circling the 5th ocean @winkfrown - Tumblr Blog

zero, gravity :-|

Well, fuck… What now?

Thats what ive been saying to myself repeatedly for the past two weeks. If you are anything like me, you might be feeling a weird new weightlessness, as if youve just been thrown suddenly into space or somewhere else that the rules of physics as you knew them, cease to be applicable, and after awhile you get to feeling so much, it almost feels like nothing at all, up and down like a yoyo as it is.

And if youre reading this, and if the rest of what ive written here has not completely put you off already, then you may also be feeling a sense of dread that you can barely find the tiniest respite from, only to come crashing back down to the horror of lived reality again. Kind of like having a rug pulled forcefully out from under your feet, and then time itself creeps to a crawl while you have yet to land; and meanwhile as bad as this slomo floating all is, what makes it worse is that you have plenty of time for it to hit you over and over and over that it doesnt seem like it gets any better from here, that an impact is still coming...

One of the good things about ptsd i guess is that this is where i have been, both spiritually and mentally, for quite some time, so i personally feel a little extra prepared for this moment. However between all my recent catching up with reading theory, and then the fallout with my friend, the actual news of the day each day had all but fallen off my radar, and so i was super surprised by the sudden turn of events. But i guess everybody was anyway...

If theres a silver lining to be had in this particular shitstorm, for me at least, i finally got to talk to Slingo again last night, and even potentially patched things up to some degree. For a little while i basically had absolutely no one to talk to seriously at all, i was just lying in my darkened room, staring up at a screen and reading, worrying, and trying not to worry. And also there was something extra sad about, for lack of a better way of saying, the tone of this sudden silence from my friend that only got worse in the wake of all thats happening now.

The only outreach option i had left with him was twitter, and while he didnt have me blocked he wasnt following me any longer, so i just had to tweet at him and hoped he read it. He responded not long after, and im reposting here our public conversation, with his permission of course, to give context to where i am now, as well as what must be all that passes for closure to these posts, to say nothing of the fact that i found a lot of it really helpful too. Tbh ive been up all night again thinking about all of this.

Also i realize that there must be an app that makes this task easier but im not learning some whole new format now, when i need to finish what i started here:

@slingolang hey i understand that you prob never want to talk to me again but can we talk?

@RemiFasollati sure thing. so are you a compulsive liar?

@slingolang no, i am not.

@RemiFasollati …well that established nothing

@slingolang okay then…… Yes?

@RemiFasollati much better :-P

@slingolang but really tho, can we talk? Dunno if you even bothered looking, but i updated my blog awhile back.

@RemiFasollati yeah sure, been meaning to get in touch with you actually, in light of recent events...

@RemiFasollati yeah, i read your last post, and i appreciate your taking the time to spell it all out like that. and i think i believe you.

@RemiFasollati but fwiw i already have more than enough reason to keep clandestine online & your initial silence flew up a few red flags...

@RemiFasollati and even after your posted confession i had to do my due diligence regarding both my thoughts & feelings

@RemiFasollati cuz my safety is at risk, it still felt very much like a betrayal to know you had lied at all

@RemiFasollati when, on some level i took a chance engaging with you even…

@RemiFasollati and also? some times you just need extra S P A C E

@slingolang yeah thats something i can really appreciate myself… i totally respect that. Im sorry i broke your trust, not my intention...

@RemiFasollati so that surely played a factor in my delay. prob would have responded eventually anyway? but it felt imperative to do so now

@slingolang thank you for coming back tho. Really needed to hear from you, im at a complete loss

@RemiFasollati hate to say this, but i am not so far off myself. everyone is looking to each other but we are all in uncharted waters here

@RemiFasollati hence the need to take time for myself first. the oxygen mask analogy

@slingolang ...wait so am i the child in this analogy?

@RemiFasollati kinda, yeah….

@slingolang ….Yeah okay fair.

@RemiFasollati so let that be the first lesson: self care matters. if you don’t preserve yourself that’s one less person fighting the fight.

@RemiFasollati that is, if you don’t keep yourself going, there’s nowhere left for your morals to live. no matter controlling that energy...

@RemiFasollati another thing: it’s almost impossible to be 100% - like: you agree with vegans but you have disordered eating already?

@RemiFasollati or even just can’t afford NOT to shop @ big chains, or buy cheaper extra- processed less healthy food? don’t beat yourself up

@RemiFasollati after all, even vegan diets en masse requires the murder of millions of animals for farmland - field mice, other rodents, etc

@RemiFasollati so, as a wiser man once told me: Do What You Can Kid

@slingolang nice. I like it :-)

@RemiFasollati so it goes w/ ideological purity. sure, if you’re not remotely antiwar, you aren’t very progressive, and that merits mention.

@RemiFasollati but somewhere down the line, you reach an endpoint. for example much of our tech relies on empire to be built and maintained.

@RemiFasollati having the infrastructure, the raw materials and resources in our phones and laptops, all depend on robbing the global south.

@RemiFasollati there’s no pure socialist way to make it happen, esp since that would have to include reparations to those countries too

@RemiFasollati but what are we supposed to do? trapped in a world that requires this connectivity of us. and we all need to connect anyway.

@slingolang !!! So wtf do we do???

@RemiFasollati just accept the fact that we are ALL problematic, and make all attempts to rid yourself of whatever you can, whenever you can

@RemiFasollati we all have some racist or sexist thoughts sometimes, society has instilled a lot of this into us since we were very young…

@RemiFasollati what really makes the difference, what actually separates you as someone to be trusted, is how you respond in those moments.

@RemiFasollati willingness to be called out when you misstep, to listen to those you don’t have to, and apologize sincerely, are what matter

@RemiFasollati honestly the only voice not worth hearing is the voice shouting loudly for an end to all the other voices. you know, fascism.

@RemiFasollati everyone needs to be heard, and we need to listen to everyone. and actually this bring me to an important point:

@RemiFasollati and maybe this will sound dismissive, deterring, something, but just trust me when i say it’s meant to relieve some pressure:

@slingolang okay im ready hahaha. Shoot...

@RemiFasollati “fixing the world” isn’t your job. you’re doing it because you want to see a better world. if you ever stop wanting to do it,

@RemiFasollati remember that you are actually allowed to quit any time. then quit for a day and reevaluate if you still want to do it or not

@RemiFasollati but the weight of it all doesn't fall on your shoulders - you’re just one out of so many, trying to lift us all up at once...

@RemiFasollati you can stop helping any time you need to recover your strength. but there is no messiah. and nobody can save the earth alone

@RemiFasollati Not even you :-D

No matter how good you think your ideas are they are probably just not necessary… And to think they must be

@RemiFasollati that without your help other people will never figure out the best way forward, assumes that they must not be as smart as you

@RemiFasollati & the thing is that even if you are super smart, that still means plenty of other people are just as smart as you, or smarter

@RemiFasollati and that very much includes women, it includes people of color, and even those who don’t speak a lick of english. To not even

@RemiFasollati realize or be able to internalize this, too, is racism at work still and, as we are so fond of saying, “not helping anything”

@RemiFasollati This is where even Albert Schweitzer got it wrong, so dont feel bad if you have been too. just stop and you are doing better.

@RemiFasollati doing at least a little better than the Patron Saint of White Saviors ever was, anyway

@RemiFasollati and in a badder world, we must choose to be better, when good is not good enough

@RemiFasollati so by all fucking means, get very involved… just don't expect to lead and be taken seriously, i guess is what i'm saying

@slingolang see this is why i needed to talk to you. Your insights are so fucking helpful & as much as i try to catch on for myself… I cant.

@slingolang every day things get worse, i get a little more lost, and meanwhile you actually reached out when i first lost it

@slingolang which means everything btw. Like, you actually seem to give a damn…

@slingolang for some timely context: a few years back i ended up fasting over thanksgiving weekend. Was mostly cuz i was all alone at first

@slingolang but it turned into a legit fast, a transcendent spiritual experience tho. When it was over i posted online, but got zero replies

@slingolang to my much-too-heavy meditations on global hunger and compulsory overconsumption. Far too grave and not gravy enough, i guess...

@RemiFasollati well, some people can’t handle the heavy stuff all the time, or in some cases ever, for that matter… it sucks, i know, but...

@slingolang yeah, see, but with you it feels like you actually care. About me, about the things that concern me…

@slingolang and me, i just came to terms with the fact that the main reason we can't have nice things, is often some variation of nice guys.

@slingolang and that even if we never do any of those terrible things we have to do more to stop them. If not ourselves, then boys we raise,

@slingolang and we need to see to it that wrong ideas don't fester out in the open, that abusive language isn't tolerated...

@slingolang and i feel like i gotta snatch up those guys; the lonely, lost and confused dudes who find themselves again around hating women.

@slingolang and that if any guys with half a brain aren’t doing this work, we’re failing those guys, all women and even ourselves, you know?

@slingolang like we need to take “manhood” back... But...

Where the hell do we go from here???

@RemiFasollati well... and i say this with love, remember <3!

@RemiFasollati before anyone really - but quite frankly especially YOU - try to lead anyone to any damn where, first and foremost...

@RemiFasollati you need to work on yourself a little bit, make sure your head is on straight and it's not just your heart in the right place

@RemiFasollati hence my stressing the importance of self care and space, given the gravity of the situation

@RemiFasollati but unfortunately a lot of these guys are completely lost causes, gone the way of white supremacist

@RemiFasollati or at the very least, so opposed to all of identity politics that they come very close to being the worst humans on earth,

@RemiFasollati just utterly, obtusely oblivious to the suffering of others, especially anyone who in any way looks different from them....

@RemiFasollati as if their whole damn thing about being white and male wasn’t, itself, identity politics…

@RemiFasollati but worse still is how many dudes got roped in with MRAs and PUAs, sold a line of male supremacy, and from there…

@RemiFasollati ...well, it was not a very hard sell to jump to white supremacy as well i guess.

@slingolang must confess that i really thought we were dealing w/ insidious hidden forces more than anything else, just some fringe element.

@RemiFasollati yeah, but honestly they truly ARE a fringe element. the thing is they managed to seize control now anyway. as they tend to...

@RemiFasollati but what they call a backlash against “PC culture” & “SJWs” is really an effort to end the civil rights era of last 5 decades

@RemiFasollati that’s not even a hidden agenda, it’s simply putting it another way really.

@RemiFasollati the real problem is that we only had a society that nominally acknowledged its failings and supposedly strived to do better.

@RemiFasollati it was failing & in many ways not even trying, but it still had to pretend to care. that may very well go out the window now.

@RemiFasollati but just FYI each of the two major candidates got under 20% of US citizens’ votes

@RemiFasollati of course some didn’t vote or voted alternatively, which might not even matter depending on which state they did it of course

@RemiFasollati some were passively disenfranchised like felons or those under 18, others actively and aggressively through intimidation, or

@RemiFasollati through the closure of polling places, or the lack of VRA enforcement now that thats a thing… or not a thing i suppose… sigh.

@RemiFasollati but ALSO: we were always headed on this track, as soon as the antiwar and civil rights left split with the economic populists

@RemiFasollati & threw the baby out w/ the bathwater, cuz unchecked financial power in very few hands is the gateway drug for this ideology.

@RemiFasollati Corp. power has never not been in danger. Ford, IBM etc, invested heavily in 3rd Reich. H Ford even agreed w/ the principles.

@RemiFasollati that era also built fortunes of future presidents at expense of all the US supposedly stood for. i mean, actual treason!

@RemiFasollati sorry i’m just ranting now hahaha, i could go on forever

@slingolang well damn dude... OK. I have a fuckton to think about now, but i feel a bit better about going forward

@slingolang nah really, it’s cool, i learn a lot from your rants lol

@slingolang so let me ask you this much at least, at the risk of prying… You said before your safety was at risk?...

@slingolang did you mean since all this?... or before?...

@RemiFasollati hang on, let me follow back again and dm with you the rest of what i am willing to say online at all.

And on that note we began a conversation that i am not authorized to publish, along with an assurance that we would still be in touch, albeit by altogether new means most likely.

In the days since ive been resting up for whats coming, and finding little ways to get started in the long fight. And ive also been doing a lot of thinking and soul searching, and coming to terms with the nagging concern that i am a part of the problem: against my will i was made complicit in the systems of oppression i hated >:( Because even tho really all i ever wanted to do in life was coast my way to the end, having been thru just more than enough stuff as a kid to wish for simplicity and a good home, and little more, i didnt realize that a lot of my ability to do the bare minimum, to be able to break the rules i saw as silly as often as i have managed to and still do, was all predicated on being a white boy. And aside from what society taught me, it also taught everybody else around me to shrug and maybe even smile at my subversions, because my skin and gender assured them that i would never betray the ultimate cause. Because ultimately, i was the cause. And those blinders are why my own tale has been as white as woody allens new york, and how i failed to notice til much later that the faces of the campers we met living in the parking lot the first evening of the roadtrip, the real one, were all white.

Now im watching whiteness, maleness, and cisheteronormativity - these clubs that will casually tempt some of us to join in earnest over the coming years and months, even weeks. But these will serve as a shield for only as long as you can keep up the act of agreeing all the time and hiding your true feelings. You can try to blend in if you want, but I assure you it will not last, and if anything we all stand a greater chance of survival if we all come out now and join together to counter whats coming.

As for me, ive just barely been able to make a go of it as things WERE so i cant help but wonder and worry what the hell happens now? Cuz on the one hand if i somehow managed to succeed at this point, working a full time job in my field for better or worse… how do i know if and when i too have been consumed by the monster? What would achievement even look and feel like in this craven new world? Not that im in any immediate danger there, i never heard back from that company after all those meetings, even Shawn himself has fallen off the map completely… Not that it matters.

Because on the other hand even if i somehow managed to convince the system that my symptoms are real, that i have a condition that exists, and i end up relying completely on the state to survive, i might just be lining up to be one of the first people to go, historically speaking. And intersected with this is having recently really realized the fact that i may - mind you i dont even get the full benefit of knowing this for sure - be part of a demographic thats prone already, as it is, to fatal encounters with law enforcement, regardless of race... Well, the whole notion of my trying to blend into whats coming would just be delaying the inevitable anyway, and not by much.

All my privileges and my outward, physical ability just rendered my younger rebellions invisible, as no cause for concern by the adults in my life, all assured i would wind up finding my place in this world and quiet down. So nobody noticed how earnestly i never belonged to all this, and even i mistook this schism for something merely philosophical rather than physiological.

But the reality is that my whole life and especially as an adult i have just been passing for some other thing than what i am, as if i were a kind of creature that functions easily and comfortably in this world. And the reasons why all ive wanted was to make it to the end of my life undetected, unbothered, were so much more than that too…. Theres always been some severe strike against me in terms of willful participation in the rat race, but ive never had the luxury of having it properly named, nor the time to nail it down myself. But the truth is that “Help, im trapped inside of a madman...” is the prayer turned lump in my throat that ive been choking on for about as long as i can recall, and deep down i know that most if not all of my refusals thru life have truly been visceral ones. For a bit there i decided that if i made it seem like my nondriver status is a principled and proenvironmental choice rather than an impossibility for me, it could maintain some quiet dignity or whatever, but suddenly the countless number of Cant-Dos that continually keep me disqualified from better, more stable life conditions, and were growing more worrisome as i age, are all the more reason for alarm now.

Cuz even at the highest point of my life i was still somehow slipping by unnoticed and it took every ounce of strength for me to keep up the appearance of… I dunno. Something. Call it normalcy i guess since i never came up with sufficient wording for it.

So now all i can do is implore everyone with even half a heart, who so far fails to understand it yet, that more so than ever now we are all very much in this, the once and future tragedy, together ;-( and if you dont think that this will come for you too, then you dont know history or you just plain arent paying attention.

But tbqh i am very tied up in all this whether i ever wanted to be or not, and i am permanently bound to anyone with any disabilities, mental or physical, and that goes especially for those who are women and anyone who isnt white, for whom these terrors are doubled or trebled. I must be, or my concern for even myself means nothing in all this.

A zeitgeist is a hell of a thing, a force of nature of its own, and something easy to get swept up in, but we must resist it with everything that we are and however you can, whatever you can. Because if we all do, all who want to, we can pull in those who are tempted to, then those who were unsure before. We will never be able to win everybody obviously, but there are more of us who want to see peace in their lives than those who dont.

And WE are a force of nature, too. Sure the world is burning, and You and I and any one person is just a drop in the bucket, but all together we can douse this fire.

And i hate to be one of those people saying this, because some of those people are saying it with truly callous disregard for what would occur in the meantime, but this sudden turn for the much much worse is perhaps a good thing, or at least a necessary one. This is a moment to be used to full advantage. Because a lot of us, myself include, have become so complacent not only to the crimes committed by our country, specifically those in charge of running it, but also to the soon literally inescapable fact that the earth as we know it is dying. And we need to face this, fight this, like we were once taught that Americans fight fascism.

But now that they are inextricably linked, not just in fact but in facade as well, even i have found something worth engaging over - ive long since known and recently even proven that i am not afraid of getting hurt, but until now ive had zero desire to cause any further suffering during my time in this life either...

This, however, is not a mere misunderstanding.

This actually matters.

And frankly, even inaction in the face of ongoing injustice that results in violence, is violence, and so at a point, rising up to stop by force that which would run rampant over everyone else, is perfect pacifist praxis AFAIC.

But sure, Slingo is right: if you don't take the time to retreat as needed, and you act out of pure reflex, your work will suffer for it - whatever that work is. And if nothing else, when there is no longer time for the finer points of self care, you must make a point to eat and sleep whenever you can, because no machine lasts long that isn't well oiled and maintained, and the ones that fight fascists are the most important going forward. So even if you find you need a break from the raging battle, dont worry about it, because it will likely all be here waiting for you for quite some time. But dont hide away for too long either, or we might miss the chance to act at all...

I myself have been trying to strike a balance between trying not to stress myself out completely, yet still staying engaged and ready to act :-| Because the reality is that at this point if we take it too easy, we make it too easy too.

I think the answer is to just get started, so in that spirit:

Sorry this is so unimpressive. This is the best i could do with what remains of my markers, and the most i could bring myself to make at the moment. But i will do more, and i will do better, in the coming days and weeks, once ive gotten myself used to having the whole world turned upside down. My drawing and my writing are probably even more important now, especially if i wield these weapons well. And since Rebekah said theyd go with me, i have resolved to go get more and better art supplies this weekend, and maybe some poster board while im at it ;-)

Hope we see you out there,

-Remi

you, too ;-(

tw: brief description of abuse and trauma

Ok I really didnt want to post again on here but circumstance has left me no other choice - a pretty common experience in the human condition i guess.

But first of all, let me just say that none of what follows is supposed to serve as an excuse or justification for anything, just an attempt to let anyone know where ive been coming from and what led me to this place in the hope that maybe my sorrow should seem relatable or somehow familiar, and to maybe make my mindset at least a little more understandable, in the hopes that my mistakes might be a bit more forgivable...

This goes for any and everyone who might have gotten caught up in this blog, but obviously it is most especially directed at Slingo, whose radio silence has become deafening as it grows painfully clear how intentional it is, and the longer it goes on.

After getting that last message from him i waited almost all night for him to show up on chat, but he didnt. Next morning i tried to reply to the email and i couldnt, as it was suddenly no longer a valid address. And even his facebook profile, the first means of digital contact with him, is gone now.

So realistically this only leaves me with twitter to communicate, but seeing as thats where everything went wrong lately i have been staying away from there out of some mixed shame and guilt slurry. Eventually i did go there to check and found his account was still there. I dont know if i should expect anything in this environ tho cuz like i said, doesnt seem like he uses it much for someone who tried to get me into using it myself. Ive actually been suspicious awhile now of whether or not this is even his main profile… It is not apparently uncommon for people to have more than one, if even just for fun and non nefarious purposes. But if he doesnt really use it, and he just deleted the only email i have for him, then why wouldnt he just walk away from this account too? Maybe it is so inconsequential he just forgot and its been abandoned, and even if i tried it would be a dead end.

Of course i also wonder what he might be keeping from me, but im still hoping to have a chance to explain to him all the things i had been… Well, that i was lying about. So it doesnt feel like a good time or place to ask even innocently probing questions.

And ultimately i dont even know what the hell i intend to say anyway.

But just for the record: i really truly never meant any harm, nor had anything insidious in mind. Probably lots of folks end up feeling this way from time to time tho right? I mean there must be all sorts of accidental damage done by those who are otherwise firmly in the Do No Harm camp, this cant be a completely unique occurrence… Can it? I dunno, i have simply lost all footing recently and can barely stand up in my own mind enough to know how i feel about myself anymore.

Instead im just gonna put this out there on here, in the hopes that he reads it eventually and can know what happened, even if my friend never again directly speaks to me :-/

Ok i guess let me just start back at the beginning? So im still all the way north and specifically in CT, no idea why my phone told twitter i was over the border in nyc or wherever it thinks i am. I would say that i never even left, but thats not strictly true either, and let me not cock this all the way up by being withholding now. The fact is that my initial account of what happened is true, in the first two posts. Chad and i made the trip one state over and spent a night in the parking lot camped out with those folks, and it went about exactly as i related it. The only things left out there were the extent of his own uneasiness over the situation, which was larger than I let on originally, as well as how i became strangely unhinged by the whole thing and needed to head back home.

If you can call it that… Home, i mean.

The next day instead of continuing west, we went back to new haven together, to the apartment where we both had been subletters, but we were firmly kicked out of the place and found it impossible to return. Fortunately he knew some friends who had a less desirable place to live here in town where we could crash for a week or so. He stayed there for two weeks with me but i myself have yet to leave. Every group of dudes i said we met with along the way were really just this same gaggle of guys at this one location. What changed i guess was my account of them, which was dependent on how i was feeling about them or just life in general at any given time. As the semester kicked into full swing some people did move in and out as Chad moved on, and i took an open room here.

My health and wealth status are all the same as they were represented here, unfortunately, as is my ongoing saga in trying to get hired by Shawns company. Thats even his real name, while Chads name is as made up as claimed.

Rebekah is very real as well, except that we really met on the street, i on the front stoop of this building where i went to chain smoke. They lived just up the one way road and had no choice but to pass by the place i lived over and over, and we just ended up talking. They were looking to start hitchhiking, and with few exceptions all they got was discouragement in all directions from everyone else they talked to, whereas i have done some traveling in the past that wasnt as hardcore but still certainly roughing it. After failing to last for more than one whole day into my last attempt at adventure i was happy to live vicariously thru a friend. So i got almost as excited as they were, if even a bit jealous, but we kept in touch after they finally did leave for NOLA as planned, and til then we had a week or so together in the same town where we did have a magical but muted opportunity for romantic feelings to bloom as well.

In fact, with the exception of her specific destinations, which i altered in all our chats when pasting them into these posts, mainly for continuity, nothing about Rebekah is unreal in any way, and i even talked to them about all this at some point in the last few days, if you can believe that. It started with this conversation, which i am probably obligated to tell you is completely unedited this time, tho no one is required to believe me:

me: Hey youre online!

R: haha yep

i still exist lol :-P

got bored and broke out the laptop, this rest stop has free wifi

which is great because getting a ride has been hard…

me: Well thank god for that

Or whomever frankly, doesnt matter who

Sorry you got stuck tho...

R: lmao

well somebody's glad to see me!

working on making my way back to your neck of the woods...

me: Yeah you dont even know how grateful i am that you showed up

R: oh yeah? why’s that?

everything ok?

me: Well...

Kindof a long story.

May need to email it to you if thats ok

R: yeah of course

if i do manage to snag a seat in someone’s car tho i might not see it right away…

just saying

me: Sorry I know that prob seems weird or something

Yeah, i know

R: well yeah it’s a little weird, since I don’t know what's going on…

more concerned than anything else atm tho

me: OK, short version is, i did something sorta bad

And im nervous as hell about telling you

Cuz even tho it doesnt have much of anything to do with you and doesnt really affect you, i worry it might change how you feel about me

R: really? hmm.

me: Yeah

R: is it really bad?

me: I mean…

Not sure if im qualified to answer that

Since I was the one doing it

It would be too easy to just let myself off the hook completely…

And tho i def wasnt trying to hurt anyone or take from anybody, dont feel like i deserve to have it minimized

R: well.

i can’t really say much of anything to all that til i know more

but i believe you when you say you didn't mean to hurt anyone

that lines up with what i know of you so far...

anyway we can keep talking, but if you would rather email the rest to me then go ahead and do that

prob gonna be here awhile :-)

So i sent my confessional email, finally filling them in on the existence of this blog as well as their unwitting role in it - not only in joining my cast of characters but also by providing a lot of the inspiration in terms of travel. Some of the places i mentioned are ones ive been to myself at some point, but others were just where they ended up and texted me from on their own journey. But the truth is theyve never been given a link to these blatherings before, had no idea i was doing this; they wouldve noticed that it is rife with half-truth right off the bat tbh so there was simply no point in sharing it, only to have to answer for myself even earlier, when i cant really account for why, now, still. Instead, then as now, I rambled right around the bush, not out of an attempt to get nowhere but simply not knowing the way forward… I talked a bit about losing dad and what that did to my family, how we never recovered and some more than others. My last relationship and the patterns from the past that emerged there to varying degrees also came up, and the truth about how as much as i was into her, it was the first time since then that those feelings were stirred up, and i was at least as much afraid of anything happening between us as nothing happening.

