Amusing Illusions of Strength

Hello bitches.

I feel the need to point something out to you that you may or may not have noticed in your comings and goings with people. I noticed this quality trait in a friend of mine whom with which I had a nice long phone call with this morning. He does not read my blog so will never know its about him. I think this truly interesting phenomena is prevalent in just about all people of a certain mental group, perhaps a genetic group, I don't know.

Ever notice how some people when talking about them self will constantly reference another person in their life and seemingly give enormous ammounts of credit to this other person? So much so that your first impression is "Whoa this person is in love and very devoted" But then... the person keeps bringing this reference up again and again, the same person, over and over again. Piling on more and more credit and praise until it gets to the point where you are almost sick of hearing about that person? What is that?! Here let me give you an example.

Joe: Dude, I got that new promotion.

Steve: No shit?! Gratz man! You rock.

Joe: Yeah, it' great. But I could not have done it without Heather, man, she was really there for me the whole time. She supported me and helped me through it.

Steve: uh... yeah, but you did it on your own and you should...

Joe: I mean, if it werent for her, I would be nothing, I would be homeless and desolate and wandering the streets completly devoid of a soul. She has saved my life man. I really love her.

Steve: ...

Joe: Dude, no one knows me like she does, she has stuck with me through thick and thin. She is the ground beneeth my feet, the wings on my back that carries me through this fucked up world and over the rocky ground of everyday life! She understands me, she loves me, she sticks with me no matter how fucked up I am or become. I owe it all to her.

Steve: Dude, get a grip.

Joe: She is my soul mate.

Steve: We can no longer be friends.

Joe: You just dont understand man...

Steve: No I do, I understand perfectly. You are pretty much a weak, souless individual with no free will or ability to make it in this world. All of your accomplishments are not your own, you are pathetic. Am I getting it right?

Joe: Fuck you dude, you don't know me. I am outta here.

Steve: Are you sure you made that decision on your own, or did Heather send you a telepathic message to help you get a spine and stand up for yourself? I mean I do not see any antenne on your head, how did you get to this resolution on your own? Wait.. did you actually make the decision to leave of your own free will? How did you do that? I am sure it was the support of your soul mate and love of your life that gave you the strength to decide this, right? You make me want to punch babies, get out of my sight.

Joe: ...

Steve: Wanna go get a drink?

Joe: Yeah.

Steve: Lovely weather we're having.

Joe: Yeah... thank Heather for that.

I think you get the point. You know this person, they are in your life, in fact they might be you. There is nothing wrong with someone in your life who is there to catch you when you fall, hell we all fall at one time or another. but give yourself some credit where credit is due. When it comes right down to it, we are all alone, even with the ones we love. Everything you are, everything you do, is a result of you doing something about it, others can not make you be the person you are. Be proud of yourself, take credit for what you have done. And do that someone special in your life a favor and DO NOT place so much responsibility on thier shoulders as good ole' Joe has done up above. Because when they fail you, as people inevitably do simply because they are human beings, you are going to crash hard. You are going to hit bottom and you may not ever get back up.. until someone else comes along you can blame all your success on.

Letting Go

If you add up all the things in your life that you have experienced, people you have met and thing you have done. Foods you have tasted, drinks you have enjoyed. Movies you liked, poetry you read. Books you have sat in front of the fireplace reading or.. hell, even your favorite type of porn. All of these things, added up, equal the sum of your life. Because all you have is memories and the present. Anything beyond that is fleeting and useless. Even love is a memory. You remember what it felt like to first kiss and hold this incredible new person, and from there, after the newness fades, your left with the memory of love. And you remain in love with the memory until something new is experienced with this person. If too much time goes by, you forget. And then you "fall out of love". And you let that person go for another new experience, something that can make an imprint on your mind and heart. Another good memory.

You know what my problem is? I cant fucking remember what I had for dinner the night before. I do not remember very much of anything at all. Ever. But this puts me in a unique place that is quite outside the box. Everything is new. Everything is a wonderous experience that keeps me feeling. I am blessed and cursed at the same time. Blessed to forget all the bad things so I do not carry around any baggage at all. None. But cursed because I am intense. I am intense and constantly searching for that next memory. That little something that will make the moment not feel like just another empty day.

Are you like me?

