Time to start quitting

I have no voice. Not figuratively. I cannot make any sounds with my vocal chords AT ALL. I am reduced to communicating via white board and crude, made-up sign language. This could not have happened at a worse time because i have a shit ton to say. I'm at the end of various ropes - have been for a minute.

First, Cousin Roommate has been using my car nearly every evening for just about 6 months now. Fine, whatever. He needs a vehicle and his piece of shit is broken all the way down. Has he taken it to be looked at? No. Has he helped me pay for insurance or maintainence? No. Is he saving to buy a new car? No. Does he have a plan at all that involves him not mooching off me for the rest of existence? No again. If he would put more than $6 a week in the gas tank, i might not want to punch his guts out. Every day he takes it, he says he's putting gas in right away. Every time i get in my car the tank is running on fumes. But he just bought himself a sweet new 2nd keyboard to compose on and he stays stoned pretty much 24/7, so bully for him! I guess i'm the asshole.

Then there's my house guest. Six weeks ago, a long-time friend of mine was in a situation up north that was not healthy. He needed to come home for a while. We all encouraged that. He, Thorton, asked if he could stay at our place for a couple (2?) weeks. Still here. No problem. I love the guy, of course i'm going to help him out. He helped me put together a custom work bench for my arting that fits quite nicely in my bay window - AFTER i rage cried in the bathroom because he and Cousin Roommate kept saying they would definitely help me in any way they could as they sat around getting lit, playing guitar and piano respectively, and generally not getting off their asses at all unless they were hungry. So i carried all the lumber to the porch and started doing it myself. At which point, a man certainly stepped because that's a man thing, building. Well, one man stepped in and the other ran to his room. That was 3 weeks ago. I've been able to use my new work space a total of two times. It happens to be behind Thorton's sleeping area. I have two lamp orders i cannot fulfill because the times when i'm not at a job, the space is occupied by mountains of whatever, a bed roll, or the man himself. Also, i am hosting a Halloween party this year and i need to get that room ready. I cannot do so and it's particularly more irritating as the date approaches.

And this work space thing...i spent a considerable amount of time before Thorton even got here designing it. It incorporates all my current furniture and allows for two work spaces and a sitting area. I moved all but one piece of furniture myself, as per usual. I cleaned for many hours and prepped for many more. I got rid of butt loads of useless materials and garbage. After my space was set up (although not organized, see above), Thorton says to me, "Now what i'd really like is for you to do something like that for Cousin Roommate." Exsqueeze me? Baking powder? No one did it for me. Why can't Mr. Humble Genius do it himself, other than being too high to function 90% of the time and utterly lacking any sort of motivation? But, in true door mat fashion, i was determined to figure a way to unfuck his rat-hole-studio using only the furniture i have, save for a custom built topper for my dining room table so it won't get ruined like everything else. I spent more than 3 hours coming up with a work space for two people (so he can have art night with his pal), a sitting area for watching YouTube videos of street fights and epic fails, display space for his paintings and sculptures, storage, AND a space for his keyboard (but now he has two, so that's fucked). I showed the plan to Cousin Roommate and he loved it. All i asked was that he pack up all the shit, clean a bit, and help me when it's time to rearrange. That was almost 2 weeks ago. What's been done? Not. A. Damn. Thing.

On the other hand, when i showed Thorton the plan, his response was, "Well, i was thinking someting more like this", scribbling on my design while explaining a thing wherein i have to get rid of 4 pieces of furniture and disassemble then reassemble 2 more and eliminating all hope of displaying anything or being able to entertain, "so that he has one big giant surface area so i can do animation." Ok. I'm sorry...Charles what now? My mind just sort of broke when he said that. If he thinks he's staying long enough to still be here when Cousin Roommate finally gets his ass moving on this, he better be drawing up plans for bunk beds in his bedroom. I want my gawddamn studio back.

Anyway, all of that was to illustrate how atypical my life is at the moment - and i'm going to quit smoking tomorrow. Because it's killing me. The smokes are killing me and not being able to tell people off is killing me. I'm getting my voice back, for good, even if i become a morbidly obese super bitch. Send good thoughts...please.

Me(at) vs. the Vegan I

That title probably makes it sound like i have an internal struggle with veganism. I do not. Even a little. I know what i am.

That said, what kind of vegan wears leather boots? Seriously?