And i recounted how i had realized recently that im so used to weighing terrible things out, shaking my cupped hands like they were full of dirt and i was panning for gold. Searching for silver linings in terrible thunderstorms. But i tend to decide the view is worth it if only i get wet, and if only my house was washed away… For some reason i measure myvplace in life with some obscene metric that mysteriously spirits away any of my feelings from the equation, so every time i count myself out somehow. Like theres a movie in my mind and it is mine, but im not so much the star as the camera, just capturing all the pieces to edit later without being really a part of any of it - if anything my presence needs to NOT be acknowledged so i can witness without interfering in events...

I told them i know a lot of this starts in my childhood, but where it really picks up and kicks my ass is in all of my attempts at interpersonal relationships while at least nominally an adult. For the longest time i simply ignored feminism, assuming it had nothing to do with me, but ever since i dove head first into all of that ive been coming across terms like gaslighting, emotional manipulation, emotional blackmail, and other more obvious ones like isolating and silencing that i had never before considered on the macro level of one on one. And i was simply thunderstruck at how much it applied to me and my love life, among others relationships.

But im sorry, im all over the place again, much like i was in my email. Long story short, i guess i just needed to live a fabrication for awhile since the present was and for that matter, is, just too much to deal with or recognize fully all in one go </3 Tho here i am, still deflecting with you fine people tbqh. Because none of this is what broke me, it just caused some cracks and dents, but for a long time i was able to hold me together, even if i had to wrap myself in duct tape to do it.

My last visit to the house i grew up in was anything but average, and by that i mean it was without a doubt worse than the worst i had ever experienced there. About a week before going ever so briefly west with Chad for real the first night i did go to see my mother, not actually to drop things off but to give her money as she had asked. I knew it was probably just going to get spent on a bottle of wine, but id tried everything already and wasnt ever gonna be able to stop her myself, so figured let me be nice now in case i never come back, never to see her again. No need or point in confrontation at this late stage of the game, right? Only she did that thing shes done so often where she calls me over only to pass out drunk before i arrive, so no answer to my knock at the door, the window, or her ringing phone. I remembered that i still had keys to the house, so i let myself in, my tiny burner phone i had back then still cradled between my ear and my shoulder as both my hands dealt with the dying deadbolt that hadnt been repaired in several years.

This is one of those 3 family new england homes with the 3rd floor rented out to the Drunkle these days, thats her brother btw, which is why i hardly ever come back anymore, and also why once in the building i shuddered a bit just noticing the steps to my right before turning left towards moms part of the house. Inside twas all cacophony, her alarm clock softly playing public radio and its inoffensive collection of light favorites and generally unchallenging examples of classical music, while in the living room cable television yelled for relevance, all while her phone is faintly ringing still. I finally found her in front of the TV and sitting in a chair, bible in her lap and opened to Job. It wasnt til i walked up and touched her shoulder that i knew she was gone. But the second i made physical contact i felt the lack of life itself, an emptiness where there should be electricity. I recoiled across the room in a split second while still calling out “Mom? Mom?” As if i didnt know full well what this was. My body and mouth just hadnt caught up yet, and since it takes up to a full minute for blood to pump its way from your heart and around your whole body, i guess that goes for the venom on the end of the knife in your chest as well.

Now im not completely clear on all what happened next exactly but i do know i grabbed her phone to silence that annoying, pointless ringing and then ended up pocketing it, because ive had it ever since, and that was how this device entered the picture, so i suppose the whole idea of it being some gift by which to stay connected with her was entirely my idea, technically speaking. I also recall the smell of the room, and my running up the stairs right after that to confront Drunkle over the fact that she had been there for fucking DAYS and he hadnt noticed it. I dont think i hit him? But i am sure i acted more violently than that random guy who tried to start a fight with me on the street a few weeks back.

I also am almost positive that i told her brother to his face that it should have been his lot in life to make the ghastly discovery i did, for all he has done to this world already. But then the next little while was an utter blur, i didnt sleep for days in a row and when i did i slept for a day or two straight. I sold my computer and a bunch of other stuff, guitars included, just to have the extra money since i simply stopped going to work, and somewhere in there i agreed to run off with Chad because why the fuck not?

But like i said we came back the day after that, and like i was saying a big part of this was because Chad got freaked out if you can believe it, all because some of the people we stayed with in the parking lot mistook us for a gay couple running away together. I didnt correct them since the person who said it also thought it was sweet, and the look on Chads face that night was fucking priceless <3! In fact the memory of that has been one of the very few things, along with meeting Rebekah and reconnecting with my childhood friend, that has done me any good these past weeks when i needed more than anything at least one safe harbor for my tempest tossed heart.

As for what did it for me, the reason why i couldnt continue on with the trip, was the fact that i failed to sleep and went wandering the lot in a loop alone, then at some point in there i came across a squirrel that had been hit recently by a car, and for whatever reason that just messed me up completely. The next morning i insisted we turn around, and fortunately he was easy to convince. As simple and embarrassing as that, honestly.

Moms account was on autopay so it wasnt cut off, and still isnt, whereas my phone was like two months behind anyway so i just ended up letting it get deactivated. Thats why i had to update my resume with a new number, and part of my ongoing stress has been over whether i will hear back from anyone in time before this one is a dead link too… If i run out of funds before this then i hopefully will figure out something short of living in one of the campsites in the woods that you can sometimes see along the train line along the connecticut shore, which i used to notice all the time back when i was a commuter...

You know in reality it may be fair to say that on some level i came face to face with another vague fear of mine that night on the road, as my whole adult life has been hanging this whole time by a thread, even before all this. I mean it didnt just turn bad recently, things were always a mess, and so it also wasnt any one thing that did me in here. It was when circumstances reached a point of no return, seemingly at least, when it finally became clear that all the broken bits would remain that way, that there was no putting these pieces into place again. And ive been on autopilot ever since.

So in my email i confessed all this, albeit in less detail, and it was a relief to get all of this off my chest because i hadnt said any of it out loud to anyone. Still havent. Filling in the facts a bit here feels like a logical next step if anything, so im glad ive done that, even if it took me a day and a half to do it. Had to stop over and over again and keep coming back to it later. Not that it matters. I havent had a lot to do lately, and tho Rebekah is back in town, that boyfriend back home they mentioned also actually lives in the area. It hasnt been very long since they returned, either, only a day or so, so i suppose i cant fault them wanting to spend time with him first.

So for now all i have is the email i got in response to mine, which took several silent days between to arrive in my inbox:

hey there,

so first of all, i am so so sorry to hear about all of what you’ve been thru recently, as well as not so recently. it is so easy to empathize that i very deeply sympathize with you, too... and not only with your last romantic relationship, which sounds like some of the bad ones i’ve left behind - but i’m also no stranger to having a complicated relationship with a parent, as well as the loss of that parent, to say nothing of the complex kind of loss that is…

anyway i can more than understand, unfortunately, and a lot of what you said makes too much sense, and serves as semi painful reminders of places i have been in my life. i also found my dad when he died… did i ever tell you that? it was back when i was in high school.

almost like a riddle huh? like, “how do you lose someone while finding them?”

haha, sorry, that was dark… i’ve been coping with it for a long time now so i can be pretty glib about it, but you’re still new to our club.

anyway, about this thing with Slingo...

i mean, i don’t think you did much wrong here, or rather i know you didn’t mean to. i can see why you were doing what you were and that your intentions werent meant to harm anyone, but you have to accept that your friend feels betrayed, because he got caught up in it, so you did wrong him, if nothing and no one else.

because intent only matters so much, and if your intention was never to cause any harm then when confronted with the fact that you did, you should in theory want to make amends. otherwise your whole thesis of being mostly a good person goes out the window.

and a drunk driver might never intend to kill a person, that doesn’t make the person they hit with a car any less dead >:( and to a lesser extent, what you might think of as “just a joke” might be really harmful for someone else, depending on who they are and what they’ve survived.

for example, how bothered were you by did my bad joke above? and would it bother you more from someone who you didn’t really know or like?

the common thread here is that surviving trauma or abuse doesn’t negate your ability or potential to abuse others. quite the contrary in fact.

abuse usually causes more abuse. where else would it come from?

and it can be really easy to not notice when you slip over a line when you’ve spent your whole life watching them get crossed on a whim... this is why i keep a constant eye out for my own behavior in close relationships, because people like me, and you, too it turns out, are prone to either absorbing or reenacting what we’ve been witness to.

now as far as the blog you linked me to goes, i’m not sure how to respond exactly, so let me tell you a story:

for a long time, there’s been a debate about the number of oceans in the world, and around the time we were kids they started making more official maps showing 5 oceans instead of just four: in addition to Atlantic, Arctic, Indian and Pacific Oceans they named the Southern Ocean as well. It’s still not a settled issue to this day, and the boundaries change every decade or so it seems, yet anyone who ever lived there would tell you how it’s a unique region unto itself.

now imagine a guy from London or New York dressing up like a turn of last century explorer type and commissioning a ship to set sail to uncover what treasures await him while circumnavigating this ‘new’ body of water, as well as to see it for himself. this may prove to be a very grand personal adventure, but… there’s nothing to be discovered here that hasn’t been known to others, particularly the peoples of these places, for a long damn time, maybe even centuries by now.

this guy isn’t adding anything to the world so much as educating himself, but in a very short-sighted and self-serving way. if he isn’t careful he can very easily drift into doing nothing more than enriching himself at the expense of the subject of his obsessive study - the native cultures and people of this neighborhood of the world. which makes him just another exploitative colonizer, like virtually every other visitor from the northern hemisphere.

anyway, i guess my point is just… circle the fifth ocean all you want to, just try not to be an asshole about it? i guess what i mean is, be confident, but considering how much the world looks to hand you, don’t act cocky. it’s just gross, especially at this point.

ok, my ride is ready. made it all the way to ohio and already back on track so hopefully i should be in CT soon and i’ll see you a few days after that!

xoxoxo

That was several days ago, but i still pull it up on my phone every so often just because, the same as i do with the last of my chats with Slingo:

me: I dunno

More than anything I wonder if and when it stops hurting, you know?

S: sure it does, man. before ya know it you'll be moving on with your life as painful as it all is and then

wham!

some new horrible thing even worse than all this comes along and then you can hardly believe that you ever thought you knew what wanting to die meant before.

me: Sooooooo….. it stops hurting when it hurts worse somewhere else?

S: in my experience, yes.

me: ...

So you too, huh?

And every now and again i go back to his twitter page as well, and just look at it for a moment before closing the app again. Not like I feel like tweeting much these days... What am i so afraid of? I dunno exactly, but after spending my whole life watching everything ive ever loved fall apart in some slow motion erosion, im afraid of all that ever happening again, and so i am also terrified of letting myself even love, let alone build anything around such love, because thats a fine way of inviting all those horrors back into my life again. Thats a fine place to start i suppose.

Either way tho Rebekah has me convinced to try him there, but whenever i go to his profile page his pinned tweet lies looming before me, my phone now glowing like the cautionary sign at the gates of hades tho all it says is simply:

et tu, Brute?

But it seems that if im gonna get to talk to him again then it will have to be this way, and im unwilling to fight him on anything right now. Hardly a stranger myself to the feeling of deep betrayal by those you thought most trustworthy ;-( And here i am, actually just another lie on the internet. So i still havent been able to muster the courage to try reaching out.

I also havent felt up to drawing in over a week but just for consistency let me include this unfinished sketch from almost a month ago that feels appropriate:

-remi

xray, specs :-o

The devil really is in the details… Thats what ive come to appreciate lately. Been a weird several days spent buried in specifics, and ive had a lot of extra anxiety and depression to deal with as i move from the utterly abstract “starting a new life” into the nitty gritty of actually setting all that up properly. Tbh ive been in a kinda of a state of shock at the overwhelming amount of tidbits to tend to in making that a reality, and i havent been able to put a lot of cohesive thoughts together lately unless absolutely called upon to do so...

So first of all i heard back from Shawn yesterday that the owner wants to meet me next week after all the guys i sat with last time have a chance to get to know me better still, with a round of presumably even more exacting questions… Not sure at all what they want to learn about me that they didnt before but whatever, not like ive gotten a ton of responses even since updating my contact info, and nothing all that promising from what i did receive. My expectations are pretty low now, this may be my only good shot at a decent job right away, so i guess theres not a lot to do but jump thru all the hoops they hold up in front of me. Frustrating as fuck tho, still not knowing if i have this job and putting in a bunch of energy toward it to the exclusion of all else.

So i definitely havent accomplished a whole hell of a lot of anything in the meantime. Actually i killed a lot of time over the last few days reading, and even spent more time on twitter than I ever yet had. Before i was just following a few comedians and news feeds that i liked, but i became fascinated by finding feminists critiquing and commenting on life in real time, and got fixated there for a bit. I followed a lot of links and just searched the web when necessary, consuming all sorts of new info. New to me anyway. At the same time tho i tried not to follow too many people at once either, let alone engage in conversation, after taking to heart an essay or two on the white male gaze, so ive been quietly reading along and learning about intersectionality instead.

I also at some point this week went thru some of my recent blog posts. The one thing that really jumped out at me, aside from the ridiculous amount of run on sentences present, was how wordy i let myself generally get on here for a guy just using a phone. But in my defense it was only just recently that i upgraded to this device, and since i no longer have to hit the P four times to make an S while texting all of a sudden, youll have to forgive me if ive been going hog wild with it. Well you dont have to i guess. Anyway sure, theres still plenty of text speak mixed in but tbh some of that shorthand was a necessary adaptation, and after a few years of use is just pretty deeply embedded… Kinda same with emoticons too, as conversations held in text only spaces are practically impossible with the absence of tone, particularly where interpersonal relations are involved… Part of me wonders if i just feel that way because of my relationship to music, but i was hardly the first person using them either so ;-)

Oh right, another thing that occurred was that i got a letter from Rebekah, in the mail mail, snail mail, like in days of yore. It was just a short sweet note with nothing in particular to it, but as they said in that text the point of it was mostly to give me a proof of address at the new place, which was one of the first steps toward getting my life here together. They are still working their way back in this direction, but stopped again near shreveport to take an easy gig they got offered the first time passing thru. So itll be another week before i get to see them again, and they havent been online much or very responsive to text.

For that matter, neither has Slingo, who has been something of a ghost the last couple of days. Normally with certain people with whom you tend to talk via technology, your conversation naturally evaporates at appropriate times, only to fill back up again later when you both have the time and energy. Unless some extra serious subject comes up that is obviously its own unique conversation, then usually it is all one single dialogue that pauses but never quite stops… But something about this feels more like a stop than any of our prior pauses and i dont know why, and the ultimate effect is my mental isolation. This was the last i heard from him, several days ago:

S: hey you inspired me

me: ?

S: i started a blog!

me: Awesome!

Can i read it?

S:…

not yet anyway

A little while later i tried googling “Slingolang” to see if anything turned up, and well after i found this blog in the results i finally gave up. There wasnt really much of anything relevant except for his twitter account. I mentioned this to him later and he texted back, “ha! you think i would be so transparent? all in good time, buddy”... Then nothing else but silence ever since.

So anyway i was able to use said letter from Rebekah, to get a library card, then go back to the bank where i had cashed my check before and this time simply deposit most of the money i had left after rent and deposit into an account with them. Nice thing was that since i was giving them a large amount of cash instead of a check, the money would be available immediately! I got some weird looks with my fat stack of greenbacks and they even called the manager before we went any further, but when she came out she remembered me and realized that all these amassed bills were a portion of those she had handed to me like a week ago, and she had to admit she was a fairly reliable source.

I was glad to not have the entirety of my equity at risk of being snagged by someone when i wasnt looking, even tho i have my own room at the house to store it in now, but i was also pretty annoyed by some of the terms of my checking account - for example, unless i keep a certain minimum balance or set up direct deposit then they charge me a monthly fee, and neither of these is feasible in the immediate future. I was even less thrilled to give my business to one of the banks that destroyed the modern economy and had built their empire long ago by way of the transatlantic slave trade. But when you do some digging, those are the only major banks left, and the handful of holdouts such as credit unions have tougher rules to joining or just opening an account so i dunno :-/

Hmm. What else happened this week? It seems like such a blur of bland nothingness.

I broke my sunglasses at the hinge and repaired them with a paperclip. It was the exact right size to fit into the place of the missing screw, wherever that went off to, and i just wrapped and bent the clip around the earpiece a few times as best i could. They now have what looks like a little antenna pointing up on one side, and it would probably be more convincing if i had a coil to add to it or something, but this isnt about aesthetics at all. Just dont have a ton of money to burn and wont waste any on something i can just fix quickly like that. Especially with all the time that frankly i do have to spare right now...

Oh of course - so im still working on the whole insurance thing, which it looks like will take a little while longer yet. Theres a ton of paperwork involved and im extremely anxious telling them how little i make now, which is none, only for that to no longer be true by the time they file everything properly… But i sucked it up so i can stop sucking air so much, i got the ball rolling, but everything has to be done in fucking stages you know. So im awaiting approval on something or this or that, im not even sure any more, i just fill out the next round of paperwork sent to me...

But then in the end it doesnt matter so much, as the pain finally got unbearable enough on wednesday i think, to convince me to find an emergency room to go to. I had to wait an awfully long time once i got there because i was gauged to not be a critical situation, which was technically true. I explained my situation to somebody and then parts of it again to a few other people here and there, and after taking a quick look at the tooth in question they gave me something for the pain, having decided this wasnt just a common drug seeking situation.

They also took some xrays of my teeth and jawline that gave me enough of a headache to just want to go back to bed. I felt too sick to be in the hospital really, even tho i guess that doesnt make a lot of sense? Whatever. So i learned from them that apparently, turns out my wisdom teeth just started coming in now?!?!?! And also just for added fun i guess it turns out theyre impacted, coming in at an angle, and thats what caused the break in my back molar. This is about to happen to the other side as well and probably both on top too, so i need to get those extracted. After all was said and done i was told to come back when my insurance goes thru and theyll have a referral waiting for me to see a dentist then… So in the Very End, it actually still matters very much about the insurance :-(

I feel that sort of sums up my situation nicely tho, that painful wisdom is breaking the surface and causing epiphanies so profound i have no choice but to shut up.

On the plus side, before i left the hospital a doctor i hope gave me a sympathetic look along with an unmarked! Bottle of pills for the pain in the meantime. These are something stronger than the codeine i grew accustomed to however, and i just took one of them a little bit ago and can definitely feel it taking over now, so lets just see if i can conclude this neatly into something before time runs out on me.

You know, when I was a little kid I was into comic books for a little while. I can't imagine they still do this tho admittedly been forever since i last checked, but they at least used to have ads selling some dumb shit in the back pages like sea monkeys or whatever. And I dont remember what it was, but once I really wanted something for sale there, and Dad literally sat me down at the kitchen table to tell me his experience buying xray specs with saved up paperboy money back in the day, and what a letdown it was. They didnt work as advertised. So i asked him why they would do that, and why others let them do it, if none of it is true. He said to me, “there's a lot of money to be made in lying, kiddo.” He is also the man who told me that if something sounds too good to be true, then it is. He didnt even say probably. And this is probably why i turned out so cynical now that i think of it.

So in all my reading recently i keep coming back to this feeling of being very, very lied to, my whole life, even by my family but especially by my school and everyone who had a hand in raising me, each and every grownup person who told me what this world was, what this society was. They pointed to inner city gang members or drug dealers and users as the worst possible things to end up as in this world without admitting the causes. And those scare tactic was used across the board and they never owned up to who was most at risk, or in so many cases really reached out to them in order to prevent it. They just told the children they had the most hope for, and usually us white kids, all the horrible things Not To Be in life. We got quarantined if we qualified and quietly other students were sent in a different direction... Almost like you needed to doom some future humans as visual aids for the rest of us... But there were always just enough exceptions to the rules to make you fail to question if a specific ill intent existed here.

Long story short, this is why i finally dove properly into twitter. Ive been giving it a chance here and there since shortly after starting this blog, and funny thing is i signed up for the account like a year or so ago too and utterly forgot to ever do anything with it, so much so that i even tried to sign up again only to be told i already had a profile with that email address, and had to change my password in order to start using it.

But only now do i get that its importance lies in that so many voices with unique understanding of the systems of oppression and their origins get a platform, and the rest of us who at best only knew the half of it can become aware of how all the things they hate work together in tandem. I feel like im not crazy when everyone is hard at work to piece together the full fabrication and deconstruct the diagram so as to better bring it down.

At least thats what i got out of it, even if to understand completely i had to search the web for explanations of or definitions to a number of terms, tho for the most part i was able to take the advice Slingo gave me and first try sounding it out, with a decent amount of success :-D

And exactly as much if not even a bit more so than when Rebekah first informed me about feminism and what it truly stands for, i have been letting a lot of dots connect themselves in terms of race in our society, a million bits of information and half-thought wonder-ifs, that all fit together in ways that are completely open and provable. Yet at the same time it is all set askew enough to be overlooked at a casual glance, and never together in the clear enough light of day to let the light shine on the bridges and lines between.

But now so many things make a lot more sense to me, in horrible ways, and i find myself also questioning myself a lot. Like i wonder if i hold any assumptions about some groups of people and i didnt even realize they were there? Probably right? But i also havent had much opportunity recently to run any experiments on myself as far as that goes, im surrounded by white guys all the time. For that matter i have been this whole trip, every place we went to was that way as well, and i failed to even notice, just like i did that night in the parking lot commune on the first night, that there was only a certain kind of person present.

But even just failing to catch on to that over and over again, is at least a certain kind of racism right?

So i will share this drawing in honor of my newfound ability to, as Slingo might say, “turn that lens on yourself, man” as well as my Dad to a lesser extent:

Because the more i critically examine the world all around me, i realize it was built on nothing but falsehoods and fabrications, sometimes pure fantasy. None of it is true, very few if any of our leaders in government ever say what they believe nor mean what they say, and it has always been like this, and the more that the people in charge are forced to answer to the public the more they will lie about their intentions. When you start to look deeply into things, with either a microscope or magic xray specs that really work, it is painfully obvious that the plan has always been to either exclude or preclude as many other people as possible at every level, first and foremost by categories that are established and maintained by those in power already… None of us are supposed to win, we really arent meant to ever climb the mountain… But some people are meant to lose so much harder that it makes the rest of us feel like maybe we kinda won after all. And i guess when presented with the option of outrage over that, and accepting things as they are because it favors you over others, most people prefer the latter unfortunately </3

Sorry, at this point i fear i am officially rambling. But like i said, ive been doing a ton of reading on topics and history to which i was fully ignorant before, and im feeling all kinds of ways. The more minutiae i come across in my research, the more evident it becomes that everything was placed this way on purpose, for a reason. Slingo was right. There really never was a national commitment to do right by groups wronged by the country until pushed to do so by those very people, and even then for the people in power the goal was to only give as much ground as they could get away with while still maintaining control. Have you ever read the text of the thirteenth amendment??? It abolished slavery and involuntary servitude… Except as a punishment for a crime…

The devil truly is in the details.

If you realize that slavery turned morphed into jim crow laws, and that slave catching companies became some of the first police departments... And that despite the civil rights movement there are still careful rewordings of laws and specific police practices that cause black men and women to be arrested and imprisoned at disproportionate rates compared to white citizens… It paints an ugly picture. But then when you learn that on the site of one of the most notorious plantations there is currently a state penitentiary where hard labor is paid with pennies per hour, if anything at all?

Im just some guy, an adult who was a kid who hated The System, even if I didn't know what that all meant. But the malls and the banality of suburbia, the unnaturally homogenous nature to both these things and many like, was somehow at the heart of the matter, but i thought it was just the superficial artifice of it all, when in all these things, the unspoken connection is often race. The suburbs weren't just about keeping poor people out - it’s about keeping black and brown people away no matter how rich they are… that's how you make a “nice neighborhood” apparently. And when you want to build a new shopping center or major highway or power plant or stadium, you dont put it where rich white people live now do you? And even tho i was already a person who had read plenty about cointelpro, somehow i missed the fact that their first target were the Black Panthers, almost like the program came about in reaction to them... I also just learned that Nelson Mandela was placed on a watch list for terrorists by ronnie reagan and wasnt removed until 2008!

So it was all these thoughts and more bouncing around in my head that caused me to make my first ever tweet of my very own:

Cant believe how many theoretically good people silently agree with a hidden system of disenfranchising certain other groups of people :-x

Pretty sure if he ever comes back online that Slingo will be rather proud of that one, if for no other reason than it was exactly 140 characters.

Thats hardly the only reason i want to hear from the guy tho. Like i was saying or hinting at before, im really lonely in a major and specific way, even surrounded by all these dudes with whom i make pleasant small talk all the time, because theres so much i dont feel free to say here. Maybe i worry that it will just fall flatly and not be received at all, or else it will get thru and be met or taken poorly. And im talking now about anything i take in any way seriously, whether my discovery of the depths of systemic racism and sexism in society, or my own complicity as an individual favored by that society, or even just my own selfish, personal panic about my own odds for the future while trying to navigate this nonsensical world with some kind of ethics...

...well shit.

I forget what i was going to say. Not that it matters.

I fell asleep for several hours right here on the couch with the app open, listening to the rain and trying to think of what to say next, and then i woke up just now to an email from Slingo.

So forget all that, and everything else i ever said. I give up.

Tbh im not really sure theres much point to anything any more, not even this blog. Dont really know why i started it let alone why i made up the parts i did. I guess maybe i was just attempting to reach out, and possibly felt it should sound more interesting than it really was? I dunno. But now youll have to forgive me for that, too…

No actually i suppose you wont really have to if you dont want to.

But just in case anyone has bothered to read all of this and wonders about the, in all likelihood, sudden stop here:

Hey.

No idea how this escaped my attention til now, maybe just because you’ve never tweeted before. But... when you did, you left your location on. And it says you’re in new york?

