Gamekeeping

I'm at Gamekeepers at the corner of Armitage and Lincoln drinking
expensive Fat Tire that Kevin's friend probably would not have gotten
for us were he not already shitfaced.

Everyone is playing Quarters over there even though all the people in
the group we came to meet are already post college. Once again I
wonder just what I missed by choosing/not having the opportunity to go
off to school to live in the dorms for all if the drugs, booze, and
anime loving borderline psychotic poontang that I could get. I felt
this way whenever my ex-roommate would set up the Tip-a-cup table at
our old house, like that I had missed out on some essential
opportunity to find out why people found such stupid fucking drinking
games to be so appealing.

I gave Sarah all of her shit back tonight and the person that emerged
from her apartment to greet me sounded utterly broken and defeated,
and now I feel like shit. Instead of fleeing a battle of self
preservation, I now just feel like an asshole who abandoned her when
she REALLY needed my help. I do miss her, even though the relationship
had gotten to the point if where I was overjoyed that we were watching
an extremely long form TV show like Lost to get through as it lets me
temporarily forget the fact that I feel like I have nothing to say to
her and I feel terrible about that.

I requested Dragonforce on the jukebox and I can't wait until it cones
up so these frat douchebags can start complaining.

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wash me away

 

 

porcelain heart

It was a shame that for me to finally have turned over your rock to
see what was beneath, I found nothing but filth and maggots.

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the rancor pit

Wow! Way to turn a day that was ostensiy about MY issues into an all
night crazy fest in which I got to learn all about/abused physically
by YOUR issues!

Let's not do this again.

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Is this the kind of thing people see shrinks over, given anyone that I
usually confide in is providing little in the way of succor?

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waiting

ramble

I've been quite irritable lately towards the people that care about me the most and this makes me feel incredibly guilty as once again in the rare occasions when I show any kind of outward emotion it's one of the less appealing ones. It could just be the stress of joblessness and the fact that I still haven't gotten any kind of confirmation or start date for Barcodes, or it could just be me going with the flow on everyone I know's life going completely to shit for economic or other reasons.

I've spent most of the past half hour texting back and forth with Sarah and declining her phone calls, as I guess she was going to have a 'beach day' with four of her friends (only one of whom has ever really shown me anything warmer than mild contempt) and she asked me to come along. Paraphrased:
'Ok, let me finish up a few things and I'll be at your place in twenty minutes.'
'Uh, we're leaving now, so we won't be here.'
'I'll leave immediately, then.'
'No, we won't be here.'
Something sounded off in her tone of voice, or maybe I was just reading into it way too much, but I found myself getting a bit testy at this. She's usually like this when hanging out with those friends, with her tone of voice over the phone becoming dismissive and callous.
'Fine, just call me whenever you figure out where you're going.' End call, no goodbye.

I found that by this point I was pissed in my usual quiet, pathetic, and bitter way (mostly due to choking it all back, so it feels like all I get are the byproduct or fumes of anger) so I texted her to tell her that I was just going to stay here, have a good time. She texts back asking if I still wanted to meet up later and of course I blow it with this reply:
"Your tone of voice over the phone indicates that you couldn't give a shit so who knows."
So she calls me like six times because as per usual when I do anything remotely in the feeling hurting zone she takes it incredibly personally. I've found that it's this way with most people and I've never understood it. Why is it that I let everything just kind of roll or bounce off of me but the second I try to give it back to anyone it just takes one lashing out and suddenly I'm a monster? I'm not suggesting that I prefer everyone be as shut down and rigid as I am (I hate being this way) but it's a mystery to me anyway.

I decline every call. There's three voicemails in the queue but I don't want to hear them because I can't stand making people cry despite how often it seems to happen. I don't know why the whole idea of her not wanting to wait for me to meet them at her apartment was such a big fucking deal to me. I didn't used to be like this but over the past week I've been so terrible and because she's the person who is around me the most she's gotten the brunt of it. No one I try to talk to about these feelings is any help at all because they tend to have the same answers. "Oh, you're stressed out about your unemployment." It just seems like the smallest, stupidest things about her set me off and I really hate that because she's doing nothing to deserve it. I eventually ended up sending her a text apologizing for being so awful this past week but I imagine I look like an emotionally retarded psycho to her right now.

