This Track Always Goes Right To My Heart For Some Reason.

Mid-July

On a summer night in mid-July

the asphalt cools from the day’s baking

and a man recovers from a day that ends in y.

Legs crossed on the floor like when he was a kid

Window is ajar and the breeze is sweet mercy.

Mercy hard to come by

even in mid-July

if you live long enough.

Money

from my blood, my sweat, my crazy 

deposited in the bank account 

of somebody in another ZIP code

in the months I used to just chill back in the day. 

Back in the day is what feels okay 

Back in the day to make ‘em spend their pay 

to make ‘em feel like they used to 

before things got sinister and weird 

and too damn expensive 

and not worth it 

back when it was all in front of ‘em 

and lookin’ like a shiny kingdom of love and sugar

I sit down here and I try this. Type my thoughts. Try to dress ‘em up like Fonzie or a monk who just got it. Thing is, usually I’m going nowhere. I’m not Fonzie. I’m not a monk. I’m not the hero. The world is full of people who think they need to be the big-dicked hero. 

We. We>me. 

I say that as I tickle these here keys all alone. Are we all these people having heroic fantasies all alone? We’re all Luke Skywalker staring at the horizon. Maybe it’s time to cut that shit out. Maybe we need to cut it out because it’s dangerous. 

I remember. Nah, I half-remember. Shit, maybe this never happened. I remember a Saturday Night Live Christmas parody. It was a parody of those holiday specials with the clay people. I dunno. Do you know what I’m talking about? Aight. There was a line that stuck with me. I don’t remember the context. I just remember the line, “It’s not about you, you douchebag.” 

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, YOU DOUCHEBAG. 

Maybe I’m way off here but that’s the heart of pure, undefiled religion right there. Of course, what happens with religion is people get transfixed by the messianic figures. That’s all they see. They try to see themselves in the messiahs. 

Went somewhere. Somewhere. Got lost there though. Might not be able to go any farther. 

Day dreamed of spiking the **********’s [Redacted] Diet Coke with LSD. 

Of course, I don’t know that that would do much good. Never done LSD myself. Some day. Maybe. 

Was going to throw some lines out but nothing is really coming to me. 

Plans. Plans of mice and men. Best laid. 

Laid and paid. Can never get both, ya dig? 

Gotta get outta this place. 

Game, set, match, cowardice.  

.Don’t play tennis. Never played it. Never watched it. Never think about it. 

Dubious metaphor. Why reference something you know precisely dick about, dog? 

That’s been on my mind. 

What? 

Appropriated blackness, ya dig? You want depth or whatever it is so you channel a voice that ain’t your own. That creeps into my voice both on the page and out there and I’m not sure how the fuck I feel about it. I mean, is that right? 

I blacked out the owner of the Diet Coke due to paranoia. You can probably guess who it is. It occurs to me that the paranoia might be preposterous because who really cares what some loser writes on some blog almost nobody reads. You never know though. I’m not too keen on having a sit down with Feds. 

Fuck.

God damn it. 

Fuck. 

Structure. 

I need to read poems or something. Let that seep into me. Let it influence me. I learned not too long ago that the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh wrote poems. I read a few of them. I dug them, especially the ones he wrote while incarcerated. There was something really honest and pure there. There is something about the work of someone who is not noted for being a poet. There is something about the work of people you don’t ever study in some course in school. Example from Ho Chi Minh: 

A COMRADES PAPER BLANKET

New books, old books, the leaves all piled together.

A paper blanket is better than no blanket.

You who sleep like princes, sheltered from the cold,

Do you know how many men in prison cannot sleep all night?

I mean. God damn it. That hits me. 

CLEAR MORNING

The morning sun shines over the prison wall,

And drives away the shadows and miasma of hopelessness.

A life-giving breeze blows across the earth.

A hundred imprisoned faces smile once more.

See. Nothing too mysterious or abstract there. He’s just writing about his situation. 

Yeah. I know. Blood on his hands. The French and The Americans had blood on their hands too. Not too many heroes there. 

Or anywhere really. 

Heavenly father, 

One more day. 

Have mercy on your boy

but if not on me, someone who fuckin’ needs it more. 

Can ya do that? 

Amen. 

Stuff that’s hard to take

The suburbs and what came from them

the fact the world was made before I had any say in it 

the truth 

especially when I know it’s bullshit and I can’t get a refund on it 

when my words are bullshit 

when I don’t feel ‘em 

when I phone this shit in 

and when just having written just ain’t enough 

the stuff I can’t catch with my syllables 

but I want or need to catch 

See, that’s all this is. 

What you’re watching (if you’re still watching, who has time?) is me trying to do that 

Wondering if it’s too early to leave the office

Sunday afternoons  

Additional Notes on How I Learned to Love the Lord

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what I wrote earlier today. Mostly I’m not too satisfied with it. I feel like things could have been more lucid and more interesting. There was so much that I could have said that I did not end up saying. 

Faith or lack thereof is a challenging thing to express. There was a lot that just got lost or at least that’s my feeling. 

