Pandering Machine

It's all hair metal and bad food when no one’s looking. Adult Blanket Fort. Cat’s ass in the moonlight. Like an old Desperado who paints the town beige.

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

I’m still in the beginning stages of trying to crawl out of a very bad place. I can’t even breathe a word of how bad. I’ve maintained just enough energy for work and socializing but beyond that it’s just been a pit of private hell and I can’t really uphold the functional facade anymore. I’m trying to roll up my sleeves, I know there are brighter days on the horizon, but between trying to take it easy on myself and outright disgust with the level of self advocacy required to even set foot in a therapist’s office precisely while feeling too low to function, it’s quite the takeout box of noodles (or should I say MAGGOTS) to extrapolate. But I’m here to remind you that someone’s public face can and often is worlds apart from whatever private struggles they face. I mean that for the charming abusive narcissists just as much for the suicidally depressed. I say this having lived through abusive relationships, alcoholism, suicides, and generally too many good friends gone far too soon. Check on your people. You don’t have to be their unpaid therapist. Just remind them you’re thinking about them. Make plans to grab a milkshake or something. Sometimes that’s all it takes, just your extending a hand to remind someone that they matter. Sometimes that’s their bridge to brighter days. And if you think you’re too much of a burden because you’re struggling—you’re probably hanging around with the wrong fucking people.

[depsidase]

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

I met a bunch of amazing new faces last night, I mean markedly gleaming, non toxic souls that just felt so light and refreshing and easy to interact with. Just a perfect, effortless groove with the kinds of likemindedness some folks wait decades for. A pristine, spring fed pool of delight. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the whole damned time I was microscopically hyper-clocking how fucking awkward I felt while wagering how much it was bleeding through in my interactions.

I didn’t have my walls up high exactly, it was actually a small battle to the contrary. But BOY, just trying to gauge all the clutches and levers and pedals and general doohickery of piloting social situations, knowing when is the most classy time to pull back and not overshare, or should I just say fuck it and drop the hammer ala Days Of Thunder or what? Then of course knowing when to kinda wrap it up cause sometimes people might be placating you until they themselves can politely bow out, or is THIS PERSON that I cannot stop GABBING WITH my WEIRD NEW SOUL MATE?

As my anxiety is making me want to run screaming into the night, what’s really happening is there’s a low buzzing electricity in me that’s always been there, this decaying, mummified rat king in the basement next to the fusebox, this dried up old rag of a baseline trauma echo that tells me no one likes me and I’m not good enough, not worthy enough, an unfortunate script running in the background at the root of me,….but it’s actively losing its wattage as evidence of the contrary exists in total abundance all around me—A botanical oasis bearing my name. Native seeds scattered by my own hand and on good days, watered by my fellow travelers.

So,…can I finally stop carrying this corpse and it’s erstwhile gloomy murmurs around? Though it’s slimy, Body Snatcher tendrils still course through me like a zombie fungus? It feels like, hopefully this could be the beginning of a Great New Unfucking. Or at least the potential for it. The introduction of beneficial predators to pluck out the blight one pest at a time. Flame weeding the negative scripts with gratitude. Trapping the feral pigs in cages of love with my own sweet hooch. May we all dine in our finest melon stained shirts and laugh like children showing each other our signature tricks. If we are indeed all walking each other home, I might’ve failed to notice how sometimes that path and your walking partners can change without much notice or thought. The trick is of course, being open to it.

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

Adult life.

[iaintjeezy]

[astralbondpro]

The Golden Girls // S02E02: Ladies of the Evening

[minima--moralia]

“I think it’s true that a romantic relationship is a sort of delusion between two people. There’s an agreement to imagine something together, and you create this idea of each other and the relationship and what you mean to each other. And when one person stops imagining all this, basically that’s when the whole thing falls apart.”

— Sheila Heti, in an excerpt from “We Need the Eggs: On Annie Hall, Love, and Delusion”, The Paris Review, 22 April 2022

[heavymetaldracula]

Happy Halloween! 1980

*Billy Sheehan was in Talas at the time - opening for VH.

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

All these years of cropping! I had no idea!

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

I’ve met a few tumblr friends irl (even crashed at their houses on road trips and attended their weddings) and others are still on an unfuckwithable someday list, but let me tell you—If getting to know someone in real life can be analogized as peeling back the layers of an onion, tumblr friends are like starting in the middle of that onion. We’ve all come here to pour our guts out and say the things we have to edit in our daily lives so as not to sink the boat. It’s like a big group therapy that’s spanned decades and thousands of miles, and can sometimes even supersede real life connections you’ve had for thirty years or better. I got to cross the streams with ole Vanpocalypse on Sunday and boy we nearly burnt the building down. Hang on to the onions who keep you going!

