Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

This years long feeling of dread that was always in my brain and when I looked out the window at the end of the day, out into the woods, into the eyes of unsuspecting weak women who had no idea who I was. “they’re all weak” I’ll tell myself forever and for the most part I'm correct. I can barely look in mirrors nowadays. That years long feeling of dread. For the most part caused by polluting my body with all types of poisons. It’s gone now. Now I am still just as paranoid and dread it all. I still feel them all behind me ready to take me somewhere I don’t want to go. Listening to them complain, echoes of the same complaints over and over for years now, the same people complaining about the same thing. Weekend nights are hopeless now. Remember a weekend evening was cause for much needed sleep the next day? A quiet night with one or three people works now. A nice night out with a friend, walking around book stores and gossip halls. Most of the week, a ghost in the forest lurking around, attempting to make women all over the world laugh when I can. I have no connections, deep connections with other men nowadays. Maybe for a long time now? In Los Angeles I certainly did not. This afternoon I missed the coast out there. The Pacific ocean, how we drove it up and down, well a couple of trips one ending almost bad and one beginning amazing. Who is the guy two years ago thinking eternity is an actual idea? Whoever I thought I was, I wasn’t even close. Under a spell of bright blue water and deeper eyes, sugar kisses and hair that flowed down like all night long. I miss it and her constantly but never think about it all too much. I hate ever saying “I’ve moved on” as that is such an empty and final thing to say for such a big piece of me in the last decade. Hmm, this blanket of white ice that seems to cover us once a week now is holding something down. Is it holding down my thoughts so they don’t float away into the sky like before and end up all over the clouds? My own thoughts spent months and months turning the clouds and sky dark gray. My own ideas for how to make things better was to move further and further away from the “nice guy” I always am. Yeah, that guy. Bitter and shot down for the last time ever I am a completely different person now and I imagine some other completely different guy out there I’ll never know in my place doing everything right I could never get down. Still not 100% comfortable with this place and this person. As much as I am obviously going to stay here for a long time, my head is always going to be scatterbrain and never be able to sit still. Sometimes I fuck things up for a reason. Sometimes other people fuck things up for a reason. It all happens so slow when you are older that you have the time to fix it, but you get so comfortable you have no idea how to do any repairs. I wonder if I’ll laugh about all this in three years time of if I’ll still be kicking myself in the teeth for it.

Mississippi

I thought I wouldn’t come back here for a few, and my head has been elsewhere for weeks now. Now that I kind of have a few minutes to breathe, where was I?

We have this awful fucking weather here that I kind of forgot about. Mounds and mounds of snow everywhere just make it look depressing, and then again people walk around still complaining about it as it happens. My main problem with it is it’s made me miss some days of work; that and just the piles of it everywhere makes life ugly for some reason. Reconnecting with a friend from my past has been very nice even if the timing of it has been horrible and awful. It’s been a nice few weeks anyway. Work has been good, and I was offered a new position already. I will be traveling around the US, and it’s not sales. I am beyond excited for this since I really have nothing here happening. I am trying to get a band together here with some friends, and that is the only thing I really would have here that I would want to be around for. I hate sitting still. I feel like everyone and everything around me is sitting still at all times. On a shittier note my last remaining grandparent (grandmother on my mom’s side) died last week. It wasn’t out of the blue, but of course that’s never a good time.

Days go by here like pages in teenage diaries
I try and keep tabs on everything and everywhere I go
I feel like I never need a reason to do anything now
Don’t give me one
I don’t need to tell anyone anything now
In my past, weak people I never met
Thousands of miles away making enemies of rednecks and dykes at the same time
Morally bankrupt couples trying to play it off like everything is okay
I see it in every woman’s eye
The desire to fuck someone new
In every man’s eye
The desire to fuck someone else sometime soon
Tell yourself you’re happy with the word forever
Go ahead

