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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
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10:32 am - The Cracking of the Glass : Part II (Short Story)
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He felt the presence of many people around him, and when he opened his eyes, Thomas was sitting at a plastic white table, outside, being shaded by a plastic white umbrella sticking out from the center of the fake-glass table top. He was alone, though a purse was on the table, purple with monster cartoons on it. Probably Lilith’s or Molly’s, Thomas concluded. The table was next to the sidewalk and he appeared to be at the food court of some outdoor shopping center, the sun blazing in the sky and people walking around carrying a plethora of shopping bags and nothing but stores in every direction as far as his eyes could see. He scratched his cheek and the stubble he felt in the other place, the other time was gone, and he was smooth as if he had shaved an hour or two before. Since the last jump, he now knew he not only had to wonder where he was, but WHEN as well.
“Oh, there’s other things you should be worrying about, my friend.”
A man sat down across from Thomas, pushing the purse aside so he could see his face. The man’s face was identical to Thomas’s, and when he saw this Thomas was dumbstruck, and though he couldn’t see it, all of the color left his face.
“I look familiar don’t I?”, the Stranger asked.
“Wh-what?”
“Relax, you’re not going crazy. Or maybe you are. Quite frankly, that’s outside my purview. Right now, it’s not quite relevant to why I’m here. I know, it seems odd that your sanity, or lack thereof, doesn’t matter. But I’ll tell you what does matter....Have you heard the cracking of the glass lately?”
Thomas leaned forward over the table and took a deep breath to steady himself . “I guess you’re not my twin brother.”
The Stranger laughed, cackled really. “Gosh, no. Nothing so banal. No, I’m you. Moreover, I’m the part of you that remembers who you are. The part of you that knows who you are beyond your full name and random memory here and there.”
“What happens when Lilith comes back to find us sitting here, talking like old chums?”
The Stranger smiled, though to Thomas it looked sinister, all the more so because it was his own face smiling back at him, like an evil mirror. “You figured out which world you’re in. It was the purse, wasn’t it? I wonder if it’s real or if you made it up. The only thing more amazing than the imagination is the capacity of the human memory to retain reams of useless information, even as it forgets or otherwise loses vital data. Don’t worry about your wife, Thomas. She won’t return until I’m gone.”
“So why are you here? How is this possible? What the fuck is happening to me?”
“All valid questions. Let’s start simple. You are not outside right now. You are not sitting across from your doppleganger at a table chatting away the afternoon delightfully. This is all in your head.”
Thomas tilted his head to the side, perplexed. “A dream?”
“Not quite. You hit your head pretty hard when you flew through that windshield. That much was real, I can tell you that. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you’re in a coma.”
“You’re guessing?”
The Stranger put up his hands in a “stop” gesture. “I’m a part of you. I only have as much knowledge as you have. And by ‘you’ I mean you as a whole human being, not ‘you’ the part of your psyche that has been jumping around for who knows how long. I know more than that part. But you asked why I’m here, and I think it’s because you don’t want to be in a coma, but you need to work some shit put before you can wake up.”
“I’m keeping myself in a coma because I need to come to a realization of some sort. Why would I do that to myself?”
“That would be a question for your unconscious, who apparently decided to bail on our lunch reservation. So you’re stuck with me, whoever I am, and I’m working under rules that I’m not quite sure why I have to follow or who made them, also probably your unconscious. You should really smack that guy”.
Thomas stood up fast, his chair getting knocked away as he did so. “I’m going to smack you if you don’t start telling me what’s going on! Why do I keep jumping from one time to another!”
“Sit down. You’re not time traveling. This is all in your head. Good thing too, because you’d really be fucking things up if you went back in time with amnesia.”
Thomas pulled the chair back up to the table and sat back down, with an audible and purposeful “huff”. “Then explain things to me.”
“You did something wrong, Thomas. The key to you waking up is to figure out and come to grips with what that is. I can’t tell you what it is because you don’t know what it is yet. This is something you know intuitively, not in the way of actual knowledge. Are you following me?”
“No.”
“Whatever. It appears the key to knowing what you did wrong lies in two realms, your memories, and your fantasies. Your experiences, and your desires. That is what you’ve been jumping back and forth from. Two lives, two women. One of these lives, you’ve made up out of whole cloth. Every bit of it is fake, or almost every bit of it. The other life are your memories. Not exact memories, mind you, since you didn’t have amnesia when you were living them out, but close enough approximations. Some experiences may even be amalgamations of different memories, your brain taking a shortcut to an epiphany.”
Thomas considered this. One world was complete fantasy, the other was made up of events he had lived before. He knew in his gut this information was correct. He also suddenly felt an enormous sadness, when he realized which was which. “Lilith’s not real.”
“Your life with her isn’t. Domestic bliss with the wife and the daughter, the perfect happy family. Most people would have thrown in a mansion and some jet skis too, but some people have modest fantasies. The perfect wife, the perfect life....maybe that’s a more unbelievable dream that some ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ bullshit. But you needed to live that fantasy.”
The Stranger stood up. “Take a walk with me, Thomas. You can leave the purse, no one’s going to steal it. And if they did, who cares? It’s not real.”
Thomas stood and accompanied The Stranger away from the food court and down the sidewalk, past shoppers and the occasional rollerblader. He felt sick to his stomach. The thought of that happiness he felt laying in bed with Lilith, for that to be fake, he wanted to cry. “Maybe I don’t want to wake up. Maybe I want to stay in my dream, with her.”
“Drowning in your dream isn’t an option here. You did something bad and you have to face up to it. There’s no easy way out here. Chasing a dream is probably why you’re in this predicament. Or maybe you’re just a selfish prick.”
“What?”
“All this concern over your fake wife being fake, and yet no thought whatsoever about the real wife you know has cancer?”
Thomas stopped in place, the Stranger doing likewise after a few more paces. Thomas felt ashamed, but the Stranger had him there. He didn’t think of Alicia at all, and she was his REAL wife. “I’m a monster.”
He looked off to the side, at the window of a storefront, and it suddenly cracked once, dramatically, down the center. He stepped back reflexively, looking to the Stranger for guidance. “It’s almost time for you to be back on your way. ‘Monster’ is probably too harsh. Your priorities need reassessing though.”
The cracking sound was getting louder, and more frequent. A window for another shop seemed to explode and thousands of tiny glass fragments fell to the ground, the shoppers by continuing on, oblivious and unperturbed. “So what do I do now?,” he asked the Stranger.
“Taped underneath the center drawer in your desk is the key to that locked drawer that caught your attention. Start there. The jumps will take you where you need to go.”
The Stranger seemed to drain of all color, until he was a shimmer, transparent figure. The blue sky turned gray and dark and the other pedestrians seemed to disappear into the graying, shadowy extremes of Thomas’s vision. The translucent stranger waved to him, then shattered before his eyes like an ice sculpture hit with a sledgehammer. The world around him shook and whined and cracked, until it was no more.
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Thomas shot up in his chair. His heat skipped a beat until he realized where he was, his study, in the home he shared with Alicia. His mouth was wet and he wiped away some dry spit, looking down at his desk and realizing when he jumped it was to a moment in time when he had been sleeping at his desk, his computer open to a word processor program, the flashing cursor waiting to start a new paragraph. After a cursory examination of what he was writing, which appeared to be an article on Leon Czolgosz, assassin of President McKinley, he gave an involuntary shudder and realized he was cold. Freezing, in point of fact. Rubbing his arms, he was clad in only a plain white T-shirt and nondescript gray sweat pants, he left the study in search of a thermostat. Once the hallway outside the study, with looked down over a railing downstairs, he could see through windows on the first floor that there was snow outside, but not on the roads, indicating it had snowed recently, but not this very day. It had been summer during the rest of Thomas’s jumps, both in this world and the fantasy life with Lilith, so he had to have jumped three months, if not more. Suddenly, Thomas remembered what the Stranger told him about the key, and his comfort with the temperature took a backseat to finding out what was locked in his drawer. He hurried back behind his desk and opened the long drawer at the center of the desk. He felt under it blindly, until finding a small metal object held there with a single piece of Scotch tape. He ripped it off, and sure enough, the object was tiny key.
He unlocked the one drawer that was not freely opened, and its contents were spare. There was a little black notebook, a little larger than the palm of Thomas’s hand, and a brief flip through revealed it to be an old journal, that stretched from when he was ten years old to right around when graduated high school. Alicia was not mentioned anywhere in it, she he put it aside from the time being, despite his curiosity about anything he couldn’t remember. He supposed when he found out what he needed to know and woke up, his memories would be intact, so reading about those awkward teen years wasn’t of preeminent importance. There were some other date books and things, nothing that seemed worthy of being locked up, until he had emptied the drawer and realized it was too shallow. He knocked on the bare bottom, and the sound was hollow. He felt along the edges inside and realized this drawer had a false bottom that could be popped out, which he think almost with out thinking.
It was then that Thomas realized why this drawer was locked. Under that false bottom had been four photographs. The first was a single head shot of Lilith, her face in 3/4ths profile, an expressionless look on her face, almost Mona Lisa-like. So she is real, Thomas though to himself. The life with her may have been fantasy, but the woman was a flesh and blood person on this Earth. The second photograph was of Lilith and himself on a beach, the camera held arm’s length way while the two were sitting where their cheeks touching and smiling. It had to have been a windy day, as Lilith’s long, brown hair appeared to have been blowing to and fro when the picture was taken. The third picture was nearly the same, except Lilith was planting a kiss on Thomas’s cheek, with him having a purposely humorous expression of widened eyes in mock surprise. The fourth picture, and in a way the saddest, was a topless photo of Lilith, from the top of her head down to just below her ample bust, with a closed-mouth smile on her face and her head tilted ever so slightly to the left.
Thomas placed the photos back in the drawer, replaced the false bottom over them, and put back all of the other items just as they were arranged before, and locked the drawer back up again. He twirled the key around his fingers for a bit as he considered the hidden photos. However long ago those pictures were taken, he held onto them. Lilith had meant something to him, enough to carry her with him through a marriage to another woman, and a fantasy life he had created for himself in his coma state. This had something to do with what he had to realize to wake himself up, but for the life of him Thomas couldn’t find what this woman, who could have been anything from a former lover to an acquaintance who modeled in photos for him, had to do with where he was in his life now. He pocketed the key rather than replacing it under the drawer, in case he felt the need to examine the photos further for clues.
He heard the front door to the house open from downstairs, and Alicia enter. The sound of her tossing her keys on the kitchen counter reverberated through the silent house, and she made her way upstairs. When Thomas saw how she looked through the door of his study, he was shocked. Alicia was petite, but now she looked downright skeletal, which her thick winter coat did nothing to hide, with a hunched over posture to boot. She wore a wool winter cap upon her head and her face appeared to have aged a decade. “Ally?”, he called to her.
She came to the doorway of the study. “I know, I said I’d be back sooner. Chemo ran longer than I thought.”
Chemotherapy. The operation to remove the lump in her breast must not have worked, and the cancer would have spread. Alicia removed her cap and, sure enough, her head was bald save for a few small, stubborn hairs that had refused to fall out just yet. “I’m sorry, “ he told her. “I should have gone with you”.
To the surprise of Thomas, Alicia scoffed at that comment. “You haven’t come with me to chemo in two months, Thomas. I didn’t expect you to start up again. I know, I know, you have to work on your book.”
Thomas got up from the desk and went to her. Once he was face to face with her, he didn’t see anger or disappointment in his wife’s face, but rather a look of resignation. Whatever bone she had to pick with him, whatever issues, she looked as if she had lost the fight for them and was learning to live with that. “It’s no excuse”.
She walked away from him and into their bedroom. He followed her as she took off her coat and placed it on the bed, apparently too weak to throw it on there. “It’s a little late to feel guilty, don’t you think. You said it didn’t make sense for you to sit in a waiting room twice a week for hours when you could be working.”
“I can’t believe I said that,” Thomas replied, talking more to himself than directing the comment at her.
“Me neither.” Alicia sat on the bed and looked up at Thomas, who couldn’t meet her gaze as he felt himself become flooded with an immense sense of shame.
“To have you go through of all this alone while I’m here..it’s inexcusable.”
“Well I haven’t been alone. Julian’s been there a the hospital with me, of course, giving me rides home...”
“Julian? The douchebag with the faux hawk.”
Alicia shot up from the bed with a speed and force which Thomas didn’t think she had in her. “That ‘douchebag’ has been there supporting me while you type away at your computer every day! I’m sorry the dead mean more to you than your wife, but maybe when this disease kills me you’ll give a shit!”
The tears began to flow from her eyes freely, and after moments of trying to not to break in front of her husband, Alicia let herself fall back to the bed and sob. Thomas knelt before her and took her hands in his. He gently wiped some tears from one of her eyes, and she met his eyeline and said, “I’ve been fucking him.”
Thomas pulled his hands back. “What?”
“Julian. When I’m done with chemo he takes me back to his apartment until I don’t feel so sick, and he makes love to me. He makes me feel good, Thomas. He’s gentle, he goes down on me...He’s been everything I needed you to be but you weren’t.”
Thomas stood up, and touched a hand to his forehead in disbelief. He wasn’t sure what he should be feeling, perhaps anger or surprise, or the flare of jealousy he felt when he met his wife’s lover in the hospital before her surgery, but he felt none of those things. He looked at Alicia, who stare up at him awaiting some sort of response to her revelation. He was not terribly taken aback by what she did, so much as shocked at what he apparently was not doing. Did he really spend months letting his sick and potentially dying wife go to her treatments alone, leaving the care her loving husband should have been providing after the fact to come from some Lothario who otherwise practically oozed sleaze from every pour of his body? Thomas felt he wouldn’t like the person he was when he had his memory. From the carte blanche the amnesia gave him, he could sit in judgement on this other version of himself, and hate him. He broke from Alicia’s gaze and looked toward the mirror above the dresser. The person who looked back at him was at once himself, but also the Stranger, but also the Thomas Reilly who seemingly didn’t love his wife, and kept photos of another woman locked in his desk drawer.
“She’s the reason I neglected my wife, isn’t she?”, he asked the man in the mirror who was himself. “Who is Lilith?”
Time seemed to freeze, Alicia stuck in place, a single tear frozen on her left cheek on it’s way down her face. Thomas’s reflection began to move independent of Thomas’s movement, stepping out of the mirror and crawling across the bureau to stand up face to face with Thomas in the bedroom. “No more jumping,” the Stranger said. “It’s time for you to figure it all out”.
The Stranger touched the tip of his index finger to Thomas’s forehead and there was a bright, yellow flash that engulfed the room, and when the light died down, Thomas was left to rub his eyes to get the yellow spots left over, the light’s shadow, away so he could see again. And when he could, he opened his eyes and saw he was no longer in his bedroom, but sitting in a red booth in a diner, against the wall. Across from him in an adjacent booth, he saw himself. Not the Stranger, but himself, Thomas. This was a memory, he realized. He was no longer living a memory, he was sitting on the sidelines watching an event unfold.
__
Thomas sat in the booth with his head in his hands, a cup of coffee in front of him he hadn’t touched. His back hurt from sleeping on the couch the previous night, letting Alicia keep the bed. She may have been the one committing adultery, but he wasn’t so heartless as to make his sick wife sleep anywhere but her own warm, comfy bed. He pushed back against the padding of the booth to try and crack his back to no avail, and checked his watch for the fifth time in two minutes. She wasn’t late yet, but he still wondered if she’d really show.
The bell above the door to the diner rung, and Thomas looked up to see Lilith enter. She found him immediately, and went to his booth. He stood up when she got there and, not knowing whether he should hug her or kiss her on the cheek or what, he just sat down, and she sat down in turn across from him. “Matching luggage,” she said pointing at first to the bags under her own eyes, and then to Thomas’s. He smiled a weak smile. That had bene one of their inside jokes when they knew each other.
Thomas had just started college when he met Lilith; him a freshman, her a sophomore. At 19, she was still three years away from giving birth to Molly, and Thomas would often spy her with her nose in a text book and a hand on her head as she struggled to understand the work for a general education class she had no interest in taking in the first place. Thomas had had some friends in high school, all of whom fell by the wayside as they went to their own respective colleges and followed their own live’s paths, but as he came to the end of his teen years, he never managed to have much luck with women. Aside from kissing a girl, once, when he was 14 years old, thanks to a game of Spin The Bottle he had to be forced to participate in, he had gone his entire high school career without any romantic experiences whatsoever. Some may have misinterpreted this as a lack of interest, but in fact the opposite was true.
While Thomas spent many a night and weekend reading books on history for pleasure, he often longed to meet a woman who would take his breath away, and replace the empty feeling in his stomach with butterflies, and ever cliched feeling and phrase he read in poetry and saw in cheesy romantic comedies he happened upon while flipping through cable channels. Even when he had begun masturbating, which predated his first kiss by a mere nine months, his more carnal desires took a backseat to the times when he would daydream in class, looking out the window at the leaves changing color on a tree outside the classroom, and wish he could lay under that tree with a woman he loved, and forget the world was spinning and the horrors of lives all around the planet, and feel content with the one person in the world that would mean more to him than anything else this life had to offer.
To say he felt all of those things about Lilith when he first laid eyes on her would not be true, but he did feel a spark the likes of which had never occurred to him previously. Though he would spend years reflecting upon this, wondering what it was about this girl, this woman, that inspired these feelings when no other woman ever had before, or since, despite his eventual marriage to another, he was at a loss to explain it. All he knew was that, despite his shyness with the fairer sex, no matter what fears he had in talking to her, his one day just carried him over to where she sat in as quiet a corner in the Student Union as Lilith could find, and introduced himself. Initially, his excuse for chatting her up was that he had seen her struggling with some of her workload and offered to help tutor her between classes when they found themselves in the Student Union at the same time.
What began as one student helping another with work soon became a solid friendship. While Lilith didn’t share Thomas’s knowledge or interest in history or writing, they found they shared common ground in other facets, such as they fiction they both enjoyed, mainly nerdy science fiction and cartoon movies and television programs, as well a generally pessimistic view of the world filtered through a sardonic wit that resulted in the both of them often having contests to crack each other up with increasingly drier and darker humor. They spent more and more time together not just at school, but before and after classes. Within 2 years, as Lilith finished the last year of her undergraduate degree, they were inseparable.
In that entire span, however, nothing romantic had taken place. Thomas was comfortable with Lilith, but at the same time frightened that if he expressed any feelings to her that were not platonic and not a slightly ribald comment of the “just kidding” variety, any connection they had built up in the preceding years would immediately shatters underneath him, and he would lose her. The closest he ever came to making a move on her was one chilly November night when, whilst sleeping over in Lilith’s dorm room, they shared a bed, and in her sleep Lilith rolled and wrapped her arms around Thomas, who spent the rest of his like laying on his back, rigid in more ways than one, afraid that the slightest movement would cause her to disengage from him, something he would never want to risk.
It was around this time, Junior year for Thomas, that an attractive, youthful-looking redheaded girl in one of his elective classes began chatting him up. This was Alicia. She made it a point to sit next to Thomas every time they had class, and would often make excuses for them to hang out socially, mainly under the guise of her asking him to help her with class work, but sometimes she simply claimed she was bored and wanted someone to kill time with. Thomas at the time though Alicia was attractive, and liked how she always smiled and would giggle like a child any anything even remotely funny, but his attentions lay so wrapped up with Lilith that he neither saw that Alicia’s feelings for him were more than related to casual friendship, nor even considered her as someone he would want to be with. Nothing of the sort ever so much as crossed his mind in passing.
Everything changed during Thomas’s fourth and final year of college. Lilith had gotten her Bachelor’s in marketing was temping at an advertising firm in the city, and no longer on campus for Thomas to hang out with during the day. Alicia quickly slipped into her spot as the person Thomas would kill time with between classes, but his mind never strayed too far from Lilith. When he saw her at night, an occurrence that grew less and less frequent upon Lilith’s comments of being overworked or stressed from her job, or on weekends, she seemed distant, in a way she had never seemed before, preoccupied by something she felt fit not to share with Thomas despite his occasional queries into the matter.
By December of Thomas’s 21st year, Lilith revealed to him that she was pregnant with a coworker’s baby. She had been seeing the man since starting the job, but had kept it secret, even from Thomas, because he was a married man with two children already from his wife. Upon hearing this news, Thomas blew up. All of the feelings for Lilith that he had repressed for three years at that point came pouring out. He admitted to her, and even to himself, that he was desperately and truly in love with her. If it had only been that, perhaps some semblance of their friendship could have been salvaged, but so hurt was Thomas that he tapped into whatever anger he had, and let loose on her. He chastised her for being what he felt was stupid and reckless, chasing after an unavailable man. He laid into her with a fury that made Lilith cry, and he kept going, laying into her with a wrath he knew even then she didn’t deserve.
When he had screamed himself out, and was left gasping for air through his own tears, which he had soldiered on through, Lilith merely looked up at him, and said, weakly, “I would have dated you. All you had to do was ask. But you never did.”
Thomas walked out of her apartment that day, and wouldn’t see her again for eight years, when she walked into that diner. In those preceding years, Lilith tried to initiate contact through old fashioned letters. She told him about the birth of her daughter, whom she named Molly, and inquired about Thomas’s life. Thomas, out of hurt and desperation, found himself growing closer to Alicia, who was more than eager to receive the newfound flow of attention Thomas had shown her ever since showing up on her doorstep the night of Lilith’s revelation to him. Thomas and Alicia would date for a year, losing their virginities to one another on the night of Thomas’s graduation, and using the connections of Alicia’s well-to-do-father, Thomas soon found himself making a decent living writing rather dry historical books and articles, which were read by almost no one except for the students of boring history teachers who assigned his work as reading material. Thomas convinced himself he liked his life fine enough. His wife, he had to admit, was rather beautiful, and they married shortly after she finished college one semester behind him. He lived comfortably financially, from his own work and from his wife’s family’s coffers. Yet, he was never exactly happy with his life, more content. He felt like, day to day, he was playing the role of a happy man rather than actually being one. This was a fine enough life, sure, but not the life he wanted.
On the occasion of Thomas’s 25th birthday, Lilith sent him a letter, and within the envelope she sent it with was a 4X6 photograph of herself, topless. On the back she had written her phone number, and the sentence “I am always here for you. -L”. It was then that Thomas started writing back to her, brief and emotionless descriptions of his life, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was he had re-opened a door he had closed in his life, and he continued to keep any such correspondence secret from his wife.
The morning after Alicia revealed her infidelity to Thomas, he woke up from the worst night’s sleep he had ever had, and called Lilith, asking her to meet him at a diner, and as she sat across from Thomas, seeing her for the first time in eight years, he had no words. The only thing that came to him was “Thank you for coming.”
“It’s okay. It worked out rather well, Molly’s school is only a couple blocks from here, so it was easy to drop her off and swing by. You look like hell, Tommy.”
Thomas uttered a weak laugh from that. “Don’t people usually say something like ‘gee, you look great’ when they haven’t seen each other in years?”
“We were never ‘usual’ people, now were we?”
Thomas shook his head, and took the first sip of his coffee, which was getting cold but sweet from the three packets of sugar he had dumped in it because he needed something to do with his hands while waiting. “My wife’s been cheating on me with a male nurse in a faux hawk.”
“Is this the beginning of bad dirty joke, or are you being serious.”
“If it’s a joke, the joke’s on me. This is all my fault. I fucked up, Lily.”
She reached across the table and touched her hand to the one Thomas had wrapped around the coffee mug, pursing her lips in empathy. “Something I’ve learned, in being the other woman...it’s never really the fault of the person being cheated on. I used to think it was okay if I was with a guy who had a wife or a girlfriend because I figured it was because their girl wasn’t good enough for them. They didn’t pay them enough attention or didn’t sleep with them enough or weren’t good enough to keep them from straying. In a way, it made me feel special, like I had to be better than whoever they were actually with because they were choosing to be with me instead of them. Later, and it took me a few guys even after Molly’s father to realize this, is that someone who cheats isn’t really doing it because of the person they’re cheating on, or the person they’re cheating with...they’re doing it because they’re a selfish prick. It is no deeper than that.”
“This is different. She has cancer. She could potentially die from this. And I....I haven’t been there for her. What kind of monster doesn’t stand by his wife while she’s sick? The problem-I’ll tell you the problem-is that I never really loved her. She’s nice and beautiful and all of that, but nothing ever...I don’t know, SPARKED for me.”
“And why do you think that is?”
Thomas looked up from the coffee in his cup and locked eyes with Lilith. “Because I never stopped wanting to be with you. Because I love you above all others. But after I said all of those horrible things to you, I couldn’t try to fix this, fix us, so I ran to the one girl who ever paid me any interest and tried to press myself into the role of the happy boyfriend and happy husband. It was like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. I played the part as best I could, but it was all artifice, I was living a lie. And then she got cancer, and it got real, I spent more and more time staring at your photo and less time consoling my wife.”
Lilith stood up and moved over to Thomas’s side of the booth, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, and tears began to leak from his eyes. He leaned his head on her shoulder, and it felt right to him. He was close to her again, smelling the lilac lotion she always used to wear, and all he wanted to do was bury his face in her and never leave, but he didn’t. She took a napkin off the table and dabbed his eyes with it. “Maybe I should have left well enough alone. Maybe writing you those letters was a bad thing. But you were a big part of my life, the best friend I’d ever had. I didn’t want to throw that all away. I knew you had feelings for me. I wasn’t on the same plane you were, but I could have been if I had called you out on it and gave you a shot. But I was hoping you would have brought it up yourself. Then, when I started my first job out of college, and guys were starting to notice me, I got tired of waiting. The things you said to me that last night we saw each other hurt me. They cut me deep. But some of it was true. Molly’s father was an asshole. I was a lay to him and nothing more. He’s never even met his daughter. Meanwhile, well, you were the guy who was in front of me all the time, and I guess you were never to let me go.”
Thomas leaned his head up to press his lips to her ear, and whispered, “What is it about you that makes you different from the rest?”
“Nothing. I’m just a woman. Just not to you. And you never just a boy at school to me, you know.”
Thomas hugged her, and she hugged him back. Other patrons and the waitress were probably looking at them, but Thomas didn’t care. He kept his eyes closed and cried silently for what seemed like forever, until Lilith disengaged. “Do you want to go back to my place?”
“What?”
“I have to leave my car here because I’m low on as and don’t get paid until tomorrow, and I still need to pick Molly up from school later, but if you don’t mind driving, I think we should go back to my place.”
Thomas looked deep into her eyes. Something about this felt wrong. He was still a married man, another unavailable man couldn’t be good for her and certainly was wrong for him, even if his wife had gone there first. But that seemed to matter much less to him right now that what felt right about this. He loved her. He’d loved her for years. And he wanted her, body and soul, inside and out. He took his wallet out from his jeans and threw some money on the table for the coffee and a tip, and Lilith took his hand and they started to walk out of the diner. Then, time and everything else seemed to freeze, except for Lilith who turned around, and looked at the Thomas still sitting in a booth, the Thomas who was jumping and watching this memory unfold as, soon, all of the memories from his life came back. And he panicked because he knew exactly what happened next. Lilith walked up to that Thomas, raised his chin up with her hand, and planted a gentle kiss upon his lips. “It’s almost time to wake up, love.”
Then came the flash.
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Thomas was driving the car to Lilith’s home, while she sat in the passenger seat. This was finally going to happen, Tommy and Lily, together. The sadness and uncertainty from the diner had been replaced by an almost giddy sense of anticipation, as Lilith brushed her hair back behind her ear in nervousness and Thomas maybe had his foot a little too heavy on the gas in anticipation of the afternoon they would share together. He looked over to her, and she looked beautiful the way the sun streamed in from the sky through the passenger side window, and backlit her head in a golden halo. That’s when the impact happened, and as Thomas flew through the windshield, and glass flew in every direction like hail, he felt this was what he deserved.
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Awake. He struggled to open his eyes, but soon he was able to, and Thomas found himself in a hospital bed, his head aching, his hands and legs on fire, and his chest tight from something encased around it. His eyes adjusted to the light, and he saw Alicia, sitting beside the bed in a chair, look right at him. “Don’t try to move,” she said, her voice eerily devoid of emotion. “You broke nearly all of your ribs.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Two days,” and then, with no warning, “Lilith’s dead.”
Though it all happened in his head, Thomas was too cried out to shed any more tears.
“I don’t need an explanation,” Alicia continued. “You betrayed me in your heart long before I betrayed you in another man’s bed. It doesn’t excuse what I did. I knew, maybe not consciously, but I always felt you never really loved me. It was like you dated me with one foot outside the pool, ready to jump back to her the minute she’d come calling on you. You left your desk drawer unlocked. I found the letters hidden in your notebooks, and the photos. Don’t worry, I didn’t damage them. I’m not that cruel. But I’m leaving you.”
Through the pain in his chest, all Thomas could answer was, “I understand.”
“You were my Lilith, you know. You were the friend I kept hanging out with hoping you’d fall for me. I fooled myself into thinking you did. If I hadn’t, maybe I would have found someone who truly appreciated me. Loved me. Now this cancer’s probably going to kill me and I”m going to die alone. It should have been you who died in that crash, Thomas. What’s going to happen to her little girl?”
Alicia stood up, collected her purse and some tissues she had left, balled up and full of snot around her from however long she spent by his bedside crying while he was in his coma. Thomas looked at the woman he had promised to spend the rest of his life with, and wondered how he could have allowed himself to do so many stupid things, which lead to so much pain now. He wanted to apologize, but he knew it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. His words meant nothing against his actions. He merely nodded to her, and Alicia began to cry, and walked out of the hospital room. It was her permission to leave him. Even though he was hurt, even though it would take him months to recover, he wasn’t going to make her do for him what he didn’t do for her, which was to sit by as he recovered for support. He’d let her divorce hm, and hopefully find happiness with Julian, or someone else. He just hoped she could beat the cancer for that to happen.
He wanted to fall asleep. He wanted to go back to the world he had created for himself where he was married to Lilith and they were happy. It was the world he might have had if he’d grown the balls to tell her how he felt in college, or decided not to chew her out, but to stand by her when she got pregnant. Hell, maybe if he had left his wife instead of sending clandestine letters, everything would have turned out differently. But it didn’t matter. He made the choices he made, and he lay in bed. Alone. Broken.
And somewhere, he thought he heard glass cracking.
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(comment on this)
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10:30 am - The Cracking of the Glass : Part I (Short Story)
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The first thing Thomas could hear was a crunching noise not too far from his face. Soon, the other senses started to fill in the gaping hole in his sensory perception. Feeling was next, and pain shot through every part of his body. His head was numb, sure, but his chest felt raw and wet with the blood pooling under him, and his legs burned hot. He must have braced the impact with his hands, he though to himself, as both were palm-down on the asphalt, raw and scuffed with bits of glass under them. That was what the crunching sound was, footsteps coming toward him on the ground, stepping over bits of broken glass. “Can you hear me? Buddy, can you hear me?”, came the other sounds on top of that, but Thomas mostly focused on the crunching and crackling of the glass as he tried to open his eyes.
He felt someone place a hand gently on his back, trying to turn him around ever so slightly, to get a look at his face, but even that tiny pressure caused pain to shoot down his spine and into all of his extremities, but he was barely conscious and only elicited a small moan. “Can you hear me,” came the voice again, “Can you open your eyes?”. Thomas tried, a first only a sliver, and then light poured through and he reflexively shut them again. Okay, try again, he persuaded himself. This time his lids opened just enough to get a blurry idea of where he was. It was a sunny day, with nary a cloud in the sky. Even he could see that from his vantage point laying on his stomach on the road. He couldn’t look behind himself to the right, but judging from the jersey barriers he was on the highway. As his eyes focused more he saw the glass, windshield glass, in tiny fragments like snowflakes littering the ground around him, and the female EMT who still had her hand on his back and was still trying to say, something, to him that he couldn’t quite focus on. Thomas figured he had hit his head, which was causing his confusion. He registered the blood pooled and sticky under his right cheek, warm from the hot pavement below him.
“I found his wallet. It must have flew out when he went through the windshield. His name’s Thomas Reilly, aged 29.” Thomas was grateful he overheard the man, who was somewhere outside of his line of vision, reading him his name from, he presumed, his license, as Thomas couldn’t remember anything about himself. Thomas. That was his name. He must have really hit his head to lose that part of himself. He concentrated, tried to see if he could remember anything. There was something important, just out of reach, that he needed to remember. It came to him, somewhat, and he mumbled it.
“What’s he saying?”, the male voice asked, and then came into focus as he kneeled next to the EMT, who placed her ear to Thomas’ mouth.
“He’s asking about a woman. What happened to the woman?”
“Oh, shit. Get him up and into the Ambulance.”
Thomas barely registered what happened next, his consciousness, or maybe just his focus, fading in and out. One moment he was still lying there, the next he was being strapped to a gurney, his head placed in those padded orange things he remembered seeing in medical shows. Funny how he could remember that. He saw a body bag being zipped up, registered seeing some long, brown hair inside of it before it was closed up. Was that the woman? Was she in the car with him? Or did she hit him? Did he hit her? He could barely form the questions in his head, but when he could it just made him feel sick, and he wondered if it was best to just fall back into the dark oblivion of unconsciousness. Maybe he’d remember things when he woke up. Maybe that would be a worse place than where he was now, or maybe it would be better. He didn’t know.
He heard the doors to the ambulance close and siren clack on. The female EMT was doing something above him, shining a light in his eyes or checking his blood pressure or something. Whatever EMTs do. Was it wrong to think she was kind of cute, maybe too young for him to be reassured she could take care of him. The pain in his head was getting worse now. He reckoned his hands and his chest got most of the impact when he flew from his car, but he must have bumped his head at some point. He could breathe fine, all things considered, so if his ribs were broken they weren’t puncturing his lungs. Maybe he would be okay, the damage mostly cosmetic. He was glad he couldn’t see himself.
He heard the sounds of glass cracking and panicked. It brought back an image. He was driving, and he hated driving, especially on the highway in the middle of a warm, sunny weekend day when everyone was out and about. But he did it for her. Who was she? He couldn’t quite make her out in the memory, even though he remembered looking at her numerous times, sometimes stealing glances out of the corner of his eye because he was too chickenshit to take his eyes completely off the road for too long. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and neither was she, he could see that. Stupid. He didn’t usually do that. He could remember that. Why was today different? The sounds of glass cracking grew louder, and he started to resist the straps on the gurney.
“Please be still, Thomas,” the EMT pleaded. But he couldn’t. He was scared. And while he couldn’t see glass, it was as if everything in his field of vision began to crack. He could see a small line progress from the top of his vision all the way down the EMT’s face, and soon it broke apart, not the face, but his entire sight, and the pieces of what he saw fell down like glass, elaving only blackness behind it until...
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He woke up. There was no pain, but he felt light headed. He wasn’t in the back of an ambulance anymore, that’s for sure. He wasn’t laying down either, he was sitting upright in a chair. There was a weight on his shoulder, and when he looked over there was a mass of red hair. Someone was sleeping with their head on his shoulder, and she smelled like lilacs. A television was mounted from the ceiling playing some inane morning show, and people were sitting all around him reading magazines or texting, otherwise looking bored out of their skulls. This was a waiting room, in a hospital or a doctor’s office or...something. But that didn’t make sense, Thomas thought to himself. He should be in a hospital room, in a bed, if he passed out in the ambulance on the way to the ER. And why was there no pain? He looked down at his hands and saw them not scuffed up or cut. They were a bit sweaty, but otherwise no worse for the wear. It was as if there was accident at all.
The woman sleeping on him groaned and lifted her head up, rubbing her eyes behind a pair of glasses rather thick for her young, narrow face. She opened her green eyes and sleepily asked, “How long have we been waiting?”
“I...I don’t know,” Thomas stammered out.
“We have to be next. It feels like we’ve been here for hours.”
As if on cue, a nurse came up to them with a clipboard in her hand. “Alicia Reilly? The doctor will see you now.”
Reilly. Thomas remembered the office saying that was his last name. So who was this redhead, Alicia? His wife? His sister? Whomever she was, she stood up, adjusting her purse higher onto her shoulder. She was tiny, maybe five feet tall at the most, and skinny. It was a contradiction that she looked both frail and yet strong at the same time, but tired, very tired. Thomas stood up and followed both this woman and the nurse down a hallway into an exam room, where they would no doubt have to wait again. The woman, Alicia, sat on the table, her ass briefly sliding on the paper they put down, the same paper a butcher wraps meat in. Thomas remembered always having though that and how sick it was. As if patients were just meat to their doctors just as pork or beef was to a butcher or the meat people at the local supermarket. Why could Thomas only remember trivial stuff like that? Now who he was, or what the hell was going on here. He chose not to make a scene and ask questions, just play along and hope for answers. He knew he wasn’t the patient, though. Alicia was. The nurse called her name and she sat on the table instinctively, with him taking the chair next to it, holding her purse and a coat he assumed was hers judging by the color, pink.
