Echo

My friend R had a huge crush on me. We had been friends for a long time and years ago, I had a small crush on him but it was fleeting. So we used to hang out all the time with a big group, but after a while, he was calling me a lot and we were hanging out on our own. He was going through a rough time in his life and I really wanted to be there for him; I cared about him a great deal and he was one of my closest friends out here, especially since it’s so hard to find people you trust in this city. After a while, he told me how he felt and I was pretty awkward about it but at least persistent, telling him that it was important to me that we be friends.

At this time, I was doing my research project on psychic ability. I had a bunch of people call different psychics and record their conversations, then I would debrief them on perceived accuracy. R asked the psychic about me and she told him to stay away from me. That I had “issues.”

So I was kind of pissed at her but laughed it off. But I thought the good thing that would come out of it would be that R would back off and just keep things at a friendship. One night, he’d been drinking and was bugging me again about how I could know that we wouldn’t work out if I’d never even tried. But to be honest, I had gotten to know him pretty well. And just knew that he had a brooding, volatile temperament that would eventually rub me the wrong way at best, and scare me at worst. But I hate it when people use that argument against me, so I agreed to try dating. He promised me that it would be really casual, no expectations. So then, the first night we kissed, he told me he loved me. I felt completely cornered. I told him I loved him too even though I didn’t mean it (romantically) but I was so afraid of hurting him in such a vulnerable moment that I said it. And in hindsight, that was stupid. So we dated for a few months and I really wanted to have romantic feelings towards him, but I just couldn’t. I knew this would never work out, but I was so afraid of hurting him that I didn’t know how to get out of the relationship. I kept asking for space and he started getting upset about why I would want space and that just made me more resentful and angry. Finally, after I demanded a week off, I broke up with him. He was pretty upset but I think he thought I just needed time and space to cool down, so he gave it to me. And we tried to be friends afterwards, though it was really awkward to see him when we hung out with our group of friends. I started dating this other guy pretty soon after, and he turned out to be a damn near maniac. He found out that R still called me and told me I had to cut off all contact with him. The stress was pretty bad and I think I really hurt R’s feelings when he called, crying, and asked if I was dating someone. Because that guy was in the room with me and he had already told me that it showed how little loyalty I had towards him when I wouldn’t tell my ex he was never allowed to call again, I told R that I was and that I loved this guy, and that he could never call me again.

I broke up with that guy soon after. He was insane.

But I didn’t talk to R for almost two years, avoiding him at a handful of functions we both went to, even though I would catch him staring at me from across the room. I felt horrible about hurting him, but I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t want that door reopened.

One night last year, 2 years after we’d broken up, he called me and left a message. He sounded pretty shaken up. I called him back and I guess he had had an incident with someone and he wanted to talk to me since I knew him pretty well and had been such a close friend once. We talked about what happened and I gave him advice, but then he randomly tells me that he hasn’t gone out with anyone since me. He started asking me why we broke up. I told him that it just wasn’t right, even though I have no hard feelings. He told me to stop lying and to tell the truth. I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, “C’mon, the reason we broke up was because you wanted to get married and I wasn’t ready, right?” …………………………… This scared me. This scared me a lot. I went back to trying to discuss other things with him and he started getting heated so I told him I was hanging up.

Now here are the things I think about. R was a really good friend of mine. But maybe he wouldn’t have been such a good friend if he wasn’t interested in me. If he had listened to that psychic’s warning, or if he had listened to me when I said I didn’t want to date, maybe we’d still be good friends to this day. Should he have stayed away because I have “issues” (which I admit that I do)? Or should he have stayed away from me because this was a bad path for him to walk down, since I couldn’t fulfill his expectations as far as my emotional reciprocation? Would our lives be different now if we hadn’t gotten together? Or would we be at the exact same place at this exact same moment?