What’s going on? :-o

So nevermind that question of navigating ethically, im going to take another pill and go back to sleep, hopefully forever.

-remi

whitewashing, fences >:(

Please pardon the interruption again. I warned you that i was no good at journaling. But this past week deserves a post i think.

First of all im happy to report that im on the mend after getting much sicker since my last post. My only symptoms were a vague inability to breath in addition to a general heaviness to having any existence at all, as well as intermittent coughing and a sneeze interspersed here and there. Just bodily succumbing to some malaise of mind maybe? Anyway my track record for remaining on the fence in the face of illness did nothing to serve me this time, as i ended up getting good and proper sick, even if it still didnt show much.

Shawn had told me not to expect to hear back from his bosses til at least monday so of course ive been a nervous wreck all week since then. I still havent heard anything back so thats going to drive me up the wall as well... But for half the days since meeting with them i was unable to do much anything else but will myself to recover and survive. This has meant a lot of time on my phone, with no other option but to lie by the charging station of choice anyway. So i am a little mad at myself for not sending my resume out to more places, but for each of the emails i started there came the same impossible hurdle: crafting a cover letter. I continued to be incapable of that task for several days, but with several i had missed my window, so instead ive been looking for others to get to sooner. But today i only have the energy to write here cuz i can say whatever I want instead of guessing at what people want to hear from me.

Oh and since it has been a whole week, allow me to update you: i am now moved into the room and properly fenced off from others in the house, which is exciting in a way. Kinda mad at myself too tho cuz for any progress i can claim at this point, it doesnt feel like ive gotten much further than i ever was before i left either so… I dunno. But just for the record anyway, that charging station in question is on an abandoned nightstand that i claimed with the room, which is mostly furnished with unfortunate furniture. Not that it matters. Not to me, or not right now anyway. I just have too many other, bigger things to worry about first.

But aside from the slightest of changes in scenery and a gradual diminishing of symptoms, the only truly noteworthy thing from the last several days is how mad i became after a dialogue with Slingo recently, the only extended chat ive been able to have with him all week:

me: Hey are you really on for once?

Discovered something uncomfortable that i dont know how to process

S: hey there, yeah i’m here... sorry, been a busy week at work.

oh yeah? been there plenty of times, myself ;-(

so what’s up?

me: Well the other day i stumbled on a short story by Mark Twain i hadnt heard of before

The Noble Red Man, is the name of it

Have you read it?

S: hmmm, no. hang on a sec

me: Sure thing.

…

You coming back?

S: sorry, yeah, got caught up reading.

me: As one does

S: so, i found it and read it. fortunately i had an idea what i might be in for, because when i searched for it one of the top 5 results was on a notorious white supremacist site and marked it as being hilarious…

but i found a different site, and i read it there, along with some worthier commentary. it seems to have been written more or less because of “last of the mohicans” for one thing. other than that, all i can say is… not too surprised.

me: Really? But this is some ugly racist stuff

And i guess i might expect it from almost anyone else of that time, even

But him?

S: oh i think i see what the problem is.

you’re forgetting that twain was a very popular writer, in his own time. so he can only be so far removed from the prevailing attitudes of the era, you know?

me: What does you mean?

S: well he wrote a lot of things, he was a successful writer - that is, a paid writer. and in order for his words to resonate so well with that many people, his ideas couldn’t really venture too far out of bounds, during a period when hardly anybody was progressive by today’s standards.

and sure, with this book he definitely took things further than he ever had before, and put a lot of people off with this book, but… you may be making the mistake of giving him credit for more social consciousness than he deserves, probably… lots of people do that with him, basically just because of one book. but if there is anything brilliant about that book specifically, it is all the transliterated regional code switching going on in it.

but as for its progressive stance, honestly, it’s mostly white people saying putting it up on that pedestal ;-)

me: I… Hmm. Hadnt really noticed, but i cant really argue with that…

S: that’s the thing! that’s the insidious thing!

you aren’t SUPPOSED to notice it!

me: Notice what?

S: the whitewashing, of course - that’s what it’s there for

me: Isnt that in the other book?

S: ha! yes. yes, it is.

but this whitewashing renders the fences invisible instead

it rewrites history, and tells us about the journey to liberty for all, presupposing 1) that we ever got there and 2) that this was a journey white people took without being dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way.

but lincoln didn’t intend to free the slaves, except as an act of war against the rebelling states. and he as well as essentially every white person who ever wanted to end slavery, meant to send black people to almost any other place, away from us, immediately after the fact.

the idea of coexistence was a laughable concept, and nobody could get elected to a major office without reassuring everybody that they had no intention of allowing desegregation on any level. this didn’t end until the last fifty to sixty years, in response to the civil rights movement…

this is why in that century between lincoln and kennedy, jim crow laws were allowed to spring up all over the country - nobody really cared, and if anything it was what most people wanted: they wanted a good solid wall between them and “all that”. especially in polite society.

so we talk a big game nowadays about what this country stands for, and about striving to reach the true vision of its founding, but… it’s simply not based in reality. this equality and diversity has never been the goal, and all the gains in the last several decades has been to keep the peace at all costs.

it has never been about doing the right thing by anyone.

me: Whoa. Umm.

S: yeah right? and you wanna know the best part?

me: Well obviously im hooked now :-P

S: there's no such thing as white people!

me: Wait, what?

S: lol! we don't exist

they just made it up in the 1600s because there were just slaves, landowners and indentured servants. over the years more and more of those servants paid off their debts, so it was getting harder to come by huge swaths of land in order to turn your freedom into wealth. the concept of “white people” was born to give those men social capital instead of actual wealth…

whatever work there was, whatever gains were made, the colonies were created to make sure it stayed in the right kinds of hands

at first this was a very specific kind of what we would call white now, it didn't include the irish or italians or polish, all of whom were eventually included into whiteness in order to abate social pressure. specifically to increase the number of “us” vs “them”

black people demanded fuller citizenship and they got some of it, begrudgingly. but a lot of people will say today “but they have their freedom, why haven't they done more with it?” they choose to ignore that being under constant surveillance isn't freedom, and even though I bet they would complain if their boss installed security cameras at work, they wouldn't see any irony.

and they ignore the history of all that has been built, and how much of that was destroyed, by white people in jealous, angry fits of racist hysteria. we've never let them forget that they are a second class of citizens at best.

they also choose to overlook all the new policies that went into place as soon as freedom and some civil rights were granted, that kept black people in their place...

so for all that’s changed in the united states, a lot of things have stayed the same

me: So then… Is everyone still just as racist, but because they call it all something different now they dont think they are?

S: well… kinda? not sure i’d go that far.

but we definitely want to believe we’ve gone a lot further than we actually have.

plenty of white people i think, they're just ignorant to these facts. but there's a very large danger in not knowing here: in their state of total unawareness of all this, they end up believing some of the racist bullshit that flies through the air in america. we all breathe it in and none of us are immune, you have to surgically remove that stuff from your thinking…

but a lot of these are the same people who you can convince to buy 3 times as much food as they need because it’s “such a good deal”

so don’t hold your breath waiting for everyone to catch up :-)

me: So…. Wow. Hmm. So what was destroyed, anyway?

S: oh man!… tell you what, just google Tulsa 1921 and read some of that, i’ll wait

me: OK hang on

S: okay you’ve been gone a minute so i’m gonna hit the bathroom, please let me know if you died of an aneurysm yet

me: Jesus. Christ.

S: oh good, you pulled through!

me: They used airplanes! WTF

This… This was like a war crime with no war

S: yep. another one of those things they don’t teach you in school

like Juneteenth, which i never heard of til well past the years of my formal education

me: Hang on, googling again...

S: k

me: Oh i see.

Yeah youd think that would be a thing to come up in school?

S: yeah except white people didn’t do that, so it wasn’t really history i guess *shrug*

me: Amazing how this works, that poor white people arent mad at the people who have all their money, who then go around spending it on stupid shit...

S: ...in part because they all hope to achieve that level of so-called success and be free to do the same...

me: So they get mad at other people who are as poor or poorer than themselves, especially if they aren’t white… instead of the obscene amounts of money being hoarded by families for generations

S: “trust me! keeping other people in their place is the BEST part of being wealthy and powerful! it’s not every day you get to feel so superior to your otherwise fellow man!”

me: Omg youre right! They tom sawyered us!

S: guess that book was relevant here after all :-D

me: So… Is this why people get so defensive about our society being a meritocracy?

S: yeah, at least a part of why. mostly because it is not one at all, so the successful have to keep us convinced that they earned all they have. and this is a big part of that deception.

me: Sure, but what i didnt get was, why do people who arent successful still think like that

And i just realized that maybe they get distracted trying to ensure their own position in life?

S: oh yes, that. this world will have you pitying up - empathizing the wealthy, powerful and famous - while punching down on the defenseless

me: But they think theyre just one lucky break away from being successful. Which is utterly ridiculous right? But…

Is it just because theyre white? Is that what allows them to think that?

S: well here’s the thing: they want to believe in the meritocracy, even if they aren’t succeeding, because belief in our being a meritocracy is justification for modern white supremacy.

most people don’t want to be called a racist, so they won’t go marching up and down the street about it. they just let the market speak for itself.

if a handful do well, that still makes sense to their unspoken beliefs, but if too many are it must be unearned in some way, like it was “just affirmative action” (which by the way does not work the way most people think)

me: Hmmmmmm…..

So wait, is this why there are people receiving benefits from the government, and complaining about entitlements at the same time?

S: YES, absolutely

people who don’t make use of any of that, they can just complain that the money could go to almost any other thing, and they would consider it better spent, than to “prop up” people who are obviously just lazy by virtue of their race or ethnicity

but as for the people who depend on them, the major fear there is that those services are for americans. you know, REAL americans?

and they assume the reason their systems of support are inadequate because they are spread around way too thin, and that undeserving people are taking what they see to be rightfully theirs.

anyway, sorry to cut and run but i have to open again tomorrow...

me: No worries. But thank you, i love these little talks of ours

Very enlightening <3!

S: haha thanks, man. in reality i am a total buzzkill who will ruin your party

but if you just want to chat one on one, especially with a filter…

me: I know how it is. Sometimes you want to be alone, but you also dont?

S: yeah that’s me every day hahaha

me: The internet is great for that.

…

Yeah same tbh…

It was in honor of this conversation that today i colored in one of my sketches from the first week here, from one of my many meanderings down along the riverwalk since it seemed a suitable fit:

So yeah, ive been rather upset as of late. Both at the implications of all this, and mad at myself for having been tricked into it too cuz ive always been so good at using mental scalpels to remove the wrong sort of thoughts from my mind. And im mad that more people arent mad about this situation, or that so many would seemingly rather go out of their way to hide it from everyone in the hopes of just moving on or something.

And how childish is that? To think that the way forward after doing wrong only includes stopping the most obvious aspects of your wrongdoing while testing the waters to see what all you can yet still get away with, and all along the way refusing to really apologize or acknowledge any of the actions for which youre accountable… It has me wondering at the correlation between the people who try to tell you that slavery was a long time ago, and the people who constantly ask what the fuck the founding fathers would think of this or that thing happening today… Bet theres just a ton of overlap in that Venn diagram.

At some point in the past however many days since i had that conversation with Slingo, i got one of my favorite poems stuck in my head and i had to look it up. It was Mending Wall by robert frost, tho i couldnt remember the title correctly and had to search for the line i can recall verbatim.

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

So i was reading this for the first time in a long time kinda and wondering to what extent it might apply to all of my current thoughts. But just as i was getting to the end i came to the lines,

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

And now a part of me wants to believe everyone online that he meant to imply a caveman from prehistory, but another part really cant be too sure, and has no reason to give it the benefit of the doubt as “savage” is such a loaded term, and this was published in 1914. That was so long before the blanket on the sham behind the semblance of sameness was lifted even a little bit, the thin veneer of perceived normalcy was still entirely intact, and redefining of the idea of default to exclude only the least alike people among us was still underway...

I dont feel like i can trust much of anything any more. And more than that, ive never been so disgusted at this country, its declarations of christian values or deism of any kind, that somehow simultaneously entertains some of the slimiest of notions in their hearts. That their faith of all things has been used to justify the inhuman treatment of others thru the whole of our history is a thing i can hardly even wrap my head around just now, let alone stop from bothering me in the immediate >:(

Anyway, more soon i suppose. But for now i have a bit of brain surgery to attend to.

-remi

vested, interest <3!

Up really early again today. Up so early my head hurts still. Was even all dressed and ready with hours to spare... For some reason it feels so much worse to get up early when you have to vs waking up at that time of your own volition.

You see yesterday i heard from Shawn again, his bosses were interested in meeting with me after getting my resume from him. What he didnt know was that the other night i started feeling unwell and yesterday was pretty much spent entirely on the couch trying not to get sick… I tend to be very lucky in this regard, i get that feeling of a cold coming on for a day or so, then another day give or take of it getting out of my system, but i never seem to land inside sick country so much as have a stop over in their airport. I mean, it definitely has happened to me, actual sickness - just tends to be very rare for me.

So im really hoping this turns out to be the case for me again, but anyway thats why i couldnt put together a post for you all yesterday - it was enough of a battle just to string more than two words together out loud in real time for anyone. At first when i awoke i felt better but then of course i had to exert myself, which is to say i left the couch and the building and went walking into the world in an attempt to procure some future survival despite feeling like death warmed over today.

And it was why i got up so early this morning - not because i had set my alarm good and early just out of some go get em grit. I had done that, but two hours before it was scheduled i woke up sniffling just enough to make it tricky to breath, and the gradually depleting oxygen level in my body told me to get the hell up, somethings wrong.

So i sat up and struggled to breathe, as you do, but after awhile i got the hang of it again, and managed to drag myself to the kitchen to make coffee that i needed more than i wanted, then i flopped back into pretty much the same position on the couch. I heard the brewing come to its dramatic conclusion from across the house, as their coffeemaker here is old and extra noisy, but it mustve taken half an hour for me to get up and get some. And by then it was tasting a little bit burnt, making me want it less while still need it all the same. I powered thru, knowing it would be a long day of doing just that, and this was merely the first of my obstacles.

Oh and of course im in tremendous pain, both then and right now, because as much as i want to theres little to no point in trying to get high, as it kinda requires my sinuses for that process. But those very cavities, the kind of which you actually want in your head, are currently quite a bit more than preoccupied. So it was just me and my otc pain relievers. I grabbed some new meds for this specific illness, but not til i was on my way back to the house, and i only just took them a little while ago since i was so light headed already i just fucking forgot for two hours after that i even had them >:(

I spent my morning scrolling thru the feeds and reading, but absorbing so little of it that i had to ask myself why i was bothering. I sipped my coffee, stood up, and immediately sat back down as the blood rushed to my head. Gave it a few minutes and tried again, slowly this time, and had success at last, so i pulled out my only suit, only one i brought with me anyway, from flat at the bottom of my bigger bag, and laid it out in front of me piece by piece. This suit was a gift that i have never worn yet, it just looked the nicest of all my dress clothes, and so it seemed like the practical thing to bring along since space was an issue. So excuse me if i had also never yet noticed that the suit has a sortof a vest sewn into the coat, as well as a whole extra, separate vest that you can wear underneath that!

Who the hell would be interested in wearing a double vested suit? Wtf why not just include a matching cummerbund and straightjacket while you're at it?

And even tho the equinox is behind us now it is somehow warmer this week than the last one was, making the extra layer extra unnecessary part of my equation.

Anyway i sat still awhile and willed myself to live through the rest of the day, finishing my coffee, reading a little bit more and actually retaining stuff. I spent some time sketching but did nothing substantial, proudly disinterested in accomplishments just yet. I sent messages to both Slingo and Rebekah both about the day ahead of me, knowing it was unlikely that either one would get back to me right away. I saw everyone off as they left, or rather i was a witness to their leaving the premises, as the whole household has decided to avoid me like whatever plague i picked up until they see me get any better. I drank more coffee, showered, made more coffee. Then i got dressed and headed out to meet my destiny.

My meeting or interview maybe? Still not sure somehow. Anyway it was at noon today, or it was scheduled for that time, and i showed up ten minutes early to wait an extra half an hour. Thats how you play the game i guess, if you have no money to offer and in fact are asking for money instead you need to invest in terms of time. Wasting away while waiting for the worker bees to come wonder what wax you have with them...

I sat there waiting in the lobby and tried not to think of this as my only shot, or how trying to get past the gate guards for any good opportunity was an almost outrageous possibility and that the only way to get ahead was for someone to take an active interest in your application or else you are another name in the avalanche, undoubtedly destined for the dust bin… Trying not to think i should have gone with Chad after all and endured his insufferability in favor of knowing a person of interest in a Who You Know world ;-(

But finally they came and got me. I talked to two older guys, both very excited and excitable. It was nice to see passionate people doing what they love, especially if theyre thinking of taking me on as a member of that team. Might be nice to work for a company that values employees as the backbone of their entire enterprise for once. The whole thing felt like it was over in no time, ten minutes tops, but when i checked my phone on my way out of the building a whole hour had passed… Hopefully that was a good sign that we meshed well and i fit the company culture of whatever the fuck they call it here. I think it went well, but then i have thought that a lot of interviews have gone well for all sorts of jorbs that never amounted to much. So.

Heres hoping tho.

Especially since the other night the guys were saying they needed to know now if i was going to take that room, so they didnt have to look for anyone else, and i said “hell yeah absolutely!” but in such a slurry drawl that only the lord god himself knows it was really something more of a hail mary hallelujah. I mean i can afford to take the place for a couple of months at least, maybe as many as several if i really stretch out my savings, but i would rather not run out of money right after that and then leave these guys in the lurch, since i like these people for the most part.

So its not like my name is on the lease and theres no particular rights or powers vested in me for my residency here, but i move into the imminently empty room on monday morning now...

I was up thru all hours that night, so stressed about my future at that point, looking for listings online to apply to as well as resources for the suddenly as well as the long term homeless, just in case. I made coffee at midnight knowing it was no use trying to sleep, trying to really get my ass in gear even tho it was literally the middle of the night and no one was gonna be updating their job boards. I think sometime around maybe 3 or 4am i started feeling really lightheaded and weak, then getting a headache in under an hour, and finally having to lie the fuck down.

The next day, yesterday, i woke up feeling ill. So i did this to myself, tho Slingo would say that capitalism has done it to me, and right now at least i prefer that viewpoint. It feels unfair to lay that all at my feet, when all i want is to fucking live…

Damn if i dont swear a lot more now, since starting this trip. It even comes out in my writing more now, interestingly as i gain greater control of my typing on a phone, i also lose a lot of power in regards to what i let slip out. Obviously i can always edit still, but… Who fucking cares?

Speaking of Slingo tho he responded finally to my message from this morning:

S: hey fasollati

so i read your last post and, well, dunno how to break this to you but....

rich people tend to prefer the status quo ;-)

me: Lol what?

And what the hell did you just call me, you barstad?

S: it’s a type of…

dammit hold on a sec…….

oh i see, i spelled it wrong. it’s fazzoletti.

that’s what you are.

me: Haha okay well thats a new one at least

Gonna just interject quickly here since i feel like i should explain. You see all thru my childhood i got picked on because of my last name. I was already small and enjoyed reading. - why did the Lord see fit to add to my already heavy cross? You have no idea.

It is a ridiculous name and not one to burden my readers with, but i will tell you that the name comes from a once very important city in Italy, now mostly known for only one thing, and that my closest friends used to tease me by calling me increasingly absurd, incorrect Italian foods and dishes, further and further away from anything even close to my name, rather than address me by my actual moniker… So anyway thats the deal with that.

S: also: gimme a break! i just woke up again, had to open this morning after closing last night, so i took a nap when i got home.

me: Oh wow, damn…

S: anyway so that sucks, about your family i mean

i’m guessing that’s not your immediate family at all?

me: Yeah, it does.

And no, not really. Aunts and uncles.

My whole immediate family has all but caved in completely, and is in much the same state as the house i grew up in now.

Very literary, i know...

S: quite a pro-Poe even :-P

me: Oh wow that was really bad haha

Worse than anything i would say anyway

Also, no fair i cant italicize

S: and the drunkle?

me: Oh, he actually has been working his way down the ladder ever since he got anywhere

And that was a long time ago so

He may be real close by now. Who knows?

S: everyone needs to have a goal, i suppose…

hey it’s your fault for being on a smart phone, man

i don’t make the rules here

anyway i bet there is some way to do that on whatever phone you have

…but then again, it may not work in every app. not sure really, i only use mine as needed.

so you think the interview went well today, or what?

me: Yeah, i think they liked me. Hard to tell tho! They might just be super nice people.

S: or polite as fuck, yeah

me: Ugh. Jorbs.

S: but you think maybe it’s a jorb you could be happy with tho?

at least for a little while?

me: Yeah i think so

But hey let me ask you…

Do you think you can ever really throw yourself into a thing?

Like… Doesnt it just seem so hard to give yourself over to a place of employment, knowing how easily they can cast you aside? How disposable you are?

I dunno, i just dont want to spend so much time doing something, i become that, and cant live with who i end up being, you know?

S: oh my friend… yes, i very much know what you mean

more than i will probably ever tell you

online anyway :-)

me: How mysterious!

Well i guess im gonna have to make a trip the rest of the way out west at some point anyway...

S: but to answer your question, i think what you do in the world is even more important as what you think, what you love or what you say you believe in

i mean, thomas jefferson may have even believed that all men are created equal, but the fact of the matter is that he calculated a reliable four percent profit in interest annually for monticello, in the form of chattel slavery, the de facto ownership of the children of slaves. so for anything he may have ever believed, or whatever he might have said against people as property, his mind was pretty easily changed after that.

me: I… Did not know this…

S: yeah well it’s not in society’s best interest for us to know things like that

so that’s not what they put their money into in terms of educating kids

me: Also: you didnt italicize the latin

S: my apologies! de facto

He ditched me shortly after that, saying he wanted to have something to show for having been alive today other than going back to work. I couldnt fault him for that.

So for the rest of the day i ended up flopped back onto the couch in more or less the same place and position as before i left. At some point i found the sketch i was working on last, of the extra vest in question, still hanging on the open door, but then filled it in with some colors that couldve piqued my interest in the garment a little more. I even considered finishing the whole drawing, walls and all, but im simply just not capable of staying invested in much of anything right now so:

The rest of the suit has been sprawled out along the back of the sofa with callous and rebellious disregard. I saw some folk today while on my way to the interview who fully looked the part of the well heeled well dressed owners of the world, people in nice suits who run everything and are more than happy keeping everything the way things are. As nice as all that must be, to be, i dont think all thats for me really, because i know too well how little you must leave for everybody else to ensure you have that much for you and your interests </3

Gosh it got late. Took the cold meds and the not-aspirin whatever it was i bought, but have also been drinking coffee all day just to keep me going, and i forgot again that the pain relievers are caffeinated too… And having successfully navigated my way to another neighborhood, entirely new to me i might add, and managed to make it thru my meeting without a catastrophe today as well mixed in with the maladies and remedies, ive been stuck in a sort of stupor ever since. It is nothing less than amazing that i managed to plug this phone in.

Good thing i did tho since just now i got interrupted from this app by a text from Rebekah, interestingly enough, at a moment i was thinking about them. I was also still considering the ways you give yourself to what you love, and how what you truly love gets your time, so i decided to ask them about it too. Let me just share her thoughts on this before i quit for the night:

R: Hmm, interesting

Yeah that’s kind of true, in some ways you are or become what you love

But it’s not like you can only have one thing at the top of your list. Lists can go sideways too, or else there would be no spreadsheets haha

You can definitely prioritize more than one thing at a time, for sure. I mean, as a poly person i have to believe that.

And if you don’t believe it, then you also have to believe a mother can only really love one of her kids, or either her kid or her spouse...

So yeah, you can have more than one number one, it can be a whole row

But all that said, if you let your list get wider than it is long, you may be inverting some stuff somewhere...

Like, no matter how great a mother you are, at some point, even if that point isn’t til a hundred kids, but somewhere down the line, it breaks down, and you can no longer keep up.

As a poly person, i have also seen people try to take on more than they can chew, just because they were free to choose, you know?

I think the trick is to make the people you love into priority number one itself and the rest follows from there... You just kinda become that person, the one who loves, as opposed to a person who climbed a mountain or conquered an industry or whatever other people do...

That make any sense?

me: That makes all the sense in the world, just like you

You make so much sense to me

R: Awww same <3!

All right, i have plenty of sleeping and breathing to catch up on, so that will have to do for now.

-remi

under, standing :-(

Woke up feeling a little depressed for some reason today. I know, i know, things are starting to go my way for once. Or at least it looks that way.

I think the problem here is that i gave myself a pass to not worry about it yesterday because the news was relatively good. But only so good, and nothing definitive, so all my extra optimism was spent enjoying yesterday.

But i cant help but recognize the fact that the blues is cathartic, and maybe if i had let myself go thru with it and felt what ive been feeling, there wouldnt be all this residual emotion lingering left. Now the morning is disappearing quickly, morphing into full on daytime, and meanwhile i havent heard a thing further regarding the potential job here in town… So now im just starting to panic. What if this doesnt actually work out? What will i do then?

Also at one point last night i think i made things weird when i more or less outed myself as a feminist to Kevin, which i guess ive become. I hadnt really labeled myself as such and i still am rather loathe to, and not just because of Rebekah urging me against doing so. I didnt even go so far as to call myself that to him, i was just talking about hierarchies in life after he was complaining about his boss and then compared this to traditional gender roles, and how if you want to treat your wife like an employee you should at least pay her...

