Month: November 2013

Personal

“I Thought I Better Tell You Before I Leave…”

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I can’t concentrate. On anything. Work. Reading. Even this post. A few draft posts linger in the backlog. I’ll Instagram the process of writing this post before actually hitting publish. There’s a lot on my mind. Most of it, I haven’t the vaguest clue.

via: EmilyStrange
via: EmilyStrange

I started reading Darkness Visible by William Styron because I loved the description of depression referenced in the Jude Law film I watched during my period of sickness. Did I mention I fell ill at the tail end of last week? A fever cloaked, unwilling to shrug itself off until I starved myself Sunday.

Most of my lack of concentration can be blamed on my depression. The fact that I can’t sleep at night no matter how much my body craves sleep, has me downing caffeinated drinks by the truck load.

The thoughts can shoulder the rest of the blame.

My thoughts haven’t been with the crush in quite some time. However, yesterday, I thought about what I should get her for Xmas. And I thought about her the night before as I listened to song that reminded me of someone else, music I’m sure she’d love.

I’m thinking about a piece brewing within me. A piece about how passive Christians need to stop riding in the backseat while these militant nutcases who pass themselves off as Christians drive the Christ bus through the mire.

My thoughts are with Amie and my nameless narrator, as I map their relationship with my fingertips.

There I go again. I just can’t focus. I’m hitting publish so this doesn’t just get logged with the rest of them.

Personal

Girls with Tattoos

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Things bore me. I pick up a book—an interesting book with lots of fucking at the beginning—put it down, and start another with less fucking and less descriptions of the female form. I begin a short story—or a post, or a poem—just to save the draft and forget about it. This listless ennui disheartens its prey so that it just sits and waits, never making a move and it is never taken.

And people bore me, too. As a youth, I jumped from crush to crush. When I felt that pang of nostalgia, I returned to an earlier fantasy girl and indulged myself. Maybe I’m just bored of myself.

This morning, Katie sent me a text message. She feels alone in this world, reaching out for some comfort. I replied, “Me, too. But probably not the in the same way.” My aloneness involves the need to wrap my hand in her (the royal her, not subjective her) hair and pull with just the right amount of force as I’m entering her from behind. The sudden urge for semi-violent sex—no, let’s call this what it is, fucking, because even sex is sweet with a hint of romance, even though it’s illusion—has filled my head. And while I do have my preference, I’m willing to sacrifice the want for the need of fulfilling these sexual urges.

Early into my adolescence, the pages of Playboy provided the entire erotic experience necessary to ease my imbalanced hormones. Later Penthouse and sexually explicit films that I obtained through various sources, could only get me off. Still, the sex in the films were rather vanilla. And the women were cut from the same fabric, pulled from the same mold. Plastic and silicone and saline. When I came (no pun intended) across Suicide Girls, it was a welcoming gateway into “alt porn.” It’s just like porn, only alternative. The girls here were a little more natural, though still very airbrushed. In my mid to late twenties, the works of Eon McKai enraptured my attention. Porn stars like Sasha Grey, Stoya, Lexi Belle—those willing to up the ante, as it were—became subjects of my fantasies, which I wrote down throughout my days of writing porn for a year.

The world fell into a crudely explicit scenario for me in which I began to question the kinks of those around me. The younger me might have masturbated until he is red and raw had he known what was going through the mind of my adult self. Not to mention shocked by the fact that what I once considered a turn off has become the focal point of my lusts. Girls with tattoos spread across large areas of their bodies, girls with nipple and facial rings, girls who aren’t socially accepted as beautiful. And the violence. Oh the violence.

Not abuse. Not rape. Nothing that isn’t consensual, but the roughness of fucking. The hair pulling. The choking. The pushing up against the wall, while letting our lusts take our respective pilot seat. The devouring of each others sins.  The perfect marriage of things both beautiful and depraved.

