Dairy of a Madman

CL is still CL. But I love her anyway, even if she does think she’s too good to take my last name.

Happy Anniversary, boog. Maybe this time next year I’ll be able to match Sarah Silverman’s anniversary gift to Jimmy Kimmel…

If I don’t get laid, it’s the woman’s loss, not mine. It’s all women’s loss. What the fuck else are they going to talk about during Ladies Night? Their hopes and dreams? Isn’t that the same thing?

Oh, and there are top ten lists, too:

Whether or not you believe in Jesus, there is one fact you can’t argue with: he was a man. No religion anywhere has ever put a woman in charge of shit. That’s called dogma — man-dogma — and it means men are better than women.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I’m laughing or taking this seriously today (here’s a hint: don’t bother reading through any of the comments; men and women take themselves waaay too seriously).

Yes, I know his name is R. Lee Ermey. And if you imply otherwise, I’ll beat you to death with nothing more than a used newspaper and your own cirrhotic liver. Removing my watch first, I assure you.

Was that Byron? I think maybe so.

Today’s conversation:

Me: Hey, Cthulhu, guess what? Me and CL got married this morning!

Incredulous Cthulhu ganked from Matthew Baldwin, who brings the Haha often.

Spiff and I sat talking at the bar the other night — about marriage, among other things. He and his RHC are coming up on one year of dating, and they’ve naturally talked about the prospects of getting hitched somewhere along the line. He asked if CL and I had talked about it, what I thought of the idea.

And I know I’ve written about it here — somewhere — before, because I distinctly remember contradicting myself at least once or twice. And I’ll probably do so again, right here, right now.

Continue reading “Third time’s a charm”

Generically speaking, I hate telephones. I’ve thought many times about why this is, and the best that I can come up with is that my mother was raped and killed by a pack of wild telephones when I was just a child. Of course, this is obviously not true; while I think that my mother might have dated a telephone in her teens (a lovely rotary, according to the pictures), she’s not the type to hang out with the phones that would kill.

Why do I have a cellphone? Well, it’s cheaper and more portable than a landline, it comes with a camera that fits in my back pocket and allows me to email myself photos instantly, and sometimes my job requires me to be near a phone at random or inconvenient hours. Plus, once in a blue moon, I like to call people, if only to tell them that I just saw their boyfriend at the movies (with another woman), or to warn them of impending if slightly fictional disasters.

Everyone that knows me well at all knows that I often don’t answer my phone. They also suspect that I am ignoring their phone calls only, and I’d like to take this moment to note that, when I ignore calls, I don’t even pull the phone out of my pocket. I have no idea who is calling when I don’t answer. I don’t care, I think, is the point I’m trying to make. Oh, and sometimes, I’m doing something that would prevent me from answering the phone: watching a movie, playing a concert, working.

In fact, that’s what I was doing Tuesday night at midnight. Same as every Tuesday, we’re playing at Bailey’s. We were a little late getting started with out second set, though, and so when my phone rang, I actually felt it (it’s set to vibrate so as not to bother those around me, but playing bass makes everything vibrate; if I’m onstage, the odds of me knowing that anyone’s calling are comparable to those that Mel Gibson’s next film will play temples across America). I pulled it out to check the caller ID.

Hey, just because I’m probably going to ignore you doesn’t mean I’m not curious sometimes.

Turned out to be CL, which struck me for two reasons: she’s almost always in bed and asleep well before midnight, and because she had a rough night with what she thought might have been a pre-migraine headache and some weird conversations. I answered, if only to make sure that she was okay.

And if any of you want to go ahead and get jealous, yes, I always answer CL’s calls unless I’m incapable of taking a call.

It was a short conversation, mostly due to the fact that Eric began pointing out to the crowd via the live microphone that i was on the phone and holding up the magical country set. Nothing was wrong, it turns out; as she said, “I just wanted to tell you that I love you.” And while it’s even better to see her eyes and feel her hand in mine when she says it, it’s those little moments, the in-between moments, those times when you’re waiting for the next big thing…

See, this is why I answer the phone any time I see her name on the screen.

I’m not a morning person, as two ex-wives, Kevin, my family and now CL will readily attest. In fact, I hate mornings, being forced out of slumber and a warm bed, with an unbridled fury that I normally reserve for Ann Coulter and Mariah Carey albums. I don’t wake easily, nor happily.