Anyway we stopped talking for the night pretty quick after all that and since i woke up way early today ended up seeing everyone before they went out, and he Kevin was friendly enough but still... I dunno. Put off? Hesitant? Reserved? He wasnt quite himself, or the version of him he has thus far presented to me.

So that kinda bummed me out a bit right off the bat, but it certainly doesnt help that i woke up bright and early to greet the day today, like six or seven this morning, and still have nothing new to show for it… I couldve slept til noon today and had the same result…

Well thats not completely true i guess. For once it was finally dry enough to have more than one cigarette on the back deck without standing under the overhang, so i brought my pack outside and sat facing the jank-ass slider door just because i could, then ended up drawing it since i had my sketch pad out and was already staring in that direction.

Not pictured: the window i had to climb thru that one night, which is to the right slightly from there and well out of frame.

What pulled me out of my funk for at least the rest of the morning was that i got to chat with Rebekah again.

me: Hey! You signed into chat :-D

R: haha hey

yeah i did

me: That makes me happy

I can assume you are some place safe and comfortable

R: aww yeah i am

found out a friend from high school lives in dallas

but i got a weird vibe from the driver, so i had to ditch him in shreveport haha

and just to be sure i started traversing less popular routes

so i was out camping for a couple of days before anyone picked me up

then i got here,

and it was a few days of sleeping in random places before i found out about my friend!

so we met up last night and i am sleeping on his couch for a few days

me: Wow, what a life you lead!

I just dont understand how you can do it…

R: yeah it’s not for everybody, i know

me: Dont you ever worry at all?

I mean i want you to be happy and live your life to the fullest, whatever that may mean for you

But i also worry about you, the way you live

Like, if you got hurt badly there would be no way to know about it

Something terrible could happen to you and no one could do anything

Maybe even never find out….

R: you’re super sweet, kid

and i love you for it

<3!

but technically something could always happen to us

and while it is very nice to be able to keep tabs on folk so that you can always locate them,

and be forever assured they must be okay or you would have heard,

that’s not the life for me, man

it sounds lovely for the owner, but horrible for the cat who actually Liked it outside…

because all those perfectly rational, reasonable requests,

are often the auspices under which abuse begins as well

like, you definitely have a right to know where your family is, how they're doing, i just…

it makes sense that people want that, need that, i get it really

but every time i agreed in real life to these totally normal requests, it just got turned against me

and turned into a controlling situation real fast

even from people who really ought to know better

so…

just not for me. you know?

me: Wow ummm….

You… Know a lot about this, sounds like

R: ok so without really delving into detail,

let me just say that ive noticed that surviving abuse, tends to create an exceptionalist narrative.

one in which we generally feel that no one can really grasp the full extent of what we’ve been thru

and while true, it’s also the beginning of the mindset that allows abusive behavior to come out

thru this belief that your story is so exceptional that it justifies anything you do, and that the rules don’t apply to you

but it all starts with silencing anyone who dares to question your behavior :-x

and not only does it justify the behavior of abusers, but also their victims

who put up with a lot more

out of a mistaken belief that our past has made us better prepared to handle “tough situations”

when really we’ve just normalized terrible scenarios, in part to cope with what we grew up with….

anyway this is something that i have to watch out for in myself so

me: Hmmmmm…

R: …?

me: Well, if that’s all true, then….

What does that say about a country that believes in its own exceptionalism?

Is there no limit to what they will excuse themselves for doing?

I mean, not to godwin myself here but...

Isnt that part of how the nazis gained power in germany? By appealing to the countrys sense of unique specialness?

R: hmmmmmmmm indeed

never really thought about it like that, but…

yeah prob

anyway, this is something i live with, and have to be wary of, like i said

tho my natural setting is to do no harm, for i know all too well what it feels like to receive

but i absolutely do have that exceptionalist thinking,

that says if i survived all that, i can survive almost anything.

only i don’t use it to allow others to put me thru the ringer when they can’t handle their own emotions

not anymore, anyway…

now i just refuse to be trapped.

and if i have to sleep in a dumpster to stay warm, just to ensure i owe no one

to make sure i have to endure no one’s abuse

word or deed

ever again

then

i can survive anything.

me: Whoa :-o

You are one badass lady, my friend

R: oh that reminds me

i am an enby now

me: enby?

R: enby = NB = non-binary

officially not identifying as a man or a woman

neither dude nor lady

and also i would prefer they/them to she/her now please and thank you

me: Oh i see. Sure thing!

Sorry about that!

I didnt know...

R: no need to be sorry!

no, you didn’t know yet

i have been trying to sort this out for awhile now

and only came to some solid conclusions recently, especially a lot since i left

lol it's a process

my whole life everybody had me fixated on my being too boyish or not feminine enough

so i have always wondered if i weren't supposed to be a boy

but what i was feeling wasn't like some of my friends, who knew they were trans, that they wanted to transition, were feeling

lost in all that was the fact i don't feel like a boy either

i don't know what to call it, but neither boy or girl does it for me

so yeah, it's okay b/c you didn't know

that's why i’m telling you now ;-)

me: So is it still okay if i find you beautiful and sexy?

R: lmao yeah, sexy is better tho lol

not that I mind beautiful really

but when I tried telling mom about any of this gender stuff she always used to tell me “but you're so beautiful! why wouldn't you be a girl?”

not always that word but

often enough it sounds like it's coded as a girl-word, you know?

me: Thats fair

So what does that make me anyway?

R: pardon?

me: I dunno, sexuality-wise

If you arent a girl i mean

But im still into you and all

R: oh! I get you

well, hmm

i mean technically i don't have a word for what i am, specifically

so I guess there is no specific word for being attracted to me…

me: Rebekahsexual?

R: lol sure

at least that works for now

til i choose a gender neutral name

me: Oh? Is that something you plan to do too?

R: yeah, have a few thoughts but not name dropping just yet lol

none of them have felt like “me” so far

and i want this to be authentic, so i refuse to rush it

like I said, it's a process :-P

After talking with her and thinking about the... I dunno what to call it. Incident? No thats way too big... My moment with Kevin last night and lack of one this morning, i guess you could say. But ive been pretty confused ever since.

I mean i recognize that she... Sorry, that THEY make it a lot easier for me, letting me ask them a ton of questions and softballing the answers to me. But still it seems like a lot of the research is out there, and while i was overwhelmed by it at first if i had given it a little longer i might not have been. So what i dont get now is what exactly other guys dont get about this? Why do so many feel like feminism is some kind of an attack on their very person when it is in reality an attempt to, among other things, save women from being attacked?

Maybe thats just how it is with people tho. Liek how being on the bottom rungs of society, you often get a better view of how things really function than if you are at the top and standing over everyone - you see all the mechanism at work under the surface of things, because they run thru the neighborhoods you end up living in. You cant help but see all the doors that slam shut in your face and all the paths you cant gain entry into.

But despite my perilous situation, it remains perfectly obvious that i am not at the end of the ladder at all. I dont come from money or anything like that but there are members of my family tree that have done way way better than average for themselves, even if they only married into it in some cases. My particular branch of the family tree, aside from being largely deceased, mostly took more purist academic or artistic paths thru life and so i personally didnt end up with a lot to show for it.

And theres some sympathy on those other sides of the family, and even a lot of lip service about love from them, i really truly could never take their money.

For one thing, one of them is the Drunkle ive mentioned. All the rest of them are sympathizers of his. Somehow they have managed to maintain ignorance of the extent of his egregiousness, or else theyve decided it doesnt matter, no matter what he has done or who he hurts. Ostensibly this is in the name of family, but then why doesnt it matter when it hurts another member? How can they turn a blind eye to that?

They give their sympathies, too, to my various losses - a very compassionate bunch of christian folk, these - but they find my insistence on “making scenes” over this very rude. They tell me i need to be a more forgiving sort of person.

So i really cant take their money. Doubtful that if i tried they would try to make me do anything like formally recant my past statements, but they would certainly thereafter have leverage on me if i should continue making them. I would have to be a lot less impolite.

Fuck it tho that bridge is probably good and burned anyway :-(

-Remi

turn, around :-P

OK so even i have to admit that things are looking up right now...

For one thing, that dude whose name in Shawn, who i met here at the house on thursday night, got back to me about my resume… Havent been offered an interview just yet or anything but he was asked someone at the house for my number, then texted me to ask about my availability? I mean he could have just as easily replied to the email i sent him in the first place, the one with my resume attached, instead of going some roundabout way to send a message that ultimately was received on the same device regardless.

Not that it matters - if anything, i take it as a good sign. Either he wanted to make sure to get in touch with me right away, or have all my contact info, or even if they were just super excited to meet me and maybe join the team, this was good news in and of itself. I basically replied to him with “you tell me when and where and i will make myself available”.

Another nice turn of events was being told that the room in question is absolutely up for taking, around a week or so from now it turns out. Kinda quiet dude named Michael is taking a spot in yet another house, i think maybe the one we all went to saturday night? Not sure really. He is actually an alright guy for the most part, so chill he barely ever says anything, and up until this weekend we had barely exchanged words at all. He said one or two snarky things into the air as a group over the last two weeks and i kinda thought he thought he was above us all, aloof and detached. But now i think maybe he is just kinda shy?

Not only is it too bad that he is leaving just as im getting to know him, but my previous judgment of him has me turning that very same lens back around on myself - am i too aloof, too? That is, does my hesitance to throw myself out there at and into the world of people come across as a weird kind of “better than” everyone else?

Whenever i share these thoughts with anyone i get told not to worry so much about what other people think… Thats not the issue here. What they are getting at is innocuous things like “do other people like me?” Yeah, sure, word. But what i am getting at, and no one seems ready to acknowledge when i do so aloud, is much more about our responsibility to each other. If i am asking, “did i drink so much last night i started calling everyone an idiot, and then move on to much more hurtful things?” your answer cant just be “just gotta live your life, man”.

These are two separate issues - one is “omg does anybody like me?” and the other is “hey wait, am i an objectively bad person, even if only under certain conditions?” and only one of them is in need of serious thought and immediate answer. And i hate to be this guy but tbh it is mostly only other guys who answer this way, and while you can ask anyone else too there is something very disquieting about not being able to get a sense of consensus from my gender. It all makes me wonder if i havent been misclassified, or if instead masculinity isnt just this mystifying for want of further research into itself?

If you want to live up to even your own standards, you gotta turn that critical lens you view the world with, back around on yourself :-)

I also went for a good long walk again today, because aside from going out to get smokes and that one awful interview i had on friday, ive barely left the house in a week! Part of it definitely is being preoccupied with ensuring my continued survival, and one of the oddities of our modern era is that much of that hunting is done better in the home… You can go out all you want and walk into every business you find to ask if theyre hiring, but in most cases you get bumrushed right back out the door. Maybe they give you an application and let you fill it out, then tell you theyll let you know if anything becomes available, but… Truth is, there are way more jorbs than there are people now, and ever fewer careers, so no - they probably dont need you, and nah, theyre unlikely to call you back, unless they really want to get rid of someone. And even in the cases where you know they are hiring and you have filled out all the requisite steps to put your name in for it, if you dare to show up unannounced to check in on the process, you may have just disqualified yourself! And at the very least, they will still turn you right around and send you on your way like you were asking for spare change.

So i went out on a walk because there werent a lot of promising leads online to apply to, so i was getting discouraged anyway, but then i heard back from Shawn and finally felt like i had enough to show for the day and even the past week, and so had stressed enough about all this for the time being. Not that i had even decided that right away tho, initially my walk was just to go get cigarettes again. Been smoking about a pack a day lately, which is a lot for me tbh tho not at all unheard of, and normally i would be way more efficient and just grab multiple packs at once… But somewhat subconsciously ive been making myself buy just one at a time because it forces me to leave the building at least once a day, and that was all i thought i was doing when i put on shoes at noon.

And i had just started walking when i got the text, and in retrospect it was great he went to all that trouble too because ive been leaving my cell data off on my phone, trying to minimize any expenses, really on free wifi instead as much as possible. So if he had emailed me i wouldnt have known til i got back, and i might not have been inspired to go for such a long walk without it already being somewhat underway when i got the news. Theres a chance i guess that i mightve been so thrilled and inspired that i would have anyway, but this felt like a kind of destiny.

The walk itself was great because the weather was comfortably imperfect, meaning a whole lot of folk opted out of wandering around, meaning there was that much more space for me to do so. I got a coffee just because i was out, a little less afraid to lose my liquid capital. I felt freer than at any point in the recent past, since before getting here, since before leaving the state that was the only one i had ever called home. For all the relief i was feeling i couldnt help but notice tho how much the pressure to live at all is different from the stress of thriving, and how when existence itself is on the line you become preoccupied with your own survival to the extent that you cant even always choose on behalf of your own best interest. But maybe for once, after seeing so many of my friends my age really going places, maybe this time around it can finally be my turn to be happy :-D

I walked so long and far that i got a little lost for awhile, but the day was so nice it didn’t matter to me, and i just let myself get more turned around than that before i even started trying to get a grasp on where i was and how to get to the house again. Even all summer in the sublet i hadnt explored the town as deeply as i explored today.

But let me not get ahead of myself here. Nothing worse than letting yourself have faith in the future you want only to see it never manifest itself. For example in my walking i was so happy that i reached out to Rebekah again, just to try to tease her into telling me what was up, what her surprise was already.

Tbh im really hoping to hear back that shes turning whatever car around and coming back this way again, then letting myself dream of a day in the not too distant future where i have some walls in which to hide behind at last, a room of my own that i would instantly share...

I meandered like i do so long that eventually i found out where i was, completely by mistake - i mean i wasnt even really ready to not be lost yet when i found myself. This is when i grabbed a drink i think, and sat down again in one of the places i had once waited for her to arrive. It felt like a good omen, in a superstitious sense, like this would herald her next response since i had somehow gotten mojo flowing again. For awhile i just watched the crowd, just like i did then, and for a bit it didnt occur to me that i was not going to see her face among them.

Sure enough tho i was sitting there with coffee only long enough to smoke two cigarettes before i got a short flurry of texts from her:

R: Well i was actually trying not to spoil it for you…

But yeah, i might be swinging back in your direction!

Nothing is confirmed but

I should know by tonight if I have a ride heading that way.

It’s complicated, as always.

But just know that I jumped at the chance to see you again <3!

She ceased communications just as abruptly, but my heart was singing with this new info and so i didnt care too much. If things go even close to perfectly from here i could end up with plenty of time to communicate with her, in several different tongues and tones.

Actually i just remembered that i sat down first and started searching for places nearby to get coffee, only to discover to my vague embarrassment that the first listing was a place that was barely across the street from where i was sitting but with my back turned to it. If i had just looked around a little or turned a bit to see behind me i wouldnt have even needed the help of technology...

Slingo may be right about the singularity already having hit us.

He got in touch with me on my walk too, which is part of the reason i sat down in the first place - his replies were coming too fast for me to keep taking my phone out of my pocket over and over, let alone while smoking or drinking coffee. So it took a little bit for me to achieve all three in a nice spot near the fountain, yet not so near as to get drenched.

S: hey man!

great news about the potential new gig!

me: Thanks dude!

Yeah really excited.

How about you? How’s your day going?

S: not bad. off again today so i’ve just been reading again

so hey, you know how they say it’s just a matter of a few bad apples here and there?

the problem with that, aside from being dismissive, is that it also overlooks the fact that all it takes is a few bad ones to cause the rest to turn, too

the point of the phrase isn’t that bad apples are unavoidable, it’s that you have to get rid of them or they all go bad

ugh just learn what a goddamn adage means before you go throwing it around >:(

let alone in print dammit

anyway. we overlooked it so long, and now it’s all around us, our whole world has been spoiled on some level

the oceans are filled with untold hundreds of gallons of oil we’ve spilled accidentally

not to mention the nuclear waste and runoff from Japan… they never fucking “solved” that by the way, because by the time we heard about that disaster five years ago by then the damage was good and done, it was part of the ecosystem and still is.

and it doesn’t stop there!

not only is it horrible to live near oil refineries or any food production plant, we also have reason to believe that living too close to power lines can be very bad for you in general and even worse if you’re still a child

there’s lead in the tap water, and it’s probably a problem in almost any major city

the bees are still dying and we don’t know for sure fully why! our whole existence is on the line, while the powers that be focus on maintaining control for themselves, keeping the few unruined patches of the earth for themselves while the environment where everybody actually lives, goes bad and gets worse.

and all this rot that surrounds us is the reason for riot, rebellion and revolt. it’s more than enough justification for retaking power away from those who would gladly kill us all.

me: Well if it is the mature and responsible thing, to take keys from a drunk who insists on driving, then...

S: YES, exactly

okay i need to grab something to eat

may be back later? i dunno, time will tell

but hey seriously, congrats about the lead on the job, really hope it works out for you man

Nice that even when the guy is on a tear about something capitalism does wrong, he still stops to congratulate me on my successful capitalism - a true friend!

Speaking of which, he actually stopped by tonight briefly for unrelated reasons, but i finally got a chance to ask Shawn why he had asked for my number instead of just emailing me. He told me he had tried to call and text my number but it said it wasnt in service, so he figured it must be an old one, and he wanted to have the new one to give the boss… Thats when it occurred to me that my number had changed when i got this phone, and while i had made a huge fuss over using this phone to fix the address into the fake - for now at least - one here in town, i had utterly overlooked the new number! No wonder no one was calling me. Well, rather theres no way of knowing how many mightve tried this week :-o

FML. My whole life, fuck the whole fucking thing.

So thats a thing to fix first thing in the morning. Probably not a lot i can do about any of the other places i applied to but i can at least alter that before i send any more out. And thank god he was so legitimately into getting me looked at that he went the distance with it.

Like i said last time, mostly im just lucky as all hell, and maybe my it has yet to run out…

This time around everyone else was subdued while i was ready to go all night, and it was my turn to grab beer so i got way more than was ultimately necessary. Everyone in their nooks or rooms, slowly sipping their single drink for the evening, so i sat by myself outside and was the sole observer to the sun-painted sky saturated in bright pink before it settled into purplish night.

Even if for once it was everyone elses turn to be antisocial when i wanted to hang out, i was still in too good a mood to be bothered by it. Feeling accomplished already, i let myself spend a little while drawing and, even more importantly, enjoying it. Actually i did a number of drawings and started coloring a few of them in, but for now here is the one that i got finished enough for public consumption:

Obviously it was included here because of Slingos comments above but also, funny enough, there was a half eaten apple sitting out from sometime before and i had never done a still life so...

Oh and i played guitar for an hour today - got back to the house and i still refused to do any damn thing to distract from my happiness. So rather than look up jorbs or even risk reading anything online that might mess up my mood, i just sat down with it, my only guitar left, for the first time since i sold the others. I think every time i look at it i also start thinking of the ones i also used to have, that would stand or lay beside this one in some semblance of intentional display… Whereas now he just looks a little lonely, stacked against the rest of my stuff in a safe, sturdy incline. Been too busy and too depressed really to do anything but move it along with all my other belongings.

But today i plucked it out from under the small pile of sweatshirts waving like windless flags off of my mountain of mostly clothing inside a series of bags. Like i said, i havent been playing so much, and today i didnt really play anything in particular. I kept trying to think of a song or some something to start and finish, but instead i sorta lazily drifted off while stretching my hands, and so ended up finger picking several dozen variations of a blues turnaround. In case you arent so familiar with the term, i mean that part at the end of each verse where the guitar brings you back to the next one. If anyone had been here at the time i bet it would sound obnoxious, kind of like if you went up to a piano and played the, “shave and a haircut” over and over but never got to the “two bits” part ;-) thats just the thing tho, if youre a musician and trying to get better you have to do that with the tricky bits, practice makes perfect after all.

After about an hour of fretting literally in lieu of existentially for once i got to thinking i latched on to the pattern i did for a reason, and it occurred to me that the happiest and most hopeful part of any blues song is that space between the verses and chorus, where the song may continue its beautiful sorrow, or perhaps come to some sort of conclusion that allows the spell to release its hold over you. So aside from the exercise i got out of it there was an element at least that was so determined to remain at peace and believe things can turn around from here that i refrained from going into a chorus.

Im refusing to have the blues right now, basically. Even a dose of hard reality from my most conscious of friends cannot and will not bring me down now.

Cuz things are actually looking up now.

And because just a little while ago i heard back from Rebekah, again:

R: Hey again Cowboy

me: Hello again my beautiful friend

Did i tell you about how one of the guys who hangs out with these guys might be able to get me a job?

R: What? No!

Does that mean you’ll be able to keep the place???

me: Well the room is very much open and i have first crack at it so

It is way more likely now than it was before lol

So any news from the slightly more western front?

R: Yeah lol

So it’s definitely a go

I will be heading back to NOLA

me: Omg wow!

That is most excellent news!

How soon can i expect you?

R: The bad news? You gotta wait another week

Maybe more?

me: Oh no! That IS bad news!

R: I know hun

But I am certainly worth the wait, aren’t I? :-P

What else could i do but agree?

-Remi

socio, path :-D

Today ive been in some kind of a weird mood. Not depressed, but not happy... I dunno, resigned maybe?

Anyway ive decided to just enjoy the ride as best i can. Yesterday i woke up late cuz as you probably know i was still up til almost dawn the night before that, and so i took my time getting up and dressed and all in favor of relaxing for once this week. Dont even have a job but i need the weekend more than ever before, after the stress of the past five business days…

I had barely had enough coffee before the guys wanted to go out somewhere else drinking, first to a bar and then to another house not too unlike this one, but with a completely different layout, so more like similar in spirit? We got back late, and when we did my phone and i both went promptly to recharge for the night.

The funny thing is that i was up way way later the night before than i was last night, and yet all the drinking did me in. Thats why today i also work up late, am taking it very easy, and may not even drink at all no matter what the guys say… They were going out again, i think maybe even to the very same bar, but i was in no mood. I stayed behind and stole some food from around the kitchen again in the hopes that it would help somewhat. Less than an hour itll be midnight and they still arent back yet - i made the right call. Might not be awake when they get home, depending.

I ate in spite of my ailing stomach and ongoing aches, chewing to the left as is my new custom, and i did feel a little better then. Keeping food down was my greatest and onlyest accomplishment for this Sunday - all i did aside from that was do it again at some point, and chat with Slingo for a few hours while drawing this:

All day ive been pretty obsessed with the direction im headed and where the flow of events and currents are taking us all, wondering if i have any say in what happens to me from here, and if so how much? It just seems like ive only survived the psychotic whims of this so-called civil society thanks to my being somewhat smart, really damn determined, but mostly just lucky as all fucking hell…

Lucky so far, anyway...

But like i said, im resigned to things til the morning. Tomorrow will be another story, when i start to scramble again, but for now i can relax. Or at least i can allow myself to compartmentalize enough under these conditions…

Oh right, i heard from Rebekah today, but only via text, and super cryptically:

Hey! May have some big news to share with you!

But don’t wanna spoil it unless it comes true, so you have to wait....

Til tomorrow, I think?

Anyway hope all is well <3!

Of course im pretty curious what that might all be about, but when i texted back she didnt respond further, so i guess i really will have to wait til then.

And then a little while ago i had maybe the best conversation with Slingo yet, so fuck it heres basically the whole thing, and then im gonna crash:

S: hey so you ever notice how people want to mock the Maya or Aztec societies for human sacrifice as ritual, but get mad when you point out that humans aren’t much more civilized anywhere else and the spectacle of death is entertainment everywhere?

like if a cop kills someone on video and it becomes news, don't thousands of people still watch?

i mean, i don’t but...

isn't there a bit of a pull to it for many people, precisely because we know how many others are watching this too?

can you prove the world has truly evolved away from this, even in the slightest?

especially in the US, where we still just regular ol’ execute people in this country like we’re in the gotdam middle ages, and give a special seat to victims and their families?

me: Well hello to you too haha

S: sorry, it’s my day off again

so i have been reading stuff, and it just angries up the blood

then i saw you were on so, hey, how's it going?

me: You know i was wondering how you stay so well informed!

S: yeah man

read all the things

read the source material if you can

read the things that contradict the other things

read the things you didn’t want to know about your favorite people

and above all, trust no one

me: Hell yeah!

So let me ask you…

Youre a communist right? Or socialist?

S: SHHH!!!

someone’s probably listening!

me: !!!

Sorry :-x

Your secret is safe with me lol

S: hahaha

yeah, socialist

why?

me: Oh i was just thinking today about how it seems like the warning about communism and socialism from back in the day, are coming true here. But like without the benefits that should come with that?

S: oh sure, i think that’s become a meme of sorts, 1990s capitalism vs 2010s capitalism

me: Oh yeah?

S: yeah, like

(1990s capitalism) “lol communists have to share rooms and everything else”

(2010s capitalism) “need money? turn your extra bed into a hotel room!”

(1990s captialism) “lol in russia you can’t choose the career you want, they just tell you”

(2010s capitalism) “we have 3 paying jorbs left but you can’t have one.”

me: Hahahahahaha you said jorb!

S: i liked it! so sue me!

me: Nah i like it

I owed you one for “Chad” still right?

S: you ever hear from him?

me: Yeah, he left his watch here, told him i found it and he got back to me yesterday or the day before that

Fucker told me to make sure nothing happened to it or he would drive back across the country to kill me :-o

S: wow what a charming motherfucker he must be

me: You know it.

So damn glad to have him out of my life and across the country now

S: did he make it all the way out west already?

me: I should hope so, been almost a week now since he left!

