Random Recovery

Every once in a while, I miss him like crazy; I’d hear a song on the radio and listen to the lyrics and hear him in every word. And, every once in a while, even though I don’t need it anymore, I long for him arms, for his face, for him, for him, him, him, to be right here.

Every once in a while…

And that one thought, brought on by a word or two, a sentiment or two, drives me crazy. Crazy. Completely fucking crazy. Every little inch of my mind is filled with just him.

Some days I wish things were different, not that I don’t appreciate what I have now. Some days, I just regret not doing a few things that I should’ve gathered the courage to do. Words come to me so easily. Across a sea of letters, I stand on my lonesome island and wait for your ship. Never, not once, will I call out for your attention to come and rescue me.

I’ve gone crazy from the moment I met you.

And I need you so much.

Truer words have never been said.

I’m crazy. I miss him.

I shouldn’t.

Goddamn, I should’ve, I should’ve. I didn’t. I’m going to regret that one little thing for the rest of my goddamn life.

Christ, Meyer. Lol

If only you knew this shit, you’d get a good laugh out of it.

I hate things for a reason, you know. A fucking reason. I hate people, I hate school, fucking working…my teeth, my life….there’s just so much shit and I don’t want to deal with any of it. Why can’t it just be alright sometimes…why can’t you just run away with me? Do you see why I hate this so much…what is the point of staying if people hate you….

I’m tired. Really, really tired.

Yeah, pretty much, I hate everything. I hate my mother. I hate my boyfriend. I hate pieces of myself. I hate my fat, it’s terrible. I bet you it hates me too. I hate my teeth. I know they hate me because half of them aren’t even there anymore. I hate just living, breathing, fucking cellular respiration and all that crap. It’s all just crap. Names, dates, people, crap, crap, crap. I can’t spend two seconds of my life re-evaluating my own crappy existence without some blaring through my non-existent French doors that barely close, ever (I live in a fucking closet), “Are you gonna go?” I’ll go on my own time, when I’d done with being sad and weeping and hating, I’ll go when I feel inclined to go, I’ll go when I’m already considerably late, but no, I will not go because you’ve asked me to go. I will not do what is good for me because only you know what’s good for me. And, if you tell me I’m old enough to know what’s good for me, I will tell you no. No one knows what is good for them. You are all in denial. And, I hate every single fucking one of you and if I had the chance, I’d a) kill myself so I will no longer have to spend my life looking at you, or b) kill every single one of you and feel quite satisfied with my accomplishments and document the extinct of the human race in a shitty history textbook, c) shit in everyone’s face.

I like that last one.

She’s always, like, how much she isn’t like grandma. She’s the same, and she’s worse. She nags, at least grandma gets the idea and leaves.

Klondike Summer

He sells ice cream, she knows that much, at the street corner by the park. The sun is strong, so he wears a red baseball cap. He is a Mets fan, how will they ever get along? Children, big and small, crowd around him, dollar bills clutched in their hands like their own personal fortunes. He passes a rainbow colored cone to one of the kids.

During the school year, he sits in the back corner of her history class. He doesn’t talk much, but he knows all the answers when Mr. Rubbel calls on him. Who was the first king of England? How long was the Hundred Years War? Explain Wilson’s fourteen points. He knows everything.

So, what does she do? She sits, in her blue summer dress-the one with daisies on it-and

I’m never naming my weird ass stories ever again. I’m really, really, really fucking hungry-but not! Not, at the same time. I’m consumed by and lacking hunger, at the same time.

My heart is about to explode. The little sounds you make over the microphone. I know you but I do. I don’t know what I’m doing with you, but I know. Security, love, contention, peace, I don’t want drama. I want apple pie with a dollop of whipped on top and your hand on my shoulder.

I want to feel your lips, warm and wet, greeting mine. Your big, calloused, scarred hands, your fingers, curling around mine, I want to feel just for a moment used and loved. I want to feel your awkwardly cut hair, the scrape and sound of black, straw like strands, against my forehead in the morning. I want…warmth.

I’m tired. Old. Shrively? Is that a word? Shrivelly?

More member activities!

STOP WITH THE WORM, STOP WITH THE WORM. STOOOOP ITT WITH THE VELVET WORM.

Life hates me, god hates me, god laughs at me, my sports teams never win. No, really, life hates me. I’m too tired to even curse and yell and SCREMA AND FUCK IT WAS FOUR FUCKING POINTS YYOU FUCKIGTN SONS OF BITCHES! POFIUOIR!! FOUR!!!! FUCKING POINTS!!!!!! You let me win Monopoly, but you can’t like Kurt Warner win the damn Super Bowl? YOU FUCKING PIECE OF NEGRO SHIT YOU!