I can’t think too much about it though because I’ll drive myself crazy. He had his problems and maybe these things were inevitable and it just happened that I was there to help him perpetuate things. And if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. But it makes me think…every decision is a small path, and if you look back and look at the grid of all the other possible things that could have happened, all these alternate realities, you’ll realize that there are too many other paths to imagine walking down, and it’s not worth it.

I don’t know what I’m rambling about. Today’s definitely a stream-of-consciousness day.

I showed my cold turkey poem to linda today and she read it a couple of times and I think her eyes welled up. I wonder if she really gets my writing, or if she’s just trying to analyze it as a means to figure me out. I can’t even tell her what these poems mean. Does she think she can? If so, that would probably be good for me.

My basketball team is sucking, thanks for asking. Did you know that I posted on the bulletin board last week to give some guy some tips for his team, and then all the guys on the board started this string of posts with the subject, “IS JULIA A MAN?” and it went on for pages and pages and pages (like hundreds of posts) and every message had that subject title? Christ. So they accused me of sleeping with all kinds of people to get to be number one in fantasy basketball and were being all-around dicks about it. I even had one guy simulate what sex with me must be like. It sounded like a simulation by a guy with an intimate relationship with his tube sock. And the sweet guys who jumped in to stand up for me got bashed too. But I thought those guys were awesome. I was sarcastically sparring on the boards with them and a lot of the messages back and forth were really funny. Then there was all the speculation over what I looked like. I think they’ve agreed that I’m a 50 year old fat guy. It would be nice to finish up the season #1 so that I can have my picture up on the ESPN Fantasy Homepage. Cuz I ain’t no 50 year-old fat guy…

good times…

I will do anything not to go to bed. I’ve been having weird dreams again. Oh yeah, Roxie got me the connection to get onto a porn set. I have to write up a proposal now about the angle of my article and send in my credits and clips. I guess I have to be really careful in my proposal because they’ve been burned a lot by journalists showing the people and industry in a negative light. I’d love to do it on the psychological process of sex and performance–how the actors prepare and perform. Submit it to Psychology Today or maybe as a trade profile for acting. I would actually love to do this article. But I need someone to go with me who will hold my hand because I’m going to be terrified.

I just got done mentally chasing my own tail and I’m freakin’ exhausted. I can’t keep this up. I’m tired all the time.

But I think I’m at that now or never point in my life. Where I have to decide what I want to be and stick with it. It’s time for some inner consistency. That’s what integrity really is. Knowing where you stand and not letting other people push you off of that.

[I watched some of the Apprentice. Donald Trump and I share the same birthday, and almost the same time of birth! The biggest difference between him and I, is that when I become disgustingly rich, I’m going to use that money to buy a toupee that fits.]

I got down today for a brief moment. I don’t mean, got down like I put on some classic funk and busted out my afro and my moves; I mean, I got kind of moody. I was trying to re-organize my office and I came across a picture of someone I dated a long time ago. Have you ever come across a picture of someone you had deep feelings with a long time ago, but have since managed to completely put him out of your life, as if he never even existed? And then, when you see a picture of him, you think, “Who is this?” You have no idea. It’s like they really didn’t exist, or they were just a figment of your imagination. So I put this picture away quickly because I didn’t want to look at it, but it’s haunting me a little.

It goes like this. We meet someone and then have an intense, intimate connection with that person, and it’s almost as if a part of you that makes up the very being of who you are has merged with the other person. But then for whatever reason, things on this level, this human/tangible level, just don’t work out and you separate, even though this part of you that’s connected, maybe a part of your soul, feels as though it’s been ripped away, and now you have a wound that you carry for a long time. At some point, to move on, you have to force yourself to forget about this person, this connection. And the more you take out this person in your mind and tell yourself that he was nobody and that connection was just a crazy thought, the more he becomes less of a person, and more of a symbol. A symbol of something that must be walked away from in order for you to function. So you paint this new picture in your mind of this person, who was horrible, or backstabbing or weak or ugly and how you just despised being with him. And he’s this person that you’re happy you never have to see again and you’ve made peace with this “Never,” this thing that is an absolute, for the rest of your life, an ending.

