Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

It’s monday night. I renailed another plywood panel when I got home, fixed my leaky toilet that’s been broken for god knows how long, watched two friends of mine get into slapticuffs over the most hilariously stupid shit I’ve seen in forever, and probably managed to piss off yet another person.

It’s been a full day.

epiphany

Nobody makes a shit sandwich they plan on eating themselves.

People don’t usually serve sandwiches to strangers.

You do the math.

epiphany

The man who makes a knife hardly ever knows what it will be used for.

Man, I was drunk as hell last night. This morning. Damn. Urrrrgghhhh. It was like having my brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

I didn’t get up ’til 5:30.

I didn’t do anything today. Yesterday I nailed most of the squeaks out of my floor. Gotta do the rest tomorrow.

Crayon on the Walls is an art jam blog based on a weekly theme statement, a phrase or couple of words like “Tex Mechs”, “Space Monkey”, or “Jack of all trades”. It features Hawk from Applegeeks, Jamie Noguchi, creator of Angry Zen Master, and Shawn Handyside of Staccato. Ananth, writer and co-creator of Applegeeks, picks the themes. They’ve only had two challenges so far, but it looks like a pretty damned cool idea to me. I tried looking around for similar blogs or sites once I found this one, but couldn’t find any others doing anything at all similar online. So, unless somebody else does, I give them credit for doing something New.™

I found this web comic Feral Calf that’s pretty funny.

I will now insert a completely arbitrary and unprovoked link to the web site of Eisner-winner artist Josh Middleton.

The villain must be, or have been, a hero to somebody. Osama bin Laden, that magnificent bastard, has been a hero to everyone in turn. He kicked the villainous Soviet from Afghanistan, with a little help from Uncle Sam. And as for the Arab world—there are quite possibly more babies named Osama right now than are named Jesus. Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein didn’t stay in power for so many years by being a friend to no-one. Hussein in particular was a friend for many years of the United States.

It is corollary to this that one need not fall from grace to be a villain, but it helps.

The villain must stand for something. There is, fortunately, little restriction on what, exactly, the villain stands for. One cannot be a villain without being a hero to someone at some time, and what is a hero but a person who stands for a principal, an emotion, an outlook on life? What else, then, can a villain be?

The villain must live a story worth telling. All tales grow until they hardly resemble the truth, but a tale cannot grow if it is never told. If no one talks about you, then you are not a villain. If they talk about you after you die, then you were consummate.

The villain must be larger than life. She must, metaphorically speaking, punch above her weight. The average person does nothing of note, and dies unnoted. If a villain does not rise above this, then how can her story be worth telling? A villain does nothing by half measures.

The villain must have victims. Otherwise, why a villain? The villain must seek vengeance, or retribution, or conquest, or something that someone doesn’t want him to have, and crush any who stand in his way.

The villain is not an altruist. One cannot be a villain without putting oneself first.

The villain cannot be humble. The very idea is preposterous. To be a villain is to realize that you’re better than everyone else, or at least better than these sorry bastards.

The villain can bend, but cannot break. To break is to fall from the ranks of villainy, to the grey obscurity of the rank and file.

I’d noticed this for the first time just recently, after I’d started drinking more heavily. Each time I looked out on that scenery with drunken eyes I’d be overwhelmed by the unbelievable purity of those colors, and I’d start feeling as if nothing really mattered, like I wouldn’t really care at all even if I were to lose everything I had.

This wasn’t resignation, or desperation. It was a much more natural form of acceptance, a feeling that arose from a sweep of emotion that was quiet and cool and crystal-clear.

Every night I fell asleep thinking about these things.

Of course I realized that I was drinking too much and that it would be a good idea for me to start drinking less, and during the daytime I always swore that I’d drink only the tiniest amount that night. But then night would come and the first glass of beer would lead to the next and soon I’d be flying along. I’d start thinking about how well I’d sleep if I just drank a little bit more, and I’d find myself fixing yet another gin and tonic. As the night deepened I’d start increasing the amount of gin, and the drinks would get stronger. And as I munched my way through a bag of the greatest snack this century has produced–Butter Soy Sauce Popcorn–I’d think, Damn, I’ve done it again. . . . Here I am drinking. I never drank enough to make me feel that I’d done something wrong, but I sometimes got a bit of a shock when I discovered that there was an empty bottle standing on the table in front of me.

. . . .

The reverberations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I’d met in all kinds of places, people I’d become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in the scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace . . . the voice was like a combination of all this.

. . . .

Inside she was probably just a strange, high-strung, unpleasant woman. But there was something truly special in her appearance. The soft shadow you saw in her panties, slender shoulders flickering in and out of the blackness of her long hair, odd little valleys over her collarbone, the curves under her breasts that seemed so impossibly, untouchably distant . . . she could have be the embodiment of the diaphanous image of Woman herself, come shakily to life, stumbling around. That’s certainly what you felt.

I ripped my carpet up tonight. Actually I just folded it into one corner. I should buy carpet last, so that it doesn’t get damaged while I’m painting, drinking, smoking, or spitting. That means instead of ripping my carpet out, I should just fold it up, nail the floor down so it doesn’t creak any more, and lay it back as best I can.

So, goal 0.01a accomplished, at any rate.

In order to make my carpet not be under my stuff, I had to move my stuff. This entailed, basically, cleaning, kinda-sorta. I was surprised to discover that this was easier than I’d thought it would be. After I picked up my clothes and tossed a few bottles and paper scraps, everything looked pretty straightened out. Maybe things weren’t as shambolic as they looked to me the other night. Maybe things are looking up.

