The War on Drugs

That was a movie, right? No... That was the war on Roses. What does anyone have agiant roses, I wonder? If war on drugs was really a war, which it isnt. Why do I persist? I presist a lot more in the summer than the winter. It must be the humidity. Wild Irish Rose is not Irish. NOt close to Irish. And who is this Richard? I have to aks for him. Myabe Keith Richards Tripple Peach. I used to be in a band called Triple Peach. People thought we were fond of ice cream. We had a song called Hop on Pop, after the kid's book. It just occuredd to me if that book was called Hop on Mom, it would have been a banned book! You drink a lot, even for an Irishman, someone said. Not to me. I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just from Ohio, I liek to say. And then I hurl.

Secret Headquarters

I apologize for making myself scarce lately, but I've been spending most
of my time at LIQUID HIDEOUT, my new favorite Wisconsin phenomenon.

My Vocaton

I just got an annual checkup at the doctor, something I do once every ten years or so, and to my surprise, health care is now like going to a cafeteria where you walk along and look at the various food options, with the prices on them, and pick out what you want and what you can afford. It turns out I can no longer afford the colonoscopy, the complete blood work, or that deal where the doctor hits your knee with a little hammer. I miss that one!

One bit of advice my doctor did give me was to start drinking again. In fact he asked me if I wanted to go out drinking with HIM! No, that's not true. I'm just practicing my lying. I'm not very good. Anyway, he is a she, and she didn't-- IN SO MANY WORDS-- suggest that I start drinking again. But when I reviewed, in my mind, later, everything she said, it was quite obvious to me, when I read between the lines, that she was suggesting that I start drinking again. If there is anything I'm good at, it's reading between the lines.













Okay. So I'm not so good at reading between the lines! But I'm pretty good at writing between the lines. It's what I do.

The Wagon is Without Gaurdrails

I just got this new New Yorker and opened right to this ad for Glenlivet NADURRA Scotch, which suddenly looks awfully attractive to me. Maybe the mag ad dept was working overtime with ME in mind, but the lighting, the way the light is coming through this slightly cloudy bottle of old Scotch (I guess it's not filtered like most whiskey, which is kind of exciting). Or maybe it's the way the bottle is sitting on what looks like a ratty old brown carpet-- what's that all about?!

Anyway, it's 16 years old, and some quick calculations lead me to believe it was made in like 1991, or before-- it's been aging that long. Which led me to think, maybe it would be okay for me to drink as long as what I drink was make before I quit drinking! (1993) There is some real diabolical logic in that, huh? Okay, I've got to turn the page, my mouth is watering! Oh, it's that fucking Palahniuk guy on the next page, one of "THE ORIGINATORS" (brought to you by The Glenlivet). Whew! I've quickly come to my senses. For now.

It Is All My Fault

Everyone is pissed at me for last week, and I don't blame them, I guess. I was selfish. See, the older I get, and the closer I get to FORTY, the more time it seems to take me to do everything and to get the day to day things done even. So I'm way behind in my work, which includes my "work," my W.O.R.K., my work work, and even the stuff I don't really have to do but WANT to which kind of takes up more time than anything else it seems.

So to me, spring on its way is just a reminder of how behind I am. It always seems like the endless winter is a good time to catch up with things because it's ENDLESS-- so where does that leave you when you're on the verge of spring and still not caught up and realizing for that reason you DREAD spring?

So what I did was I sat down with God, who by the way does have a beard, and Mother Nature, who, don't ask me if she was wearing a bra, I was really nervous about this meeting. We sat down like honest businesspeople and I asked them, I pleaded with them for another week of winter so I would at least have the chance to catch up. And they said OK! It was that easy

I thought, then, about asking for a few other things, but I didn't want to push my luck.

So that's why the extra week of winter. I'm sorry, I really am! And I know this sounds like I'm making it up, but I swear to God, it's true!

A Painfully Difficult Confession

I have a confession to make: I am addicted to child pornography! It doesn't come to my house in anonymous brown wrappers, or on the internet (I don't even have the internet at my house), but from the public library on DVD in the form of the first season of the television show "Veronica Mars." Okay, I know this is not a laughing matter, and I don't mean to joke about what can be a very serious problem, but I didn't know how else to get into this difficult, for me, to talk about, subject.

