From Memoirs: Annyoing Things

I once ate an entire bag of Doritos by myself, after a stressful experience. Then, I walked back to the grocery store, and bought a replacement bag and pretended like I hadn’t eaten a thing.

Sometimes I eat during too much during stressful experiences, while at other times I don’t enough as much as I should. If I eat just a little before I’m to eat a large meal, I won’t finish the entire meal. Then when I go back home I find that I’m still hungry and wish to go back somehow and finish my uneaten portion. Or other times I will not eat and consume everything in sight.

I think some condiments taste good with foods that wouldn’t be eaten with them, usually. I have mixed barbecue sauce and tomato sauce for a strange kick to spaghetti or pastas. Once I added about half a cup of shredded Parmesan cheese into a mixture of buttered rice and young peas. It was actually quite good.

Other times I do not understand why people will eat one condiment with a completely unsuitable food. Most people in Mexico, for example, will place huge amounts of mayonnaise on baked potatoes, and then proceed to add bacon bits, peppers, lines of bright hot mustard and apricot sauce. I had a roommate who once had a hot curry dish served to him and said there was not enough heat. He then proceeded to take a large bottle of Mexican hot sauce on the curry, and consumed the dish in sight of the astonished members of his dinner table.

This reminds me of another time in which I took a friend of mine and his boyfriend out to a Chinese buffet restaurant. My friend was a devotée of fine dining and immediately took to the assortment of fresh sushi laid out before him. His boyfriend, who had never seen such food, immediately took interest and asked about the nature of the wasabi sauce served alongside, and thought the color interesting. We warned him that it was not Hass avocado, as he thought, but it was too late, since he had placed about two tablespoons of the stuff into a taco and consumed it. He became purple and began to make gagging sounds. As I was already embarrassed by his absolutely banal behavior, I simply crouched in the seat of our booth as he swug down the greatest amount of ice water I have ever seen any man do. Needless to say, we did not dine together again thereafter.

I do not like to be embarrassed at the table. So many people do this to one another without any sort of knowledge that this reprehensible behavior is occurring. Once I noticed a high ranking official who was dining with his wife at table once, and I was there; no sooner had the waiter come around with menus was he making all sorts of outrageous demands, ordering dishes for everyone (we were all going Dutch). Infuriating still was the fact that his wife expressed her opinion about the soup we were to have, whereupon the man reproved her, saying that she had never had the soup she wasn’t entitled to speak openly about it. I excused myself from the table and made my exit quietly.

But by far out of all the people who have no decorum at table are parents. Their children are sometimes well behaved enough to excuse themselves, but there are those children that feel that they have a great amount of liberty, since they have been given everything they could possibly desire. Once while in the company of a church group gathering after services for lunch, I saw a blowsy woman and her beleaguered husband contend with two children, a younger boy and an older girl. When they did not recieve what they initially wanted on the menu they threw such a fit that they were dragged kicking and screaming from the line and disciplined quite ineffectively outside. I heard the mother say, “Now you behave yourself. If you don’t, then you won’t get anything at all.”

I cannot stand arrogance on the part of some fathers who believe that since they have the greater endowment, they have more say, period. While working retail I experienced this when a father took his daughter and began to make unrealistic demands on me, saying that since the quality of the goods I was selling to him was not of his desired caliber, I should go down in price. “Well,” he said, “it looks like you’re trying to cheat me.” I said, “You are incorrect. I am selling these as marked.” He angrily said, “I’ve a mind to speak with your manager.” Whereupon I said, “You’re looking at him.” He took his daughter out of the store and stormed out.

I find it hateful for a woman to make it seem like her demands are paramount to any other woman’s. This is especially the case when the woman wants something you couldn’t possibly deliver.

Hateful more is a person who patronizes you on account of your age, calling you endearing names but not being agreeable in personality or disposition at all.

I hate a person who pretends to know what they are talking about, especially if that person is a religious person.