The nurse closed the door behind her, and Alicia let out a yawn. “I hope it’s not too much longer. Are you nervous?”
“I don’t know. Should I be?”, Thomas replied. He had to play it safe with his answers.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure if I should be worried, or if that does me no go, or...oh, I don’t know. Only one of two things is going to happen. The doctor is going to walk through that door and say either ‘You dodged a bullet’ or “You’ve got cancer’, and the answer isn’t up in the air, like any wishing or hoping will change the results. The answer’s there. I just haven’t heard it yet, and no amount of worrying is going to change the outcome.”
The door opened and a rather youthful doctor, he would look barely forty if his hair weren’t completely silver, stepped in, and closed the door behind him. He had a manila envelope in hand, Alicia’s chart or file or whatever, and Thomas could tell by the barely contained look on his face that the news wasn’t good. The doc pulled up a stool from next to a counter filled jars of tongue depressors and the like, and sat down. “I’m not going to dance around it Mrs. Reilly. The biopsy confirmed breast cancer.”
Alicia squeaked and maybe mumbled a weak “no” before she started to cry. She was rather contained, Thomas noticed, not shaking or sobbing, not even a shoulder tremble, just crying, some snot dripping from her nose, and the doctor handed her a tissue for that. Thomas, feeling the need to do something, stood up and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him like he was her rock. “So what now?”, he asked, knowing she couldn’t ask the questions that needed to be asked right now.
“Well, we don’t think it’s spread too far just yet. I’d like to schedule to have the entire lump removed as soon as possible. That way, if we catch it early, we can save the surrounding breast tissue and avoid a mastectomy. We caught it early, and that’s something to be optimistic about. Your wife was smart to come in for that mammogram when she felt the lump. Many women try to ignore or it or put it off, and by the time they come too me...well, things don’t look so good. But I think I can get you into an OR as soon as this weekend, and I think we have a real shot of nipping this in the bud.”
She’s my wife, Thomas told himself, in his head. His wife had breast cancer, and he couldn’t remember her. He couldn’t remember how they met or when they get married or when he fell in love with her, and now she might be dying, no matter what this doctor might be saying. None of this made sense. Just minutes before he was in a car accident, and he was with a brunette. Then again, he couldn’t see her face. Maybe his wife used to be a brunette, and dyed her hair red? Or was this a memory? Did he fall asleep and was dreaming something that already happened and this came later? But he woke up here? Was the car accident a dream? A memory? And how could he be so selfish to be thinking about this when the woman leaning against him, trying to capture some strength, was sick.
Some questions and answers later, and Thomas and Alicia walked out of the exam room, with Alicia dabbing her eyes with a tissue, though by now the tears had stopped. Thomas held the coat open for her so she could slide her arms through the sleeves. She reached into the pocket and produced a set of keys with he placed into Thomas’ hand. “Would you mind driving, hun? I know you hate to, but I can’t right now.”
Thomas looked at the keys in his hand and froze. He saw himself hitting..something, and flying through the air onto the hard ground below and he trembled. That’s when he heard the cracking. Almost like a can of soda being opened or someone stepping on some leaves, but now quite. He looked over at the window looking into what must have been the nurse’s longue, with various men and women in blue scrubs drinking coffee and socializing around a table next to a yellowed fridge that was once white. Cracks were appearing from nowhere in the window. The cracks spread from the window to the wall, like there was an earthquake ripping through the building, but it was always just the tiny sound of glass breaking. The crack worked it’s way across the wall and down to the floor, making it’s way toward Thomas down the ugly grey carpet that lined the hallway, and he felt Alicia touch his arm. “Are you okay?”
The crack stopped at the tip of his shoe, but then it worked it’s way up his leg, and he felt the same burning in his legs he felt as he lay on the highway pavement. It got to his chest and he felt the blood pooling under it, even though he was standing upright. This didn’t make sense, not one bit of it. And when the crack got to his face, and he felt numbness, and his vision broke away again like shard of glass, he let the blackness take over him. The calm.
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Giggling. Thomas could hear giggling. He opened his eyes and was nose to nose with a child, whose blue eyes were opened to their fullest extent. Thomas jumped back a little in surprise, hitting the back of his head on a wooden headboard, and the child, who he now saw was a blonde girl of maybe eight years old, just laughed more. “I scared you, didn’t I?”
Thomas heard a groan, and looked to his left to see a woman laying face down under the covers next to him, her face turned away from him but he saw the brown hair. He flashed briefly to the image of him laying on the ground in a similar fashion, and then to the woman who was sitting next to him in the car just before that happened. Was this the same woman. The shade of hair looked similar. The woman rose up on elbows and looked at Thomas and the child. “She can never sleep on a Saturday,” she said, not entirely unamused, but still obviously wanting more sleep.
“Can I have some cereal, Tommy?”, the girl asked him.
He looked to the woman, who turned over on her back and shrugged. “Don’t want to disappoint your biggest fan, dear.”
She was beautiful, early 30s, the bags under her eyes and lines in her forehead just beginning to show her age, but only seemed to make her more radiant to Thomas. Who was she? Was he cheating on his wife. The child called him Tommy, so he wasn’t her father. The woman was undoubtably her mother, and the child was familiar with him, so this wasn’t something casual. Taking any excuse not to have to examine this any further for the time being, Thomas stepped out of bed, attired in a T-shirt and sweat pants, and followed the skipping little girl into the kitchen. The girl sat at the kitchen table and beamed a smile at him. “Can I have some apple juice too?”
Thomas looked through the cabinets aimlessly until he found a box of Fruit Loops and a cereal bowl. He presented the box to the girl. “Is this the kind you want, sweetie?”
She nodded enthusiastically, and Thomas poured her a bowl of it. She picked some of the Loops up individually with her thumb and index finger and munched them daintily until Thomas walked over to the drawers below the kitchen counter and procured for her a spoon. He then found the glasses, found one with Disney princesses on it, and poured her a glass apple juice from the fridge. When he placed it in front of the girl, she smiled up at him with multicolored bits of food between her teeth and said “Thank you” with her mouth full. Thomas couldn’t help but smile and made his way back to the bed, plopping down on it.
The woman moved closer to him, placed her head on his chest, and wrapped an arm around his waist. “She’ll be calling you daddy before you know it.”
The girl’s my stepdaughter, Thomas thought to himself. This meant the woman sleeping on him was his wife. But the redhead in the doctor’s office was also his wife. He had to get more information without alerting anyone. “Did you think it would take this long?”
“She always liked you. She was a little jealous of you when we told her we were getting married. I’m sure you remember that time she used your dress pants to fingerpaint on”.
Thomas let out a small laugh as if he did, but he could recall no such event. He looked around and took in his surroundings. Their bed was rather large, and located in the middle of what was otherwise a living room. He assumed the place was a one bedroom, and that bedroom belonged to the child, necessitating the studio apartment set up of the living room being a bedroom or himself and this woman who was apparently his wife. His other wife. Across from the bed was the door and the couch, and to his right the entertainment center. The kitchen was adjacent, and he saw a hallway beyond it which presumably lead to the kid’s bedroom and a bathroom, maybe one other room too for the couple’s clothing.
The woman sat up a bit and looked into Thomas’s eyes. “Are you scared?”
“Of what?,” he asked. There were so many things he was scared of right now, and yet oddly comfortable in this woman’s arms, even if for all intents and purposes she was a stranger to him in this moment.
“You married a single mom. Most guys just buy into life with a woman when they get married and build a family from scratch. You jumped into a ready made, furnished family. I don’t want you to feel like a resident guest here. This is your house, your family. That little girl in there loves you and I know you love her. I know we’re only a couple months into this, but we knew each other a lot longer. I’m just scared sometimes that maybe you didn’t really want this.”
Thomas saw a vulnerability in the woman’s eyes that he guessed wasn’t normally in there. Everything about this woman seemed strong, confident, but maybe part of that was an act. He kissed her on the forehead, and then she kissed him on the mouth, and it became a deep, slow, passionate kiss. When they separated, Thomas knew this was a woman he could love, or could have loved, or maybe did love and just couldn’t remember it. But she was right. Something about her, about this, scared him. He just didn’t know what. “I want this,” he told her.
The girl came back into the room, nibbling on the tips of three fingers as if she walked in on something naughty and could barely stifle a giggle. The woman turned toward her. “Did you finish your cereal, dear?”
“Yes, Mama.”
The girl ran and jumped onto the bed and crawled over to fit between Thomas and the woman. “Mr. Thomas Reilly and Mrs. Lilith Reilly, do solemnly,” she had a hard time pronouncing that word, “swear, to love each other forever and give each other many kisses.”
His wife’s name was Lilith. Or at least this wife’s name was. He smiled at the girl, who looked at him and Lilith with the beaming affection only a child with unconditional love can see. Thomas thought to himself that this hard to be a dream, that domestic bliss like this only exists in the wet dreams of the people who make Hallmark TV Movies, and maybe that’s what he was scared of. He was scared that this was a dream. The other worlds of car accidents and wives with breast cancer and pain might be the real world, and this was just a place he was escaping to, and any moment it might be ripped away like the bad worlds were, and he might never come back here. So he hugged his family, even if was only a temporary family for now, and he closed his eyes.
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Hours passed and he was still here. Lilith had taken the child, whose name he had ascertained was Molly, to buy new clothing for school and he had bene left in their home, HIS home, left to his own devices. As his wife in this life kissed him goodbye, she whispered into his ear to enjoy his “time alone”, and with a sly smile on her face Thomas assumed she was referring to him having the privacy to masturbate, which in a home shared with a child was probably a rare occurrence in his life, he ventured to guest. In a room past the kitchen he found, as he expected, a small half-bedroom which appeared to double as a study, which would really be a generous term meaning a computer and a modest desk for it to be stationed on, a closet filled with Lilith’s clothing, and a dresser, which upon a casual examination of its contents, Thomas found to contain his clothing. He sat at the computer and firstly attempted to search for any record of his car accident, but nothing came up which suitably matched the details of what had happened to him. He also searched for anything that could explain what was happening to him, visions of cracks that came from nowhere, jumping from seemingly one life to another, but found nothing except some science fiction stories and links to films with similar content.
He also searched among the folders in the computer which were labeled to be his, assuming that in this life he, as many males do, had his porn stashed on his computer. In a folder marked “Thomas–Ivy” he found hundreds of nude picture of Lilith, and only of Lilith. Thomas wondered to himself what man would only have pornographic pictures of his wife and no one else on his computer, but after a further examination of the files under his name he concluded that indeed, his wife was the only woman he apparently wanted, or needed, to see in this light here. He assumed the photos were taken by himself, as the pictures showcased Lilith looking comfortable, safe, and often times playful, except when specifically going for a serious or sexy look on her face. Her body stimulated the part of Thomas they were meant to, and as he examined the large but natural breasts and they way they hung realistically from her body like a real woman’s, yet not sagging by any means, or the stomach that was flat but not toned to ridiculous extremes like the women who model for such photos professionally, he instantly knew why his wife, or THIS wife at least, appealed to him so. She was a real woman, not an idealistic fantasy, and yet excelled in all of the areas of a real woman to in fact become his very ideal. And so it made sense to him that his wife would be the only woman in his fantasies, as no fake porn star or no amateurish barely legal girl could ever truly compete for his heart or his loins the way this woman could.
He quickly closed the folder when he heard the door open and Molly run into the house holding numerous plastic bags filled with the purchases of the day. She had run into the “office” with a smile. “Want to see what mama got me, Tommy?”
Lilith appeared in the doorway behind her daughter, smiling but looking tired and frazzled. Thomas stood up and said, “Sure thing, Kiddo”, and saw Lilith smile, knowing she could hand off the child to her husband for at least little while as she could decompress from a day of running from store to store with her.
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By the time evening was well under way, Molly long since gone to sleep and Thomas and Lilith in bed, her reading a magazine and he watching the TV from the odd, sideways angle the bed’s position relative to the set allowed him to, Thomas was hopeful the cracks would never come back. This was the life he wanted, and he didn’t want to jump back to the worlds of car accidents or sick wives or hospitals. He almost didn’t notice when Lilith placed her magazine on the floor beside the bed and sidled over to his side of the bed to cuddle. “Did you miss me when I was gone today?”, she asked, asking him quietly into his ear, her hot breathe making the tiny, delicate hairs on his neck stand up ever so briefly.
“Well, I had some photos to keep me company,” he laughed.
She laughed along. “I still can’t believe you did that. Deleted all of your porn for me. But I guess it was a fair deal. I wasn’t comfortable with you getting aroused over other women, but you still needed something to get you off when I wasn’t home or in the mood, though luckily for you I’m rarely not in the mood. Do you remember what you said to me when I asked you to delete it all?”
“I want to hear you tell it,” Thomas answered, playing it cool to not set off an alarm bells.
“You said, ‘Honey, you know I love you, but I gotta be able to jack it on occasion. So if you want me to get rid of years of this stuff, you better give me some of the hottest, spank-worthy stuff you got in you’. Fair is fair. But do ever get tired of jerking off to the same pussy you’ve fucked hundreds of times?”
Thomas rolled over atop Lilith and began to kiss her neck. She squirmed and cooed under him in delight. He whispered into her ear, “Never”, and as they made love, Thomas felt more at peace with himself than he could remember, even if what he could remember wasn’t much. When they had finished, and the lights were turned off and Lilith lay in his arms asleep as he too began to drift off, he was too wrapped up in his own bliss to hear the cracking noise which had begun.
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It was still dark when Thomas opened his eyes. He looked over to the clock on the bedside table and saw the clock red a bright, red “3:30". It dawned on Thomas slowly, through a fog of still being half-asleep, that were no bedside tables in the home he shared with Lilith, and he shot up in a sitting position before his brain even registered that he was no longer in that home. The window to his right let in enough moonlight for him to appraise his surroundings. He was on the second floor of a two story house, judging by the branches on the tree just outside the window. The carpets were beige and the walls white, with the shadows from that tree stretching out on the walls almost like, well, like cracks, causing Thomas to involuntarily shudder. Directly in front of him was a long bureau, and above that a wide mirror that stretched to show off almost the entire length of the room. He saw his face for perhaps the first time he could remember. The cop at the accident scene said he was 29, but looked younger, maybe early 20s, though some beginning wrinkles seemed to betray his true age from his otherwise youthful face. His hair was short, but had an unkempt look that made him look he didn’t shower much, though he assumed he could chalk that up from just having been asleep.
He heard a soft moan next to him, and a woman rolled over and turned on her bedside lamp. She sat up and it was Alicia, and Thomas almost sighed, at least relieved that it wasn’t someone new this time. “What wrong, baby?”, she asked him. “Can’t sleep.” She fumbled with her left hand for her glasses and placed them on while her right hand rubbed Thomas’s chest in a consoling fashion.
“I guess not.”
She sat up, and Thomas was surprised she was wearing a flimsy silk pajama top that did wonders for the contours of her small but firm breasts. It was a few long moments before he realized he was staring. “You’re worried.”
He raised his eyes to meet hers. “Very much so,” he answered, the sentiment honest, despite the omission of the reason being tantamount to a lie.
“The doctor said,” Alicia began, pushing the thin strands of the top from her shoulders down her arms, and letting the top slide down her torso to reveal those breasts, “that he thinks things will be okay. I know how much you love these,” she motioned with her head to her bust.
Thomas leaned forward and kissed her, ignoring the brief pang of betrayal he felt for a moment and the flash of Lilith’s face that lingered on the inside of eye lids before Alicia’s tongue entered his mouth. His hand found it’s way to her right breast, the one without the lump, and their mouths disengaged. “Would you still love me if I lost them? If things didn’t go well and they had to cut them off?”, she asked him.
“Don’t think like that.”
Alicia’s face grew stony, and she slid the straps of her top back up and around her shoulders, covering her chest. “That’s not an answer.” She shrugged Thomas’s hold off of her and put her head in her hands. “You seem so distant lately. At the hospital yesterday there was a minute where I thought your brain just went into a different dimension or something. I’m scared, Tom! I don’t want to have to do this on my own!”
“You won’t, you’re not on your own.” Thomas felt real guilt now. He didn’t know what was real, if he had ever loved this woman or if there was an entire life here he couldn’t remember, but he knew he had a connection to her. She was beautiful, sure, but it was more than that. He searched his mind desperately for something, anything, a memory or a sense, that would make him able to comfort this woman the way a loving husband should comfort his soul mate when she was sick and vulnerable. Then there was a flash, like a camera going off in his mind. A college campus, during some indeterminate time in the past. He walked sullenly from one building to another on the way to a class he knew he would never be able to concentrate in. His heart was broken, but he couldn’t remember why or by whom, that part remained fuzzy. Alicia, almost a decade younger and carrying 3 books in her arms that seemed destined to be to dropped as she ran over to him, appeared as if waiting from him. She had been there for him, Thomas realized. She was the friend waiting in the wings, hoping he would one day see her love for him. This was that day.
The flash died down, and Thomas sat next to a different Alicia, one trying not to cry from sadness and anger. He wrapped an arm around her. “Don’t think for a second I don’t appreciate you. You were always there, when everyone and everything else fell by the wayside. It’s you and me against the world. Always has been. And I don’t care if you lose your breasts or your hair or your nose falls off. I’m here with you, FOR you.”
Alicia smiled a tiny smile. It was what she wanted to hear, but she didn’t think the words were entirely genuine. Not that it was a lie, per se, but the emotionality wasn’t completely right. It would only be when they woke up the next morning that she would realize what was wrong. He didn’t use the word “love” anywhere.
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Thomas woke up the next morning in the same bed, Alicia dozing soundly beside him. He planted a kiss on her forehead, not quite knowing why, thinking maybe it was a sense memory of something he did often, and got up, the clock reading 9:00. He left the bedroom and saw the upstairs consisted only of another bathroom and a study for himself. No kids in this universe, he thought to himself. He entered the study with the goal of finding out something about himself in this life. The large, heavy okay desk was indicative of money. He was well-off, but the suburban nature of the house in general indicated not by too much. The desk was bare save for a computer and a small desk lamp. The walls were lined with shelves covered with books, most of them non-fiction hardcovers about history and politics. Framed along the walls under these shelves were various pictures of himself and Alicia : Kayaking, leaning against each other in a restaurant booth and smiling, and other such poses. They seemed happy, but how much can you really tell from photos. A framed college degree was on the adjacent wall, indicating he had a Master’s in Journalism. Other degrees revealed Bachelor’s in Journalism and History. Curious, he pulled one of the history books off the shelves that had particularly caught his eye and, sure, enough the spine showed the author as one “Thomas Reilly”. The book was about suppression of religion in 20th century Communist regimes. Thomas considered for a moment if it seemed out of place that he was the writer of history books, and came to the conclusion that it felt right. While he couldn’t remember many details about himself, now that he focused on it he seemed to have a lot of knowledge of history and current events in his head.
He took stock of the books and found that three of them were authored by him, maybe a dozen were compilations of articles and essays to which he contributed, and the rest were solely the works of other authors. At only 29 he must be doing pretty well for himself to have this house and this kind of resume, he thought to himself. He wondered what Alicia did for a living. He sat down at his desk and browsed through the drawers. The contents were of no real consequence, pens and notepads, paper for the printer, some scholarly journals, etcetera. But of the seven drawers in the desk, the middle drawer on the right side was locked. Thomas considered this for a moment. Where would he hide a key? He assumed the reason it was locked was to prevent Alicia from snooping, as she was the only other resident in the home. So it would have to be some place she wouldn’t look. Not knowing much about Alicia, this line of thinking didn’t help him as much as he thought. He would have to come back to that later.
A flutter of movement caught the corner of his eye, and he looked up to see Alicia standing in the doorway, stretching her arms up into the arm with a decided “crack” from her joints. She was wearing different pajamas than the night before, these a slightly fizzy pink pants and a matching top with snap buttons down the middle. “I’m surprised I slept, all things considered, “ she said.
“Are you still upset from last night?”
“What?,” she asked him, puzzled look on her face and a yawn beginning to stretch her mouth open. “I hope they make me wait long before they get me into surgery. I’ve seen enough waiting rooms in the past few weeks to last me a lifetime.”
Thomas rubbed his face, confused, and it dawned on him that his face was scruffier than it had been the previous night when he saw his face in the mirror, more than a simple night’s sleep would account for. And wasn’t the surgery supposed to be that weekend? Then it hit him. He had jumped while he was a sleep, but not back to the world with Lilith, but a few days forward in this world, almost a week, at that. He stood up and moved toward Alicia, wrapping his arms around her waist and touching the tip of his nose to hers. “I should get dressed. What time do we need to get there for?”
“Eleven.”
“Ok.”
__
In few hours time, Alicia lay in a hospital gown and cap waiting to be wheeled into the OR for surgery, Thomas standing beside her, holding her hand. They were waiting for the anaesthesiologist to come by with some preliminary questions about her weight and other factors so they would know how much gas they would need to knock her out safely for the procedure. From there, she would be wheeled into the OR and put under while Thomas was to stay in the waiting room until ready to join her in post-op. Alicia seemed calm, for the most part, but Thomas sense intuitively, in the way only someone who has known and loved a single person for a long time, that she was more nervous than she was letting on, maybe even to herself. “It’s going to be fine,” he reassured her.
“I know. I’m okay,” she looked up and smiled at him, perhaps trying to convince herself more than her husband.
A youthful male nurse in blue scrubs sporting a black faux-hawk walked by, but stopped when he casually glanced over and saw Thomas and Alicia there. “Ally? Back so soon?”
He came over to the bed and Alicia beamed at him. “Hey Julian. Yeah, turns out I had a lump, so they have to cut the sucker out of me. Oh, this is my husband, Tom.”
Julian extended his hand and Thomas shook it, at first unsure why he felt a sudden, inexplicable surge of anger toward the smiling nurse with a chain tattoo running down his right forearm. Maybe it was the way his wife’s face lit up upon seeing him, an expression he had only seen on her face once since this all began, when she saw him on the quad in college in the flash he had. Maybe it was the obvious joy in her voice upon saying his name. Whatever it was, he didn’t expect to feel the emotion of jealousy this day, yet here it was.
“Julian was here when I came in for my mammogram and I see him every now and then,” she explained to him.
‘Well I gotta complete my rounds,” Julian said, “But good luck in there. I know you’ll do fine.” Turning his attention to Thomas, “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Thomas answer, trying to hide the angry fire behind his eyes and hoping he succeeded.
The nurse walked away and there were some moments of silence. “Ally, huh?”
“Yeah, he’s real friendly. The first time I came in and I was waiting for the doctor in the exam room he stayed in with me the whole time, telling me not to be nervous and telling me about the history of breast cancer with the women in his family and stuff. He’s a sweet guy”.
“Surprised they let him wear short sleeve scrubs with his ink. And what’s with the hair? That seems unprofessional. And all the products in it can’t be sterile.”
Alicia’s brow furrowed, and was on the cusp of saying something expressing upset when the anaesthesiologist showed up. And when he showed up, so did a cracking sound. Thomas squeezed his wife’s hand instinctively, and she briefly looked over to him before returning back to what the doctor was telling her and releasing his hand to sign some consent forms. The cracking got louder, but only Thomas could hear it, and soon he saw the cracks extend from the tiles on the floor, at first slowly like snakes, and then rapidly, breaking apart and crossing until the floors, and then the walls, looked like spider webs in the intricate design of jagged, black lines. Thomas closed his eyes as the room broke apart and everything fell away except in, floating in black nothingness, knowing he’d be somewhere else soon.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, September 12th, 2009
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6:35 pm - Storming (Short Story)
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Standing before a floor length mirror can be a trial when you hate the way you look. However, it is also a necessity if you plan to avoid appearance-related embarrassment once you step outside of your home, that safe place where you can be comfortable in the prison you have created for yourself and store the shit you have accumulated, and expose yourself to the constant eyes of civilian judgement. I take an assessment of how I look right now. A mop of dirty blonde hair spills over my face and I wonder if it looks cool or just skeevy. My thick, black glasses poke out from the strands like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water gasping for air. I have short sleeved, plain black T-shirt on under an open, button down woven shirt that’s red with green pin-stripes, and I hate that at least one person always calls it a “Christmas Shirt” when I wear it. I check to make sure my fly is button and zipped up on my faded blue jeans. Affirmative. And as I’m making sure my shoelaces are tied I hear a car horn from outside my house. That would be Lisa. I run a hand through my hair, knowing that does nothing yet unable to stop myself from doing so, and head out the door, locking it behind me.
Lisa’s Jeep is idling by the curb. I can see her through the passenger side window looking into her vanity mirror and applying lip gloss, puckering her lips together as I hop in. She smiles, flips her visor back up, and in a swift motion puts the car into drive and peels off without looking behind her to see if anyone was coming. I buckle my seat belt and though the Jeep is by and large very clean, I feel the stickiness of long ago spilt soda on the buckle. I wipe my hand on my jeans and Lisa asks me, “So, you excited?”
No, I think to myself. I am not excited. I hate parties, but when Lisa invited me I was left with two choices. The first option would be to sit at home alone and miserable, knowing that Lisa would be at a party full of douchebags, would likely get inebriated, and end up fucking one of them. The other would be to accompany her, be miserable at the party as I watch guys flirt with her and try to get in her pants, as I try in futility to make sure that, if I can’t stop her from fucking some guy who doesn’t deserve to fuck her, then at least prevent her from being date raped. I chose the latter. “Yeah, should be fun,” I lie to her.
It’s a thunderstorm party, the lamest excuse for a party I have heard in quite a while. I look out the window at he sky above us. It’s almost full dark now, but beneath the black-purple sky there is an almost limitless stretch of cloud-cover, to an extent that I can’t even make out where the moon might be. If the weather reports are correct, and despite the general conception that the local news weatherman is never right, I would hazard a guess that statistically he is correct more often than not, the storm tonight is set to be a doozy. By that I mean lightning, thunder, maybe some power outages. And rain, of course. How I love rain. It’s early October and already leaves have fallen onto the sidewalks and lay soaked and filthy in the gutters. I don’t know if hurricane season is over, but a hurricane that was downgraded to a tropical storm and then downgraded yet again to a normal storm made it’s way up the east coast just so that tonight it could create background ambiance for a drunken cadre of young people to listen to music. Until the power goes out, in which I shudder to imagine intoxicated partiers attempting to light candles. The host of this shindig, whom I’m sure Lisa knows though I somehow missed the pleasure of their acquaintance, probably didn’t think this party idea through.
As these thoughts wind their way through my head, my body is on autopilot. I mostly keep my head straight looking out the windshield, occasionally looking at Lisa politely as she talks. I register what she saying and respond with the appropriate comments verbally, but it’s meaningless small talk. I hear it but don’t register it. I don’t mind, though. I’ll take any excuse to be with her, to look at her, to have her confide in me. If she says something of importance I’ll break out of my current state. I imagine a little man in my ears taking notes like a court stenographer, and if certain words or topics of phrases leave Lisa’s mouth and enter my ears the little man will run his way to my brain and hand the notes off the guy in charge so that I, Alex, will know it’s time to give all of my attention to her and not get lost in the inner monologue of tragedy that consumes most of my conscious hours.
The car stops, Lisa tells me we have arrived, And I’m off of autopilot. When we’re out of the car I stand for a moment and take in what she’s wearing. Her short hair style covers some of the right side of her face, her lips shiny from the gloss. She has a tank top on that doesn’t show any cleavage but stops just above her navel to show her taut stomach. Over the top she has one of those denim jackets on that’s really more of a half jacket, or a third of a jacket, as it stops just below her bust line. She has tight black jeans on below those, so I know that when she sits down I’d be able to catch a glimpse of her thong if she were to lean forward. I’m guessing today’s are purple. “So who’s house is this?”, I ask, looking at the one level ranch we’re heading into. There cars in the driveway and a few against the curb in both sides of the street, with the other houses on this block ridiculously far apart, meaning a noise complaint for this party would be unlikely unless one of the neighbors is a particularly feisty and miserable old coot. Pity, I was hoping for an easy, early escape.
“It’s Jenny’s”, she answers. Jenny is one of two friends Lisa has who are both overweight nymphomaniacs. It seems to be a pattern that these girls flock to attractive girls like Lisa for a simple reason. Guys will come onto Lisa when she’s with them. The guys, if rejected by Lisa, will end up hot and bothered and upset that they struck out, and will boink the Jennys of the world as a 2 AM consolation prize. Jenny has tried to fuck me on several occasions after a night at a club, on hose nights I prayed Lisa would come home with me instead of choosing some prick with a six pack and overly gelled hair, and one occasion I was so weak and dejected that I let her jerk me off in the front seat of her car using some Purell from her glovebox that caused my pee-hole to burn after I came all over her hand and wrist. Ever since she’s wanted us to do more, but I know that if I fuck Jenny I’ll both be disgusted with myself and lose any chance of Lisa dating me, or even just hooking up with me. As it stands right now Lisa doesn’t know about the handjob, and Jenny’s not one to jerk and tell, lest her friends know how much of a slut she is. Lisa’s not exactly a prude in that department either, which I am an unfortunate authority on due to her propensity to confide in me and my inability to not NEED to know every guy she chooses over me in my maddening attempt to figure out what I need to do to change myself for her.
“Jenny,” I say. “Great”. I’m just full of lies tonight.
I hear music coming from the house as we make our way to the door and Lisa presses the doorbell. “I suppose we could just walk in, but that just seems rude to me,” she laughs, and I nod in agreement with smirk at how cute her laugh is and the electric current it sends down my body from my ears to my balls in a delightful tingle only tainted by my urge to hide it lest I reveal my feelings in some nuanced body language, as if she were a poke player who could notice from a twitch or an adjustment of my glasses that I want her.
The door opens and Jenny, all smiles with a cute or possibly ironic red bow with white polka dots in her hair, just fucking BEAMS at both of us. “The dynamic duo has arrived, hey guys!” She hugs Lisa briefly, and as I raise my hand in a half-hearted hello gesture she presses her body to me in an almost painful embrace and plants a sticky, newly applied Chapstick kiss upon my right cheek. When she finally disengages, she turns to Lisa and says “How did you manage to get ol’ sourpuss out of his cave?”
“I promised to flash him,” Lisa jokes, and we all laugh politely as Jenny steps aside form the door frame she completely fills and we walk inside, the light outside seeming to darken as we enter, though I’m sure that’s just my imagination. Either way, it’s officially night time.
Jenny’s house has a 1970s suburban feel to it. The floors are carpeted in Earth tones, the walls covered in faux-wood paneling, with most of the illumination coming from gaudy light fixtures on the ceilings or the sporadic thrift store lamps located on various end tables if they aren’t stand-up models. The living room is host to maybe 15 people right now, standing and chatting or sitting on the couch or love seat drinking. One girl dances in the center of the room in front of the stereo located on the top shelf of the entertainment center, with the music pouring from two fairly large floor speakers. Unlit candles or all shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of melted-ness are placed sporadically in every room from my vantage point, which looks into the living room and, on the opposite end, the kitchen, with a staircase right inside the door leading to the upstairs. I’m just happy there’s no candles on the carpeted steps, but even I know Jenny’s not that stupid.
Upon Jenny’s prompting we follow her into the kitchen for drinks. A possibly drunk couple are making out against the fridge tenderly, which I find sweet despite the cynicism I have wrapped around myself this evening. “What do you guys want? I have tequila, rum, vodka, Mike’s, Coronas...”
Lisa tells her she wants a Mike’s, I opt for the beer. Jenny retrieves them form the fridge while the couple kissing seem oblivious, or perhaps don’t care as they pause from kissing only to look into each other’s eyes. Jenny thrusts the bottle of beer into my hand with her huge smile, and I pull my key ring out of my pocket to make use of the bottle opener, opening Lisa’s before mine. “So is this everyone?”, Lisa asks out host.
“No. I’m expecting a few more people. I hope they get here before it starts storming. If they come in soaking I’ll smell wet rug for days.” She looks to me, and I think she’s waiting for me to rurn the phrase “wet rug” into a vagina joke, but I let it pass.
“Anyone I’d know?”, Lisa presses.
“Kyle’s coming.”
Fuck. I see Lisa’s eyes twinkle for a fraction of a moment and know that I’m fucked. By my estimates, Lisa and Kyle have slept together three times, possibly four. Kyle is 43 years of age and acts like he’s a senior in high school, though he looks like the mutated bastard child of a father with down syndrome and a mother who was a leather couch. He has numerous facial piercings in his eyebrows, ears, and nipples, and tattoos on his arms that I’m sure are to distract girls from his somewhat doughy center to his admittedly impressive “guns”. He usually keeps his hair in a greasy faux hawk and will use any excuse to be shirtless. He is the quintessential douchebag, and Lisa creams her panties over him without fail. I want to run into Jenny’s bathroom and cut my wrists right now, but instead I take a long, deep swallow of beer, and I hear the rain begin to poor outside.
“Goddammit! The rain’s started!”, Jenny exclaims as the people in the living room cheer at the start of the storm, and I ponder how drunk everyone else might be and someone turns up the music to compensate for the thunder that will most assuredly be forthcoming.
The doorbell rings and Jenny excuses herself, giving my arm a gentle squeeze as she passes by me. Lisa turns to me and gently taps her foot against my ankle. “Hey.”
“What?”
“You’re upset about something.”
“No I’m not. I’m just being quiet like I always am,” and as the words leave my mouth with the trace of an upward inflection, I know Lisa can tell I’m lying. We’re close friends, and despite her not seeming to realize my feelings for her, she knows when I’m hiding nearly anything else.
“Don’t bullshit me, Alex. Look, I know you don’t really want to be here. But you have to get out more. You’re never going to meet a nice girl sitting at home on your computer all the time.”
“I met you that way.”
“The exception that proves the rule, dorko”. She punctuates that sentence by playfully bopping me on the head. “Find some girl at this party you think is hot, wait til she’s tipsy or smoked a little, and try and take her upstairs. Jenny’s got at least 3 bedrooms in here. It’s been a while since I slept over when we were kids. This used to be her parents place before they got the condo in Florida”.
“I don’t want that.”
“You don’t want pussy?”
“No, I mean...”, and I need to choose my words carefully here, “...I don’t just want to bang some random skank. I want a girl who means something to me.”
Lisa considers me for a moment with her head slightly skewed to the side, and I begin to think I’m fucked. The curtain has come down and the Wizard of OZ has been revealed. She knows. Until she says “Well, if you want a girl who means something, you still have to say hi to a random girl. Finish your beer and grab another one. Liquid courage never fails.”
__
A couple more doorbell rings and a beer later Jenny returns while Lisa and I are making small talk with a short Asian girl who’s regaling us with the tales of some cartoon character Lisa has just gotten into, and I mostly just zone out and nod at the appropriate places. That emergency system goes and I’m rocked back to the moment when I see Jenny is followed by Kyle, who is flanked by a guy in his late 30s wearing a black T-shirt and stained jeans, and a girl who looks 17, if that, in a tight-fitting T-shirt accentuating breasts that are way to big for her amazingly tiny body frame, which she makes up for in being taller than average. Flecks of rain drip from Kyle’s goatee as he peels his soaked shirt off his body, and his male companion do that same. “Could you put these through the dryer for me, Jen-Jen? Man is it pouring out there!”
Jenny takes the shirts from the men after taking a moment to let her eyes linger on their bare chests, and leaves the kitchen. “You should take your shirt off too, baby,” Kyle tells the girl.
“I’m not wearing a bra, asshole. And it’s so fucking cold everyone in this place is going to know that,” she points to her protruding nipples stretching the black fabric of her shirt. Her anger toward Kyle endears her to me even more than the wet shirt clinging to her ample attributes does.
“So? I don’t think anybody would mind a little topless action. I know my man Alex wouldn’t.”
