My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, I’m listening to Aimee Mann and Elliott Smith, wearing a little pink bracelet that says, “Elopement.” This is because I’m in the e.r. waiting to get a psych evaluation. I don’t know why the bracelet’s pink, I don’t know why it says Elopement. I just decided that I’ve been thinking about, and writing about bleeding in the bathtub for far too long.

I used to be pretty against Courtney Love, mostly because I felt like she killed Kurt Cobain one way or another. However, until a few weeks ago I’d only heard three Hole songs. I’d never realized she wrote some pretty amazing stuff. I know it’s alleged that she didn’t write everything, particularly their entire second album, but I don’t buy it. I think Courtney’s writing is smart, and honest, and fucked up in a really beautiful sort of way. العب كازينو

I admire songs like Dying, and Miss World, and Reasons to Be Beautiful. I’ve felt like those songs. Just like Kurt Cobain, I don’t think Courtney was or is an “act,” she feels what she writes, it’s real. Very dark, but very real. I can’t say whether or not she killed Kurt, only she knows, but I definitely don’t hate her. طريقة لعبة البوكر في الجزائر She’s really fucked up and she writes about it, as do I.

I was talking Ziztur earlier about how it’s been suggested that I need lots of therapy, and she said…

That’s what happens when you don’t hide how you feel to the rest of the world. العاب ربح المال من الانترنت  I have a sneaking suspicion that everyone is just as batshit as we are – we just tell other people.

I just know that really honest writing makes me feel better, whether it’s mine or someone else’s. We’re alone, but together in our dark places.

Today was not my most stellar of days. I was rather astonishingly depressed, and managed to upset some people. It actually started last night, I was giving Sara advice about a story on a guy with locked-in syndrome. I was explaining what the lack of being able to easily communicate can do to a person, and the longer we talked the worse I felt.

It’s hard to explain, but I am really terrified of the idea of not being able to communicate at all. I also get depressed thinking about how different things have gotten for me over the last few years, I get scared things will only get worse. I find that I talk to people less sometimes, just because it’s slower and more difficult. I know that people talk to me less for the same reasons. I’m really lonely sometimes, having to type or use the alphabet for everything. There are very few people around whom I don’t feel like less of a person. I couldn’t admit that to myself until recently. It’s actually worse around people who knew me back when I could talk. 

So, I kind of freaked out, and I think Sara and I are officially, officially done on all levels for awhile. Sometimes I feel like I’m entirely broken and I don’t know how to fix it.

So, last night, I got this crazy idea and I’m looking for a way to fund it. I figure I’ll pitch the idea to you all and see what happens…

At any rate, it’s always been a dream of mine to take a road-trip via Greyhound bus. Aimee Mann is performing her Christmas show on December 18th at the Nokia Theater in NYC. So, I aim to hop a bus and see the show. No family, no swanky hotels, just a bus, my gear, an assistant and the cold. Then, I want to write about and publish the entire experience.

Well, that is my idea. It’s time for me to get back in the game. Anyone who contributes $5 will get a special thanks at the end of my writing. Those interested in being a part of this absolutely crazy idea can paypal me using the button below. Also, feel free to e-mail any questions to michael@lithiumcreations.com.

So, I’m sitting here in the dark listening to Aimee Mann’s Christmas album, One More Drifter in the Snow. It’s so spectacularly melancholy, the perfect background music for ripping open presents or slicing open wrists.

Listening to it this year is so entirely different. I got it last year after Sara and I went to see Aimee’s Christmas concert in Boston. On the flight up one of the batteries for my breathing machine died unexpectedly, and I heroically killed a pair of pants. It was so astonishingly cold, the kind of cold that makes you wonder if you’ll ever feel warm again. It was the first Northern-winter trip I’d ever taken with my trache, so there were plenty of problems. I could have done so many things so much better.

Still, just being there with Sara, holding her close in that dark theater listening to such sadly beautiful music, life seemed pretty perfect. I just felt happy, I pictured next year being better. Now it is next year, and everything’s the opposite of what I want, it’s like a bad dream that won’t stop. I didn’t want to quit, I didn’t want her to quit, I saw things so differently. It’s just so Goddamn fucking stupid.

Well, my little get-together ended up canceled. So, I walked around the city I hate, looking for a dive interesting enough to write about, but I didn’t find anything, nothing interesting, or fun, just empty and dull. I almost never find anything, and it’s really terrifying to think that ultimately I might not. It’s all my problem and I can’t fix it.