I am at war with a "vegan" at my job. She doesn't know it. She doesn't know anything, apparently. I can't believe she's even real. This is the type of person i really do actually despise and it has nothing to do with veganism (which is something i don't believe in - probably because it's stupid or i don't understand it). I despise her because she is yet another example of someone who has nothing spectacular to share with the world and therefore has glommed onto an ideal which she believes makes her more interesting and better than others. In reality, she is a sanctimonious asshole who hasn't bothered to even read up on the thing that she says she is.

Vegans do not:
wear Dr. Martens.
eat 9 pieces of buttered garlic bread.
consume copious amounts of chocolate chip cookie bars while exclaiming, "These are TOO good!"
eat gummy anything.
lick the bowl of the meat-based pasta sauce i made and ask to take home any leftovers.
eat all the peanut butter and leave the knife gummed up with the stuff all stuck to the side of my sink - IF they like their patellas in their correct location.

And they certainly don't tell me how pretty my chicken salad is while lamenting that they cannot eat it after they just ate rice cakes containing FIVE animal by-products. ! And how very dare they say, "I'm a vegan with poor self-control."?! What you are, ma'am, is a dipshit who wishes she was a hipster with an angle. I say throw her to the real vegans - they'd gobble that shit up, EXCEPT real vegans don't eat animal by-products.

I'm starting all my soups with chicken stock this winter and finishing them with heavy whipping cream, so she'll have to pack her own lunch of gummy fruits, rice cakes, and chocolate chip bars.

Priorities, man. Music always wins.

In about an hour, i'm going downtown to watch my buddies' band play round 1 of a battle of the bands. They're awesome. You check them out - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Flannel-Season/305504089484374

Anyway, after they win that, i sleep. After the sleep is an hour and a half of work and THEN i leave for Riot Fest in Chicago. Holy shit. Best.

This trip is going to kick all of the asses. I'm going with the Queen of Roadtrips, Jewels. I will never get caught up financially after this and i don't give one FUCK. We have less than 12% of a plan. It's perfect. It's like when i went with Angeez to see Gwar in Chicago back in 19-tickety-7 (Gwar stole our word for ninety-BAM!), except better for several reasons.

1) I have approved time off from work. Back then i composed a note to my boss at Happy Joe's that went a little something like this: "Hey, J-----, Angeez has an extra ticket for Gwar tonight. I'd really love to work my shift but Gwar won't be there. They will be in Chicago, however, so off i go. I hope i'm not fired. I'll be in tomorrow if not. Thanks!" My employment was not terminated. At that time.

2) I have money this time. Some. Last time i literally had $2 in dimes. No spanging this time, boy howdy. No trying to write bad out-of-state checks. No following weird rich suburbanite bro-hams to some freaky mansion and doing shots while hiding from dude's parents. They took our $25 check and didn't rape us, so there's that. And no blowing tolls because we put $22 in the tank and bought a pack of smokes with the rest.

3) I am legally allowed to drink. However, i shall not do so copiously because i can't navigate 7 stages drunk.

4) I understand #3. At 19, i couldn't navigate just one stage. Anyone attempting to point that out would have gotten face-punched though.

5) Three letters: GPS.

I'm so stoked!


UPDATE: Flannel Season DID win Round 1. Muthafukkin straight!

Way to go, boners!!

Dick-tionary

Yesterday i binge watched half of the second season of Spike TV's "Ink Master" while working on various art projects. Dave "Lady Lips" Navarro (which i call him because, honestly, he has the prettiest mouth) spends a lot of time on that show defining words like contrast and light source. Words that are basic as hell. I thought maybe he's really dumb. Maybe he spends so much time caring for his luxurious hair and trimming those atrociously weird "mutton burns" that he never got a chance to learn vocabulary. Maybe Spike TV doesn't expect their audience to be very bright, a fairly safe assumption considering most of their programming.

Anyway, after the binge, i sat around with three of my dude-friends listening to them talk. These are dudes who treat me like one of the guys, so i get an almost accurate sense of what they talk about and how they talk about it when ladies aren't around. And i was able to figure out why ol' Lady Lips tries to sound like a dictionary. It's not because he assumes other people don't know what a word like, for example, GRID means. It's because he's trying to sound smarter than he really is. Trying to establish authority about a subject that he actually doesn't know a whole lot about. Apparently, in groups, dudes do this all the time. All three of those guys did the same thing last night. None of them do that when talking to me one on one, mainly because i'd roll my whole head and scream, "Zoidberg!" at them. It's like faux-intellectual bullshit that irritates the fuck out of me and bores me to the point that i lose all interest in whatever they're trying to say. I don't need a definition from their dick-tionary because i have my own. And it's bigger.

