August Eleven: the division that was lately this odyssey, believe me

Someone asks: “who are these people?”

I.

Rob was a friend I met in high school. I briefly wrote about him in the post titled “Diseased”. He was chronically absent back in our school days because he was touring with his metal band but he still graduated and we remained friends into adulthood, drawn together by the common bond of being music nerds and picking up girls. He and I used to party, exchange pills, and play guitar together. Our best time were spent sitting on his back patio smoking cigarettes and talking for hours. Intimacy is hard to come by. I was one of his few friends who wasn’t a complete idiot. Such is the nature of being in the music/drug scene. The pussy situation is one hundred times easier if you’re doing live performances. A fact as old as time I’m sure.

But the drug thing always worried me. I remember when he told me he shot up heroin for the first time with this one faggot photographer we knew. He kept insisting he’d never do it again and talking shit about the hard stuff and how it was a distraction and how he didn’t want to end up a tweaker like his dad apparently was when he was younger. I’m not sure he did meth but I’m going to assume he did. Photofag got sent off to some farm where he got sober and must’ve joined some cult of sobriety because that’s all he ever talked about after he came back. But Rob disappeared suddenly. Living with some girls in a shitty ghetto. His phone stopped working. I looked for him but nobody seemed to know where the fuck he was – nobody. An old friend of mine said he saw him sleeping in a car with some black kid. It bothered me endlessly but what could I do? He had my acoustic guitar and I know he pawned it for drug money since he pawned his three-thousand dollar Iguanaburst Les Paul. I didn’t care. I just wanted my friend back.

Much to my surprise, he turned up after over a year of nomadic car living and drug abuse. He moved upstate with his mom and got sober. I heard this and planned to visit him.

I was outside the cafe (where I currently sit writing this) in my beaten-to-hell Toyota Camry when I got a text from our mutual guitar mentor that said:
“Robbie Lee?”
I responded “I haven’t heard from him, I think he’s avoiding me because he stole a guitar from me.”
Text came back “He’s no longer with us. I’m sorry.”

I had missed the funeral but made it to a friends’ gathering that night. Some of them were trying to convince themselves that it was an accident. Nobody mentioned the twenty-seven club. I played the audio file posted on this blog over the garage stereo. It’s  tainted by sadness now.

II.

I started dating a girl who lives two apartments down from me. This is a mistake if you didn’t guess that already. She’s a petite blonde who is sexy but modest. She goes to church on Sundays. I dated her for two years and never fell in love with her. This is why we broke up last week. I was honest that I didn’t love her. I feel guilty about it.

But she’s boring and neurotic. Holy shit, can we just go somewhere without you complaining the whole time? You put up with my hyper sexuality and racism, but you can’t handle the fact that I like to stay up late and sleep in. You can never decide on what you want to watch on TV on the rare occasions I put that shit-box on. Fine. We’re watching Jason and The Argonauts then. No sense of adventure; mentally or physically. Her mind locked in the status quo, mine looking to the eternal Forms. You’re a good girl. You’re every incel’s dream girl but you have no discernible inner life. “What are you thinking about?” every women asks every man at some point hoping the answer is their future together. I was thinking about the Zapruder Film. What would’ve happened if JFK crushed the deep state and didn’t commit to Vietnam. If LA Sierra PE became the national standard and I didn’t have to date bland women just because they’re thin. So we broke up and it’s for the best because I never let myself be intimate with her. I also banged a whole score of other women during the early days of our relationship. What’s wrong with me?

III.

A girl I hang out with has me writing album reviews for a Portland based online music publication. I call it a blog. I can’t do it. “It’d be nice to have a musician contribute to the site.” No it wouldn’t be. The thing about Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs is they know precisely nothing about music. This is why Christgau writes about personalities and Bangs about lyrics (like a retard). You cannot write about music and I cannot imagine anyone wanting to read about it. You want to read about Keith Moon driving a limo into a pool, not about why a song is good or not. Music is supposed to be listened to, not talked about. How do you convey that little brraaaZING sound in Beck’s gamma ray really makes the whole thing work? Do a whole review in onomatopoeia?