S: oh damn!

where does the time go when you don’t give a shit about a guy???

and yet, ever since you started describing this guy, i’ve been thinking:

i bet the worst part of being powerfully wealthy is the fear of losing it all…

that’s probably why they keep trying to get richer all the time - always getting more means never having less, so they work their way up to a point of controlling everything, to ensure that the flow of more, never stops.

and then that becomes their life’s obsession, the whole point of everything they’ve ever worked for, to make sure they never stopped getting more, no matter who they had to take some away from on any given day to make sure they flow continued….

me: If corporations are people, then i think theyre all sociopaths

S: well i mean theres just more reward going that route instead of becoming a serial killer

for one thing, if you join the super-wealthy elite you become almost untouchable

that spokesman for subway, he was just a famous millionaire

but a billionaire pedophile can be caught red handed after a decade-long open secret becomes too obvious - then barely go to prison, be let out 6 days a week to go to work, and after all that they’re allowed to continue running everything exactly as they were, but maybe just a little more carefully. you can even quite actually literally get away with murder if you go about it right.

so, you know… why be JUST a serial killer?

me: When you could do all that and get a statue in your honor too?

Haha wow, yeah tho

This is why it really makes me laugh any time I hear someone talk about the “free hand of the market”

Let alone an atheist!

S: oh ye of little faith ;-)

me: In this case we know 100% for sure that it's just some BS we made up, yet so many folk who cant shit all over faith fast enough are suddenly devout followers

Hehehe yeah

But i mean even tho it's just as obvious, if not more so than ever, that it's just a cult where all responsibility is palmed off as inevitability, by leaders who don't feel compelled to follow their own rules

Rules they made or maintain for everyone else!

S: in a system that is absolutely controlled and manipulated by human hands

me: Proving it all to be a bunch of bullshit set up to keep the masses in line...

S: meanwhile everything is becoming so automated that we soon won't need people to do most of the jobs they used to have

and even though everything would be a lot cheaper and easier to just give everyone free health

care, education and a guaranteed income, we’re being run into the ground as a species and a civilization really by a bunch of narcissists and worse who are obsessed with making an even bigger pile of cash each fiscal quarter than allowing any of us “little people” to ensure our own fucking survival.

me: And whenever possible, get somebody else to pay for it. All of it. Whatever it is.

Of course these are the same bunch who convinced this country that corporations are people, people who need tax breaks while costing even more in taxes, or not paying taxes, or moving overseas for most of their operations to avoid having to pay taxes on employees, or even pay those new employees much…

S: worse than that though: they can’t even let themselves think ahead for the sake of the company, either!

they can’t present a business proposal that fails to make not just a profit, but a larger profit this time than last time - not even once, let alone three or four reports in a row.

not even if they pull focus to look to the future, not even if it would have made them so much more money in the long run to do so

because that is a risk, and any risk is too great.

and even the CEOs of large corporations have their hands tied, because they aren’t allowed to do anything that causes the stock price to go down.

so they too are automated now :-/

hmmm….

weird question: do you read scifi at all?

me: Hahaha what? That took a weird turn

S: just bear with me, i swear i’m going somewhere with this.

me: OK sure. And yeah, a little bit. Havent read a whole lot but some for sure.

S: have you ever come across the term singularity?

me: You mean like a black hole?

S: nice! but no, i meant specifically the technological singularity, not gravitational.

well played though! i wasn’t even thinking about that

but yeah, the scifi trope of artificial intelligence evolving past the need or use for human input

then eventually, of course, humans

me: Oh so you mean more like terminator

S: oh right, i could have just said that i guess. but it is not a great example necessarily.

whatever.

me: Not that it matters.

S: right.

so anyway, i have long been of the opinion that we were so worried about HAL or Arnold coming for us, that we failed to notice that we’d already been swallowed up by the singularity.

it just wasn’t the way we expected it to look, so the sidestepping over humanity took a whole different path.

like you said, we gave citizenship to corporations, and they have made way more use of the fourteenth amendment than those human people, for whom it was intended, have been able to...

and now we all answer to corporations on one level or another, whether at our jobs or banks or grocery stores, we are at the mercy of their whimsical decisions most of the time, because the only thing that can change the mind of a corporation is a drop in stock, and only a dip in image or their favorability can cause such a shock to its system.

that all started a long time ago. all that stuff this century? they just clarified and doubled down, and made it more officially the law of the land.

because corporate capitalism is reaching its logical end results, and can only get worse from here. all it can do is continue to syphon money away from those who aren’t rich enough to get caught up in the vacuum :-(

eventually only the very wealthiest people will be able to avoid the same fate.

and no matter what the vast majority of the world and its peoples may want, may say, march for and demand, nothing else matters but the bottom line. eventually it may simply eat us all, but it is a gruesome beast that feeds better by feasting on its victims slowly, over the course of their entire lifetimes - which are mercifully cut tragically short, after years of nothing but horror and trauma.

and we may very well be powerless to stop it. not unless enough of us recognize it for what it is and call it out by name.

because that CEO has to answer to a board of directors of whatever the fuck, but really all they care about is the immediate bottom line, the company image, and their portfolio. and probably mostly check in just often enough to make sure the status is still quo.

so functionally, no one at all is at the wheel, here.

it’s all just dictated by a bunch of numbers, many of which are fabricated or falsified, much of which is stored and tracked and managed and maintained by computers doing the heavy lifting, at record speeds. all calculating corporate interests.

meanwhile, we made corporations into not just people, but the most important people.

a special kind of people whose continued survival requires constant hoarding, and exponential accumulation of resources. and a kind of people who feel no remorse for causing the deaths of countless humans to ensure that continued survival, and who never have to answer for their crimes against us with anything more than a relatively small fine.

an intangible, immoral immortal set of being to whom we all have to answer, as they are so powerful that they can even consume each other if one gets too weak...

anyway there’s your fucking singularity for you.

me: …………..

Whoa dude!

That got DARK

S: haha sorry

this is the stuff that keep me up at night...

long story short: our socioeconomic trajectory is certainly on a worrisome course

me: No no no, really cool stuff!

Depressing, but cool hahaha

Also think i need to read more sci fi now :-D

We kept going a little while longer after that, but it was much more subdued and nowhere near as interesting, so thats as good a place as any to cut it off.

OK. Good night, dear reader, good night. Gonna try to get to sleep early so i dont sleep late again like the last two days, as i really need to make some progress here....

-Remi

respect, ability ;-)

Well i cant sleep. Probably my fault for trying... Thats how im feeling tonight.

So i dunno if i mentioned in my post earlier today but i actually had an interview scheduled this afternoon. Nothing too serious, not the best pay, but a pretty easy jorb that i could take immediately. I mean i know why i didnt tell anyone around here about it, cuz thats just my MO anyway, but now im really wondering... did i not even tell you, blog-reader?

But you are basically me. No one is looking at this... Was i so paranoid and superstitious about it i didnt even mention it to myself?

Well even if so, hardly the weirdest thing about me, really. Whatever.

Jokes on me tho since it didnt go well anyway.

You know i just noticed i called it a jorb up above, but im not gonna fix it. I kinda like it in fact. Jorb, jorb, jorb.

Didnt see it at first since i get a lot of hits for spelling errors whether they apply or not, and something about typing on a phone and this app especially! makes me care a little less about the particulars. Maybe since i know the limitations im working with and can assume that a lot of other people know it too? I dunno. The most luck ive had so far in the fight with autocorrect has been thru doubling down on certain words and patterns until they register as normal in the device, tho they dont always link up between apps and some words end up being more real in some places than others.

It kinda reminds me of one of my music teachers who told us regularly, “if you cant be right, be wrong - but do it with confidence.” What he was getting at was that even when some music seems to sound weird or incorrect, if you repeat that pattern enough times it not only convinces the brain it was intentional, but also the ear - you stop noticing after enough repetitions. Over a long enough period of time, this also accounts for how new genres go from fresh things that older people tend to think sounds dissonant, to being another old hat part of history...

Sorry, we were talking about... Wait what the hell WAS i talking about?

Forgive me, i am high as all holy hell right now. I smoked a bunch before i went to bed, as is my custom since running out of codeine, but obviously i failed to fall the fuck to sleep.

And so in part out of lonely late night boredom as well as to stem the tide of intrusive thoughts, likely the very same that hath murdered my sleep, i went out back with a whole joint to myself this time, hoping to pass out and die so i can be with my beloved nights rest in the hereafter :-P

Now at least even the most hopeless of thoughts have become subject to my humor. I have always had an innate talent for finding something to laugh about even in the worst situations... Of course i credit that partly to having been thrust so often into those scenarios that i developed an effective coping mechanism. I dont even need the drugs to do this, they are far more useful for aiding against insomnia and persistent pain. But unfortunately i realize now as im sitting here and just took another couple of the OTC pain relievers i bought this week, that one of the active ingredients is caffeine.

Thats good for getting it into the bloodstream faster and all, but i guess i might be up for a good long while tonight.

So anyway, been looking for jobs left and right, but everything seems to be a big put on. Theres a ton of links out there that just seem to want to trick you into giving them money, and some of them go well out of their way to explain the trick so that it seems halfway reasonable, til you realize that paying for work is not in any way, shape or form reasonable...

Been applying to anything that it seemed like i could get to easily with the public transit here in town, and could convincingly argue that i would be a good fit. Few responses werent something shady that made me regret wasting the time, and i got one reply back just to tell me that in the greeting i had spelled the guys name wrong and so was discounted. Like, i get it - but you dont have to write a sassy email back throwing it in my face when i have a sneaking suspicion you have no plans to give even half that courtesy to most people you reject, youll just move on with whoever you hire and fuck all those people, right? But you just had to let me know, fuck me. Great, man. Now i know i dodged a bullet....

So i was pretty excited when i got called in for this job. Like i said, pay was fine at least for what they wanted, i could get by on it and still look for something even better while i made use of the place.

Then i get there and im interviewing with three people, none of whom even give me a name after asking mine. Then halfway thru some dude barges in and he starts asking everybody questions like this is the most urgent thing in the known universe, and then proceeds to simply stand there and watch the meeting for the rest of the whole time. When they finally run out of questions, the barger who went silent introduces himself as the owner, but still without a name! And then he asks me how i would feel if this position were an internship instead....

ARGH!

I'm so good at so many things. Not that it matters. Without a piece of paper or some other proof that i have five years of doing each one behind me i might as well be good at nothing... I just feel like theres no winning here :-(

Makes me think of a conversation i had the other night with some of the guys here at the house, about football since tis the season, and the moment was so hopelessly charged with masculinity that i couldnt keep myself from thinking, and then eventually saying, something like, “You know what’s funny to me about how people say 'well, women just can’t do certain things that men can, so…’ is that it is so obvious that in their heads they’re picturing some dainty girl, and if theyre a guy then probably some slender lady in particular who they find attractive, the moment you say the word Woman.

“And then they start comparing her, lady with an average build, to the body of a man who is so perfectly built to play football, he is in fact a professional... Why dont they ever think of a man my size? And why dont they ever consider anyone like the dozen or so players of the undefeated women’s rugby team at my school - any one of whom would be better suited to play linebacker in the NFL than i could ever hope to be?”

This line of thinking did not go over particularly well.

It was whatever tho. I have made enough of an impression that everyone gave me the benefit of the doubt, which i guess was necessary here, and just took my interesting observation at face value. Tbh for a minute i was really worried that they were gonna turn on me for being too feminist or some damn thing...

Why do i do this? Is this who i am? Or am i just looking for reasons to constantly single myself out for whatever reason?

I dont even know any more. This week has got me so tired and uninspired and borderline hopeless even. Dont even have it in me to draw much but this stupid sketch sums up my feelings well enough:

Sent that to Rebekah and Slingo both, one right after the other. Despite the time difference and the fact that it was earlier where he is than either of the places she or i are, he got back to me first, but was too tired to talk long and pretty much went straight to bed.

On the plus side tho even if i wasnt able to catch Slingo for more than just a few minutes, in spite of syncing up with his left coast time zone, i actually got to talk to Rebekah at long last and for much longer :-D i had sent her an email about all of my sense of discouragement with the jorb hunt and how it seems that even if you are provably qualified to take on all the tasks they ask, you can still end up not hearing back ever. She showed up on chat tonight while i was sitting solo out back and smoking myself asunder still.

I had also written to her for advice on making non-traditional money, which tbh seems like a better option for me, as im not very good on paper, and she had a ton of useful things to say:

R: hey! so i got your email

sorry to hear things have been so rough!

me: Hey!

I mean i guess it isnt all that bad

It’s just that i have applied to SO many jobs this week

And i have heard so little back

And what i have heard, has turned out to be some bullshit

So i kinda feel like im getting nowhere.....

R: you mentioned that guy who came to the house there the other night?

any word from him?

me: No, not since i sent it. He got right back to me, about an hour later, and let me know he got it and would show it to... Someone, i dunno.

I wish i could just be given a chance to show what im capable of

Rather than compete with some nebulous, bottomless talent pool

R: aw sweetie

i know

the world just doesn’t work like that...

me: Yeah… I know

Just frustrated

R: it’s okay, i totally get it

so you wanna get into busking then?

me: Yeah well

On the one hand that sounds wonderful and liberating

But then again i feel like my income depends completely on my continued ability to put myself out there... And like... I dunno.

I have so much respect for your capacity to do that btw

R: well first of all thank you <3!

but secondly, i really must reiterate

that i make it look easy sometimes

and that is not so much a compliment to myself from myself,

so much as a warning that i don’t really talk about how hard it is

like, really is

and third, it’s surely worth mentioning here that i take another of gigs that are not in the public eye, too

me: OK sure, but how many of them have you in various states of undress in a room alone with a guy who may or may not be nice?

Seems like an even trade

R: Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...........

when you put it that way, not so sure how even it is lol

but you know, they aren’t all like that anyway so

me: And besides i dont see getting quite as many offers to do that kind of work as you do lol

But it seems like an alternative worth considering since im not really the competitive sort, and i dont have a lot of ways to prove how good i am or even could be at anything because so few people hire me.

I barely had a job before that was worth anything before i didnt have it again, and here i am...

And i wish i could just show up somewhere and show off something useful to somebody, but...

Hard enough getting your foot in the door anywhere.

R: well yeah

you’re right on there for sure, but

on top of all that,

even if you do manage to get thru and to an interview,

you still have to prove that you fit into the “culture”

which of course is code for

you can belong in the boys club,

or at least play along

and pretend like it doesn’t bother you :-x

now i bet that for you.....

hmm.

i bet it’s not easy.

but!

you are still a guy. and a white guy, with a very good command of english

so..............

theres a lot of doors that might shut on you eventually, that wouldnt even budge open for many other people

me: Hmm... Yeah.

Thats true.

R: sorry, not trying to diminish what you’re dealing with

you just went off on a tangent there for a moment

understandably so, i might add!

but then i also thought i might add to it lol

me: Hahaha no no thats ok

Its just... Job listings are all a bunch of exploitative scams, a way to spam your email address, or in some cases a real honest-to-god job with insane demands just because they can get away with it...

And on top of that someone was telling me that a lot of companies now use software that just searches for keywords in your resume and cover letter. So they end up discarding a lot of applicants with terms that whoever runs the HR dept doesnt know personally

Even tho the tech dept or whoever is begging them, if theyre gonna do that, to first and foremost get a list of terms to search from the people already on the team looking to expand...

It just seems like theres a lot of talk about this country being a meritocracy, but the only thing that merits a second look is who sent your contact info to the right desk. Incredibly demoralizing, you know?

R: you're telling me, cowboy

willing to bet you haven’t showed up for a gig and been offered double if you blow the client

me: Cant say as i have!

:-o

R: lol that is either exactly the right or the wrong emoticon in reply to that anecdote

Oh, rereading that reminds me: at some point today or yesterday i guess i heard the word meritocracy, but they said “a meritocracy” so fast and slurred that it sounded like “Ameritocracy” to me, and i had to ask them to make sure they hadnt just come up with an awesome new word. But i like it.

I forgot to tell Slingo, who i know would love it too - he got a huge kick out of it when he called this journal a travelogue and i said, “more like a travelanche”... Anyway i have updated my the blog and its header accordingly with both my new terms, and hopefully he will get a happy surprise next time he checks...

Another thing we were talking about, randomly: the Beatles. Never been a huge fan myself beyond a handful of songs, but i understand why they endure so well for many people. And something i started telling him in chat but never really got developed until thinking about it again now, but i really feel strongly that Shes So Heavy is a bit of a better love song than Something is.

No wait hear me out:

The reason i like it better than Something is because it goes a step further and says what that something is... i kinda feel like that smooth sexy bassline and his insistent repetition “I want you” misleads the listener into believing he is just very determined to make love…

But then, the chorus, where the guitars go from hip-wiggling suggestives to profound clarity, and almost out of left field, his vocal inflections evoking almost a “No! What I mean is…” before actually saying, and only saying, “She’s so heavy…………..” over and over, leaving you with that thought alone while the instruments turn around to the verse again. The tempo changes but the song remains the same, and then it comes back to that chorus again, and ultimately the point seems to be something like “Your face may be that of an angel, but your mind clearly belongs to a goddess; so let me just shut up now and, please, if you will, keep talking to me. You blow my mind wide open.”

I can already hear some dudes or bros or dudebros saying that to be so caught up in another person, to be so in love with their ideas that you’d take the whole package on that alone, is some kind of weakness; and if i counter with anything like “but it’s acceptable for women to do that with men all the time?” then I’ll mostly get back from THAT crowd, “Yeah - cuz women are weak or something and that’s how it should be or some shit. You gotta be the smart one.” Being the compassionate person I am, i have no choice but to wish them the best of luck with that, as they will need it.

But regardless of how that interchange would have actually happened, I’m just going to bypass all such conversations, forever and ever, right here and now: for truly I tell you that if you can only hope to be guilty of some mental weakness for having devotion and attention to one of the strongest minds you’ve ever met or heard of, man or woman, then everyone who has ever cheered for any football player isn’t really a sports fan - they’re just guilty of physical weakness ;-)

Oh lord its 4am now. Ok on that note let me just try to call it a night once and for all before it simply cant be called one any longer.

-remi

quarter, after :-)

Sorry again, everyone. Anyone.

Sorry i havent been on in a few days. Well really i have been, just not here. And tbh i have never been very good at keeping up with a journal in my whole life. Some days i have no words worth expressing i guess, and then the next thing you know two years have gone by...

But this time i can say that at least if theres been a gap in my posting here, it has not been out of despondency or anything... This time ive been super busy trying to find a job in the area, tho here it is just quarter after eleven in the morning, and i already need a break… Been looking like mad since monday this week, looking everywhere - even craigslist. I bet at some point that site must have been a very handy tool because my whole life ive heard people swear by it, and it has been a cesspool as long as ive been looking at it.

And yeah there are other sites to go to but it still has a few good hits here and there, and is practically the only place to go to look for a job and a place to live at the same time, which unfortunately i have to do just in case.

At least i can say i got an early start, unlike yesterday, when i just had to sleep the fuck in again.

I had heard from the guys here that there may be a complication with the room and how available it is, but to stay tuned...

So, you know, what else does one do but double down in their efforts to find a new place, staying up all night if necessary, even without a source of income yet to recommend them?

Never even learned what that complication might be tho cuz the next day they told me nevermind, not to worry about it, no longer an issue…

So thats nice i guess. But i am still in such a panicked survival mode i cant relax, no lie i am pacing around in circles now as i type this. It takes awhile to get things right but i cant sit down or still or anything. Cuz ever since then my top 5 questions became: What house will have me? Which buildings take boarders? What domicile may i dwell in? Where will I quarter after this?

Oh yeah right and also where the fuck am I gonna live?

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to not be so thrilled right now, but instead of letting them get to me ive been diving into attack mode, trying to find solutions to every little problem, figuring i will let the anxiety and angst of failure eat me alive soon enough anyway. Free to react however i choose and do as i see fit. But i may have reached the limit on that in less than a week...

So yeah, this time the reason for my missing a few days was not due to depression, tho it may yet result in it </3

And aside from the worry that the room wont work out somehow and the need to find an income to keep whatever place i do wind up in, i also havent heard much from Rebekah this week. She has sent a few messages here and there and so i know she must be okay, at least as of a few hours ago... This past week has just got me running on empty now, and theres still another day to go, and i could use some time talking to my new friend, even if just electronically....

Oh right that reminds me: its been a few days for me and i just realized you must be wondering, so i am thrilled (if for no other reason than) to be able to report that Chad has actually left!

I could hardly believe he was gone, but sure enough he pulled away in the car monday evening and didnt come back at the end of the night, nor the next morning, and not any time since. Before he left he was after me for like a quarter tank of gas he said i owed him since we hadnt had an even split the way down here, according to him, and also a couple of pints from the other night i had forgotten about.

Fair enough i guess.

But i heard from him today if you can believe it. I sure couldnt. He doesnt want to be my friend... Right? No way thats the case.

No, he doesnt. Apparently he left a watch behind at the house here and he didnt have anybody elses number, so he had to text me to ask about it. So who the hell was his friend that made him come here in the first place anyway, and did they move out before i got to figure that out?

The night we first got here, like two weeks ago he called... Someone... To open the door for us. The memory of who exactly opened the door escapes me tho, and for that matter i cant even be sure if that was the same person who was on the phone with him, or if it was simply a case of dude nearest the door at the time. Not that it matters.

Told him i would let him know when we found it and that someone here would get it to him as soon as he gave us an address.

....oh wow. I just now realized i never even told anyone else to look for it. I got so wrapped up in trying to secure my own situation that it disappeared off my radar this whole time. Not surprising i guess tho considering that im so used to not disclosing anything to those around me :-x still no one knows about the broken molar, not here anyway. And when there was a potential conflict with the room in question, whatever it was, i kept any of my panic to myself, but of course now that ive made my decision and am stuck with it, i have nothing but anxiety about it…

And also of course i tell no one any of this, or at least no one who i have any chance of running into in person any time soon.

Where the hell has this year gone anyway? I feel like if all goes according to plan in the next week or so and i end up being able to take this place, then after that theres only one single season still, like a quarter left of the year really. Summer seems to have just started and now is almost gone already... It got so cold one night this week that i actually had to pull out my favorite hoodie by going on a deep dig into one of my other bags, as in, not the bookbag i use daily like some giant purse on my back, but one of the two other medium bags i have of just stuff like extra clothes and things i couldnt leave behind. Honestly didnt think i would need it for longer than that, at least not til i got to the end of my trip, but then again i guess i have gotten that far now havent i? And considering the extra week we spent here before Chad moved on it should realistically be about due by this point... Autumn begins in like 5 days.

But there is something unsettling about the weather and the whole earth settling around you when you dont know for sure whats to become of you in the coming months. Dunno how it manifests down south here as compared to up north, but i dont know if i could take too much of an open-ended harvest season, with all the things surrounding you starting to feel like death and retreat, and you feel like all you can do is either die or retreat yourself for the next few months, with me just stuck in the middle with nowhere to go...

Seriously - even willing to find a bear just blind enough to be easy to convince i was one of her young so i have a place to hibernate and generally not expire in the near future.

It all made so much more sense last week - if i had gone with Chad and had some security if only very temporary, only to have to begin the inevitable job and apartment hunting routine once I land somewhere - what then? Why not just get a jump on that if I am already in a place I kind of like?

But therein lies the rub i guess - do i truly like it here, or is this just a place she is likely to return to, while i just want to give her a safe place to stay with me in case she returns?

Is that any reason to settle anywhere?

And also: do i have any good reasons to go to or settle anywhere else???

Now BELIEVE i would fucking love to just go ahead and own it, my decisions, stand by my convictions or whathaveyou, but i cant really do that until i can be sure that this will pan out somehow into anything >:(

Still not completely sold that theres gonna be a room to let set aside for me but im trying to shrug it off and stay focused on one task at a time. Yet after a couple of hours of scrolling through the job listings at the same time as checking for potential new places to live every day this week, i got completely discouraged and just gave up trying to send out my resume even. Trying to apply to jobs in a new town with no actual computer to use? Just damn... I was just barely able to make a new copy of my resume in the same format with the new address, the one i am using presumptively and from where i type this sentence to you now. And this is why i gave up and started journaling again this morning...

Ive spent most of the last four or five days feeling more like a ghost than ever, a kind of almost non-entity that you still have to talk to if you cross paths in the common areas. I keep weird hours in an attempt to catch new jobs as soon as they are posted and maybe get an edge there, but of course this all happens only so often, and if you were to religiously devote a full 8 hours to looking for work you would still not be applying non-stop. And in all those moments in between, literally looking for work but with no one new to contact yet, theres nothing to do but let the worry wash over you in waves: not just where will your home be four weeks from now, but will it be at all?

I know i was always taking a risk, this whole time, that i might not end up landing somewhere good, or that it wouldnt work out even if i did. But now that im in a place for real and need to get started the odds seem more stacked against me. Probably this is illogical, but before when i still could have ended up anywhere, it seemed that there were limitless possibilities and any one of them could snatch me up in their loving providence - but now that even a single factor is concrete, it already feels like a whole solid wall im up against, with a rock on the other side of me.

Also Slingo wasnt on long before he went to bed and i still havent seen him this morning, but last night i was telling him about some of this:

S: hell yeah man

everybody knows that getting established in a new place is hard ;-(

especially if you don’t have much of a network to work…

also:

have you ever heard the term “quarter life crisis”?

me: Yeah i have

Hmm.....

You think i got that going on?