My stomach does a somersault as the attention lands on me. The look on the girl’s face, which spells revulsion, certainly doesn’t help matters, as if she’s stained just by the idea of me seeing her tits. Kyle slaps me hard on the shoulder and I try not to wince, looking up into his face. Our eyes lock and we size each other up. I see him for exactly what he is, but unfortunately, he can see me just as clearly. He knows I have a thing for Lisa, and he hates that he has to put up with me in order to hang out with her. However, he’s smart enough to know that he needs to feign an affinity for the best friend if he wants to stay in Lisa’s good graces and continue to fuck her, so he acts like I’m his buddy in front of her, and we’re just the best pals in the universe. I can’t call him out on the facade, and just tell Lisa what a piece of shit I know he is, as that would likely reveal my feelings for her or, at the very least, cause her to have some animosity towards me for not liking this man who she is inexplicably enamored with. So while I may fantasize about punching him in the cock so he will collapse to the floor, thus allowing me to climb atop him, rip each and every piercing from his body one-by-one, and pound this carnival sideshow piece of shit into a bloody pulp because I hate him with every fiber of my being, and I hate how Lisa deems him worthy to be intimate with her, to be inside her body as close as any human being not performing surgery on her or gestating in her woom can ever be, yet I am not and will never be.
I push my bloodlust deep within, and it chokes me. “Hey, Kyle.”
He introduces his male companion as Steve, one of his poker buddies, and the teeny-bopper as his girlfriend, his girlfriend for fuck’s sake, Tammi, with an “I” at the end. She ends up storming out of the kitchen when Kyle turns his attention to greeting Lisa with a kiss on the hand like some French Aristocrat greeting the wife of a head of state. I almost feel like following her, but Jenny comes back and blocks the exit behind her. “Shirts should be dry before the party dies down, assuming the power stays on,” she announces.
“No rush, darling,” Kyle says, and Jenny practically coos at him.
“You guys want something to drink?”
Steve, who until now has been blissfully silent, asks “Do you have any weed?”
Lisa chimes in. “Oh, I could soooooo use a smoke right now.”
“Well,” Jenny answers, “I don’t have much left, but I have some. We better go upstairs to one of the rooms, though, otherwise I’d have to share it with everyone here.”
“That’s a capital idea if I ever heard one,” Kyle says. “Shall we?”
Jenny leads the way out of the kitchen up the stairs, with Steve behind her checking out her ass. Kyle waits a moment for Lisa to pass me, and they head up side by side until they have to climb the stairs single file, Kyle behind her to both check out her ass and keep me from doing the same. As Lisa passes him, he gives me a wink, which has the same effect as if he were a dog pissing on her. It tells me he knows I want her, that she’s his, he’s going to fuck her tonight, and I can’t do a damn thing about it. I hate that he’s right.
___
When we get upstairs to Jenny’s bedroom Kyle and Steve make quick work of sitting on the bed on either side of Lisa as Jenny retrieves her weed and red bong from the closet, leaving her and I to sit on the floor, backs against the wall across from them. Once the bong is equipped with water and the herb, Jenny passes it to Lisa and Kyle breaks out his lighter to torch it up. Lisa takes a long, drawn out hit from it, holds, and exhales with only two tiny coughs disrupting what is otherwise a gentle stream, followed by her giggling. The lights flicker with a clap of thunder and Jenny goes “Oooooo, spooky”.
Lisa passes the bong to Steve, and Kyle leans across Lisa, taking the opportunity to glance at her chest while her head is turned up to the ceiling enjoying the first hit of pot, and he lights it for Steve to take a massive hit off the thing, reveling him to be a pro when it comes to call things cannabis. “How you feelin’, baby?”, Kyle asks Lisa.
“Pretty good,“ she says, her voice full of silk and a giddy sexuality. Steve hands me the bong and I have never needed a hit more in my life.
Kyle merely passes his lighter to Jenny, who sparks it up for me, and I take a longer, deeper hit than an amateur like me should, feelings the smoke burn my throat and fill my lungs up with fire and as I exhale I cough like I’m hacking up half of my body and the room save for Steve laughs and Jenny light-heartedly taps my back like she’s burping a baby. “That’s good man,” Kyle says, “coughing helps it get you higher”. Paging Dr. Douchebag.
I try to pass the bong to Jenny, but with a mischievous look on her face he says “I wanna do a shotty. Alex?”
“I dunno...”
“Come on, Alex,” Kyle presses, and suddenly I see where this going but am helpless to stop the freight train from getting to the station.
I do another hit, but let the smoke fill my mouth, and Jenny leans around me, her elbow digging into my lap painfully, and she latches her lips to mine like a leach and I blow the smoke into her mouth as she sucks it from me hungrily, giving my lips a once over with her tongue as she disengages to exhale. She I hold the bong out and Jenny passes it up to Kyle along with the lighter, and I anticipate the next moments with dread. “That looked like fun”, he says, and hands the bong over to Lisa while almost covertly meeting my eyes and widening his grin. Lisa takes a hit, and Kyle pulls her close to him to lock his lips around hers. She starts coughing as Kyle had no interest in taking the smoke, but instead full on launches his tongue down her throat, and my heart feels like someone has reached inside and is squeezing it to see how much pressure it would take to make it burst. When they disengage Lisa playfully slaps Kyle’s chest in a mock how-dare-gesture, and takes another real hit for herself. It doesn’t escape my notice that Kyle is making an effort not to get high. When she passes the bong to Steve for his second hit, I excuse myself and walk out of the room, and I hear Kyle making a joke about me not being able to handle the weed, or something to that effect, as I close the door behind me.
I head to the bathroom, my heart racing and tight in my torso. When I open the door Tammi is standing there topless ringing her shirt out into the bathtub, curtain pushed to the side in obvious haste as evident by two of the hooks hanging off the shower rod. I’m too upset to be focusing on her tits, spectacular as they would be under any other circumstances. I’m about to walk right out, muttering a weak “sorry” behind me, when she says, “No wait, stay. They’re just boobs for Christ’s sakes”.
I stop and close the door behind me. “I didn’t mean to..”
“I know, it’s fine. You can piss in front of me and we’ll call it even.”
“Um-“
“Joking, kid. I’ll be out of your hair in a second.” The lights flicker again. “Go ahead, ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“What do I see in Kyle?”
“Why would I ask you that?,” I ask, my confusion a blessed relief as it distracts me from what might be going on Jenny’s bedroom right now. “The age thing?”
“No. Because by getting my answer you think you’ll get HER answer, the girl you’re with. You love her, don’t you?”
I take a deep breathe, and part of me is relieved I can talk about this with someone. Even if it is Tammi with an “I”, tits akimbo and wet in front of me. “Does it matter?”
“It does to you, obviously.”
“I mean does it matter. My feelings aren’t returned, otherwise something would have happened a long time ago, at least sexual if not romantic.”
She walks up to me, wet shirt in hand, and tosses it on the counter behind me as she stops mere inches from my face, her tits pressed against my chest. “Is your dick hard?”
“What?”
She reaches out and cups my groin in her hand, realizes it’s half-hard. “You smell like pot, but I don’t think that’s why you’re only at half-staff. Most guys in this situation, 16-year-old girl-“
“-You’re 16-“
“16-year-old girl topless and naked, they’d be raging and ready to go. Pot could explain it. Or the fact that you care less about the girl with her hand on your junk and more about the girl in the other room with Kyle.”
The mention of his name clears away the fog in my head and Tammi takes her hand off me and takes a couple steps back as she grabs her shirt from the counter and throws it back on over her head. “So what do you see in him?”
“Chicks like older guys. Makes them feel more grown up and mature themselves despite their insecurity. Plus daddy issues. They like a confident, strong protector type, which you, my boy, sure as hell ain’t. Sadly, I’m a cliche just like all the others. Unlike your girl, though, I’m self-aware. I know he’s a prick, I know he’s using me so he get off on fucking a jailbait piece of ass at his age. All that hardware in his face, he’s the opposite of us girls. He wants to feel young again, so he’s playing at being my age when he could be my father.”
This girl isn’t at all what I expected her to be like, and I think she knows that too. I wonder if she can see into my mind, into my soul. Is she really just some teenage girl who’s complicit in being some older guy’s fucktoy, or is she more than that? “What do I do?”
“You can’t make her fall in love with you. You probably couldn’t even get her to fuck you no matter how much shit you pump into her system. So unless you’re willing to fuck her when she’s passed out, you have to move on or learn to be okay with just being her friend.”
“And Kyle?”
“He’ll get bored with her, just like he’s almost completely done with me. You grow a tolerance for one drug, or one piece of ass, you jump to the next. But the thing is, Kyle doesn’t matter. There will always be a guy like him ready to take his place inside your girl. You were in her life before them, but it’s up to you if you want to be in her life during and after them. Maybe she’ll get dumb and marry one, or let one knock her up, or maybe she’ll find a nice guy who she still won’t like because he’s not you.”
She walks past me and opens the door, gives me one last, regrettable look over her shoulder, and closes the door behind her as she exits. I want to cry, and my tears would drown this town faster than this storm ever could. I want to se the world devoured in my pain, in my suffering, and as I look into the mirror at my angry, bloodshot eyes on the verge of tears, I hear a knock at the door, and before waiting for a response, Jenny walks in. “Pot too strong for you? It’s the good orange shit, not that shitty weed Lisa buys.”
She comes over to me and starts rubbing my back. I so do not need this right now. “Jenny, stop.”
She moves closer and I feel her hot breathe on my cheek, and then my ear, and she whispers, “Do you want me to go down on you?”
I back away quickly and, I’m sure to her, rudely. “Jenny, I don’t like you. I let you jerk me off once because I was drunk, but that was a one time thing.” Her face begins to crumble, becoming my own face from the mirror only moments before, and I can’t be to her what Lisa is to me. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be angry, it’s just....I don’t feel that way about you.”
She laughs, a brief, curt laugh and she walks over to the toilet and sits. “I know you don’t, Alex. None of the guys I do anything with like me. I’m the fat girl. Don’t try to spare my feelings, I’ve accepted it. Why do you think I fuck so many guys?”
I stumble over some words trying to improvise an answer that won’t make her feel bad but has a ring of truthfulness to it, but I come up with nothing. “I guess I never really gave it much thought, Jenny.”
“How else can I get guys to give me the slightest bit of attention? I’m not some fucking nympho like everyone thinks it’s just...sometimes, I just want to feel like the pretty one. I want to feel like Lisa must, when all the guys fall all over her. Even if the guys who go with me don’t think I’m pretty, they treat me like I am when I let them do it to me. Even if they call me names after it’s done. You can understand that right? You’re lonely. I never see you with girls.”
I can understand. She’s me, just another form of me, desperate to be loved at any cost, even if it kills us inside. I walk over to her, and kneel before her so my face is almost level with hers. I lean in and I kiss her. My eyes closed, I imagine Lisa, and I kiss her like I’ve always known I would kiss Lisa if she ever gave me the chance to. This way I know Jenny will feel loved, if only for a minute, because she’ll feel the love I have for Lisa flow from my mouth to hers, and for the length of that kiss, she’ll feel it’s her that I love, a love so overpowering it threatens to break us both. When I stop and pull away, her eyes stay closed an extra moment, and I stand up. “I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“For what?”
“For seeing you the way girls see me.”
I walk out of the bathroom and close the door behind me, then slump back against it. The door to Jenny’s bedroom is diagonal from this one. I ponder whether I should go back in there, and have to face the increased flirting of Kyle and Lisa alone, or just head downstair and wait for them to be done with their smoking. Maybe Tammi’s still downstairs and I can pick her mind more...no. I have to make sure Lisa’s okay. So I move to the bedroom and open the door.
Lisa’s on all fours on the bed, her pants laying on the floor in a heap, and her shirt pulled up over her breasts but still on. Kyle is behind her fully naked and fucking her from behind, sweat dripping from his brow as he pounds into her with brute force. Steve is in front of Lisa with his T-shirt on but bottom-less, sitting up on his knees, penis erect and in Lisa’s mouth as Kyle’s thrusts pound her further up his shaft, then back down, then back up, as Steve pays more attention to lighting and taking a hit off of the bong. I have never wanted to see a woman naked more in my life than how much I wanted to see Lisa, but there is no sense of joy in me as I watch her, high out of her mind, being taken from both ends.
Kyle notices me in the doorway and smiles, slapping Lisa’s ass for good measure causing her to moan around Steve’s cock. He wants this to hurt me, and he fucks Lisa harder while glancing back from her ass, to me, and back to her ass again, repeatedly. He’s having what I would die to have, but to him it’s just another silly girl with a lukewarm hole to fuck, and he wants me to know this. It makes this conquest more thrilling for him to know he’s fucking the girl another guy loves, and that guy can see it, and it will destroy him. For a while all I can do is stare, and part of me thinks this is a nightmare and I’ll wake up and be in my bed covered in a cold sweat but it’ll be okay because this isn’t real. But I know it is. It’s only when Kyle pulls out and begins pressing the head of his cock against her asshole that I walk away.
The sound drains from everything around me, and I feel the corners of my vision become black, and blackness gradually begins to seep from the corners of my eyes toward my nose and engulf my sight, engulf the world, engulf me in complete and utter darkness. Somewhere the lights go out and people cheer and the music stops and candles are being lit, and none of it matters to me. I head out the door into the pouring rain and I’m soaked within seconds, and I don’t know where I’m going but I think and hope I’m heading in the direction of my house or a bus stop or something. I see lightning from between or maybe behind the clouds, and they light up the sky in brilliant white and blue as the thin vein of electricity flows through the sky, and I almost hear the thunder, but it’s more the shadow of a sound than a real sound. My legs feel weak and I feel I might collapse, and I don’t know if it’s a bad reaction to pot or what has transpired or both. And I feel myself falling forward into someone’s lawn, but arms warp around my waist and hold me up and somewhere a voice is telling me I’m too heavy for her and I have to stand up. I do, and the voice holding me spins me around and it’s Tammi, soaked yet again, her hair sticking to her wet face in strands as the wind blows the rest helter skelter around her. She yells something to me and my face must not register because she moves her mouth to my ears and screams “Get in my car!”
She takes my hand and leads me to a car against the curb just behind Lisa’s, because I must have only taken a few steps at most, and she opens the door and pushes me in, holding my head down the way cops do when they put people in the back of their cruisers. Time seems to jump ahead and we’re driving down a road and the rain is coming down so hard you can barely see anything through the windshield even with the wipers on high. “Where do you live?”
“What?”
“Home, domicile, pad, where do you keep your fucking stuff?”
“Is this Kyle’s car?,” I laugh, totally high now. “Grand theft auto”.
“No, I drove him and his stoner friend, and they can walk back in this fucking storm. I’m done. I’m guessing you saw what I saw. Your friend being filled out like a survey”.
I want to object to comment but the blackness consumes me and I pass out.
__
My eyes see muted yellow-red, and I gradually realize that’s what you see when your eyes are closed and there’s brightness beyond them. I open them and find myself damp, laying on a couch in the living room of a spacious and bright home. There’s a bed comforter over me acting as a blanket and I come to realize that under it I am naked as a newborn. “Hello?”, I call out, confused and somewhat afraid.
Tammi walks in, dressed in Happy Bunny PJ pants and a pink tank top. She had a coffee mug in her hand and takes a sip. “You’re up. Finally.”
“Where am I?”
“My house. You passed out before I could find out where you live. I checked your license but didn’t know where your address was, so I took you here. You were kind of awake and able to lurch in here, but I couldn’t get you upstairs to the guest bedroom, so I hope your back’s okay from the couch.”
I sit up, belatedly realizing again I’m naked, and shifting the blanket to cover my crotch. Tammi giggles. “I saw it all last night big boy. And I do mean BIG. Don’t get too excited, I’m not going to fuck you, but I was expecting you to be tiny. I’ll get your clothes from the dryer.”
She’s about to walk away when I tell her, “Thank you.”
“Well I wasn’t going to let you pass out on the lawn and probably drown. What a stupid way to die that would be. It just stopped raining twenty minutes ago”.
She leaves the room, and in a few moments comes back with my clothes. “Where can I change?”
“Again, I saw it already. If you want to thank me give me another show. You already got a 10 minute look at my tits, hun.”
I stand up and let the comforter fall away, and begin putting my clothes on. Tammi looks at me with what I think is amusement, which is at a much needed improvement over the disdain I thought she saw the other night, but I guess that was more for Kyle than me. Fuck. Kyle. Last night crashes back to me in a wave. When I’m fully dressed I sit back down and put my head in my hands. “What am I going to do?
“I’m not your life coach, dude. You have to figure that out.”
“How could Lisa...”
“Let two jerks use her. Think of it this way. If you walked in on a guy friend of yours getting a double blowjob from two girls, would you be upset? No. You’d slap him on the back, say ‘right on”, or some such shit, and that’d be that. Luckily, I doubt your friend will remember what you saw so you won’t have to fake encouragement when you see her.”
“She didn’t even notice me as far as I can recall. How can I see her after that?”
“You love her? Then you’ll see her. Because no matter how much it hurts you to see her do these things, and this shit will happen again and I won’t be there to pull you out of the storm so you better get used to it, you’ll stay by her. As sick as you feel right now, about what you saw and what she did and how she’ll do THAT but not you...you’d feel sicker to not know her. Or to have her hate you if you confront her about this, or with your feelings. So you’ll suffer in silence.”
“And that’s it?”
Tammi nods. “Unless you meet another girl who likes you for you and you get over your little Lisa obsession. Or maybe Lisa will give you a pity fuck after all and you’ll get it out of your system and realize she’s not the end all and be all of my gender. I know, last night I said that would never happen, but I wasn’t aware she was a girl who’d go Oreo-center. Let me throw on some clothes, I’ll drive you home.”
__
When I get home Lisa’s voice is on my answering machine. She says she’s worried about me and wonders where I went. She even makes a joke asking if I hooked up with a hottie. I erase the message and don’t call her back. My head is aching dully and my stomach grumbles, but I’m too lethargic to eat anything. I sit on my bed and fall back and stare at the ceiling. I don’t know what to do from here. I don’t know what I have been doing all this time. Did I really think I could win Lisa over just by hanging on long enough, hoping she’d stop fucking assholes or they’d lose interest as she got older and went after the next generation of Tammis instead? Fuck, I don’t know.
I pull down my pants and reach over to the bedside table, where in the drawer is a bottle of Astroglide. I’m going to rub one out, guiltily to what I saw last night, only replacing Kyle and Steve with two of me, because my fantasies don’t have to conform to logic. Hell, me fucking Lisa doesn’t conform to logic. But all I have is my hand and my thoughts. And for four minutes, this won’t hurt as bad. And maybe after I cum I’ll figure out where to go from here, but probably not.
I’m hopeless.
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, August 9th, 2009
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3:30 pm - Can't Be Filled (Short Story)
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I’m standing in the airport just outside the roped off lines people have to walk through on their way to the metal detectors. People carrying and dragging luggage, taking out their ID so rent-a-cops can flash a tiny pocket flashlight over them to make sure their authentic, the lights and barely audible intercom voices and advertisements galore assault my senses. I don’t like crowded places, and I don’t like people. I slip my left hand into the pocket of my jeans and try to look as casual as I can without looking suspicious. Though I’m a rather inconspicuous and short white male, thin as a rail but more defined than my younger years, with black glasses to touch off my ensemble, I still have what is likely an unwarranted fear of being mistaken for a terrorist or spree shooter and whisked away by security. Of course, if I just stand in one place too long like a statue that would also be rather suspicious. I suppose it’s also possible someone here might recognize me from my movies. I seem to recall the way an older woman, maybe early 50s, glanced at me and smiled while her husband or whoever was scanning the signs overhead for the correct ticket counter.
I should probably just sit down, but when she comes out from the little hallway which passengers who have arrived at their destination pour out of into the lobby, and then into the crisp, Los Angeles summer night, I want to look as fetching as possible. I haven’t seen her in person in maybe a decade. I slip my hand out of my pocket briefly to check my watch. Her plane landed two minutes ago, and I remind myself even if she only took two carry-ons her gate may have been way the fuck at the end of the terminal, and even if both are the type on wheels you can drag, well, this is a big fucking airport to walk through.
I see her now. Her hair is still long. Well, I stay still because it was long that last time I’d seen her in person, but I know she had cut it and kept it short for some time in the interim. I had wondered if she would wear it down or in a ponytail, not getting my hopes up and expecting her to fly halfway across the country in pigtails, and see she did put it up in a ponytail for the flight. She has one carry like a purse, shoulder strap seemingly digging in so I see her adjust it more than once as her eyes find me and she makes her way in my direction. The other is being dragged behind her on wheels, and the angle of holding it makes each step forward rather awkward and somewhat amusing, if she didn’t look so tired, that is. I keep waiting for a smile to hit her face as she looks at me, any sign of pleasure that she is here, with me, but it doesn’t come. As if this were a game, I don’t smile either, but I’m sure if I could see myself there would be a twinkle in my eye that would betray my joy and enthusiasm that she is here, that she came her for me.
Suddenly she’s 3 feet away from me and stops, letting go of the carry-on with the wheels. “Hi,” she says, finally smirking a little. She consciously tries not to show her teeth when she smiles. That is why I like to make her laugh, when I can. She can’t stop herself from showing them then.
I respond “Hi” in kind, and for a long, awkward moment we just stand there looking at each other, until finally she makes a move closer to me with arms stretched out slightly, and we embrace for an uncomfortable and yet, for me, glorious hug. For a brief instant I feel the desire, no, the need, to pull her closer and make the hug last longer, perhaps uncomfortably long here in this place, surrounded by so many strangers having their own reunions, but I let the hug be momentary, and we split. I motion to the doors which spill out into the night, and as I take the carry-on around her shoulder from her in what I hope seems like a chivalrous gesture, even it is quite heavy and I’m sure she can see the visible strain I have trying to walk with it, a strain she didn’t showcase herself whilst carrying it, we engage in the usual small talk people do at this juncture. “How was your flight?”, “Are you jet lagged?”, etc. There will be time for substantive conversation later. We’re both on autopilot as we go through these motions. My thoughts drift to try and penetrate her thoughts, as if I were a telepath and actually capable of such a feat. But I can’t make anything out. Is she nervous? Bored? Angry? Anything? Does she want to be here, or does she feel she has to be? Did she come here out of a sense of obligation or guilt? I don’t know, and I’m terrified to know. But in a way I need to know.
When we reach my car on the 1st level of the parking garage, she stops abruptly in mid-sentence, recounting some anecdote about a creepy guy asking her for the time at her layover and then not leaving her alone, and is surprised or shocked by my vehicle. I pop the trunk and put the carry-on I’d been lugging in, and she almost literally shakes herself back to reality to fold her carry-on’s handle back into itself so she can hand it to me and I make it join it’s partner in my vehicle. “For a guy who hates cars,” she says, “you sure have a nice one.”
My vehicle is a silver convertible, ostensibly a two seater but it has a tiny backseat that could uncomfortably sit one or two people if I were to scootch the seats up a bit. I do hate cars and hate driving even more, but a producer I’ve worked with many times indicated to me that if I wanted to stay in a modest house, I couldn’t have a modest car. Not if I wanted to be with women outside of work, that is. There’s a certain lifestyle they expect someone in my profession to have, he told me. He was right. Many nights I’d walk into a club, a woman would recognize me from some film I made, and she’d be so impressed with the car that she wouldn’t care when she saw I lived in a one level house in a suburb just outside the San Fernando Valley. It’d be late, she’d have a few drinks in her, and the night wind blowing through her hair on the ride over here would leave her wet and ready to blow me even if I lived in a shanty town. Of course, I don’t tell any of this to my current female companion, who stands there expecting me to explain this apparent contradiction of a car as I close the trunk. I merely shrug it off and explain it’s part of my job, to meet the expectations of the public. Or some such crap. She’s too smart to buy it, but too nice to call bullshit on it, so she hops in and soon we’re off to my place.
___
Two weeks ago , I was sitting at my kitchen table drinking a green tea, and I had a guest. His name was Brian, and he was a reporter for AVN, which is Adult Video News for those of you not in the know. A producer, the same one who got me to buy my car, set up this interview to increase my profile. See, straight male adult film actors, which is what we prefer to be called rather then the more colloquial and frequently used moniker “porn star”, are pretty much ignored in the industry. We make far less then our female counterparts, which makes sense as they are the ones our audience is paying to see. The men are just meat props to thrust and be ridden. Of course, if a male star wants to be famous, or make more money, they can switch to man-on-man films, go “gay for pay” if they are straight off camera, but I could never do that. I didn’t get into this business for money or fame.
Brian, who looks barely old enough to watch an adult film lat alone cover them for our biggest trade paper, asks me why I did get into the business. I give him half of the truth. I tell him a height-challenged, skinny as a prick nerd boy can’t obtain sex with top of the line women on his own. I tell him that just because I AM a skinny prick doesn’t mean I HAVE a skinny prick. Quite the opposite. Skinny guys are missing a layer of fat above their pubic bone which, on most men, hides an inch or more of cock, and thus skinny guys appear to have larger penises, which is the only attribute that truly matters for men in my profession. As long as you have a big cock, it doesn’t matter what you look like. In fact, it’s better of you’re ugly. Porn plays into the fantasies of the male viewer, so if he sees a beautiful woman he dreams and creams about every night fucking a guy who looks like Ron Jeremy or myself, he thinks to himself “Well, if that girl will fuck that ugly loser, than she’d most assuredly fuck me” , albeit he probably won’t think it in exactly those words, especially when he’s 15 seconds away from busting his nut. Sure, there are male actors who are attractive to, your Evan Stones and James Deens, but by and large male straight porn stars are ugly guys with big cocks.
“But you’re aware you have a female following?,” Brian asks me.
I answer that of course I’m aware. Some women are what we refer to as “size queens”. They like big dick and they’re not ashamed to admit it. Some women have fetishes, they like hairy guys or guys with muscles or whathaveyou. My fans tend to be older women, your cougars, who like young men with boyish features because they remind them of their sons’ friends, or the younger emo-type girls who like skinny, pale boys with River Cuomo glasses. The latter are the type of girls I try to fuck in my personal life. I tell Brian to make sure he prints that last part, give the ladies who fit that profile who want to fuck me some liquid courage to approach me after reading that, perhaps. He laughs nervously and smiles, and I get the feeling I’m an idol of his or something. I’m 32 now and this kid could easily be me from the past. I still look only a few years older than him, when I’ve probably got a decade and some change on the guy.
He stops me in my tracks with an unexpected question. “What about love?”
“I’m sorry,” I reply, because it’s the only thing I can think to reply.
“You got into this business to get laid because you couldn’t otherwise. Is that a fair abbreviation of your answer?”
I tell him it is.
“So what about love? Is the sex enough for you? Have you been in love since you got into the industry? Have you ever been in love?”
I decide to answer him truthfully. Mainly because I’m still too reeling with surprise over the question to come up with a lie or a way to spin my answer to come out as sexy and charming as I’m suppose. I tell him yes, I’ve been in love, not since I moved to California and joined the industry at 27, but in my past. He presses for more details. Who did I love? When? Why didn’t it work out? I decide to shut him down. “Out of respect for the woman in question, I won’t go into detail. But suffice it to say this : Just because a girl cares about you, doesn’t mean she will fuck you. Just because a girl will fuck you, doesn’t mean she cares about you. And just because you love a girl, doesn’t mean she’ll love you back.”
Brian looks at me across the table for a good, long moment, and I can’t decide if he finds my answer evasive, enigmatic, or profound. He clicks off the mini-tape recorded I had forgot he was recording this conversation with, in fact I’m surprised people still use those in this day and age, and he stands up from the table, so I do likewise. He shakes my hand and thanks me for the interview.
Three days later I read the article and it makes me look really good. He lies or imagines that I was holding back tears when I answered the love question. I come across as a lost, hopeless romantic who just needs a woman’s love. That night I hit a local hot spot I frequently pick up girls in, one I just happened to drop the name of to Brian. When I get there the owner greets me and thanks me for the publicity. He tells me not many people read AVN, but the ones who do will certainly think it positive to visit a club that porn stars or either gender frequent. Ah, the joys of living in the porn capital of the US. He tells me I can have drinks on the house of life, and he hugs me as tight as one man can hug another without inserting part of himself in the other, which under any other circumstances I would find disturbing, but now I just laugh it up. He’s a big man, burly not fat, with a smooth bald head and always a grin that stretches from ear to ear. His club isn’t the biggest in the area, or the most happening, but he was the first friend I made when I moved out here, before I got my first big break, so I keep coming back. The interior is a dark red, almost a burgundy, a large bar to the left when you enter that stretches the length of the place and is often manned by two or even three bartenders. If there’s only two they are always exactly one very fit man, and one very tight woman. Something for everybody, as the owner always tells me with a slap on the back. If I hadn’t walked in on him in his office in the back one night banging a female patron in the ass, I’d swear he was gay. Though at the time, he did wave me in to join him, an opportunity I passed on, so who knows?
The majority of the space inside is taken up by a dance floor, which has tables and stools surrounding the periphery where people can sit and attempt to talk over the music, or make out, or whatever. It’s not uncommon for girls to get fingered on the stools even though everything is very much in plain sight here. I come here on the nights they place dance able rock music, but the owner usually alternates those nights with others for hip hop or top 40 shit. This night was a rock night, and I sat at the bar and scanned the crowd. Some of the patrons here recognize me and they nod in my direction or stop by and say hi, but they know to keep it brief so they aren’t cockblocking me. Some of the women here I have fucked, more than once, but they don’t get too clingy. That’s both a blessing and curse of being an adult film actor. No one ever wants to date or love you if you make adult films. To them you are merely a fantasy, or a lark. Something to try out so later they can bring up to their friends oh-so-causally that they once boinked a porn star. They can put on one of my movies where I’m drilling the pussy of some hot girl with a massive, engorged erection and they make their friends jealous. In a way, I’m providing a service. Some people buy bigger houses, or faster cars, or more expensive clothing to try and one up their peers. Some people, on the other hand, just want to chalk up better conquests. That’s where I come in. That’s the hole I fill, or one of them, at least. The flip side to this, of course, is that no woman wants to have a serious relationship with someone who has fucked hundreds of women, and who continues to fuck women on camera for money. And the women who are okay with it, well, they’re not the kind you’d want to settle down with, to be quite honest. But when you’re heart’s been broken to the point of no return, you learn to settle for what you can get. You pack your shit, move 3,000 miles away, and find out if your supposedly big dick is enough to get your foot and other appendages in the door in the adult entertainment industry. Are you big? Can you get it up and keep it up for hours while you’re filmed from many different angles while dozens of people stand off to the side rigging lights and holding microphones and adjusting camera lenses? Can you pop (cum) on command? If so, chances are you’re America’s Next Top Meat Puppet. No girl will ever love you, but you can bang a girl who’s 83% silicone in the backdoor for cash. Not a bad Faustian bargain, I suppose.
Scanning the crowd, I lock eyes with a young woman, maybe 19 or 20, short blonde hair, petite, 80s-style jelly bracelets offsetting her outfit of Hot Topic plaid skirt and a tight black top with spaghetti straps showing off B-cup breasts and pokey nipples. I know immediately that she came here for me. Something about the way she bites her lower lip and almost giggles as she brings the straw of her fruity drink to her lips while gently swaying to whatever Nu-Metal song is playing tells me she read the article and came here to fuck me. I could probably summon her over with a flick of my fingers, like a mafia don summoning his lackeys, but I decide to walk over to her, smile on my face. When I get to her I don’t even have time to introduce myself before she slips one arm around my waist, her hand briefly and tentatively brushing my boney ass, and she stretches on her tip toes to put her mouth by my ear, probably five feet tall max as I’m only a few inches taller than that, and asks me if I want to go back to her place, following the invitation with a small flick of her tongue on my ear lobe. I nod “Yes”.
Not long after that, following a car ride in her used Toyota from the mid-90s where she gushes on and on in a fangirl way about how she used to swipe her older brother’s porn stash as a young teen and finger herself to my movies, and how she moved out here to be a star, you know a REAL star not a porn star, no offense, and she can’t believe she’s hooking up with me. She talks too much for me to get a word in edgewise, save of a “yeah” and “you don’t say” to punctuate her sentences when she stops to catch her breath. At her apartment, which has clothes and unpacked boxes strewn about helter-skelter, she kisses me deep and hard and drags me into her bedroom, telling me her roommate is at her boyfriend’s for the night. We fall back on her bed and I break the kiss long enough to pull my shirt over my head, and fast as lightning her hands are on my belt, undoing it, and soon my pants are pulled just low enough for her to wrap her hands around my half-hard cock and free it from my underwear, and with two gentle squeezes I’m fully hard. She looks up at me and laughs before taking my cock in her mouth. What she lacks in experience she makes up for in enthusiasm, and I close my eyes and (think about the woman I’m driving to my place from the airport) let the pleasure take over me.
She stops abruptly and has a devilish look in her eyes. “If I don’t take any pictures, no one will ever believe this”. She takes a pocket digital camera off of her night stand and I let her take pictures of my erection, twitching from excitement and coated with her saliva. She takes pictures of it in her hand, then in her mouth, here eyes looking straight at the camera with a “wow” look, like “Wow, here I am at the Eiffel Tower”, except right now the tower is almost choking her as she tries to swallow more than she’s capable of. She puts the camera away as I remove her top, and she flips over on all fours. I lift her skirt up, give her ass a gently spank, and enter her pussy from behind. She’s every vocal, moaning and then screaming, until she breaks up my rhythm by telling me “I love you”. I continue drilling her pussy but I’m so flabbergasted that I have to ask, “What?” She tells me she read the article and knows I just want to be loved, so that’ll get me off, right? So with every thrust sending her forward, so close to the wall she almost bangs her head on it every time I hit her cervix, She says “I love you, I love you, I love you”, until I feel her pussy clench around my cock in her orgasm and I explode in the condom I don’t recall her slipping onto me. Good thing she did, as my mandatory 30 day STD test all adult performers need is a few days away. I’m usually not that stupid to forget to go safe with my hookups, but tonight I guess my mind was on other things.
After we’re done she tells me I’m free to spend the night and cuddle with her, and she’ll take me back to my car at the club in the morning. For some reason tonight I don’t find that patronizing, and I do just that.
___
We arrive at the house, myself and Aimee, and my female friend from the airport. I catch a few neighbors pulling their curtains to the side to spy on me and my latest female visitor. Most of them know what my occupation is, that they can type my screen name, Cyrus Crystal, into any search engine and see my cock in full HD glory. Here in liberal southern California most of them aren’t offended, but a few might be jealous. I get Aimee’s bags out of the trunk and we go inside. The previous ride over was mostly quiet as it’s hard to talk with the top down and the wind blowing. She makes a humorous comment about being glad she wore her hair up, otherwise she’d have hair in eyes and mouth right now, and I laugh politely. Once inside, she sees how humdrum my house is. Front door opens into small hallways with leads to the two bedrooms on one side and a bathroom on the other. To the immediate left before the hallway is the living room, and to the right is the kitchen, and that’s about all she wrote for my place. It’s small, it’s quiet, and it fits my stuff. I lead her to spare bedroom, which houses a full size bed and an overflow of books and movies I own, including some from my own resume. She jokes about whether I am going to giver her the “grand tour”, and I tell her I’ll let her get settled first. “Eric”, she calls after me as I leave the room, the first person to use my real name in my presence for years.
I step back in the room to see what she wants. She looks at me trying to find the words before finally saying, “Nothing. I forgot what I was going to say.” I smile and tell her she can take a nap if she likes.
___
A few days earlier I was on set preparing to shoot. By a set I don’t mean some studio backlot, but actually the rather expansive and large home of the director. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say about half the films I’ve done were simply in the homes, which could sometimes be classified as mini-mansions, of director, producers, or starlets in the industry. The other half would be sets because the film’s story would call for something more out of the ordinary. A short list of the more colorful roles I have played would include a pirate, a doctor, a ghost, a vampire, a pizza man (of course), a massage therapist at a tropical resort, and a knight. It’s like Halloween with cumshots. When I first started out in the business my physical appearance was my niche. In my first dozen films I played a variation of a nerd boy who, through various circumstances ended up fucking the cheerleader or the homecoming queen or the hot co-ed he was tutoring or whathaveyou. Imagine a pigtailed cheerleader who looks everyone of her 28 years and breasts as big as most real highschoolers’ craniums acting as if she’s bored while yours truly attempts to get her to pay attention to her calculus homework so she’ll ace the test, her mom will let her go to prom, and she can fuck the cute football star. But she gets bored and horny and desperate, decides to peel off the nerd boy’s clothes, is surprised that he was glad to see her and it WASN’T a calculator in his pocket, and they fuck like nasty pigs as the geeks watching this on DVD get to fantasize that this could have happened to them and they fap until cum shoots out their ears. Play into their fantasy.