I’m racist. And, I’m angry. Larry Fitzgerald you have my sympathies and my love. I’ll add the Cardinals to my small, growing, list of sports teams that never win. I’ll start watching hockey. I will. And they won’t win either.

Ketchup Mustard
Salt Pepper
Sour Cream Onion
Fish Chips
Peanut Butter Jelly
Mac Cheese
Cereal Milk
Cookies Cream
Mint Chocolate Chip
Tortilla Chips Dip
Nachos Cheese
Peas Carrots
Cheeseburgers Fries
Pancakes Syrup
Meat Potato
Sushi Wasabi
Noodles Soup
Gin Tonic
Spaghetti Meatballs
Martini Olives
Sandwich Pickles
Chickpeas Lentil
Cumin Coriander
Ice Cream Soda
Hotdog Bun
Buffalo Wings Blue Cheese
Vinegar Olive Oil
Lemon Chicken
Beef Broccoli
Bacon Egg
Mashed Potatoes Gravy
Popcorn Butter
Crepes Nutella
Turkey Cranberry
Bread Butter
Rice Beans
Apples Oranges
Pasta Sauce
Lettuce Tomato
Aeronautics

I’m over the Cardinals. There’s always next year. I really hope I don’t fail English. I hope it’ll be okay. I’m no longer going to think about it. Alright. Shut up. STOP. STOP. OKAY. SHHHH.

O-o;

I wonder what it says about music when Pandora plops Nickelback next to Avril Lavigne.

Swallowing hurts.

I’m sick at heart, as always. Hormones suck.
You know, when I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. Generically childish, but, hell, it seemed wonderful at the time. It gave me a strange sort of thrill, a shiver down my spine, to think about reaching out and feeling the cool, black marble of space against my palm. A strange sort of thrill to imagine nebulae, dressed in wispy, diaphanous robes of stars, a strange sort of thrill to realize that space is empty, that space is big, that space is a never-ending void where the light of my tiny planet Earth goes to die, where the light of my tiny planet Earth is reborn anew, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, in the colors of another world. I’d cut the cable anchoring me and drift and drift and drift, past the valleys and mountains of the cosmos, past the milky lakes of galaxy, past the dying dwarfs and the supernovas. Space would be my grave and silence, my requiem.

It’s nice to be a kid because you’re allowed these kinds of dreams. You’re allowed to sit with your mouth half open, staring at something. You’re allowed a canvas and some paint, your creativity and your imagination, you’re allowed all of these things like you’re allowed toy trucks and Barbie’s. But, once you get to that age, that age when people start thinking you’re retarded because you sit with your mouth open (and draw with crayons), the dreams stop. And, also because there are no stars in Manhattan, there are only helicopters. Dreams are little kid stuff, when you grow up, you have to deal with grown up stuff, like doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, learning how to drive, learning how to cook, learning how to do your own taxes (someone forgot learning how to learn, a small task most people seem desperately incapable of understanding), but most importantly, learning how to run the rat race. There are no dreams in Manhattan, only Lexington Avenue stretching south to the tip of the island. Concrete would be my grave and the closing bell, well, it’d be the closing bell.

On yet another childish note, dark chocolate is only dark, according to the Europeans, if the chocolate contains 35% cacao solids. According to the Americans, who have no real standard for such things, dark chocolate needs only to contain 15% chocolate liquor to maintain sufficient darkness. The real question: Is my American Dream…dark? When you stop running the race, what do you taste? White chocolate-a misnomer if I ever saw one because the thing contains no cacao whatsoever? Or, just pure cacao powder, bitter and raw-the kind of stuff that smacks you a couple times to make sure you’re tuned in to the proper episode of Life? Or, am I just talking about something completely pointless?

I mean, when you’re reading something like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, its like life just handed you lemons and insisted, if not pleaded, for you to make lemonade. All right, I make the lemonade. The little voice inside my head can’t help but quip every two or three seconds, “Look! Look! He wrote Moby Dick! He’s gotta have a point! Something real deep and philosophical! Look! Look!” So, I look. The thing about classics (and, by default, the people who write those things) is they’re expected to have a point. They’re supposed to teach you something nice and important and warm, to fuel the intense flames of your imagination, to keep you going at night when you’re down and out (though, really, ice cream does the same thing). Why else would you have them? Entertainment? A thousand page tome on the finicky details of Victorian courtship? Say hello to my trash can. And, when you read a classic, you’re expected to get something out of it. You’re expected to take away with you this wonderful understanding of something new. You’re expected to enlightened! But, what if I’m confused? Or, bored? Or, just plain don’t care. Am I any dumber than someone who enjoyed Pride and Prejudice? Am I any less worthy than someone who loved The Great Gatsby? Am I just a kid, sitting my mouth open, if I couldn’t even get through The Great Gatsby because life demanded my attention elsewhere? Well, Life, thank you for the lemons. I’m going to enjoy my lemonade, without the added sugar.

