Captain’s Log

I used to have an imaginary friend, ’till he fucked with me too many times and I ate him. I used to have a girlfriend, too … same story. There is only me. I killed the rest. They couldn’t hack it, anyway. Like the emperor’s new clothes, the light shone right through. They couldn’t be near me, the light just radiates.

I’m sitting here, now, in the darkness of the back porch, watching the cherry of my cigarette burn bright orange like an exploding star against a black sparkly landscape. The moon drifts slowly through the sky; I can see it moving if I stare at it. Early morning rush hour roars at me from the distant freeway. It’s a beautiful picture … but as the fire burns, I hunger again.

I’m going to start in the middle. Then I’m going to write the beginning. And then the end.

I need a sewing kit. I don’t need a sewing machine, but a really useful hand sewing kit. Thin needles, thick needles, big needles, small needles, fine needles and needles for leather.

That’s the middle.

Loveless. I’ve always wanted to see it, even though I know it’s really nothing more than a billboard in the video game Final Fantasy VII. I think it’s supposed to be a play, or maybe a movie. I’ve been Midgar for far too long. I’ve been Loveless for far too long. The things I’ve surrounded myself will all seem as though they are only half real. There is no love in goods crafted by lifeless machines. They serve their purpose, and over long periods of time I can even instill my own love into them, but they are like dolls … I want people. I want love. I want life. I want them like my lungs want air and my body wants water.

I bought this beanie that does a fairly decent job of seeming alive, for something clearly made by a machine. I like this beanie. I also bought some t-shirts, and even though they are covered in clever and meaningful symbols, they still seem insubstantial … that is to say, they lack substance. I suppose when I say they lack substance, I particularly mean the ephemeral sort of substance. The key ingredient in good food is love.

I need to go visit some art exhibits, maybe buy some things if anything speaks to me, to hang on these empty walls.

That wasn’t a full paragraph, and neither is this. It’s just two sentences.

I’ve been feeling rather ugly lately … rather heartless. Maybe heartless isn’t so bad, but if anything could use some aesthetic sprucing, it’s a void where a heart should be. Black velvet, and suede, and the smell of roses and cinnamon … clothes hand stitched by the recesses of the psyche … instruments played on deft hands … outside the sunshine or a warm, breezy starlit night. Wine in the glass after dinner, followed by a quiet evening. The ruffians can stay in the streets where they will be so picturesque, and I will call them friends. The rest of the world tucked away in it’s tangle of politics and religions and sex-crazed media, worshiping the violence and gore displayed on 800×600 for the daily news. The celebrities dancing in front of them like so many daffodils. And I will work, and play, and meditate wide-eyed on on the wonder of it all. The world is mine, and I love it.

Now … about that sewing kit … and some material to set to work on … can’t get it right now. It’s 6:24am and I’ve been awake for well over fifty hours now. So I’m going to watch Wall-E. I haven’t seen it yet, but it seems like just the right movie for me right now, based on the reviews.

this is not,
Jack Wolfe

I had to dig deep, but I can recall having one good Christmas.

I must have been either 3 or 4 years old. We were living in Orange County, down by Disneyland. My mom was still married to her first husband … that was a happy time. I remember learning how to make cookies (for Santa) and oatmeal (for the reindeer) on Christmas Eve … 20 or 21 years ago … in my Alf onesey pajamas. I know it was a good Christmas because what I remember about it was all the attention I got … but it wasn’t really focused on me … it was focused on Christmas itself. Trying to put that somber cheer into the house by decorating a tree, making cookies and oatmeal for Santa and his reindeer, home movies on the new tape recorder … I don’t even remember being asked what I wanted for Christmas. It didn’t matter, it wasn’t about wanting … it was about that mystical experience that I can only poorly label as finding warmth in the coldest part of the year. Everything might have been bleak, but there was still comfort to be found in home and family, and enjoyment can always take the silliest of forms … like bringing a dead tree into the house and putting shiney stuff on it. It wasn’t about the tree, or gifts, or snow, or even Santa … it was about making the best of the worst, it was about creating a warm little spark when nature itself seemed bent on making the world dark and dreary and cold. It was … home. Probably the only real home I’ve ever known.

It’s funny how my experiences have crafted my knowledge. The past sets the stage for the present. With only one good Christmas, and a very poorly remembered one that happened a lifetime ago, it’s no wonder I have no interest in the holiday.

Every Christmas after that all I can remember is the tangled mess of family politics and everyone obsessing over what to buy or getting what they wanted.

Tomorrow is Christmas. Maybe I can try to create that special warmth in the darkness in the new appartment this year. Unfortunately, it’s looking like it’ll be pretty lonely. At least I won’t have the family politics to navigate.

So it turns out Spinnerette booked a few gigs (yes, GIGS … not SHOWS … not CONCERTS … but teeny tiny little gigs … ::cries harder::) at the end of this last October, down in LA … and I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT THEM! … the chance to see Brody … in the flesh … just feet away …

… maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t know about it. I might have exploded or spontaneously combusted or gotten a restraining order put out against me or something. At least thrown out. Getting thrown out of a gig starring Brody Dalle … that would definately be a dream come true.