After a while a producer, who liked to call himself “Jerry Fuckheimer” but was really named Marty, saw my work and decided to take me under his wing. He set me up with a personal trainer who gave me muscle definition despite my picky and unhealthy eating habits, so while I was still rail thin you could see the lines where muscles should be rather than having my chest look like a white erase board with nipples. I signed a contract with his little outfit to do X number of films a year for a six figure a year sum, and I shot approximately 2 films a week. Most of the actresses in mainstream porn weren’t my type, plastic surgery galore, make-up applied to every inch of their body to cover up ass pimples and ingrown hairs from shaving their pubes, uneven DDD tits and bleached assholes. Fake women who probably hated sex because of all the work they had to put into it. But every now and then, usually every 4th film if I had been one to keep track, I’d get my type. Natural-looking, girl next door types, or redheaded Goth girls with tattoos. On days where I filmed with those women I wouldn’t need to go out to the club after and pick up a real girl, and I wouldn’t have to close my eyes and think of Aimee to pop on their faces.
Preparing for a scene can involve any number of things. Less attention is paid to men, but women literally get make-up applied to every inch of them as directors make sure the lighting is just right to show off the glistening vaginas in just the right light. If anal is involved, women will usually use an enema the night before. Production assistants stand by with garbage bag sized ziploc bags full of bottles of lube, lip gloss, paper towels and rubber gloves to clean up various fluids, condoms though most productions don’t use them. If an actress forget her birth control, doctors are on stand-by with morning after pills. Tampons and pads are available, though most actresses are smart enough not to schedule a shoot on their cycle, unless that’s part of the film, of course. For me, it usually involves manscaping, shaving everything, having the make-up people apply various powders and shades to cover up pimples, blemishes, shaving cuts, birthmarks...anything that destroys the fantasy of perfection beyond what is meant to be imperfect. While the scene is being set up, lights rigged and such, the performers usually stand around and shoot the shit nude, or in whatever costume they will be wearing before they get nude. It’s not uncommon to see a man with an 8 inch erection jutting out in front of him standing nonchalantly by the Craft Service table eating a jelly donut. When I joined this business it was to get laid in ways I couldn’t otherwise, but the truth is most of these people find this job dull. The blue collar technicians and behind the scenes workers don’t give a shit. It makes no difference if they’re shooting “Weapons of Ass Destruction 23" or “Lassie 3", it’s a job. It amazed me on my first film when I’d see people standing off camera yawning while a woman was getting titty fucked on an ironing board, but there you have it. When you’re around something long enough, so matter how bizarre or out there or taboo, it becomes boring and matter of fact. So it goes.
When I got out of make up I made my way to the room my scene was going to be shot in, which if I had to guess was one of the directors living rooms, which had a lot of light pouring in from the sliding glass doors looking out into a very green and meticulously cared or lawn with tall hedges cut into exacting, geometrical shapes. I feel a tap on the shoulder and turn around to see a familiar face. Her name is Chloe, an actress I’ve worked a few times. I remember a time when we filmed a scene in the afternoon where I gave her an anal creampie, where you cum inside and let it drop out for the camera, and then later attending her daughter’s 8th birthday party in the afternoon, her husband being the man who directed that particular movie. It’s always odd to find out my fellow performers have kids. Some are so liberal they share what they do for a living with their kids, but most lie and come up with a cover story so boring it will discourage any follow up questions, at least until they’re teenagers and have to get teased in school when their friends dig up whatever movies their folks made. I give Chloe a hug, careful not to smudge her tit make-up so the hug is more akin to the way they make kids stand a foot apart from each other at a junior high dance, and we make benign small talk about how we’re doing as I inquire about her family and she mentions my interview with AVN. Chloe is one of the few women who found love in the industry and was able to make it work. Both her husband and her are allowed to sleep with people outside the marriage, with certain rules, and they seem to avoided any traps of jealousy. In most cases those who find love either stop acting and move behind the camera, or if they’re a woman they’ll switch from boy-girl to doing girl-girl films to make their partner happy. But in a profession where the intimate becomes open, the emotional becomes professional, it’s hard to find yourself anything more than detached from human connection as anything more than holes and plumbing and fluids and noises. Unless, of course, you’d felt love before, if sex meant something to you more before, and you’ve spent every waking moment trying to get it back no matter how much you try not to admit that to yourself.
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Aimee’s nap turning into a full night’s sleep, and the next morning she finds me sipping tea on my living room couch reading Newsweek. “How did you sleep?”
“Not bad. I usually have trouble sleeping when it’s not in my own bed, but I was so tired from the flight, well...”
I put down my magazine and slide over from my laying position with my legs outstretched to sitting upright, and Aimee sits in a chair off the side of the couch, facing me. I look into her blue eyes and wonder if I’m seeing sadness there. Maybe I’m really just seeing what I feel, a sense that I lost something years ago and even though what I lost is sitting right here in the room with me, in some sense, I’ll still never have it, not in the way I need it anyway. “It’s good to see you again,” I tell her, a weak attempt at starting the real conversation I know we must have.
“You too. Not that we ever saw each other in real life much before.”
This is true. Aimee and I met online, when I was in my early twenties in college studying to make films that were about more than showing genitalia, her raising a young son on her own a thousand miles away from where I sat. I was lonely, unhappy, and having a pen pal afforded me the fantasy that even if I could get a woman to like me in my general area, here was a woman I got along with who was smart and funny and gorgeous, and the only thing keeping us apart was geography. As the years went on she dated other men, I was able to obtain pity sex and couple of girlfriends who did nothing for me except alert me to the monster in my pants, but Aimee never strayed far from my mind. Finally, one day, maybe a year or less before I moved out to California, I flew out to meet Aimee. I went with giddiness and excitement with romantic and sexual fantasies of extreme naivety, only to find a woman who was not as enthused to see me as I had hoped.
One night we were in my hotel room, her mother watching her son, sharing a bottle of an alcohol I can’t recall save that it was bitter, but perhaps that’s just because my memory tastes that way as well. It wouldn’t be too long before I had to head home, and as I watched Aimee do a parody of a sexy dance in my room that was in actuality turn me on and thus not a parody at all, I asked her in a slightly slurred voice, “I want to be intimate with you”.
She stopped in her tracks, having been holding up her hair in mock sexiness she dropped it, and it fell upon her shoulders as she looked at me with the cocked head of a confused canine and asked me to repeat myself. I did, she sighed, and she sat down next to me. I don’t remember the specifics of what happened next. I just remember the bottom line : her answer was no. She gave the reason that she was going to give it another shot with her son’s father, and how she had originally been planning to sleep with me before this happened, and it was just bad timing, blah blah blah. I couldn’t take it. I flipped out and threw the bottle at the glass closet in my hotel room, shattering most of it, to what would later be the tune of $400.00 extra to my room bill. Aimee was scared and stormed out. The next morning she dropped me off at the airport without saying a word to me.
Months passed. Aimee married her son’s father, and we eventually feel back into the pen pal role, but it was never the same. What was once a steady stream of communication feel into a once a month, if that correspondence. She knew I’d be too jealous hearing about her life with her husband, which left our communications shallow when they were made. Despondent and feeling empty, knowing I was incapable of loving or being loved by anyone else, I made my goal sex. I would fuck as many women as I could in as many ways as I could, until Aimee was just another one of them. I succeeded in the plan in that I did do all that fucking, but I could never quite get past Aimee. I don’t think I ever believed I would anyway.
“How are you handling the divorce”, I ask her. She’s here. Time to beating around the bush.
“As well as can be expected, I guess. I get lonely at times, especially when my son is with his father. He’s 12 now, so he’s getting to that point where he wants to play sports with his dad more than he wants to be coddled by his mother, you know?”
I lie, not having had a father growing up, and tell her I get it. I don’t know much about her husband, but I hate him anyway, to have had Aimee and tossed her away. Part of me knows that’s not rational, that I don’t know what went on between the two of them, that my idolization of the woman will make me blame him even if he left her because she killed and ate his entire side of the family. But I don’t care. The man threw away the one person I would give everything to be with. “I’m glad you decided to come out here. I know we haven’t been as close since...since...”
“Since you flipped out and broke a closet?”, she laughs. A laugh that tells me she’s over it, water under the bridge, or whatever other cliche you can think of . I’m not quite as over it as she is.
“Exactly. I just figured you could use a vacation. I know all the hot spots. I’ll even go to the beach with you, even if tanning would ruin my image in the industry,” I joke.
“You know, I’ve kept up with your career. Watched your movies. Not ALL of them of course. There’s too many. I still remember how nervous you were that time you took a picture of your penis for me for the first time.”
“Yeah. You told me it was big then and I didn’t believe you. Thought you were just trying to boost my confidence. And you never sent me anything dirty in return either, I remind you.”
We’re both smiling now, remembering a more naive time for both of us. We’re still skirting around the main issue, but neither of us wants to bring it up first. So we dance this dance, the difference being I know where I want this to go, but I don’t know where she wants it to, and that loss of control of the situation is frightening. “Do you ever miss it?”
“What?,” she asks me.
“Us. Do you miss us? The rapport we had before I visited you.”
“Of course I do, Eric. But things were different after that and, well, sometimes you can’t go back. I mean, even sitting across from you now, with everything that’s happened, It’s nice but...it’s not the same. We’re the same people we were back then but, we’re not either, you know?”
“Do you know why I moved out here? Why I became a porn star?”, I ask her. No more dancing around now. “It’s because of you. I was so hung up on you that I had to try and force you out of my heart, out of my head. I thought if I could have enough women then maybe...maybe not having you wouldn’t hurt so much.”
She’s leaning forward in the chair now, ever so slightly, the corner of her lip curled like a little girl about to cry, but I know she’s more solid than me and I’ll cry way before she does. In that moment, her hair now down and messy form bed head, she’s so radiant to me that I almost can’t look at her, like I’m staring at the sun and if I look too long I’ll be blinded by the light. But I can’t peel my eyes away from her either. She asks me, “Did it work?”
“No. Fucking all of these girls is like a drunk trying to make it on non-alcoholic beer or something. I’ve slept with girls who were, no offense, prettier than you, or whatever, but it makes no difference. Because I thought this was about sex and that I just wanted to sleep with you, but it was never about that. It was....intimacy, I suppose. Needing to feel like I was special enough to be with you. Needing to know you returned some of the feelings for me, even if not as many or as strong as I held. I just, fuck it, I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”
She gets up from the chair and knees before me on the floor, taking my hands in hers, and I start to cry. “Are you in love with me?”, she asks.
“Does it matter?,” I ask back.
“I’m not as special or spectacular as you think I am, Eric.”
“And you think I am? You think I’m ANYTHING? I’m nothing! I’ve spent every moment since I left you trying to fill am emptiness that won’t be satiated. Fuck! I don’t even know why I asked you out here. I didn’t think you’d accept anyway.”
She gets up off the floor and sits beside me. She holds my hand and I try to not let myself become too much of baby, but I sense I’m failing in that respect. ‘It’s that article,” she finally says, after a long moment of silence. “He asked you about love, that reporter did. It got you thinking.”
I want to tell her I never stopped thinking about her. That it wasn’t the article. It was spooning Blonde Emo Girl to sleep that made me realize this was the most intimacy I had ever had with a girl, and how I hated myself. How I would like to just once sleep with a girl who means something to me. But I can’t. I would break down and cry more if I tried to say anything. So I just nod. It a simple enough answer, she doesn’t need the director’s cut of my emotional breakdown. She releases my hand and momentarily I fear she’s disgusted and leaving, but then she put both arms around me and hugs me, and I bury my face into her shoulder and sob. I realize now I’m not thinking or considering her feelings in the matter. Maybe she never liked me as more than a friend, cared about me and that was that. Maybe she played along with my flirtations all those years ago and THAT was the real confidence boosting effort. Maybe she doesn’t need this with all the emotional baggage she has of losing a husband. I whisper “I’m sorry”, over and over again as I cry, and I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for. She pulls away from briefly, and when I look up into her face to see what’s wrong she kisses me. As her tongue enters my mouth and becomes entwined with mine it occurs to me how little kissing I’ve done in my life, no matter how many women I’ve been with. I go with it, enjoying the taste of her my tears drying up as I try to shut my mind off and enjoy this melding of the object of my affection and myself. I want to ask her why she’s doing this. Pity, or desire? But it maybe that matters as little in the grand scheme of things as whether or not I love her, of which the answer to I can’t bring myself to answer yet, even after all this time.
I find my way on top of her, and she pulls my shirt off over my head, running her hands down my chest. My hands fumble, actually fumble, with getting her top unbuttoned and off even though I’ve done such actions effortlessly time and time again, part of me thinking she’ll back out at any moment. I realize she won’t when her shirt and bra are off and she pulls me down to her, sticks her tongue in my ear before asking “How do you want me?”
I tell her I don’t want anything funny or crazy. When filming they position and contort you into all sorts of uncomfortable positions to get the camera have a good look all the piston like in-and-out action. I don’t want any marathon circus fucking with her, I just want her. “I just want to be able to see your face, “ I tell her. “I want to look into your eyes.”
Our pants come off, then our underwear, and I sit up on my knees and look down upon her glorious naked body. Age has been kind to her, and it feels refreshing to look at a natural body that isn’t harnessed into a Barbie doll for mass consumption, nor is it the barely adult body of the college girls I’d been banging outside of my job. This is a woman. A real woman. The only woman that matters. I go down and take one of her breasts hungrily into my mouth, nibbling and sucking on her nipple so hard she’ll have bruise-like hickies on it for days. I make my way down her stomach with kisses, tonguing her belly button and feeling proud when she emits soft moans or I hear her breath become short at my touch, until finally I’m at her pussy. As I eat her out, I place the palm of my hand flat against her stomach, so I’m acutely aware of how good I’m doing by how much her body bucks and twitches to my technique. When she cums she lets out a long, protracted, accented moan that makes the peach fuzz of back and arm hair I have stand up like an electric current has been run through me.
I don’t wait for her tom recover. She’s wet and I’m hard and I insert myself inside of her, and I watch her eyes as she looks deeply into mine and I push further and further into her, until I’m at the hilt. I start thrusting and she puts her legs up in the air, pulling me deeper into her with her hands gripping my ass. I want to make this last forever, but I know it won’t. I’ve craved this for too long and I can’t contain myself. I kiss her more, and lick the beads of sweat off her neck as I drive into her with all that I have. She releases my ass and wraps her arms around me like a bear bug, and with a tight grip tells me to cum inside of her. When I do, it is heavenly, and I collapse upon her spent and sweaty and exhausted and partly crying. She kisses my forehead and I black out.
___
We’re back at the airport. All in all Aimee spent 4 days with me. We slept together 10 times in that period, and when we weren’t sleeping together I took her to various LA sites, the La Brea Tar pits, the walk of fame, all the gaudy tourist crap I’d never done even after all the time I’d lived here. Occasionally a woman would see us together and look jealous, or at least have a knowing little smile on her face. Now Aimee tells me she has to get back. I know this time together hasn’t meant as much to her as it has to me. I had tried to bring up the topic of her coming back, and she’d either deflect the subject or tell me something about how she needs to figure out her work schedule or when her and her husband have her son, and all reasons that are very legitimate and yet hide something I know deep down is true : there’s no future here. This was a one-off. For her, this was closure. She chose her husband over me, and after all these years that choice crapped out and she wanted to right what was, at least partially, and old wrong. Give the friend from the past what he wanted., needed, and she could satisfy her curiosity after seeing my movies and feel desired again after being dumped. Maybe she knows I want more, maybe she doesn’t, and maybe it doesn’t matter. I want a future with her I can’t have, that doesn’t even exist if there are infinite alternate universes where almost anything is possible. But the idea of her and me is too perfect, to good to ever truly exist in a world as shitty as this.
So she has her carry-ons and is about to get in line to go through security. She hugs me and we kiss, briefly and tastefully as far as PDA goes. She asks me again, “Do you love me?”
I have nothing to lose, so I decide to be honest this one and only time. “Always”.
I think I notice a tear in her eye, but then again maybe I just want there to be one. She smiles and walks away from me, and I leave rather then watch her go through security and disappear from view. Disappear out of my life. I can’t have what I want. I can’t get what I need. But I got something I never thought I’d get, which is at least a taste of that. Now, whenever I’m fucking some random girl in a film, I can use this experience to enhance my performance, make the camera think I’m as passionate about Tits McGee as I was, am, about Aimee. I have many holes to fill in my job, literal ones. But the holes in my soul will still remain. Some holes just can’t be filled.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, March 28th, 2009
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4:25 pm - PG-Porn
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Not many people read my last "real" entry. Too depressing? In any event, I won't write my next "real" entry until tomorrow, so I figured I'd break up the sadness by posting some funny videos, courtesy of James Gunn's "Pg-Porn" series.
Pg-Porn are parody porn videos not featuring any sex, just the set up of porn and diff payoffs.
The 1st is my fav, starring Jenna Haze, the porn star i saw strip live at a local club.
My 2nd fav is a parody of those misogynist "Bang Bus" videos.
And then we just have this awesomeness.
Hope they made you laugh.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Sunday, March 15th, 2009
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2:56 pm - Hide Behind An Empty Face
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Hey there,
Beware the Ides of March. So this isn’t going to be a “real” entry, which is why those of you not on my preferred list are able to read it. Instead, since my last two entries were both long and in-depth, and thus nobody read them, I wanted to post an entry more people could read so I can see a greater number of readers on my blog hit counter and feel less sad and alone. I’m a pathetic attention whore, lol. Well, I’m too bummed out to hang out with the few real life friends I DO have right now, assuming they would want to, because I don’t want to bring them down and annoy them and piss them off, so I seek attention from online friends. And since THEY aren’t reading my blogs (well, a few of you are...or at least skimming them to come up as hits, so thank you), I need to appeal to random looky-loos and stalkers. How y’all doing today? That’s right, I typed “y’all”. Deal with it.
Now I will scare you all off with a video of me shirtless. This is grosser than that “Two girls, One cup” video, lol.
Maybe it’s me, but I think I’m actually gaining weight, because my belly seems to be sticking out more there, beer-belly style. Sadly, the weight is concentrated only there because my chest is still flat and lacking anything resembling masculinity, with my ribs jutting out anorexic-like, and my arms are as thin as twigs. I should start lifting weights or something. If I can’t seem to gain any real weight, maybe I can be one of those skinny guys who at least as some modicum of muscle definition? I dunno. If it weren’t for my tattoo I’d still be deathly embarrassed to show myself shirtless at all. Now, not so much. I don’t know, there’s got to be some hot girls out there with a skinny, depressed, emo, geek-boy fetish, right? No? F**k you! (Public entry, have to censor, lol).
I posted a bunch of pics on my Myspace and Facebook of me shirtless (Friends Only pics) as well as some pics of me wearing some of my newer T-shirts (viewable to everyone), but I thought I’d post 3 of my better-looking shirtless pics here. I’ll post more pics in my next “real” entry, which will probably be on Tuesday, since I doubt I’ll be doing any for St.Patrick’s Day (I sigh at lack of green boobies in my life...green is my favorite color and boobies are my favorite anything, lol). In the meantime, those on my preferred lists on my blog sites should go back and read my last two “real” entries. And COMMENT for Xenu’s sake, will ya? Lol.
Okay, so since this isn’t a “real” entry, I’m going to use this opportunity to re-post two articles I have wanted to re-post but are too long to tack onto my already super-long “real” entries (the last two were 20 and 18 pages, respectively, when typed out on WordPerfect). The 1st is Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” essay on a film called “Exotica”, which is my 3rd fav movie of all time and really speaks to my current situation in life right now. The second is something my internet friend Tiffany posted in her Fubar blog about how to keep a successful relationship, which I thought those of you who are not hopelessly single like me would enjoy. LOTBSIS.
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Sex for money sometimes conceals great sadness. It can be sought to treat wounds it cannot heal. I believe that may happen less in actual prostitution than in the parody of prostitution offered in "gentleman's clubs." Whatever is going on is less about sex than psychological need, sometimes on both sides. Atom Egoyan's "Exotica" is a deep, painful film about those closed worlds of stage-managed lust.
It is also a tender film about a lonely and desperate man, and a woman who is kind to him. How desperate and how kind are only slowly revealed. In a technical sense, this is a "hyperlink movie," in which characters are revealed to be connected in ways they may not know about. But Egoyan, who also wrote the film, surprises us in how slowly he reveals the links and even more slowly reveals what the characters know about them. When the film ends, you sit regarding the screen, putting together what you have just learned and using it to think again about what went before.
The critic Bryant Frazer wrote that after the film played in the 1994 New York Film Festival, a woman asked Egoyan what had happened at the end. Egoyan was "visibly perturbed" by the question, he said, but finally responded. Frazer writes, "Here is what the last scene in the film meant, he explained, his four- or five-word declamation a stark and numbing negation of the gentle, almost languid spirit of the film, which invites the audience to its own discovery. The 'what happened' is simple enough to explain, but you can't really understand it unless you're fully caught up in the cinema when it unfolds in front of you."
Frazer is right: There is no mystery at the end, except the mysteries of human nature that Egoyan evokes. What you think about those will define the film's importance to you. For me, they make it a cry of sympathy for people suffering from loss and guilt, and also an affirmation about how others are wiling to understand them. A film can only get so far by simply stating its message; if the message is that easily defined, why bother with the film? "Exotica" does what many good films do and implies its troubled feelings. Nothing is solved at the end, except that we have learned to understand the characters.
"Exotica" takes place in a Toronto strip club, but not one of those hellholes of expense account executives and drunken bachelor parties. This club seems to fill the special needs of the men who go there, although we learn only about one. He is Francis (Bruce Greenwood), who every night buys the company of Christina (Mia Kirshner). She looks young, dresses in a school uniform, opens her shirt before him, and then they talk softly and intensely.
Watching this is the club DJ, Eric (Elias Koteas), who stands on a perch above the action and contributes an insinuating commentary on the lives below. Also watching, from behind one-way mirrors, is the pregnant Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), who inherited the club from her mother. The decor creates a tropical club heavy with palm fronds, the music slinks between the tables, the lighting is an oddly muted garishness, gloom cut with neon reds, greens and blues. Egoyan's camera glides around the room, pausing to regard Francis and Christina. Whatever they're talking about hardly seems to be sex and seems to absorb them equally. The DJ notices this.
Other characters are implicated. The opening shots of the film show customs officers scrutinizing an arrival on a flight from the Far East, through a one-way mirror. This is Thomas, whom we discover is smuggling rare macaw eggs. At the airport, a man suggests they share a ride to town and pays his share of the ride with two ballet tickets. Thomas gives one of the tickets to a good-looking gay man outside the theater, and they eventually spend the night together. The man was one of the customs officers. He confiscates the eggs, but wants to see Thomas again. Thomas' pet shop is audited under suspicion of illegal imports -- by Francis, who later wants him to help eavesdrop on Christina. You see how the subterranean connections link.
I have made "Exotica" seem to be all complexities. Following the connections is straightforward. Deciding what they mean is the challenge. Egoyan has not unfolded the plot as simply as I summarized it, and he uses other suggestive characters. There is Tracey (Sarah Polley, then 15), the young girl Francis hires every night to baby-sit while he is visiting the club. But it's other than baby-sitting. At the club. he's a client of Christina, who dresses as a schoolgirl; does this suggest he has a sexual interest in Tracey? What does Tracey's father think of the arrangement?
Enough of the plot. Let's draw back to admire Egoyan's method. If we do not at first understand all of the relationships between the characters, they do not all understand them themselves, and in certain ways never figure them out. That provides the film with hidden emotional currents as powerful as those that are visible. When you think through the film later, you realize how much some of the characters never know, and yet how important it has been to the outcome. Egoyan isn't weaving these strands simply to divert us with a labyrinth; he is suggesting the hidden ways in which we affect other lives with our choices and behavior even though unaware.
Beneath everything pulses the atmosphere of the club Exotica, its promise of sexuality masking deeper needs and obsessions. The grave voice of Leonard Cohen and the starkness of his songs, played by Eric the DJ, seem wrong for a strip club, but not for this one, where not desire but desperation is catered to. The advertising, selling a sexy thriller, is all wrong.
Zoe, the club owner, is in some ways the spirit of the film. She is very pregnant, very happy about it, very convinced that her mother created the club in a special way for a special clientele with special needs. She knows more about some of the clients than they realize. She is worried about the tension between Eric and Christina. She meets with Francis after he is thrown out of the club. She wants to restore peace and order, and I won't tell you why that is so difficult for her.
Atom Egoyan, born in 1960 in Egypt of Armenian parents, brought up in Canada, has consistently stepped outside the mainstream in style and subjects. He's fascinated by how people are kept separated by the realities of culture (ethnicity, gender, background) and walls of images, and how they try to get through or around them. One of the most uncompromising of major directors, he hasn't made a single film for solely commercial reasons.
Egoyan is best known for "The Sweet Hereafter," which won the grand jury prize at Cannes 1997; "Felicia's Journey" (1998), and "Where the Truth Lies," that remarkable 2005 film with Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a team not unlike Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, implicated in a murder. He often works with his wife, Arsinee Khanjian, who like Ingrid Bergman has the ability to project carnality and sweetness simultaneously. Egoyan brought his first feature, the $20,000 "Next of Kin," to the Toronto Film Festival in 1984. He was only 24.
There is a quality in all of his work that resists the superficial and facile. Even at the very start, he wasn't interested in simple storytelling. He is drawn to what Fitzgerald called the dark night of the soul. Secrets, shames, the hidden and the forbidden coil around his characters, but he is not quick to condemn them. He and Khanjian are warm, friendly and smile easily, and in the films, you sense love for the characters and the belief that to know more is to forgive more.
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Golden rules for finding your life partner
By Dov Heller, M.A.
When it comes to making the decision about choosing a life partner, no one wants to make a mistake. Yet, with a divorce rate of close to 50%,
it appears that many are making serious mistakes in their approach to finding Mr./Miss. Right!
If you ask most couples who are engaged why they're getting married, they'll say: "We're in love". I believe this is the #1 mistake people
make when they date. Choosing a life partner should never be based on love. Though this may sound "not politically correct", there's a profound truth here. Love is not the basis for getting married. Rather, love is the result of a good marriage (or a relationship, in my humble opinion). When the other ingredients are right, then the love will come. Let me say it again: "You can't build a lifetime relationship on love alone". You need a lot more!!!
Here are five questions you must ask yourself if you're serious about finding and keeping a life partner.
QUESTION 1:
Do we share a common life purpose? Why is this so important?
Let me put it this way: If you're married for 20 or 30 years, that's a long time to live with someone. What do you plan to do with each other all that time? Travel, eat and jog together? You need to share something deeper and more meaningful. You need a common life purpose.
Two things can happen in a marriage:
(1) You can grow together, or
(2) You can grow apart.
50% of the people out there are growing apart. To make a marriage work, you need to know what you want out of life! Bottom line marry someone
who wants the same thing.
(Easier said than done, huh?)
QUESTION 2:
Do I feel safe expressing my feelings and thoughts with this person?
This question goes to the core of the quality of your relationship. Feeling safe means you can communicate openly with this person. The
basis of having good communication is trust - i.e. trust that I won't get "punished" or hurt for expressing my honest thoughts and feelings.
A colleague of mine defines an abusive person as someone with whom you feel afraid to express your thoughts and feelings. Be honest with yourself on this one. Make sure you feel emotionally safe with the person you plan to marry.
QUESTION 3:
Is he/she a mensch?
A mensch is someone who is a refined and sensitive
person. How can you test? Here are some suggestions:
Do they work on personal growth on a regular basis?
Are they serious about improving themselves?
A teacher of mine defines a good person as "someone who is always striving to be good and do the right thing". So ask about your Significant Other...
What do they do with their time?
Is this person materialistic? Usually a materialistic person is not someone whose top priority is character refinement.
There are essentially two types of people in the world:
(1) People who are dedicated to personal growth and
(2) People who are dedicated to seeking comfort.
Someone whose goal in life is to be comfortable will put personal comfort ahead of doing the right thing. You need to know that before
walking down the aisle.
QUESTION 4:
How does he/she treat other people?
The one most important thing that makes any relationship work is the ability to give. By giving, we mean the ability to give another person pleasure.
Ask: Is this someone who enjoys giving pleasure to others or are they wrapped up in themselves and self-absorbed? To measure this, think
about the following: How do they treat people whom they do not have to be nice to, such as waiters, bus boys, taxi drivers, etc. How do they
treat their parents and siblings? Do they have gratitude and appreciation? If they don't have gratitude for the people who have given them everything; can you do nearly as much for them? You can be sure that someone who treats others poorly, will eventually treat you poorly as well.
QUESTION 5 :
Is there anything I'm hoping to change about this person after we're married?
Too many people make the mistake of marrying someone with the intention of trying to "improve" them after they're married. As a colleague of mine puts it: "You can probably expect someone to change after marriage for the worse" If you cannot fully accept this person the way they are now, then you are not ready to marry them.
(You cannot change anyone unless they are wearing a diaper)
In conclusion, dating doesn't have to be difficult and treacherous. The key is to try leading a little more with your head and less with your heart. It pays to be as objective as possible when you are dating; to be sure to ask questions that will help you get to the key issues.
Falling in love is a great feeling, but when you wake up with a ring on your finger, you don't want to find yourself in trouble because you
didn't do your homework.
Another perspective....
There are some people in your life that need to be loved from a distance....It's amazing what you can accomplish when you let go of or at least minimize your time with draining, negative, incompatible, not-going anywhere relationships. Observe the relationships around you.
Pay attention.... Which ones lift and which ones lean? Which ones encourage and which ones discourage? Which ones are on a path of growth
uphill and which ones are going downhill? When you leave certain people do you feel better or feel worse? Which ones always have drama or don't
really understand, know, or appreciate you? The more you seek quality, respect, growth, peace of mind, love and truth around you...the easier
it will become for you to decide who gets to sit in the front row and who should be moved to the balcony of your life.
An African proverb states, "Before you get married, keep both eyes open, and after you marry, close one eye". Before you get involved and make a commitment to someone, don't let lust, pity, desperation, immaturity, ignorance, pressure from others or a low self-esteem make you blind to warning signs. Keep your eyes open, and don't fool yourself that you can change someone or that what you see as faults aren't really that important.
Do you bring out the best in each other? Do you compliment and compromise with each other, or do you compete, compare and control? What do you bring to the relationship? Do you bring past relationships, past hurt, past mistrust, past pain? You can't take someone to the altar to
alter them. You can't make someone love you or make someone stay. If you develop self-esteem, spiritual discernment, and "a life", you won't find yourself making someone else responsible for your happiness or responsible for your pain. Seeking status, sex, and security are the
wrong reasons to be in a relationship.
WHAT KEEPS A RELATIONSHIP STRONG ARE:
1. TRUST
2. COMMUNICATION
3. INTIMACY
4. A SENSE OF HUMOR
5. SHARING TASKS
6. SOME GETAWAY TIME WITHOUT BUSINESS OR CHILDREN
7. DAILY EXCHANGES (meal, shared activity, hug, call, touch, notes,
8. SHARING COMMON GOALS AND INTERESTS
9. GIVING EACH OTHER SPACE TO GROW WITHOUT FEELING INSECURE
10. GIVING EACH OTHER A SENSE OF BELONGING AND ASSURANCES OF COMMITMENT
If these qualities are missing, the relationship will erode as resentment, withdrawal, abuse, neglect, dishonesty, and pain replace it.
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| Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
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8:09 pm - Tennessee Videos
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| Friday, December 26th, 2008
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10:14 pm - Dysthymia83’s 10 Best Films of 2008 List
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It’s that time of year again. Time for my annual 10 best films of the year list, which I and every other movie geek makes. Go back one entry if you wanna read a regular entry (it was a long one too, with a lot of pics, so someone better read the goddamn thing) So let’s get too it :
FILMS I HAVE NOT YET SEEN FROM 2008 THAT MIGHT HAVE MADE THIS LIST IF I HAD :
-Repo : The Genetic Opera
-The Wrestler
-Milk
-Che
-Let The Right One In
So keeping in mind I haven’t seen those yet, here is my list :
10) WANTED
Yes, the film is stupid, over the top, and completely devoid of any sense of realism or originality (the film rips off my 3 fav films of 1999, “Office Space”, “Fight Club”, and “The Matrix” in its first 15 minutes alone, lol)..but it’s also a geek-boy’s escapist fantasy : A dull, scared, depression, stressed cubicle jockey finds out he’s a super-powered assassin capable of amazing feats...and gets to make out with Angelina Jolie, lol. Filled with great special effects, unique direction (from the visionary Russian director behind the otherwise incomprehensible “Night Watch” films), and showcasing a great sense of humor and pure fun, this is as good as braindead action movies get, and it’s specifically tailored to geek-boys rather than muscle bound meatheads like most action films are. I don’t know how much I like the idea of the sequel, already in pre-production, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
(Available on DVD and Blu)
9) THE RUINS
The year’s best horror film was this bleak, dark film about friends in Central America who, while hiking through the jungle, end up quarantined atop a pyramid full of odd weeds....that happen to be sentient, man-eating plants. It may sound silly, but the film is dead serious, and one of the most disturbing, gory, and powerful horror films in years, which for once has characters who are smart and well-developed, that we actually care about. The film finds the right mix of drama, suspense, and gore, without any one over-powering the other two. If you’re a fan of horror, this was the best 2008 had to offer in the genre, and is a grossly underrated gem.
(Available on DVD and Blu)
8) ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO
The best porn-centered comedy since “Orgazmo” was Kevin Smith’s latest film, an incredibly raunchy and potty-mouthed tale of two platonic friends of the opposite sex who decide to make a porno to pay their bills, making the film oddly relevant in the current economic crisis. Beyond the dirtiness and pervasive profanity, the film is also a sweet story about two people who have been in love for years, and probably didn’t realize it until the shit hit the fan. So for a film to have as much heart as it does T & A, to be hilarious and yet sweet and charming, almost innocent and old fashioned in its view of low and as throwback to screwball comedies despite it’s very up to date subject matter or Youtube and amateur porn and such, it’s an odd mix of the salt and the sugar that works perfectly.
(Should be on DVD around February-ish)
7) HAMLET 2
A failed actor-turned-high school drama teacher writes a sequel to “Hamlet”, and the result is delightfully absurd (and to some, offensive). This independent film was a hit at Sundance but failed to make waves at the box office, but don’t let that dissuade you from checking this film out. “Hamlet 2" is edgy (songs like “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” and “Raped in the Face”) and yet innocent, and takes superficial swipes at religiosity and self-important artists without getting too bogged down in any message to forget it’s main job is to be funny as all hell. And this film certainly is. The film will also be especially funny to anyone who has ever written anything or tried to write anything, and anyone who has had a dream they never had a chance of achieving, but kept on going because they were too naive to know it.
(Available on DVD)
6) THE DARK KNIGHT
While I’m still not a fan of Heath Ledger, and think his performance in this film is overrated and still not the best Joker they could have gotten, this is still probably the best film adaptation of the Batman comics and characters that we are likely to see. The film is a contemporary allegory of terrorism and post 9/11 methods of stopping terrorists, deals with questions of morality and whether people are inherently good or evil, civil or insane, and is an otherwise very deep examination of human nature disguised as a comic book action movie. The characters, so familiar after years of comic books, are given more dimensions as director Christopher Nolan continues to try to bring the fantastical elements of the source material into a grounded world with as much realism as a story about a man dressed as a bat fighting a clown can be.
(Available on...oh who am I kidding, everyone on Earth has seen this film already, lol)
5 ) DEFINITELY, MAYBE
Every now and then, a chick flick comes along that I love, and am then made fun of for liking. “13 Going on 30" was one. “The Lake House” was another. And now this. Those of you who have read my blog know that I took the name “April” from this film to use an alias for a girl very important to me, and if you see the film, you’ll know why. This film is the charming and delightfully moving story of a man who tells his daughter how she came into this world, specifically how he and her mother got together and fell in love...but he changes the names of the main loves in his life to give his daughter (and the viewer) a layer of mystery as we hear about a man who might have had a kid with either his college sweetheart, an outgoing journalist, or a cute, spunky redhead who is his best friend (guess which one was my fav and named April, lol). The film is a chick flick meant for guys...albeit guys who are pussies and will sit through a chick flick. But as a tale of a man going through life trying to find the girl of his dreams, or trying to find which girl of his dreams is really right for him, this film is especially relatable to a guy like me, a guy who wants to find love but it can’t seem to find him at the right time with the right girl. And a film about how even mistakes can lead to good results, and gives the hope that there can second, third , or forth changes when you’re too unlucky, badly timed, or dumb to make things work the 1st time.
