an ode to grey

 In my initial thoughts for this post I wanted to just share some current music. Like a memorial day musical round up, but then I realized that no one gives a shit about that anymore with recommended songs and computer generated suggestions. Then again, how much of that is actual bullshit? Slop in some stuff the rubes will enjoy but then put in those guerilla marketed songs and try and get you hooked? I have no idea, just like I said I basically have no notion of what I'm going to do here now that this music idea got bunked up. This is obviously going to stay meta, well more meta than usual because I need to do this from time to time. 

I started writing words on paper a long time ago. It was before I even owned a computer to type anything so I had notebooks. I filled them up, passed them around, and lost them all. I enjoyed sharing words that made people laugh. It was similar to real life but more scripted even though my editing style has always been the same: none, just this weird self-referential parenthetical foot-note thing I do, circle back to stuff but only after I've kept going longer than I should. It's not "writing" so much as it's some type of free form, half speech, half editable words that I just leave. Like those last few sentences, what in the high holy fuck are they? Sometimes I use a comma because I pause to smoke. 

If I want to call anything I've ever done "writing" then I need an actual editing phase. I did that once or twice, but it's a pain in the ass and this suffices as the therapeutic activity that I think it initially desired. That's what confession is supposed to do for us and that's what I've used this medium for, almost solely. I get out my darkness here so that it doesn't infect the other parts of my life. Maybe in those times of high quantity, it's an indication of an increase in darkness. Which would thereby imply a decrease in the light? 

in-tense(ts)

 A lifetime or two ago, much like any young man, I used to aspire to philosophical ideals. I thought that there was wisdom in the words of the old ones, maybe? I was old enough to realize most of the older ones in my life up to that time were at least 95% full of shit so I had to search elsewhere. Maybe, those timeless classics could tell me some tale. The really old ones: the cynics, the stoics, and the candlestick makers.

It was an opportune time for such searching as I was in college and had ample books to read and an open schedule to fill. I chose my classes in school more for interesting topics and afternoon openings than any kind of academic plan. At some point later in life I realized that philosophy professors did mostly the same kind of scheduling so there were few personality conflicts and consequently, I attended a lot of those classes. 

I really enjoyed that semester. All of my classes were in the building directly across the street from my dormitory and none of them started before noon. It was the perfect setup to drink as much as I wanted, every night! And yet, I didn't. I drank alcohol, I just didn't give in to the excesses. Maybe because I realized I'd made the perfect setup for functional alcoholism and I didn't like what I'd done or maybe because I was actually enjoying myself. Either way, looking back now, it was objectively the best time I had for the whole five years.

My most favorite and objectively the most righteous of the old ones was Diogenes. He was the guy that listened to Plato describe a man one day as a featherless biped and thought it was so fucking stupid he plucked the feathers off a chicken, came back and in front of a crowd of Plato's peers shouted "BEHOLD! A MAN!" Accounts of the event conflict but I imagine he then looked disapprovingly at Plato and just shook his head. Personally, I would have aggressively added "You're so fucking stupid" before walking out, but that's just like some kind of weird power move thing I do sometimes.

ex post muerte

 The relationships we have are often very strange. If you spend a lot of time with any creature, the two of you get weird to the rest of the world. It just happens. Familiarity, to a certain degree, is the amount of weirdness you have with another living being. Couples or friends in pairs or more get more familiar with each other as they get weirder and more indecipherable to the outside world. This kind of mystery is part of the allure of intimacy.

Tragedy or times of great stress can cause these bonds to deepen or shatter. When you put any relationship into the crucible of stress, you can pull out something more beautiful than before, something broken, or something horribly disfigured. Although, since beauty is in the eyes of who holds it, maybe those horribly disfigured relationships are more beautiful. 

Regardless of whether you like it or not, close relationships always have inside jokes, running gags, nightly routines, and morning rituals. Stuff that makes them less comprehensible to the rest of the world, or weird, in a way. Those odd things are the first that you miss when you lose someone. You can't go to sleep properly if you don't say goodnight to the person you lost. You hear something they'd really love and you want to share it but they're gone. When you first wake up and your feet hit the floor in the morning and your hand misses that furry head that's always there to greet you for a morning refill of their food bowl. You always used to rub their belly or they'd yell. This could be a person or a cat, you decide, but I'm thinking now of my cat that decided to go for a waltz the other day. He didn't tell anyone where he was going and he's not answering his cell phone.

Of course I have a special bond with my pets. It's not because I'm an animal lover. I guess I kind of am, but sometimes they're just so adorable who can resist their charms? I was certainly never a cat person, though. I was allergic to all manner of things in another life: cats, dogs, grass, outside maybe. I was a pretty sneeze-y teen but cats seemed to keep me sneezing even into my later years. 

