wish you were here

Snow. Beautiful.

Can’t wait for summer.

Copy and pasting stuff before bed.

So.

My week.

The holidays are almost over. I have one more anniversary to remember next month and then we can get on with spring.

I’ve been generally just kind of quiet and unresponsive going out this week, and Monday kicked that off nicely. We tried to have open mic at the bar and I just wasn’t feeling well anywhere in my being. I’ve been trying to fight off a relapse of my cold/flu/phlegmy-stuff-hijacking, and I just didn’t feel like dealing with the outside world much, despite my inner attempts at wanting not to be at home.

I had a quiet Yule-solstice alone. I started on a poem.

Tuesday was spent shopping, and I kept remembering how I bought stuff for Dad and it never was opened. These days those kind of memories are still painful, but in that dull scar kind of way, and I’m getting a good feeling thinking about Dad and changing this room. I think some of his blood is still in the carpet. My brother didn’t call me, and I didn’t call him, because I know he doesn’t handle anniversaries very well. He doesn’t like someone else to remind him that he should remember and move on with things. Especially me, since I was The Good Kid. But I can’t tell him how to deal with himself.

Wednesday was quiet. Thursday as well, went over to Sean and Brett’s for a few hours and presents and smiles and “I’m so tired, let’s get Xmas over with for chrissakes” were exchanged.

Sean went out of town Friday morning, so I wasn’t really motivated to want to party anywhere. I’d started clearing out more of the bedroom, and ended up getting more in the actual bedroom done, but not after cleaning the closet (insert a “yes, that was meant in every way possible” kind of comment here) and moving my altar in there, mostly to feel like I’m in an enclosed space. Plus all of my pagan-y books are in there anyway, so if I need a quick reference, it’s there. Lisa was in town from Denver, and with her Christmas money, wanted to get a new tat, so we went to the Iron Horse and I was very impressed with Eddie, the guy who did her tat, not only because he was just a generally good bloke, and has better linework than most artists I’ve seen in town, had the best answer to the question of how many original drawings he gets in his days: “Not enough.”

The tattooing didn’t get started until about midnight, so I didn’t get home until about 3 in the morning, setting my alarm for 8:30 so I could do the drop before I had to go back over to Sean and Brett’s to see my Aunt Kathy, Mom’s older sister.

When I got home I fell into darkness. It was fantastic.

Peigi called to see what I was doing, and didn’t have any plans because I was still recovering from my day. I was just planning on staying home, really. But she invited me to a benefit/house party and I wanted to go just to see people other than myself in the mirror.

As I was leaving the house to meet up with her and Gregory for coffee I looked in the mirror and just didn’t feel right about myself inside. I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the party, I was just tired and I didn’t really know anybody and wasn’t in the mood to dance and… you know where that goes. I had a nicer time having coffee than at the party, and felt like an asshole when people asked me to get up and dance and I had to refuse because I just wasn’t into it. Then again, when am I really ever into it.

I slog through the holidays, I really do. And now with the cleaning of the house and how it’s wearing on my body a little along with this relapse, it’s just making me all over non-participatory. I’m hibernating for the winter.

But. I have a feature to get ready for in February, and a big reunion of the program I was in in college the week after that, and the agent search to begin again, so I’m prepping for some of these seeds to germinate in the spring.

Just got back from seeing Lisa get her new tat at Iron Horse.

There will be a complete recap of the week coming soon. But maybe not tomorrow, since I have to be up in about 5 hours to go to work (Sean’s out of town once again) and I have to be at a family function at about noon.

Bedroom’s almost ready for moving, and painting.

This weekend, although completely devoid of energy, was somewhat productive: I cleared out the rest of the CDs and all the books into the garage, and got about 80% of my shopping done. Tomorrow will be more shopping, hopefully with much smaller, less headache-enducing crowds.

Plus a little online shopping to do, too.

I thought I was getting sick again, since on Friday afternoon I started to feel the tinge at the back of my throat, and when I went over to Kim’s to see the new dog it was worsened; by the time I headed down to the Icehouse for Mixed Bag I was just utterly blah. Saturday I woke up quite phlegmy and completely unmotivated, but getting actual shopping done made me feel a little better. This morning I woke up thinking it might have gotten worse overnight, but after chewing down on a bunch of Vitamin C fruit-flavored tablets, I think it was just my body’s way of telling a cruel Yule joke. The Sun King doesn’t die, your cold does.

So.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a complete and utter mess, and no matter what the theories are, or what seems to be the agreed upon behavior that I should or should not be exhibiting outside of that, there are too many criss-crossed wires in my head right now for me to have any focus, my friends and family basically being the only exceptions for this.

Really. It’s difficult to give time and love to someone when you can’t even handle your own inner schedule. And for someone like me with so many ups and downs and personalities, the idea of snapping on someone at any moment is not exactly how I’d like to be spending the new year.