(Available on DVD)
4) FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL
Far and away the funniest film of the year, and possibly one of the best films ever made about a broken heart, this film came out right when my heart was breaking hard...and it helped. For that it holds a special place in my heart. But even if it hadn’t, this film, about a guy who is dumped, goes on vacation to get over it, only to find himself staying at the same resort as his ex, who has her new beau in tow, turned out to be an absolutely gut-bustingly hilarious tale of pain and woe and self-pity and self-delusion, and quasi-stalking...but also of renewal and moving on, and finding the grass is sometimes greener on the other side...and the film features way too much penis, which makes it all the more funny, lol.
(Available on DVD and Blu)
3) THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Director David Fincher (Fight Club) has once again made another masterpiece, this time an incredibly moving saga of a life from birth to death, filled with loves and adventure, happiness and pain, loss and gain. The odd part is that the main character ages backwards : born a baby that looks like an old man, becoming a kid who looks in his 80s, and gradually looking and feeling younger as he gets older. While the film is centered around this gimmick, it is used as a way to really have the film be about LIFE, how fleeting it is, how we need to make every moment count, how the good times are precious and we need to enjoy them, and the bad times build character and shape us to enjoy the good times even more. Filled with great performances and marvels of special effects, this is an epic film with a seemingly narrow scope, but which touches on the very foundation of drama, an examination of life itself. A beautiful and marvelous film.
(In theaters now)
2) CHOKE
Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), “Choke” is about a sex addict, a man so traumatized and in pain by his unusual childhood raised by his deeply disturbed mother than he desperately seeks affection in love through random, meaningless sex, and by purposely choking on food in restaurant to be saved and cared for by whomever is around to perform the Heimlich. This is a dark film about sad, pitiful people...and it is darkly funny and moving. For a film so smutty and filthy and sometimes nihilistic, it has a lot of heart when you realize, behind all the sick and pathological behavior the protagonist exhibits, the film is really about a man searching for love, and going about it in all the wrong ways because he’s too damaged to know otherwise. You can see why I relate to this film so much, and often times the films I love most are just the ones I see myself in. “Choke” may not effect you the same way it effected me, but even though I’m not a sex addict (I can’t actually get sex enough to be one, lol) I can understand the drive and need for physical affection and validation than can lead a person like this film’s protagonist to become mired in such a life of swill. “Choke” is a drama about love and pain disguised as a comedy about sex and anti-social behavior, and it’s brilliant.
(On DVD in February)
1) RELIGULOUS
I’m an atheist. I hate religion, and I believe religion is hugely evil, a danger to our lives and to the intellectual growth of the human race. Bill Maher is a comedian and an agnostic, who shares my hatred of religion, and he made this documentary expression his opinion, which is 99% mine. In an age where people in America are highly religious, where George Bushs and Sarah Palins get points for invoking their imaginary friend “god” even though they’re both retarded. Where even President-elect Obama, and intelligent man, has to have a piece of shit like Rick Warren perform his Christian voodoo at his inauguration to gain points with the other side of the aisle, it takes balls to make a movie saying Religion will kill us all, Jesus never existed even as a historical figure, and if you believe in this nonsense you are stupid at best or insane at worst. I am glad Bill Maher made this movie, because now I don’t have to. He presented his argument in a very funny way, asked intelligent questions of any religious person who would talk to him (and mostly got stupid answers), and opened the door to say it’s okay not to believe in imaginary omnipotent super-beings. And if you believe in the bible or any religious work literally, if you accept the word of any other human being when he claims to know the answers to things we have no proof or evidence of, you are stupid.....yes, I’m sure I’ve offended someone yet again in my blog, lol.
(On DVD and Blu in February)
So that’s my list. Not many conventional picks there (only “Benjamin Button” and “Dark Knight” have any Oscar hopes), but he films I respond to tend to say something personal to me. But I hope some of you like these films too.
I’ll probably write a new regular entry tomorrow, or at least Sunday.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, December 11th, 2008
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8:40 pm - Video Tour Of New Apartment
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| Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
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3:03 pm - Video Blog 11/25/08
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So I was in a car accident.
I am physically fine.
My car was not driveable after the accident, as i was not able to move it off the road, and had to be towed to the autobody shop, but i believe it is repairable and not totalled.
I am upset because this is just one more thing to worry about on top of having to move and all the junk related to that.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, November 10th, 2008
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8:07 pm - Let's Reintroduce Our Shadows
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“It really makes no difference
Because I know that I’ll never be fixed”
So the elation of Obama’s victory lasted all of a day, and by Thursday I had crashed back to Earth. My problems remained the same and unchanged : The possible foreclosure, the loneliness I feel without a girlfriend, etc. Some days hurt worse than others, but lately it seems the pain is especially potent.
I have tomorrow out of work for Veteran’s Day. It will also the 3 months since my night with April. It seems a lot longer to me. Sometimes I re-read my blog entry about that night so that the memories come alive, fresher. It remains the greatest night of my life, and I fear it will never be topped as such. With the best moment of my life behind me, it makes it sadder as time goes on, and I get further and further away from it.
It might be easier to deal with if I had anything else in my life to live for...that is enjoyable. The title of my screenplay, which I may never actual finish, is “Anhedonia”, which means the inability to feel pleasure. I’m starting to think that’s my own state of mind lately. I find it hard to truly enjoy any aspect of my life. For instance, on Friday I had lunch with my best friend and Kerri at work. I was feeling like shit that day, and they usually sit across the street with the others, for this day they chose to sit with me. In some ways it was nice. My best friend is often very busy I don’t get to hang out with her outside of work anymore, which means I only really talk to her 15 minutes a day on the days I spend break with her and Kerri, and I often avoid break when I’m in a bad mood because I feel guilty about bringing them down, and I don’t want to make them angry at me for being so glum, and also if someone else joins us who I’m not comfortable being “the real me” around, I leave early. Kerri and her fiancé Nate (who sits at the desk behind me during the night shift so I usually see him as I leave) have extended me an open invitation to hang out with them when they get their fellow film geek friends together for stuff, but I can’t drive to their place and they (rightfully) won’t drive my phobic ass. So yeah, they joined and we joked around and stuff, and it was nice...but I still was kinda depressed during and after it. Why? Because the conversation was a lot of sex humor, and it while the jokes are funny and stuff, it’s just a reminder, slapping me in the face, about my inexperience and unfulfilled fantasies and how this activity, for lack of a better description, is impossible for me to partake in. It seems like it’s so damn easy for other people to get laid...to me, at least. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m picky, or that I’m shy and don’t know where to go or who to approach for it, I dunno. But it makes me feel ugly and like a piece of shit when I see or hear about assholes and pricks and skeevy guys who do so well with women...and then here I am. I’m not a good looking guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m nice, sweet, kind, receptive, and eager to please. And unless April was lying to me, I have a fairly large cock and aren’t too bad at going down on a girl (TMI, I know, I know, STFU about it already, you know what my blog is like by now). Doesn’t really matter if I have these attributes/talents and I can’t use them, or no one is willing to use them, now is it?
This is also the same reason I can’t even enjoy porn. When you take away the ability for me to enjoy boobies, you know I’m a goner, perhaps close to rock bottom. I must have spent nearly all of Saturday on Suicidegirls, and I just felt like shit afterwards. I can look as these beautiful women, not just their bodies but their faces, their eyes...and I’m just struck by the knowledge that none of these girls would ever give me the time of day...even the ones who like geeky guys, I bet. Just like when I watch porn, mostly amateur stuff, and it only reminds me how I can never do these things (again) and all I really have is the vicarious thrill of watching other people partake in the experiences I cannot attain for myself. Plus the fact that guys in these videos are usually pieces of shit who hid the camera, or posted it online because the girl broke up with them, like an asshole. Either way, it’s just the realization of what a failure I am, how I’d like to think I’m better than the liars and the cheaters and the assholes who use women...but those are the guys who get what they want...or hell, maybe they get bored with that stuff and it means nothing to them, but it’s what I want goddamnit. And maybe I would stoop to their level if I didn’t have a fucking conscience. And while it’s not exactly a representative sample of the population, I often go on the “Slut Pride” group on Suicidegirls to read about other people’s sexual experiences, and it amazes me how many people have such unique stories about their sex lives, and rack up 20, 30, 40 partners before they hit the age of 30. Not that number of partners was ever a big deal for me. I really still only want that ONE girl to spend my life with. If I did end up with a girl, I’d probably clock out with two partners, her and April.
“I woke up to self destruction.
It's hard to know that I wasn’t good enough.
You're afraid of something, she told me one thing; I don’t care who knows you
cuz you're not good enough for the phrase...I love you.”
But of course I don’t want those of you reading this to think I’m just a horny bastard (though I readily admit I am). The sex thing bothers me less than the fact that I am unloved. No one wants me. Logging back on to OKCupid and Plenty of Fish is still as useless as ever. I haven’t heard back from Megan even though she’s been online frequently, so I think it’s safe to say she’s not interested. Oh well, she’s a great girl, I had fun with her, and at least she gave me a chance, which is more than most girls give me. I need to learn how to meet girls somewhere other than online. But where the hell do I go for that? I spend night after night home alone, and then all weekend alone. I am so fucking alone. I just wish I had a girl to sit with and watch movies, or lay with, holding each other and talking, cuddling under a blanket. Hell, even if I can’t get a girlfriend, I like the cuddle buddy idea, even it sex wasn’t a part of it. Just to have someone to hold, and the intimacy of a warm body next to you on a cold winter night so you don’t have to face another night in your bed alone weeping about how things are never going to get any better.
Yet I still try. Because finding a girl, finding love, is the only thing that will make me happy. In the long run, at least. And when I’m at the point where I no longer enjoy anything because of my loneliness, it becomes a huge deal. Friday after work I went to see “Role Models”, a good movie (gave it a B), but all I can think about during it is how the awkward, nerdy character of Augie has it make with a cute little nerd girl who likes to dress like an elf princess, and how I wish I had my own little shy-yet-beautiful geek girl who was smitten with me. Or I see a scene where the Sean William Scott character has sex with a girl wearing glasses that he just met a party, and I know I will never be the guy who can pick a girl up at a party, assuming I actually went to a party where single girls were at. Or the week before and I see “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” and....well, I think you can all see how I would be thinking about how that relates to my issues. Or how I watch “Can’t Hardly Wait” on bluray this weekend and while I’ve always loved that movie, I should avoid it like the plague when I’m depressed as it features : Unrequited love, a nerdy guy who becomes popular with women very quickly, a hot girl-next-door redhead having sex in the bathroom with a loser-boy, and is just an overall reminder about how my high school experience was devoid of anything nearly as fun as what goes on in that movie. Yeah, even things I like just remind me of what a pathetic, hopeless loser I am. How I watch a good movie I own, or read a book or comic, or listen to music, and I can’t help but think how I’m wasting my youth alone in my bedroom because I have no one to hang out with and I’m hopelessly, forever single, when what I really want is some adventure, some (safe and not too scary) excitement. I want to break out of my shell and do random, crazy, stupid shit. I want to take a bunch of pictures along the way. I want to kiss a lot of girls and dance like a moron with them and make them smile with cheesy compliments. I want to go on road trips (in the passenger’s seat). I want to find the love of my life and travel Europe with her. I want to move into an apartment with a girl and go shopping and argue about what curtains we want on the windows, and end up wrestling to put the ones we choose up on the windows only to get up tangled and making love on the bedroom floor.
I want what I can’t have, because I can’t do anything of the things I want to alone. And that’s all I’ll ever really be.
It’s kind of stupid to buy new clothes and try to change my look when I have nowhere to show them off since I can’t really go out to clubs or whatever alone, not that I’d meet girls there anyway. Even at Club Hell, where the type of girls I like go (at the least the Goth/Emo/Scene ones...and maybe a few of the geeky ones too), I doubt those girls would like me anyway. But yeah, I got the new work shirt in from Old Navy, so at least I’ll have an excuse to wear that. The Pac Sun hoodie wasn’t bought to impress girls, just to be something warm to wear when I go out to the movies of whatever. I should have bought the small because the medium is kind of big on me, but it has fleece inside and is really warm. I’ll have to take pics next time I wear it. So yeah, I would like to buy nicer clothes to help me attract women (something that might make a woman come on to me so I don’t have to be the hopeless pursuer for once), but if I have nowhere to wear those clothes, what’s the point? I mean, there is a cute girl at BK who looks that “Maria Full of Grace” girl (even though I don’t usually go for latina girls), but why buy a $50.00 Pac Sun shirt just to get a smile out of her.
Or Saturday I went to the doctor about those dry skin spots on my chest, neck, and back. He said it was common thing and wrote me a script for 2 pills, take in one dose, and they’re supposed to go away in a few days. I mainly did this so I would be less embarrassed to take my shirt off in front of girls (which isn’t really a big deal since I am still embarrassed to do this due to my Holocaust-victim-like skinniness, and there aren’t many excuses to be shirtless in the winter, and when am I honestly going to be a position with a girl any time soon where my shirt is going to come off....maybe I’ll take more shirtless pics now, though..with better lighting). Afterwards I go to the pharmacy to pic it up (74 cents...cheapest prescription ever) and the pharmacy tech is one of the most beautiful, non-Lisa Loeb women I have ever seen in real life. She was about my age, taller than me, rail thin, light red hair pulled back in a tight pony tail, the palest blue eyes you’ve ever seen, and skin white as a vampire. I nearly fainted. I wish I had bothered to look at her name tag (I usually make it a point to look at pretty lady’s name tags since they are pinned right above a booby) but I was so captivated just by her face, and struggling to remember what words I needed to say, that I didn’t. As I waited for my script I did over hear her talking to the others about going to Austin, Texas for a music festival, though, so chances are her personality is as awesome as her beauty (Austin, Texas is like a liberal, arts-friendly hot spot in Texas, and Ethan Hawke and Lisa Loeb are both known to be there often...plus the best movie theater in the US, the Alamo Drafthouse, is there). But no, I wasn’t going to ask a girl out as she gives me my pills for skin spots. Even if such a magnificent creature were single, and I doubt it, what the hell would she ever want with me? But my science, was she something. And then I go home and am depressed because I’ll never end up with anyone, let alone someone as amazing as her. Fuck me.
“Life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward”
I can’t remember where that quote is from, but it’s so true.
But that’s my dilemma. I just don’t enjoy anything any more. Nothing is fun for me anymore. Not movies. Not pictures of naked women. Not music or books. Not even conversations with friends. Every smile I flash is either fake or has a dark cloud behind it. I find myself regularly on the verge of tears. It seems like everything I see and hear is yet another reminder of how lonely I am, and of the all things I want in this life that I cannot have. If this is all life is ever going to be for me, this pining and longing and wishing and hoping and dreaming, then I just wish I were fucking dead.
“And right now I’m crying more than I’m grinning
I’ve been thinking
it’s been so long since I’ve lived my life
It’s time I’m waiting”
I guess I just have some odds and ends to talk about before I end this thing.
CGCN talked to me Friday. Another reminder of things I can’t have. This beautiful girl is creeped out by me, but is still nice enough to pretend she’s not and talk to me once in a while. Though Friday I had my least favorite conversation in the world with her : the one where someone runs down a list of things and asks if I eat them or not, and then asks me what I actually do eat. I’m a picky eater, I always have been, and I hate that everyone else is so fucking obsessed with food. As far as pleasures go, I’d rank it far below everything else that has ever felt good to me. And of course this probably means CGCN views me as an even bigger creepy freak than she did before. Great.
“Repo : The Genetic Opera”, the horror music I’ve been dying to see, only opened in 8 theaters. They’re dumping it direct to video almost, in January. Oh well, this was one of the 3 films I was most excited about seeing this year, and I was able to see “Religulous” and my best friend took me to see “Choke”. The closest theater playing “Repo” is in NYC, and I don’t know anyone willing to drive me 4-5 hours to see a 100 minute movie. Even in 8 theaters, the film managed the 2nd highest per-screen-average for all the films last weekend. If any of you reading this know what that means, I owe you a cookie.
I bought 3 new CDs I’ll get sometime this week. I am on the lookout for new rock bands that have depressing, lovesick lyrics, for the nights when I lay alone in bed at night with my headphones on crying myself to sleep (which is almost every night). Evans Blue, Framing Hanlet, and Breaking Benjamin are my favorites for this activity right now, so I went on their profiles, as well as that for ex-EB singer Kevin Matisyn, to look for new bands I might not have heard of. I ended up buying a CD from a band called 32 Leaves and 2 CDs from a band called 10 years. Hopefully those are good. If anyone else has any suggestions, leave them. I’m running out of good song lyrics to title my blog entries after, lol.
“There’s honesty in all the things that you ignored
But honestly how could you ignore me?
Make way for my new angles
Make way for twisted versions
A match to light a candle
This was more than I could handle
And you made a light of these feelings
And you left when it was wrong too
Was I such a waste of time dear?
Will you miss me when I’m gone from here?”
I do spend more time on the Hopeless Romantics group on Suicidegirls than the Slut Pride group, for what it’s worth. Okay, I guess I’ll stop whining for now. Tomorrow for the holiday I shall be spending the day alone, doing nothing. Wishing it were 3 nights ago and I weren’t going to spend yet another day alone wishing I were someone else...wishing I was SOMEONE else instead of ugly, shy, insecure, loser twig boy.
Life Sucks.
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| Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
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8:48 pm - Quo Vadimus
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The boobies have spoken, and Senator Barack Obama is President-Elect of the United States.
I follow politics pretty closely. In some ways, I’m not sure why. Politics, after all, is how policies and laws are made which effect the lives of large groups of people, and I hate most people. I suppose it’s because, like everyone else, I have an idea of how things should be. That maybe if things were different, not only would people’s lives be better, but people THEMSELVES would be better. Maybe if people weren’t preoccupied with their own short term, selfish desires, and we thought of things in the sense of the long term or the big picture, we would act differently and the present, and future, wouldn’t look so grim.
I’ve never been the most patriotic person in America. I see a country that has great wealth, even in this current financial situation, and yet we’re behind most other nations in intelligence (based on tests scores, at least), health care, environmental considerations, and many other yardsticks by which we should measure a successful society. Hell, we’re not even the freest nation on Earth, a few of the Scandinavian countries would have to fight it out for that honor. Now, the flag-waiving non-thinkers who believe the country is perfect would normally say to this, “If you don’t like it, MOVE!!”. Well why the hell should I move. It’s not my fault the country is lacking. If anything, this country should get better to deserve it’s citizens. John Kennedy, an overrated president, once said “Ask not what your country can do for you...”. Well that’s exactly what I ask. A country isn’t really anything. It’s imaginary. It’s a landmass or series of landmasses controlled by groups of people and governments. Which is why I find it odd that many right-wingers claim to be the most patriotic, and yet so mistrustful of government. And you know what a country, or a government’s job should be? To help and protect its citizens. We don’t need to do anything to a country, as it is not a sentient being. It needs to do things for us.
Naturally, we all disagree on what a country should do for us. Everyone has a different idea of the perfect world, or what a Utopia would look like. Laugh at it all you want, but I tend to look at “Star Trek : The Next Generation” as a good model. It takes place in a future where there is no money, and people do their respective jobs, be they scientist or Joe the Plumber, not for monetary benefit (as all necessities and even wants are covered by technology and whatnot), but to better themselves. It’s a society where human beings have evolved beyond the need of religion (at least on Earth, but I’ll limit the sci-fi nature of this description), where interpersonal conflicts are at a minimum, and yet things are not boring. It’s essentially a Socialist Utopia.
Yeah, I know Socialism has become a dirty word. McCain and company used it as one their many ludicrous attacks on Obama. This is likely because people think “Socialist” and, having no actual knowledge of what it is, think that the fascist, Communist-in-name-only countries like China and the former Soviet Union were true Socialist societies. They weren’t. I’m not going to go into all the nuts and bolts of Socialism here, but it is democratic, it’s not about taking things away from you that you’ve earned, or all that nonsense. It’s an economic alternative to Capitalism, a system which benefits the few over the many.
But yes, I believe it would be better for the government to run some things, like healthcare, better than private companies whose only care in the world is profit. With government running things there is more oversight and, yes, more accountability. It would require higher taxes, but think of it this way : How much money is taken out of your paycheck each week for your Private healthcare coverage? Well what if that same amount went to the government, and you were guaranteed medical treatment with it, as opposed to private healthcare coverage where you could pay the same amount and still be denied treatment for some bogus reason, or have your insurance run out after time.
Now yes, the government messes up a lot of things...but that is usually because the American people are stupid, and elect people like President Bush. If you elect competent people who can do their jobs right, it runs well. And hey, many people collect Social Security, and people get that money the same day every month like clockwork. So the government can do programs like that efficiently, though obviously not perfectly.
So yes, I am ultra-liberal. Economic-wise, the liberal ideology, which of the two major parties is represented by the Democrats, believes in more government help and intervention...government programs that help people get on their feet, or feed their families, or clothe their children, or pay college tuition. The conservative ideology, represented by the Republicans, believe people should fend for themselves like rabid dogs, and the private sector is where people should get their help...which is absurd because private companies care about profits, not people.
Socially, liberals believe in more freedoms : For gays, for women’s rights, for minorities, etc. Conservatives, socially, base their policies on a shitty book of ancient Jewish fairy tales called The Bible. This gives them the excuse to be homophobic, deny a woman her right to choose, believe a glump of goop in a petri dish (stem cells) are a human being with a soul, and that the world is 7,000 years old, which means science is wrong, and if science is wrong, global warming and evolution are myths.
For most of my 25 years on this Earth, the conservatives have been in power. Through two terms of Reagan, whose policies and philosophies are the cornerstone of modern conservative thought, thus making him, in my opinion, the 2nd worst president of all time, and through one term of Bush Sr. Sure, we had 8 years of Clinton too, but he was a moderate, and he could barely get anything done because the conservatives controlled Congress though much of his presidency, and were preoccupied with how much head Clinton was getting. Yes, I supported impeachment because Clinton broke the law when he could have easily said, “F**k you, she blew me and I liked it”...but I’m more forgiving of him lately considering how many laws and constitutional amendments Bush has wiped his ass with.
Ah yes, George W. Bush. A man who ran every business he ever headed into the ground. A man who spent his life in a coke and booze-filled daze for 40 years, before trading in one unhealthy addiction with another and becoming a born again Christian. A man who somehow got Cs in Yale, and whose biggest dream used to be to rise up and become commissioner of Major League Baseball. A man who can barely utter a sentence without embarrassing himself, and who I suspect is less intelligent than my 9 year old sister. This man garnered about 50% of the vote in 2000.
In his first term he ignored internal intelligence reports, which allowed 9/11 to happen on his watch. (Yes, for all of Al Gore’s faults, I do believe he could have prevented 9/11). When he heard “The country is under attack”, he sat like a statue for 7 minutes while he read a children’s book to a kindergarten class. Some conservatives say to this, “What was he supposed to? Panic and scare the children?”. No, but there it’s not as if the only 2 choices were A) Sit like a retard and B) Go bat-shit crazy and fling feces at schoolchildren. He could have calmly got up, and excused himself. He didn’t know what kind of attack (nuclear, biological, etc) and yet he sat, waiting for someone to tell him what to do, because he’s a retard. He also started an unnecessary war with Iraq that has cost thousands of lives for no reason. He has allowed our government to commit human rights violations and torture prisoners, who are often held without legal representation or a trial. Oh, and he can wiretap and search your property without a warrant.
And that was just his first term. And knowing all of this, he was RE-Elected in 2004. It was at this point that I lost all hope in the intelligence of the American people...when a slim majority voted for an evil retard when they knew all the things he had done AND that he was dumber than a 5th grader.
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Cut to last night. I, and many others, voted for Obama, and he won a landslide victory. 9/11 happening on the Republican’s watch, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina’s botched aftermath...nothing. In the end it took almost the financial collapse of the entire world for people to wise up and say, “Hey, maybe we should vote for the smarter guy with the better ideas, and not base our votes on personality or shallow reasons or because we pray to the same false God”. Oh sure, there are still some idiots who believe Obama is a Muslim (he isn’t...I’m concerned that he IS a Christian, because I don’t like anyone who can believe anything that has no evidence to support it, be it Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq or an omnipotent superbeing in the sky who listens to your prayers and helps you out if you follow his asinine and often contradictory rules), or that our country is more prone to attack now (remind me which party was in power on and immediately before 9/11 again....anyone? Whose watch did that happen during?). Some people liked McCain even though he voted with Bush 93% of the time. But hey, some people still believe the earth is flat.
But most people, finally smartened up, and they voted for the better candidate. Not a former war hero who renounced all his old beliefs and sold his soul to the radical right to get elected, and who picked a grossly unqualified VP candidate who is possibly the only politician dumber than Bush and whose only role on the public stage should be in Bukkake videos. McCain is a nice guy, even if he did leave his first wife for a woman who picked him up in a bar (his current wife), and who owns 14 houses and 7 cars yet claimed the guy who was raised by a single parent and built himself up from nothing was “elitist”. But Obama was the better choice. Much better. Infinitely better.
It’s good to be on the winning side of one of these things for once. And my faith in American and it’s people has been restored...for now. Last night I was, for perhaps the first time, truly proud to be an American. That for once people saw past the bullshit and chose the better man for the job. But now, Quo Vadimus : Where are we going. It’s a question I ask myself about my own life, and it’s a question we can ask about the country. The economy needs to be saved, the war in Iraq needs to end, Bin Laden needs to be found and killed, we need universal healthcare (socialized medicine), we need to find new ways of harnessing energy to stop dependance on foreign oil, and we need to stop and reverse global warming before this planet becomes uninhabitable. Do I think Obama can do all of this? No. Can he take is in the right direction over the next 4 or 8 years? Yes he can.
So while American has voted for a Black president (or half-black, whatever), it seems racism is not as strong as it used to be. Now we have a new civil rights issue: gays. Gay marriage amendments were struck down in 3 states last night. Once, it was the N-word that was allowed in conversation publicly, now it is now, but words like “Faggot” still are, and it is socially acceptable to be prejudiced of gays as we deny them of basic human rights, like the right to love who they want and marry who they love. And I can’t help but think no one would have a problem with this, if it weren’t for that shitty fucking book again, The Bible, telling people it is wrong.
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Okay, enough politics. I’ll do some brief updates on me.
I asked Megan out again this weekend to a movie, but she said she was unable to go. She had a legitimate reason, but she also didn’t want to see the movie I offered, “Role Models”. I can’t really tell if she likes me or not, but she said she had fun on Sunday, so I asked her to let me know when she’s free again so we can hang out, and we’ll see when/if that happens. If it does, I need some helpful ideas on what to do or where to take her, because I want her to enjoy herself and not bore her, lol.
I was in a good mood today. Even though I had a slew of bad customers at work, I had 2 meetings which kept me off the phone a while : one about our new online time sheet system, which blows, and I cracked a lot of jokes about it sucking during the meeting. My manager came up to me after and told me other people in the meeting asked her why I was so vocal, since I am usually very quiet and not as funny. The other meeting was a corporate propaganda meeting that was useless. Hard to feel good about the bank with all this economic turmoil. Oh, and they changed out healthcare provider, so our co-pays will increase drastically, and apparently many doctors in the area don’t take it. Oh, and they give us 2 weeks paid vacation, but we may no longer have the option to buy a 3rd week, something I wanted to do for 2009. Plus, during break with my best friend and Kerri, Random Office Lesbian (a cute girl in glasses who is actually bi) was hanging about, and was pleased with the passing of #2 in Mass last night, which decriminalized small amounts of pot, under an ounce. Plus at the propaganda meeting she kept bringing up bad things about the bank and pissing off the guy running it, lol.
I am kind of getting depressed and pissed now, though, which sucks because I was hoping the high of Obama winning would keep me in a good mood all week, but I overheard my stepdad complaining to my mom about “all the boxes” I get delivered. I think he’s just jealous I can shop and he can’t pay his bills, or that he has to worry about leaving the dog outside during the day because he might chew my boxes. My mom whispered to him not to make a big deal about it, but it was just a reminder that A) The house might still get foreclosed on and we’d have to move, upon which I feel the need to look for my own place and B) Even if we don’t my stepdad will resent my disposable income while I live here and that his debts are so huge, which will make me living her uncomfortable. I can’t even get a full day to be happy. At least last night, watching election coverage on MSNBC, CNN, and Comedy Central (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had a live, 66 minute special...I was watching them when they called it for Obama at 11 PM even though when they called Ohio for Obama at 9:30 PM everyone knew it was mathematically impossible for McCain to win), I forgot about my living and romantic problems, and was caught up in something greater than my own selfish problems. It was nice.
My romantic problems are still here too. I’m so damn lonely. But maybe things will be on the upswing for that too. 2008 has been a weird year for me. It started out okay, New Year’s Eve talking to Crush, got really bad when Crush rejected me twice and sent me into a deeper depression than I’d been in years. Then better when I started hanging out with my best friend, who is my co-worker and who I knew in high school, and she began helping me in countless ways, not the least of which expanding my group of real life friends. I did my first tequila shots, went to my first party in years, had my first date in years. And of course, losing my virginity to April just 9 days before turning 25. And now, the US elects a President I can support and be proud of. With under 2 months left in the month, can I fit any more momentous events in here? Smoke pot for the first time? Get a girlfriend? Finish my screenplay? Have some more sexual firsts? I don’t know.
Did you laugh? No? Damn. Well okay. I know what I want, I just don’t know how to get it. In my increasing attempts to change myself, I did ask my internet friends where I can buy good clothes online, after finding not much of anything on the Hot Topic website. Well, Krista came through like gangbusters, and gave me a bunch of links to cool clothes on Old Navy and Pac Sun’s websites. So far I bought a work shirt from Old navy and a Hoodie from Pac Sun:
I like a lot of the shirts on the Pac Sun site, but some of them have tribal designs that I’m not sure are work appropriate. Though I did wear the skull necklace my best friend gave me to work on day this week because I wore a shirt that showed too much chest for my comfort (the shirt’s buttons are positioned so that I either have to show too much chest, or have my neck choked...another reason to get better work shirts aside from style and wanting to impress females) and no one gave me any shit for it, so who knows.
Quo Vadimus : Where are we going? Where am I going. How do I get there?
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, October 27th, 2008
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8:46 pm - My Imitation of Life
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Hi.
So things are still bad for me. I think many of you are starting to lose patience with me too, since the bulk of the advice I got on my last entry more or less boiled down to “Suck it up, faggot”. I’m sorry, I can’t help that all I really am inside is a terrified little boy. Someone did ask why, if I have money, am I not helping my mom and stepdad out with the mortgage. Aside from the fact that they would never accept it even if I offered it, after 2 years of saving up my money, it would be a big waste to use it to Basically just buy my mom and stepdad a couple more months, and then they’ll just be right back in this same position, and I have nothing to show for it. It’d just be delaying the inevitable and blowing my nest egg at the same time. But yeah, right now it looks like they’re going to try and file bankruptcy very fast in a manner that will allow them to keep the house. If that doesn’t work, we might have to move, and then I have to start seriously considering getting my own place.
Anyways, if you read the last entry I already laid out all of my reasons for why I’m scared of doing this and how I’m not ready even though I’m, at least chronologically if not mentally or emotionally, a grown man, so I’m not going to reiterate that stuff here. But between the fear I have of trying to be self-reliant and the ever increasing feelings of loneliness, which are starting to become worse than ever, I find myself sinking into the lowest depression I’ve felt in years. Considering it was almost 3 months ago that I was the happiest I had been in years, this has certainly been one fucked up year. 2008. One for the books in my life, certainly. Who knows? By 2009 I might be living on my own in some piece of shit one bedroom apartment, barely making ends meet, and so completely and totally alone and isolated that it takes a concentrated effort not to cry. Hell, it’s bad enough I’ve been crying myself to sleep pretty much every night. The redness under my eyes is pretty much a permanent fixture.
There. Now you all know what I look like without glasses. Last week was a little rougher than usual since my best friend was on vacation, so I was even more alone and isolated than I usually am, since I was pretty much anti-social. I could have spent break with Kerri (who herself is on vacation this week), but some of the other co-workers sit with her now, and for the same reasons I don’t eat lunch across the street with them, I don’t want to spend my breaks with them either. If my best friend and Kerri sitting with them becomes a regular thing, I might just skip hanging out on break with them altogether and just spend all my breaks in my cubicle, which means my only interaction with my real life friends will be when we hang out outside of work, which is pretty rare. So yeah, I am becoming more and more alone almost every day.
The only day last week I felt kind of okay, was on Friday. The entire department, except me, dressed up as Dalmatians, and for some reason the girls in the department, including CGCN, put their hair in pigtails for this. I have never seen a Dalmatian with pigtails, but whatever. Add to this that another department dressed up as nerds (a costume I wear every day of my life) and the girls all put their hair in pigtails for that. So yeah, there were an abundance of girls in pigtails that day. That pleased me. But yeah, I was the one party pooper who didn’t join everyone else in dressing like a Dalmatian, instead I hung back and took some pictures for Kerri and my fav of the bosses. The pics I took for my boss were later e-mailed to everyone, so I forwarded them to my home E-mail so I could make a stalker collage of CGCN in her pigtails using MSPaint. Yeah, I’m such a fucking creepy guy. Why didn’t I join the others in dressing up like a dog? Well, because for all my talk about not being with people and wanting to be normal and have fun, there is also a part of me that likes being the outsider, the unique one. “He walks amongst us, but he is not one of us”. That and I hate wearing white. I have one white, long sleeve shirt, and I only wear it when none of my other work clothes are clean. I wear white shirts to bed, with things like Lisa Loeb or Kurt Cobain on them, but I prefer black or sometimes grey.
Last week I did make an effort to fake being happy. Or at least, hide how sad and miserable I am. On Friday we had some computer issues which forced me to leave my fav boss numerous Post-It notes on her desk. I usually draw a little smiley face on them for her, but this time I drew more elaborate, Halloween-themed pictures on them. She then cut the pics out of the post-its and hung them up in her cube, so that was kind of funny. Then today both my fav boss and Katie, this girl who sits in front of me (nice girl, cute, but not my type so no mini-crush like CGCN) asked me how “Saw 5" was, and my fav boss also started watching “Twin Peaks” upon my suggestion, so she was telling me what she thought of it so far, so that was the extent of my social-ness today. I didn’t spend break with my best friend, but she stopped by my table at lunch to fill me in on some her vacation stuff and show me some pics from her trip.
Thursday we had a 90 minute meeting with some mid-level big wigs at my banks parent company. I don’t know how much of the meeting was BS corporate propaganda so we’re not all worried about being laid off after the parent company was bailed out by the UK government and 58& of it could end up being owned by that Govt, but they joked and swore light-heartedly, and assured us that they would actually ADD jobs to our departments and not cut them (lots of collections people needed in a bad economy after all). Still not quite convinced my job and the company is safe right now, but I appreciated 90 minutes off of the phones.
I dunno. I’m just really fucked up right now. I’m not logging on to Yahoo or Stickam as much lately because I just don’t feel like talking to any of my internet friends. In the same way that porn just kind of depresses me now because it’s a reminder of something I can’t have (sex, or even physical closeness with a female) talking with internet friends (at least a few of whom are attractive girls who might actually date me if I lived anywhere near them) is another reminder of what I can’t have...a girlfriend...or even friends I can hang out with more often. Then again, no one wants to hang out with someone as gloomy as me, and I feel so guilty about depressing those around me with my own shit that I often push people away, which is how I lost my old friends from high school. It’s just hard because what I want is so simple and easy for everyone else, and yet for some reason is so goddamn impossible for me. HOW THE FUCK DO PEOPLE MEET PEOPLE ANYWAY?!?!
That’s a quote from “Choke”. I posted it before, but I made a picture out of it. Bored weekend alone, what can I say. Yeah, “Saw 5" was pretty good, gave it a B..which is the lowest I’ve given a film in the series so far. They’re supposedly only making one more, and I think that’s good because the series is running itself out. The more they keep retconning the more they are going to ruin Jigsaw. First he forces people who don’t appreciate their lives to appreciate their life, then he’s rehabilitating people who have done bad things in their life. First he sets up games where anyone has a reasonable chance of winning, then he sets up games heavily stacked in favor of the subject losing but then claims he wants the victims to survive and despises murderers, etc. Basically the further it goes, the more Jigsaw is turning from a hurt man who is trying to teach people lessons, to a sick fuck who wants to torture people and devises a fake philosophy so he can feel blameless, and I think that’s the wrong direction. Plus part 5 cut some corners dialogue and character development-wise, and Hoffman is far less interesting than Jigsaw or Amanda. But the film was still good.