So it was, a few years ago, when I found myself in a position where I had to decide the fate of a pair of kittens. I took them, clearly, or I wouldn't be typing this now but I was duped into it with alcohol, sex, and pussy pics. Obviously, the pictures were of the kittens and they were simply two of the most adorable balls of fur I'd seen since the night before.

hot in hell

I struggled with what to share for part two of this series of misdeeds and malevolence. I want to kind of increase the heat so that this stays fresh and interesting instead of dark and weird. I also have to balance my natural desire to go full throttle and just start listing atrocious things I've done with my need to craft a compelling narrative. Though I hope I'll be the only one to ever read this, I will still read this. Choosing this story was a difficult decision to make. I thought about it all day and finally settled on something pretty tame, considering some of the other heinous shit I've gotten into.

Like a lot of the more evil shit I've done in my life, this took place during the halcyon days of my drinking youth. I think I'm using that correctly, it was a golden age for degeneracy and turning into a demon. These were still the days when I had brief moments where I knew how far down the dark path I'd gone. 

It was just one of those moments that makes this story so special. I don't remember all the details, though I'm sure if I dwelt on the memory I could fill them in. That's kind of my thing these days: not dwelling too long on the past. Let the memories in, and then let them go. Enjoy them while they last and make the best of what you can. 

It was definitely summer time, right here in the beautiful 'Burgh. I was out for a night on the town. As usual at the time, I did some drinking before I did my drinking. Most nights I either stopped at a bar on the way home from work for happy hour or had people over for "shots and shouts" which is the name I made up for my favorite game of drinking and yelling out the window at people passing. Almost all of the games I played at the time involved drinking. Then there were times like these where I made up a game to explain some of my drinking.

This night did not start out well. I had too many drinks in the afternoon and not enough food during the day. So a trick I liked to do in order to continue drinking in times like that was to go and eat the biggest meal I could handle. I was "incidentally bulking" at the time so this was a lot that night. One of the details I recall vividly was that I ate at least two (probably three, possibly four) gyros. They were delicious and only cost five dollars. When you live three blocks from two gyro shops, you tend to get a lot of gyros. 

After I gained my equilibrium back, I met some friends for some more drinking. The night waned, I made a new friend at the bar, and she and I went to her place. The details here aren't very important and I don't remember too many because I'd been drinking for half the day at that point.

This night, my new friend was really enjoying herself. I however, was unable to really give my all for the performance because I felt nauseous. I started out great and was having a grand time but I think the exertion stirred something in my innards because the nausea was quick and strong. I told my friend I had to take a bathroom break and I wanted to get some water then I'd be right back for round two, well, to finish my first round at least.

As soon as I was in the hallway I ran to the bathroom. Except I went in the wrong direction and had to turn around and run back down the hallway to actually get to the bathroom. Once inside, I hit the light switch and went to drink some water to try and calm my stomach. It didn't work at all. I immediately had to vomit and it went everywhere. 

I was standing over the sink so some of it got in the sink and I was able to rinse that (very poorly). A great deal of it got on the mirror and between chunks of tomato and gyro meat I could see that some of it got on me as well. I looked down and I had vomit splatter all over my chest and boxers. I looked around and saw that nearly the entire bathroom was covered to some degree in bits of digested meat and bread and pieces of lettuce and it was enough to make me gag. 

I threw up again, but this time while aimed at the toilet. Except, I was standing upright and not expecting it so I vomited all over the toilet, toilet paper, and some type of big candle on the back of the toilet. It was on the walls, on the sink, in the sink, on the toilet, in the toilet. I even got a good bit of spray on the shower curtain which saved the shower from my angry spew. 

I did what I thought was a smart idea at the time and took off my shorts and turned on the shower. I didn't have a bag so my boxers were being donated to my new friend's bathroom garbage (which was also covered in a healthy amount of vomit splatter). I rinsed myself off in the shower, gargled some mouthwash and had one of those moments as I looked at myself one more time in the vomit covered mirror. What in the fuck was I doing with my life? How do I get myself in these situations? Am I a bad man? It was only a brief reverie before I headed back to my friend's room, naked.

I was somewhat sobered up at that point considering the fact that I just re-enacted that Exorcist scene in the bathroom. I finished with my friend and immediately left. There was no chance I was staying longer than I had to in case someone else used the bathroom. It seemed like she might have roommates but they clearly weren't home because someone should have asked about the vomit noises and shower running at 2AM. Maybe that was normal for these folks but I never found out because I left. I left because I might be a monster. Maybe.

i'm not the devil?

 Recently, I had the opportunity to have a heart to heart with a meth addict I know. We traded stories about some of the terrible things we've done to other people. At the end of our conversation, he called me a monster and said I might be the devil.