I used to attribute this to my lifestyle-induced lack of sleep; for years now, I’ve subsisted on two to four hours of sleep a night, catching up on Sundays as best as I could. Turns out that’s not true, though; ever since CL and I started dating, I’ve entered the world of Adult Human, and I get about eight hours or so a night. As I always predicted though, the deleterious side effect of adjusting to a healthy amount of sleep is that on those mornings following nights that I have to stay awake late (to work at the bar or play with the Exhibit(s)), I’m absolutely miserably exhausted.

We played an extra night this week, helping Carlos fill his slot on the calendar last night, and so for two nights in a row I’ve not gotten to bed until three AM-ish, which meant that this morning I might as well have been dead. If it weren’t for CL, I probably would have slept until noon or beyond; I didn’t hear either of my alarms at all. Fortunately, today is her birthday, which (counter to the schedule and stress of the past week) made this morning a really good waking.

Not having kids, and not planning to, I never would have imagined that I would feel like my parents in certain ways. Mostly, I think of things like the eye-rolling dread that comes with a 2 AM phone call from the local precinct asking for bail money, or the anger at yet another window or screen broken with a soccer ball. But as I lay there this morning, smoking a cigarette and trying desparately to keep my eyes open, watching Cynthia open her presents, I had that weird feeling of looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, and it hit me that I was living my parents’ lives on every Christmas when I was a kid.

It’s impossible to wake up with anything other than a warm heart and a glowing outlook on life when a beautiful woman is sitting next to you with the eyes and smile of a child. I understand now how my parents were able to get so little sleep and still not kill us with our own gifts every year.

Happy birthday, CL. And thanks for letting me celebrate it with you.

It’s wonderful to know
That I could be
Something more than what I dreamed
-Dream Theater, Octavarium

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and not just about the usual weird positions that I’ve seen the neighbors trying out through my binoculars (I salute you, by the way — my girl is creative and experimental, but I’m fairly sure even she wouldn’t be willing to do that thing you did last night with the shoehorn and the kitten). Thus far, 2006 has felt like a year of realization, of fulfillment, of life coalescing into something more … I don’t know, maybe right is the word I’m looking for. I’ve finally seen my writing published on a national level; I completed my first short film (emphasis on film; Chance’s constant elitist berating has made that seem important). Even the steps backward (returning to bartending, for instance) feel right and natural. It’s as though I’m finally clearing out the chaff of societal expectation that I’ve always wrestled with and becoming comfortable with what’s important to me.

I look around almost every day and I see people wrestling with the past, clinging to it with some sort of sickening justification. Many of my friends are embittered towards women, because they’ve gotten hurt in the past. I see people scared to chase their dreams because so many before them have failed. I see people “growing up” and leaving behind their creative passions because they aren’t “important enough” or “there’s not enough time in the day.”

I don’t dwell on the past. I think I used to, to great detriment; part of me is such a romantic, such a dreamer, that it is very easy for me to drift into a sort of selective nostalgia, ignoring the bad and fixating on the good, making me wistful for what I imagine used to be. I’ve let that go, by and large, learning to focus on what’s ahead instead of what I see in the rear-view. I also came to realize that it’s all water under the bridge, gone and past; there’s nothing that any of us can do to change what has come before, and to live as though constant obsession will correct your mistakes serves only to waste more of the present. I don’t hold grudges, I don’t torture myself over the things I’ve done wrong (to myself or to others); I do my best to glean lessons needed from my experiences, storing them away for future application, and move on.

I think that this — combined with patience, determination and a slow-burning hard work ethic, and maybe more than a little self-examination — is what has allowed this year to be so good for me. Rarely in life do we see immediate results; for those out there with an inflated sense of entitlement, instant gratification is rarely something that you’ll find.

I regret nothing that has come before. Done again, certainly, I would do things differently, avoid causing pains for which I am responsible, steer clear of situations that left deep and permanent scars on my soul (anyone who has read Vonnegut’s Timequake can understand this). But everything from then has taught me important lessons that have helped me make now better, stronger, easier.

And I wholeheartedly thank everyone who has been a part of my learning up until this point. To my parents and siblings, who instilled a lot of things both good and bad in me, but most importantly taught me that it’s okay to question the world around me (and in doing so granted me the ability to distinguish the good and bad). To my friends, past and present, even those that have long moved out and on from my world, because it is through them that I have learned the real meaning of friendship. To all the women that I have dated and crushed on and stalked (my lawyer assures me that once the case has been acquitted, it’s okay to use whatever descriptors I want), because I have learned a lot about myself through them.