Halloween is Friday. I have no plans. My mom and stepdad invited me out to go to clubs with them, probably Club Hell and Mardi Gras, along with my stepdad’s brother and his girlfriend, but I can’t imagine anything more lame than going clubbing with your parents, even if Club Hell on Halloween night, a Friday, would be sweet. But I can’t exactly try to pick up girls with my mom there. Not that I’d be successful if I went with Jess or someone else anyway. So yeah, if the times work out I’m just going to go see “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” an then spend the night home alone, probably crying that I can’t have hot sex with a girl dressed like a Goth Kittie or something. I’m not a party person anyway, so unless I had a reasonable chance of meeting a girl there, I wouldn’t want to go to a Halloween party anyway. Still, it’s pretty sad that a horror freak like myself can’t find anything to do when Halloween falls on a Friday. That’s my main problem, though. All the things I want to do in life are things I can’t really do alone, that I need a girlfriend, or at least more friends, to do: to go to a club and have fun (something tells me I’d have more courage talking to girls if I had a group of, I don’t know, seven people to go with instead of by myself or just with one or two others), or travel Europe (scary and boring if you go alone), or get an apartment with a girl I’m dating so we have two incomes and are not alone in our challenges, or fuck in a graveyard (oh wait, I already did that one, lol. Now when I listen to the song “Things You See In A Graveyard” from the “Repo” soundtrack, I smile just a little). I wake up alone, I sit in a cubicle at work alone, I eat lunch alone (though this is preferable to sitting with co-workers who I am not comfortable being the “real me” around and feeling awkward and even more miserable...and it gives me a chance to read the Sookie Stackhouse books).
I love “True Blood”, especially now that Lizzy Caplin, the cute girl who played Marlena in “Cloverfield”, has been topless on it a lot. And Anna Paquin was topless to. The only thing hotter than sex, is VAMPIRE sex, lol. Yeah, this TV show is one of the few things bringing me pleasure lately. It seems like the DVDs I buy or the movies I go to see or the porn I watch or the books/comics I read aren’t doing much for me. The usual things I could go to to make me feel a little bit better just don’t work much, unless the movie is a masterpiece like a “Choke” or a “Religulous” or something. Hell, my best friend tried to cheer me up today with a tried and true method, and it didn’t do much good. It’s just that the things I want are things I can’t buy in a store, and no one I know can give me. Yes I want love and a girlfriend. Or someone to cuddle with. Or at least a willing partner to be with on some of these cold, lonesome nights to help me fuck the pain away for at least a little while, if only a hour or two to take my mind away from this lonely, pathetic, meaningless life I lead. And next week we have to set the clocks back and it’s just going to get darker and colder. Before you know it, there will be snow and the dreaded New Year’s Eve and...ugh, I don’t want to think about it. But when you’re isolated in your bedroom alone, with no one to hold and tell you everything will be okay, all you have is time to think think think.
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Suicidegirls lately. It seems no one talks through Myspace anymore, I fucking hate facebook with a fiery passion, and besides Porch and Tiffany no one talks to me though Yahoo...and Fubar’s just Fubar. Suicidegirls at least has members who are like me : lonely guys who don’t quite fit in....the other members are either douchebag guys (just a few) or hot girls (and who doesn’t like talking to them). I must admit, sad as it may be, I get a little chill when a suicidegirl talks to me. I posted a pic of my cat and I on the “Kitties” group, and an SG responded to me.
I spend most of my time, the time not gawking at naked, pale redheads who wear glasses and are loaded with freckles, that is, posting on the “Hopeless Romantics” group. I also trolled the “Virgins” group, thankful I don’t need to join them...and also that there were people older than me who were still virgins, not by choice, so that made me feel a little better about myself. Granted, the girl who helped me out there was a friend and not a girl who thought I was hot and desired me, but not every guy is lucky enough to have a hot girl in Maine willing to bone them, so I count my lucky stars every day for that. But posting in a group filled with other shy, lonely, somewhat nice guys who keep getting rejected or passed over or simply can’t find a girl makes me feel less alone, somehow. Sometimes you just need to know you’re not the only one having these problems, when the people in your immediate vicinity certainly don’t.
There was apparently some tattoo expo/rock concert in Providence over the weekend. I saw an ad for it on SG, and my mom wanted to go to it (she’s really into tattoo lately but doesn’t have any...go figure) but it was $30.00 a ticket so too steep for her now. If I could drive there (downtown Providence) I might have gone. Godsmack was playing and they used to be my fav band before Evans Blue and Framing Hanley, and seeing girls with tattoos and body mods all around is my idea of Heaven, but that’s also something not very fun to do alone, even if I could have gotten a ride, you know?
I made that too. I use that quote a lot. I keep putting off talking about the election, but it’s only a week ago, so I might as well make a perfunctory comment : I’m voting for Obama. If you vote for McCain after 8 years of Bush policies he supported 94% of the time (based on his Senate voting record) you’re a fucking asshole. He sold out his old “maverick” beliefs and has moved more and more to the right to get elected. Sarah Palin is a fucking retard who looks and acts like Peggy Hill and is useless, except that her face just screams to be cummed on, lol. The debates were useless and all candidates ignored the questions and pretty much just gave the same prepared lines and points, which were often vague, and then attacked each other. I’d like to think the country isn’t dumb enough to elect McCain, but after Bush let 9/11 happen on his watch while he read “My Pet Goat”, or after he stole the election in 2000, or started an unnecessary war in Iraq, you idiots still voted for him in 2004, so I have no faith in this country or it’s electorate, and they’ll probably elect McCain because, between the two coasts, the entire middle of this country is a big, stupid, fat, dumb redneck country, addicted to Jesus and Nascar.
I’m so fucking lonely. A breaking heart in an empty bedroom is the loudest sound you’ll ever hear.
I guess that’s all for now. The thing that hurts the most is that I don’t even have anyone to focus on as a possible girlfriend. All the girls in my life I have mini-crushes on, like CGCN, are people I have no chance with. I have no hopes or potential out there. I have nothing to latch onto as saving grace. It’s just me....alone...with nothing to look forward to and no hope. That’s why I haven’t updated my Myspace mood from “sad” in 9 days. I’ll update my mood when my mood actually changed. Until then, I won’t end with my famous 7 letter sign off....but you all know how shitty I’m feeling. I’m getting better at faking it, at least, but like that Framing Hanley song goes: “You can paint the picture pretty, but it serves as no disguise”. Anyone who knows me well enough can see right through my facade. But at least I’m trying, and not jumping off any bridges yet. But the only way things are going to get better is if I one day look into a girl’s eyes as she laughs at one of my silly jokes, and I see a spark that tells me she actually likes me, desires me, wants me. Until then, I’ll settle for someone to sleep next to, to hug, to kiss, to hold. Anything. Just to not be alone, if only for a little while. To pretend for a little while that it’ll be okay.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
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8:11 pm - Insecurities Beyond The Hotel Lobby
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Hello,
So It’s been a week since I posted my girlfriend application, and 10 days since I posted my last “real” blog entry. The only thing more indicative of me being in bad mood than blog entries posted really close together, are when I wait a long ass time between “real” entries, and the past, oh, week and a half or so, I’ve been pretty goddamned bummed out. Last week was really horrible, but this week, while I still feel really shitty, I am working on my skills at faking being okay, which are met with mixed results. I kinda/sorta faked being happy a little bit at Waterfire, but I was genuinely happy most of that night, so the stretch to fake it for about 10% of that night wasn’t too bad. BTW, the picture above was from that night, I stole it from Crystal’s Myspace (hopefully she doesn’t mind, lol). Of course, things have actually gotten worse this week, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
So what kicked off my latest bout into unfathomable sadness and nights spent under the covers crying myself to sleep listening to that awesome Framing Hanley CD? Well, it was one night when I was online and it hit me how alone I was. And what made me realize it was the fact that I, currently, have no hopes as far as girls I am interested in. Don’t get me wrong, there are always girls around that I am attracted to, like CGCN or whomever. But right now there are no girls I am crushing on that I actually have even a minuscule chance with. I have no one to pursue or try to win over or hope something might happen with. I have no prospects out there right now. None. Nada. Nothing. I am so fucking alone right now. I spend all of my nights alone in my bedroom. I don’t even have anyone I can call up for cuddling or sex, like some other single people I know at least have, which is less than what I want, but still a lot more than I have and would be nice. But no, I have nothing, except a computer and my increasingly futile attempts to try to make connections with other human beings using it. Even now that I have real life friends, it still doesn’t fill the gaping hole left by the lack of love, or at least some approximation of physical or emotional intimacy in my life. And knowing I have no hopes or prospects right now toward correcting that status in my life, toward changing the tide and winning over a girl...it leaves me feeling hopeless, defeated, and gloomy, and I wonder what the point is of living and my entire life is going to be miserable because I’ll never be truly happy unless I’m WITH someone.
It came to a head at the end of last week because on top of my personal issues with the lovesickness and all, I had an issue at work where my computer was broken Thursday and Friday, which left me having to sit at other cubicles where all the systems are lacking or screwed up and it made me more irritable and angry on top of how sad and scared I already am, and obviously that caldron of negative emotions effects your job performance. I felt bad because my best friend was going on vacation that Saturday, won’t be back til Monday of next week, and I was feeling so down I didn’t even hang out with her on break that Friday, and the day before I barely spoke and was just a horrible, angry, depressed bastard. Though before I left on Friday I did make sure to wish her a fun vacation, I didn’t want to be an asshole and leave work without speaking to her. Since then she’s texted Kerri to say hi to me, and to say that she bought me an awesome gift down there and “he better cheer up or he ain’t getting it”. I’m not quite sure the strategy of withholding a good thing from a depressed person to make them less depressed is prudent, lol. But she’s usually quite good at cheering me a lot of time, so maybe by next week I’ll feel a bit better, but I doubt it. Well I do have “Saw 5" to look forward to on Friday. At least there’s always the movies.
Well aside from romantic problems, I guess I have a more immediate problem to worry about now : my house might be getting foreclosed on. I live with my mom and stepdad, and while I’ve been doing quite well for myself (assuming the current banking crisis doesn’t effect my job..which it might since the UK government bailed out my bank’s parent company and despite all the corporate propaganda memos telling us we’re okay, the pathological pessimist in me thinks things will get a lot worse), they have not. So unless the steps they are taking to try and work out the issues succeed, by mid November or December I might have to move again. I fucking hate moving. I must have moved 20 times in my life, all within the same 3 towns in RI. I like this house, and I was kind of hoping the next time I had to move would be when I finally move out on my own, but I guess that’s not the case. Of course, if we do end up moving it’ll probably be a short notice deal, and we’d probably have to take whatever we can get, and who knows if where we move will be someplace I am comfortable driving to, or driving to and from work to. And if the place is some small little apartment or condo if there will be room for my stuff and the dog and the cat and....would you think any less of me if I admitted I was scared. Terrified. Petrified. Because I am.
Part of me thinks I should take this, I hesitate to call it an “opportunity”, to see about getting a little place of my own. But that prospect scares me too. I had always hoped that when I finally moved out, it would be to get a place with a girl I was dating, that way I wouldn’t be doing it alone and responsibilities would be shared. The thing I hate about the idea of striking out on my own, REALLY on my own, is that it would make me even more alone. At least now I have my mom, my stepdad, my dog, and my cat. If I move out, it’s just me. I’ll wake up in an empty apartment, go to work, and come home to an empty apartment. I don’t know if the isolation would drive me crazy or make me more depressed, or if the stress of going from having relatively no bills to having a bunch would cause me to have a nervous breakdown. And I don’t think I could do the roommate thing since I hate most other guys, thus couldn’t stand to live with one, and if I had a female roommate I think it would be awkward if the girl brought home a guy and I had to hear them fucking in another room. Maybe if I just had a lesbian roommate and I could hear her fucking her girlfriend in the other room...that’d be kind of hot, and much better than a nightlight when it comes to safe things to help you fall asleep, lol.
I don’t know. Right now I have a good amount of money saved up from my job and from the money I inherited after my father died. Living with my mom and stepdad has helped me save that since my only expenses are car insurance, internet, student loans (which will be completely paid off in January) and money for my groceries (my mom does the actual shopping). Oh, and gas for my car, but one of the good things about the bad economy is that it has caused oil, and thus gasoline, to become cheaper, and I can once again fill up my tank with $25.00 and that lasts me 10-14 days due to how little I drive. If I were to move out, my budget would be much more strained since I would have to pay for rent, water, heat (gas or oil), electricity, cable, internet, car insurance, groceries and other food-related expenses (BK), gas, plus any furniture or appliances I can’t take with me. Depending on what any apartment or condo I move into comes with (and some of those above utilities might be included in rent) I might need to get a washer and dryer or a fridge. Seeing as how it’s just me and I probably won’t be entertaining company, I could probably make do without anything like a living room set. Hell, chances are the apartment I would get would be 3 rooms, a bedroom, a bathroom, and some main room/kitchen dealie. Essentially I’m just afraid that the nice little sum of $$ I’ve saved up, which I’ve been telling myself would be to help get my movie made some day even though I haven’t worked on my screenplay since August, would rapidly deplete. I’d also have to cut down on the $$ I spend on Amazon or other things, like on the rare occasion I go out with friends. In the worst case scenario of the house being foreclosed on and us having to move out, I might have to just make a detailed list of expenses and figure out how I can live comfortably on my salary if I wanted to live on my own, and hope my job doesn’t get cut if I did so. Also my driving phobia will limit the places I will look for an apartment to towns I am comfortable driving in : Johnston, Cranston, Smithfield, Scituate, and Warwick. Something tells me it won’t be easy finding places to live right now, and if I did find a place in my price range it’d probably be some little shanty, drug den or something.
The thing is I’m not ready to move out on my own. Yeah, I know I’m 25 years old and people my age are getting married and having kids, but it’s no secret that developmentally way behind my peers. I just lost my virginity a little over 2 months ago..most people lose theirs at 15 or 16. And yeah, I know it won’t exactly help me with the ladies when I tell them I still live with mommy, nor can I bring a girl home for nookie on the odd chance non-existent Hell froze over and I met a girl at a club or something and she wanted to get amorous. Pretty much the only plus I can see to living on my own right now would be the freedom to walk around naked and look at porn any time I wanted. Everything else is a negative. And hell, well I live with my mom and stepdad, I at least know I can count on them to drive me to work if the roads are bad from snow, or something like that. The idea of being self-reliant scares me because I have no confidence in myself. At least if I were living with a girlfriend, like Alysa and I almost got to the point of doing, you’re not alone when you tackle a problem, you’re a team. Plus two paychecks are much easier on the bills than one. Hell, I know plenty of couple who have 2 paychecks and can’t make ends meet, so I don’t know how I’d be able to do it on my own.
So yeah, I’m fucking scared. Really really scared. And depressed because it seems like this is just one more thing that pushes me toward being more alone. Because I can just picture it now. We’ll have to move out and into some small little apartment. My mom and stepdad will be super stressed because there’s not enough room for all our stuff, and immediately they’ll launch on me because I have so much “junk” (DVDs, books, knick-knacks, etc) and the stress they cause me combined with the asshole customers at work combined with my sadness over my inability to get a girlfriend will just drive me back into a deep dark depression. Let’s reintroduce out shadows. It’s bad enough I’m getting worse right now, crying myself to sleep nearly every night because I’m so sad and scared and lonely and angry at myself and at the world, but it looks like in the enxt couple of weeks things are just going to keep getting worse. And New Year’s Eve, one of the 3 biggest depressing days of the year for me , is right around the corner. I got through my birthday thanks to April, and Valentine’s Day is far off enough that I don’t need to worry about it yet, but New Year’s Evil is going to knock me for a loop, I already know that.
So yeah, I’m hoping either my mom and stepdad can refinance or the foreclosure date can be pushed back so they can file for bankruptcy or get a lawyer and a court date to keep the house or something, but I doubt it. Things are going to get worse before they get better. And I’m all alone in struggle, really. Fuck.
Alright, well you’re all tired of hearing me whine about how I can’t get a girl, and if I keep talking out this foreclosure/possibly moving thing I’m going to have a panic attack, so I’ll put that on the back burner for now and move on.
Last weekend I went to see “W” and gave it a B-. It was odd how the film tried to be fair and even with Bush, and yeah it was the very treatment that made me hate the man more. Instead of portraying him as evil, he is merely a dumb jock who spends 40 some odd years of his life as a drunken buffoon with major daddy issues, then trades one unhealthy addiction (booze) or another (religion) and decides to get back at his dad and try to boost his own ego by becoming president, and his own selfish attempts to feel better about himself cause the country to nearly destroy itself. Bush is an asshole. Fuck him. I can’t wait to vote for Obama in 2 weeks. The film was pretty good, but would have been better if it have covered a wider scope. It mainly just covers Bush’s college years and early political career, and then the build up to the Iraq war. I would have preferred a 3 hour film that covered more areas (cocaine use, Air National Guard, the Florida recount, 9/11, Katrina, etc) but the film as it is makes for a decent biopic with some great performances.
My recent Amazon purchases are as follows:
-“Star Wars : The Force Unleashed” video game for my PS3. It’s a fun game but very short. I’m stuck on a level where you have to use the force to crash a giant space ship. I beat the level once, but I was using a cheat code and the game won’t let you save if you use cheat codes, so I have to try and beat it without the code, which I can’t.
-“Right At Your Door” on DVD..haven’t watched it yet, don’t know if it’s any good.
-“Family Guy : Volume 6" on DVD...haven’t watched it yet, seen some of the eps on TV already.
-“Simpsons : Season 11" on DVD...this was the first season since season one where there were more than a few episodes I didn’t like. It’s still the best comedy series ever on TV, but starting with season 11 not every episode was a complete gem.
-“Dead By Dawn”...this is the 1st book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, upon which the HBO TV show “True Blood” is based. I started reading it today, after finished reading “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” (A very good book about Hollywood in the 1970s) and so far the book is close to the TV show, but the TV show added a ton of other stuff, naturally, like season 1 of “Dexter” did with the book it was based on.
-“The Porning of America”...a book about how Porn has seeped into mainstream culture and how it is affecting society. My screenplay touches very briefly on some of these issues, as it relates to how young people (approx my age) are dealing with sex and romance and intimacy in a highly sexualized society that has also turned sex into a commodity a huge degree. I’ve heard good things about the book, and while I am a huge supporter of the pornographic arts, I’m interested in reading a book that is not anti-porn, but does worry about how ready and freely available access to sexually explicit material is possibly harming the emotional development of people in their teens and 20s. In some ways I think it has helped me, since I didn’t see my 1st real live vagina til I was 21 or 22, and as someone who can’t get sex it’s helpful to have porn to satisfy urges and fantasies and whatnot...and apparently watching porn made me more than adequate at cunnlingus, lol. But at the same time has overexposure to sexually explicit material responsible for how depressed I get over my lack of experience as compared to how I perceive the experience of my peers as being, which could also bleed into my depression over being unable to find love or be in a relationship. I don’t know.
-“Halloween : Nightdance”..a comic book featuring Michael Myers from the “Halloween” films.
‘”Hack/Slash” volumes 1 & 4...These are comic books. They had a special graphic novel of “Hack/Slash” that tied in with the Suicidegirls, and after I bought and read that I felt like I should read some of the other stories. Volume 2 was out of stock and volume 3 won’t ship for a few weeks because it’s on back order, that’s why I got 1 & 4 right now, as they were in stock and available. The comic is about a girl and an odd monster-guy who hunt down slashers (horror movie-esque serial killers).
Speaking of Suicidegirls, I did have one happy moment this week. A Suicidegirl read my blog. Well ok, she read my girlfriend application, or at least skimmed it, and even though she didn’t fill it out, she left a comment.
She didn’t approve my friend request, so I don’t think the comment was a compliment, but the fact that a hot, nude model read my blog kind of makes me happy. BTW, my blog hits on Myspace passed 13,000 this week, and my Myspace profile views passed 11,000. Nice to know I’m popular online, even if I’m not in real life. Oh, but another Suicidegirl sent me a picture of herself nude and made up like a zombie, which I think she only sent to her friends (though she probably has thousands of people on her friends list). That made me smile.
I think I forgot to post the link to my SG profile so here it is :
http://suicidegirls.com/members/Dysthymia83/
Ok, I guess that’s all I need to talk about right now. Friday I’m seeing “Saw 5" after work, so hopefully that will cheer me up, or at least distract me from my horrible life for 90 minutes. Earlier this week at work the bosses were trying to convince people to wear white shirts on Friday so they could pin black spots to us and we could dress up like Dalmatians for a group Halloween photo, and somehow this lead to some good-natured picking on me, which I unfortunately was in too bad a mood to appreciate, so I basically just stated I wouldn’t be dressing in white because all my on-work clothes are black (a half-truth) and I didn’t want to wear white to “Saw 5". My fav boss tried to bribe me by saying she’d let me lave 15 minutes early on Friday to catch the show if I dressed up, but I actually don’t need to leave early since the show starts at 5:15 PM and I get out at 5 PM anyway.
Next week my best friend returns, but my guess is she’ll be too busy with other people to hang out with me much that week, especially with Halloween that Friday. My only Halloween plans are to see “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” and try not to be too depressed that I won’t have a Sexy Goth Kitten to help me fuck the pain away while Skinny Puppy’s “Tormentor” and Marilyn Manson’s “Para Noir” blast in the background (yeah, I’m not too depressed to develop a special Halloween sex fantasy). And then it’s November. I hate that we’re going to have to change the clocks and it’ll be dark when I wake up and then dark when I leave work. I’m not a fucking vampire, I need to see some sun in my day. Plus I’ll have to start my car in the morning because the windows will be frosty. Stupid New England winters.
Hopefully in November Jess from RI will find time to take me to Club Hell so I can try to meet a cute Goth/Emo/Punk/Scene/Geek girl. Vicki said she’d get back to me on when she can hang out with me too. So yeah, no real friend hang out plans on the horizon. And “Repo: The Genetic Opera” isn’t opening anywhere remotely close to RI, so I can’t even use that as an excuse to get someone to hang out with me, whereas if it opened in Boston I might have been able to rope Jess into driving me to that one. After a girlfriend, a fuck buddy, or a cuddle buddy, more real life friends is 4th on the people I need to meet.
Ok, I guess that’s all for now. I end this entry with someone I found while looking through my old blogs. It’s called “Ode To Nice Guys”. I didn’t write it, and I don’t remember where I found it, but here it is :
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This is a tribute to the nice guys. The nice guys that finish last, that never become more than friends, that endure hours of whining and bitching about what assholes guys are, while disproving the very point. This is dedicated to those guys who always provide a shoulder to lean on but restrain themselves to tentative hugs, those guys who hold open doors and give reassuring pats on the back and sit patiently outside the changing room at department stores. This is in honor of the guys that obligingly reiterate how cute/beautiful/smart/funny/sexy their female friends are at the appropriate moment, because they know most girls need that litany of support. This is in honor of the guys with open minds, with laid-back attitudes, with honest concern. This is in honor of the guys who respect a girl’s every facet, from her privacy to her theology to her clothing style.
This is for the guys who escort their drunk, bewildered female friends back from parties and never take advantage once they’re at her door, for the guys who accompany girls to bars as buffers against the rest of the creepy male population, for the guys who know a girl is fishing for compliments but give them out anyway, for the guys who always play by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters, for the guys who are accredited as boyfriend material but somehow don’t end up being boyfriends, for all the nice guys who are overlooked, underestimated, and unappreciated, for all the nice guys who are manipulated, misled, and unjustly abandoned, this is for you.
This is for that time she left 40 urgent messages on your cell phone, and when you called her back, she spent three hours painstakingly dissecting two sentences her boyfriend said to her over dinner. And even though you thought her boyfriend was a chump and a jerk, you assured her that it was all ok and she shouldn’t worry about it. This is for that time she interrupted the best killing spree you’d ever orchestrated in GTA3 to rant about a rumor that romantically linked her and the guy she thinks is the most repulsive person in the world. And even though you thought it was immature and you had nothing against the guy, you paused the game for two hours and helped her concoct a counter-rumor to spread around the floor. This is also for that time she didn’t have a date, so after numerous vows that there was nothing “serious” between the two of you, she dragged you to a party where you knew nobody, the beer was awful, and she flirted shamelessly with you, justifying each fit of reckless teasing by announcing to everyone: “oh, but we’re just friends!” And even though you were invited purely as a symbolic warm body for her ego, you went anyways. Because you’re nice like that.
The nice guys don’t often get credit where credit is due. And perhaps more disturbing, the nice guys don’t seem to get laid as often as they should. And I wish I could logically explain this trend, but I can’t. From what I have observed on campus and what I have learned from talking to friends at other schools and in the workplace, the only conclusion I can form is that many girls are just illogical, manipulative bitches. Many of them claim they just want to date a nice guy, but when presented with such a specimen, they say irrational, confusing things such as “oh, he’s too nice to date” or “he would be a good boyfriend but he’s not for me” or “he already puts up with so much from me, I couldn’t possibly ask him out!” or the most frustrating of all: “no, it would ruin our friendship.” Yet, they continue to lament the lack of datable men in the world, and they expect their too-nice-to-date male friends to sympathize and apologize for the men that are jerks. Sorry, guys, girls like that are beyond my ability to fathom. I can’t figure out why the connection breaks down between what they say (I want a nice guy!) and what they do (I’m going to sleep with this complete ass now!). But one thing I can do, is say that the nice-guy-finishes-last phenomenon doesn’t last forever. There are definitely many girls who grow out of that train of thought and realize they should be dating the nice guys, not taking them for granted. The tricky part is finding those girls, and even trickier, finding the ones that are single.
So, until those girls are found, I propose a toast to all the nice guys. You know who you are, and I know you’re sick of hearing yourself described as ubiquitously nice. But the truth of the matter is, the world needs your patience in the department store, your holding open of doors, your party escorting services, your propensity to be a sucker for a pretty smile. For all the crazy, inane, absurd things you tolerate, for all the situations where you are the faceless, nameless hero, my accolades, my acknowledgment, and my gratitude go out to you. You do have credibility in this society, and your well deserved vindication is coming.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
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8:17 pm - Dysthymia83's Girlfriend Application
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Feeling lonely and lovesick, and thought I’d create an application to become my girlfriend. Not that anyone is interested in applying, lol.
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BASICS
Name:
Age (Under 18 or Over 30 need not apply...unless you’re Lisa Loeb):
Straight or Bi:
Location (Must either be 15 miles from my location, or be willing to do a shitload of driving) :
Highest Level of Education:
Religious Affiliation:
Political Leanings:
Occupation:
Height:
Weight (Sorry to be shallow, but over 200 lbs need not apply):
Hair Color:
Eye Color:
Booby Size:
Do you wear glasses? If no, why not?
BACKGROUND
Where did you grow up?
How many family members lived with you in your childhood home/homes?
Are you close to your parent(s)?
Do you have any siblings?
Would you describe your childhood as happy?
Public or Private schools?
Did you have many friends, or just a few?
ROMANTIC PAST
How old were you when you had your first kiss?
How old were you when you got your first boyfriend?
How old were you when you lost your virginity?
How many serious relationships have you been in?
What were the reasons those relationships ended?
Are you still friends with any of your exes?
Have you ever lived with a significant other?
Have you ever gotten close to marriage?
ROMANTIC PRESENT
Why would you say you are currently single?
What are you looking for in terms of romance right now? (EX: Long Term, Just Dating, Casual Sex, Friends who cuddle, etc)
Why are you filling out this application?
Are you more concerned with finding love or having fun?
How long would you have to be with someone before you move in with them?
How long would you have to be with someone before you’d expect to be proposed to?
ROMANTIC FUTURE
Would you like to get married someday? If not, do you want a long term, monogamous relationship even if it’s not called marriage?
Ideally, how old would you like to definitely be married by?
Do you want kids? If so, how many, and how long into the marriage would you want to start trying for them? If no, why?
What type of location would you like to live in once married? (Region of country, City vs Suburb, House or Apartment, etc)
COMPATIBILITY WITH ME
Do you enjoy going to the movies frequently?
Does the idea of many nights at home cuddling and watching TV appeal to you?
Are you a cat person, dog person, some other animal person, or hate pets?
Do you read for pleasure? If so, how many books do you read a year?
What type of music do you listen to?
Are you interested in:
-Politics
-History
-Philosophy
-Literature
-Photography
-Writing
Do you enjoy long, one-on-one conversations?
Do you prefer hanging out in small groups or large groups?
Are you affectionate? Can you tolerate a lot of affection? How do you feel about PDA (Public Displays of Affection)
Do you find getting complimented a lot awesome or annoying?
Are small, romantic gestures sweet or stupid?
Do you like cuddling?
Would you like to travel?
Would you consider yourself geeky?
Would you consider yourself Goth, Punk, Emo, or “Scene”?
Would you consider yourself a “Girl Next Door”?
Do you have any piercings?
Do you have any tattoos?
Are you shy or outgoing?
Are you more often depressed or happy?
MY FLAWS
Do you mind doing most of the driving?
Does being with a picky eater annoy you?
Are you willing to help an introverted person break out of their shell?
Are you willing to date someone who has suffered from depression?
Are you okay with very skinny guys?
Are you okay with perverted humor?
Would being with a short guy bother you?
YOUR FLAWS
Would you consider yourself “Damaged”, “Scarred”, or “Fucked-Up”? If yes, explain why (it might make me like you more, oddly enough)
What would you say is your biggest flaw?
Are you jealous? Would you have a problem dating a guy with many platonic female friends?
Are you direct and open with your feelings/thoughts?
Do you like to test the men you’re with?
Have you ever cheated on your significant other? If so, what were the circumstances?
SEX STUFF
Ideally, how many times a week would you have sex?
List any 15 big turn-ons or fetishes for you. If you don’t have 15, list as many as you can think of.
How many of the following sex acts appeal to you :
-Regular Sex
-Handjobs/Fingering
-Oral Sex
a) Giving (Swallow Y/N–Deep Throat Y/N)
b) Receiving
-Anal Sex (Receiving Only, Kthnx)
-Titty-Fucking and/or cumming on boobies
-Facials
-Dress Up (Schoolgirl, Various Goth-ic attire)
-Handcuffs, Duct Tape, or other tying up?
-Dirty Talk
-Dancing/Lapdancing
-FMF Threesomes?
What are your favorite positions?
In general, how long would an average session of sex last?
Are you on birth control? Would you require condoms in a long term relationship?
The guy cums. Where do you want it?
YOUR PERCEPTION OF ME
What parts of my physical appearance do you like?
What parts of my physical appearance do you not like?
What parts of my personality do you like?
What parts of my personality do you not like?
YOU
Write a few sentences about why you think you would be a good match for me.
MISC
Is there anything you wanted to add that wasn’t covered in the above questions?
THANK YOU FOR APPLYING. =D
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, October 12th, 2008
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4:49 am - She Wants You To Eat Her Pain
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Hello,
So it’s 2:30 AM and thus technically no longer the 11th, which means the 2 month mark since my night with April has passed. Yeah, pretty much the 11th of every month will be focused on me remembering that one night of happiness...until I get a better night...which will be never, lol. At least today turned out to be a very good day, for the most part. After a week where I was more depressed than I have been since about May when the Crush stuff was still fresh, I really needed this. But of course, not every day of happiness for me is truly happy...except that night with April, of course. But I’d say today was 90% happy and 10% bad thoughts, but since everyone tells me I should fake it when I’m feeling bad, I don’t think anyone caught on to the scattered moments I was depressed...until they read this, that is, lol. Oh well. But let’s back up a bit.
So the last entry I posted, which was Preferred List/Friends Only/Favs Only, was super depressing. The day I posted it I was on break at work with my best friend and Kerri and I pretty much sat there staring into space like a zombie so mired in my own sadness. Then the next day, both had read that blog. We had a false alarm fire drill that day, while I was in the restroom no less, and as we were waiting outside to go in my best friend started pushing me, lol. It got me to smile despite the fog of depression over me, I’ll admit. Later at break her and Kerri essentially gave me a pep talk about my issues. There’s always a big issue that comes up that I always firmly disagree with : You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else or have anyone else love you. I know this is bullshit because I have fallen for girls who have pretty much downright hated themselves, lol. Also there’s the notion that another person can’t make you happy if you’re not happy with yourself. I offer as contradictory evidence my last GF, Alysa. With the exception of my night with April (I’m probably going to mention her a lot this entry. Sorry, lol) I was never happier than in, say, the first 6 months of my 7 month relationship with Alysa. I wasn’t happy because I felt better about who I was, because I didn’t, I was happy because I was with her. So yeah, it’s possible to love someone who hates themselves, and it’s possible to be happy with someone else even if you’re not happy with yourself. Kerri did bring up an interesting notion that this might be perhaps due to the “newness” of that relationship, that a relationship is perhaps surrounded by a glowing aura of happiness in the first 6-8 months, much like newlyweds, so if the relationship had gone on longer things might have changed, but I can only speculate on that hypothesis for now.
As far as my gung ho NEED to get a girlfriend, my best friend has always been adamant that it’s not really that I need a girlfriend, it’s just that I need friends. I’ll get into it later, but there were moments tonight where I realized that was dead wrong, but my answer to that at the time was simple : there are things you can do with a girlfriend that you can’t do with platonic friends. The obvious is sex, naturally, and while I know sex isn’t the most important thing in the world, it’s a lot easier for people who have had a fair or decent amount of sex to argue that. I had sex once, with one girl, exactly 2 months ago yesterday. Would it be so wrong to admit that I might want some more experience? That there are fun and exciting things in this new world that have been opened to me that I’d like to try (a recent entry, Friends only on Myspace but open on the other blogs, ended with a list of my unfulfilled fantasies). That maybe I’d feel better about myself and less inadequate if I had something to hold up to among the various sexcapades of my peers. Sure, I tend to be more emotional than other guys, so some have argued that random, meaningless sex would probably do me more harm than good, but I think with April I proved that I’m able to separate sex with emotional intimacy if needed. Sure, April was someone I knew a long time, care about very dearly, and wasn’t just some random hot girl I picked up, but I don’t love her, she doesn’t love me, and it was nothing more than a gift or a favor to me. And I know that even if the distance wasn’t an issue, or if she comes back to RI from Maine for the holidays, we’ll never do that again. (Not that I wouldn’t want to, but I know she wouldn’t). It’s not as if I stay up at night wishing I could be with her...more often I stay up at night going back to my memory of that night, which if I’m using my imagination rather than porn or whatever, I find April to occupy my thoughts far more than any, say, female celebrity. I suppose this makes sense because, if I’m imagining having sex with someone, I only have one frame of reference to go back to, but also because April was gorgeous and tender and caring and gave me the first time I wanted and needed and was flawless. My only complaints about that night where that it wasn’t long enough, and are in regards to my own performance, not hers. She was so amazing that, again, it is unlikely I will ever have sex again, and that sucks and depresses me. But at the same time I do know that many guys out there may sleep with dozens of women, and most won’t be half as beautiful as April, or as good in bed as April, or will appreciate being with a girl as much as April, simply because of how long I had to wait for it to happen, and how the hype and expectations where built up in my mind and yet somehow amazingly not only met, but exceeded by this amazing woman. So yeah, if nothing else, I’ll always have that...but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to have more sex. Maybe it’d help if I wore a T-Shirt with this on it :
Still, when I pointed out there are things you can’t do with a platonic friend that you can with a girlfriend, I didn’t just mean sex. I meant cuddling and holding hands, and wrapping your arms around someone, or even just putting your arm around them and having them rest their head on your shoulder or your chest. My best friend pointed out that there are some friends who do this...cuddle-buddies as opposed to fuck-buddies. But I also had to point out that in addition to not being able to find a girlfriend or a fuck buddy, I also lack to ability to find a cuddle buddy. Hell even my best friend, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to help me with a lot of shit, wouldn’t let me do that. Today was the first time she ever hugged me, for instance. But I did get two of them! Score! So yeah, on the two month mark of losing my virginity, as least I had some physical contact with a female. BOOYAH! That’s awesome too because I love hugging. Kerri said the same thing tonight to. I like the mixture of intimacy and yet innocence in a hug. It’s someone you can do to your grandmother but also to a lover (albeit with different force, closeness, and tightness). So yeah, hugs rules. But okay, let’s assume I have real life friends (which I do now). And let’s assume on top of that I was able to find cuddle and or fuck buddies. Would having all of that make me happy, or would it really take a steady, loving relationship to make me happy? Because sleeping with April made me super-happy, but only for about a two week period...and then for a few minutes every time I’m able to block out any thoughts but of our night together. Maybe I just need someone to boink me on a bi-weekly basis....like payroll, lol. But no, I’m co-dependant and needy and lovesick, and I won’t be happy until I have a girlfriend. And the people who say I need to be happy BEFORE I get a girlfriend just make me more depressed because that means I’m stuck in a non-terminating cycle : I’m sad because I can’t get a girlfriend because I’m sad because I can’t get a girlfriend because I’m sad...etc. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t stress myself out and get worked up and depressed and try so damn hard to get a girlfriend if my “needs”, socially, intimately, and sexually, were being temporarily handled elsewhere by a combo of real life friends, fuck buddies, and cuddle buddies. Well, at least I have one component of that kind of down now with the real life friends. April doesn’t count as a fuck buddy because that was a one time thing and I’m pretty sure to be a fuck buddy it needs to be a regular things, so I don’t know what to call her...except a Goddess for doing for me what she did. Because honestly, how many of you would sleep with someone you were not attracted to (at least not anymore) and whom you had no romantic feelings toward whatsoever, and maybe even a little skeeved or repulsed by, just to help them out with a major problem in their life...and to not even half-ass it, but go in there and give 110% to make sure it’s great for the guy. Not many, I tell you that. As an atheist, that’s the closest thing to saint-like I’ll ever see. And who knows, if things ever get really fucking bad for me, it might be that one act of kindness from Saint April that saves me.