S: well...

not sure. i mean, i’m not sure how i even feel about it.

for one thing, it is awfully generous to assume a century long lifespan

and for another, well, i have been this agitated and aware for awhile now and i can definitely blame some people who are between 5-15 years older than i for this - trusted individuals who were out in the real world before i was and gave me some knowledge in advance.

most of them were going through something like that, but it is also very easy for me to consider that they saw the writing on the wall - their careers were on the line, maybe already on the chopping block.

and they had been struggling from the sound of the starting gun to make a sustainable life for themselves, trying to ensure their lives meant something, while they kept the faith and pursued their passions.

then settled on just not making the world and worse while still surviving :-/

but all that said?

there is something i have noticed about getting to our age, and i have seen it ahead of time and now in real time, even in myself, and a lot of other people with whom i personally identify on some level... and so if i am noticing it in you as well now i would not be very surprised.

anyway all it is, is, a waking up one day to a sensation that you need to pull together all the pieces and make something out of it. and i would say “almost anything” but that gives the wrong impression.

if i hear that it is happening to somebody, it could manifest itself in virtually any form, but the soul of it is the same:

you turn into an ant building a hill, a bee making a hive

you begin to build... something. a career, a network, an establishment, some kind of business or commune or... something.

you need to make, because something needs to be made by YOU

i dont know if that is just something that comes out of looking directly into the void of the world as we know it now, or if this is just another thing you can attribute to the human condition

but either way, it’s a thing, it’s there, and it may account for how you’re feeling right now, at least in part.

that make any sense?

It really truly did. He managed to sum up a lot of my feelings, even ones i was having before i started making this journey, like the feelings that inspired me to do this in the first place, and that i hadnt been able to name yet let alone parse out like that. This was definitely not the full extent of my life in words, but it got to a lot of things by touching on a current running under the surface, one well worth the noticing since i had failed to do that my own self.

Before he went to bed i asked him about those older friends too, the ones who had to choose between selling out and settling to survive - he told me some settled and some didnt, and that some survived, but some didnt :-(

Tho this has got me thinking today and feeling a way, like, if that truly is a thing, and we all or mostly all go into crisis one fourth of the way into life, just a quarter century after we are born - which is to say almost as soon as we get started in the world for ourselves - is there not something seriously wrong with everything we are doing?

Argh. Depression is as always on the horizon, tho still kinda hoping for a helpful new turn of events here... This world has me chasing down each nickel, running after every quarter, and basically brawling over any dollar that might come my way. But i dunno. I remain hopeful regardless. Doing my damnedest anyway.

There are a few silver linings to look to: for one thing Chad is gone and i relate even better to the group as it settles back into normal, and i am my own semi permanent fixture looking to join the group proper, so things are a bit different, dynamic wise and otherwise.

For one thing i was able to buy weed again finally, and just in time before running out too. Dunno if this is a north vs south thing or what but the price was ridiculously fair to me and so I got a whole ounce rather than just the quarter i was initially after, figuring i didn't know what levels of pain might present in the near future. Couldnt hurt, right? I mean it does already, so... So that much was nice at least.

Another nice thing is that i mentioned the so-so search for work to some of the other guys a couple nights ago and they all said they would keep a look out for me at their companies for me.

And then last night actually some guy came to join the regular round of drinks since his weekend starts on thursday nights, turns out we are in more or less the same field and he asked me to send him my resume - so i may have a lead on a real new job.

The best part of it was that this came out organically and in front of everybody, and the group reaction was totally positive, like they were hoping i could work out a way to join the gang... Like... I just got here but here i am, one of them. Weird. But nice i guess and kinda comforting. Like i might have found a new home, exactly what i was looking to find for myself...

But nothings set in stone yet tho so i am still super nervous; guess this is what they call cautiously optimistic, maybe?

Anyway ive wasted enough time complaining, gotta get back to the grind now.

-remi

PS - Found his stupid watch btw but decided not to tell him right away :-) figured i would draw it first:

I did a bad job distinguishing the colors on the band from the lettering but it actually says:

TIME IS $

Omg what an asshole.

point, taken </3

Someone who has been through a lot: “i have been thru more than you”

Someone who has been through even more: “i have been thru a lot”

-@slingolang, sometime earlier today

So i finally got around to telling Chad i was thinking of staying here in NOLA, and his reaction really surprised me - he was disappointed!

“Aw, man… I dont wanna go on a roadtrip by myself! Whats the fucking point then?”

I was almost flattered, but not really, and i almost wanted to saying something, but also not really. He just doesnt want to be doing this alone, i think, more than he cares about who the other person is...

Anyway yeah, i felt bad using a natural disaster as an excuse just to delay the inevitable decision making, when people have actually had the whole point of their lives taken away from them... So i finally just made a call after waffling on it all weekend basically. It came to the point where he was going to crash for the night and had quietly started to put some stuff into the car, but in a way that was totally drawing attention to the process, not staring at me exactly but definitely making a point to walk past me each time.

I guess that makes it official tho, even if i do technically have the room to change my .mInd at any time before he goes. But right now ive got so much going on that needs to be taken care of, and the sooner i settle somewhere the faster i can start getting to all that.

Mostly tho i suppose im just talking myself out of my prior anxiety. The weekend is just about over now and that meant Chad wanted to get going again… I can hardly believe i told him to go on without me! Once i did that I had more or less reached the point of no return, and tho I really could rejoin if I really wanted it would be sort of bad form at this juncture. So there's kinda no backsies on that one, but then again when since i began this trip a d this stupid blog has this NOT been the case?

Of course i need to double check to make sure the invite to crash here is still good, or else it becomes a moot point anyway.

But i cant complain. Oh sure, theres always the agony of course, but he and i are becoming fast friends at this point, and i dont know what i would do with myself if he were taken away from me now...

Oh and yeah i really cant complain - i mean im physically in too much pain to talk much today :-x the codeine is officially gone now. On the plus side i am not the only regular buyer of weed in this building, so theres that going for me - if nothing else i can at least get more of that pretty easily….

But considering how much it hurts me to be physically existing these days, and how much mental, emotional and even spiritual anguish ive experienced, and continue to, i dont think someone like that pugnacious drunk on the street the other night can even fully comprehend how small a man he is to me, a screaming flea on the back of life itself. Go on and hurt me with your man-fists, prove to yourself for one moment that you are not so small, but if you are really lucky you will get to die slowly, leisurely even, in your own bed, surrounded by those you love. And then you will have just enough time left to notice your insignificance…

Sorry. Jjust took the last one a little bit ago and getting loopy. This ones gonna be choppy or punchy or both, mostly i just need to get stuff out of me. Sorry.

So I dunno. The whole premise of this trip was to wind up somewhere new and, if at all possible, somewhere good… and all circumstance aside, in some ways I have already done that, right? In a cool city with a lot going on, some relative strangers are already accepting of me... What was it going to be like anywhere out west if not exactly like this?

The only difference I can see is that my perspective would be different, if only because it would be crystal clear that I had done no leas than I had set out to do…

Anyway so now i have to find a job nearby in the next couple of weeks in order to take a room that may or may not be available still in that time, so i ALSO also have to keep an eye out for similar places to live in the same area, just in case.... But still, better than drawing things out any longer really.

Oh and speaking of drawing things out:

Yeah i just gave up on the pencils... They feel totally unnatural to me and every line is so light i can't even make out the shape of my drawings without outlining them in pen after. But worse than that is this set is only so good, or else my grip is too hard or something, that as soon as i sharpen one to a fine point the tip breaks off almost immediately after trying to use it >:(

Also i decided, fuck it, there's no extra points awarded for getting to the end of your life with your markers intact. Not feeling terribly inspired anyway, might as well enjoy the process at least.

But, whatever. Not that it matters. Either way, i really cant complain. I mean, theres really just no point in it, right?

No ones gonna listen anyway, so i hear.

But as long as no ones listening either, what really bothers me tho is that im not even looking for anything too significant. Of course i would love to feel like my life has meaning, but i do my best to make that myself out of fabric i weave by hand. If that sounds brave, let me assure you it is not - this is pure survival mechanism. There have been so few tangible elements in my life that have made me feel truly important that had i not learned how to spin it out of thin air it would just not be, and neither would i.

So no, not looking for a hip scene to be in or to make a name for myself. I just want to be able to be dammit. On my terms.

Man, but trying to rebuild a life once the whole point has been taken away from you, and trying to relate to anyone else for that matter... Like even just small talk is weird when you walked away from an inferno.

And right now where i am, i just feel like simple concepts such as “meaning of life” are so very distant, almost quaint... I dunno, some things hit you so hard that its easiest just to never speak of them - a simple case of needing to sort of ignore the past in order to move forward at all. But whatever.

Slingo wasnt really on at all today, hence why i was reading his twitter account earlier. Not that he seems to use it much, i noticed... tho for all i know it isnt his only one? He did show up on chat briefly, and i gave him a much shorter version of some of this. He was true to form:

S: don’t worry buddy, you’re hardly alone there ;-(

yeah but you can always rebuild again. it cant ever be exactly what you had before, but as long as you’re still here you can still just start again.

as often as you want in fact

it doesn’t matter

This was actually pretty comforting, but when i read the text i hear a voice that i attribute to him in my head - i dont know what his voice actually sounds like now - but it is quite an authoritative voice. And then i reread it without the voice and even if it sounds good it doesnt have the same weight? I dunno. Sometimes the source means as much as the message i guess.

But anyway, it was nice to hear, or read rather, because i have not had the ability to have much faith in my chances of getting anywhere all day. Pretty much since i told Chad what i was doing and it was a confirmed thing, or at least an out in the open one. Now i am in sheer panic mode, trying to keep cool when i just ran out of chill pills.

How weird to be so out of faith. As you might have gathered, i was a strangely devout kid in a lot of ways, and for more than a little while. At the heart of it i was mostly what a lot of folks call “spiritual not religious" tho for a time was young enough not to see much difference, so i went along with a church.

The weirdest part probably, even to me looking back on it, is that no one was pushing me at all in this direction, it was truly organic. My folks had become the Easter and Christmas variety of Christian and only found their faith again based on my example. I guess they figured there were infinitely worse things for your kid to get obsessed over, and decided to encourage it.

But i went pretty deep into it, making time to read the scripture on my own and ask questions later. One day reading the old testament i got to Numbers, chapter 6 i think? Anyway it gives details about what is called a Nazarite vow, a pledge of extra separation and dedication to God. I thought this sounded great.

So i followed the same rules as Samson and John the Baptist, more or less. I gave up grape soda, my favorite, since you can't drink anything that mightve become wine accidentally overnight or anything, so if it was made with grapes, raisins or prunes - which meant no Dr. Pepper, i remember - it was out entirely. I stopped cutting my hair too even tho it didnt give me strength enough to raze a temple full of unbelievers.

Not that i tried, i dunno. Maybe it did... What a waste of faith :-/

Anyway my relationship to all these things has changed a whole lot since I was 12. For one thing my grandma died about a year into all that, and there was no question i was going to her funeral since we were close - one or two great aunts died in that time and i was excused because part of the pledge is that you cant go near a corpse. But i attended this one, figuring God for an understanding sort, and then followed the rules laid out for a Nazarite who happen upon a dead body unintentionally: cut my hair off, wrapped it around incense and cinnamon, built an altar by hand out of found rocks, and set my sheared locks ablaze while in silent prayer. In the back yard of my childhood home. The neighbors were not pleased at all.

You might even say they were incensed.

But then it was over. And yet technically, it wasnt, and maybe isnt.

See most people only know the one Nazarite, so let me go with him: Samson was the guy who was tricked by Delilah into cutting his hair and thus losing his strength, only to be made a slave by his enemies - but one day in the presence of his mocking captors, his hair had grown back, and he pushed some load bearing columns til the whole damn structure collapsed around them, killing them all.

So basically what im wondering is if i dont get a haircut for a long time, does the Lord return his favor on me? Because i could sure use even just one righteous superhuman ability right now...

Tho i got the next best thing in a conversation with Rebekah for a good long while after everyone started going to bed. Tonight at the house was the same old drinking party and crew but cut much shorter since Monday is coming up, for which i was pretty grateful, especially since i caught her on chat for a little while before she went to sleep herself.

Speaking of which i feel im not far off from that destiny too, so i will share this one interesting bit of our conversation with you, relating to some of the topics we have been talking about since she left. Other than that theres no point to putting it here, but im about to pass out dreamily and this makes me happy, while what awaits tomorrow could be the worst pain yet with a side of withdrawal. Indulge me please:

me: Okay so one thing still confuses me.... The whole friendzone thing.

Not with everyone i ever meet, but a number of times, especially in college, when i first started getting close to a girl at all, there was this weird vibe at first, when we didnt know yet the extent of how we felt about each other.

And it was this mainly unspoken thing, but when you both felt it you could often both tell that the other one felt it, making it extra weird really that neither of you were saying anything, which made it extra hard to say anything....

But this one time in particular i was becoming friends with a young lady, we just had a ton of things to talk about.

Over the course of a week we spent about half of each day together, both of us really excited to discover this other person and to learn more about each other, but still strictly platonic - the subject of sex has never come up.

So yeah, about a week of this goes by, almost exactly, and on the seventh fun day in a row - this time we found a door propped open and we snuck into the dining hall after hours, just to make coffee and drink it in the much fancier faculty dining room.

We even smoked in there :-P

But there was no way to get back out of the building without setting off an alarm, cuz that door was shut when we tried, so we just pushed it open and ran like the wind.

And then we had gotten a safe distance away but we were still catching our breath but we were both laughing really hard so we couldnt at first... We were calling it a night anyway, but ended up with one last great memory of the day.

So then she said reluctantly, “Well i better go back to my room and get some work done...” as she put out her arms to hug me. But i told her i thought i would rather kiss her.

She smiled and said, “Oh yeah?” and our postures shifted just slightly into the other kind of embrace instead.

Anyway, immediately after we shared that kiss she said to me, “I’m so glad that happened... It kinda felt like this was the last moment before we were officially just friends, you know?”

“Like, if it were going to happen, it would have by now at the very latest, and it did end up happening at the very last second... I mean, how beautiful is that?”

And the thing is i knew exactly what she was talking about, the thing that made me step up in that moment was this pressure in the air around us.

I could tell it was now or never, after that we would have spent too much time together just as friends, and that wouldve been that, you know?

So whenever i have heard the term “friendzone” i was like... Yeah, i know what that means. That is too bad, but it happens and you move on.

Anyway you know what i mean tho?

R: yeah,

that is a real thing, i know what you’re talking about...

happened to me plenty of times

the problem is tho, when it didnt happen

and then a lot of those dudes were hanging out in there,

well after the fact,

not realizing there was no other bus coming....

and in some cases, getting pissed off about it

like it could be anyone elses fault you didnt check the schedule before waiting on a bench for six months when no one fuckin asked you to....

sorry hahaha touchy subject :-)

so anyway yeah the term is so damn loaded now, that what you are talking about

it has to be called something other than “friendzone”

because that has come to exclusively mean the lonely guys who assume they are worthy of a lady’s affection somehow,

even when she has never indicated it

and so if you throw that word around, then people will only think you mean the common usage

kinda like how, yeah, sure, meninist would be a great term for the kind of social justice group you were talking about

but if a group forms today with those very goals in mind, they absolutely cant call themselves that

and if they are even remotely serious about the work they intend to do, they will recognize that fact without any prompting

me: Hmmm... yeah

Yeah, okay, i see what you mean.

All right, thats enough. I really need to get some sleep, tomorrow i begin a new life here or something...

Now i dont know if anyone out there is reading this at all, nor do i know if any of those would-be readers are they praying sort, but whoever you all are or are not, please send me warm fuzzy thoughts, as i am downright petrified at the decision i have made, or maybe just having made a decision.

The only comfort i have at the moment is the compellingly logical notion that, if i go all the way west, well... i mean... What, then? Never gave that part of it close to enough thought even til now, and really the gist of this whole trip was to just wash up somewhere new and interesting and just kind of start again, right? Is this not close enough?

So on this holy day, really just a regular sunday tho, or well anyway it was still when i began writing this - where does the time go O Lord? Can it really be 3am already?... Oh and i might as well add it was the anniversary of Nine Eleven.

So maybe it will have literally been a holiday, at some point in the future.

But anyway. On this, one of the many sabbaths belonging to the Great Confounder in the Sky, i need to take a moment and reflect on those for whom even faith is not enough.

Because yeah, sure, you can always build again, and make whatever you want, even.

The truly hard part is actually putting your heart into something when it isnt there already. And when you are just building for the sake of rebuilding - let alone if you get stuck somewhere and not making much progress, or struck by the extent of the irreplaceable loss - at some point, you almost have to stop and wonder why you even keep bothering </3

So to anyone reading this who understands this perfectly, may my broken heart be with you now, brothers and sisters.

-Remi

other, wise :-x

Today i have been alternating back and forth, spending most of my day in a state of panic about what to do next, and if i wasnt feeling that way then otherwise ive been in a kind of shock still about the extent of how gross men can be, and have spent some time online, just reading more about that for some damn reason...

But really i have to decide what the fuck i plan on doing already.

Theres a big part of me that just HATES to leave things unfinished, and the mere thought of just quitting the mission now puts knots in my stomach... On the other hand, theres nothing to follow thru with here but followthru itself - do i really want to go on the rest of this roadtrip with Chad, a guy i dislike so much, it has caused me to call him by a derisive moniker so long that now i hardly remember his real name anymore? Every time i think we might bond, he ruins it, and the longest stretch we have gone without him really driving me nuts or similarly grossing me out has been this week, since we got here, and have had completely different schedules and lives again. But it has only been two weeks since we first left together in the first place so...

But the alternative is getting back into the car with him, just him, for miles and miles of maybe desolate nowhere again, and that is causing me just as much anxiety, if not a little more, than the thought of not finishing a trip out west.

So in honor of that, here is an utterly unfinished and imperfect sketch for you:

To really make this work think i would have to color it in more or something, but not really feeling the pencils today, and otherwise have to chance losing use of a few of my markers permanently, when im just barely feeling the drawing itself, so... Nah, not today anyway.

But aside from all of that, and the ongoing pain that needs constant maintenance - meaning both the injury and the pain itself do - it has otherwise been a perfect, lovely day. For one thing the weather has calmed, and i got to have ongoing conversations with both Slingo & Rebekah, even if not at the same time. And while it was nice just to be in touch with people, she also gave a heads up about the flooding in the western part of the state still being an issue. Apparently they are directing traffic away wherever possible, and she and her driver had had to head north first, to go basically anywhere else from here. I meant to bring this up to Chad as soon as i heard it, since weve been here almost a week now and, funny enough, this time he is the one getting impatient to leave. But there are just so many fires burning now and i dont know if i can keep up with them all...

When i finally saw him i explained about the flooding in the Baton Rouge area - he had heard nothing about this - and how Rebekah had said we quite probably have to head north to go west. This info seemed to slow him down a bit - guess he was really looking forward to meeting up with someone in texas but didnt want to have to drive all the way south again. When i told him i think the flooding has hit parts of texas too, he actually cursed his bad luck without a trace of irony or humor, in good taste or otherwise :-o

So i managed to convince him that it was worth staying through the weekend or else we would just get caught in even more traffic, but all this did was buy me a couple of days - literally, two - and yet i have elected to waste one entire one of those, distracted by this whole other new thing on my radar, rather than making up my damn mind about the subject at hand.

What really enabled me to let myself get drawn into it full force today was that i finally heard back from Rebekah, which was exciting all by itself. Stuck looking suddenly thru a new lens at men, here i was surrounded completely by them. I felt strongly that i should talk to a woman, or at the very least not a man, about the things i was trying to wrap my head around...

R: hey! was going to reply to your email but noticed you were on chat too

so how is the Big Easy?

still as big and easy as i left it?

me: Omg thank god you came back

R: hahaha miss me already then do you?

me: Well, actually, yeah tbh.

R: yeah my phone doesn’t have much of a data plan on it

i only check my email or chats or anything when i have time to whip out this laptop i lug everywhere...

me: I like you tho. More than i like anyone who is still here.

R: oh yeah?

well i guess that is a bit flattering

but on the other hand you have only been in town a week

there could be a ton of other people you could click with for all you know

technically speaking anyway ;-)

So i guess you googled Nice Guys huh?

Did you get to PUAs and MRAs?

How about MGTOWs?

Stop me when you don’t know an acronym

me: Ugh, a little...

I just dont get it. Why are they trying to parody social justice groups when what they need to be doing is actually forming actual social justice groups?

Kinda like these guys are just mad about not getting laid ever...

R: i think that’s it exactly

they want to believe it’s the fault of the women they want

when really these guys really just need to calm down, ya know?

every time they talk to a woman, you’d think they were playing the last level of a video game for the first time…

and if they realized that it was all just for fun anyway

that your success or failure this time didn’t really MEAN anything

then maybe they wouldn’t put so much of that pressure on themselves that they turned into scary menaces at the slightest hint of rejection?

me: Sometimes guys make me wonder: do you even LIKE women?

The way so many of them talk about women, who they supposedly like,

That widespread instinct among guys to talk about using their dicks to “punish” women…

Like, if you like them, why do you talk like that about them?

And if you don’t like them, why not just leave them alone?

R: well... they like women, i think?

or they like the idea of women,

as long as they never question men,

or their motives, their impulses and decisions....

so yeah, they like women, but they like sex even more?

i think they want girls who never challenge them at all, because their egos can’t handle it.

and prob b/c they have no justifications or deeper meanings to anything they do or say :-/

they just aren’t that self aware,

and can’t defend themselves at all when called on anything.

so they hate feminists

or any women calling out men,

because those men simply can’t answer for themselves

because they have never had to even try to

outside of one of their many many manly versions of those safe spaces they think are so funny or pathetic.

like, any and all clubs or groups that were ever created just for men.

but without those similarly safe spaces consisting only of other men,

(and the kind of men who sympathize with their plight and offer no criticism of their logic btw!)

they would have to either shut up completely or accept that maybe they aren’t blameless in every situation,

or maybe that there are other things they could just be doing?

like... anything else???

but they think they are powerless, because they see themselves as individuals more than a group.

even when they become a group to complain about it together,

and even when they lash out as a group,

and even when there is no significant crackdown on their behavior,

they still somehow convince themselves that they are powerless.

the underdogs.

so they hate feminists,

as a group,

for, as they see it, hating men...

individually...........

???

and i can’t help but feel that a lot of those guys would be really surprised.

like culture-shocked.

cuz a lot of those scary “man hating” feminists are actually really sweet humans who,

it turns out,

don’t even hate a straight guy if he’s honestly treating everybody with basic respect and dignity.

like if their egalitarianism is TRULY that,

and they can just chill, hear people out and accept some new-to-you truths when they hear them, even if they make you uncomfortable at first.

me: Yeah, if you can’t even do that, why should anyone listen to what you have to say?

R: what’s probably even more surprising

if you’re also not just trying to get laid all the time

if the passion isn’t only in your pants

then plenty of so called misandrists may even find you lovable and desirable.

me: ...

Just amazing what happens when you manage to get over yourself i guess

Now before anyone asks - yes, i paste and repaste the word “me:” over and over to the chats i post on the blog, otherwise it just looks... I dunno, wrong? To me anyway. I can only keep track of who said what because i remember. Too many years having to do it from an actual computer, i guess? Maybe thats the first sign of getting old - you reach a certain age, your brain finally congeals into a piece of meat mature enough to rent a car to, but you lose the ability to grasp new technologies quickly :-( not much of a trade off really.

Anyway. She and i kept going with our chat for awhile but mostly just regular stuff - she and her driver had made it almost all the way to Shreveport, which is about the same distance from Houston and Dallas apparently, and she is trying to decide if she wants to keep going with this guy or start hitching from there, depending on where she gets work next.

Now that i think about it i guess there was a little overlap between my talking to her and messaging Slingo, but it kinda didnt feel like it since my conversation with him was just picking up as the one with her was tapering off, and he and i had much less of a volley going on this time anyway.

There was one really interesting exchange we had and if you happened to see a change to the last post i did, this is why:

S: oh by the way, i read your latest update

you might want to put a trigger warning on that one, just fyi

me: Oh?

S: yeah, i mean i had no problem reading it, but if anyone else comes across it and is a survivor of abuse or anything, it might put them right back to that place by reading that one bit

me: Really? Wow, okay. Hadnt thought of that at all. I kinda glossed over that and refused to go into details

When writing it i mean

But now that you mention it, for that very reason...

Guess i kinda thought if i could write it without letting it get to me, it must not be too much? I mean, not like i wanted to expound much on that anyway...

S: hmmm, i know what you mean

it just doesn’t work like that

and for what it’s worth, you’re a pretty great writer - and it doesn’t take many words for a great writer to bring you Right There

i only mention it at all, because you did that really well here, so....

me: Okay wow yo first of all thank you that means a lot

And second, after that comment i can take any criticism :-D

S: hahaha no, not a criticism really, more of a... point of etiquette, maybe?

but that’s all

Other than that, we didnt really talk about a whole lot of anything significant, just learning some more of the ins and outs of who the human i knew turned out to be all these years later. For a year or two of my childhood he was an anchor, and still is in my memory - i remember being Super Unhappy when i heard he was moving across the country, and i wouldnt hang out for like two weeks after he told me. I got over it, before he left even, and we made time to hang out of course, to make the most of what we had left.

And i got over it, his absence after that, pretty quickly. I just kind of accepted it, in that way only really young kids can do, especially when it wasnt like death or anything super tragic, you just probably never saw each other again, but at least got to hope the other was happy.

Then one day you wake up a few years out of school entirely and the Lonely Adulthood starts creeping up on you out of nowhere, whether you spend your time working or looking for work. In there somewhere i made a fresh facebook account and just reached out to anybody who looked familiar for awhile, and now that he has come to the forefront of my life, i do kinda recall him accepting my request at some point, but havent the slightest idea when that was any more...

