From the Beginning…

I have really let this blog go over the past six months or more. I’ve been reading like a mutha, and I’ve posted 147 book and film reviews over on the other blog  but here on the general mind romp blog, nada. I’m sorry about that. It’s sort of funny, because even though it’s been roughly five months since I’ve written here, I’m still getting hits. Teh permanent Interwebs are amazing, I guess. We never die, because our posts keep on getting hits.

There’s a great topic: we never die, because people still think about us.

Maybe I’ll write that someday.

I am going to attempt to write more starting in the near future. My book reading goal for 2013 is 150 books. I’m currently reading #147. I think I’ll be cutting back on the reading, and work more on writing. Kelly and I have an idea for a YA novel-from-hell, and I think I’m ready to start at least trying to write that. Yes, my brain is still majorly fucked-up after 16 months, and I never know what my chemicals will do. I can go from somewhat happy to massive rage spikes in the turn of a second. I’m imbalanced, and it off-pisses me greatly. I mean, how many drug regimens can one person go through without stasis? Answer: I’ll tell you if we ever find it.

Anyway, what I wanted to do was share my very first blog post ever. It was on the blog I didn’t know I still had, over at Blogspot . I may copy all my posts into that. I just don’t know. Social media is weird, and I’ve been dicking around with it the past week. We’ll see what happens when and if it happens.

Herewith, my very first blog post, from almost six years ago. It starts out rough, but smooths out a little by the end. I will never equal Lent in Casablanca’s Annie the Soapmaker’s Ingrid Bergman beatdown–that’s my favorite of all the ones I wrote, and (perhaps inappropriately) it makes me laugh aloud, probably because I know Annie, and she’d so totally talk to Ingrid Bergman that way, as well as drinking and smoking with Rick (fuck, this is a long parenthetical)–but I was trying to learn how to write sober again.

Without further apologetic disclaimers, and hoping I’d use this blog more-frequently anon…:

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Nice turns of phrase

 

My friend Ali said she wasn’t sure whether she was premenstrual or had cancer. I doubt she really wanted either, but I’m sure PMS would be her selection.

Uncle Pete had a hangover one time, and said he felt like a sack of smashed assholes. Of all the hangover descriptions I’ve heard, that one seems most fitting. I remember college, those days before I got used to being hungover. That was it: the morning after, I felt like somebody had broken into wherever it was that I passed out, filled my skull with heavy sharp industrial parts, eviscerated me, replaced my organs with a bunch of assholes, then smashed them with a ballbat. Amazing how I never awoke during this period. Amazing, too, how I didn’t get hangovers when I didn’t drink.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “In the real dark night of the soul, it’s always three o’clock in the morning.”

On many mornings after dark nights of the soul, I’ve felt like a sack of smashed assholes, although I’m unsure whether Uncle Pete ever read Fitzgerald.

T.S. Elliot: “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each; I do not think that they will sing for me.”

I have heard my neighbors screaming each to each; I really hope that they don’t scream at me.

Ever since Chynna died across the hall, I pay a bit more attention to screams. She was depressed and she told her boyfriend on the phone that she was sick of living. She hung up, turned her ringer off, removed the hidden key over her door, then od’d on heroin. Her boyfriend came over and pounded on the door, screaming her name. I didn’t hear him. I was having my own true dark night of the soul. I, too, was sick of life. I drank a bunch of whiskey, smoked myself hoarse, and blasted something loud and guitar-intensive through my headphones. Dark night of the soul or not, it was 3 o’clock in the morning. If I hadn’t had my headphones on, maybe I’d have heard the boyfriend screaming. Maybe I would’ve done something heroic and life-saving, like crash through her door and resuscitate her.

Probably, I’d have done nothing. Probably, I’d have put my headphones on and played something guitar-intensive really loud to drown out the screaming.

For awhile, I was afraid she’d haunt me. I wasn’t really worried that she’d go all poltergeist on me–I’d always gotten along with her quite nicely. Nonetheless, she did die really young across the hall from me, so maybe her soul would get trapped here in Building 33, destined only to walk up and down the concrete steps, watch the rather boring antics we the still-living perpetrated, and swat the ghosts of the mosquitoes and cone-nosed assassin bugs that also died.

That was like five years ago. Chynna was a 20 year-old club kid who worked at some chain fern-bar type restaurant. I’m supposedly well educated, well-read, intelligent, ad nauseam, but she knows the answers to the biggest questions there are: immortality, God, who wrote the book of love, etc.

Chris the Shrink calls suicide, “A permanent solution to a temporary problem.” He’s pretty sharp, in that shrink sort of way.

Whatever Chynna’s problems were in this world, they ended there, on the beige carpet of her living room. Along with those problems (PMS or cancer, eg) went all the opportunities for happiness. All the orgasms and cheesecake and giggles and hugs and sunsets and Thanksgiving Night leftover turkey sandwiches and meteor showers and hand-holding and hearing your favorite song on the radio while driving.

Maybe in the next world, the clock hands finally moved off of 3 o’clock in the morning. Maybe the mermaids sang for Chynna. Maybe, too, they’ll one day sing for me.

–30–