of those rare occasions when I felt more masculine than my girlfriend's fantasy guy. Kinda girlfriend. Key distinction there. Anyhoo I was faithful to her and she was wonderful and she loved me, and she was legal. We spent our days blithely slipping into nights and lived for the weekends, never asking or even allowing ourselves to verbalize the question that lingered at the edge of all our clandestine thoughts and dreams: “What are we going to do with our lives?”

But the weeks had somehow stretched into several increasingly cozy months in our 2^nd story court apartment downtown with a view of the backside of Schreiner and Weeks. She worked and I took classes, I worked while she studied and nights we would return at almost the same time, eat together and I would turn on the brown peanut lamp and drink vodka+cider while we watched jeopardy. She knit baby clothes for her nieces and nephews. Our apartment smelled like Graham crackers and cardboard. Life was good.

We shared a sock drawer in our bureau. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we built forts out of pillows and watched the light filter different colors through the blankets.

It was a late afternoon in February that was so cold that I decided not to go to class. I was working on writing a story to submit to a Fiction Contest, the Honeybird I think, and so the cold was more an excuse than a reason to stay in, but I had been working on it all day when she called and said that she was staying out with some friends and wouldn't be home until later.

I didn't think anything of it. Not consciously anyway but I must have stored away some resentment. Or perhaps it triggered some secret stash of resentment I had been hoarding for just such an occasion. In any event, she arrived about an hour after Jeopardy was over and tripped just slightly as she removed her boots by the door so I knew in a moment that she was drunk and trying to hide it.
“Have a good day?”
She told me how she had been out with her best friend Kelly and how they had gone to Mickies and she had met the man who they had both later agreed would be her future husband. This irked me but I let it go and turned on my brown peanut lamp. We ate bad leftover pizza and neither of us said anything as we watched Grey's Anatomy (since this was back when every episode was amazing, even the repeats). But it ended and then a National Geographic show about African wildlife came on and when I looked over she was asleep on our futon. Oh that really pissed me off and I couldn't tell you why. So basically, I shuffled off to resume writing.

I was doing a lot of slash back then. It wasn't high art exactly, but it was elite in its literaryness, for hook-up fiction anyway. I had my own desk with a picture of Poe and a window of the world and usually words poured out because I was young and inspired, at that heavenly balance of egolessness and pride, and perfectly suited to this artform I'd “found” but that night I wrote a little before getting stuck hanging on a word and so there I was. Lights off in the building and everything's aglow by my white computer light, my foot tapping madly and the nighttime calling from its portal. I put on clean clothes, went downstairs and slipped into the night.

At Mickies I shook off my overcoat. Two guys with white jerseys were making smalltalk about the weather and sports scores. One team was in downfall, another, inexplicably on the rise-- isn't that always the way? One system blowing in out of the west, pushing away another, to the east. A girl was squawking drunkenly to her top heavy girlfriend,

“They're my favorite new band in forever!”
“Sometimes they bother me. But I love how they're just having fun, mmkay?”

I made my way onto a seat and my eyes briefly connected with those of a guy with thin slicked-back hair and a beige coat.
“Nice coat.”

There is nothing better in life than a good honest pretentious conversation. An older guy in a coat like that had promise and I knew it. But this was back before I was making all my important life decisions based on fear, and I was happy. When a few drinks down I could forget who I was. When being pretentious was a game and not merely a thoughtless affect. How naïve I was.

A few drinks in and I had forgotten who I was. A drinking style I had taken to calling sledgehammering “The Adorashun of tha Myshtick Lamp? Ish widely considered to be tha single most influential painting. Um Everr.”
“Would you care for a cigarette?”
“Shure.”

If I did have a thoughtless affect at this time it was that I loved Lucky Strikes because I intrinsically thought of them as incredible harbingers of style and I couldn't fathom why or how they had ever been denigrated to a second class cigarette in this country. We lit up and both attempted not to shake it was so cold. He asked about what brought me there. Suddenly it all poured out of me.
“I went to a fundraiser for retards for her!”
I started crying.

It even started to rain. A cold rain pouring in vengeful strokes. I felt a loneliness I hadn't known since childhood wash over me. I felt wholly alien to the world for a spineshiver second. It's the most important thing to make a connection, even if it feels like you it's the least likely thing your secret heart want to do. I know this now. I didn't know it then. Instead what I knew was that too many whiskeys and the smoke in the rain was going to make me sick.

Feet slipping in the slush and mud and icy grass and shit, I stumbled into the apartment.

Everything was over.

Sometimes I like to sit on the floor of my closet. There's a flashlight in there, in a box beside where her shoes used to be, and I'd take it out and hold it in my teeth and carve little ditties into the wood with a swiss army knife. Just, putting it out there, in there. Yesterday while I was moving things out of that closet I noticed where I had written:

I did it for love/ if I did it/ I did it for love

Everything was over.

And then I met the most beautiful girl in the world.

Dreamsicknesseses A-Go-Go

Where's my Bartletts?


Goin' 'gainst yr mind at givin' up the ghost. Goin' with the grain sucks
to the
MOST.




I breath a ragged and grating rasp, this pestilence hast consumed my house, my elaborate plans, the end
of everything now stands...
THE END!
THE END!

Weird scenes inside the highway of my mind, a gold mine amidst a roman wilderness. A plain of pain... children insane, the ancient lake where the terrible snake dives. The hunter who wakes before pink dawn when everything blurs he put his boots on,
C'mon snakeskin boots
all hearty seeds and luscious fruit

the garden
with its four legs in the air like a dead cow

that's me now
sick, and my house
fenced off with spiked wire
and old pipes, and litter admire

the signs telling admonishing you to beware
an the old can rusting

As writers we weave our lives into our work. I wanted to write a great blog because I read so many terrible blogs that were wonderful because they were real. My real life was terrible so fake, it could be wonderful, I thought. Well. I took it too far. My life. My art. Whether it's subtle or blatant, it’s there

I fear truthS like anorexics fear a Buffet.

And sick, now, watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
highway of images continue:

And appreciating my memories.
Trying to learn from the past,
but realizing
people change




Oh. Poop.