Not that it matters. The first thing either one of us ever said to each other online since then was chronicled in my very first post here. I was that excited tbh.

And frankly even if it is just online, im also ridiculously glad to still have Rebekah in my life too. Long after our conversation had dried up and even the one with Slingo was petering out, out of the blue she sent me an email:

Hey thanks for taking the time to talk this out with me. Seriously.

It means a lot to me that you have taken these things to heart and are really thinking about them...

Damn i really may have to come back to see you...

Anyway, you’re doing great! Keep reading and keep thinking, and ask me anything you want along the way, i don’t mind.

Just promise me you won’t turn into a Male Feminist, they’re almost as bad as nice guys...

prob gonna pass out now? been a long day!

Sleep well when you do <3!

-R

I have some insecurities about abandonment, which was something that came up at one point in our talking, if briefly. And i feel like she has managed to be both sensitive to that and to not be condescending about it at the same time, if that makes any sense to you... She doesnt confuse this for a need to be coddled or whatever. I just dont expect anyone to ever come back once they go, simple as that. And so i guess that may be why i latched onto my old friend, one of my first lessons in learning to let go, who randomly came back to me when i really needed it.

He also has become a super aware dude, and i am so eternally grateful that every time i come to him with whatever random thought, he manages to already be at least a step or two ahead of me... Not even mad, actually i find it kinda inspiring if anything that theres so much more to learn out there.

And for the first time in my life, actually thinking about some of the stuff ive just lived with for a long time, and realizing that i am a person who could probably benefit from trigger warning myself... For probably the first time ever i feel like i have a vague grip on exactly why im not quite like the other guys, thanks to my old friend.

One of the other interesting things he had to say today was short and really far back up, and i dont want to go scrolling for it so im just gonna paraphrase it: he said that pretty much all young straight guys in our society at least, are a little misogynistic when they first bloom into sexual beings. We get raised into it.

They spend their childhood getting filled with the stories of human history, which mostly only covers the conquests of mostly men, as well as the wide variety of rites of passage into manhood, and they become convinced that they have to kill a lion and wear the skin home or something, or else risk failing to measure up as men.

And since for a lot of men in western culture, there isn’t one clear rite of passage to manhood anymore except losing their virginity, women become their prey.

And because theyre terrified, and so choose to become terrifying to hide it. This reminded me of the drunk guy on the street, when he said this.

Anyway. I havent been doing any of these things, or being those men, because long before that, i had to endure those men for many years, and the very idea is so disgustingly anathema to me to the very core. Ive been preyed upon enough, is all, to not become a predator. But while it stopped for me, none of those men stopped.

It can be a hell of a shock when you learn what other people are going through, people not like yourself. You never know what you have been spared from by virtue of your specific type of existence, unless you go looking for what goes on otherwise. When you are on the winning side, like men are, you can afford to be completely unaware of it, because it doesnt apply to you. You dont even need to know there are different rules for different people.

Just because you dont see it, tho, doesnt mean it isnt unjust.

And i cant help but thinking right now of the story of Solomon and his wisdom in the dispute over a child. It is an utterly ridiculous story, of course, but i see no proof that we as a species dont still require such examples. There IS a certain wisdom in it, asi think it is still very important for us to note when someone chooses the ludicrous option, drawing a line there in the sand... Otherwise we can no longer tell when the conversation has gone totally off the rails.

Considering there are so many guys out there willing to cut a baby in half rather than accept that anything is their responsibility, or that sometimes things can be your responsibility without really being your fault... of course, if you ignore it for too long under that reasoning, and you make it worse, that much IS your fault then but... We need to be reminded that someone will always choose the least logical option too.

Speaking of acknowledging issues tho, i have really got to stop allowing this to preoccupy me, since for once i am going to have to fight my nature and force myself to speak up about a thing, but god knows i dont want to :-x Yet by tomorrow night i have to tell Chad something, even if just “go on without me, bro” - otherwise i will need to actually gather all my stuff and start acting and planning like im actually going anywhere any time in the near future...

Soon all the dudes will be back from wherever they went, different places today since it’s saturday, and they will interrupt my otherwise excellently isolated day, and we will probably just repeat the same damn drinking marathon muddied with small talk throughout, never saying anything too profound or even just personal, let alone the stuff always on your mind or keeping you up at night. I know i sure as hell wont be doing that anyway.

-Remi

nice, guys :-/

tw: brief but graphic description of child abuse/ paedophilia

Good. God. Damn.

My eyes are tired, but my head and my heart are even more tired. Also my lungs, as i have been outside chain smoking in the dark while i have no lie been up all night again, this time reading half the entire internet.

OK, sure, thats not true: at some point i also drew a few sketches too. See?

You got me:

So what have i been reading that kept me from sleeping? Well.

Between all the events of the other night described in my last post, yesterday too was quite an interesting experience as well, and i have been trying to get ahold of either Rebekah or Slingo or both to make sense of it all, but preferably her, as she is the person who got so many of these thoughts rolling in the first place. But neither one has been online tonight.

So. The last two nights have been exactly the same: everybody who lives here comes home, from school or work, and wherever Chad goes. Beer gets bought and a small fire gets lit, in the grill down on the concrete area below and away from the deck, where we had been hanging out the night before. And for as sad or whatever as i might have been both nights, it was a nice feeling of belonging going on with everyone making a big deal about my seeing a girl her last night out of town. More than for my ego, but for some appreciation for the bonds being forged here, i did nothing to correct them - simply refusing to elaborate on any details whatsoever. The dirtiest parts of their imaginations did the work for me, and i got... Not sure how to put this, but... I dunno, dirty grins, leers of mutuality and brotherhood, or something? Im sure it was meant positively tho it was just ugly and weird as all hell, those faces they made.

This devolved over the hours into every dude needing to prove his worth or his viability as a sexual male specimen, and each recounted so many of their so called conquests that i am tempted to assume that not one example was left out, that they all told every tale they had to tell. Things moved on to fantasies and other weird abstracts, which made even less sense to talk about in this group, so around this time i excused myself to get more beer and roll a joint, tho mostly to get away from everybody for a few minutes.

So weird to me that they arent particularly bro-ish, most of these guys. Chad is probably the worst offender in that regard, really. But when they get together, it is a completely different story than talking to any of these guys one by one, when it turns out most of them are pretty nice guys. But then this other side that comes out in group settings makes me wonder - are they just pretending to be normal guys too? Or is this what normal guys are? If enough guys are pretending to be this way that it cant be called normal any more, then why do we pretend it is?

I have this horrible set of fears plaguing me, either that most men really are this gross at the core and i represent some semi rare exception, or that somewhere buried deep within me are the seeds for all these things, too - which is somehow even worse. Thats one of the main things actively fucking with me today :-(

You see the other night, the last with Rebekah, she had said something to the effect of “You are a really nice guy... just dont be a Nice Guy, okay?” The way she said it the second time implied capital letters on both words, like a brand name or something else official. I didnt know what to make of that at all, and let it slide in the moment in favor of the things i felt i could keep a grasp on, just to keep the conversation going.

But last night, after everyone else had gone to bed, i knew i was in no danger of falling asleep since i had gotten back at dawn and slept in til past noon. So i was awake and full of questions and unfinished thoughts - had the dynamic of these dudes really changed any since the night before, or was i just suddenly all too aware of other things going on and noticing more and different elements?

For some reason i decided to email her, i guess cuz i felt like i had a lot to say, but it turns out i didnt really... I had too many questions that needed answering before i would be able to articulate what all the rest of them were, if that makes any sense? I dunno. I told her what was going on at the house and in my head, and asked her to fill me in a little more on topics she broached but had tapered off, only to be left hanging in the air ever since. Now my head is full with it tho.

Unfortunately i didnt hear back from her, she was either asleep somewhere or out of range of service - i know that happened to me a couple of times the way down here. She could also even just be busy, for all i know already somewhere and doing a late night gig or something. Overcome with confusion and not even having Slingo on to talk to yet, just had to look it up online myself. The web is a great resource, of course, but damn if everything isnt also sketchy as all hell and hard to tell fact from fiction at all any more. It can be really handy to have friends who you can bounce things off of, but that requires them to be even more well-informed than you, and to be getting info from trustworthy sources themselves...

He seems to fit the bill tho, which is why i waited as long as i could but still sent Slingo a barrage of questions and other assorted paragraphs, long before he ever showed up online in my very short list of contacts. I figure thats one of the perks to having a friend like him, the kind of person who is always on :-D figured he could just answer whenever he gets a chance.

And yet after awhile i couldnt help myself, i had too many haunting thoughts that were actually keeping me awake, so i just researched, did some homework. But this is a topic covered so well online that it very quickly becomes too much to parse thru, and i got in over my head. I found this all really annoying at first, but i also realized there was probably very little room anywhere else to publish these findings. I had a full set of encyclopedias of harassment and worse open before me, complete with links to some sources more primordial than primary - like the harassment, debasement and outright threatening of women online, for having the nerve to write about these things in the first place...

Seriously, what the fuck?

So i went out back and had a cigarette, leaving my phone inside on the couch like it was some sticky mess that i didnt want to bother cleaning yet, and didnt want to get any of the mess on me in the meantime either. I was thinking about one of the bits of conversation Rebekah and i had that last night, after she asked me about the status of my foreskin:

“My feminist praxis is one of direct male intervention - i teach men the feminism they need but won’t learn without asking for cookies, or turning into a pedantic ass who thinks he somehow gets feminism better than most women, or both.”

“But... shouldnt they just be something like, i dunno... Meninists then? I mean if they plan to be a bunch of men, tackling issues that largely effect men... right?”

“Well…,” she laughed. “I mean, there ARE meninists, but… have you ever been online?”

Evidently i have not been. Not ever before today, he blogged to himself.

Silly me, i spent years using the internet getting to know strangers across the country, and the world even, who needed a place to talk about their faith and potential lack of it in a safe space, away from church or anywhere that had a vested interest in which answers and decisions you came to. Sometimes they made or were trying to make some kind of art, too, and you proofread a lot of short stories, and taught each other how to make your blogs looks better and stuff like that.

And i thought that was what web-savvy meant.

In my haste to answer lingering questions i had been pulling out terms that stuck out to me or had confused me in any way, things to look up later from among my conversations with her, and just started googling. Now that later had come, and i finally did it... Wow. I mean i know i dont really hang out with a lot of guys - or i guess really anyone for that matter - but how the hell is this a thing now? How long has this been going on??? They even have tshirts for christs sake.

But now at least i understand her reaction to my original question a little better, because there are definitely things that effect men more - male prison rape, just for an obvious example, is something you would assume a group calling themselves mens rights activists would have some interest in bringing to a halt, or bringing up to congress or something - but no, the subject only comes up as a means to silence women in conversation, women who are actively crusading to stop rape, or bring attention to the fact that it happens far more often than is acknowledged, to women and men both </3 Apparently these men would rather devote time to blaming women for, i dunno, everything? rather than having to do anything about the things they claim to care about in an argument, but dont do anything to solve...

Got so lost in my thoughts, not sure how long i was out there after that, but then again im equally unsure how long i had been reading before. I smoked a few cigarettes in a row since i wasnt paying attention, and then i felt a little sick from it after. I went back inside a few minutes later when my stomach settled a bit more, and looked around briefly in the kitchen for something to eat since i have not been very good about keeping up with that this roadtrip, not that i ever have been. But i managed to put together something out of random bits in the fridge i thought no one would miss, and went back to the couch with it, but i started to eat just as Slingo sent me a couple of messages in a row:

S: so you discovered Nice Guys huh?

haha oh boy, that’s a whole thing...

anyway i just got home from work so i need to hop in the shower, but i’ll be back on for a bit after that...

you gonna be up for a bit?

I told him i would and took the time to eat finally. Had the pain pretty much under control all day yesterday, then took some more codeine late last night to avoid waking up to pain again like i did the other day... But also to try to sleep, which of course failed me. At my current rate of taking them i have enough codeine for at most the next two days, tho maybe i can stretch it out a little knowing thats the end coming up... And even tho eating after everyone else has gone to bed tends to make me tired, that failed me too... It did make me want to have a cigarette again, however, which i finally indulged after awhile had passed. Took the phone with me but until my friend came back i wanted nothing from the online world, so i just brought out my sketchpad and waited.

Even though i was drawing this time outside, i began thinking about earlier last night, when we were all drinking together like i said, and i was already in a mood that was weird to say the very least, but still trying to actually be pleasant with people more or less. So this meant drinking a lot. I had hardly returned to the group for about ten minutes with a new beer before i was out again, so i excused myself to get more - then Kevin i think it was? Anyway one of the dudes, in perhaps the worst fake Italian accent i have ever heard, said “Hey, dis guy’s a problem!” and everybody laughed, out of politeness or whatever reason people laugh aside from comedy. But i couldve sworn for the life of me at first that he said “Hey! Disguise a problem!”

And well of course i had jumped at that, because i know im hiding a major issue in terms of my health, one that nobody in my IRL knows about it.

But speaking of not-speaking, all this reading ive been doing and about all these things stirred up a bunch of stuff that i dont really talk about myself :-x for one thing, like i was saying before, my general appearance at first glance tends to make me look suspicious - like if you saw me in an extra nice house, looking for a fork, you might assume i was stealing the silverware. Yeah thats happened to me. But no matter what problems it causes, i havent really considered altering it. And like i said before, part of that is a product of growing up in the places and parts of town that all the other kids were afraid to visit. Or their parents were afraid to drop them off, let alone leave them behind? Whatever.

Anyway it wasnt a fear of being jumped by gang members or anything like that, i saw things going on sometimes but basically just got a weird shrug when i would walk past places on my way home. I was just part of the landscape in a way. The thing that changed me in my youth was that i used to prefer to keep my hair long and already had a thin frame, and i experienced a lot of street harassment with a number of really scary episodes... There was one time where the strange dude who clearly wanted sex wouldnt come out and say anything directly, but just kept on walking with me and being creepy, and when i even suggested that he was coming on to me i thought he was going to get violent...

These were all each a scary enough event on their own, but they all solidified into the sedimentary rock wall surrounding my psyche that was initially poured one night when i was like twelve or thirteen and the Drunkle came to stay with us for the holiday weekend, whichever it was, and ever since i can never look at that man again without seeing him nude and crying, wiping away tears, snot and cum, weeping over what he had just done and how he shouldnt have...

And the thing that kills me about him is that everybody ive ever known who also knew that fucker just says, “Oh sure, Nice Guy....” Churchgoer, obviously. And a republican, but not that it matters. Ordained minister too.

Not that it matters.

But all of this really has me thinking, and thinking dark. How many serial killers and domestic abusers have been described as nice before the truth came out - or even after that???

And for that matter even that guy the other night, the drunk who wanted to lose his wallet - his sister came over to assure me how he too is Such a nice guy when you get to know him - he just gets trashed at parties and starts fights with strangers.

Like, is there anything you CANT do and still be called a nice guy by the public at large? :-o

When Slingo came back online he sent me a torrent of text that i could only just barely keep up with, let alone reply much to:

S: ok, so. the “nice guys”.... yeah.

these are guys who are either really awkward, or just really bad at...

...not sure. something, though.

but for whatever reason, they don’t have a girlfriend, despite their strong desire to have one. key wording there, i think - maybe they might say they want to “be with someone” but in most cases they don’t even sound like they have the slightest clue what that means. so “have a girlfriend” is a better way of putting it.

and when they see women out and about with men who, at the very least, have enough confidence to have introduced themselves to her at some point, they seem to assume that the flaw is with the women and their reasons for choosing these men. this presupposes, of course, that any of these guys really are better than the men being chosen, but whatever.

because instead they decide that when relationships end, women are always bemoaning their inability to just find a “nice guy” and, somehow, these dudes have always been overlooked by the women in their lives, despite meeting that qualification.

they fail to notice that their sole theory of their niceness essentially boils down to their ability to hide their sexual feelings for a woman, from the woman, while attempting to develop a relationship with her - all the while remaining primarily motivated by sex and a desire to be with her. if she has to put it bluntly to him that they will never, ever, ever be together - watch how long he stays around.

so really they are just wearing a mask of civility, a nice guise if you will

and it’s as if they want a reward for not being the worst kind of person in the world, as if that’s a thing to be proud of in itself... but somehow they become so awful in their entitled whining, they really end up being some of the worst people you can meet.

these same cats are the ones who will keep insisting that if we have all these complicated rules in place about consent, no one will ever get laid again.

look.......

i’ve been the other man once…. okay, maybe a little more than once. and there have been more than a few times in my life where i’ve had multiple reasons to ask “are you sure you want to do this?”

hell, one time i had to full stop and tell a woman, “hey i haven’t even been trying to get laid the past few months, so i don’t have any condoms handy...” and she had no problem with it. she even got dressed with me and we walked hand in hand to the nearest all night pharmacy to get some

then we walked all the way back to get some ;-)

so here’s the thing: as far as i’m concerned, if stopping to ask for consent in the heat of the moment is enough to kill the mood, then you’re probably a terrible lover to begin with, and you never really had a fire going.

anyway. those dudes are full of shit on all the levels

as if being “nice” even means much of anything. so you’re a nice guy?

so what?

nice doesnt really mean anything, and it doesnt mean “good” by a damn sight. at best, it’s the weakest of compliments.

all right, that’s all i got for now. after this day and that shower, i just need to eat and sleep

i’m off tomorrow though so i’ll check in with you then, ok

I learn new stuff about my dude every damn day...

And at least now after he said all that, i had some kind of counterbalance to it, and could point to one other guy in the world - a friend, even! - who also thought this was all crazy disgusting stuff going on here.

So mostly i have been up all night reading about this, and just how ridiculously common it all is. There are so many blogs and other websites full of this info. I feel so stupid, i had no idea it was this bad, and i have some idea how bad it can be... I mean i had no idea it was this prevalent.

And for all of what i might have gone thru i tend to mostly focus on worst case scenarios and horror stories, whereas i have not even experienced this other, still insidious phenomenon first-hand for myself. Just heard a handful of stories from different women i have been close to over the years... So i knew this was a thing, i just had no idea it was such a Thing.

Anyway, nicely done, fellas. We have caused all women to have to be suspicious of our every move, to question our every motive, the second we begin to interact - each and every one of us. Because there is just no lower limit on what men in general might pull when we dont get our way, and theres no way to be sure who you just got into a car with or whatever.

Yeah, sure, it would be a nice world if you could see a young woman walking alone at night and offer her a safe ride home, but there is no good reason for that woman to accept, and like a hundred reasons to not take it...

And maybe there was a time when there was enough decorum and or social pressure that a man could go up to a woman in the town square and give her a flower and say some romantic thing without assuming he was a rapist, but in that same era there was even more social pressure on the woman, as well, and it probably included tolerating a lot more bullshit from landowning men, including rape... so who’s to say?

Thats just not the reality we actually live in... and maybe as a man you dont feel like it’s your fault we cant be trusted to make innocent offers, but i can say with certainty that it is even less the fault of the women getting harassed just for going out into the world... Whatever, i am at a loss for words at this point. Tho i must confess i actually only read a fraction of the whole internet while failing to sleep at all, and probably a small fraction at that.

Besides, now i have a new thing to worry about: just a few minutes ago as i was typing, someone came into the room, surprising given how early it was. “Hey, I heard you were off with that Becca chick the other night,” i heard Chad smiling at me from across the room. Knowing he was smirking even before looking up from my phone caused me to keep my eyes averted at first.

But i played Dude along with him, which i did almost entirely by the tone of my voice when replying, “yeah well, it WAS her last night in town…” and then mostly out of intellectual curiosity finally looked up at his punchable face to confirm that grin, the one that just screams of the liberation to seek joy in all the crimes it has yet to even conceive of, and for which it will never have to answer - that smug look of his was in fact resting in its usual place. I looked back down at my phone only a few seconds after in disgust.

“Oh yeah?” His voice was full of genuine interest. “Cuz uhhh… I've been ready to bounce for a few days now, but if she left too, you wanna go, like tomorrow maybe? It seemed like you were having a good time here and I felt bad about Louisville, so I was cool to stay here a minute, but…”

And i couldnt help but think in the moment then, what a nice guy he can be...

He left the room already before we could even discuss it further tho :-/

-remi

Updated to add trigger warning

man, hood >:(

Not sure how to feel about last night. Tbh im so confused by so many things that i am tempted to feel pissed off in general, just because anger is a last resort for when you dont know how else to feel, or let yourself feel.

Anyway. Yes, we got to see each other again, and yeah, she's probably gone by now. Yes i could always check in but also kinda dont want or need any further confirmation on that just yet, it sucks enough just holding it in my chest. Today is all about the pain management anyway, since the throbbing sensation that used to be a tooth has returned with a vengeance, seemingly unsatisfied with my so far successful stoicism. Just rude, is what it is, since this is not a case of my trying to get away with anything, so much as simply attempting to man up in the face of adversity when few other options are available…

On top of the actual ache of it all, there is another at least equally uncomfortable sensation going on, a sort of nausea over the whole notion, that only comes to the forefront when the overwhelming injury itself is abated. It is impossible for me not to feel dismayed and disgusted at the sudden loss of such a noticeable chunk of my being; i wonder if this would be like losing a finger or even part of one, if there wouldnt be some small revulsion to it at first, just to have visual proof that a piece of you has literally died already. Anyway.

She said we could keep in touch, and sure, thats definitely a thing i want to do, but it just isnt much solace right now when i was already neurotic over the fact that all my close contacts are in digital spaces. And honestly any consolation i could possibly take from that concept relies heavily on the extent it is made manifest in the near future... I mean, will i actually hear from her? Will she get close to this guy she is about to make the next trip with, or someone else who lives wherever she ends up next? Will i just fade into her past from here?

So ive spent most of the day on the couch where i have slept every night since we got here, just coping on codeine, reading and talking to Slingo, about all these things and masculinity in general. Rebekah has been putting all kinds of weird new ideas in my head that are just starting to make sense, and i needed to bounce what i heard, and have been reading since, off another dude, and one i could trust. Fortunately he somehow had insight on that just like everything else.

SlingoLang: sometimes you meet someone just in time to know you missed them, like your paths cross briefly at an intersection and share a slight moment before you each return to the normal flow of everyday traffic.

from what i can tell, this is just another one of those sorrows that a lot of us share ;-(

can't tell you how many almost-loves i met just before they were moving away or something...

but whatever. i would rather be single and holding onto the moment that might have been something, than allow myself to be so desperate about my loneliness that i take just anything.

Had to admit that this perspective helped me a little, at least in regard to that one thing at least . Yeah, sure, i am bothered by her sudden departure - a whole lot, in fact... In contrast to our earlier meeting last night, the whole thing had an aftertaste of sadness this time, and i wasnt sure if that was on my end or hers or both. But i am still trying to make sense of last night in general, mostly.

Again all we did was talk, or sometimes not talk so that instead we could just experience together, be locked into the same moment alone with each other. She definitely had some extra things on her mind and kept getting distracted, maybe even a little distant, but it was never when i was saying anything - more like we came to natural stopping points in the conversation, and allowed the talk to stop - much like we did in our wandering, we would go for a long time then, coming to a place that either looked or felt right, we would stop without a word about it.

So it was all perfectly natural, but weird, like the weather - which sure didnt help things any in terms of my own awkwardness. It has been really hit and miss the last couple days, where it has either been really nice or really unpleasant. Rain here and there, but mostly just wild whipping winds that would pick up out of nowhere... I think if youre in a good or happy place it could even be a little bit soothing or something, but when youre already agitated on any level then it just gets to be too much very quickly. Earlier tonight things had died down enough to make for a nice evening with a soft, gentle breeze... but now mother nature changed it up to highlight the shift in mood and tone i guess. At least for the most part it was still warm, but if you spent enough time outside then the wind would start to get to you.

Of course today, the next day, the weather has been just fine and placid :-/

We went on, and eventually so did she. I forget if i asked or if it was brought up unprompted, but she began to go on about her next plans - where she wanted to land, what she wanted to do there, and how she was going to choose the next place after that.

I shivered. There was still a chill in the air, or at least to me there was, but then she said, “God, it is still so warm out! I need to take this thing off.” She removed her hoodie and tied it awkwardly around her waist, but we walked less than half a block of constant attempts before she gave up trying to wrap it around herself in any way. “Sorry, can you you hold this for me?” I took it and bundled it up under my arm as we continued.

We wandered a little further, still in silence, then found a secluded spot to stay for a bit again. I tried in vain for what felt like a full minute to light a cigarette and she pulled out her Zippo for me, then rolled and lit one of her own. She looked beautiful staring out at the water so i tried to sketch her, but it came out badly so i moved on to a still life of her sweatshirt, as long as i was in charge of it for now. I finished filling it in today since ive had not a lot better in mind to do:

After a few minutes or so, my phone went off in my pocket and i pulled it out to check, almost instinctively, in spite of my company and her being the only one i wanted to hear from. Interestingly, it was from her anyway:

hey just put the damn thing on before you freeze to death

fuckin dork :-P

Guess i had got pretty distracted to not even notice her taking out her phone to text me. I took the hint, and put her hoodie on instead of just holding or drawing it. “See? Not so bad, is it?” I didnt understand, and she asked if the garment was too girly for me to wear. I told her no, not at all. “So why have you been shivering all this time instead of putting it on?” I said that it wouldve felt presumptuous, to me at least, and she smiled as she moved closer, close enough to wrap an arm around my waist. I stopped shivering.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked.

“Obviously,” i smiled even tho it hurt to do so. “Sure, anything.”