The story that I told myself as a Christian was that I was a reformed criminal that found redemption. Reformed criminal? I was a kid that did something dumb but in my mind, I might as well have been knocking over liquor stores or have been some kind of budding serial killer. I had a desire to convey to people what a wretched sinner I was if I ever got the chance. I look back on this and I’m both amused and disturbed. 

People give reasons for doing things. I don’t know that I buy too many of the standard answers given about why someone takes the dive for J.C. especially if it is couched in theologically “correct” language. People can say that they became conscious of their sinful nature and of their need for a savior but I often suspect there is a more interesting, more honest, more genuine reason. If someone tells me they believe simply because they like Jesus or it just kinda seems correct or just wants it to be true then I respect that a lot more than some bullshit they half remembered from a text book or a tract or something. Wow, this paragraph sucks. Moving on. 

My faith was nonsensical. It was utter bullshit. It basically revolved around feeling guilty for having sexual desires. I got really tired of hating myself for natural desires so I kinda just said fuck it and quit. Hating myself for liking the idea of sex made no sense. I wasted a bunch of time hating myself for a stupid reason when I should have been hating myself for being a Republican. 

The marriage between evangelical Christianity and conservative politics is an awful thing. It’s destructive. It baptizes ideas like peace through strength, low capital gains taxes, gutting the social safety net and other abominations that make the world a terrible fucking place to live. I can’t be part of that no matter how bitchin’ those praise songs are. 

It’s ultimately just not a very adult way of looking at the world. Adult is the wrong word. I just don’t think it’s a very honest way of looking at the world. 

Brain feels kinda smooth today. It always feels like it’s not quite firing on all cylinders on a Monday. 

Fuck Mondays. 

Yeah. I said “Fuck Mondays” but I don’t really feel it that viscerally at the moment. Nothing much happened really. Just dealt with minor problems here and there that I was able to fix fairly quickly. I got to spend my idle time at my desk listening to podcasts and reading. I’m about halfway through the book The Great Divide by Matt Taibbi. Maybe I can finish it by the end of the week. Been awhile since I actually finished a book. 

I’m flirting with the idea of cutting back on my gaming, specifically Rocket League. I’ve played Rocket League pretty much every single day since I got it some time last year. It’s a fun game but I think it distracts me too much. Yeah. You are reading about a 35 year old man talking about his need not to game so much. I find myself firing up Rocket League even when I don’t really have a desire to play that much. I guess it fills up time when I have absolutely nothing else that I could be doing. It stimulates my brain when I ain’t got shit else to stimulate it. I guess I want to see what happens if I try stimulating it with something else. 

I put in a call to a therapist I saw some time last year. He hasn’t called me back yet.

This navel gazing is getting old to me. I want to be writing about something else but I have no idea what. 

I’m fucking bored. 

I suppose I’m bound to catch a feeling about something this week. 

I am half-assing right now and not even lying about it. I am phoning this in. I don’t give a shit. 

Sup with you? You good? Did you daydream about sex or murder today? Did you fantasize about being some sorta hero? Did you cry today? Did you do anything to advance a criminal conspiracy today? 

This is a man throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. This is a man sitting cross-legged in a chair and trying to think. 

This feels like a fuckin’ homework assignment.

I don’t feel much of anything right now. 

I just am. I guess that’s okay. I mean, what’s the alternative? 

Been working almost 6 months. I have not held down a job for more than 6 months since 2012. If I make it beyond 6 months and I’m still employed, do I fucking win something? I’ve been thinking about that. What does that mean for me, if anything? 

Fuck. I tried. 

This is not any sort of earth-shaking revelation but it was apparent to me today that I am capable of expressing myself very lucidly if I try just a little. It’s important for me to not try too hard. Trying too hard will fuck things up. You gotta dance with it a little. You make it smooth. You steer it gently and you make it do what it does. That’s how expression works for me. 

I got into a discussion with the parents about the way the world works, about U.S. foreign policy, about a better world. It wasn’t very long before I got fucking pissed off about their attitude. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow breakdown of this discussion but the gist of what I kept hearing from them was people can and have tried running the world a different way but those different ways have always failed. The way things get run in this country is not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot worse in every other place on earth you care to name. 

Is that what getting older does to us? We just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, things will never be perfect but we have it a lot better than those brown people over there who don’t speak English and who get followed around by flies.” 

I am not at all convinced that this is a generational phenomenon. 

This is totally a propaganda thing. We don’t get educated about the way power works. Maybe we go to college and we get a professor who assigns some Zinn or Chomsky and then we forget all that when we go to work to make some asshole a bunch of money. I think maybe something like that is what happens. 

I’m not sure what this is.... 

Maybe it’s just a little venting with line breaks. 

I got kept inside like 

some girl in a tower. 

I’m a 21st century digital boy. 

World was small 

so I came here. 

Everything is late

I’m not normal 

but not in some cool way. 

I’m wise 

but I’m weak 

Mostly I go no idea what the hell it is I’m doing out here. 

Yo.