Seeing a picture reminds you that this wasn’t just this black and white, good and evil thing, but that this is a history, and a set of real feelings, and a person. And you have to take apart the make-believe castle you’ve built around your heart in your mind and face not the things you told yourself to believe, but some of the realities, good and bad, making it impossible to compartmentalize your feelings.

Mostly, when I saw this picture, I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that I had been really intimate with this person, had shared such a depth of feelings. And all that was left of him was this two dimensional image showing tiny glimmers of what it was that had gone on inside of us. And I looked at him and thought, “Was that what you looked like?” Because he doesn’t look like the man I once loved and KNEW. He looks like a mildly familiar stranger, like someone whom I may have taken the same bus with every weekday for years, whose his inner-workings and soul effervescence had been overlooked by me.

If you stopped for a moment and just thought about it…isn’t it sad how people come and go within our lives? Do you ever say goodbye to an acquaintance, and as they’re walking away wonder, is this the last time I’m ever going to see this person? Do you ever hug an older relative and then wonder, is this the last time I’ll hug you? Have you ever kissed a boyfriend or girlfriend, and just felt it down to your soul, that this would be the very last time you kissed? Even if things are going really well? Do you ever just know this?

Sometimes I do. And it hurts so much in that moment. And then it hurts every time I remember that moment.

Goodbyes are awful. You know what? If I were granted three wishes, it would be 1. World Peace 2. A big rack 3. Never having to say goodbye again.

I don’t like looking at pictures of people I know I will never see again. No matter if we had a good relationship or a bad relationship. It’s just having to face the true meaning of Never… that’s why we need to believe in things like God, and ghosts and past-lives, right? So that we can say, yeah, there’s a Never, but there’s no such thing as Never…. Because on some level, things go on, right?

Wouldn’t that be nice to think that there’s no such thing as Never? Only Always. And even if the people you don’t like, all the things that you have to do that you hate, even if all these things were ALWAYS present, so would all the good things in your life. You would never have to say goodbye to a loved one. Never have to think, this is the last time I’ll ever be able to walk, this is the last time I’ll ever watch the sun set over the ocean, this is the last time I’ll taste fresh orange juice on a beautiful Sunday morning with the love of my life by my side… I would gladly agree to live with the constant presence of the worst things in my life, so that I can have the constant presence of the best things in my life.

Always. That’s my idea of heaven. And it’s also a maxipad.

Today was just a day and I don’t know what’s going on with me these days. I’m pretty content at work because lately, they’ve just been giving me stuff to do and leaving me alone and that suits me just fine. I just want to put my headphones on and be alone. It makes me sad to know that I don’t have that many vacation days. My dream travel schedule would look like this:

March–Austin (South By Southwest)
April–Seattle
May–Cleveland (Ethan gets his PhD! Congrats, Dr. Schafer!)
June–Germany, Italy, Amsterdam
July–Hawaii

Linda called as I was leaving work and wanted to know what was going on. She said I sounded down and I just want to be left alone, so I told her that I would call her next week, even though I know that I won’t. Because right now, I’m the only one that I really trust and I’m so tired of how everyone has an opinion on the way I need to be and how I should be living my life and after a while, it starts seeping in. It makes me wish that I had the $50,000 now.

I had lunch with Jake and he always makes me feel calm. He’s the best friend a person can ever ask for and he’s one of the blessings that I count every night when I pray. He’s one of the most amazing souls I’ve ever met and one of the few guys whom I refer to as a Man.

Michael also called today and he did well at school. He’s become quite the fun conversationalist. Sometimes I wish he lived with me. He would wrap me in one of those bear hugs when he knows I’m feeling blue, and even though I’ve spent my whole life being so protective of him, it’s moments like those when I feel completely safe and loved. Michael is my angel.