I did feel bad as my best friend and Kerri were giving me this pep talk and I started tearing up. Kerri had never seen me super-depressed before, and my best friend, who has seen me depressed, I don’t think has seen me tear up before...aside from those Youtube videos where I cried over Crush, lol. That’s got to be uncomfortable for anyone, so hopefully I’ll get better at this faking happy thing to save them that, because I can’t afford to lose the real life friends I am gaining. At least not until I find those cuddle buddies and fuck friends, lol.
I did start feeling better Friday after work though. I caught a 5 PM show of “Quarantine” the new horror movie starring the uber-hot Jennifer Carpenter from “Dexter”. The film is a remake of Spanish horror film called “REC” (unseen by me) and is essentially “28 Days Later” confined to a small apartment building, and filmed in a POV camera device like “Cloverfield”. The film was derivative and unoriginal (seen one zombie movie and you’ve pretty much seen them all...but I still love them), but it was tense and claustrophobic and pretty damn good. So I gave it a B and seeing it cheered me up some. Then I got BK on the way home from work (first time in maybe 2 weeks I’d gotten BK...I needs to gain some weight) and there was a new episode of Bill Maher, so score!
Today I saw a bulletin on Myspace from the official Suicidegirls Myspace profile that had a special half-off deal for a year’s subscription to the Suicidegirls website, $29.99. So, after the shitty week I’ve had, I decided to treat myself, and bought that year subscription. If I can’t get sex or physical contact with women, I at least want to look at bare assed naked Goth/Punk/Emo girls with impunity. Plus I like that the site has a social networking aspect to it, where you can post blogs, write messages to the models, and has message boards and groups and all of that fun stuff. I even found a Suicide Girl who was born and raised in Cranston, Sid, and she wears glasses in one of her sets. Of course, this will probably be a bust in trying to meet women, since most of the local female non-model members (and there aren’t many) are lesbians. I know, who’d have thought female members on a female porn site would like women? Lol. I guess I’m hoping I’d find more bi girls, aside from the ones who already have a boyfriend but want 3-somes, lol. Anyways, I took a screencap of my profile.
So today I had planned to drop off the rest of my best friend’s birthday gifts off to her (I gave her an early B-day present, a book, 2 weeks ago, and today I gave her another book and 2 DVDs) and not stay too long since I felt it would be awkward being there with just her and her family, but luckily Crystal was there too, which made it less awkward, not being the only friend at a family function. Crystal’s cool anyway. This was only the 3rd time I’ve met her, the first being the beach and the 2nd being my best friends party, but she strikes me as an awesome person with a somewhat similar personality to me, and we share the same musical tastes, which means I might have someone new to burn CDs for, lol. I love making mix CDs, and after my best friend loved the first one I made her, I struck out with #s 2 and 3, so I should quit while I’m ahead with her. But yeah, today was the first time I had any substantial, one-on-one conversation with Crystal, and she’s definitely someone I would want to be friends with even if we didn’t have my best friend in common.
In the end, I didn’t leave the party. I thought I would be in a worse mood today, with it being the 2 month mark and all and considering how depressed I’d been all week, but I was feeling decent and I felt a day with two awesome women, joking around and talking, was better than an afternoon home alone on Suicidegirls all day. Plus my best friend’s family isn’t that bad, considering how uncomfortable it can be hanging around someone else’s family. It was later in the day when my best friend asked me why I was okay sitting with her family but I don’t like sitting with some of the other co-workers at lunch. I found it hard to explain the difference, except that sitting with the co-workers is more of a peer-oriented setting, and I have no desire to be friends with most of them, whereas in a party setting it is not set up like that, but rather as people you politely smile and nod to. And yes, I did eat something at the party...a large piece of cookie cake with frosting. It was quite yummy.
Aside from the party, Crystal and I spent some time giving my best friend advice on what to take on her upcoming trip, and a large part of the afternoon was spent just talking and having fun. Plus, lately I’ve been feeling that I’m not as funny as I used to be and that my jokes fall very flat, but today it seems like many of my jokes did well, and I was making people laugh quite a bit, which was good. Even some of my really filthy jokes landed really well. Anyways, I had also planned to leave early because my best friend had originally planned a party, which morphed into just 3 couples going to Waterfire, this thing in downtown Providence where they light fires on the river, block off the streets, and have this quasi-bohemian festival going on. I didn’t want to do this since 3 couple and me would have just been really depressing. The 7th wheel? Lol. Yeah, I would have felt like shit. But then one party dropped out and it became 2 couples and 2 single people, with me being one of the singles, which is a much less awkward and depression situation, so I ended up going. We were joined by Kerri and Nate, who as always rule, and a friend of Crystal’s who I met at my best friend’s party last month. Well, we stopped at some place for hot wieners beforehand (I didn’t eat anything, naturally) and then it was off to Waterfire.
Having never been to it before, I found Waterfire kind of bleh. In fact, the reason I started getting depressed was because the whole thing seemed very romantic, or would be under the right circumstances, but naturally I had no one to wrap an arm around and gaze off into the water with, and run my hand down her hair and neck as I kiss her earlobe and the heat from the fire warms our bodies as we grasp each other and....yeah, I’m lonely as fuck, lol. It didn’t help that almost every hot girl I saw there was with a guy, especially the ones in glasses, lol. I was kind of hoping there’d be a plentitude of hot Brown University or RISD girls there, but aside from a Witchy girl selling jewelry and a girl in glasses, who was with a guy, that hugged the Witchy girl, there weren’t many girls that made me stare and say “HELLLOO” in my head...not that I would have tried to pick any up anyway, lol. Too shy for that. But still, I was kind of hoping more single girls would be there, but it looked like all hit girls were accompanied by males, and it’s not always apparent by body language which male-female are couples vs just friends. So yeah, there were moments during the night when I felt lonely, despite being with 5 pretty damn cool people, all of whom I was comfortable with and where conversation flowed well. And there were some great sites to see, like the State House lit up with cool lights, or an odd drawing on a tile wall of a man and a word balloon asking “Does masturbation make you fat?” (In case you haven’t noticed from all the pictures of my skinny bod, the answer is a resounding NO to that, lol). Though I did see a few sights here and there that day which will take their rightful places in the hallowed halls of my spank bank. (TMI TMI I KNOW LOL).
There was kind of an odd moment in the night where Crystal’s friend made an offhand comment about setting much with some girls he knows, and it kind of made my best friend angry because, knowing how fragile I am, she didn’t want me to get my hopes up that he’d come through for me, when in likelihood he won’t. I won’t get my hopes up, in fact I’m sure he won’t find anyone for me (and if he did my instincts tell me he might find me fuck buddy material more than girlfriend material) but any time anyone offers to help me with that, I will take it, because we all know I am certainly not doing any good on my own looking for girls. Apparently online and randomly walking around Waterfire don’t work, and none of my real life friends know single girls who might be attracted to me, so I’m kind of screwed here. So yeah, even if I know nothing will happen, any time someone offers something along the lines of “I’ll look for girls for you”, I’m going to take them up on it, because I need a girlfriend, and if I can’t get one I won’t be happy. Or hell, at the very least I’d like to have some more sex...or even just someone friendly and warm to hug and cuddle and pet and kiss (yeah, I don’t know what the cuddle friend rules are, but I like kissing and would like to kiss girls more often. One of my other regrets with April was that we kissed at the every beginning and the very end of our time together, but I should have kissed her a bit in the middle as the actual sex was going on).
The night ended after a brief trip into a restaurant for drinks at the place my best friend’s brother, who I also went to high school with and always thought was a really nice, stand up guy. I didn’t have any drinks because I would still have to drive myself home from my best friend’s house later, even though she drove me to Waterfire because I can’t drive to Providence, or can but won’t because of my phobia, lol. I do realize the driving phobia is a big problem when it comes to my girl issues, but I also go back to Alysa and how, because I loved her, I would drive all over the place for her and with her. Not on the highway, but on backroads I drove all around Warwick, West Warwick, and even some of the slummiest, unsafe parts of Providence for her. So yeah, if necessary I would work on that for someone I love. Also the picky eating thing wasn’t a big problem for Alysa, but I tried a handful of new foods for her, all of which I hated, lol. There are 2 ways to get me to try foods : have me love you and you (probably) love me back, OR, put the food between your boobies and let me pick it out from between your boobies or, and I prefer this second option, let me eat it directly from your boobies by diving my face in. I’ve actually have female friends who have let me do the picking one, but so far no takers on the face one...so I guess my picky eating habits aren’t THAT big of a deal, lol. The again, during Waterfire I ate some of Kerri’s popcorn and she seemed oddly happy to see me eating something she’d never seen me eat before, and took some pictures of me eating popcorn. If she sends them to me I’ll post them at a later date.
But yeah, all in all it was a good night, but now that I’m home I’m left as unfulfilled as I always am, because I’m alone and unloved and horny, lol. I can only really think of how a night like tonight would have been so much better if I had a girlfriend in tow. Not to take anything away from my friends, but it doesn’t compare to having a SOMEONE, you know? So yes, I had a very good day. Good friends, good conversation, a lot of laughs, some stuff that made me horny in a good way, I got out of the house, and it was a nice little adventure. It just would have been better if I had my arm around a girl while she had an arm around my waist and we could walk around only to stop and make out in front of the Waterfires. **Le Sigh**
But okay, it’s a 3 day weekend, which means I have Sunday and Monday out. I imagine I’ll spend most of this time on Suicidegirls, as well as BK runs, watching DVDs, and probably searching online dating sites hoping I can find a girlfriend that way, considering I met both of my exes through Myspace...I just have to watch who I request from now on. I may not be as happy now as I was 2 months and 1 day ago with April, but I feel a lot better now than I did the rest of this horribly miserable week. So thanks to my best friend and Crystal and Kerri and Nate and everyone else who has helped cheer me up today and in the past..and probably the future. And of course to April, whose one act of kindness keeps me going in my darkest moments in ways she’ll never truly understand of realize. The one month mark on 9/11 was a shitty day, but now 10/11 was good. Let’s hope every 11th of the month until I stop celebrating it is a good one too.
Okay, it’s late and I should get to bed. I assure you I will discuss the VP and presidential debates in an upcoming blog. This week I have no plans, as I have not heard back from Vicky about Boston or Jess about Club Hell. This week “W”, Oliver Stone’s movie about Bush opens, so I will see that. I am also thinking of seeing “Sex Drive”, because a movie about a virgin who takes a road trip to meet an internet friend willing to sleep with him is right up my alley, lol. The week after that is “Saw 5" and the after is Halloween, and my only plan for that night is to go see “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” and try not to be too depressed that my Halloween will probably not include having sex with a Sexy Goth Kitty.
TYYL
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, October 4th, 2008
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6:53 pm - Will You Be My Girlfriend For 5 Minutes?
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Why hello there.
It is freezing cold in my house today, which is odd since it is rather pleasant outside, and when I drove to the movies today it was extremely hot inside of my car. It’s possible all of these weather changes, combined with my propensity for taking extended walks in the pouring rain, which have lead me to having the cold I have now. Yes, I was feeling rather lousy on Wednesday night, and barely got any sleep, what with coughing, a runny nose, a soar throat, and a fever. The odd thing about having a fever is that it makes me really horny, lol. Do you ever notice that when you have a fever contact on your skin feels REALLY good? The next time you have a fever try running the tips of your fingers gently down the length of your arm. It feels awesome. So I can only imagine how good sex must be like with a fever. (TMI alert...I once got a BJ while I had a fever and it was terrific...TMI over). That might be why all those young kids take ecstasy and then have sex, because it raises your body temperature and probably makes contact on your skin feel better. Though I have no desire to EVER try that stuff. That stuff is synthetic chemicals and poisons and highly dangerous. The only illegal drug I have any inkling of desire to try is pot, but considering I’m a guy who has only been drunk once in his life, you know I’m not the type to indulge in a lot of mind altering crap. So yeah, it’s hard to go to sleep at night when you’re sick and horny and can’t stop rubbing your arms, lol. Still, on Thursday morning I attempted to go to work because I prefer to take sick days when I want a nice day out and not when I’m actually sick, lol. Well, I went to work for half an hour, and I was losing my voice and barely able to talk on the phone, so I went to one of the bosses and asked to leave, and I went home. At least I was able to give my best friend an early birthday gift, which was a book I knew she’d like (and so far she seems to really like it, so I’m pleased about that). I got her some other stuff too, but I’m going to give that to her at her party. I’m not actually going to her party with her friends (for a handful of reasons, some of which I’ve already discussed in past blog entries, regarding my general disdain for parties and that since the date falls on the 2 month mark since my night with April I don’t think I want to be miserable as I fail yet another attempt to be social that night, especially when I’ll end up comparing it to how goddamn happy I was that night), but I’m going to drop by her house in the afternoon to give her the rest of her stuff, which I think she’s okay with. In any event, the fact that it was cold today lead to me wearing my new Suicidegirls hoodie for the first time today. I bought the large and I probably should have gone for the medium, but other than that I think it’s awesome, and that if my nose weren’t raw from blowing it with hundreds of tissues and my eyes weren’t red from sickness, I might have looked pretty damn hot in it, lol. Plus my hair is all kinds of suck, so I need to shave it again this weekend.
Should I start with a girl update? Ok. So this week I have begun exchanging messages with a girl on Plenty of Fish. She’s the first girl on the site who has responded to more than one of the messages I have sent them, so that’s a good sign. Her responses to my messages are always rather short, but she is often complimentary and appears to be interested in me at least a little. She’s 23, a shy and nerdy girl who works jobs in a book store and as a house cleaner, but she occasionally goes to clubs and dresses kind of Goth-ish. Oh, and she’s an Atheist who is very gung-ho about her atheism, and has no desire to ever have kids. Yeah, almost sounds like my perfect girl, lol. And she’s local. Of course, anytime something like that happens I get my hopes up and wind up disappointed, so I’m trying not to be too excited, but so far so good. She’s already told me she’s the type of person who is very uncomfortable meeting people and would probably have to talk to me for a long time before agreeing to meet, and that she’s keeping her options open so I’m not the only guy she’s talking to me, but there’s no harm in seeing where it goes. And then today, I’m logged into that site, and for the first time I get an IM through the site. The girl only IMed long enough to give me her Yahoo screen name (I send her an add request which she hasn’t approved yet) and to tell me her real first name. I looked at her profile and she’s very cute, 19, and seems pretty cool, so hopefully she’ll want to talk longer. She added me as one of her favorites on the site already, so that might be a good sign.
On top of that, Jess from RI, the friend who invited me to her Halloween party, said that she invited me because she thought I’d have fun meeting her “cute, single friends”, after which I asked why, if she had cute and single friends, why in the 2 years I have been single she hasn’t set me up with any, lol. She told me they’re not the type to be set up (I don’t think she has any cute, single, straight, local girl friends, lol), but she did offer to take me to Club Hell some Friday night since I won’t come to her party (due to my inability to drive there and my hatred of parties). She even concocted a plan to meet girls that I think might have a shot at working : she’s going to have me pick out a girl I like, and then sort of rope them into a dance with her and myself, and then she’ll excuse herself, leaving just me and the girl I like. There are a few possible flaws to this plan : my horrible dancing skills might be a turn off . I can slow dance pretty well, but fast dancing not so much, as anyone at my best friend’s party a few weeks ago can attest to. Though I probably would have been a slightly better dancer there if I had a single girl to dance with, because I wasn’t really comfortable grinding my best friend while there were other guys there she might be interested in or might have been interested in her. With a single girl I might dance closer, pull the girl to me, grab hips or almost-ass or ass, etc. And at Club Hell, unless they play something along the lines of Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, NIN, or Perfect Circle, probably won’t have any music playing that is workable for a slow dance. Aside from that, there’s the possibility that the girl will just turn away from me and lose interest in dancing with me once Jess exits, because the girl I pick might end up being a lesbian or a female-leaning bi girl who was putting up with me to dance with her, lol. But Jess said the strategy worked for another one of her shy friends, so who knows. It’ll either be very fun or very awkward or embarrassing, and either way it’ll make for a great blog entry the next day, lol.
Aside from Jess, it looks like I might also make another real life friend too. Vicky is a friend of my best friend, and apparently I went to high school with her but I don’t remember her even though she remembers me. Well after “meeting” her at my nest friend’s party, I friend requested her on Myspace and we’ve been messaging each other back and forth, and she invited me to hang out with her and go to Boston to check out the science museum and the aquarium and some other fun stuff. I think this will be really fun, since she’s been really nice to me and really supportive and funny, and I think I’d enjoy hanging out with her, so hopefully we’ll get to do that in the next couple of weeks.
Last night I went to dinner at Chili’s and a movie with my best friend, Kerri from work, and her fiancé Nathan, who also now works with us, albeit on the night shift while the rest of us do days. The last time we all hung out together was when we saw the short films for the Rhode Island International Film Festival, which 8/10, and then a day later I was with April, so I think this group is effectively my good luck charm, lol. Which isn’t to say I’ll be getting laid today (I don’t think...days not over yet, lol) but I tend to be in a very good mood I hang out with them. It was funny that when my best friend came over to me at the end of the day to let me know the plans, she did so by walking into CGCN’s cube, so that when she walked away CGCN talked to me, asking me what movie we were seeing, and asking me if I saw “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, which I told her was my favorite movie of the year so far (I didn’t tell her it was actually tied now with “Choke”, and today I saw “Religulous” which has beaten both of them to be my favorite...but more on that later). Plus when my best friend was talking to me she made a fake-mean comment about how she was going to take the highway to my house and not follow me since I only take backroads, and CGCN looked at me and was laughing like “Oh my god, why does she berate this sweet boy” (CGCN doesn’t know “Real Dave”, which is probably for the best since she finds “Work Dave” creepy, and he’s much less creepy than Real Dave). So yeah, my best friend did that on purpose so CGCN would talk to me, another reason my best friend is awesome.
So yeah, my best friend got to my house before I did, whereupon my stepdad and mom were outside regaling her with stories of my bad driving adventures, which I have told my best friend all about already, and then we went to Chili’s where I had my usual fries and Shirley Temple with Captain Morgan in it. The waitress was really cool and talked to us a bunch, joking around, and the 4 of us had a really good time. I was also much less quiet around Kerri and Nate than I was last time, even making one or two jokes that made them laugh hysterically, though Nate is funnier than I am so he gets the biggest laughs. Then after dinner we went to the movies (my best friend knows some people who works there and got us free tickets...if I could drive to that theater I would SOOO take advantage of this, lol. I’m a movie geek whose best friend gets free movie tickets, lol). We saw “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” . I read the book a few months ago, and I now count it as one of my favorite books, and I had my best friend read it to and she liked it. The film version was good, but I was still disappointed by it. They changed a lot of stuff and I felt like the film just wasn’t as emotionally powerful or as romantic as the book. The book played like a teenage version of “Before Sunrise”, that great Ethan Hawke film where a guy and a girl meet on a train, and spend the whole day together walking around Vienna having an awesome conversation, and in the midst of it they fall in love. In the book and the film of “Nick and Norah”, two 17-year-olds spend the night in New York City together, though they have some random adventures to go on. I guess I like that idea. Two strangers meet, spend a long amount of time together in a single sitting getting to know one another, and that’s how they fall in love. I wouldn’t mind something like that, one of those nights where you like the company so much you never want it to end. I’ve had a handful of those in my life, but none that were ever as good as what it’d be like to find love that way. In any event, the film was funny but not funny enough, romantic but not romantic enough, and even though it featured schoolgirl outfits, a nerdy kid who makes mix CDs (Michael Cera has done more to make geeky guys seem sexy to girls than anyone else ever, so I thank him for that) and the hot, busty girl from “40-Year-Old Virgin” plays Norah. I gave it a B-.
Speaking of playlists, Myspace has changed up it’s music player thanks to a new deal it made with some major record labels, so now they’re trying to get every some that is on every album from every artist who has a profile onto the site. You’re allowed to put 10 songs on your playlist, not an infinite number, so I chose the 10 songs above. I put a lot from Evans Blue because, even though they kicked the most important member of the group out and they are likely to do nothing but suck in the future, those first two albums are still genius, so I put up my fav songs of theres. I only put one Lisa Loeb song because most of her stuff isn’t up on her profile yet, and “Do You Sleep” is my fav song of hers anyway. Godsmack used to be my favorite band before Evans Blue, so I put “Sick of Life” because when I get really depressed that song speaks to me. My fav song of Godsmacks wasn’t up yet when I looked, “Moon Baby”, which is a song about unrequited love and the lead singer, Sully Erna, wrote in his autobiography about what lead to him writing it and I relate to the song a lot. Framing Hanley will probably replace Evans Blue as my favorite band unless EB manages not to suck after kicking out the man who wrote all of their lyrics when lyrics were the best thing about their music, so I put my fav FH song, “23 days” on there.
When people ask me what my all time favorite song is, they usually expect me to say something from Lisa Loeb or Evans Blue, but in actuality it is a tie between “Hey Jealousy” by Gin Blossoms and “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls, two bands that I’m not really big fans of in general but who each have that one song that I absolutely love, so I added those two as well.
I had been looking forward to “Religulous” for what seems like forever. Bill Maher is one of my favorite comedians, and I agree with his political views more often than I agree with anyone else. Many people don’t like him because they think he’s cocky or smug, but I like the fact that he’s never afraid to state his opinion, even if it’s controversial, not PC, or can be easily misconstrued by idiots who need every political opinion to be reduced to a simple soundbite to understand it. His views on religion are 99% the same as my own (I am an atheist, whereas Maher is more or less still an agnostic). So the fact that he traveled to holy sites all across the western world to make a comedic documentary attacking organized religion was enough to give me a movie-boner, lol. So after that anticipation and build-up, what did I think? Well, it has been 7 years since I have given an A+ to a film, “Memento” in 2001...but I have decided to give an A+ to “Religulous”. I could spend dozens of blog entries pointing out what arguments in the film I think are important, or shooting down the criticisms of the film I know religious pieces of shit will hurl at it, or the criticisms that will be leveled at it because, like documentaries by Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, it is as much or more about opinion as it is about journalism...but that would bore most of you, especially since many of you are not atheists or religion-haters like I am. I will instead urge you to see the film. I’m contemplating seeing it again in the theater, something I rarely do. The film represents my views on religion better than I could express them myself, and makes many of the same points I have made in my blogs after reading books from Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and watching films like “The God Who Wasn’t There”, and doing my own research into religions. Like Maher, I was raised Catholic until I was 13, was a sort of non-religious God believer for a while, before becoming an agnostic and then finally officially declaring myself an atheist. The film attacks Christianity mostly, but also covers Judaism, Islam, Scientology, and Raelians. It doesn’t cover the eastern religions, but I know from being familiar with Maher that, like myself, he considers Buddhism to be more of a philosophy than a religion and that it has some good tenets to it, but that Hinduism is rather silly. The main thesis of the film is one I share : religion is dangerous and retarded and based on myths and superstitions that can be easily disproved with science and historical fact, and yet people still cling to those idiotic beliefs and that is why we will never move on as a species. The film is hilarious, takes many cheap shots but also contains many valid points backed up with fact and evidence and statistics, and it ends with the single best anti-religion rant I have ever heard, which begins with the words : “For mankind to continue, religion must perish”. I hope in the next few days someone posts a transcript for the entire end rant, because I would love to re-post it. So yes, I LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED the film. This film is to me what “Passion of The Christ” was to Jesus-Freaks. And I highly doubt that any other film will surpass it in my eyes for the title of best film of 2008. Bill Maher is my hero...and I wonder if any religious whackos will be so pissed off that they put a death warrant on his head like they did to Salman Rushdie after he wrote “Satanic Verses”, lol.
A few more things before I wrap this up. I got a shitload of awesome stuff off of Amazon this week. The CD soundtrack for “Repo: The Genetic Opera” was a real CD, with a booklet and cover art and all that jazz. And the music is awesome, though for some reason the songs are not in the same order on the CD that they are in the film, from what I’m told. Go figure. My fav song is “Legal Assassin”, sung by Anthony Stewart Head, who is best known for playing Giles on “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”.
On regular DVD I got “Sports Night”, a half hour dramedy from the late 90s-early 2000s that ran 2 low rated seasons before being cancelled but that I loved. Another CD I bought was the soundtrack to “Hamlet 2". On Blu Ray I bought “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (now in a tie for second place for best film of 2008 with “Choke”), which has a shitload of extras that I have watched and they are hilarious, “Iron Man”, which I have not watched any of the extras for yet, and “Can’t Hardly Wait”, which I haven’t watched since I got it at all yet. Next week all I have coming is season 12 of “The Simpsons” on DVD.
So tomorrow I should be going with my best friend and two of her other friends to King Richard’s Faire. I don’t know if people around the country are familiar with it, but it’s kind of an outdoor medieval festival thing-a-ma-bob. I’ve never been to it myself but it comes here once a year for about a month in the fall. I haven’t met one of the friends who is coming, but the other one I met when we got dinner after our trip to the beach a couple months ago, and he seemed really cool though I sensed he didn’t care for me much. The day might be a little awkward since I don’t get along with other guys as much as I do girls, but I think it’ll be fun anyway. Aside from that I have no other plans for next week except to briefly see my best friend on 10/11 to give her her remaining gifts. Vicki mentioned either 10/12 or 10/19 for the Boston thing, and Jess said Club Hell would probably be a Friday, but I know it won’t be Halloween since they have their party, and it won’t be 10/24 since “Saw 5" comes out that night.
But yeah, 2 girls kinda/sorta talking to me on Plenty of Fish, possibly making 2 new real life friends in the next few weeks, 2 out of 3 days this weekend with my bestest friend ever, and the first A+ movie I’ve seen in 7 years. This is the happiest I am capable of being without a having a girlfriend or getting laid, lol. Not too shabby, I guess. And hopefully this cold will go away soon, since the fun horny-fever has gone away leaving just the annoying runny nose.
Oh, and the reason my last entry was “Friends Only” is because I ended it with a laundry list of sexual fantasies I either didn’t get a chance to do with April or that she wouldn’t let me do. On the topic of horniness, yet again, while my main concern remains finding love, I am more and more finding the idea of a fuck buddy to be a good one, since it would help me gain the experience I need to both be less nervous and to get better at doing it so I can make my partner happy, plus I’d feel less inadequate. So while the best scenario would be to have a girlfriend who is also a freaky yet monogamous nymphomaniac, if I can’t get a girlfriend but the opportunity for fuck buddy comes alone, I’ll take it. If not, and worst case scenario I never find a girl willing to let me touch her again, well, at least I’ll always have that night with April, and that isn’t too shabby. =)
The entry title is from the book version of “Nick and Norah”, BTW. TTYL
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, September 28th, 2008
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12:03 pm - Choke On This
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"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
That probably sounds to a lot of you like something I would have written in my blog before. It is in fact, however, a passage from the novel “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk. As many of you know already, Chuck Palahniuk is my favorite author. His first novel, “Fight Club” is my favorite book and was later made into a film that became my favorite movie. In late 2002, while he was promoting his novel “Lullaby”, I got to meet him at a book signing at brown university. I shook his hand, had my picture taken with him, and he signed my copy of “Lullaby” as well as a “Fight Club” postcard I had.
Forgive how my hair looks in these pictures. I need to re-shave it, and my cowlicks been acting up and the humidity’s making it stick up, so I look horrible all around, lol. But that’s me holding the picture I have of us together. About a year later I wrote him a letter, and he sent me back a package full of stuff, including a necklace he made me and autographed the case for, an autographed paperback copy of “Fight Club”, and a bunch of odd joke-trinkets, including the pair of handcuffs I am wearing in my “Fun With Medal” picture folders on Myspace and Fubar. He’s an all around great guy and an excellent writer. But what is it about his work that makes me respond to it so much that I have such enthusiasm and love for it. Well, Palahniuk pretty much summed it up himself when he described his work in a collection of essays :
"If you haven't noticed, all my books are about a lonely person trying to connect with other people."
And there you have it. The reason I connect with his novels, and the 2 films based on his novels so far is because I relate to that main characters. These sad, pathetic, lonely people who go to extreme measures to find happiness, to feel alive...well that’s me. I read the novel and saw the film version of “Fight Club” when I was 15, and even before I became a cubicle jockey who buys crap he doesn’t need, and 2 years even before my depression would hit, I related to that story more than I had to any other work of fiction among that tens of thousands of movies I had seen and the hundreds of books I have read. Oh sure, I’d never gotten half naked and beaten up other guys in the basement of a bar, but the overall themes I related to even if not the exact plot points. Oddly enough, I actually relate to “Fight Club” more now, 9 years later, then I did when I read the novel and first saw the film. Despite having a heads up, I have become more and more like it’s unnamed Narrator. I now work for a bank and sit in a cubicle all day, have perpetual bags under my eyes that will not go away, I used to cut myself, which I suppose is sort of like needing to be beat up to feel alive, and I buy a shitload of crap off of Amazon tot ry and fiull the empty, vacant hole in my life that I feel from being unloved.
But I’m not here to talk about “Fight Club” today....because that’s against the rules, lol. I am here to talk about the newest film adaptation of a Palahniuk novel, “Choke”, and how and why I relate to this so much, and how 7 years after reading that book, I relate more to THAT story than I did when I first experienced it.
I received the novel “Choke” on the worst night of my life, the night of my high school graduation. The reasons that was the worst night of my life are not something I want to go into again here, since I have done so in my blogs before, but suffice it to say the two worst people I have ever known in my life, my father and Val, were both contributors to it. Well, when I came home from the graduation, my mom had some graduation gifts for me. Among them was the novel “Choke”, the first new novel Palahniuk released since “Fight Club” the film came out (at the time, “Survivor” and “Invisible Monsters” were already out). It told the story of Victor Mancini, a sex addict trying to come to grips with a scarred childhood from a crazy, overbearing mother who made him paranoid and denied him love, and trying to find love through meaningless sex and by faking choking in restaurants so that for a few moments someone would coddle and care for him as a stranger becomes his savior and responsible for him.
Denny : You can’t fool someone into loving you.
Victor : You wanna bet?
I have not re-read “Choke” since first reading it in June of 2001, which was the most depressing month in the worst year of my life. But I’d rate it as my 3rd favorite Palahniuk book, behind “Fight Club” and “Survivor” (the latter of which is where Suicidegirls got its name and where Panic at the Disco got the song name “The Only Difference Between Suicide And Martyrdom is The press Coverage”). Upon seeing the film, I can’t readily remember what was left out and changed in terms of content, but what was changed was tone. The book had a sharp-edged and angry tone. The film, on the other hand, has an almost sweet and sad tone. I think this is right. It makes the characters of the story, who range from despicable to skanky to sleazy to insane, sympathetic and even sometimes likeable. In a way, I relate to the story more now. It was funny how, leaving the theater, I was telling my best friend how I relate to the main character, and she didn’t see how we are similar, mainly because Victor is a sex addict and I can’t get laid to save my life. What I explained to her was that it wasn’t the specifics I related to, as I don’t fuck many random women or work in a Colonial Williamsburg theme park, but the overall disposition of the character. Victor is a man so hurt by his past relations with a woman (in this case his mom, in my case Val) that he is unwilling to take risks and put his heart on the line to do something as simple as asking a girl out on a real date. Instead, he attempts to fill that gap in unhealthy ways, like random meaningless sex, or the brief intimacy he feels when he is saved by someone after choking in a restaurant, where they hold him on the ground , almost cradle him, and tell him it’s all going to be alright. In my own life I suppose you could substitute my vicarious living through movies or how I attempt to make up for my lack of connections with real people/women with those I make with people online, who are real and yet not “real” because I can’t really be with them.
“More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea...
That if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention again.
That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and private lives.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing.
That if you eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more.
That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.
That you could ever be smart enough.
That you could someday get enough sex.
These all became the little boy's new goals. The illusions he'd have for the rest of his life.”
The novel is full of passages like that, and the one I began this entry with. Passages that could just as easily be about me as about the character in the novel they are actually describing. And the odd thing is that if I indeed could get sex anytime I wanted, I probably would be addicted to it. Because even if it’s not love, and that’s what I really want, it’s the closest approximation I’ll probably ever feel. I mean April wasn’t love, but Alysa was, but that night with April was happier for me than even some of my best moments with Alysa, probably because I never really knew where I stood with Alysa, whereas with April I knew exactly where I stood, what this was and what it was not, and that allowed me to just enjoy it...when I wasn’t too nervous that is.
"For sure, even the worst blow job is better than say, sniffing the best rose...watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh."
Maybe it’s just about feeling something. Why do I go to movies if not to feel powerful emotions? I spend so much time alone in my bedroom feeling either sad and lethargic or numb that to be able to feel a smooth, warm body against you is heaven compared to anything else. So yeah, perhaps the only major difference between Victor Mancini and I is that I can’t pick up women as well as he can. But no matter how well he does with them “that way”, it’s ultimately love he wants, and so when he meets a girl he can love, it turns his world upside down. “Choke” is largely a comedy, but there were two dramatic moments in the film between Victor and Paige, the woman he falls for, that got me kind of choked up...pun intended. In one scene they are attempting sex, and Paige puts a stethoscope in Victor’s ears and to her heart and tells him to thrust into her in time with the beating of her heart. Aside from being really fucking hot (where can I buy a stethoscope), that is probably the most intimate sex act Victor has ever had, because as many women as he’s been inside physically, that allows him to hear her from the inside, and the sounds of her heartbeat are largely connected to what she is feeling inside emotionally, not just sexually. The other scene is the closing credits, set to a Radiohead song called “Reckoner”, where Victor and Paige have sex in the same manner in which Victor lost his virginity, an airplane bathroom, but whereas his first time was random woman who cared nothing for him, we get the feeling at the end of the film that of all the times he has ever fucked, this is the first time he has made love....and the fact that it’s with a supremely insane woman is kind of fitting. The damaged attract the damaged. And the closing narration does make mention of the fact that this might just be another fucked up woman, like his mother, that will end up hurting him more than before, but sometimes you have to take a risk to get anything. That’s still my problem. For a guy who isn’t afraid of death, I sure am afraid of a whole buttload of other stuff, lol.
Anyways, I gave the film an A, and right not it’s in a close race for my favorite film of the year with “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, another film I related to very much. The funny thing about “Choke”, well that are many funny things about it, is that I even related to some of the minor characters, like the compulsive masturbator Denny (don’t say it) or the boss at the theme park who is upset when the girl he likes, the Milk Maid, ends up with Victor who is an asshole. When he catches Victor and the Milk Maid together, he pretty much asked Victor why she would go for him, an obvious jerk, instead of a nice guy like himself, and Victor pretty much answers that it’s just human nature...so yeah, the girl going for the asshole instead of the nice guy, I can sure relate to that too.
“Every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married.”
