3/20/13

Found A Way Back Here Again

It's been a strange sort of anniversary. I keep having to remind myself the way that time flies! I thought everything bad happened last year, but that's not true. Some of the bad stuff happened way before last year. And maybe last year was the time I found out. By this point last year I definitely felt like the world had proven itself to be particularly ugly and evil. Three people I really cared about in different ways all sort of had the same horrible thing happen to them and two of them are dead and one of them is alive but it's not necessarily my story to tell? I guess I broke my heart the summer before, when I took drugs with a group of my best friends (my better friends) and proceeded to humiliate myself before them. I let out all of the absolute worst parts of my personality. I mean I blasted them. We haven't really discussed it since. And everyone is more or less still my friend. But that was, for all intents and purposes, the end of my 20s. The punctuation of my mental decline. I have not recovered and I have lived in shame, to one degree or another, every day since then.

The last year has been a trip. I guess I could say that for every year, huh? I'm excited to sing that song "Big Stereo" tonight: There's too much, there's too much / treble in here. / We lost some, we lost some / people this year.



My father is an avid bicyclist and is often out on some form of a long bike ride. A few days ago he was was riding around the former naval base in the suburb where my parents live, and a stray cat got caught in his spokes and he fell off the bike. He didn't break any bones, but is apparently bruised up pretty badly. I don't know how the cat is doing. He had a concussion and has no memory of the accident or the days leading up to it. He's totally fine, but he was wearing a helmet. I want to just put this down on my blog to remember that things could have been so much worse.

If you are reading this and you like to ride a bike, please wear a helmet.
Everything is scary.



Stevie brought me a huge bag of chocolate fortune cookies when he visited last week from Chicago. I've been meaning to bring them into the office to share with other people, since I don't need to eat so many cookies myself, and I'm fairly terrified of knowing my future. But I've been slowly chomping my way through the bag. I wander into my kitchen to crack open a cookie anytime I'm bored, or hungry, or nervous, or confused as to what I ought to do next. Last night I was thinking about suicide (again) and I opened a fortune cookie. The fortune read: "Your imagination will lead you in a new direction. Go for it!"



I found an end for my show, ENCOURAGER. I was stressing out last night about how fake the ending felt. Some bit about dark matter and outer space, recycled from an old issue of Scorcher. But then I realized that if it feels forced to me, writing it down, it will feel forced to the audience. And I don't want to do anything that seems too extraneous. And I'm not thrilled about the idea of playing a character, in this show. No personal anecdotes. So I just lopped off the ending part. I have written so, so many really cute (hilarious even!) monologues and anecdotes for this show, which I am not using.

I'm saving them. For the next show or most likely my blog. Maybe a future zine (if I care to write again).

It felt good. I mean. To realize that I had already made my point, and that I don't need some flowery metaphor to make it. Maybe people won't like this show. It's not glamorous. It's not sexy. It's not exciting. there's not much to look at. It's kind of boring. I am not a person, in the show, who is interesting. I feel like people will probably say it's derivative of stuff I've never seen. Maybe that's true. It feels like what I need to be doing right now, like, it feeds me to be so in the dark. It felt good to find the ending. That was the only thing that's felt good lately. I forgot!



For some reason this one memory is playing itself over and over in my head and it's this memory: we had broken up. There was perhaps a little bit of confusion as to how or when. I felt like that night we had a date planned, and we smoked a joint and made out, and you wouldn't have sex with me because you thought I had STDs (even though I got a test just to reassure you). I tried to convince you to come out to my friends' party, since we weren't going to stay in and fuck, but you told me you didn't want to party with my friends. So I said I didn't want to date you anymore and I stormed out of your apartment and went to my friends' party and I gotta say, I had a really great time at the party that night.

In the morning, you sent me a link to the St. Etienne cover of the Field Mice song "Kiss and Make Up":



You knew how much I love St. Etienne and how I told you how hot it was to finally meet another boy who likes them. But I didn't want to make up with you. I wanted to break up with you. Several weeks later, I was at the gym, and I got text messages from you saying that you were going to kill yourself. I don't remember what specifically you said, but some kind of bratty question as to what the best (least painful) way to do it would be. You eventually let me know that you were killing yourself because you'd just exposed yourself to HIV and you were positive that you were infected and you were sure that you were going to have to kill yourself. I had been on the treadmill, running, when you sent the message. Even though I didn't want to be your boyfriend (I did want to, but just felt like I couldn't, like I wasn't allowed), I was scared when I saw your messages. I tried to get in touch with you but you wouldn't pick up the phone. I didn't even ask how you had allegedly knowingly (deliberately) gotten yourself "exposed" since you wouldn't even touch my naked body for fear of contagion. But when you finally did pick up, you were really rude and let me know that you were fine, now, that because I had taken so long to get back to your suicide threat, you had called a different exboyfriend to come over and talk you down.

And hey, look. We're both still alive today.

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