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

Last night, I dreamt that I was with Mike’s family in a much larger house than their own, in the countryside of northern New Mexico. We were emptying and cleaning the house up so they could sell it, but simultaneously preparing for a second wake on the one year anniversary of his passing. After we finished cleaning up a HUGE amount of people showed up, I mean hundreds, and somehow a huge constituence of the semi famous and standup comics and luminaries of every sort that were “fans” of Mike’s. It was like Big Fish where his bigger than life persona and stories that seemed too tall to be true actually came to life. Later in the evening people began leaving but a handful stayed to have a slumber party. I laid down on an air mattress with someone from left field that I’ve crushed on for years in real life, no words were spoken but it was clear she intended on comforting me after a hard day of emotional upheaval. We laid down and embraced and she began softly, repeatedly kissing my temple in a way that just seemed to melt away tears of pain and trauma. It felt like “home” in a way that nothing else had. It felt like I had needed it very badly. Like I’d gone too many years alone and forgotten what benevolent human touch felt like and just melted in her arms. It wasn’t overtly sexual, just soft and sweet. It filled my cup in a way that reminded me—everyone deserves to be loved. No matter if romantically, platonically, or otherwise. It’s a basic human need like food and shelter. Mike always filled my cup in a similar way; it was like a message beaming from “home” or the universe that I could lay down my guns and stop fighting so hard and just rest and laugh a little while. That I was safe to have some soup and be loved as I am without bounds. Give and receive hugs and laughter and feast on the present moment with those you care about most. I woke up crying and I wasn’t even sure about what. A mix of intense emotions. Grieving his absence. Grieving atrophied love. Grieving for his family and all the trails they’ve endured. Every traumatic event slowly strips away the bullshit until you have no real choice but to be a raw nerve of love, because that’s all there is.

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

The timing is absolutely surreal. He hung on to complete the mission and say goodbye.

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

Grief, especially when operating in the background, feels like having sustained a head injury. You might be past the sudden bouts of ugly crying and can show up to life caffeinated, alert, and outwardly functional, but just behind that it feels like half the pylons in your pier are rotting away beneath you. It churns away in the boiler room of your amygdala, but in a covert Klopek basement kind of manner that doesn’t necessarily blow out the front windows and marr the facade of general normalcy. You have trouble remembering, you lose track of time easily, you experience inexplicable fatigue, headaches, and loss of motivation to do the most basic, everyday things, let alone keep any kind of consistent schedule or routine. You feel like you’re operating on half the amount of cylinders, your very existence both physically and psychologically becomes clutter. You can’t think clearly and live in a perpetuum of foggy segues, hoping for it to clear and return to some kind of order that never comes.

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

[bodidarma]

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

After several devastations I can confirm this is absolutely true. Cynicism is for the young, naive, inexperienced, and in more unfortunate scenarios—contained in the throes of arrested development. Nick Cave having lost his fifteen year old son who’d fallen off a cliff, and Stephen Colbert having lost his father and brothers in a plane crash at the age of ten, who also said, “What punishments of God are not gifts? It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that.” And I believe all of this with every molecule of my being. Have you ever met someone who hasn’t known much suffering? They’re like giant, insipid toddlers. Something I learned the first time I took psilocybin was that suffering was like a spiritual rock tumbler, an abrading element or that ultimately wears all the calcified bias and frivolous bullshit away, and sculpts you into who you really are at your most elemental and divine. Closer and closer to who you really came here to be as this soul in this timeline. Every time I hang out with Mike’s family now, we laugh, we cry, we keep noting how it feels like he’s still here when we’re all together, and I leave feeling that same renewal I felt from him. Only now it’s more like this cosmic molting—-through our suffering his loss and gratefulness for his existence, we’ve all sort of begun to emit this joy of togetherness. Maybe I’m full of hooey but it feels right and I’ll continue following it, because that crackling life force of energy is something I always felt when he and I were together, and it always gave me hope.

"Hopefulness is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion."

[segamascott]

[jumpingoutofmyskin]

I not so jokingly told someone they could make me a “birthday cake” out of fresh baked bread with Irish butter as the icing and I’d die happy, albeit still slightly hypoglycemic.