Michigan

I didn’t look forward to bright white skies and grey sidewalks
I never look forward to this time of year
Icicles wrapped around your face and brain for hours a night
Going to sleep not knowing if I am good enough
Going to sleep with ten thousand sad saxophones swirling around
Why the fuck did I come back here?
Why did I ever think this was the right place?
I connect with nobody here
I don’t have anything in common with New England
I don’t have anything in common with the winter
I’m not a cold person
They all are
Every last one of them
They complain and whine and tell you of headaches and colds and flus on the internet
They compare their hatred of their lives to each other
So and so is not as good as I have it and so and so is better off than I
I spend less and less time worrying about how other people are and feel better for it
I feel better off than everyone
I feel ten thousand times happier than I was say five weeks ago
Four weeks ago
Three weeks ago
Two weeks ago
Everything needs an epilogue and here it is I guess.
It didn’t turn out at all like I thought.
I forgot about 2009 and 2010
I forgot about music I played and songs I sang and stories I wrote and roads I traveled and pictures I took
Everything is gone now
This year is already better ten days in

The 99 People You Meet in Heaven

1.       We could easily turn this into a fight, hold on, let me get my glasses.
2.       You could wear a thousand different hats and no man is ever going to notice.
3.       White chicks at this point
4.       She would walk home exhausted as a whore.
5.       “I heard you knew a lot about music”
6.       I don’t talk to you because you’re fat, not because I’m some sort of dickhead.
7.       “These fucking Greeks!”
8.       His breath smelled of rotten cabbage and bad poetry but his cock smelled like heaven.
9.       I brought all of the pills with me
10.   “Is your name Dave?”
11.   I honestly do care how awesome you think Pink Floyd is.
12.   One night Rick showed up and everyone cheered.
13.   “No, please enlighten me as to why Leslie is the way she is”
14.   I walked in and made eye contact and immediately walked out. Every time.
15.   He was so scared of her, he asked her best friend to dance to the Bob Seger song instead.
16.   They tried working out their differences with a murder/suicide.
17.   He drove all night to the casino.
18.   “What’s your band up to these days?”
19.   He only cried when white men played the piano. This is how we knew he was gay.
20.   Trying to explain George Gershwin to someone on beer.
21.   I read this thing about this thing and apparently the thing is pretty awesome.
22.   How many cigarettes do I have to give you for you to get cancer right here in front of me and die?
23.   “oh man, that chick has huge tits!”
24.   “I know!”
25.   After a shared bowl of spicy corn chowder she walked home from his dreamy bedroom eyes and was brutally clubbed to death in front of a Starbucks.
26.   “Hey hey mama said the way you move. Gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove”
27.   He ripped apart a whole gorilla with his bare hands.
28.   “I tell you what, wait right here and I’ll go get the policeman myself”
29.   This completely changes how I need to escape.
30.   She got a text message that just read “Sheila needs tht $40 u owe her”
31.   One time I decided not to breathe for a whole night. This prepared me for everything I now know.
32.   “When is your new CD coming out?”
33.   On Friday nights she would cry Mike’s Hard Lemonade flavored tears into her lonely bowl of lentil soup.
34.   Black Sabbath – Technical Ecstasy
35.   “Oh hey man…no, it’s Mike”
36.   You’ve probably told more lies in the last seven minutes than I have in the last two.
37.   “Holy shit, they’re playing an acoustic version of Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency! ”
38.   “No, it’s Satellite by the Dave Matthews Band”
39.   “Oh”
40.   1996 called, they want your taste in music back.
41.   I was on drugs.
42.   “Hi, I’d like to report a crime in progress…there is a band performing music live and they are all white”
43.   He would always give her the parsley off his plate. Three years later she jumped out of a window and landed on a white BMW with the license plate “SPOYLED”
44.   Oh man we ate some serious pussy back then. Then of course Craig had to move away.
45.   “Man it’s pretty crowded in there. Is Rick still here?”
46.   “What city please? Wakefield. Name please? Yes, it’s September eleventh”
47.   The guitar solo from “Hold on Loosely” by .38 Special
48.   I’m the guy that plays songs but they are funny.
49.   I’m the guy that plays songs but they are progressive.
50.   Gregory
51.   I’m the guy that plays songs but they are beautiful.
52.   “Wow this beer tastes really good. Wait, am I an idiot?”