Words are another thing. Words are supposed to be concrete and honest. They can be beautiful like T.S. Elliot but honestly, nobody cares anymore. Even English majors don’t read anymore.

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December Three: Ex’s and Oh’s

 

You’re an attention whore. You posted a picture of yourself in a bathing suit in November with the caption “thinking of sunnier Sundays.” Is this normal behavior; to be fondly reflecting on summer by posting bikini photos of yourself on the internet? Your tits looked perfect semi-supported by your black top, sticking out just enough to not show your nipple. The composition emphasized your snow white chest and freckles, your breasts shaped into a near perfect water drop. I squeezed one out it to that picture – you probably knew I would. I sprayed some avocado oil on my hand and imagined forcing myself into you. Your stupid expression turned into frantic moans in my sick head. Anyway, I got you to drunkenly admit to flicking the bean to memories of me so I guess we’re even. Sometime I masturbate to you twice in a day while I used to only be good for one fuck followed by a long nap. Absence makes the cock grow harder and all that. I want to fuck you but I also want to hang out with a girl who isn’t boring. You always listen to me with interest. These girls in Midtown are bores. They act as if they’re allergic to showing even the slightest interest in another human being, especially me. And they’re ugly so why bother? There’s two cute girls in the neighborhood and I’m dating both of them. I’m still unhappy. I’m still a cunt. I want to tell you to come move back to Northern California and marry me. Your faux aristocrat mother hates me because I’m poor and unrefined but I’ll still beat her at tennis because she’s an old woman. Put a little spin on the ball so she has to chase it.

You’re living that life though. You’re going to gain more weight and get the capacity for intimacy fucked out of you by tall grad school faggots. You’re going to get a 100k job in marketing or something and spend all your money on LA rent and student loan payments. Golden handcuffs. You’re going to be thirty by that time and you’re going to want kids more than your job. Your friends are idiots and they’re fat and they’re failures in relationships. These things are not unrelated. Stop taking advice from them. Stop looking up to that Facebook feminist twat while you’re at it. Slim up and let me undo it by getting you pregnant. That would make you happy. I’m happy to pop Adderall and play David Bowie songs on a piano all day. It does get lonely though.

June Thirty: My Therapist Says to Write Things I’m Thankful For

Continuing in the theme of withdrawal-induced negativity from the last two days, let me tell you how much I hate the TVs and music at the gym. I can always find a way to complain about AV. First: what the fuck do we need to watch TV while doing cardio for? And why can’t I look away? These things are hypnotic. I’m focusing on becoming more atomized and isolated and weird by putting podcast voices directly into my brain while meditating on the LED track showing the miles I’m simulating riding for some reason. There aren’t any TVs near the weights because men need to focus because they actually work out there. This is a chick thing. It’s just the fat chicks on the bikes who are trying to pretend like they’re out-training their shitty diets by keeping their heart rate at ninety BPM for an episode of Real Housewives or two. They’d be better off not exercising so at least they wouldn’t be able to pretend like they’re in the process of becoming less of an eye sore. Keep climbing those Random Hills, Missyphus. The music is fucking terrible. These auto-tuned, guttural ejaculations of sound sitting so high in the mix that they literally fuck your eardrum. UGH UGH UGH UGH in the chromatic scale. That bass noise that sounds like a digital fart. Music so bad, it’s practically avant-garde. Who writes this shit? I read on the internet it was old Jews who are trying to keep us demoralized. I used to think that was crazy but no longer – there’s no other logical explanation.

The endorphins from working out have quelled my anger. I’m glad art is dead and architecture sucks. Plato said ugly buildings and public art would turn people into assholes but look how normal I turned out. He didn’t know we would have electronic facsimiles of African bards screaming their exploits into our ears everywhere we went as well. I’m thankful for Chopin, the AR-15, thin women, Safeway/Vons supermarket, chess, the ocean, girls who don’t shave their cunts, and Marcus Aurelius.