I wish the guys at work would stop making fun of me for not wanting to date. I’ll go out when there’s someone new to meet, but overall, I just don’t like going through the motions of dating since most of the time I can tell it won’t go anywhere, and I don’t want to be in a relationship right now anyway so nothing is going to go anywhere. I just want to be left alone, with the small circle of people who mean the world to me.

This isn’t finished…

america the day it went cold turkey off of prozac

tonight america feels unsettled
uneasy
like a blister on the brink of burst

the fires of the west have not stopped raging
not nearly enough to mollify the
slow burn of violence rumbling in its belly
digging at the seams

the moon hangs high
exuding indifference

detachment

self-loathing

fear

neglected in its own defiance
a rotton child plotting with an axe

66 runs like a vein through the heartland
feeding off the windtossed litter of the desolate masses
but it’s the silence that feeds the slow burn
the silence that eats itself from the inside out
until there’s nothing left to be remembered by

on the shoulder near cleveland
a bum wanders the freeway
a forgotten man
following the twisted metal guardrail
through the tunnel of his existence
stumbling on a paved road that laps up
the hollow spaces in between
but never once choking on the things that
were meant to be kept

and if you ask him in a way that he knows you exist
he’ll tell you

he’s heard this place whispering
when it thinks no one is listening
towards a heaven overrun by sycophantic wings
flapping to the rhythm of a rhythmless beat
praying for an upended big rig
or a six-car clot to end its misery
and begging someone to touch its emptiness
to really feel it
before dropping it back into that dark
hungry space
where everything that is found
was once lost
and loss is the blanket which covers us
when our insides becomes too expansive to be named.

and you and i?

we slept in our beds
and dreamed our dreams
that shielded us from the nightmares
never aware of the world outside
swirling in its own misery
contemplating its meaning
until it awoke to find itself a butterfly in
its own dream
floundering deeper into a bottomless gulch
that was never given a name

and when i wake
you will not remember me

one day i will land softly on the tip of your tongue
a butterfly kiss that’s more a twitch than a tug
briefly reminding you of a truth that preceded the universe
and you will remember a time
from somewhere far away
in some distant memory
once
when you were loved
by someone who existed

http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html

AMAZING book. Already one of my favorites. It only took a total of a few hours to read, but, oh my God…it’s the book I wish I had written. It moved me and made me feel less alone in this crazy world. It reminded me to count my blessings and hardships and to appreciate them for making me so unique. And to appreciate all the amazing and quirky people around me who love me unconditionally and whom I love unconditionally. Congrats to Stephen Chbosky! For a writer to touch so many people in such a deep way…that is exactly the magic that communication and creativity is all about.

Some quotes from the book:

“It’s like when you are excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means that you’re happy too.”

“…we accept the love we think we deserve.”

“Not everyone has a sob story…and even if they do, it’s no excuse.”

“Then I turned around and walked to my room and closed my door and put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.”

“…because things change. And friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody.”

Awesome…just got an email from a scientist studying paranormal activity. I had explained to him something that I believe to be true about places that are “haunted” and wanted him to tell me what the most widespread theories are, and he told me that my beliefs pretty much hit the nail on the head, which made me feel really validated. There’s so much random non-empirical knowledge that I was born with that I don’t talk to people about because I have no way to prove things, but it feels good when I find out that something I’ve always believed to be true is a conclusion/theory that has been reached by others.

Anyway, here’s the thing that I’ve started to become more open about.

That house my family moved into when I was in 4th grade and everything went downhill…from the very first day we moved in, I felt that the guest room was haunted. That room was supposed to be mine and they moved all my stuff into it and everything. But I had a really bad feeling about it so I ended up sleeping on the floor in the room across the hall and my parents had to move all my stuff over to the other room when I refused to live there. I’ve always avoided that room and the closet especially scared me. Around that time, my brother started having seizures at night and wet his bed consistently. My parents were constantly arguing, sometimes near-violently and I became extremely withdrawn and moody. I also started waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night, where the air was crackling with static (I thought they were aliens talking to each other) and it felt really crowded in the room and I would be scared shitless.