And especially to Melissa, who more than anyone in my thirty four years helped me discover and change a lot of things about myself, who set the bar even higher than what I had imagined for what a relationship with a woman can be, and for raising my expectations and hopes about the world and the people in it. Some might see it as sad that we didn’t work out, but I suspect that, in a lot of ways, she’s in a much better place with the man she’s seeing now, and I’m incredibly happy myself. But my current state of mind and being is indebted to my time with her, beyond any quantification, and for that I will always be grateful to her.

When we were in the process of getting divorced, she came into the apartment one evening where I was sitting on the counch watching Buffy, freshly out of the shower. I don’t remember the exact words, but she pointed out the tattoo I have, of the Mandarin symbol for love woven into the letter ‘M’ that is over my heart, and noted that I was stuck with it forever.

She was right, of course. I hope I never forget everything that we had; without what came before, what I have now — so much more than what I dreamed — would not be possible.

Last night, we’re playing our usual unusual Tuesday night gig at Bailey’s, adding in a full set of patriotic (Eric called it Freedom from Terrorists day) songs like “Born in the USA,” “The National Anthem” (fine, but everyone loves some Radiohead) and my favorite, “Coming to America.” Seriously — what goes better with fireworks than a little Neil Diamond? Nothing.

Which makes me think of my favorite joke: What’s orange and looks good on hippies?

…

Fire.

So we play the first set, which gets a remarkably good reception (we should play holiday sets every week, as no matter how badly we mangle the songs, they get wondrous responses from the audiences). Short break to continue sweating profusely and chat with a few of the regulars, and then we’re back for a return to our usual programming. We blow through an original or two, then into our cover of “And She Was…”, and then, possessed by some demon that hates Eric, I launched into “Seven Nation Army,” which is guaranteed to both get the crowd dancing and screaming and also to make Eric vomit into my amp. After that was our always-rousing “War Pigs,” which — despite my expectations — never fails to get one of the best surges of energy from whatever audience we’re playing for. I guess people just don’t hear enough Black Sabbath on the club circuit in Birmingham.

Sometime in the middle of this set, I looked out into the crowd, seeing who was doing what. About two measures later, I realized that my bass wasn’t making any noise; I checked to make sure I hadn’t bypassed my amp with my tuner (no), that the battery in my active pickup hadn’t fallen loose (no), that a cable hadn’t come loose (three nos and the on-deck batter advances). And I realized suddenly that — aside from the fact that I was obviously not completely in the mix, as no one except me seemed to notice that the low-end had disappeared — there was no sound because I had stopped playing. I had found my girl in the crowd, dancing with her roommate and Eric’s wife, and I had gotten completely and utterly lost in her smile.

And for a few seconds, it didn’t even matter to me that I was pulling the most unprofessional musical move I’ve ever even considered.

These moments don’t come along every day, you know. You’ve got to learn to spot them and, more importantly, learn to appreciate them when they happen, no matter what it takes.

That woman has beauty enough to slow time, to change the course of rivers, to reignite forgotten galaxies.

Everyone should be as lucky as me, to stand witness in the glow of her smile.

But you’re not. Ha.

…but then, that’s what Photoshop is for, yeah? Fine art for the person who has no manual dexterity (which is at odds with my bass playing, but that’s a topic for someone who cares).

I think I’ve decided that maybe the best way to get where you’re going is to stop thinking so hard.

I’ve heard a million stories of ruined vacations that fell apart thanks to ruthless timetables and unrealistic expectations. You’re going from point a to point b, making twenty stops between, and there’s a laundry list of things you want out of the trip; but then one thing goes off-schedule, and then another, and the trail of dominoes falls without pause.

I’m not saying that you should just hop in your car with no destination in mind. Maybe have a few ideas about things you’d like your vacation to include. Sure, you can hope that you get a chance to see or do any number of things, but don’t make your vacation’s success contingent on those things.

I’m stumbling clumsily with this metaphor, but then, I suppose that’s what blogs are for.

I think what I’m saying is this: you get a certain image in your head of your ideal [job, partner, car — whatever], but you’ll never make a complete picture. And then maybe you start thinking certain combinations don’t exist, whether through experience or through heresay, so you start giving up on them. Maybe you give up on some traits because of bad experiences with correlations to those traits.

But when you stop thinking so much (not stop looking, I’ll point out, but maybe not looking so hard, like the guy running down the hall asking where his glasses are when they’re perched atop his head) — well, maybe the things that you want find you. Or maybe you just notice them because you’re not so busy convincing yourself that maybe they exist.

My life is a perfect example of why you should never give up hope, no matter how many failures you stumble through along the way. Endurance is a virtue in this world, and a stubborn determination to acheive your dreams can help you find them, eventually.