A digression:

I am going to take a small break from my tale to talk to you about the simple pleasures in life. Keeping in mind these are very personal and you may have the same or completely different ones. Normally a day in the life just moves along, you are carried along by it because time will not stop for you and you don’t have much of a choice. Sometimes however, sporadically during your day, something will amuse you. Brighten your day. I had one such occurrence today and I thought I would share it with you. I am a smoker, yes I partake of the great white cylindrical death enhancer. The cancer stick. Thus far I will say the whole experience has been somewhat non-rewarding. It is a means of self destruction that takes entirely too long and leaves your clothes and fingers smelling poorly. I wish it would just hurry the fuck up and kill me already, but no such luck. Anyhow, I work in a building in Manhattan where there are several other smokers. One of them I see often and she smokes with me. Now normally we stand there and look at people walking by or stare into space. However today she decides to speak to me and she tells me a funny story. She says: “This guy starts talking to me in a bar last night, trying to pick me up and asking for my number. I asked him if he was married, he says ta me, ‘whats it maddah’ (she is a 4ft tall 50 something year old Italian woman, thus the phonetic spelling of some of her words.. for ambiance) so I sayz ta him, whaddaya mean whats it maddah? Where’s ya wife tonight?. He sayz ta me, ‘she’z at home with da kids’ I sayz ta him how do you know?” At this point I laugh outloud and award her several levels of respect. She told me that no more than 10 minutes after he gave up on her he was on his cell phone calling home. How funny is this? This pleases me. A simple pleasure but one that I felt the need to share. Ok, the story shall continue… back to my commute.

Lieing is bad:

It is at this time that I convince myself that I am in the process of getting up. Getting up out of bed and going to take my morning shower. But I just lied to my girlfriend, I am lieing to myself and its going to cost me. I can not help myself, my eyes just close and I am fast asleep once again, dreaming that wonderful dream. After all, why not catch a few more winks, right? I am partially deaf now so I should sleep even better. But what I do not expect, what I should not expect, but what is inevitable is… pain. Pain is coming. It is arriving on a galloping white mare, full plate mail armor and a sword of shining steel. Suddenly, without warning, the nerves in my big toe send an immediate SOS message to the brain stem.

“Holy shit, were taking heavy damage down here, I think were done for. Tendons are popping, the bone is creaking and I am pretty sure were being pulled completely off. Tell the other toes, Ill miss them, I never wanted it to end this way.. Good bye… good bye… aigggh”

This of course, no living being could sleep through and I spring immediately awake and check my surroundings. Confident that I am no longer in possession of my big toe and that it has been unceremoniously removed by violent means; I spot the face of my girlfriend. She is not smiling, this is good I suppose, I mean what kind of woman would be smiling while holding the recently severed big toe of her boyfriend, right? Don’t answer that… But I’m shocked to realize it is still attached and I know this because it is throbbing. This is the point where I realize that to remain in bed would probably result in further unpleasant abuse and I begin the attempt to move. First I roll over on my stomach. This way I can put my hands under my chest and give a half hearted push so I will slide down off the bed and onto the floor. Hopefully on my feet, but my knees will work if I get that far. I know, this sounds strange, but bear with me. Believe me, I am not a huge fat guy who can not get out of bed, I am amazingly spry when I am wide awake. But before my smoke and 2 cups of coffee, I am about as mobile as a cement truck with square wheels. This method is tried and true and seems to work for me. Try it sometime you might be surprised.. or not. So, here I am, hands under my chest and I am pushing. But ya know… it’s so comfortable like this. I mean.. the warmth of the blankets still covering me, the slight chill of the outside air dancing over the tips of my toes.. Well my one good toe and my nearly mutilated toe, that is. The throbbing is now a comfortable thud, singing in time with my heart beat. So… relaxing… and…

….. The Ears: “Ahem… wake up dude. I hear foot steps. No seriously she is coming back to check on you. Dear god, don’t let her see you fell back to sleep. Jesus, we saw what happened to the toe, we are just spongy cartilage, were your ears man... You need us!”

Fortunately I manage one last push and I feel the icy cold wooden floor make contact with my feet just as she pokes her head in and casts me a look that surely would have turned Medusa to stone and blasted her into tiny fragments of sand and blown her out the door and down the street. So off it is.. off to the shower. This is another adventure in itself.

“GET the FUCK out of BED!”:

Some people have an alarm clock. Some people have this internal alarm clock that magically wakes them up at the right time everyday. They are never late for work, they always catch the train or the bus and they are sitting at their desks at 9am smiling and ready to go. I am NOT one of these people. I will tell you why. I was stationed onboard one of our nation’s largest aircraft carriers during Desert Storm. A 5000 man floating city, with enough space to house several apartment buildings, a football field and a bowling alley or two. Hell, it had its own mini airport! Guess who slept directly under that airport? You guessed it. My bunk was directly under the main catapult. Some of you may have trouble understanding what this means. Your typical F-14 weighs roughly 76,000 pounds, how powerful would something have to be to propel this piece of machinery off the end of the flight deck at 125 knots (144 mph)? So powerful that when it did this the entire front end of this huge ship would shake like a bowl of Jell-O in a paint mixer. The BAM that the catapult made as it slammed into the front of the ship while launching these aircraft rivaled Emeril Lagassee with a ten thousand watt bull horn. The two together was like a mini nuclear explosion in my sleeping compartment every few minutes. Not normally conducive to favorable sleeping environments. I don’t imagine the people down at MIT studying REM and sleep patterns will often place mini-nukes under their patient’s beds. But I had to learn to sleep through this. And I had to learn to get a good nights rest and wake up feeling refreshed.

