My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, let’s say God is real and suicide is definitely a one way trip to Hell. I wonder if falling asleep and not wanting to wake up counts as being suicidal.

I wonder if drug overdoses, or over-indulging in brandy is enough to end up swimming in the Lake of Fire. I wonder how much intent matters to God. I mean, consciously we know that overdoses are very possible, but I don’t know that most people expect to enjoy their vice and die.

I wonder if not wanting to live is the same as actively taking steps to die. I wonder if suicide can be passive.

So, this Halloween was interesting. As far as costumes go, I really outdid myself. As I’ve written, I’m fairly, okay, really addicted to a Nirvana video of them performing Dive. So, I was inspired to dress as zombie Kurt Cobain in drag. It was kind of a re-imagining, because I couldn’t match his look exactly, but I think I was faithful to the essence of the video. I think I have more piercings and tattoos.

If I decide to do something, I get rather into it. I do it with everything, really. Happiness, depression, love, drugs, sex, tattoos, zombie costumes, whatever, I take it all the way downtown. It’s probably the best and worst thing about me. 

The party was fun and depressing all at once. I know lots of people I don’t particularly want to know. It’s not that they’re not nice people, I just don’t fit, but I pretend to fit. It’s that “alone in a crowd” feeling, I feel it almost everywhere, all the time. Then again, there are people who do fit me, people I hung out with tonight, and time with them is too short. That contrast is really difficult, pretending to fit and actually fitting. It’s depressing, I get lost, I forget that there are places that feel good.

I went so many years bored and lonely, completely apathetic to do anything about it. I’ve just only started making my own way in the last three years, meeting people who really feel right to me. I hired assistants, started doing things that really suit me, trying to make connections that don’t feel empty. I met Sara, fell in love, brilliantly choked on some juice. I died for a bit, came back with a tube in my throat. I lost Sara, I got better acquainted with not talking. I found Sara again, I got used to feeling “at home.” Sara had to move to Boston, I handled that spectacularly badly, lost Sara again. The last three years in Reader’s Digest form.

Now, here I am, zombie Kurt Cobain in drag. Trying to feel like the right me again. Trying to fit when I sometimes feel broken.

Well, last year, my Halloween costume was rather simple. I wore vampire fangs and Sara wore the bite marks. We went to a party with her co-workers, so she wanted me to tone down my usual theatrics. Still, it was fun, I liked being her vampire, she my familiar.

This year, however, I’m alone. No co-workers, no familiar. My costume is totally theatrical and amusingly fucked up. There’s a party at my place, but it’ll be different.

It’s stupid how much can change in a year.

I wonder if I’m broken beyond repair, faking normal like May. It’s possible, but I don’t yet have a cat in my freezer, let alone a creepy doll for my best friend.

I don’t know. I know I’m not the right me. I see him sometimes, but he visits less and less.

I got high on the ferris wheel, didn’t like how it made me feel so alone…

…is a line from Aimee Mann’s Looking For Nothing. It’s astonishingly sad, especially the way she sings it. It came up in my shuffle a bit ago, and I started thinking about how lonely I feel lately, but never when I’m high.

In the last couple of years I’ve been high on various narcotics for pain after trache procedures, and loneliness is never part of the experience. Being high is the polar opposite of feeling alone. If Hell is the absence of God, Demerol is the absence of Loneliness. It’s warm and safe. It’s someone you love holding you close, whispering everything will be just fine. It’s the part of sex that has nothing to do with thought and everything to do with feeling. For an hour, the entire world is perfect.

Of course, it’s a fake perfection. It’s fake, and deep down you know it. It’s a place you want to visit, and the visiting’s fine, but staying will definitely destroy you. I don’t stay, but sometimes, I think it would be nice not to leave, which is why I always do.

Give the song a listen.

Okay, I was too mean to Bill Pullman, he did what he had to do. I should kill myself for watching Zero Effect, that’s more fair.

Bill Pullman should just kill himself for making Zero Effect. That’s really all I have to say right now.

I mentioned in another post how The Strangers is the epitome of ridiculous torture porn. I don’t like the genre, I find empty violence in fiction somewhere between boring and disgusting. Everything Rob Zombie does is both. People say the Saw series is torture porn, but for me, the series has at least tried to say something, which is why I keep going back.

At any rate, after talking about The Strangers someone suggested that I see Funny Games, as it’s been described as complete torture porn. However, after watching it twice, I have to say that such descriptions are completely wrong.

Starring Naomi Watts (Ann) and Tim Roth (George), Funny Games is a well-written and acted film that examines the nature of evil in both fiction and reality. It revolves around a couple and their young son visiting their gorgeous lake-side vacation home. It’s a gated community, everyone with a dock and a boat, everything safe and beautiful. Safe and beautiful, until it’s not.

Enter Peter and Paul, two perfectly polite young men, cleanly dressed in white golf shirts. Oddly, they’re also white-gloved. They visit to borrow eggs, they stay to play a game. The game is simple, after eight hours, they bet that they’ll be alive and the family of three will be dead.

Peter and Paul are absolutely chilling. They’re all “please” and “thank you.” Peter shatters George’s leg with a golf club, after which he offers that George could call an ambulance. Unfortunately, Paul dropped the family’s cellphone in the kitchen sink and the house doesn’t have a land-line. As Paul helps George to rest on the sofa, he kindly inquires as to why the family doesn’t keep a land-line. Peter offers that they’re really white-trash drug addicts, then he explains that they’re really just jaded rich kids who simply like hurting people. He asks George what sort of story he’d like to hear to help him make sense of their actions.

Of course, there is no real answer, sometimes evil can’t be logically explained. This is true in both reality and fiction. Funny Games deftly illustrates that we often ask questions that have no answers. It examines how we look to fiction to explain evil that simply has no explanation. It does these things mainly in dialogue, as most of the violence actually takes place off-camera.

Funny Games isn’t torture porn. It’s really a metaphor for the futility of trying to understand why bad things happen, a metaphor for the futility against death. There will come a point when we are going to die. There won’t be a way out of it, no Deus Ex Machina will save us. We’ll die and it probably won’t make sense, or resemble anything like a film script. That’s the essence of Funny Games, that’s why it’s brilliant.

Fuck if I know why I’m posting this, but it’s a great article about a device that helps people with Asperger’s to better interpret facial gestures, and Sara’s an excellent writer.

So, I closed my eyes for what felt like moments, but when I opened  them again the clock said otherwise. Apparently, I slept three hours, an unheard-of nap. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, Ativan or not. Last night I was up until 5 AM and got up at 9:30 AM.

I went with a friend for something like brunch. We went to the Thai Temple, it’s an actual temple, but every Sunday they have a little market. I hadn’t been in awhile. It’s outdoors, on a river, with gorgeous trees for shade. Today it was cold under the trees and warm in the sun.

On the one hand, I really liked my company. She’s really cool, very smart. She reads this blog. On the other hand, and I have to write this, because no matter who reads this blog it needs to be an absolutely honest record of my thoughts, I’m not comfortable going back to the temple, and I won’t. I used to go with Sara, I can’t go there now and feel at all good about being there. I thought I could, but no. It’s too difficult for me to separate certain places from her. It’s so stupid, I’m so stupid.

Anyway, I had a nap and woke up tired. I usually wake up tired, it’s getting to be my way.