This is a TV show that has been apparently aired on "the WB" whatever that is, and now "the CW" whatever that is. That is another world we won't get into. It's a mystery show about some high school kids in a 90210-like California coast town. Veronica is a detective, and like Nancy Drew she is an only child and lives with her father. Nancy's mother was dead and her father a lawyer. Veronica's father is a private investigator, and her mother has disappeared. This is one of the mysteries she's trying to solve, though the big one is who murdered her best friend. Several new mysteries present themselves in each episode, and she's often doing about four things at once. And, of course, all the mysteries are related.

Not meaning to downplay the very real pain very real child pornography has caused many, I still want to pursue that analogy, just because when I think of pornography I don't only think of nudity and sex, but violence and exploitation. It could be that kids aren't allowed to see a naked body in a movie, but can see a body being torn apart by a weapon. It makes no sense, but I don’t want to get into that. I don’t really think Veronica Mars is pornography, but on paper it's pretty hard core. Here are high school kids that drink, smoke, do drugs, and have sex (just like real high school kids do-- I don't know how they show this on TV, but I'm not worrying about that)-- and even worse, these kids have very adult senses of humor (intelligent, quick, and vicious-- and the degree of reality there is just a matter of degree).

If you look at it simply on the level of victimization, Veronica has got to be one of the all-time record holders: as an underage girl in high school, and this is just in season one, she has been dumped by her peers, had her best friend murdered, she was drugged and raped at a party, her father was run out of his job as sheriff, her mother left town, her father is then seeing her new best friend's mother, and there are very real questions to who her real father might be-- there is the possibility that she might be the illegitimate daughter of her former boyfriend's dad. That's right-- that would mean she had been sleeping with her brother!

How does she deal with all this? She is clever and ruthless, hard-edged and funny. The best senses of humor come from the worst pain. You can't help but like her. Yes-- at first I was annoyed, but I got hooked. Okay, maybe it was the mystery element that hooked me. I read movie scripts from time to time, as a vocation and a profession, and I have found that a good mystery will help get me past the most shallow characters, bad dialogue, and terrible topical humor you can imagine. I mean, you have to look no further than the criminals (currently holding the government of our country hostage) who are using a fictional mystery-- weapons of mass destruction-- to attempt to make palpable the hijacking and destruction of an entire country for corporate financial gains. But back to Veronica Mars-- the mystery gets you hooked, but then the characters, just like the people you know, start to endear themselves to you in spite of their annoying traits.

But finally, the thing that really got to me with this show (okay, I'm still dying to find out what happened) is that it became emotionally complex, and in many different ways. There are the questions of family-- who is family, where does loyalty lie-- how important is blood, and how important is devotion? Then there are questions of "the truth"-- can it ever be known, really, and the relation of politics, public relations, and money to the truth. And then most of all, the questions of responsibility. Veronica discovers, as a survival technique, her talent for ruthlessness and revenge. That is her way of coping, and she's good at it. But at some point she realizes that her actions affect people in ways she hadn't intended-- that there is always a ripple effect, especially with extreme measures and extreme results. Sometimes in helping someone she is hurting someone else more, someone she had not intended to hurt.

I can't imagine what is going to happen in the second season, because Veronica, as a precocious high school kid, is already becoming more adult than most adults do in an entire lifetime. I am half expecting to see her end up in a monastery, or high up on a mountain, in self-imposed isolation, waiting for a student, perhaps, who can take on the entire world.

The Wonders of the Human Mind

For absolutely no reason at all this morning I suddenly found myself singing, "Yikes! Stripes! Beechnut fruit stripe gum!" --over and over and over...

Fucked Up Valentine

In a way, I guess, it's appropriate. If you're going to break up with someone, WHY NOT on Valentine's day? After all, it's a ridiculous, stupid holiday based on guilt and with really no reason to exist than boost sales at certain worthless retail businesses, the same as Christmas. And seeing how I used to be an FTD pimp myself, maybe I had this coming.

But I didn’t SEE it coming, that's the sad thing. We've been together for seven years now, and things have been going well. SO I thought. As Lou Reed says...

Oh, fuck Lou Reed.

Okay, what happened, I got off my third shift job at the Suicide Hotline to come home and find that she had completely moved out. I mean everything, including the cat and things that were mine. I'm exaggerating, she didn’t take that much that was mine, except for the Revere-ware.

She left a brilliant note, short, but to the vicious, horrible point. I'll reproduce it here...

No, fuck that.

Not that I'm trying to protect her anonymity or anything, but becaue it's a really GREAT letter, and I don't want to share it. It's for me. The clear-mindedness of it, and the viciousness, and the serial killer coldness just makes me love her more than ever.