I mean, LOOK at those LIPS!

Really, i'm not using it

Free to a good home - or bad one, i don't care: One barely used uterus. Like a piano, the actual getting it out of where it is and to your place might be tricky - that part is up to you though. Seems to work fine, except for once ten years ago; however, since then, it has been perfectly regular. Requires meds two days a month. Answers to a variety of swear words. Pick it up today and i'll throw in two ovaries and a diva cup as a bonus.

Seriously, get this fucking thing out of me.

15 Years

Apparently, even after 15 years a person can still experience Crumple Neck. Crumple Neck is a phenomenom i first witnessed and named after my brother Mike died. He was an immensely popular dude. There were a lot of people coming and going to offer comfort and to pay their respects. That moment when it hits you that someone is gone, after the shock wears off and reality sets in - that's when it happens. I saw it happen to each of my siblings and my dad and countless of his friends and family. The hands cover the face, the head falls forward like neck has given out under the enormity of sadness filling the brain, the whole body quivers for moment and then down they go. The body just collapses as if their bones have crumbled. All the times i watched it happen, the Crumple Necker was caught and mad hugging and sobbing ensued. It was horrible. I didn't experience it, or perhaps part of it is not realizing it is happening. I guess that could be.

I've been feeling not entirely like myself for about a month. I feel offended and slighted by completely innocuous things. I feel like i'm on the defense at all times. My brain gets fixated on stupid shit and won't let go like it normally does, like lakes and harmless off hand comments or a not-prompt-response from someone. My inner dialog and even what comes out of my mouth has been a nonstop stream of hateful bitchiness. I've been worried constantly about nothing in particular and seem to look for something going wrong to focus on. But everything is awesome - there's no reason for this. I love my jobs, my home, my friends, my city. My parents are moving back soon, the school year is about to start and the program this year is going to be bigger and better than ever and i get to work with two of my best friends, my art has been selling a little. All these things are great. So why do i feel impending doom? My anxiety has been getting progressively worse for a week straight.

Yesterday i realized that this is the exact way i was feeling in the weeks before my brother died. I kept having panic attacks and thinking everyone secretly hated me. I went to my doctor 3 times in the month leading up to Michael's accident. Every time all i could do was cry and tell him over and over that i felt like something bad was going to happen. I couldn't explain why or what, i just felt doom. After he was hurt, he was improving for two weeks and had one week left in the hospital before getting transferred to a care facility for therapy...and then he just died. He was fine, burnt but fine, and then he was dead.

When i felt that yesterday, that i was back to that place i was in before that all happened, i panicked. For real panic, worse than i have experienced in 15 years. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop and i'm absolutely terrified something terrible is going to happen again. Everything could go to shit again. I Crumple Necked. There was no one there and i went down like a ton of bricks. I went to the doctor, poor guy. He was only a general practioner, but he listened and was encouraging. He let me know that even if i watch for this stuff and do what i can to twart it, sometimes depression can get in there so intensely that before you know it you're bawling your head off, hiding in your bed or becoming a defensive über bitch and start having panic attacks. That is how my depression presents, and that way sucks because panic attacks can happen if i'm worried about having one or i remember ones i've had before. It's a sadistic disorder.

I miss my brother and i miss feeling normal. I hate my stupid brain for not knowing what chemicals to produce and when. I hate feeling like a fuck up when i'm doing the best i can. I hate feeling like i can't talk to my friends when i feel this way because i don't want to seem weak or bring them down.

This shit was supposed to be under control.


UPDATE: I didn't find this out until 3 days after i published this post, but on the day i had my freak out and went to the doctor, my oldest brother DJ was on a farm during a grain dust explosion. He was not hurt, thankfully, although there was a casualty at the site. Weird, huh?