I need to stop here and explain something. I’ve always been extremely sensitive. You know how they say that if someone is blind, their other senses will over-compensate…so for instance, they will have an amazing sense of hearing or smell? I know people always make fun of me because I can’t hear, and my sense of sight and smell aren’t great either. But I’m very sensitive to energy. The wavelength/type that I’m most sensitive to is negative energy, or the places that hurt. Empathically, I can feel out pain in other people, even if it’s extremely repressed. Sometimes, if I concentrate or if they have a strong need to have it weeded out, I can tell pretty specifically what the pain is. Other times, it just feels like someone is directing a lot of static into me and I feel it (it translates to noise or pressure in my head). Have you ever left a TV on, maybe on Video 1 because you were watching a DVD, and even though there’s nothing on the screen, you walk by the room and you know that the TV is on because there’s static in the air? It feels like that. Some places, things, people have higher energy and I can feel that static. The same way I feel that someone has left a TV or CD player on or the way the room fills with static the split second before the phone rings.

This residue energy is the reason why I don’t like places that are old, I don’t like vintage clothing stores (these places are LOUD with energy!!!!!!!!), I don’t like to wear other people’s clothes or be around people who have very negative people around them. Everything is very loud and it gets very distracting for me and tiring for me to block it all out.

So this house…the energy is centered around the guest room. It’s a very high energy room. But it has negative energy that isn’t always on high, but when it is, it’s scary.

I used to try to toughen myself up by locking myself in the closet of that room with the lights off, and learn to relax despite being in the epicenter of this negative energy. I still remember those experiences as the scariest of my life and I really don’t think anything will ever scare me more. But it also made me realize that these things (the energy) can’t hurt me and there’s a peace to that.

So here’s the story. The script I’m writing is called The House and it’s about a woman who ends up returning to the house in which she was killed in a past life, but she doesn’t know that history. But the thing about this house is that it’s not haunted by “ghosts,” per se, but the house, like our minds, conjures up the traumatic instance over and over again and the only way it can get relief, is for her to break out of her own internal cycle of torture. So the house has maintained the burned emotional imprint of a trauma that happened within its walls. I had originally written the script as though it were haunted but that never felt accurate so I’ve been sitting on this story for a long time. But one night last week, I went into my weird “zone,” which is when I’m pretty much asleep but somehow I’m not so I have access to certain information. This time, I called my mother because I had a message for my mother (which I’ll exclude because it’s personal). I’ve never talked to her about being afraid of the guest room but I told her that the house was haunted. But not by people ghosts but by a bad thing that happened in the room. She said that no one could have died in that house because it had only been built 4 years before we moved in. I asked her about the family that lived there before us and if there was a little girl, a little girl who is very afraid and then at night something bad happens. She couldn’t remember so I told her that there was a little girl who lived in that room and she is very scared and now the house continues to be scared for her.

When I woke up the next day, I realized that houses can be haunted not just by the spirits of those who have passed on, but by negative energy left by a traumatic event (like a rape or a beating or anything in which someone exudes a great deal of emotion, splattering the walls with it, if you will). Thus, how I realized the way my script needed to go to be truthful. Like when people fight in a room and you walk in, you can feel it still there even if those people have left and you didn’t even see them. I think that when we go through something horrible in which we are very angry or scared, we give off energy that is absorbed by our environment. Kind of like, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, did it really fall? Well, yes. Because the forest saw it. And if it screamed in agony when it fell, the forest heard it as well, and maybe it scared the forest, even if by “scared,” I mean, the forest absorved the tree’s fear/pain and made it it’s own. Can we absorb energy the way we absorb sunlight? I think we do.

