Thickening

It's been about three months since my best friend died. The common ground we had spidered in just about every direction. From surviving by the music we loved, to a horrific wit... The last time I saw him we were at a Decemberists concert, he, having stolen an extra hot pretzel from the busy counter in the lobby was busied with texting nonstop and had slunk into his movie seat with no intention of being bothered with the show. The first act was singing about how there was "joy in repetition".... I found myself taking in the scene from an outsiders mind, feeling inadequit and stared at. He motioned that he wanted to go and I lied and told him I'd be glad to take him home. I dropped him off at his front door and found myself in front of his casket a week later. There were signs, plenty, but I ignored all of them, the stealing, the drowsiness at 5 in the afternoon. I like horse too, don't get me wrong, but I cleaned up a couple years back. He was the bad kid in school, corrupting and over cynical, too cynical to believe himself most of his life. His Fiance has since moved in with another man who was a friend of hers for a couple years about a month after his soul died. I don't blame her, what the fuck would i do in her shoes?
I can't get my head round the death of him. Even starting at his open castket, his body looking stuffed like a creepy doll, putting a flower on his grave, listening to his childhood friends eulogy and holding my friend Andrea's hand while she and I cried in the church, all of it just events, punctuated by time that I feel guilty for not having anything to say anything about.
Now, three months on I feel like I should do something to make his life worthwhile, but what do you do for someone that you saw so much of yourself in? I feel like such a big part of me died that day. And every day that passes things just mean a little less to me. It makes me up so ugly to think that all of life is this and the arbitrary meaning I stick to the sky. Like a neon post-it note: "Thickening"

Watch for low hanging plans

I responded to a friend yesterday... I thought this may be of interest:

hmm, this is just in a comment to your email yesterday. I don't think there's anything shallow about trying to enjoy what's in front of you. Most days I spend reeling in my own emotions unable to separate what I think I feel, or how I want to feel, from my own world that's right in front of me. To want to reach out and touch a frond, not a bad thing. I play make believe that all the things around me are there to make sense and prove some sort of a point, when in reality it's just arbitrary meaning. To say that my relationship is shallow, yes of course it is, and to say that it's deep, of course. We've survived literally living in a cesspool together. It doesn't hurt my feelings to think I like to see what I love showered and smelling fresh... i guess maybe it comes down to desire and commitment. maybe that's all it is, and for me to keep that desire, it has to be desirable. True, I should be happy with myself, I should be happy with what I love, and to extents, I am, but to separate the love I have from the desire I have is inhuman to me, calculating... I hear about people being content with the life in front of them, how they're all set now and have sublimated their worldly desires, I don't believe it at all. What's the point? Heaven's gate? There is no all encompassing love unless you want to drown your senses in a drug and fuck. And when it wears off your left looking for something again. But I can see how 4 trillion dollars in advertising has culled my senses to think that everything has a beginning and an end. Every religion has one of each. Every sentence. My mind conditioned to believe in time and extremes. The smallest of particles, the infinite pi. Things just don't work like that. But I do want them too. And that's the sickness I want to kill off.

Baby, looking is all I do....

Maybe the idea of a career just isn't meant for some people. I started off finishing college in a whirl of design and desire. I worked for a month bricklaying and saved up enough to move 3500 miles away from Buffalo which smacked me in central London. I spent my college graduation money and the (really) hard earned bricklaying funds in the first two weeks. I drank and walked the streets, found myself heading up unfamiliar alleys trailing tumbling newspapers and sidestepping steamvents. I got a job selling stolen speakers out of a van. Only the speakers weren't stolen- it was a pitch to crane some poor gits head to fish into his wallet for a few hundred quid. I lasted four days at that one. Then I got a career emptying ash trays and beer bottles in a converted church called the Limelight- I'd work until 4 and jump a bus that dropped me two miles shy of my apartment, with the sun behind me like super string theory all the long walk home. Sometimes i'd sing songs I made up to keep myself occupied. I hated the people i worked with, but sidelined my feelings because I had no money for food, and trust me, when you miss a few meals in a row, you forgive a lot for a bit of cash to buy you one. I moved from London to Coventry and took up a job with the last of my legal work visa selling rental TV's at a place called Granada rentals... a college graduate english degree at it's finest.
To sound bitter wouldn't make any sense to me, life has been a long frustration. I'm now in another job I can't stand, selling a product I don't believe in and yet I think things will be different. It's been 9 years since those days in England. I'm now in Philadelphia. Abrupt and caught somehow by my own frustration with myself. To forgive the past? I carry it with me as I can't get rid of myself.
I've read about the now. The now that forgets the past and just is. The useless psychobabble of someone else who's forced to use a learned language, a house of cards that we ply, but never really dissasemble, the house caves, but the cards still remain. Experiencing the same sun and alternating stars over and over. Same sun: same differentiating, forgetful and overly moody heart.