53.   “That might have been the best harmonica solo I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m only twenty”
54.   I can’t think of any books I’ve read to impress this chick’s tits
55.   One night at a party at her place I put on some punk rock music and her new boyfriend shut it off and put Jethro Tull on. This dickhead, literally wearing one of those tuxedo t-shirts did an air-flute solo. She fucked me a week later and cried halfway through. 
56.   “Hi, I would like to buy this copy of Draw the Line by Aerosmith and put it on my credit card”
57.   They were then told to enter the room and sit until ‘the black guy’ showed up”
58.   She didn’t realize that her nose was too big.
59.   “Oh shit, that’s the guy from Agnostic Front!”
60.   He was one part Danny Glover, one part Osama Bin Laden and just a little bit Rachel Ray.
61.   “When do you guys start singing?”
62.   “This one goes out to all you crazy motherfuckers high on PCP out there tonight, it’s a little song called One by U2!”
63.   Sometimes he would show up with a suitcase so full of insecurity she would suck his dick just so he’d go home.
64.   “Kim, do you realize what today is?”
65.   He would tell me war stories about how drunk he was this one time, who he fucked, how awesome life was. He never told me if my sister was still alive.  
66.   “Oh great, we’re out of cocaine again”
67.   That guy Larry from Three’s Company vs. a teenager with a Fallout Boy shirt on
68.   Debbie could sing. She couldn’t lip sync though. Man if karaoke existed back then she would have been the queen of the town.
69.   “Yeah but I’m not your father”
70.   Incense and tuxedos. You know them. We would go over there and get high and listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees records. Man I would pay a million dollars to see those people again. That one dude never wanted me to know he was gay because he thought I would beat him up. He was kind of cute.
71.   They shared a brief fond memory of their first date at that museum as his car went careening into a tree killing her instantly, him three days later.  
72.   “Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and since we’ve no place to go let me eat your ass while we watch Jay Leno ”
73.   “Oh great, Sting is here”
74.   That one dude that looks like he has something wrong with his ear.
75.   “Did you used to work at Panera Bread?”
76.   He needed to tell you the same thing over and over. You knew everything he was going to say three weeks in advance.
77.   “What the fuck is wrong with your cousin?”
78.   He bought a drink for her and her friend. When he got home that night he did crossword puzzles into the next morning.
79.   “Hi Candice, did I happen to leave my dignity in your car last night?”
80.   Side three of The Song Remains the Same soundtrack
81.   We talked about Ornette Coleman all night and then I woke up and had to go to work. The following night I dreamt I was on my way to some sort of gala event. I wore a tuxedo. It was odd; I could actually think clear thoughts, unlike in real life where every piece of information going into my head is barely processed before making a quick exit. When I arrived at the event I discovered it was just a group of people standing around drinking beer from countries nobody has ever heard of talking about football scores and what kind of cars they all drove.
82.   I took her to meet three women I had fucked so they could judge her
83.   The guy in the Hawaiian shirt just showed up and apparently is ready to “fuck anything with two legs”
84.   The first time you heard Shoot to Thrill by AC/DC
85.   When I think of her and that state she lives in I hope the whole place is earthquaked into the stone age
86.   Even fat I manage to surprise myself
87.   “She practically invented abortions”
88.   I need to run far away from here. I keep telling myself that and then good things happen.
89.   These men. I watch them with their women and deep down to myself know there is no possible way they know about fucking.
90.   “I’d like to report a rape”
91.   I’m too jaded and burned out to ever fall in love again at this point. I enjoy showing up in other languages. I don’t want them to read me. I don’t want them next to me and rubbing elbows with me and my family and circle.
92.   They try to get in on the fun and make jokes like I do and fail miserably. Every time
93.   “Wow that woman looks like one of my daughter’s friends, but if she was on Xanax”
94.   If I went to Egypt
95.   Currently feeling tall and small and closed in and wide open all at the same time. Better than feeling all alone in a sea of tall trees and wide open spaces. Wait, I guess?
96.   “wait, that’s the dude Taylor is fucking now?”
97.   Denise
98.   “Ladies and gentlemen, orgasms”
99.   I died once.