“Is it okay with you if we dont... do anything tonight? I mean, i know we might not see each other for awhile, but...” I let her know it didnt bother me, even if it would be nice, and i said that too, as well as that if i thought she felt pressured to when she wasnt feeling it, it would be a lot less nice. She smiled more and hugged me a little tighter.

“So can I ask you something else?” Before i could say anything, since i had just a moment before already said yes to literally anything and was at a loss for what to say to confirm further, she continued, “Sorry in advance, it’s weird.”

“OK, what is it?” And she asked me if whether or not i am cut, that is to say, if i had been circumcised. I informed her that i am not, and she said, “Nice! I knew it.” She did? “Well it’s not like I was 100% positive on it, but there’s a trend I’ve noticed.”

She told me that she had a working theory about circumcision, how guys who are cut treat their dicks almost like these blunt instruments, whereas a lot of uncut guys have no choice but to be a bit more sensitive, since their extra skin also needs lubrication and foreplay is a good way to avoid having sex that just ends up uncomfortable. We talked about this for too long probably, because it was really interesting how it lined up with my own thoughts and feelings about sex, and how i couldnt align with most men and their attitudes, or even make much sense of how they came to those conclusions, for most of my damn life, really. “I’m not trying to say that if all men were left uncircumcised, that there would be no more rape or war or anything like that - but it does seem to me that allowing for cruel and nonconsensual but permanent mutilations of newborn boys is a good way to assure the continued creation of cruel men...”

I couldnt help but agree for the most part: in the developed 21st century it is just not necessary from a medical standpoint. I mean i get it if you’re not thrilled with washing your kid’s penis manually for the first few years of their life, but you’re still wiping their ass that whole time anyway. And it just seems horrid and cruel to change a boys natural body within hours of being born like there was already something wrong with it. I bet it’s fairly traumatic, even tho you don’t remember it, and i bet the period of adjustment for a cut penis still hurts for many days.

But of course, having read the whole bible, i had to ask her, “What about Jews?”

“Yeah, i know, my theory doesnt hold together there. But in that case, where it’s a cultural thing, i think it comes along with a lot more respect. Call me a cultural relativist if you must, but there is something different at play here. Like, you have some idea of why that happened to you and some part of you must recognize an attempt at holiness or whatever, even in this minor surgery on your supposedly least holy parts... Dunno what it is, but the few Jewish guys I’ve been with were exceptions to this rule, so i don’t think it applies there... It’s complicated.

“Anyway, all i was trying to get at, is that i prefer it when dudes arent pushy, or obviously and exclusively sex-motivated. And that is the trend i was getting at before. I like when men can be comfortable as themselves, even when fucking is imminent...anyway. I like you, kid. Come on, let’s keep walking.” Somehow even the diminutive endearment remained endearing ringing from her mouth. I was really fucking grateful too that in spite of all the positive reinforcement of male behavior and ego i had just participated in earlier, i hadnt let it end up getting the best of me and blowing it completely this evening with her :-)

So we kept walking, kept talking. I let out that i was going to miss her a lot when she left, and then got annoyed with myself because i knew i was trying to keep that under my hat. Dont know why exactly, but it felt like some unspoken rule at play... I dunno. I guess it isnt so bad to have said that, and she did respond very positively to it - even reciprocated the sentiment - but also i felt like i had to be calm about it, not let on too much the tidal wave of my emotions.

Have i always been like that? Theres a part of me now, and last night walking with her too, that is suspicious of overwhelming feeling. It can feel like some kind of intruder into yourself, like someone stole the car that is you and went joyriding all night, only to leave you in the morning with no gas and new engine trouble. I feel like i have to guard very strongly against that possibility, basically at all times but especially at others.

Fortunately for me, i know one of the greatest possible deflections, a secret held by therapists, pastors and counselors who eventually turned it into a career: so i asked her what was wrong, since she was seeming distracted too.

“Oh, nothing,” she told me, clearly withholding something as she did. I could be annoyed by the obvious lie, but i would have to be annoyed with myself too. “I just get stressed out before i make a move somewhere. I love to travel, i hate to anticipate it. Does that make any sense?”

I nodded, because it did, actually. So much so i had to wonder if that really was all that was bothering her, or if she was a better deflector than even i am...

“I do love this town... Tell ya what, you stay here and get settled, and i will stay with you next time i come back. And maybe i will make it a point to come back, because i know that you got settled here. What do you think?” I told her i was already half sold on doing just that before and that now i had to really consider it. “Okay,” she said, coming to a stop in front of a random dark house, “this is me. Or, this is where i leave from in a few hours...” She kissed me softly and i said i hope she does come back. She said to stay where she can find me, preferably someplace cool, and it was a deal. Then she went toward the dark house and disappeared into it, and for all i know out of my real life forever </3

So i started walking back to the house, not hers but not mine either, in such a dejected place in both heart and mind that i meandered my way there thru less familiar terrain, testing my internal compass. I tend to prefer meander to the mere word “wander” in times like these, since it feels like a mashup of “me” and “wander” and has this implication that the inner self is the only destination in mind. Once a little time passes you begin to detach from the world around you, still completely aware of things like traffic but simply uninvested in anything but the most direct and actual danger.

And eventually i came to not know what street i was on, how far from the house i was exactly or much of anything else but the relative lack of traffic on the path i followed, but it was here something caught my eye - a parked car spun suddenly yet casually into action just up the street, and a guy about my age walked away from there to join a large gathering about a block or so further up. He was half a block ahead of me at least, heading the other way.

The was truly only one factor involved that a served to spur me into interaction of any sort in this moment, let alone with some stranger. Dude in question dropped his wallet while putting it into his back pocket, but he kept walking, seemingly oblivious. I sighed like a comic book hero before they make a silly quip aside like “never a day off, huh?” before they spring casually into action. I sped up and snagged the wallet on my way, and saw him ahead of me, swerving a bit but at a steady enough clip, so i picked up my pace at the same time as his parcel.

When finally i got within shouting distance, it still took a couple of calls to get him to turn around, and his response to my “hey man, you dropped something” was a smile and nod and shrug, coupled with a watery squint that made me wonder how drunk he was. He said something but I didn't hear it, then he turned away and continued walking, which prompted me to double time the last bit of distance between us and reach out to tap him on the shoulder, just about at the gathering he seemed to be headed toward.

He turned around again slowly, no noticeable change in immediate demeanor, and then reached out to me so softly and even gingerly that i just watched it with a kind of curiosity. He grabbed my shirt and pulled me in very close, “You comin at me mad disrespectful,” he informed me. I tried to apologize, saying that was about the last thing I was trying to do, my hands up to show my peaceful intent and continued lack of aggression. The crowd spilled onto the sidewalk and quickly surrounded us, most of what looked like his friends and family trying to intervene, but on my behalf; if this all werent confusing enough, it turned out this guy and i share a first name, so a bunch of people i never met before seemed to be trying to reason with me. Most of what the guy said was lost on me in the ensuing din despite the fact that he grew louder and more insistent. When he reached an unintelligible crescendo, he released his grip and backed away, then turned and headed somewhere inside maybe, but totally out of sight. It was utter chaos but only changed the melody and not the minor key playing within me, not even the tempo altered, just stacked harmonies of confusion, deescalation, and whatever the hell this drunk dude was yelling unintelligibly about, in whatever direction in the distance from which his voice still echoed.

Less rattled than even i thought i should be, i straightened out my shirt and just said, “fuck all this, then,” then continued on a moment before spinning on a dime and, to the person of the group nearest me I said, “just let your man know he dropped his goddam wallet, and i was trying to get it to him.” I handed it off and resumed my walk again. My phone buzzed and i found a few missed messages in addition to the new one from Rebekah, so i was most of the way to the end of a longer than average block i stopped to respond, but barely typed anything before i found that i was at a loss for anything to say at all :-x For a moment i stood there staring at my phone.

Still lost in my own world, the drunk had covered most of the distance between us before i noticed him approaching at all, his gait still just barely wobbly, like he could technically drive a car right now but really truly should do no such thing. He was definitely not coming to me to apologize, that much i could tell, but only that. I looked up at him, puzzled, and not at all sure what to expect, and still not really caring much beyond a morbid curiosity, or just a desire to feel something, just anything, different from all the sorrow and physical pain thats accumulated within me now, even if it is in no way something good. I remember feeling or thinking: So we’re about to fight? Ok I guess, wonder how much this will hurt tomorrow...

“What's your problem?” he demanded.

Still annoyed but also just lost at this point in our relationship, i told him there is no problem, “You kind of attacked me, for no reason, when all i was trying to do was help you out… So i decided you didnt want my help, and then i left. End of story. Simple as that.”

“So who you tryna call then?” He stepped up to me aggressively, toe to toe and eye to eye, so close you cant even really see anything anymore. It felt more awkward than anything else. “You think I’m afraid of the police?”

There was something about all of this that struck me as mostly posturing, and i began to feel like if he was going to hit me he would have done so already. That twinge of doubt in his voice, too, made me wonder if he maybe was really scared of the cops, and hence this whole extra outburst. I couldnt help but notice that he made it impossible to look into his eyes, which is exactly what i would do to hide my true feelings just as they threatened to spill out all over the place. So i stood there where he met me, eyelashes practically batting each other, and said in my calmest voice, “Dude, no, i had no plan to call the cops on you. I swear.”

“My sister said she saw you dialing, who you tryna call?”

Still calm, i smiled and showed him my screen, where on top was the last text from Rebekah, and between that and the keyboard below was an unfinished chunk of words that had yet to go out. I had turned my head to watch my hand pull the phone out of my pocket, but otherwise had kept the stance he chose for us. He smiled devilishly at me, and put his arm around me with more force than any maneuver i had seem him try yet when he said, “My Man!” His posture was still this side of threatening and aggressive, but there was a happy lilt in his voice now as he yelled up the block, “My man was just texting his girl!” And he started to walk away before he got up close again, tho not as close as last time and told me something along the lines of not puffing out my chest so much, i think. Only that doesnt make a ton of sense since i definitely dont do that, but maybe he doesnt realize i have starved myself concave over the years, so a casual and drunken observer may very well be confused, i guess. And sure, i have adopted this kind of sketchy, unshaven look as a result of growing up in neighborhoods a lot like this one, but it is all a deflection, too. Faith or no faith in religion, or even god, im still a priest at heart who foolishly believes in compassion and peace for no other or greater reason than the tasks themselves, and who will take all your heathen confessions to the grave. So if you start a fight with me, well... you must have really wanted to start a fight, is all - and you have simply found the wrong kind of man for all that.

But hell, not like any of that encounter held up to further scrutiny anyway. And for that matter, even i walked away almost disappointed that nothing happened for all that pomp and circumstance that came along with it, but even startled myself a little with the observation that dying under such ridiculous circumstances, over an easily explained misunderstanding, would just be the perfect ending to the story of my whole fucking life...

Got back to the house just before dawn, and promptly passed out, forgetting to take anything for the pain i would wake up to of course >:(

So yeah, thank god for my tooth slowly abscessing, or i wouldnt know how to feel at all today.

-remi

leaves, changing :-P

My night with Rebekah was great and almost perfect. We met up really nowhere, just near a bunch of landmarks that i already forgot cuz what i was scanning the scene for when i got there, was her.

I managed to show up at the gist of the intersection of streets and shops where she said was best to find her, albeit a little early - actually by half an hour. And then of course, true to form, she still arrived later than the time she had planned, so there was nothing to do for a little while. I found a grassy, leafy, verdant place to park myself near a fountain and just kinda peoplewatched til I got bored and started drawing. I sketched a few things but this one I started to flesh out, maybe I will even give it to her?

After I finished doing that i sent a picture of it to her, telling her I was relatively here, to which she texted back

me too!

Where here are you?

Which here inside of here?

What part of the here do you occupy???

Argh this was a bad idea sorry

Technically she was right, this place was not only broad in scope but still full as hell of tourists for a tuesday evening, and not even THAT tuesday. Meeting a person here is as ill-fated as arranging to find each other deep within a dense national forest, far off the beaten path - once you get close enough it becomes easier to spot one another, but getting to that point can be bloody murder.

But i had been having a nice time waiting and was really excited to be seeing her at all, so how could i be mad? I texted back that only one of us should move around looking, while the other stayed in one place, that way we don't end up just missing each other over and over. She said that made sense, and since she just got here that i should stay put while she would do the looking.

This time we hadnt tried to meet at any specific place, just to meet out in the open and go from there. I told her that this time she could choose the place while I paid for it , which seemed like an ideal contrast to our last meetup, and also because I figured some good should come from my being so uncomfortably flush with cash atm. She texted back,

Maybe this is weird but not sure I'm comfortable with that?

The paying for me I mean

You can choose the place again tho if you want :-)

I admitted it was rather stressful endeavor trying to figure such things out in a strange place and a timely fashion, and she was so amenable to that i could hardly believe it. Normally in a moment like that such a revelation only yields shame on my part, but i didnt feel it this time.

So once i got the word she was in the vicinity as well i did my damnedest to describe the stuff I was in front of… i had moved from the fountain by then, having been sitting there so long with my sketchpad that one of my legs had fallen asleep, so resolved to return to an obvious site where i could be more easily spotted and told her where to find me.

Argh i was JUST there!!! Hang on

Coming back around lol

Soon enough we actually did find each other, but eventually we had to resort to literally using our phones as phones to call each other like in the olden days or something. I was almost annoyed at the whole thing til her approach at last, laughing, saying “always a good sign when you have fun just trying to meet up with someone, right?” She hugged me, but immediately spun her whole body so we were facing the same way, and we began walking in that embrace.

You know those movie-perfect dates, where the weather is perfect and youre both totally engaged and all your establishing shots are sunset? That was my evening basically.

And truth be told we didnt even really do anything, just walked around, grabbed some food at some place, somehow all immaterial in the long run no matter how tangible in the moment. We talked, about nothing really, but it felt so good to say and to hear it all. I feel like i did a lot of the talking this time around, but she kept asking me to since i guess i usually dont. Ironically i will not reproduce e any of those thoughts here since i talk about myself enough in this space as it is. Thats the point i suppose, but still, pretty sure a lot of all that has already been covered in these digital pages anyway.

So yeah, an almost perfect evening all around, and totally perfect right up til the end, when she drops the news on me that shes heading out of town ASAP.

I was walking g her back to her stop on the trolley apparently, tho she knew the way way better than i, when she paused on the sidewalk and gently touched my arm. “So it looks like I'll be going soon.” My heart sank deeper into my chest, for warmth and protection </3 “Tonight? Maybe tomorrow, not sure yet,” she replied to my obvious journalistic questions, then continued. “I think I just need to get the fuck out of Dodge, ya know?... That photographer I told you about, well, he gets worse daily. There were so.e soft red flags at first that turned out to have sharp edges...” Her eyes ddrifted off with her thoughts for a moment, and I was basically alone briefly, wondering at the details but not wanting to pry. I asked if she couldnt just find someplace else to stay in town, and she sighed, looking as if she couldnt be more exhausted as she exhaled, “I just make it all look a lot easier than it really is.”

She said she takes a somewhat taoist approach to life (although she stressed that she hesitates to call it that), that she goes where the wind and the offers take her. So when a friend put her in touch with another friend in town planning a road trip of her own, they got in touch and she got a ride going as far as she wanted in that direction.

“I'm compelled to seize these opportunities cuz I grew up without much, so we never got to travel or anything cool. But once I was a legal adult I had also lost enough of my family and structure that it was super easy to just let the rest go. Let myself go. And in some ways I still just barely care what happens to me, cuz I've only ever had so much to build on, or build with, that building anything UP became a pipe dream. And when I stopped trying, I felt free finally…. I would rather find ways to sustain myself on next to nothing, and just go wherever I want and see new places all the time…”

As much as I appreciated & understood each & every one of those sentiments, it also struck me as a lonely existence; her boyfriend seems to mean an awful lot to her but still she travels away from him constantly. For some foolish reason I actually asked her about that, and if there was nothing worth staying anywhere for - any place she might put down roots and create a full life for herself. She frowned, and I instantly regretted it.

“I do have a full life,” she insisted, “fuller even maybe than most. And sure, part of me would love to just stay with him all the time. But among other things, he woukd never let me do that to myself. If I ever get sick of what I'm doing and want to call it quits, that would be something different entirely - but he was the only one to encourage me while everyone else was just tearing my ideas down, tearing ME down, and he always reminds me that this is what I signed up for. And most importantly, he would rather risk losing me than keeping me locked up under false pretenses. Or just cuz I'm too afraid of the world and what I want.

“Anyway. I can make attachments just fine. And in case you failed to notice, I made a special point of seeing you again before I have to go... May not seem like a lot right now, but…” She trailed off again but this time her eyes stayed locked on me. I smiled and she smiled right back. We both glanced in the direction of the oncoming streetcar, and when i looked back she pounced, kissing me so hard there was nothing to do but return in kind <3!

“Awww! So you DID notice!”

She gave me one final, loving look. It was over in an instant, and in the next she was boarding and already gone.

I found myself in that spot between walking distance and needing transit, where waiting for a train or whatever will take as long as just going on foot. So i headed back toward the house, trying to remember what day exactly we got here, but my brain is a bit fuzzy from all the drugs the last few days and then the sudden not drugs today. What was today? Still Tuesday? OK so tbh i didnt abstain completely, just cut back dramatically, tho I brought a backup pill just in case of a flair up, and that moment seemed as good as any to take it. Thought about wandering with my thoughts awhile like this, but then thought better of that, remembering all the cash on my person - i had left the vast majority of it at the house, but still brought an unseemly amount along tonight. Still, i got lost for a half block or so at some point til I came to a cross street & realized I had simply turned early on the last one, was all.

When i arrived at home base I went straight to my bag and checked the stack in there as stealthily as possible. Suspecting but trusting no one. For the first time ever there was some strange internal appreciation for modern banking, but it sickened me and i decided not to indulge it. I looked around when all was safely tucked, but was alone. There was laughter in the back so I went into the kitchen, and sure enough there were people outside drinking on the back deck, only half of whom i recognized. Chad wasnt there, and that was mostly good, but thanks to different sleep and play schedules we had barely seen each other since we got here. Again thats not to complain, but i keep expecting him to ditch me here, so also like keeping tabs on him. Joining the crowd, I grabbed a beer i barely wanted and asked what my fellow traveler was upto.

“He left,” said a guy named Kevin who seems cool but is more aloof than even i, meaning we have learned nothing about each other in almost half a week here together.

I held my panic in check and just asked, “He left? Where the hell to now?”

“Just took Jesse to the airport, should be back soon depending on traffic.” I asked why he didnt just take his own car there, and Kevin filled in, “actually my car, now. Jesse is moving back home and he doesnt want it any more anyway, so he sold it to me.”

It turned out he was only here for a two year grad program that he finished last spring, and was just staying the summer in NOLA til his lease was up. They just finally got someone to replace him and who moves in tomorrow, so he made sure to be good and gone by the end of the day.

Fucker didnt even stay to say goodbye >:(

I saw Kevin with new eyes then, now more of a main character than a backdrop, since i felt like I was losing all my anchors at once. Not gonna lie i kinda hated him for half a second just because he was all i had left, esp if Chad just kept driving instead of coming back. How would I know? How could i stop it? What kind of recourse is even at my disposal in that case except to make do here?

Aw fuck, i just realized that Jesse was probably offering me his room, and it was too late now. And if he just meant for me to crash here awhile - is that what he said??- there may be no taking him up on that now. Would these guys be cool?

No reason to worry yet, i figured, as much as I wanted to, so i chose to drink instead, quickly finishing my first and instantly diving into the next. No, i would be cool. Having gulped the second drink even faster i got just enough attention to organically bring up the subject of weed and having it, which was also a crowd pleaser, so I disappeared to procure it.

Also for no reason, in my rummaging thru my bag my hands made tactile contact with the three separate wads of bills squirreled away in there. There are just enough tiny hidden compartments to accommodate this, meaning my more illicit belongings were made less secure. Not a big deal, but just cumbersome and messy all around in a life so thoroughly disordered already. I shrugged and plugged in my phone to charge, since I hadnt when i came in.

When the screen lit up I saw a new message of general encouragement from Slingo, who wanted to know how the pain was going, and couldnt figure out what he meant a moment. Not that theres an absence of pain right now, but what there is should still be news to him. Of course he just meant the tooth, i figured at last, but i stopped everything to vent to him. His last text was a few hours back, but i felt like he honestly cared and that was enough.

I wrapped up, apologizing for bombarding his inbox, and gathered the stuff i promised to share with the guys out back. Right on cue, Kevin walked in.

“Hey! Was wondering where you went. You coming back out?” I nodded and stood up from the couch, waving my phone before setting it down again on top of my open bag, nonchalantly telling him that a girl distracted me. “Cool,” he said, smiling at my normalcy and relateability, “brought you another beer by the way.” I took it with my free hand, his eye on the contents of the other. “Do you mind if i roll it? Jesse always let me.”

We were still standing near the couch, so when my phone went off it was audible and visible even without moving much. Slingo had replied to my rantings:

i dig, man. i’ve got abandonment issues myself. i think a lot of people do ;-(

I handed everything but my drink to him, my closest IRL friend for all intents and purposes, and picked up my phone again.

His timely text made me wonder about the inner workings of the other mind in this room. Was he missing his friend tonight? Did i just gain some upper hand in noticing theres no cause to be on the defensive? Is being the coolest guy in the room that easy, or did i just morph into a new person somehow? What even is a person?

Oh right, third beer in on top of pills, of course the only way to be from here is loopy... Good thing for me nobody seems to have any plans but to do the same themselves this evening so it shouldnt stick out very much.

Speaking of which, Kevin, who was halfway thru the task he had asked for, now inquired whether or not i was going to respond to her, the girl i mostly made up. I laughed and lied about how sometimes you gotta make em wait or something else a guy might usually say, then texted back to the only other person in my life who puts me at ease. Not to say that she, the woman who i didnt make up, has been written off - but if she heads out for parts unknown then she becomes just another abstract. Just when i was bonding with another guy in my immediate, which is rare enough…

Oh and fuck me if fall isnt right around the corner, too - i mean it is still very early in september and kids are just starting to go back to school, and not to mention that there are only so many places any farther south i can go without a passport - but i am a born and raised new england boy and i will never fail to notice leaves starting to turn. The northeast US can be really beautiful, especially the farther north and/or east you go from nyc, but only in the warmer months, and once those leaves start to go it gets prettier still, but also acts as a harbinger of the harder time to come for anyone who isnt just visiting.

It just seems as though whenever somebody important to you leaves, like one of the major moving parts that makes your internal life and compass function, it’s always a precursor to basically everything changing - your whole life, really. And maybe it’s the direct fallout of their departure, like you cant afford to live in your own house anymore, but sometimes i think it just hits you on a gut level either way, like when a couple has been together for 60 years, then when one of them dies the other goes 6 months later…. :-/

I dunno… My feelings have been floating all over the place all evening, which is what i told Slingo too just before declaring my intent to get fully intoxicated this evening, and promising if i survive he will get word in the morning. My phone was set to silent and set back atop the rest of my belongings. My boy Kev was certain he was finished tho less confident he had done well, but i told him it looked all right and we went thru the kitchen, toward the back yard again, only stopping for what i decided should probably be my last drink for now, gauged by the pills in my system and my sudden inability to recall from when and how many.

As we stepped outside Kevin paused and turned his dark eyes in my direction again to ask sincerely, “You sure it will burn ok?”

And i realized or decided or both that i can simply be anybody, whoever i want to be. With the sense that i was accepted and that my input had as much sway here as the rest, i led us both to the center of the group and said loudly, to one and all, “well it's worth a try right? And fuck it, i can just roll another while we're smoking, just in case. Let me get this one started first.” Everyone surrounding me was immediately distracted from their prior conversations to applaud my generosity, then went quiet and now were watching as i lit the fruits of Kevins efforts. After a second attempt i got it going well enough to hand off and just as a dude named Frank, a skinny guy in skinnier jeans, came around the corner from out front with Chad right behind him. I took a slow sip of my beer with the hand not busy passing to the left, making eye contact with my traveling pal the whole time.

He asked, “Any beer left?” before he even came to a complete stop near an empty seat in the circle that was right in front of me. I had been thinking of taking it anyway and so into it i flopped, as casually as i could.

“Plenty in the fridge,” i told him. “And could you grab me an extra one, too? I have work to do.” I broke eye contact to scan for a good surface to roll on while taking an inadvisably huge swig of my active beverage. Someone left a notebook out with a vinylly cover on it so grabbing that, asked my audience, “who has my weed? Is it me?” Some of the guys laughed, but they were all altered anyway.

Kevin, mostly joking, sat next to me as he said, “Here ya go, boss!” just in time for Chad to return with our drinks. I rolled another in record time, and yeah it was an objectively better job done, but as far as the speed goes i humbly told them there was a lot of shake in this bag. I was going to light it but Kevin, on my right, handed me the half-finished first of them then, so we swapped.

“You waited til last, last time, so you can be first on this one,” i told him. “Jesus said so, it's in the Bible.” I stifled my giggles til after Kevin passed the second one to me, and i to Chad, who stole someone elses seat to sit next to me.

The rest of the night went on like that, til my unique body chemistry and extra tolerance handily outlasted everyone, who excused themselves one by one to hit the hay. I gave in to do likewise, but my heart wasnt really in it and i ended up on the couch awake, writing this post instead, which ive been up to ever since. But just a moment ago i got two notifications:

ok i bought some time! meetup again tonight?

or did you already write me off as a goner lol :-P

Yeah, i can be anybody, including a dude who gets no sleep...

-Remi

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