So, tonight I’m going out with a lady I met on the internets. كيف تلعب لعبة بينجو One might call it a date, but I’m never sure what to label anything. لعبة الروليت مجانا Whenever I go meet someone from the nets, I always tend to imagine that at the end of the evening I’ll be hacked up and neatly stacked in her freezer. مواقع الرهان على المباريات

I’m going to die one way or another, so being murdered by a net lunatic seems spectacular. It’s a lot less stupid than being killed by choking on some pineapple juice, which actually happened, but it just didn’t take and I woke up a few weeks later.

So, I had a friend, Stuart. We met in middle-school, he was in 8th-grade, a year ahead of me. Back then I was in special-ed, where Florida likes to stick any kid with any disability, cognitive or physical. For pretty much all of grade-school I was always the only kid in class without a cognitive disability. I’d get “mainstreamed,” sent to a period or two of regular-ed, but I was mostly alone in both sides of grade-school academia. I was the “really smart different kid,” never picked on, but always an outsider. I made friends with my teachers, but until Stuart I didn’t have any peers. Stuart was better at math, and I was better at English, but we were basically a class of two doing the same work. We liked the same sci-fi and video games, we got to play trivia during last period. It was fun having Stuart around, school was less lonely. 

The difference between me and Stuart was that I was socially apathetic, while he was painfully shy. He could drive his own power-chair and write with a pencil, he got mainstreamed a lot more, but he had a really hard time socially. Kids tease each other innocently and not-so-innocently, but Stuart couldn’t handle either. Of course, this made him great to tease. I could take any joke, and give one back if I felt like it, but Stuart just couldn’t. He once came back in tears because someone kept making fun of one of the bumper-stickers on his chair. So, we got along because we were both very smart, had things in common, and I never picked on him. I mean, I can be cruel. I’ve said just the right thing in just the right way to make someone sob. Yet, I’ve had the same done to me. I watched my parents do the same to each other for over a decade. So, I try very hard not to use that weapon on other people, especially people who are unarmed.

Stuart went off to high-school and things didn’t go so great. All the clicks and social groups only made him more sensitive. I guess I saw him as a mirror of everything I didn’t want for myself. I wanted to go to regular high-school, not mainstreamed high-school. I couldn’t imagine being so socially paralyzed by my physical disabilities. It was awful of me, but I cut back on hanging out with him. I avoided going to his place and invited him less to mine. He just acted so much younger sometimes.

We grew up rather differently, his mom left when he was really little because she couldn’t handle a disabled son, so his dad over-compensated by completely sheltering him from practically everything harsh, and never instilling the idea that Stuart was different and that there are awkward facts about being disabled, but facts are facts. His dad wanted him to feel too normal. We’re different, we can’t go to the wash-room alone, we can’t feed ourselves. None of that is “normal,” so you do your best to accept the awkward things and live.

I had a much rougher family, intact, but completely unfiltered. I also have an able-bodied brother, and growing up our differences were never made into a big deal. Fact: I couldn’t play baseball with him. So, we’d play video games. Stuart was raised in such an idyllic way that he broke if he didn’t fit “normally.” I’ve had over a decade to come up with my own definition of normal, and I still don’t have one that’s entirely comfortable, but even as a kid I knew what I didn’t want, I didn’t want to be Stuart. Still, I should have been better to him, he needed company that made him comfortable, maybe I could have helped him. I try to be better today, stronger for people who need it. Obviously, I still fail sometimes.

Anyway, Stuart was my only disabled friend. One weekend he got a flu, and a few days later he died. I was his best friend and I failed him. Apparently, nobody really knew him. I went to his memorial service only to find out that Stuart kept hidden journals and notebooks. He wrote sad poetry and nobody knew about it. He had all that stuff in his head and it died with him.

So, when I almost died a couple of years ago, I had all sorts of thoughts in my head, but I was too afraid to express any of it. I had all kinds of worry that I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Sara. I’d always held things inside, still do sometimes, but for the most part I’m a pretty open book now. When I met Ira Glass, I decided that between that episode of TAL and my blog, nothing would go unsaid. Anyone who wanted to know me, depressed or otherwise, good or bad, could just look and see. I have a constant and honest record of myself. Absolutely nobody has to read it, but it’s here. I don’t want to go out like Stuart, unknown and misunderstood.

I just want at least one person to really see me, I don’t want to wind-down feeling alone. That is part of why I blog so unflinchingly.

Honestly, I didn’t mean my last post literally. I was just trying to be a little dry and funny, but it got overly sarcastic. All my problems are mine, definitely not Sara’s, and probably not the terrorists’. I just can’t keep on going the way I’ve been going, it’s up to me to change things.

If I don’t wake up and get back to being my old easy-going, intelligently optimistic, delightfully melancholy self, Sara and the terrorists win. Losing isn’t my way. so it’s time to wise up, as Aimee Mann once wrote.