Kiss, Don't tell
Kiss, Don’t tell (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Personal

The Ghost Shelf

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Sometimes I forget other people have feelings. Sometimes that they’re even human. I awoke to the sound this morning. My world shook and I was ripped from my dream. I’m consumed by whatever madness lives within me. The pressures of just smiling weighing me down. I look in the mirror and see the edges cracking. I am a book rebound and taped. Mended and re-mended.

The weather’s perfect for these feelings of personal isolation. Nothing bothers me. Nothing that isn’t me, anyway. I bother me. I’ve always bothered me.

The weeding process started yesterday (being Wednesday at the time of this post). Discarding books like discarding children, it’s not something a person with a heart can do. At the moment, these withdrawals will be placed on a “ghost shelf,” where their existence will continue without continuing. Like being dead while still breathing.

In the last month, I played with the thought of suicide. I’d never do it, of course. There’s Shaun to consider and the several people I haven’t pissed off yet. Besides, it’s never been in my fashion to leave behind a mess of things. Instead, I place myself on the ghost shelf. To continue exist in the sense of nonexistence.

I promise the next post will be a porn or something chipper like that.

Personal

“Everybody knows that you’re just an asshole”

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JT asked if I was reading at the Beat poetry reading. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Why not?” “It wasn’t my group. I wasn’t invited.”

Last year, I made a snide remark about an anti-bullying poetry reading that excluded prose readers. I compared it to sitting at the loser’s table in the proverbial high school cafeteria. The plagiarist called me on an ironic statement—a poet who doesn’t understand irony? That’s ironic, right?—even went as far as bullying me into apology. That’s right. He bullied me until I apologized to him. As if a mariachi who humiliates someone online has any right to host an anti-bullying poetry reading. That’s not irony. It’s messed up.

But it’s no secret that I’ve been on the outside of his circle jerk of friends. I never conformed to his ideologies, dogma, and never gave him a chance to use me as a stepping stone to the top. Every idea he’s had belongs to someone else. And credit is never given. When I met him at FESTIBA all those years ago, when I bought his self-published book, and shook his hand there was something about him I didn’t trust. He invited me to partake in “his” festival of poetry. An idea that he stole from a friend of mine. There was a charge. I never paid to read before.

“A book is being published,” he answered. A book indeed. A collection of works by those who partake, reminiscent of the poetry.com bullshit from my teenage years.

I danced around the truth when JT asked me why. “I went into hiding,” I replied. “After which, no one wanted to take me back.”

The truth is, the only dick I’m willing to jerk off is mine.

Music

The Marshall Mathers LP 2

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Has it been 13 years since The Marshall Mathers LP found its way into my collection? A 17-year-old, skinny high school student whose music collection was limited to the disenfranchised post grunge albums and industrial rabble-rousers proclaiming god was dead. I heard about Eminem—hi, my name is cheekacheeka Slim Shady—but rap was for assholes with their pants sagging so low you wondered why the fuck they didn’t just walk around in their boxers. But his third studio album hit me hard. “The Way I Am,” “Marshall Mathers,” and “Stan” hit me hard that not all rap albums are full of shit. That Eminem had a gift and he was going to change the rap world with it.

The Marshall Mathers LP 2Now, I’m a 30-year-old man and his latest album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 dropped so hard the ground shook beneath our feet. The perfect homage to his younger self, the album reflects his growth from the angry, bleach blonde homicidal manic in a jump suit and Jason hockey mask. He’s still angry. But his lyrics are filled with so many emotions it’s easy to overlook it.