We had a similar incident two nights ago when I had her over despite knowing good and well that I just wanted to be alone that night, and we watch a documentary on Cuttlefish that I had downloaded, and then she immediately moved over to the bed because she hates sitting on my futon. This caused a similar reaction in me to the phone call in which I just wanted her to go away. I was also really tired and irritable (I was hoping that was the actual cause for my lack of reasoning ability but it's carried over to the next few days) so I told her that I was just going to go to bed and that she should go out and get food on her own. The thing that frustrates me the most is that she would keep asking what she could do to make me feel better because I do know that she really cares about me but I could give her no answer, as the only one I could think of was 'leave me alone.' She proceeded to lay down in the same bed and try to sleep with me, but I felt trapped, immobile. I couldn't sleep, but at this point I also couldn't find it in me to tell her to go away. It was just a bad situation for everyone but mostly me.

I just got off the phone with her and I guess I'm going to go meet her downtown and then we're going to the Wicker Park Fest to see Isis. I hope I feel better by then.

Hilariously Literal Album Covers Theater:

Sinister Corporate Global Hegemony of the Dark Knight

What Bush and Batman Have In Common

I'm usually not one to engage in pointless Bush bashing (what would I really say that hasn't been said by everyone under the sun before me?) but I had a few issues with this particular love letter to the current administration that somehow manages to connect the events of its fantastical depiction of supercrime with our current aggressive domestic and foreign policy.

First off, they are partly correct. Both our soon to be ex-president and the Dark Knight do not have much in the way of respect for the constitution or due process as they flout conventional law as a way of keeping us "safe." In a comic book world of supercriminals where every day of the week (and twice on a Sunday) some asshole in a costume tries to poison the Gotham Reservoir, the conventional authorities are not equipped to handle this kind of thing, so of course we delight in the adventures of an eccentric rich guy dressing up in a costume and foiling the crime with his array of martial arts and gadgetry. This makes sense in that kind of logic.

All of the shit in there about Bush making the same kinds of 'hard choices' that Batman does in the movie (like turning every Gotham citizen's cellphone into a 'sonar resonator' that can listen in on their conversations and even 'see' where they are, kicking the shit out of the Joker in the interrogation room, various other violations of the fourth amendment) don't really apply in a world where a single grievous terrorist act changed our way of thinking so that we're on the offense instead of the defense.

The Joker is NOTHING like the Islamist terrorist threat that we're facing in various resource rich regions of the world. The Joker says numerous times through the movie that he's an 'agent of chaos' who pursues anarchy as a means to itself. Al Qaeda at least has some sort of political agenda by way of religion involving kicking us out of what they perceive as places that the U.S. does not belong. And yes, assuming we were to kowtow to this we can assume that they would continue being a bunch of assholes to their own regions as they rip themselves apart in sectarian conflict. We can also assume that they wouldn't be terribly interested in us outside of whether we were buying the oil or not.

So yeah, there's my internet nerd rage, except I'd like to think my target was a bit better than complaining about Sony losing PS3 exclusives to Microsoft.

I got a letter today saying I qualified for unemployment.

SUCK IT MIDPHASE.

gutter tie

to catch a space predator

"I can see the space rohypnol is starting to kick in."

the pills on the bus that I found

Your result for The Venture Bros. Test...

Brock Samson

The epitome of being cool and a bad ass. Like James Bond, Vin Diesel and The Fonz rolled into one. You're cool under pressure, magic with the ladies and you've killed someone with a sock full of poppers. Keep up the good work.

Take The Venture Bros. Test at HelloQuizzy

the bat man: dark nights

The Dark Knight was a better movie than Begins on every conceivable
level, insofar as I think powers that be had more confidence in the
creators to make it less about gadgets and empty sound and fury, with
them trusting the actors and the setting to do all the work for them.
It was strange seeing 99% of the movie's 'Gotham City' as being the
place that I had been working for nearly a year, and there were plenty
of sly nods to Chicago throughout, like a city bus having GTA on the
side instead of CTA for the Chicago Transit Authority.

Heath Ledger's Joker was a force of nature and it makes it far sadder
that someone who could be as compartmentalized and minimalist in
Brokeback could so effortlessly switch over to complete madness. His
Joker is the unholy union of Tom Waits, Hugh Laurie, and Kakihara from
Ichi the Killer. His Joker was a nightmarish, flinch inducing pleasure
to watch in every scene he was in and I think it's terrible that I
can't think of another actor who would bring such a frighteningly
physically intense take on the character.

My only real complaint is that Christian Bale's Batman voice is
TERRIBLE. Instead of sounding gruff and frightening he just sounds
like he's chopping the beginning and ending of all of his words off,
while fighting his way through some sort of ENT ailment.

There's also a completely ludicrous plot cheat involving cellphones
that has to be seen to be believed.

I liked Hellboy 2 significantly more but this is by far the best
Batman movie and possibly the first DC movie that doesn't assume its
audience is eight years old.

Watchmen looked like complete shit.

Good night.