And guess what friends? I did. Much to my dismay, I retained the ability to sleep through even the most audibly assaulting, physically abusive situations you can imagine, many years after leaving the service. All forms of abuse save one… The Girlfriend.

Let me paint a picture for you. Let me lead you down the familiar path of peaceful sleep. You know the one I am talking about. The one where you are all stretched out, tucked in under the covers because it’s nice and cozy warm under there, and outside of that safe little environment it is about 40 degrees cooler. You are deep in the middle of one of your most pleasurable dreams of your life, hell, you’d be happy if you never woke up again. When suddenly… unexpectedly… you are absolutely certain that your ears were just impaled with rusty, electrified, barb tipped Ice Picks. Your heart actually stops beating for a minute just so it can ask the brain if everything is all right up there. All of the muscles in your body stiffen in a full on, cave man like, instinctual self-preservation mode. This causes you to rise up a few inches from the mattress, hands and arms outstretched to catch yourself, because now you’re in the air, and falling back to the mattress. You’re immediate concern is to check for blood coming from your ears, but the smiling, disarming face staring at you from the foot of the bed does not coincide with the twisted horror of a face that someone should have if they were staring at you and you looked as bad as you felt right that moment. That, my friends, is how loud I just heard the wonderful words “Get the fuck out of bed”. Allow me to pause for a moment… *deep breath*

You know how when you are going through your day and somewhere in some store, or on someone’s car radio you hear a part of a catchy song? And later on that day you find yourself humming it, or singing it and you can not get it out of your head no matter what you do? Yeah.. that song. Well mine is “Get the fuck out of bed.” How could it not be? I just heard that spoken to me at decibels that would shatter most glass and probably turn the heads of the deaf. Hey, they might not hear it but they could defiantly feel the massive air disturbance caused by her vocal cords. So the words are imprinted in my skull so I can replay them all day long. Isnt that lovely.

At this point the brain responds back to the heart “Yo, yeah its all good up here, sorry we just had quite a scare, all is well.” The heart responds back “Well do you think you could stop sending us all that adrenaline? We are working dangerously close to the death threshold down here and we haven’t even had our morning cigarette or cup of coffee.” …( a slight pause) .. “Oh! Right.. sorry bout that”. And the adrenaline stops. The heart slows back down and the brain, the blessed brain; it does something that is really not all that wise. It responds to the Girlfriend completely autonomous of any direction from “me”. Now when I say this I do not mean to say that my brain is separate from me. But there are times that I do things without thinking, without effort, and without any forethought or afterthought. No thought of consequence, coincidence or otherwise. Its called autopilot, you know you’ve been there. The brain responds to the girlfriend “Ok, I am up, getting up now.” This is a lie.

Lieing is bad...

Welcome to my hell! :)

Thanks for coming by and checking this out. You probably got here because you were doing a web search on something that interested you and this is what the search engine gave you. If that’s the case and you did not find what you are looking for, I am sorry in advance. If you were looking for this site, then I think it is safe to say either I know you personally or you have a penchant for self abuse. Maybe you can use the info you find here for self-discovery or maybe even a little chuckle at my pain. Make no mistake this site is about my pain. Why should you care? I don’t know. Maybe you will merely become quickly bored and make up your mind that I am in need of counseling... Deep, intensive counseling. Let me give you a little background on the author (that’s me) so maybe you can better appreciate what you will read.

I am a 34 year old Male. That alone speaks volumes for me I am sure. I am Eric Everybody, Christopher Common, Matthew Mundane. The most exciting thing I do everyday is to successfully get my deodorant on in the morning without getting any on the outside of my shirt. But I didn’t used to be a “nobody”. I used to have a pretty good life! But I’ll get more into that later. For now all you really need to know is that I live in New Jersey and I work in New York City. I am going to bring you up to speed on what my day is like soon enough, don’t you worry. But first we are going to have to cover some important facets of my day. Set the stage so to speak. It is important to me to get all this off my chest, share with you, the general public, my pain. You do of course remember that I told you this site is all about my pain, right? Well, if you’re still reading, this is the part you have been waiting for, the good stuff, the meat, the cream filling, all that and the bag of chips. Lets get started, shall we?