My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

I’m alone, and I’ll be alone, and I earned it.

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Do you know he’d stay, do you know it deep-down, in that same place you know the sky is blue only to fade to black? Do you know he’d stay until the end of his everything? He’d stay perpetually wanting, he’d stay until he quit breathing, if you asked. Did you see that in his face, in his eyes, did you feel it in his touch? بلاك جاك 21 Do you know these things?

He’s enthralled to you, you hold every key to his every lock. Your smile. soft and bright as full moonlight. Your warm eyes, the color of fall leaves. He knows your face so well, loves you so well, he could sketch every inch with his eyes closed. 1xbet موقع It’s almost too much beauty, more than he can hold inside him sometimes, almost too overwhelming, when things are quiet, when he’s alone, He knows you’re more like a star fallen from the sky than just some anybody. He knows there’s no one who can fill his dull world with so much radiance. He knows you’re the only you.

He’s laid next to you at night, woken from bad dreams, feeling you there slowed his racing heart, made his head a safe place. You never heard it, you looked too peaceful nudge back to conciousness. but he’d tell you things.  Angel, I love you, I can’t explain how much, I just love you with everything in me. I don’t want to be anywhere else right now, you’re where I want to be, always, since the day we met. I don’t ever want you to go. He’d feel so much, say so much, all while you slept. 1xbet عربي

He loves you for all your beauty, for the peace you give him when you’re close, but not just those reasons. Something intrinsic draws him in, there’s something intangible that he sees in your eyes that binds him and ties him to you so tightly. Sometimes his wrists bleed, bound by invisible strands. The pain makes no nevermind to him. He’d cut himself a thousand times for you. He’d bleed out for you.

He’s never told you these things, but do you know them anyway, in ways unspoken?

You’re asleep now, but you’ll be awake soon, somewhere else and not with him.

The line from this song that I can’t get out of my head, I don’t know what to do with your clothes or your letters that’ll make a whisper out of you…

I don’t know either. You can get rid of all the things that someone leaves when they leave you, but they’re still so right these, always there. You see them every time you close your eyes.

At least it’s a pretty song.

Tattoo by Fish, Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

So, this is my fifty-sixth tattoo, I’m honestly running out of space. I mean, I could put little images all over me, but as far as full lines of text go, we’re getting toward the home stretch, I think.

This tattoo is from a Nirvana song, an early demo version of one of their most famous songs, Heart-Shaped Box. The demo’s off their With the Lights Out collection. I really like this version a lot, you can tell Kurt has the idea in his head, a song about an intense, crushing relationship with a woman, he has the sound figured out too, but he’s still sorting out the words and the imagery. I really like feeling like I’m sitting in on that creative process. He uses lots of funeral imagery, I’ve been buried in your heart-shaped box for weeks…Then the last line, the line etched into my upper-arm, I’ve been locked in heart-shaped coffins for too many weeks…

Now’s supposed to come the why of it, some sweeping narrative that would explain me. Honestly, I’m just tired. I experience those words every Goddamn fuckin’ day.

So, went to open mic at Sacred Grounds last night. It was okay for a little bit, but… I was, I was sitting there, Dani was on stage playing her violin. I’d already done my reading, Connection to divinity, Well, goodbye, and a really old piece, Your daily suicides. The first two were really hard to hear, that’s when I got that empty feeling in my chest, an emptiness that hurts, like a part of me is somewhere else.

Practically everything I’ve written for almost four years was for one person, I just wanted her to know how I feel about her, that I love her so completely, that I feel alone without her, that I have always been so scared of losing her. I gave her so many words, and, now I can’t stand reading any of them. I was in this room full of people and it all just felt so hollow, and lonely. So, I left.

Visual metaphor time!

Lauren, Dani, and me...

You can see my scruffy face, I think I’m just letting it go.

Me, but people are back there somewhere...

I tend to feel like this a lot, like only a part of me is anywhere.

So, I obviously didn’t get around to writing about the new tattoo, but I will. Soon.

Last year, July 25th, everything was so fucking perfect. The world was right, and beautiful, and wide open. I marked my calendar. I wish I could forget… fuck it. I can’t, I don’t have the words. Today was supposed to be so much better.

I’m just stuck.

I don’t want this song to be so true. It didn’t used to be true. I have to make it not true. I can write my own reality, I can. I know I can. Life isn’t just something that happens to us, this string of seconds minutes hours days weeks months years that we can’t control, it’s not. We’re all capable of magic, words do cast spells, words create. Words are powerful, I just have to use them better. I have to stop wasting them. I have to stop letting myself fall until I’m dead.

He fell and fell and fell for her until he burned to nothing in her atmosphere.

So. that drive I mentioned last night, with all the ripped DVDs, it’s officially a paper-weight. It’s dead. I tried a bunch of recovery utilities, nothing worked, it’s not coming back.