I hate a person who makes you feel uneasy when you’re doing something right, making you feel like you’re doing something incorrectly. Or when you are doing something incorrectly, and they offer no advice towards the opposite.

I do not enjoy the company of a person who always talks of themselves and rarely of anything else.

My ex used to be this way. He would annoyingly seize conversations for his own ends, talking for twenty minutes or more about certain tangential things that had nothing to do with the main conversation he had diverted from. This was especially hateful and we were on the road, and he would talk about his endlessly depressing experiences, making himself a martyr among the other afflicted members of his immediate family. Still more derisive was his insistence on finishing the story, knowing full well that my attention had diminished exponentially from it.

I dislike a person who talks of one thing and one thing alone, without making any concessions to any other thoughts, simply because he himself knows no better subject than what he has learned.

Religious people can be quite depressing. Yes, one can be happy when one meets with one, talking of prayer life, but it begins to get tiresome when the person begins to sound preachy, as well as presumptuous and arrogant. How hateful!

…Um, Okay…

I’m not feeling too emotionally healthy today.
I’m actually really depressed. First day I’ve felt like this in a while.
I haven’t cried yet. I feel more angry at people, for no apparent reason.

I feel neglected today. Like I don’t have a voice. Like no one cares to hear what I am saying. Like people are too hung up on themselves to say anything about other people, even if it’s just a little nice.

I feel like my beliefs and ideas are under attack from many, many people. I feel so paranoid. I feel like people are out to get me–like they’re just there to ruin my life, or try to usurp my religion for their own ends, or to use whatever means to get me to do what they want to.

I’m so scared and insane right now I can’t even think. I’ve been having horribly vivid dreams about the hurricane, even though it never came. My dream life has been active lately. I’ve been oversleeping alot. I was supposed to work this evening, but I don’t even feel like it. I’m angry at myself for that too, since I need to work to help myself out. I don’t know what to do.

Sometimes I feel like all of this is a dream–my whole life, because it’s never been this desolate or bad before. I know I’m doing the right thing, though, I just have to stop being so lazy.

There are secrets that I could not tell anyone else but one person. I wish he were here to talk to me right now. I’m hopeless without his good advice. I feel like I have no one to talk to objectively and have them understand the way he could. He lives kinda far, in Georgia.

Sometimes I want to lay down and die. Maybe I’ll do that one day.

I keep on getting told not to go back to college until I have more skills available. I know this is true; as embarassing as it sounds I don’t have the skills I need. I feel so fortunate as I’ve done so much with my life but so many many other people like me who live down here will never see things as I’ve seen them, and I guess that saddens me more. I want people to experience things in the way I’ve seen things, to go and do stuff I’ve done.

At the same time, I feel that if I leave home again, people will see me as exotic or strange, or not want to talk to me because they think I’m going to speak another language, knowing full well that I have a developed vocabulary that could contend with most college professors. In Austin people looked at me with a strange aversion, as if I had somehow defiled their personal space. Why is this? What do I give away that makes me avoidable? I am no different from another person, save a few physical differences. Whenever I mention that I’m from this region of Texas people think I’m dirty or uneducated.

I’m scared that people are judging me for something I’m not.

I wish life wasn’t this way. I bet it’s like this for everybody, though. Maybe people don’t think about it on such a huge scale like I do, but they must think about it in some capacity one way or another.

However, I feel like I’m special for belonging to this region. Unlike other people, I feel so uncomplicated about living down here. I am the product of the border–not a border of fences or laws, but the uncomplicated territory of mountains, hills, rivers and passages. I belong to the earth. I’m pretty green inside. Cut me open. I do not have an addiction to things like most Americans do. I came from an isolated place and I will return there one day. I want my burial-place in an open field, or on a hillside covered with flowers. Or if I am cremated I want my ashes spread over a living body of water.

I feel like I’m more connected to God because of the way I’ve lived. I feel like I’ve only had to rely on Him, because so many people have entered and left my life so quickly that I can never form lasting friendships. I feel like I’m always going to be on the sidelines, watching and avoiding, never really being ever accepted, and moving out into the hinterlands, and slowly disappearing.