The Story of Kasper OR Why I Never Trust That I Actually Know Anything

A long, long time ago, when i was in community college in Illinois, i had a classmate named  Kasper (obviously, that is not his real name). He was a mega-babe and by far the most hilarious man i had met since moving away from home to a place where i knew no one except extended family who lived 45 minutes from where i was working as a live-in nanny. The family i worked for was (still is) awesome, and while i was content with my living and working conditions, i was lonely. I had made no friends outside of the cul-de-sac and none of those people were my peers in any way. I just didn't do anything except work, create art in my hella sweet suite in the basement, write letters, talk on the phone endlessly with all the friends i had left in Iowa, and spend hours reorganizing my expansive Pez dispenser collection. In the first six months i lived there, the lady of the house kept encouraging me to go to college, to figure out what would come after being a nanny, to challenge myself and put my "obvious intelligence" to use in bettering myself. She convinced me to get an education and helped me enroll in night and weekend classes at the county college 20 minutes from our house. Oh, the perks of living with a brilliant school counselor...

I excelled at my first two semesters although i had a hard time relating to the kids in my classes. They were all several years younger than me and had all come from very different (far more privileged) backgrounds. Working in groups was like being thrown into a group of derelict aliens. After a year of not meeting anyone who i thought possessed any of the qualifications i require for friendship, and after about the Nth time some idiot 18 year-old boy said, "Cold out there?" while eyeing my chest as i came in from a snowstorm, i came to the conclusion that i was simply not going to make friends. And then, in Spanish class, i met Gata and in Math for Teachers i met Kasper - all in the same week. Gata was the funniest girl i had ever met and easily the coolest and most interesting person i had met in years. I had thought all the cool people were already my friends and that they all lived in Iowa and that people from Illinois were pretentious jerks. She proved me wrong and i am forever grateful. Now Kasper...he was funny too, but also kind of dark and mysterious. He had these brown eyes that i wanted to live inside of, or else rip from his face and keep in a jar. I would get so nervous before class that i almost felt like puking. He would come in, look around for me, and then take a seat as close as possible and proceed to ignore the lecture portion in order to show me pictures that he drawn or things he had written. If i came to class late, he always had a seat for me. We worked in groups or pairs together exclusively and talked about music and art and deep things. After class we'd go to the cafeteria or the commons and just hang until the school closed for the night. If i happened to be looking stressed or unhappy, he would go out of his way to make me feel better. We never talked outside of school but i thought about him constantly and talked about him to Gata even more. One weekend she and i had plans to meet some other friends at a bar to see a local band that did a pretty decent rock cover show. Gata convinced me to invite Kasper to meet me there. I somehow managed to ask him without throwing up all over myself or having a stroke and to my utter delight his reply was, "Hell yeah - i love their show. Can't wait!" And so Saturday could not get there quickly enough. I wish that the world had ended at that moment.

Saturday night i sat at our table breaking my neck to see the door. Eventually i started to think he wasn't going to show and gave up watching the entrance like a hawk. I was having a good old time with Gata and some other classmates when someone taps my should and i stand and turn to see Kasper...with a really pretty redhead on his arm. He introduces us (i can't remember what the fuck her name was because really all i could hear was the blood rushing out of my heart and brain and some voice inside me saying. "You stupid bitch. You really thought this was going to be a date, didn't you? You sad, sad stupid cow."). After the intro, the redhead says she's going to get a drink and Kasper leans in, all smiles, and says, "I can't believe she said yes - i've been working up the nerve to ask her out for months." I opened my mouth and heard, "Oh, how extraordinarily awesome that must be. Hope it goes well." Then i turned back to my table, drank my beer and Gata's, ordered shots and another round for everyone except the traitor and his red-haired hussy. I proceeded to get as drunk as possible as fast as i could. Needless to say, Kasper and his date found another table and spent the whole night gazing into each other's eyes and giggling with their heads together. They didn't even watch the goddamn band, the losers.

The rest of that night went as expected. I was feeling hurt and embarrassed, but above all pissed off. I was mad at myself for misinterpreting his friendship for something more. I was really honked off at him for spending all this time talking to me about everything in the world besides that dumb slut he brought ON OUR DATE. And i was incredibly angry that i had just looked so stupid in front of my one and only friend in the entire state. Gata was awesome about it though - she offered to cut his brake line or punch the girl in the face or follow Kasper to the bathroom and cut his balls off. You know, all the things a best friend does. In the end though, it was me who got punched in the face that night. I ended up getting jumped by 3 horrible cunts over a misunderstanding about the stupid drummer's sweatshirt. That's a story for another time.

Anyway - that is why i never actually believe anything that i think i know. My heart is a big mean jerk that can trick my brain into almost anything given the chance.