I think something bad happened in that room once. And all I’m saying is that I’m extremely passionate about issues regarding children and inappropriate sexual behaviors which is unusual because there’s nothing in my history that has shown that anything has happened to me. I also think that when a place holds negative energy like that which hasn’t been resolved, it will affect those who inhabit that space. I have said time and time again that when I first walked into the office of the tutoring company that I worked with, that it had really bad energy. It SCREAMED. And through good times and bad, I was always extremely anxious to the point of having a panic attack whenever I was in there. I still can’t figure out if it had to do with something that had happened there, the people or the dynamics of the people, and I really tried to figure it out like a mystery, even though I didn’t like to be in there (like when I used to make myself sit in that closet in the dark). But I know that it vibrates with that bad energy, and when finally I quit, I was so relieved about never having to go in there again. And even though I still need to return my materials, the one thing I refuse to do is step foot into that office, even if George is the only one there and I like George.

Have you ever watched The House of Yes? That is a great movie. You can almost feel how, so many bad things happened in that house, that the house almost has a negative energy of its own that helps perpetuate t
he negative things that happen between the people. Maybe if people changed locations, they would have an easier time resolving their negative cycles. Same concepts as feng shui, I guess. That an environment brings its own energy that can affect people. It may not necessarily have to do with the arrangement of things affecting destiny or whatever which sounds pretty sketchy, but maybe like, if you have a cluttered bedroom, you won’t feel as good…if you live in a place cluttered with negative energy, you’ll start feeling negatively and will start acting negatively and thus, perpetuating bad things in your own life. And changing your environment (ie living somewhere else) might be enough to help you get back to feeling good.

My personal view is that the woman is very nice and kind, but you can never trust a wild animal even it shows all the nice gestures and love. There are better ways to be nice and care but not stupid enough to get yourself hurt.

You guys may not agree with me, but this world is too complicated. We want to be nice and caring, we shall also be protective to ourselves and our families.

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You guys want to know a secret? Everyone knows how difficult my last relationship was; but I promise you, everything happens for a reason. Remember how I told you, “The devil likes to play a drowning man…don’t give him a hand…” ? Well, this man (and I use the term “man” here very loosely) was determined to drown and after lending a hand and nearly drowning myself, I walked away. Here’s the thing; here was the information that I was given beforehand, before making a decision to take on this life challenge. Dated 11/2/02 (4 months before we started dating). What I was shown of him and our future:

* We challenge each other. Powerful sexual attrraction. But M is not in true partnership mode. He’s attracted to me, but thinks he’s good-looking and knows a lot of girls. He’s playing with life, makes up his own rules of the game. He’s a fool who is not developed enough to think outside of his own skin. He’s a flirt but at this time, he’s pissed off at a girl so he’s playing games. But he thinks I’m smarter than him and is afraid that I will figure out his game and beat him at it. He hides his feelings and is very calculating. He has his own mating game (for example, he likes to ignore girls to get a reaction). Likes to play with people; he’s playing with life. He’s trying to work out my game and sees me as being strong. He will try to play me.

Anyone who knows us will know how accurate this is. Creepy, huh? So why did I go ahead with it anyway? Because I don’t like to think that things are that bad in the world, that people can be so rotten. Because I want to think that I can use my knowledge and passion to change things and help modify when people are off their paths. And I was always taught to never leave a man behind. But then came all the lies. All the lies I got caught up in that he told me, all the lies we got caught up in that he told himself. And the bullshit and the disrespect (Mike…did you really think I wouldn’t find out about the things you said???)

But is this one a lost cause? It doesn’t matter to me. I only know that I have washed my hands of him. He wants the train wreck that he’s heading for and I don’t want to be around in any capacity when that reality comes around the bend for him and manifests. Because it’s horrifying. But it’s not my life and I walked away because it’s not my responsibility. And this is a lesson for which I am grateful.