For The Boys

Usually, it shouldn’t be this hard to write out. You take one of those long dreary essays and stretch it out a couple of pages more out until there’s very little cohesiveness to it, and all you’re left is about 20 pages of the same stuff, really; it’s all about how you and your mother went to the store one day and how some gentlemen stopped you and asked your mother if she had dropped her coupon on the floor. And the hot brilliant sun of Southern California met your five year old eyes, and soon enough it was one of those dry afternoons in Moorpark and you weren’t sure where you feet ended and the road began…

“Have you met Miss Jones?”, they ask, and you respond, “I’m not sure how much I’ll get for bus fare but I know it’s enough,” and before too long you’re sitting at the back with some guy’s cock in your right hand and you’re blowing him and he’s loving it (God, how much he creeps you out); he’s got a wife and two kids back home in San Diego and once, just for once, he’s partaking of the sweet twilight of homosexual sex–the car windows all fogged up in the back of a parking lot on a damp summer night. Sheila and her other friend–the one with the blonde hair tied up at the back–watched the sunset from the red rocks and over the shale outcroppings of a long dead sea.

What you read in this catalog is not just the newest fads, they’re all part of the new trends for the millennium. Don’t you just hate having all that just thrown at you? She said, “I knew the man who raped me was at the closest intersection to the hotels and red light district.” God, he smells like shit. Or worse. I could have sworn I smelled booze on him once or twice while he kissed with his jagged mouth. Last night she stole a chili cheeseburger out of a dumpster in the cool, sinless air, and devoured its somewhat stale contents behind a storage facility. Children on the jungle-gym after school, in the broad sunlight of a TV afternoon.

Last night I killed a man in the bathtub of the former hotel. And now there are pines, the end of the drear forest with its one halflight and huge blocks of stifling grey clouds coming out of the mountains. God, why is it that he doesn’t miss me after so long, that all the hell we’ve been through that he doesn’t care? It is a confirmation of greater things yet to come, so that when I lay my body on this bed you might lay with me in the same manner. And she slammed the book down and said, “I’m not the woman you thought of me as–I’m not the lawyer you thought of me to be!” You are…well exactly what are you? Are you the young man you used to be? Wait, was that you in the high school yearbook maybe three years ago winning all those medals? And now what are you doing? Still paving the way for sunset glories at USC, with all the others? This television is so brand new, I can’t believe I stole so much to get it. And now you’re in someone’s car, blowing for another 50 dollars of money to support a habit and a cheating girlfriend. Last night I killed a man in the bathtub of the former hotel.

It was a flophouse. He was a businessman. And here come the businessmen. They’re always the first. Everything is a deal with them. They don’t politely ask, they negotiate, the way businessmen usually do. “Do you ever see things?” he asked me, and I said, “Yes, I do” and he said, “What?” and I said, “I see things”–it was blisteringly hot that morning in downtown and we were both sitting at the edge of the stoop and I could have blown him, but he was a friend and–not that it mattered if he was a friend. The businessmen come every day at nine o’clock in the morning. I see one in the back of his Lexus with broad shoulders and thick sunglasses on. He forces you to take it in slowly, not caring if it hurts or not. He never gets naked. It’s always in the back of his car, with his short stubby stump of a penis poking unprecariously out of his expensive tailor suits. On Saturdays there are usually nine or ten of them.

What about this new car you have? I heard he recently got married the last Saturday we were in Santa Monica but we didn’t get invited. My God, there was a cake and everything? I went back to Mom’s house in Twentynine Palms after some trucker gave me a ride with an old duffel full of sweaty dirty clothes. The night passes over the long blue mountains in the distance, out past the old rugged ridges of last night’s hangover with the boys. You know, this is the only time I have ever really been happy, here at the house. One sees visions at night. You were five and that man…you can’t say…

Lying on the table under a sad looking florescent light that buzzes indiscriminately with a feverish tic. There is something about these tiles, one after another in succession, and after awhile you see them and see their inconsistencies, such as where the grout lines swerve out of succession, where there are cracks in the individual tiles, where the colorations mottle from bone white to eggshell to cream, and where, despite the ministrations of some forgotten letter in some forgotten mailbox, you realize there is no hope. This one always comes in with the same requests. I’m not anything to him, I’m a body. We talked while I was putting my socks back on–and he said, you would have made someone great–I would have, like it’s impossible now or something? I looked back and said, “Ditto”.