Or maybe I should just stop trying to find something in every little nothing that comes along.

Just because she doesn’t want to touch you doesn’t mean you have to be her friend.

Your friends are people whose shit you put up with, and whose you put up with in return. When you’re tired of putting up with each other’s shit, you’re tired of being friends.

Wake up every morning and ask yourself, is this the life I want to live? Is it even my life? If the answer to either question is no, spend the afternoon figuring out how to change that, and the evening putting it into action. Don’t forget to ask yourself again the next morning.

You’ll never see a sheep sit back and enjoy a wolf-chop.

An ox is a strong creature that spends its days plowing others’ fields. At the end of its days the others cut it up and eat it. Aside from this, an ox’s life is a good life, for those who would spend it walking around chewing their cud. Are you a cud-chewer?

Only the pitiful would rather be pitied than hated.

I will celebrate my 34th birthday (2007) in my own place. I don’t kid myself that this is a normal goal for a 34-year-old, to have their own place for the first time since…whenever, but then, I’ve never kidded myself that I was normal, or that I’d want to be. I have met the normal, and they bore me. They are dull, and their wit does not cut me.

I don’t regret bangin’ around learning a little something about life the last eight years, but it’s time to move on. I want to live my own life the way I figure I ought to, without ashtrays to spill on the fucking carpet, for one thing. To have whoever I want over whenever I want without them being hassled. To have silence when I want silence, and sound and fury when I want to signify nothing. To be free from the incessant whining of the television. A place to focus. A place to find The Idea.

I don’t think I’m ready to leave the 45 yet, though. One step at a time.

Or maybe I will be. I don’t know. A year’s a long time to decide where to go. It’s enough for now that I’ve decided to go there, and that I know I will not waver, and will not forget why.

That means I need to pull all the carpet out of my room sometime this week.

Damn. Who knew having a goal would be all this fucking work?

My place, is not a home.
It don’t make no difference, but I have found
that I need a place to stay
I never listen what the landlord man say

You should have seen all the flops in my house
They was jumping on walls and kicking ceilings
Nowadays people listen to me,
when I say…GET OUT!

Am I rearranging my life or just falling apart? Is there a difference?

What am I looking for? Will I know when I find it?

Will it be shiny?

I saw Chris’ journal laying on the garage floor tonight. It was a red spiral notebook that said, in Sharpie, on the cover, In My Mind written by Christopher Lee Oldham.

Better than out of your mind, I suppose. Seriously, though, In My Mind. That’s a cool name for a journal. Mine’s delusion. What kind of name is that?

It actually took me a minute to remember where I got the name, which is odd, because we go way back, me and that name. When I was a kid (this should tell you the kind of fucked up kid I was), like ten or so,  I always wanted to own a software company called Delusions of Grandeur Software, because I had all these delusions about how great it would be. I pictured that the logo would actually be DoGSoft, with like some kind of RCA puppy or something. I used to run around woods at the back of our land, smashing down the reeds beside the stock tank and terrorizing opossums, daydreaming about this software company.

I guess I never really lost that. I still want to be Delusions of Grandeur Software. I should really go down and file a DBA under that name before I lose it. Hell, DoGSoft is already taken.

delusionally yours, -k. -_-

I think I”m going to sign off with -_- from now on. ^_^ is history. ^_^ is for chumps.

The Tao is both light and dark, evil and good, positive and negative, north and south, life and death, female and male, being and non-being. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

I always figured that the Tao was all of those things because they were two sides of the same coin, and the Tao was the coin–the unifying principle–in the center. To name it, I’d always thought, was to reduce it to that one aspect and therefore rob it of its duality, and hence omnipotence.

I realized as I walked tonight that there’s something more important going on here. All of these things are names we give to our imperfect understanding and conception of the things we think they represent. To name something is to build a bridge between what you understand and what you do not. To name something is to define it, to extend a metaphor of the known to the unknown. These metaphors are imperfect by nature; since the unknown, by definition, encompasses more than merely the sum of the known, these bridges we build cannot help but be rickety.

Still, these bridges are built from one to the next and on top of the previous generations’ bridges, extending shell-like back to a center at the beginning of the human mind. Perhaps it extends even further than that, twisting through dimensions in a hyper-conch that encompasses the sum of all imperfect understanding of the universe. Or, maybe not. All I know about what lies past the center is that I cannot see it, and never will.

If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.–Isaac Newton

I do know that I have a better view of this ramshackle spiral bridge coiling back through time than any who have come before me, and that our children will stand upon the bridges that we build and see even farther. They, like us, will stand at the forefront of human knowledge and, looking ahead, see the same gaping void we see before us today, though the gap we despair at today will be full of bridges by then.

So build your bridges as best you can.

Anyway, that’s enough pompous posturing for tonight. I’m going to sleep.

I have discovered recently that if you’re a guy and you’re down, Liz Phair singing in your ear all day about how she wants your hot white cum is a good way to cheer up. Really. Puts a bounce back in your step.

give it to me, don’t give it away
don’t think about what the others say
my skin’s getting clear, my hair’s so bright
all you do is fuck me every day and night

you’re my secret beauty routine
na na na na what my body has seen
i’m lookin’ good and i’m feeling nice
baby you’re the best magazine advice