I don’t tend to care about “things,” but stuff related to the computer is always a little different. This stuff in particular has a lot of memories attached, I ripped half of those movies when I was in the hospital for two months, after I choked on the pineapple juice and died for a little bit. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I had all my DVDs brought in and I’d just rip a few every day until the 200+ were finished. Yes, I owned them, no piracy at that point. I ripped them on a MacBook Pro that Steve Jobs gave me just a few weeks before I ended up where I ended up. I was supposed to receive some award and give a presentation at ATIA, this big assistive technology conference in Orlando, I e-mailed Jobs about it, said that I wanted to show Macs as THE platform for assistive technology and I wanted to do so on a “bleeding edge machine.” He agreed with me and in two days, I had the best MacBook Pro available at the time. I definitely meant everything I wrote, I wanted to give a spectacular presentation, but also, and mostly, I wanted to impress Sara, my then girlfriend. I liked showing her that I could take all my crazy ideas and make them real. Anyway, the ripped DVDs, I’d watch them at night with Sara, or when I was too scared to fall asleep alone, waiting for the drugs that would make me sleep.

I’d had those files for so long, and they’re gone because I wasn’t paying attention for just a few minutes. It’s not like I can’t get all those movies back eventually, but they won’t be the same movies that I watched with Sara, with other people I love, people who are gone.

Yes, I’m weird.

So, within an hour of waking up today I killed an external hard drive and lost over 300 GB (which equates to a fuckin’ lot) of ripped DVDs. I then had the drive tossed in the trash in a fit of disgust. Then, I went for my fifty-sixth tattoo, which I’ll post tomorrow. I want to let it pretty up a little, right now it’s in that raw, someone just carved a bunch of words into your flesh, look. Though, that is kind of a neat stage in the life of a tattoo, maybe I should post it in this post.

See, I’m just writing stuff as it pops into my head, I didn’t start with anything in particular to say. I will post that picture, you folks can puzzle over it until I write about it tomorrow… 

Tattoo #56, raw...

Right now, I’m trying to recover that drive, it’s been dug out of the trash. I’m a sucker for lost causes, it’s the Jefferson Smith in me.

So, I got this beautiful comment from a reader right here in Tampa…

mike, i don’t think you are so tough.  we are all dealt the hand we are given in this life:  so what?  deal with it.  be thankful that such HUGE resources were dedicated to keeping your ass alive.  under any obamacare-style healthcare rationing you wouldn’t have the shelf-life of a hard-boiled egg. quit wallowing in self pity and live your fucking life til you die

Where to start? The child-like grammar? The “”Obamacare” non-sequitor? The general warmth of the writing?

I wonder if the person knows how to read, at least at the proficiency of a toddler, or understands the definitions of certain words…

I mean, I know I’m not tough, or brave, I’ve written about it before. Tell me something I don’t know.

I’ve also written many times that I’m thankful for everyone who keeps me alive, for my assistants, for all my technology, just for life in general. I’m really very lucky, and blessed, I’ve written, and genuinely meant all these things. So, again, not sure where that came from.

I write about a lot of things here, including being very down. I write about fear, frustration, loneliness, saddens, optimism, romance, sex, zombies, sex AND zombies, I kind of cover  the gamut of human (and undead) experiences.  The one thing I don’t think I write about is pity, not in my life, not in my fiction. You could say a lot of things about me, but self-pitying really isn’t one of them. Self-loathing, absolutely, I’m definitely not someone who unceasingly likes himself or regularly pats his own back. If anything, I take personal responsibility for everything, for every failure, for every mistake. Do a search of the blog for “my fault,” see how that goes. I even blame myself for things that probably aren’t really my fault. Like, one time, it started raining rather hard, rather abruptly, and Lauren (my assistant) got caught in the torrent getting me and my stuff into the house from the car. She looked like a kitten who just climbed out of a swimming pool. She covered me with a blanket, she’s good like that, I was fine. So, I apologized. If we’d left the coffee shop fifteen minutes earlier like I originally planned, we’d have beaten the weather and Lauren wouldn’t have gotten unexpectedly drenched. Really, I couldn’t see outside, I, like most people, don’t have one eye always on the doppler radar, and I definitely didn’t stay the fifteen minutes knowing what would happen. Still, I felt responsible and I apologized. Self-loathing, self-criticism, that’s me. Self-pity’s like, “Why’d God build me so broken? Why are all these bad things happening to me? What’d I do to deserve this? Make it stop!” Thoughts like those don’t cross my mind, I really had to think about the definition of self-pity just to write those examples. I just don’t think that way. I really don’t see how someone could read this blog and say I wallow in self-pity.

As for dreaded “Obamacare,” yes, and under Obamacare, if your adorable grandma breaks a hip, her doctor will take her out back and shoot her in the face. I’m so sick of people saying stupid things about the health care bill. Stop being stupid.

I am living my life. I  keep breathing, and doing, and writing. I’m just writing what I feel, honestly and in the moment. The thing is, I write all my moments, dark and sunny, I don’t see how feeling darkness for a spell equates to not living my life.