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past imperfect

A very astute person told me last night that nearly everything that I
made reference to in my past had a girl attached to it and I found
that to be kind of startling, but now that I think about it it isn't
that surprising. It does make me question if that's really the best
metric by which to measure my life experiences and how I felt at the
time though.

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Joyriding

wash the day

turn off the signal
wipe out the noise

One year later and I'm back on the same beach, buried up to my shoulders. The lake is calm but there are thunderheads in the distance like always. On any other night I feel like I could weather the storm and flood to come, but I feel particularly fragile.

My dismissal from my job has had me feeling vaguely numb and anxious, but it is all through the filter of my brain not allowing me to see the full scope of how fucked I am if I don't find a job as soon as possible. Getting that job was a total fluid involving meeting the right person at the right time under random circumstances after three months of totally fruitless searching. I won't make it through another unemployment cycle like that without losing a lot of what I value most, like privacy, communication, and electricity. I've never been the kind of person to panic at these kinds of things, but sometimes I wonder if that kind of release would be more healthy that what I'm actually doing, which feels like just standing here slackjawed while my whole life falls apart.

I'm difficult and standoffish to those that care about me most because I worry that right now feeling ANYTHING will lead to complete collapse. This is only occurring to me now, but it may explain the vast majority of my personality issues that I've had since the beginning, that my mind is so set on pushing forward through everything and burning every bridge behind me that I've never let myself just stop and breathe and appreciate things. The novocaine-like emotional response that I've had to the main thing that was structuring my life collapsing suddenly isn't that different than how I feel all the time.

This has been another long and tiresome entry that has changed nothing. Thank you for reading it.

song of the moment

walking through the undergrowth
to the house in the woods
the deeper I go
the darker it gets
i peer through the window
knock at the door
and the monster i was
so afraid of
lies curled up on the floor

-Peter Gabriel, "Darkness"

One year later and back to square one.

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reckoning

It feels good to know that the world is truly a better place with
Jesse Helms no longer living on it. It is a shame to be so sure that
there is no God, as I thoroughly enjoy the idea of him rotting in
eternal perdition.

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hoboweight champion

A hobo tried to jack my beer as I was walking home from Dominick's tonight.

I was walking by the notoriously sketchy Howard Station on a night where it was even darker than usual, I have no idea what was up with the lack of streetlights. A heroin addict looking old white guy in cutoff jean shorts, a ripped up AC/DC shirt, and combat boots starts walking directly towards me and he tries to do this shoulder check thing while trying to grab the case of Leinenkugel Red I'd grabbed in addition to the change I had gotten for laundry at the store. I dodge out of the way, yelling:

"Don't you fucking touch me!" I bellowed. The guy immediately gets up in my face and tells me that because I disrespected him, he's going to jack my shit. I stared him in the bleary eye and snarled fuck you, I don't think so, get the fuck out of my way, I'm going home.

"Fuck you ain't goin' home! Give me a fucking beer or I'm taking your shit!"

"I don't think so. I'm going home."

He faltered for a second and then put his hands in his pockets, stuck his chin out, and told me I could have one free shot in exchange for a beer.

I stared at him with utter disgust, shook my head, and then walked down the street and ducked into the corner store where I get a Monster on the way to the station every morning. He didn't follow, but I was checking over my shoulder the entire ten minute walk home and mentally preparing to flag down one of the cop cars that passed that street every 30 seconds if he had reappeared. He didn't.

I'm still shaking from the adrenaline I had in this encounter, because I can't remember being this angry in quite awhile. If the guy had put his hands on me I'm pretty sure I would have just dropped the beer and beaten the piss out of him. I'm not by nature a violent person, but whenever anyone tries to invade my comfort zone on that level I can do some pretty drastic things.

I believe there should be a Hobo Code. If you want to beg for a living, that's fine. Some people will simply never find themselves with the motivation or wherewithal to get a job like normal society. Every job I've ever had was pretty much based on luck or connections and there are people who have none. It should be up to the individual person to decide whether they want to ignore, respond, or acquiesce to the request of said hobo. Like if I've got leftovers and somebody on the way home asks for them, 9 times out of 10 I'll give them up because the person who is asking probably needs them a lot more than I do. If the guy had been like 'hey buddy, can I get one of those beers?' I'd most likely have given him one as I'm not a total dick.

The violation of the Hobo Code is when you just try to take it though. That infuriates me beyond all belief and leads to the encounter tonight. I'd rather not do this on a daily basis, but if it happens again I imagine it will be worse.

rock star

On the purple line right now there's a toddler who won't stop
periodically shrieking. This in itself is annoying but there's also
some autistic dude doing the whole 'agitated rocking and thrashing
around' thing in response to it.

I hope I can escape with my life.

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