Well, I’ll have to keep a weather eye out on the horizon for any new gigs … I hope I didn’t just miss my last chance … that would … well, I think I’d honestly really regret that. One of those lifelong regrets things … it’d be like if you were a hippie back in the day and you missed woodstock because you weren’t paying attention … 

If you want to make me explode, get me to a Brody gig.

I have had a vision and the best place I have to record it is in this so-far wretched journal.

It began with a long dream about Jack Wolfe (another of my personas) on various adventures.  I was sutrggling and determined and only marginally successful.  Somehow I wound up in a sea on the coast of some land, the Middle-East and North Africa, or more generally the Mediterrainean come to mind.  Iw as standing on some sort of flat, moving object on the seaward (and port) side of a vessel which was attempted to either moore or un-moore from a dock and I was moving, more specifically I was floating, in the opposite direction of said vessel.  I was either expected aboard or appeared to be in need and so I was thrown a rope.  Only it hung from the freeboard of the vessel to the water, about 10 feet away.  I leaped to it and caught ahold of it, only I was unable to climb it.  My strength was unable even to lift myself, nor could I push myself with my legs for my feet would always slip from the rope.  At this point I realized they would try to hoist me to the deck if I couldn’t make it on my own, at which point I somehow made it aboard.  I stood there taking everything in and everything was tinted with yellow as though I were watching robotic pirates burn a fake village in a Disney Theme Park when a lid exploded into the air from a coffin which I had mistaken for a crate and was lying on deck.  Lying in this coffin was a woman garbed in an elegant black dress without a speck of color about her whole person aside from her eyes which were a startlingly brilliant shade of piercing green which contrasted the sepia-yellow tones of everything around her and even more sharply contrasted with her own colors of pale ivory-white and raven black.  Inside the coffin with her were snakes of the same brown and yellow flames of the setting.  She sat up with no help from her arms and without bending her legs.  I have no recollection of her leaving the coffin as in the next moment she was facing me at my side, snake wrapped about her shoulders.  As she began to speak with a velvety voice and a strange accent I slowly turned my head to the left to look at her.  She was only slightly shorter than myself.

“You have ambition,” she said, “This comes first.  I will give it to you.  Power is first, and wealth follows, and then …”

She said a third thing which I cannot recall.  The last thing I remember is the beauty of the scene before waking.

Status

Body: Exhausted, sore, sinus troubles

Spirit: Foiled again! Begrudging complacency

Mind: Primarily subconcious, very little activity of my own intent.

Once again I have elected to yield to the machines of politics and economy.  I am still unsure whether or no I believe discretion has anything to do with valor, but in the face of such an insurmountable foe as the entire world it is a necessirty of survival.  I play to win, and if that means sacrificing the glory of the day and an almost certain death, so be it.  I’ll work a shit job.  Grudgingly.

Things to note:  Eric is now working with me at the shitjob.  Mark is getting increasingly angry with numerous little things.  Jeffrey still lulls in Texas.  Busby’s getting married (!) in Novemeber and I am to be best man, and God only knows what my other Californian quasi-allies are wasting their time with these days.

Status Report:

Body: Sore Calves, Sinus congestion

Spirit: Rapid changes between angry and aggressive to glum and lethargic

Mind: Analytical and Determined

Fought with Marcos the other day as a form of therapy.  It was some small measure of good for my spirit.  I wish I could do that every day, but Marcos doesn’t want to fight anymore.  I bloodied his lip.  Eric will be next, I hope.  He’s never been in a fight before, so it should prove interesting.

Am rapidly running out of food and money.  If only I knew where I misplaced my last paycheck.

After I fought with Marcos I still was full of energy and in increasingly high and aggressive spirits, so I went running.  I ran some six miles before I fell through a railroad bridge and then ran, limping, 6 miles back.

I am also recovering from a nine day bout with bronchitus, hence the sinus trouble.

It would seem to me that my poor spirits are a reaction to being forced to work shit jobs just to survive and not being allowed to do half the things I would like to, fighting for example.

My mind is, as ever, the universe.

Lots of shit’s going down, but I’m not gonna write about it.  I don’t know why I’m not going to write about it, but I’m not.  I’m crying inside.  Struggling with myself.  I don’t know.

I wish I could write as quickly as I can think.  I need to get my head screwed on straight.  It seems as though I can’t even do the simplest of things.  It is an immense struggle even to write these things down.  It has been ten minutes since that last sentence was written, all the while I was trying to write something.

Oh.  Right.  I remember what it is now.  No one believes in me.  That’s a terrible excuse, but it’s the only thing I can come up with.  Sometimes I wonder if I even believe in me.

Pause! Cigarette.

Unpause.

I’ve turned off the music I had playing.  Music takes me away from what’s in front of me.

I finally don’t have to rely on that damn blue pen.  I find it amusing that I still have it, though.

To do list:

Fix lights on boat (Checked off on Moon 266)

New Mainsail Cover

Find out info on new job (Checked)

Finish cleaning boat (Checked)

Take of sweatshirt (Checked)

Write like a madman

Swim like a madman

Be a madman (Checked)

Get naked (Checked)

Stop drinking rootbeer (Checked Moon 266)

Be stronger

Be faster

Be more enduring

Regain lost pride (Checked Moon 266)

Stop this for now because this entry is terrible and you need sleep to see Lauren tomorrow (Checked)