I have learned to appreciate those people around me who are true. Those who have that rare inner light and strength. And as much as it has saddened me that I have not always appreciated it, it makes me count my blessings even more that I can see and experience the true beauty around me. It reminds me that I need to contribute to those who are living, not those who are dying.

During a long and particularly harsh winter, a woman gathering firewood in the forest finds a wolf lying by the side of a path. He is starving and bleeding from a wound on his side, and looks to be on the brink of death. Because she is a kind woman who could never turn her back on anyone or anything in need, she picks him up and carries him home. She feeds him and bandages his wounds and nurses him back to health, and for weeks, the wolf would lay at her side by the fireplace, letting her stroke his head as he slept. Sometimes, he would lick her hand affectionately to show his appreciation and love. She became used to the wolf and even loved him, as her unconditional kindness had created a bond with this wild animal and had made him her gentle companion. One morning, she awoke to find her door open and the wolf was nowhere to be found. Deeply saddened, she searched the surrounding woods and left food out on her doorstep every morning in hopes that he would return, but he never did. She never saw him again and the abandonment by her lost friend broke her heart.

Does this story seem sad?

Here’s the story from a different perspective:

During a long and particularly harsh winter, a wolf can not find enough food to feed itself. Starving and wounded from fighting for prey, he drops to the snow-covered ground, wheezing out what he believes to be his last breaths. Through his half-closed eyes, he sees an old woman approaching from the distance. The wolf knows that if he had more strength, he would rip through this woman’s neck with his teeth and take her down. But in his current state, this is impossible. Luckily, the woman is a kind woman; she takes him home and nurses him back to health, sharing the food off her table with him and bandaging his wounds. The wolf greatly appreciates this woman’s kindness. He lays by her side at night, and accompanies her during her foraging expeditions, loyal and protective. But deep down, something gnaws at him–he knows he is still a wolf and his nature is to kill. As his strength increases day by day, he begins to feel his predator urge creep up on him, particularly at night, when the woman lies sleeping in bed, her vulnerable flesh exposed. The wolf can not deny his nature even if he wanted to. Knowing this and because he loves her, one morning, when the door becomes unlatched by the wind, the wolf leaves, going back to fight for his survival in a harsh winter landscape rather than risk letting his nature hurt someone who has extended such kindness.

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Happy Post Venereal Day everyone! Hope y’all had a great one. I had one of the better V-Days to date…even better than that one a few years ago when I went out with that drummer from that band…

Went to Cheesecake Factory with Brian, Roxie, Jake and the fam to celebrate Michael’s birthday since he wanted to do it in LA. We had an interesting porn debate at the bar. I’m hoping that Roxie can hook me up with this girl she knows who’s an ex porn actress. Okay, I don’t mean “hook up” in that way. I mean…I’ve been trying to get on a porn set to write a “trade” article. I don’t know why I just put quotations around the word, trade. It’s a serious article. Just a standard set visit article written objectively by a credible, established freelance writer who has published many industry interviews and set-visit features. I don’t know why people keep accusing me of just trying to talk my way onto a porn set. And watch people do it.

Anyway. We took a picture of me snorting sweet and low off the table through a rolled up $1. It looks pretty realistic so I’m not going to post it anywhere because I don’t want to have my character questioned (I mean, I’ll post pictures of myself with a loofah stuffed down a pair of hot pink spandex butt huggers while wearing a mesh tank and a flaming pink robe and cowboy hat, but I won’t post any sweet-and-low snorting photos). Jake and I met up with some people for drinks in the valley. There was a cool cover band featuring a woman who sounded like a man. It’s funny…I used to love Bon Jovi back in the day, but I don’t remember Living On a Prayer starting with the line, “Tommy has a 2-inch cock…”

I don’t remember a whole lot after that. It was a late night. We got up early this morning to head over to Big Bear so Jake and my mom could ski and I could fall asleep with my face pressed against a filthy food court table while my brother wrote a history of Mercedes M-Class Automobiles. Good times…

You know those scenes in horror movies where the family comes home from dinner and all the lights are off, and they notice, something’s wrong. “Where’s Sparky?” They look everywhere and the kids are calling Sparky’s name but there’s no sign of him, until the wife flips on the lightswitch in the master bedroom and screams…because someone has decapitated Sparky and left his mutilated body on the bed. You know what movies I’m talking about?