And while I’d like to think none of my problems with women are due to mommy issues, I do think guys who are raised by single moms are more needing of love from a woman, and more easily domesticatable if you will, than those who grew up with fathers. It might explain why I also find girls to be better friends than guys and why I tend to hate most other guys. Though after seeing the film my best friend (who is a woman) and I went into Hot Topic, and the guy who worked there, who had Satan-esque facial hair and looked like he stepped out of an Anne Rice costume ball, complimented my LOLCat shirt and directed me to a website where they have re-written the entire bible, old and new testament, into LOLCat speak (I went there, it is hilarious. All blessings be to Ceiling Cat). I was kind of surprised a guy who looked like he was into heavy metal and the vampire subculture was an LOLCat fan, who knew all the characters and the common terms. Then again, I suppose I’m kind of like that, or want to be like that. But it kind of struck me at that moment that someone like that would make a good friend for me. If I could meet more people like that, maybe I’d have more friends. But I have a hard time networking with people. Plus my search for friends is often a distant third to my search for love...2nd I suppose would be a search for fuck buddies, lol. Yeah, I’m sorry, but I’ve been really horny lately, and seeing all those cute girls in hot topic with plaid skirts and piercings didn’t help that, lol. So if I can’t find love, I’ll settle for sex til something better comes along...something that wasn’t true before April. But now that the special first time is out of the way, and now that I know exactly what I am missing out on, I’m turning into Victor, lol. Just as I have turned more and more into Narrator from “Fight Club” as time goes on, lol.
“I'm so addicted to
all the things you do
when you're going down on me
in between the sheets.
Oh, all the sounds you make
with every breath you take.
It's unlike anything.”
That was a song, not anything from Palahniuk, lol. But yeah, “Choke” had only been playing at Prov Place, so my best friend was nice enough to drive me there and see the film with me. After 2-3 weeks of being pretty damn depressed, an excellent movie with my bestest friend was exactly what I needed to cheer me up, and I had a lot of fun. The process of cheering me up actually began on Thursday night, with the very funny season premiere of “The Office”, which involved Jim, who I like to think of as a much funnier and much more good looking version of myself, finally proposed to Pam....OUTSIDE IN THE POURING RAIN...FOLLOWED BY MAKING OUT IN THE RAIN!!! That is TOTALLY how I would want to propose to a girl. Next week it won’t be on because there will be the VP debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, which should be hilarious, lol.
"Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass. The minute something better than sex comes along, you call me. Have me paged."
That’s back to “Choke”. But yeah, Friday night was the first debate between Obama and McCain. I think the debate itself was a tie. I obviously agree with Obama more than McCain, but in terms simply of debate performance I think they were about equal, with Obama being better on the economic issues and McCain being better on the foreign policy stuff. But in general both candidates stuck to their same talking points and didn’t go off book, and I don’t think anyone changed their minds. I still think McCain is a disingenuous, cynical asshole and that Obama is the far better choice from president. Plus after the debate was over Bill Maher was on and so hearing some humorous commentary on the debate was pretty sweet. Hard to believe we’re only a little over a month away from the election. If McCain wins the election I think will have lost all confidence in the American people, though. They re-elected Bush after 9/11 happened on his watch and he started a useless, unneed war. If they elect McCain, who has thrown all his old beliefs out the window to tow the GOPig party line, picked a retarded and unqualified person to be his VP candidate, and votes along with Bush about 90% of the time when it’s Bush’s policies that have created the mess we are in (cutting taxes and increasing spending results in us having less money! Wow, who’d have guessed that, lol), then we really are a country of idiots. Too bad Iceland doesn’t allow you live there if you weren’t born there, because I would love to live in Iceland, lol.
Last night I popped some popcorn and watched the new Chris Rock stand-up special, which was hilarious. He pretty much covered 3 main topics : the election, race, and the differences between men and women. Simple, easy, relate able topics, and funny as all hell. I think his material works so well because he does point out things that are very obvious and yet no one seems to realize in terms of societal norms and gender interactions.
Okay, it’s now Sunday. In my last entry, which I posted 2 days ago, I already wrote about everything that is coming up for me this week and a tad beyond, so go back and read that. I just wanted to write this entry to let you know I was in a better mood, albeit hornier and thus frustrated that I can’t get any, lol. Yeah, I sadly didn’t run into any Milk Maids on my way out of the theater. (If you haven’t seen the film of read the book, this is a handjob joke). I would prefer one who looks like this :
But mainly I just felt the need to devote an entry to “Choke”, since the story of a damaged boy who can’t find love and so desperately tries to fill that hole and do anything that will make him feel alive, from near-death choking to a staged rape fantasy with a woman who is very particular about her bedspread, was very relate able to me. The film may not have been as great as “Fight Club”, but then again what film is? And by turning the book into a sad, sweet, tragic story with bits of romantic comedy even peppered in, was a change in tone I welcomed. So until next time, remember, the safe word is “poodle”. LOL.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, September 25th, 2008
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8:42 pm - Lick Me Like A Lollipop
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Hi,
So I was in an okay mood Monday and Tuesday, and then a really bad mood yesterday and today. I guess I should start off with some bad stuff. When I logged into Fubar today I found out that one of my internet friends died in a car accident. She wasn’t a close internet friend, we had never had a one on one conversation to the best of my recollection, but I read her blog sometimes and she read mine, and we commented each other a few times. She was a great woman, and lately she had been posting pictures of her new engagement ring, and it’s just a kick in the teeth to find out she died. There was a link to the news article, so I know this is legitimate and not some online hoax, either. That’s one of the sucky things about internet friendships : if something were to happen to one of my internet friends, how can I be sure I’d ever know about it? Years ago when I was suicidal I had many friends who were also severely depressed, and internet friends tend to disappear when they delete profiles or screen names and whatnot...how many of them actually killed themselves, I wonder? As far as I know, this is the first internet friend I’ve had who has died, and while we weren’t close (if one of my close internet friends died I’d be devastated) it’s still a horrible event. So many horrible people in this piece of shit world, and one of the good ones has to go? RIP Kept in Corsets.
http://www.pittsburghpostgazette.com/pg/08268/914646-100.stm
Also, my internet friend Tiffany underwent major surgery yesterday in regards to a tumor. Her husband was nice enough to send me a message, and has been putting bulletins up on Myspace about her progress. I wish her a speedy recovery, and she IS one of my closest internet friends, so I am very worried about her.
But not all is bad with my internet friends. Jess from SC celebrates a birthday today, so happy birthday to you!
So what have I been depressed about? “The Usual”, of course. Sadness, anger, and horniness is really an odd combination of emotions. Mainly the anger is at myself, the horniness and my inability to relieve horniness since I cannot get a girlfriend or even random sex/fuck buddies leaves me feeling empty and frustrated/angry and depressed, which plays into the sadness about my inability to find a girl who is attracted to me and wants to date me. And I’m just so goddamn lonely. I’m tired of looking through the glass at the things I’ll never have. It’s funny how the entire country is in turmoil over the economy while I have no money problems currently (my student loan will be paid off in January leaving me debt free...it’s not that hard when you don’t believe in credit cards), meanwhile it feels like, even if it may not be true, like the rest of the members of the human race have no problem making friends, getting dates, or getting laid, whereas those are near impossible feats for me, still. When it comes to this I am of course my own worst enemy. If I weren’t so depressed more people would want to hang out with me, but I get depressed because no one wants to be with me, and then no one wants to be with me because I’m depressed. And even when I fake it and act happy, or on those brief occasions where I’m doing kind of/sort of okay, girls still avoid me like the plague. I can’t fucking win. Maybe I should just stop caring. Just accept that I’m not like everyone else. That there is nothing I can do, nothing I change, nothing I can fix, to make me someone a girl would want to be with, at least as more than friends. There’s just something wrong with me that was broken a long time ago through a small series of events that left me lacking any semblance of confidence or self-esteem, and left me this callow, sad, fearful, shy, timid, needy, co-dependant wreckage of a human being. “He walks amongst us, but he is not one of us”.
Jess from RI, a long time internet friend, invited me to a party Halloween night, but I declined. I can’t drive to it anyway, but even if I could going to my best friend’s house party a few weeks ago showed me that even at a small, laid back get together where I know a decent amount of the people, I will still have a miserable time. So yeah, a hopping Halloween party where I will know one person....that just spells disaster for me. Right now my plans for Halloween are to go see “Zack and Miri Make A Porno”, and probably be bummed out that I’m not having freaky circus sex with some girl dressed like a slutty Goth kitten, lol.
I did, however, make plans with Kim, a girl I have talked to occasionally from Plenty of Fish, to go see “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” on 10/4. I don’t know if I’m going to be attracted to her, or if there will be any sparks, but worst case scenario she’s a nice girl who seems to like me for who I am and she’ll at least be a new friend if nothing more. On top of that, I found out that “Choke”, the film based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, only opens in RI at the Prov Place Mall cinema, which I cannot drive to. My best friend did say she might be able to go with me on Saturday though, so that would be nice. I wish we got to spend more time with each other outside of work. Well, she does have her B-Day party coming up (I know, another party...bleh), but this time I won’t be staying until 3:30 AM. I’ll probably just drop off her presents and leave. Plus the date of the party will be the 2 month mark since my night with April, so being uncomfortable in a large social situation where I stick out like a sore thumb as the sad, quiet, anti-social boy will probably feel worse when in contrast to where I had been two month prior that night, which was still the greatest night of my life. Enough time has gone by where it’s safe to say that is true and the newness and shock of it happening hasn’t lead me to go off on hyperbole. No, that night will remain one bright beacon in the fog-covered swamp that is my pathetic, shitty, hopeless life. But at least I have that night....I never even though I’d ever get that.
It’s kind of worrisome to me that I’m starting to not even find enjoyment in things I used to. I haven’t been to BK all week because I’m actually getting sick of chicken fries. As a result of the decrease in fat in my diet, and the bad mood I’ve been in the last 2 weeks, I’ve lost some weight too. I look really disgusting with my shirt off, like a skeleton covered in mesh cloth. I’ve been buying more and more things off of Amazon, and I remember not too long ago I used to be excited to see a package on my bed and a new movie to watch or whatever. Now it seems like not even movies, one thing I used to always count on to make me at least temporarily happy, are starting to no longer have that magical power over me. Last night I got “Sex and the City” on Blu Ray, a movie I really liked, but half-way through it wasn’t working on cheering me up, so I ended up going to bed at 9 PM and crying and additional 90 minutes before going to sleep. Hell, even the fact that a crap load of movies I’m excited about seeing coming out over the next weeks isn’t bringing me out of my funk. It’s the same with porn, too. I get horny, I look at porn, and when I’m done I’m just left feeling pathetic that I have to settle for these video recorded dreams because I can’t get the real thing. Watch enough amateur videos of girls sucking off their boyfriends or dancing naked to bad hip hop and you start to get what I hope is an exaggerated perception that everyone is fucking like bandits but you. Hell, my love of movies, starting around age 9 or so, comes from my lack of a real life. Why be so taken with fictional movie dreams if not to escape from a life unfulfilled, with no excitement. But when you’re a kid most activities revolve around athletic, so a geek boy finding comfort in a dark theater staring at the flickering images of a life less ordinary isn’t too hard to picture. But I guess lately I’m no longer content to live vicariously through those dreams. I want to live myself. I’m 25 and I’ve wasted my entire so far dreaming of things I’ll never do and girls I’ll never be with, and I’ve spent so much time becoming who I am that I don’t know how to change in a way that won’t kill me.
It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. That’s my problem, I’m still afraid to lose...what? My dignity. Some semblance of self-respect? My fear of embarrassing myself or making myself look like a fool from being rejected keeps me from breaking out : from asking a girl out who I think is out of my league, from kissing the girl who may or may not be sending me signals because she might push me away or slap me if I’m wrong, from talking to the cute quiet girl who might just want to be left alone. It’s funny. On Monday I was watching “The Sarah Conner Chronicles”, and I remembered that the previous week the angst-ridden, teenage John Connor was sitting outside at school, and a girl came up to him and began flirting. I’ve seen many scenes like this, and I think they’ve ruined me. I think I have always hoped that even if I were quiet and shy, that one day some girl would find me brooding and mysterious and all the more interesting because of how “tortured” I looked, and want to chat me up...but like many things in the movies, that’s not how it actually works..probably because the people who write movies were geeks like me who are putting their adolescent fantasies onto film to live through their own painful memories and non-existent chances taken.
If there’s one lasting thing that April gave me, it was the feeling that once I actually land a girl, I would be able to make her happy and hang onto her. That I can be good enough for a girl. What I didn’t help me with was how to actually get to that point. I need to actually attract a girl to me before I can win her over, and I don’t know how to do that. I can fake flirt all day, but I feel silly and foolish when attempting to actually flirt with a girl I like in real life. I obviously need to change my appearance. Yeah, my best friend hates my new necklaces. I don’t know, I think the spiked necklace will look good when I wear my usual all black ensemble, and then the other necklace works with everything else I might wear, if I adopt a quasi-skater look or something. And you know what? Part of me wants to be the guy in all black with the spiked shit and the Goth or vampire make-up. I’m too geeky to be that guy all the time, or even most of the time, but maybe for one night I could be him...maybe at Club Hell? But for now I think the spiked necklace is good with my usual black t-shirt (or black hoodie...I think my Punisher and Suicidegirls hoodies go with it)and jeans outfits, and then if I get some new clothes where I can wear open, button-downed shirts with a t-shirt underneath and some nice dark jeans, the other necklace will look good with that. Then again, I know nothing about how to look attractive to women. I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to be attractive. Maybe I’m just the sometimes cute but mostly ugly guy. I’ll never be the handsome or sexy guy girls go ga-ga or get excited over, or write “Mr.s [my name]” in their spiral notebooks about, or get butterflies in their stomach and swoon when they think of me. I’ll never have that effect on women...but if that “Heroes” gene becomes real, I want that power. Then I’ll invite Lisa Loeb, Liz Vicious, Jenna Haze, Alyson Hannigan, and Crush to dinner, lol.
I took some pics of myself in my dorky work clothes to show you how horrible I look. I don’t think I can tuck in my shirts correctly, because everything just balloons out from under me like someone’s blowing air up my shirt. Yes, I am aware some of this would be helped if I could find shirts that fit me, but Baby Gap doesn’t have a business casual section. Also I am so used to wearing my waste high-water that wearing them lower, but probably still too high, feels uncomfortable, so I make my belt super tight otherwise they feel like they’re falling off, and it only accentuates how thin I am. I also have no ass, as you can see. It’s back and leg all the way. I don’t know what April was holding into in hindsight, lol.
And there you can see the infamous “hunch”. Yeah, I have bad posture, and even when I stand up ramrod straight I have it because my shoulder blades are so much wider than my skinny waste that they stick out unusually far from my back and then as you go lower it becomes oddly smaller since my waste is so small.
Granted, my webcam doesn’t have a timer on it, so I do have to lean somewhat to click the mouse to take the pictures.
You can tell by the redness under my eyes that I can been heavily crying.
CGCN actually talked to me quite a bit today. When she sneezes she usually sneezes about 5 billion small, very cute sneezes...the same as my cat, lol. And she has this thing where she can “make a wish” for every 3 she gets in a row. Well lately I have been getting kind of sick, sneezing and my cough is coming back, but not has heavily as it usually is. This is probably due to it getting much colder than it has been (fall is here..I switched to long sleeve work shirts today) but then I spend all day at work where the heat is cranked up for all the old people who need a temperature above 75 to survive. But CGCN wraps herself in a blanket, which is cute, so I can’t complain, lol. Anyways, I sneezed twice in a row, which is how I usually sneeze, and she said with one more I can make a wish, but I didn’t. She also asked me if I was getting sick or getting allergies, and had a brief discussion about whether she was getting sick or only had allergies, and debating the benefits of Benedryl vs drowsiness. Oh, and then at 3:45 PM she stood up to go to the restroom and said “It’s not even 4 yet, David make time go faster”. I joked that I left my time machine at home, and she said “just change the clock, you can stand on my shoulders”. Ever since she pulled my best friend aside to see what my “deal” was, CGCN has been talking to me more, and I catch her peeking her head up between out cubes sometimes, but I’m usually on the phone so don’t acknowledge it. Don’t get me wrong, I harbor no delusions that she likes me or anything, but if she maybe no longer finds me creepy I guess that’s good. Actually, I think the other co-workers view me as less of a weirdo after seeing me with my best friend and realizing I am capable of having a regular conversation and joking and smiling (yeah, my best friend can usually get me to smile...she’s one of the few things that can these days..probably because if I don’t smile she’ll beat my ass up), at least when I’m not so bummed out I’m thinking of jumping off bridges like I was today.
Hopefully the one hour season premiere of “The Office” will cheer me up tonight. The two hour premiere of “Heroes” on Monday was better than anything from season 2, but it still seems like things have gotten to silly and outlandish to save this show. If Claire’s blood can heal anyone and bring them back from the dead, and at least 3 characters by my count are now immortal, where’s the danger? If any character can cheat death, there are no stakes and thus no drama. And honestly, how many near apocalypses can the world have in a 2 year period? At least the show seems to be providing me with an endless supply of hot, super-powered blonde pixies to perv, from Claire to Elle to that french Flash-girl. Where’s the redheaded., glasses–wearing, schoolgirl superhero?
Aside from “Sex and the City”, I bought a movie called “Pathology” on DVD that was good, even if I fail to understand most of the characters motivations in the film. It stars the guy who plays Peter Petrelli on “Heroes” and is about resident doctors who determine cause of death on corpses, and some of them participate in a “game” where they kill random people in ingenious ways and the others have to guess how the victims died. It was a pretty good film, oddly disturbing and with almost no likeable characters. I haven’t had a chance to watch the 3 Godfather films on Blu Ray or to watch any of the episodes of season one of “Friday the 13th : The Series” (which had nothing to do with Jason, but rather an antiques store and two cousins trying to hunt down cursed objects), but I bought those too.
Next week I have my best friend’s birthday gifts coming in, and for myself I have “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (my fav film of the year and a hilarious yet realistic look at a heart-broken guy...came out when I was still fresh from heartbreak over crush), “Can’t Hardly Wait” (if parties where like that film, where the geeky guys ends up with the hotty he’s been nurturing unrequited lobe for, or where you get to bang the redheaded burnout hottie in the bathroom, I’d like them more, lol), and “Iron Man” on Blu Ray. Then on CD I’m getting the “unofficial” “Repo : The Genetic Opera” soundtrack CD. The soundtrack CD isn’t coming out til January when the movie is being dumped onto DVD, but the songs are being available for download, and an Amazon exclusive is a CD of the songs, which are apparently just burnt using CD-R technology, but it includes a booklet and album art, and is being promoted by the official Repo sites, so it’s quasi-official and not an out and out bootleg, so hopefully that means I have some guarantee of product and sound quality. And I’m also getting the “Hamlet 2" soundtrack, because any CD that has songs called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” and “Raped In The Face” needs to be owned by me.
So yeah, Saturday hopefully I’ll get to see “Choke” with my best friend, but otherwise I have no plans for the weekend. “Choke”, for those of you who don’t read the works of my fav author Chuck Palahniuk (and shame on you) is about a sex addict. Something tells me I’d be a sex addict except for the fact that I can’t actually get sex. Actually, 6 weeks since my night with April, maybe I’m just an addict in withdrawal, lol. It’d explain the increase in horniness and my deteriorating physical condition (losing weight, burning eyes with bags under them, coughing and sneezing). What’s the sex equivalent of methadone? A quickee, 15 minute BJ? Do any clinics offer those? Lol.
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Brian: You don't need to put your P in a V right now.
Peter Bretter: No, I need to B my L on someone's T's.
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Some “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” dialogue there. I forgot in my last entry to post the “winning entry” for my turn-on contest to, didn’t I?
“My biggest turn on is when you talk to me dirty.. but you sound so cute still..and then you laugh and get all awkward. I like to imagine myself dressed up in school girl and knocking on your front door. Then I picture myself walking into your room and pushing you down on your bed... I’ll let you create the rest.. You.. gotta be one of my biggest turn ons”
Yeah, you can see why she won, lol. But she’s on good terms with her BF now and doesn’t talk to me, lol. Then again, there was never really a chance there to begin with, due to the distance.
Oh, when I was driving to work on Monday a deer darting into the road in front of me. It was far enough down that I wasn’t in danger of hitting it, but it was odd since the street was no where any woods big enough to support wildlife, and quite frankly seeing a graceful deer prance-run into the street in front of me, stop to stare bug eyed at my car, and then run back down the residential street it came from is not a common site in quasi-suburban Rhode Island, lol.
Anyways, I’ll end this entry with song lyrics. Framing Hanley, that band I just discovered and can’t stop listening to, did a cover of the song “Lollipop” by Lil Wayne. I don’t like the original version (same ol’ rap shit), but the rock version by Framing Hanley rules. Here are the Lyrics. TTYL.
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I said he so sweet make her wanna lick the wrapper
So I let her lick the wrapper
she she she lick me like a lollipop
she she lick me like a lollipop
she she she lick me like a lollipop
she she lick me like a lollipop
CHORUS:
Shawty wanna thug
Bottles in the club
Shawty wanna hump
You know I like to touch
ya lovely lady lumps
( Repeat 2x )
Okay, lil mama had a swag like mine
She even wear her hair down her back like mine
I make her feel right when its wrong like lyin
Man, she aint never had a love like mine
n’ man I aint never seen a ass like hers
That pussy in my mouth had me loss fo words
So I told her to back it up like berp berp
And I made that ass jump like jerp jerp
And that’s when she she she she like me like a lollipop
(oh yeah I like that)
she she like me like a lollipop
( oh yeah I like that )
she she she like me like a lollipop
( oh yeah I like that )
she she like me like a lollipop
( oh yeah I like that )
CHORUS:
Shawty wanna thug (shawty wanna thug)
Bottles in the club (bottles in the club)
Shawty wanna hump(shawty wanna thug)
You know I like to touch ya lovely lady lumps
Shawty wanna thug (I like that)
Bottles in the club(yeah I like that)
Shawty wanna hump(I like that)
You know I like to touch ya lovely lady lumps
CHORUS:
Shawty wanna thug (yeah I like that )
bottles in the club (yeah I like that )
Shawty wanna hump
You know I like to touch ya lovely lady lumps
Shawty wanna- [shawty wanna…]
li-li-li-li-li-li-lick me like a lollipop
shawty wanna li-li-li-li-li-li-lick me like a lollipop
she wanna lick me like a lollipop
(She wanna lick the wrapper)she she lick me like a lollipop
Shawty wanna thug (shawty wanna thug)
Bottles in the club (bottles in the club)
Shawty wanna hump (shawty wanna hump)
You know like to touch ya lovely lady lumps
Call me so I can make it juicy for ya
Call me so I can get it juicy for ya
Call me so I can make it juicy for ya
Call me so I can get it juicy for ya
Call me so I can make it juicy for ya
Call me so I can get it juicy for ya
Call me so I can make it juicy for ya
Call me so I can get it juicy for ya
CHORUS:
Shawty wanna thug (oh yeah I like that)
bottles in the club (oh yeah I like that)
Shawty wanna hump
You know I like to touch ya lovely lady lumps
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, September 21st, 2008
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5:59 pm - Living In These Pictures, It Never Comes With Ease
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Hello everyone who reads this blog,
So “The Quest” is kind of a 2 two part endeavor, really. It involves changing both my personality and my looks. The personality one, which involves gaining confidence, enhancing conversation/flirting skills with women, being more outgoing and fun and social and less shy, is the harder one. The looks one is by comparison much easier...at least in terms of clothing and apparel. Well when my best friend was dressing me (not literally, she picked out my outfit) for the strip club 2 months ago, she had asked me if I owned a necklace, because that would have helped my ensemble (you can look in my Myspace or Fubar pics, or go back to my blog entry about the strip club visit to see what I ended up wearing). The only necklace I actually owned at the time was the one Chuck Palahniuk, author of “Fight Club” and “Choke”, made for me. It’s cool, but is rather gay, lol. I wore it all the time when he sent it to me, but it’s not exactly stylish. So my best friend suggested perhaps a link necklace, but in my searches for them online I didn’t find many types that looked cool to me, and the ones that did were grossly expensive. The other type I thought I might like were “black rope” necklaces, perhaps with silver pendants. Yeah, I know they’re not really rope, but I don’t know their actual names. However, since I decided to get a necklace, I hadn’t actually gone anywhere where I could shop for them.
Then yesterday my mom asked me if I wanted to go to the Prov Place Mall with her, and I hadn’t been there in months, so I accepted. I don’t know why my mom asked me, but every few months she likes to spend a day with me, usually because my stepdad is off doing something. Yesterday was his birthday and he took our dog, Logan, to Lincoln Woods to run around and play and whatnot, and my mom wasn’t into that. So I went with mom to the mall and we browsed in a few stores like Borders, Newbury Comics, Hot Topic, and Spencers....to me , that entire mall is really those 4 stores, since I don’t shop anywhere else, lol. I will have to eventually when I can either my best friend or someone else to take me shopping for some better clothes. All of my work clothes are ugly and way too big for me, so when I wear them at work I look like an uglier dork than I usually am (and I must be a complete retard because I seem to fail at being able to tuck in a shirt in a way that doesn’t make it look like I’m puffed up the way a person’s shirt looks when they’re skydiving, lol). Well okay, there was a new store set up for the season called the “Halloween Shoppe” which was filled with costumes (are all Halloween costumes for adult women delightfully whore-ish, or was it just this store, lol) and the usually Halloween decorating paraphernalia. My mom was looking for a Corpse Bride costume but they didn’t have one, and she made me try on a fuzzy green pimp hat and took a picture of it on her phone, but it didn’t come out. I myself wasn’t looking for a costume because I doubt I’ll have plans for Halloween. I’ll probably just send up going to work (it’s a Friday) and then catching a screening of “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” later. “Saw 5" open the week prior. My mom did mention that her, my stepdad, and possibly some other people would go to Club Hell to see the people dressed up (yeah, my mom and stepdad have been known to go to Club Hell on or around Halloween...I don’t know if I should find this cool or embarrassing, lol) but at the risk of running into Crush I don’t think I’d be up to that...plus it might be kind of embarrassed to be there turned on by half-naked girls with my mom accompanying me, lol. That’s the reason I haven’t gone with them in the past too. Imagine if I actually got lucky and ended up dancing or making out with some girl there...that’d be awkward, lol. “Hey mom, you can go ahead, I’ll catch a ride with the girl with green electrical tape over her pierced nips”, lol.
It was when we were in Hot Topic that I began my search for some cool necklace. Most of my T-shirts and a few of my black jeans are from there, and I got my Punisher hoodie there too, so I am usually lucky finding clothes there I like, though I’m a bit too shy to buy some of their more audacious Goth or Emo clothes....I probably could have pulled that stuff off in high school if I tried, but at 25 I’d feel silly wearing black pants with all manner of silver buckles and hoops and whatnot all over. Chalk it up to one of those experiences I never had at a younger age due to my sheltered disposition...like awkward high school sex, lol. Instead I had quasi-awkward 24 year old sex, lol. Though I think losing my virginity in a cemetery earns me major points with the Goth & Emo types, right? LOL. I’m suck a goddamn poser, I know. But geeks don’t have cool clothing and trends to copy so PFFT. It was pretty funny that when I was in there some teenage white gangsta wannabe was in there asking if they had gangsta clothing or anything with Tupac on it, lol. Yeah, what the hell would make the kid thing Hot Topic would have that shit. Every OTHER store in the mall caters to the hip-hop, MTV viewing vapid youth, so why would he walk into the store adorned with “Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Twilight” stuff in the windows? Lol. But anyway, while I was in there I looked at some of the belts (I’m super skinny and need a belt anyway, if I’m going to start wearing more and more stuff tucked in, I should have belts that are less lame) but most of the belts were too big for me (I need a 30 and the smallest they had in the designs I liked were 32 or 34). And as for the necklaces, well, most of them were womens, and the mens necklaces they had were all adorned with crosses, Celtic and Christian. No thank you. So I was disappointed that I came up Empty in Hot Topic.
When I told my mom I was looking for necklaces, and the types I was looking for, she directed me to some stores I would normally never set foot in : Pac Sun, American Outfitters, etc. I also struck out there, where they either had ugly necklaces or necklaces only for women. My mom had asked me why I wanted a necklace, and I basically told her I was trying to change up my look, which I imagine surprised her since she has been trying to get me away from my black jean and black T-shirt look for the past 10 years or so with no success. And even though I made it clear after all the shit she put me through when I dated Alysa, because my mom hated her, that I would never discuss my romantic life with her ever again, I told her this changing of my look was pretty much to land a girlfriend, to which she replied “clothes won’t get you a girlfriend”, and left it at that. She’s right in a sense, but I do think if I’m wearing clothes that I think are cool, and even more so that I think GIRLS think I look cool in, that will end up making me feel better and more confident about myself, which WILL attract girls. And hey, if I really do look good and am out somewhere, maybe a girl will approach ME for once. I hate being the one who always has to be on his toes looking to find and pursue a girl. I’d like a girl to like me so much that she goes after me for once, you know?
In the end I found the two necklaces I bought in Spencers. That store has gotten much cooler lately. They had a rack of itty bitty schoolgirl skirts, lol. They had a “Juggalos Suck” shirt I had to restrain myself from buying, lol. But yeah, I eventually found the tight necklace with the 7 spikes, and then that larger necklace, both are from a company called “Body Rage”, who apparently don’t have their own website, otherwise I’d probably look for other stuff they sell, like maybe a cool wristband for my right arm to offset the watch I always wear on my left. I think the tighter necklace will look great with my usual T-shirt ensemble, and then if I end up wearing more button down shirts I can be okay leaving the top button undone with the longer necklace covering my unappealing bare chest, lol. The again :
Yeah, I took some pics of me with no shirt on wearing the necklaces, lol. Yeah, that’s the dirtiest I’ll get with my webcam. Today there was actually a girl who came into my chat room on Stickam and pretty much within 45 seconds tried to get me to whip out my cock for her, lol. Now, for one, I’m definitely not doing anything dirty on my webcam and especially not on Stickam where they’re flag-happy about anything inappropriate, but also when a girl who has barely said hi, is not on her webcam on a webcam-centric site, and only has 2 pics of herself on her profile is that forward, it usually means it’s a 50 year old gay dude, lol. Though there is one girl I met and she did flash me on the site, which was unexpected...that and she blew a toothbrush for me, lol. I was in my chat room talking to one of my internet friends, this new girl joined in, my friend left, then the new girl for a tad dirty, lol. Why are the girls who are attracted to me so damn far from me? And then yesterday I spent a few hours in the morning talking to this great girl whose a highs school teacher and only 2 years older than me and shares my love of reading and horror movies...but she lives in frickin’ Louisiana! The girl who flashed me, who is a glasses wearing band geek BTW, lives in Pennsylvania. Is it just that hot Rhode Island girls who might like me don’t go online at all? When I was in the mall yesterday there were quite a few hot girls with glasses roaming about, but they didn’t look twice at me, and more than a few of them were with guys who were likely their boyfriends. Then again, my mom is 40 and looks my age so they may have made a false assumption that I was “with her”, but I find that too disturbing to contemplate, lol. It’s funny that my mom now has to wear glasses full time because her eyes are too dry for contacts. She works in an eye doctors office and was joking with me that I should hang out in her waiting room and try to pick up the girls, to which I responded that perhaps hanging around a doctor’s waiting room all day picking up girls wouldn’t look too good, lol. She also said something about how there was a cute girl there Friday but she was 21 and “that’s a little young for you”. WTF? Crush is 21. Hell, when it comes to potential GFs I’d I tend to go younger than me since with my lack of life/romantic/sexual experience I need someone younger than me so that we might be on the same “level”, and at 25 I’d like to think I’m not so old that it’s creepy for me to date someone who is 18 or 19 yet (though I would prefer 20+ to be honest...still, on internet dating sites I tend to put my search parameters at 18-29). But yeah, 21 is not too young for me, I don’t think. 4 years difference? Then again, I usually think guys who are in their 30s or 40s and still hitting on girls in their 20s are skeevy assholes and usually are only interested in sex or go after those girls because they’ll be on top in a fucked up power dynamic, and know a younger girl will be more easily manipulated and enamored with/by them than a woman their own age.
Some small updates on CGCN. Apparently when I was absent from work on Wednesday, it caused CGCN to pull my best friend aside and tell her that she prefers I sit next to her than the girl who got to sit in my cubicle that day when I was out. This wasn’t so much a compliment to me as it was an insult to the girl who sit next to her. In fact, the next day when I came back to work, CGCN told me “you are not allowed to be absent from work anymore”, lol. And then the next day she asked me if I thought she was shorter than the girl who was sitting at my cube that day (CGCN is a very tiny, petite woman). I told her I didn’t know because I had never seen them standing next to each other. Anyways, I guess CGCN asked my best friend what my “deal” was because I don’t talk to CGCN that much and apparently she thinks I ignore her when she tries to talk to me (my guess is I’m either on the phone or don’t hear her or don’t see her in my peripheral vision when she pokes her head above our cube divider). Naturally I’m not actually ignoring her, but I do get intimidated when she talks to me since she’s beautiful and cute and sweet and nice and funny, and yet I know I have no chance with her and that she thinks I’m kind of creepy. Well my best friend told CGCN that I’m not ignoring her or annoying by her, but that I’m just shy and, here’s the kicker, “especially around girls he thinks are pretty”. So yeah, now CGCN knows I’m attracted to her. I guess this isn’t a good or bad thing, as thinking she’s pretty and the existence of my mini-crush on her are two separate things, but the me-thinking-she’s-pretty thing is out of the bag now. Then again, every guy in the office wishes they could be with her, so what’s one more, lol. There was a funny moment this week too where I guess she was working an account and I heard her exclaim, in her very cute high pitched voice, “stop overdrawing your account you crackhead!” lol. She also tends to say “oh bother” when she gets frustrated, just like Winnie the Pooh, or “Ooh money!” when she finds money in another account that she can transfer. Yeah, this is the stuff I notice in between my own phone calls, lol. But yeah, she’s adorable and I wish I could find a girl like her who actually likes me.
Work this week did suck, though. Granted, I am not as depressed as I was earlier in the week, but the angrier and angrier customers, who are less and less likely to be able to pay their debts in our current economic climate, make the days more stressful...and then I come home to my empty bedroom alone, miserable about how I can’t find a girlfriend or love or even just a warm body to hold, and I log on to my computer and now my webcam, desperate to make a connection with another (female) human being, even if it can never really be real. **sigh** I suck at life.
So let’s see what else I can talk about. Well this week on Amazon I bought “Risky Business” on Blu-Ray. I watched the film (the video on the Blu-Ray is not all that spectacular) but haven’t watched many of the extras yet. I look forward to the video commentary. I have not yet watched the DVDs of “The Graduate” or “The Apartment”. Next week I have “The Godfather” trilogy and “Sex and the City” coming on Blu-Ray, and “Pathology” and “Friday the 13th : The Series : Season 1" coming on DVD. The week after that I have “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, “Can’t Hardly Wait”, and “Iron Man” coming on Blu-Ray, “Sports Night : The Complete Series” on DVD, and the CD soundtracks of “Repo : The Genetic Opera” and “Hamlet 2". Yeah, a lot of money being spent that week. Plus my best friend’s birthday is coming up, so I’ll be buying her a few things too.
In movie news, I opted not to go see a movie this weekend. But next weekend “Choke” opens, and despite news that is was getting limited release, they keep advertising the shit out of it on Comedy Central, so my guess is it will open in RI Friday. Hell, I’m even seeing commercials for “Religulous”, so maybe that will even open in RI on its “limited release” date of October 3rd...maybe I can even make that a 2 movie day with “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”. I wonder if I can fake sick that day, lol. Especially coming so soon after taking a sick day this week. I’ll think about it. CGCN might be pissed though, lol.
Well I guess that’s it for now. This is the last full week of September. Oh, and I did make a contest a month ago for people to tell me their biggest turn-on. Well, only two people entered, and the person who won was AWWW, who patched things up with her BF and isn’t talking to me anymore, so the contest is pretty much null and void, hence my not sharing their answers. Not that any of you were wondering about it or even remembered the contest. Anyways, since my contests don’t seem to ever be too popular, I’ll hold off on starting a new one. So yeah, I’m not as depressed as I have been the past 2 weeks, but I am still feeling pretty bummed out over still being single. I doubt my goal to meet a girl before New Years will be accomplished, but then again I doubted my goal of losing my virginity before my 25th birthday would be accomplished, so who knows. But yeah, I’ll probably spend that night home alone and miserable. I certainly won’t go to any parties if I’m single, because the last thing I need will be to have no one to kiss at midnight while a bunch of people are kissing around me. That would make me want to slit my wrists then and there, lol. At least last year when I was home alone I spent the night talking to Crush for 6 or 7 hours. Of course, she’ll have her BF to kiss this year. 2008 has been a great year and a horrible year all at the same time. Maybe if I stop being lazy and finish the first draft of my screenplay it will take the sting out of it a bit.
I leave you with this :
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dysthymia83's journal