In “Headlights,” which features the vocals of Nate Ruess (Fun.), he revisits the anger and grudge he held against his mother. “I went in headfirst/Never thinking about who what I said hurt, in what verse/My mom probably got it the worst/The brunt of it, but as stubborn as we are/Did I take it too far?/Cleaning out my closet and all them other songs/But regardless I don’t hate you cause ma/You’re still beautiful to me, cause you’re my mom,” opens Eminem’s verse of the nearly tear-jerking magnum opus of a son putting all his hate behind him. He goes on to say, “Now I know it’s not your fault, and I’m not making jokes/That song I no longer play at shows and I cringe every time it’s on the radio…/But I love you Debbie Mathers, oh what a tangle web we have cause…And I’m mad I didn’t get the chance to thank you for being my Mom and my Dad/So Mom, please accept this as a tribute I wrote this on the jet/I guess I had to get this off my chest, I hope I get the chance to lay it before I’m dead.”

While in “Stronger Than I Was,” Eminem revisits his crumbled relationship with Kim Mathers. Rather going off at her, placing her body in the proverbial trunk, he finally sits back and sees the relationship from her point of view: “And you’d tease, you’re just fucking with me/and you must hate me/why do you date me if you say I make you sick? […]We were Bonnie and Clyde/No, on the inside you were Jekyll and Hyde I/Felt like my whole relationship with you was a lie/It was you and I, why did I think it was ride or die? […] And I thank you cause you made me a better person than I was/But I hate you cause you drained me/I gave you all, you gave me none/But if you blame me, you’re crazy.”

By far, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is the most important album of the year, surpassing my favorite band’s come back. It proves that Eminem has matured, while remaining the rap artist we fell in love when he first came out in the scene. The album is packed with references from older material (such as the feud he had with the Insane Clown Posse), guest musicians (like Rihanna—I’ll happy skip these tracks in the future), Skylar Grey, and Kendrick Lamar). Still filled with misogyny and homophobic slurs, it’s no wonder that Marshall Mathers LP 2 has stirred so much controversy and resentment from this pretentious politically correct world. In other words, the musician can grow older without having grown up.

 

Personal

On Being a Man

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I hate, no, I loathe, no, despise. Yeah. Despise. I despise No-Shave November. And it’s not for the pity reason that I cannot—genetically or professionally—grow a beard, but all the posts declaring that real men don’t need pre-selected month to grow a beard. They’ll post Internet memes and photos of their lion’s mane made up disgusting chin pubes as evidence to support their case. What’s really knackers me, however, is that most of these proud “real” men aren’t men at all. Not really, anyway.

No-Shave NovemeberThat is not to say those who show off their beards year round aren’t “real” men. My friend René, for instance, is a real man. He’s a father who takes care of his kids. He’s good to his wife. He’s a provider and a protector. But it isn’t the beard that makes him a man. It’s his actions. Meanwhile, Duck Dynasty wannabes walk the streets thinking the biological aspect is the only thing that counts, while they forget their children, forget to pay child support, insult ex-wives, can’t hold down a real job, etc.

These are the same jerk-offs who crack jokes at my inability to grow a beard. In their feeble-minded eyes, I’m not up to par with them. Meanwhile, I try my damnedest to provide for Shaun, to meet his mom half way, and work my ass off, taking on extra hours to make ends meet. I’m not out there chasing some dream, and just hoping my life will fall into place. I’m not the greatest man in the world, but I don’t need a fucking beard to prove that I’m better than you in every way.

Addendum

Someone called me out on this already. I’d like to clear it up for other people who might see me defining real men as fathers. In this post, I use fatherhood as an example but not the foundation of real men. My friend Amado once told me that fatherhood is a rite of passage to manhood, but that ignores several different types of men. Men who can’t have kids, for instance, are still men. Men who don’t want children are still men. Manliness isn’t defined by straight or gay concepts either. What I’m stating here is that a beard doesn’t automatically make you a real. I’ve seen women with beards and kids straight out of high school with beards, so that argument of real men have beards is null. However, it’s the actions that make the man.

I used fatherhood for the strict reason that I am a father and the person who pissed me off is a father. And while I don’t fall into the class of real man in his book because I can’t grow a beard, he doesn’t fall into the real man category because he’s a lousy dad.