They laid the first body out on an outcropping of rocks in the desert, and I remember the legs were open and you could see her snatch bathed in hot brilliant sunlight. Dead hooker, they said, and they said she had died from taking a little too much heroin after being with the Senator at the after-party last night. I didn’t blame her. I wish I could have joined her too, and killed myself having a good time. They told me he didn’t cry, and as for the other one still in the car…You know how the routine goes. He’ll say, I’m doing the best I can, Jesus Christ, I’m working as hard as I can, and even though he loves you, there’s no room for you. “This is the best I can do, dammit…”

I am not dreaming. Or am I? I think I am. But then again I know the sunlight is too real, and I know it hurts to cut myself on broken glass. And in the drear light of the afternoon, I can hear the trees explode with the sound of millions of tiny crystal birds, all singing a completely incoherent song

Lusting and Losing

Mmmkay. So I haven’t posted in a couple of days, and now I feel like I need to. I actually have been a little productive, working on Music Diary, a journal of musical plans and part-compositions, for my Yahoo 360 blog. I also have two phone blogs up and running, which I haven’t posted to, namely because of my own laziness. Since I also don’t have DSL service, my connection is extraordinarily slow, so I don’t have the advantages of the rest of the civilized world in terms of moving massive amounts of data from site to site. Never fear, because I know this rough little chapter in my life is coming to a close, and presently I will be entering into a renewed state of activity. Summer, after all, is an inactive period among people: however I have been “working” more than usual, and I don’t mean housework.

I remember being in a state like this a couple of years ago, and it drove me crazy. I hate being here at the house with nothing to do, aside from idly sitting and staring at the computer screen. Kevin Wagoner, my pastor friend who also runs a skateboard/extreme living store on the side, offered up the opportunity to improve my state by asking me to help him open up a store here in town. Now, what that entails I am not too sure; this week I worked on a flyer, but I was lazy about it, and it doesn’t look all that attractive, but I did my best. I’m not the most adept of graphic designers (but boy, wouldn’t I love to be), but I think something simple and attractive will serve. Kevin will prepare large Tupperware boxes full of skateboard stuff, and I would have to sell these packages to kids who skate at the skatepark. I’m thinking of bringing along my own board, too; it would be pretty funny to slack off on a job like that, but I think I might like it.

In the end Kevin and I want to open a shop that will be a permanent fixture in town. The authorities in the City are wary of the propensities that might be caused by the skating communities as a result of skateboarders using various public edifices as ramps and the like; the City is adamant, as was told to me at the Chamber of Commerce, that “that thing wouldn’t be so interesting”–which makes me think, “Why would business be so bad in town?” It would scare Kevin, as well as me, to open up a business in a financially non-lucrative part of town, for there are many such locations here, and I have no idea how to open a business in the first place. Kevin and I had a discussion one rainy night, and I expressed my worries about what would happen had I chosen something like this, and he said it would be foolish to run back to school everytime life here at home got bad, as I was planning. Ryan said it was a good idea just to work and take a break, and to go back at a much more favorable time. But might I ask, when is the right time? I’m still expecting someone to save me from the mess I’ve gotten myself into. But seeing that theory as no longer viable, I am stuck with what I have, and now I must be content with my lot.

But for now I am done with talking about the more negative elements of my life. Peter has told me it makes no sense to complain about things that cannot be changed, the trick about living a good life is knowing when to let go and let the current take you somewhere unexpected. That being said, that will do for now about the sordid, insignificant details of my existence.