We spoke some more on the subject and neither of us could really decide. You see, I used to be quite a handful in my younger days. I was dredging up some of these less rosy colored memories the other day and I had to take a break because I realized just how many people I've done some type of injustice to in the past. It's staggering to think of how many people I've fucked over in one way or another.

I've decided to share some of those memories here and now. I'll see how it goes but I'm hoping for some type of cathartic effect, I guess? Maybe I'm just a guilty soul with a lot to confess and no one to confess to unless you count priests who might try and molest me after? Will this do anyone any good other than myself? No, of course not. I hope the people in the stories I include here never read them because they might realize the cartoon like proportions of my callousness. 

discipline made me type this

 Sometimes I write with a plan. There's a notebook I keep for such occasions. There's actually quite a few notebooks for many occasions. The issue is these notebooks are in boxes, containers, or bags. There's one I've loosed on the world once again but his friends all remain safely locked away.

These notebooks contain too many dangerous ideas. You see, they contain mostly the missives of a much younger man. A much different man. Except, I'm much the same as well. Maybe.

I tell myself and anyone who will listen that I have more wisdom but I know that's not true. I have more years and I might have more experience. That's weird to say but it's certainly true. More years with the possibility of more experience, though that's not what anyone ever says. We're comfortable with phrases like "I've forgotten more about this than you'll ever know" while being stone certain more years always equates to more experience.

XP, as the gamers call it, is the coveted currency of the working force. When you first start your journey into tedious labor all the bosses want more experience. Eventually you get to a point in your life when you're thrown the bullshit salary negotiating tactic of "we can't afford you" because you maxed out your XP doing side quests. Then there's the point where you realize life is nothing but a series of side quests and you go back to just enjoying the game.

Let's be honest with ourselves, what's the grand importance of pushing papers? Who cares about some spreadsheets and graphs? Optimizing one thing or another only leads to specialization. Instead of adding beauty to life we decide we'd rather have productivity. Why not both? I'd rather have a beautiful disaster than an efficient turd.

One day soon (maybe today?) I'll dust off some of those boxes and unearth some of those notebooks. They're so dangerous, written when I had more cares and the desire to change the world. They also make me think maybe I smoke too much because they look like a mix between ransom notes and poetry. So, basically, just ransom notes.

it takes two to toxic

Imagine you're on a camping trip having the absolute worst time of your life. Disregarding the fact that you've chosen to sleep in a tent when (presumably) you have a roof somewhere you could sleep under instead, this imaginary camping trip is even worse. The drive was a nightmare and you're pretty sure you got poison ivy on your ass. To add further injuries and insults, you've been arguing about everything. Why would you ever agree to go camping with such a toxic person?

Before we go any further, no sane person would ever agree to go camping. Who wants to shit in the woods when you have your home throne upon which you can dispense your daily business? On top of that, you're clearly not sane because this imaginary camping trip was a solo adventure. 

Setting aside all this hyperbole and weirdly specific rants about camping, if you can't stand to be with yourself then everything else is going to be wrong. You could have not exposed your bare ass to a dirty weed that causes immense suffering. You could have made your gypsy (GPS) give you directions. You could have said "Camping is for sasquatches" like any normal person and stayed near home.

tenido tres vidas

 At least, I think that's right. On the whole, of course, I've only had the one but life itself is a cycle. The first two weren't exactly entirely continuous and the route was full of detours and booby traps, but I think it's safe to say I'm finally at a new beginning again. The sun is rising once more over the empire of my happiness. Hopefully this time I've reached my final form as I saunter through re-birth.

It could be that first paragraph was woefully obscure to the casual reader, but there is no other kind of reader when there's years between words. I would apologize, but that's not really my style. Javier Nelson (is allowed to speak in the third person) was born in the second age, an era of equal parts youthful exuberance and naivety. It was a time for dreamers, one without urgency even though the sun moved away shortly after the first clouds appeared.

I've returned to where everything began, and by that I mean my very first life. This time seems charmed so far but everything else just seems a bit smaller than I remember and all the distances are shorter. There's also the matter of returning to sanity while the rest of the world slowly sinks into the curious embrace of madness. I know that siren's call all too well, she's been a constant partner of mine for years but I think it is best that we parted ways. You lot can have her, though I loved her truly.

I'm looking at some of the same things I saw years ago through new eyes. I haven't released my savage soul back into the wilderness, I've merely accepted that it wasn't mine to control in the first place. I'm simply acknowledging that I never had the power to control anything about myself. Those nights spent pretending would have been better spent listening to the wild spirit and letting chaos reign.

I type this now in the biggest office I've ever had because one day I said "Fuck this, I've had enough".