Fuck Sir Walter Raleigh. Or native Americans. Whatever.

June Twenty-Nine: Two Years Gone

Jesus Christ – I drink a lot. It snuck up on me. Drink some beers after work, run out, drink some Seagrams 7 and bitters, go into work hung over. Repeat. I have to quit smoking because it’s given me some weird sleep apnea shit and I feel sick all the time. I do pretty well at not smoking until I get drunk – so I have to stop both. It’s the most unoriginal problem ever and thus, the most unoriginal blog post. I hate my job and so I am literally killing myself when I get home. My neighbor does the same. He works in a warehouse where they sell building supplies. Doors mostly. He manages ex-cons for ten to twelve hours per day and then comes home and drinks gin and tonics and smokes American Spirits. I keep saying “we’ve gotta quit doing this” and he says “yep” and then we don’t.

Technology is a series of petty frustrations. Nothing fucking works right and if it did, it would still be stupid. I’m an AV integrator. That means I struggle with stupid bullshit all day; wireless mics drop out, switchers crash, transmitters stop transmitting – there really isn’t anything in AV that works consistently. I’m constantly hanging giant TVs (ninety inches minimum to see an Excel spreadsheet clearly) on walls and getting my hands cut up from running cables. And I hate TV. I don’t even have a TV. People ask why and I say “to keep the Jews out of my head” but honestly, I’m too lazy and unenthusiastic to watch anything. Or too drunk.

I’m about to have my second yearly review for this job and I’m about to turn twenty-eight. I cannot remember the last two years at all. It’s because I’m inexplicably tired all day, every day. I wake up early and I’m tired. I force myself to the job site and I’m still tired. I got to lunch and get more tired. I go home and drink and smoke and briefly don’t feel tired, then I go to sleep around ten because I’m tired. I  keep my bedtime consistent in order to get nine hours of sleep which doesn’t do anything to make me feel better. I’m still tired. I dream I’m drinking water at Nigel Farage’s house – right out of the sink. My subconscious is telling me I’m dehydrated. I need to get up so I can get on this conference call. “State your name” then that creepy beep. “Let me give you the elevator pitch. We’re gonna to revamp your huddle room…” I hate these words. They make me ill. I mute my mic and projectile vomit last night’s Heineken and ground beef into the toilet. The girl I’m banging cleaned the bathroom while I slept. It wasn’t dirty.

June Twenty-Eight: Stabbed In Sacramento and Now I Post on MPC

I went to the ocean. I climbed a cliff and got screamed at by the Osprey nesting at the top. I picked some mussels off a rock to eat later*, slipping off the kelp-covered rocks and getting my shoes wet in the process. I swam in the freezing North Coast water.

I did this instead of going to the White Power rally down the street. All around midtown there were these Antifa signs about “smashing Nazis” and “keeping hate out of OUR CITY.” I tore a few down because I hate Antifa. They’re these punk kids who protested the Roosh meetups. I went and talked with them. There was one dirty guy in his thirties who was on a long spiel about some Communist history stuff that I couldn’t follow. It was clear that he was banging the shaved head girl next to him. Nice. This one fat guy said Roosh was a rapist who wanted rape legalized. “Wasn’t that from a satirical article?” I asked. “If it was satire, do you think we would be here?” Clearly you would because you people are fucking idiots. I’m here trying to empathize and have a dialog and all that bullshit and all I can feel is contempt. Your minds are addled with clickbait; the internet has emotionally manipulated you into standing in this park at night in hopes of virtue signaling against guys trying to get pussy enough to get some pussy for yourselves. Thanks for bumming me a Camel Filter anyway, faggots. I wanted to see the skinheads beat up these aging punk kids but I didn’t and now it’s all over the news because people got stabbed. I decided to throw away my cigarettes and go spend time with my family at the ocean and I missed out on all the violence.