Not that I’m shutting myself down completely– let’s face it, whatever comes along is going to come along regardless.

This year’s been really weird for me. There’ve been parts of myself that I (re)uncovered, whether for good or bad, and some of those things need to be put away, and some of them explored.

It’s the holiday about death bringing life, and I now feel like I’m starting to come out of my winter and start warming up. I’ve had the cold, dark time. I want to start having the brighter, warm time.

On the news, I’d just heard about a study that the number one state for toothless people is Kentucky.

Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Kentucky. Though I’ve seen lots of people in the bar since I was a kid with hardly any or no teeth. Dad had all of his teeth pulled out the summer before he died, and to see perfect dentures smiling back at me was just fucking scary. I mean, people who get new dentures in general are a little frightening– think about it: you get so used to someone’s smile, the specific intricacies of their mouth and teeth in that way, and seeing newness to it makes you fluster. Especially since it was right before he became unable to eat at all. He used to joke about the irony of getting a g-tube only months after getting new teeth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about going back to school. But I really don’t know, other than spending a lot of money, what else would be the point of doing that.

Now that things are moving a little forward with the house– I got the bedroom measured today for the floor to be tiled– I’m re-decorating the site, too. (Except the blog, for now.)

Actually, I’m just redoing the writing part of the site. It just needs to be cleaned up a little, and I may take out a bunch of the poems in the poetry section and put some newer ones in there, and separate them into slam pieces and pages poems, then put up some clips.

Man, I really need to actually put some content in here and make things interesting. I just end up doing all these rants that may or may not have to do with writing, and nothing to do with anything else I may be interested in. I’m more apt to do commentary in poems than here, I guess. I know you guys as my friends like the updates in my life, but I should at least make an attempt to write a story every once in awhile.

Maybe I should just start hustling some small presses about the novels. There was a girl sitting behind us at the trilogy who was talking about her book just being released.

But is it good? Are mine good? Who knows. I’ve been thinking about them both lately, probably because I miss being with the characters. I feel so behind sometimes.

The agent search will begin again after the New Year.

Just got back from Trilogy Tuesday: back to back showings of the extended editions of Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, then a 10:00 showing of Return of the King.

I have no words. The ending was perfect.

There’s more, and maybe it’ll come out in bits, or maybe a whole thing, over the next few weeks.

My back hurts. A lot.

Maybe I should develop a heroin addiction.

So.

Last night was weird. Went to a feature out in Green Valley with Peigi and Damien that was good stuff, but just really long. And we headed to a little house party-type-thing hosted by a local freelance writer (yes, two weekends in a row for these literati deals, who knew), and by the end of the night Peigi and I were pooped out sitting in T-Bird’s. There was something about the night that just didn’t feel right to me, and I can’t tell you why. Maybe it was because we didn’t know anybody at the party except the host. Maybe it was because we were planning on the night going differently. By the end of the night you just wanted to take a shot of something and plop into bed when it’s 2 in the morning.

A late night, a semi-early morning for work. I’m there from about 9:30 to about 1:30, and even though my body’s a little tired, when I get home, I make lunch, digest a little, and just start getting the garage in order. I threw out a lot of stuff. A lot. Most of it was liquor boxes and old X-mas bags/boxes. A few unuseable kitchen things. Old clutter. Broken stuff.

I have bags and bags of my dad’s old clothes. I can feel him all over those things. He wants me to give them away, and I will Wednesday when Sean’s home and he can help me hawl them somewhere. I can feel the heaviness of them. They’ve been sitting there since he died.

There was one box with some of my parent’s stuff in it– a few pictures of Mom’s family, but mostly Dad’s. His high school yearbook (Allderdice HS in Pittsburgh, 1964) that people wrote their quips in on the pages with their pictures. One girl wrote, “You are a funny guy but that doesn’t help lawn mowing.”

I found one picture of Dad from when he first moved to Vegas. He’s standing on a sidewalk downtown somewhere in a smart leather jacket, his hair swept away from his face by the wind, and there’s just something in his eyes that this is not the same man I was born to years later. There’s a rough charm to him. I could see why Mom didn’t like him at first.

After I piled up the garbage, I took a breather and went back into my own bedroom and started taking posters down and putting them up in the garage. And I couldn’t help but think that all these things are memories for me, whether they trigger a place I’ve been to, a time in my life. And when I started taking down all the pictures I had on the wall I just kept thinking that I’m turning the garage partly into a Memory Room– a place that I should choose to go into, not force myself to live in all the time.

I guess I put all that stuff up in my bedroom because I wanted to remind myself of where I’ve been. But I don’t really need to do that when it’s all in my head. I have journals and journals of just stuff written down. I know what inspires me; if I want to tap into that I can read or listen to it at will.

Slowly, I’m changing the energy of this house. I will stop carrying this heaviness in my stomach, all the crap that won’t leave me. I will make this house into the space that I want.