And the best thing is that she left this HUGE box of chocolates, probably something she bought at Walgreen's that would go on sale tomorrow for a dollar because the expiration date is LAST Valentine's day and they are full of worms. Even better, I looked at the ingredients and it's chocolate with crunchy shit it, which is made of, yes... WHEAT! Which, as you know, is poison to me. Not to mention that she knows I quit eating chocolate because it gives me migraines. The only thing better could be if I had a deadly peanut allergy or something, because there are peanuts in it too!

Maybe I'll send her flowers. But, really, I don't hate her that much. At least not yet. Maybe I need to give this time to sink in.

I have nothing against flowers, in fact I LOVE flowers, it's just what flowers have become. You send someone flowers because someone has died, or because you are guilty about something, or because if you DON'T you'll be in the doghouse. You send someone flowers to say you're sorry, because you fucked up massively, and you are asking for one more chance. And you send someone flowers to say "It's your funeral." And you send someone flowers because you are saying, "I'm above all that. Maybe I don't forgive you, and I can never forgive you, but here's some goddamned flowers!"

I'm not going to send flowers. I'm just going to get over it. In about three years, is my best guess.

Laundry Mishap

Another laundry day, another breakfast at Brady Street Pharmacy, another mishap, another problem, another another another. I put in my wash, went over to BSP for two eggs, over, burnt beyond all recognition (translates as over easy here), bacon, sausage, Canadian bacon, country ham, sausage gravy, no biscuits, no toast, bananas and milk, butterscotch sundae. I can't button the top button of my jeans, I wonder why. I don't mean now, after eating all that. I mean lately.

After breakfast, which included coffee, and a couple of cigarettes, courtesy the IAB, I went back to the laundromat. While leaning over the washer, scooping my clean (kind of, you know...) clothes into the rolling basket, I suddenly HURLED my breakfast right on the clean clothes. Rather than getting upset, I put the now quite soiled clothes right back in the washer, added more soap and seven quarters, and changed the settings from "white" to "bright colors."

From my notebook 12/31/06

I used to keep a dream notebook—well, I still do—but lately I haven’t been writing in it, primarily because the dreams are so horrifying, and I’ve found that if I don’t write them down I forget them faster. But anyway, today I had the unique experience of having a nightmare, waking up, going back to sleep for less than an hour, having a worse one, then after getting up for awhile, and being careful not to doze off AGAIN, momentarily dozing off to continue a nightmare from much earlier (or from another day!). As usual, I cant even talk about these dreams, because the horror was so acute—and I’m a fool for even mentioning it now—but one thing just occurred to me—that part of one of the dreams was about someone getting robbed, and then hearing that the robbers took (along with the usual valuable stuff) their Danny O’Day ventriloquist dummy!

Okay—so I won’t seem like I’m trying to be all mysterious and everything, and just making all this up—one of the dreams—not the worst of them, though, was just one of those about someone trying to kill me. In this case, it’s a young, jock guy, he’s up on some structure—it’s the inside of a building, like a train station—but it’s—as usual with my dreams—an invented, new location—not something I can identify from the real world—this guy has some ridiculous military rifle that has rocket launchers on it and scopes and lots of hi-tech shit—but he’s just trying to simply SHOOT me as I run out. I get away, but then into a place where I’ve never been—but is somehow familiar—like an apartment or suite of rooms—very cheap locks on the doors—I even lock TWO of them—but still he’s coming—and then things just get WORSE. I know when you write it out like this it doesn’t sound so bad—because it just makes you think of a MOVIE where this would be happening—and with my hero’s ingenuity I would set up a HUMAN MOUSETRAP and get the dude—or else find a convenient handgun floating around and suddenly (though I’ve never shot a gun) I’d be an expert marksman and shoot him before he could shot me (or perhaps John Wayne would, hiding in the shadows). But NO, this dream is really much more along the lines of a movie like Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT. But even worse than that. The fortunate thing is being able to WAKE UP! And then to forget. Often I have horrifying dreams and once I wake up I’m not even that disturbed by them, just happy that I’m awake and the dream was a dream. Well, this morning, when I dozed off AGAIN, I had that weird continuation dream from?—when?—who knows—sometime earlier—or maybe not—maybe it’s just dream déjà vu—annoying—this one was bout me smashing all the windows of the cars in the driveway parking area of where I live—I had smashed the car windows sometime earlier in that earlier dream—now I was facing the consequences.