*you can die from eating wild mussels in the Summer. Don’t attempt.

June Three: My Favorite App

We’re too distracted these days they say. That’s what people do when life gets all fucked up. They find distraction. I’m not going to get into a “materially wealthy but spiritually bankrupt” diatribe but, you know, that stuff is all true.

Every day I drive an annoyingly long distance through the suburbs to get to the highway. Down a long, hot stretch of pavement with its traffic, it’s congestion, its ugly people driving their jalopies that spew out shitty air that happily bypasses their broken EVAP systems. They sit in their cars with their fat rolls spilling over their seatbelts, sloppily eating fast food that drips all over them. Some of them wander around the Target parking lot high on methamphetamine, turning their ghoulish faces from side to side, sticking their tongues out and smacking their lips. Mutants. This place is a fucking dump. A war-torn city in the Middle East has more charm because it was at least nice at one time. This place was designed ugly. I drive past a giant billboard that reads: DON’T FEAR ISLAM, UNDERSTAND IT! with some Asian cunt in her Muslim garb giving me the thumbs up. The mutants j-walk in the searing heat. All plant life is dead. There’s just one strip mall after another, all with the same banal architecture. One place after another where you can spend your money on stupid shit you don’t need or food that’s completely devoid of any nutritional value. Most of America looks like this to some degree – fucking ugly. There’s no way to traverse the landscape by foot. It’s too fucking big anyway. You have to drive a car. So I get into my car that runs on miracles and expensive fuel, with its dents and scars and leaky fluids and its shot EVAP system and I distract myself by listening to Rhapsody: unlimited music streaming to your iphone for only $10-a-month. First month is free.

March Thirteen: Love Sick

Fall, Two-thousand-eleven:

I sat on the left side of the bar at the Golden Bear alone. I was texting this very fly girl I had met a few days prior about going to a black-and-white attire party that weekend. I was setting up the logistics of a couple more dates on my BlackJack II (a true man’s phone) when an extremely petite girl with dirty blonde hair sat down next to me. She had a Teutonic face with an Italian nose and carefully curled hair with bangs – she was pretty in a nature’s child kind of way. She ordered a High Life ($2.50) and I delivered a stolen line to her saying she “looked like she was having the most fun out of anyone here.” “What?” she replied. She didn’t hear me. I’m not sure how our conversation proceeded but soon we were outside having a pleasant, flirtatious chat. I didn’t think of her as a real prospect. She was just a girl to chat with that night. I took her to another bar (“You’ve never been to the Stinky Old Tavern?”) and we drank and she smoked and we talked for a couple of hours. She became drunk but she was still coherent and enjoying herself. She had taken some Xanax (pill addict of sorts) and was soon wobbly, so I took her home. She let me into her nineteen-twenties apartment (gas heater, wood floors, Murphy bed) and I put her to bed. It was only then that we exchanged names and, shortly thereafter, numbers. I kissed her and told her goodnight. She so sweet and vulnerable and I questioned her sanity letting me into her house while she was on the verge of passing out. I made sure to lock the door on my way out.