Reading a classic like Bartleby the Scrivener, for example, is just like living the American dream. Examine, for a moment, the conditions under which I found my copy of Bartleby the Scrivener. It was Halloween, of the year Two Thousand and Eight and people down the hall were singing the Village People. I’m late as usual, hardly unexpected. In an attempt to get into the Halloween spirit, I’ve somehow bothered to waste my time and squeeze myself into a costume. Upon arriving on the sixth floor of the pasty colored building that is my high school (high school really ought to be a synonym for hell) and waddled down the hall to the last room before the Hudson Staircase, I was greeted by Mr. Murray (whose name I’m quite sure I’m spelling wrong)! What a vision he was indeed, a number 2 pencil in hand and the attendance sheet in the other, in the place of my usual English teacher. Dressed, as usual, in non-descript sweater and pants, Mr. Murray beckoned me towards a seat, with what curiosity I took my seat. Immediately I was told to grab a hideously red book off a cart. What I’ve never truly understood about books in the public school system is that they all come in this awful, smelly, deteriorating form. The actual cover design of the book is shrunken about an inch on all sides and printed in the middle, with bright and often disagreeably colored border. And, on the back, in large, black Serif print exists a blurb of, usually, irrelevant information. The pages are brown and smelly and awful to the touch. In my copy of the book, all some thirty odd pages of Bartleby the Scrivener were happily detached from the actual binding, making for a handy portal addition of larger, already portable object. I thought it was quite charming. Then, I proceeded not to read it until class the next week.

If a classic is classic and should be taken seriously, why in the name of god did it arrive in my hands in such conditions? If the American dream is a dream of striking it rich, a dream of rising from the quagmire and cesspool of anonymous oblivion, a dream shared by men like Gatsy, shared by men like Bartleby, why is it nothing more than just a nightmare? Examine, for a moment, the conditions under which I found that my life had no meaning, in possibly all too metaphysical sense. I was sitting at a computer, some years ago, though not that many years ago because I haven’t lived many years to begin with. It suddenly occurred to me, as I ogled at why it was that computers worked, that I’ll never be able to find an answer. And, yes, I know, there are people out there who know how computers work. But, rather, the question is, why computers work? Why do I work? Why does my heart beat? Why do I write essays? Why do I even fit in the proper scope of the world? Why can’t I say, “I prefer not to,” and just not do something? The simple answer, and the short answer, is that I’ll end up like Bartleby, I’ll end up dead.

The amount of trouble I’m having with an English essay really just makes me wonder where the hell authors get their inspiration. Do they just plop down next to their typewriters and word processors and let their fingers run wild? And Melville said, “Let there be Moby Dick!” And, born was another classic, one to toss into the flames of high school English curriculums, one to fuel centuries of imaginations. Christ, Moby Dick was about a whale and Bartleby the Scrivener was about a scrivener.

The world isn’t a patient place. It rushes people, rushes people into things they don’t like and never wanted to do. It makes people write essays for class at four in the morning. No one likes that.

This essay isn’t fun. The American dream isn’t fun. It’s a relic of the past.

The back of my head is itchy, it’s persistent and annoying and I’ve been scratching at it for a while.

Bartleby, the Scrivener, quit life. Slowly but surely, he steps out of the world of the living and into the world of the dead. However, the world is an impatient and rather pragmatic creature, eventually leaving Bartleby behind in his resignation. Only on an act of charity, and possible nuisance, does his employer, an unnamed lawyer, come to retrieve him, to attempt to coax him out of his grave. In his simple minded ignorance, the lawyer fails to provide Bartleby with the simplest of all charities, understanding and sympathy. Instead, he showers upon Bartleby more values of the material world Bartleby so aptly abandons, illustrating the fatal flaw of the American dream. Thus, Bartleby succumbs to life and is granted the ultimate sanctuary of death.

In one of the last exchanges between Bartleby and the lawyer, Bartleby declares that the job of a sales clerk is too confining. To which the lawyer replies, “‘Too much confinement,” I cried, “why you keep yourself confined all the time!'” To these two different men, the word ‘confinement’ held different meanings. To Bartleby, perhaps the word takes on a much deeper, more metaphysical sense. He speaks not of the physical confinement that the lawyer remarks of, but to the inner confinement of a sales clerk, the repetition and the boredom of doing the same thing over and over again. What for Bartleby is an essential freedom is but a trivial absurdity to the lawyer.