Well, there have only been two times that I’ve felt like that, like I’ve suddenly stepped into a scene in a horror movie. The first was when the pharmacy let my dad pick up my birth control pills when he went to pick up some cough medication. I came home from work to find the little pink oval packet lying on my bed, and I almost screamed (in case you can’t tell, Asian households are repressed).

The second…I have a stack of mail from this week that I haven’t been able to look through yet. But a few moments ago, Brian picks up a package addressed to my dad and says, “What’s this?” It’s a large envelope with Bush/Cheney ’04 emblazened on the envelope. Inside, the print letter says, “Thank you for being a charter member of Bush/Cheney 2004” and included, there is an 8X10 COLOR PHOTO OF MONKEY-FACE DUBYA AND HIS WIFE.. I freaked out. To discover an 8×10 Color photo of monkey-face Dubya and his wife in my home, is like finding out that someone had taken a huge dump in the middle of one of the rooms in your house, but you just now discover it, days later.

(“TV’s Best and Worst Boyfriends” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4193247/)

Here’s an excerpt cappin’ on Ted Danson’s character on Cheers, who’s an anti-commitment freak:

Romance has its ups and downs, but it is a rare young girl who lolls about her bedroom, listening to music and dreaming of the day that someone will come along who will grudgingly tolerate her.

This reminds me….

I once had a guy tell me (among other really selfish, self-absorbed things):

I don’t ever want to get married. But I know that I’ll have to some day because that wouldn’t be fair to my kids.

Okay, buddy. But you’ve got to find someone with low enough self-esteem to marry you first.

Oh my God! I still giggle sometimes when I think about the absurdity of that statement. I mean, doesn’t every girl dream of having a guy who will put down the remote long enough to take his hand off his balls and out of his sweatpants, look her lovingly in the breasts and profess his delusional self-centeredness? I thought it only happened in fairy tales!

Okay, first of all, Mr. I’m-Every-Naive-Girl’s-Dream-Guy-In-My-Tiny-Delusional-Head, you’re not all that. You’re a sad, little, transparent boy who missed the bus to Manhood. You’re not developed enough to think outside of your own skin. And when scientists finally discover the center of the universe, don’t be shocked when you find out that you aren’t it. You ARE all that to those girls who are so fucked up they’ll do anything to find someone who will keep fucking them up because they can’t value themselves otherwise, but in Grown Up Reality, you’re nothing. You don’t even register on the radar of people who have real thoughts and direction when they pass you on the street. And the day you get your head out of your own asshole, you’ll realize that 1. You’re a profoundly selfish coward who has no sense of reality or of how to interact with people like a normal human being; 2. You are going to have a long, productive life self-inducing your own misery and happily going out of your way to destroy anyone who tries to get close to you; and 3. You may be able to fake being something you’re not for a while, but you have my word…no sophisticated, self-respecting girl will ever have anything to do with you.

So you were right…I was completely wrong about you. But you managed to pull the wool over my eyes for a while, and for that, I applaud you and say, “Good game.”

Click on “Ghost Girl Video”

What do you think? Real or not? I can’t decide. Regardless, I missed her the first time I watched it and then saw her the second and I just about peed my pants (I was never known for my bravery in the face of the supernatural). Scary filmmaking if you aren’t paying attention.

http://tlewis777.tripod.com/G.H.O.U.L.I/

Another crazy site. I’ve been listening to their audio recordings and watching their videos. Pretty freaky.