Dear reader, I will not bore you with many details of what happened next but I would rather paint a picture of the next year of our lives. We became nearly inseparable for the summer. I flaked on my other prospects and they flaked on me and I found myself enthralled with this girl. I learned all her secrets, her desires. Some of them were innocent and some deeply disturbing. This was the silly, incongruous and endlessly appealing nature of my new-found lover. I was unemployed and completely broke and she was teaching middle school in some farm town forty-five minutes North of our beloved, incestuous little city. We went to the river when it was hot. We threw house parties with hippies and hipsters and old people who read poetry and drunken party-crashers who came in off the street. Her two black cats roamed around and brought us half-dead animals in the night (a mouse one night and a bird the next night. I bludgeoned both the critters with the same empty Heineken and threw their bodies outside). We slept on a sheep skin rug and made love under the air conditioning. I fucked her hard, awaking the little deviant who had been in a nine year sexless relationship with a man who turned out to be a homosexual. I trained her good and called her my “little slut” often. She wore dresses or pencil skirts daily, and a bright red one-piece bathing suit for the river. She hurried off to work in the mornings. I walked about her place eating food and feeling lonely. I faced the Egyptian Question Mark of a cat’s asshole with every turn in that apartment. We participated in setting up banal art shows. We danced often. We played records while it rained outside. We knew everyone and it seemed everyone adored her. I intimidated and irritated her suitors who annoyed me to no end. We traveled to the desert, to the snowy mountain town where she was born, to the ocean town where she went to college (we crashed a Mestizo History course). We camped on the beach. We fucked outdoors, in tents, in the back garden, in the kitchen, on the dining room table as party guests were leaving (always unshaven and unprotected). We ate mushrooms until the world felt distinctly round and alien and colors painted the insides of our eyelids. This went on for over a year. I eventually had find a job but we kept pace and I spent a lot of that year in her dilapidated apartment. I belonged there with her – it was almost perfect.

There was always a tension with us. She wanted nothing more than to have child and I wanted nothing less. “This won’t last, it can’t,” I would think. She told me she loved me one day and I didn’t say it back because I knew our relationship wasn’t sustainable. We fought that night for the first and only time and I left her. I was torn up and anxious and sick the next day so I banged some feminist whore for two hours straight. It only left me feeling worse. We got back together while I was going over to her place to collect my records. She cried, we fucked, and I admitted I loved her too. She moved down the street (rent-raising landlord) and were together again. Life became muted and strange after a while though. She kept telling me to either give her a baby or go, and faced with that ultimatum, I left. We fucked one last time and it was sorrowful but nice. I left her place in a daze, forgetting my bike in her basement.

Finally March Thirteen:

“I want my bike back,” I said to her through a text message. She agreed to ride it to the cafe (the astute reader knows the place) and return it to me. She suggested we have a drink and catch up a bit. Why not? I hadn’t seen her in six months. When she arrived, she asked if I have a girlfriend right away. “You’re wearing girls socks,” she observed. “I am.” “Are they your girlfriends?” “They were, I stole them.” “Is she pretty?” “Extremely,” I lied. She told me she is engaged to a man with the same name as me who is the same age and who (she says) resembles me. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, I guess we know your type,” I told her over a hard cyder. She said she isn’t happy with him. He is always rehearsing for plays (actor) and he wants to move to L.A. even though she loathes the place. She is lonely, she tells me. She described him as gay-acting and less handsome than I am (female honesty at it’s finest!). She told him that I used to fuck her in the ass. “Why would you tell him that? No good can come from telling your fiance’ that,” I said. “He doesn’t care, he would never do that anyway. It’s not his style.” So, dear reader, her fiance is a tepid lover and he can’t please her like I did. I take pleasure in this somehow. We drank and chain smoked and talked and flirted. “Do you still love me?” she asked. “I don’t have to answer that,” I said with a smirk. She knows. We walked from the cafe to the old apartment. She wanted me to try to break in through the back door. I could have. We would have been alone in that old, empty place all alone. We would have fucked on the Murphy bed (regret washes over me as I type this) and I probably would have knocked her up right then and there. Let my faggy doppelgänger raise my seed! Nobody would question the paternity. But I didn’t. We smoked on the porch and she rested her head on my shoulder wistfully while I rubbed her neck. She needed to beat her fiance’ home so we climbed in my car and I took her home. She crawled on top of me in the car and we embraced and I kissed her neck. She started to leave but I pulled her back in and she sank into me again. “I have to go!” She said. “I know, just one more whiff,” I said as I sniffed her obnoxiously. “No,” she said sadly. “Too late, already got it. Goodnight!” I said and she laughed. She smiled with all of her face in that way only a woman in love does and waved goodbye and her fiance pulled up and parked in front of the house. I drove away carelessly, high on the pain of love.