The exchange continues: Bartleby remains adamant to stay as he currently is, preferably stationary. This enrages the lawyer, “‘Stationary you shall be then,” I cried, now losing all patience, and for the first time in all my exasperating connection with him fairly flying into a passion. “If you do not go away from these premises before night, I shall feel bound-indeed I am bound-to-to-to quit the premises myself!'” The world, obviously, being such that it is, has no place for a useless man. The lawyer attempts to either grant Bartleby a form of obsolete charity to console himself, or attempts to bypass this obstacle in the course of his life, like a stream bending around a huge bolder. What he does not understand, a fact that Bartleby never articulates, is the intense monotony of what he is rushing forward to greet. Bartleby’s strangeness is but a tired and weary defiance, a quiet anger, at the world that had neither shown him mercy, nor patience, but has only instead robbed him of his will to live. No form of charity will mend this hopelessness.

The last paragraph of the short story adds one essential piece to the Bartleby mystery: Bartleby’s previous station of work as a Dead Letters clerk. Dead letters, aside from having a potent connotation, as Melville writes, are “on errands of life, these letters speed to death.” Humanity, in an attempt to escape death, only rushes towards it, only rushes head first in the furnace of an unending hell. Bartleby realizes the futility of this American nightmare and simply kicks his own bucket. He did not quit his job at the Dead Letters Office, rather, he was removed. Adding to his place more despair and hopelessness that eventually drove him over the edge. The American dream is not a dream, it is a nightmare, a nightmare sugar coated for the unsuspecting that flock century after century to that golden door. What waits beyond those sacred doors save for a Bartleby ending? Perhaps not everyone is prone to “pallid hopelessness”, but everyone is prone to the relentless grind of life. The American dream is a poison for the world, opium for the capitalist masses. There is no cure, for “he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.”

Though I am not prone to any sort of hopelessness, I often wonder whether or not it’d be worth it to join Bartleby in his preferential resignation. Shall I not prefer to write this essay? Shall I prefer not to live? Shall I quit life? How tempting an idea it is to drop everything, to stop typing, to cease to care about everything, and just sit silently upon a banister. Sadly, I’m kept running this rat race by a pesky instinct called survive. Against my own volition, I’m kept swimming against the tide by nothing but a preference to live. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

I want to cry sometimes, but I can’t. And, there’s a feeling, a little latch of feeling that comes up, creeps up and fills your entire body. It hurts and it’s strange. It’s like loneliness mixed in with sadness, with anxiety, like a cocktail of feelings without the alcohol, just raw bitterness. It’s sharp and tangy and wet and it tastes a little like a piece of me dying on the inside. No one knows, no one cares. Everyone’s too caught up with there crap. Garfinkel stuffing his face with a plate of food coming up from the fifth floor. Katerina and her weird vaginal cramping during SING practice. Jeffrey, how much I love Jeffrey, and his non-descript grunts over the phone…

If feels like the world’s abandoned me, or, in another sense, I’ve abandoned it.

I want to make up. But I don’t.

I’m scared. But I’m not.

What am I then?

Hurt? No, not even. Apathetically depressed about everything.

Is being content really that bad, so I need drama? Do I need happiness, do I need anything but you? I want to cry, to grab you, turn you around, bury my face in your chest and hide. But, you don’t love me anymore. Not the same, anymore, you’re distracted, distant, elsewhere. You need to sleep, you need to work. You need your life and you don’t have time for me anymore. Go, please. Go. Don’t worry about me. I’m sure you don’t worry about me. Forget about me. Forget about it. I want to end it, but I can’t because I’m still clinging to some sort of hope that it won’t end. Please. Don’t go.

He hasn’t called back. He hasn’t messaged me. It’s quiet and the quiet is eating away at me.

There’s a hole in my sock. I’m in my winter jacket, the periwinkle one that made Ehtesh look like a woman from the back. The periwinkle one with the dirty sleeves that’ll never wash out, browned and oil stained. The hole is strangling my big toe, I can feel where the edge of the fabric digs into flesh each time I move. There’s a hole in my pink sock, stained black and blue by my trousers, my shoes, the dirt on my floor, in the gym, perfumed by the pungent smell of my feet.

I can’t help it. Shut up.

I enjoy being tormented like this, all the time, all the time. I miss the pain, gathered up like a little ball, a rubber band ball of my problems, in the center of my chest. Like Iron Man’s heart reactor. If someone said that three years from now, you’d be long gone, I’d stand up and punch them out.

Come back. I love you. You bought me all these things, all the little Pooh’s, everything, come back. STOP UNDERLINING SHIT IN RED. FUCK OFF WORD. Damn everything. And the fucking capitalization.

I can’t get my toe out of that hole if I don’t use my hand. Damn. He’s not responding. I’m worried? Or, just lonely?