Well, now it’s baseball season, so whatever I was doing before will now go out the window.  Why did I re-re-resign up for Netflix when I know I won’t have time to sit around watching movies anymoregod DAMN it.  Tomorrow is tuesday and the game starts the same time The Best Show starts.  This conflict will happen, oh, nearly every week.  DAMN it. Say good-bye to listening to The Best Show Livenand now whatgod DAMNit – don’t check your who is haunting your Facebook friend requests, just don’t.   I’m not going to like my dreams tonight., that’s all I can say  Though to be fair, though, when do I?  The only time the do not lack the luster of a life I whouldwouldcould lead I am throwing myself down the stairs of sorrow. Thanks for the tip, Brainy. Or TRIP.  Oy.

Though Mid Monster just died. Maybe I will have nightmares about being a junkie.

Oh, it’s been too long, old friend.  Much, much too lo..

Oh, hi.  No, I was talking to this joint. But, I mean, it could mean you, too, ESJ.  Widdle, widdle, ESJ. Koochie!

Someone just asked me what I was good at.

And I did not have an answer.

Because I spend most of my time thinking about all the things I fuck up.  I’ve never stopped to consider what I excel at.

And after a moment…

I went into a bullshit answer about art letting myself fail and whatever, it was total bullshit answer, and the person saw right thru it, and I am an idiot.

Because what can you say.  I’m good at making coffee? I’m good at parallel parking? When so much of your energy goes into etherial aestics, it’s difficult to verbalize just what it is you do. And I in no way consider myself even close to being good.  Being good when oyu are an artist means you are a master and have nothing left to learn. I feel like I don’t know shit.  So though I am competent, I am far from a “good” artist.

Or writer.  I mean, you read how I write.  I’m not being kooky meta, but who writes like this?  There is absolutely no focus! It’s amazing I can ever string this together.  But I guess what you can say positive about that is my writing really makes you feel like you have just been in a room with. Exhaustion and all.

Hey, guess what. I’m watching the Olympics.  And rereading the words below about “not having the power to write” bla bla. Come on.  Power isn’t a fist, it’s a feather. We’re doing this shit.

It was 2006, round this time in bitter wicked winter’s breast, when I was on a lot of pills to make me not feel what eventually everyone who has ever had to fall out of love feels. Yeah, but they weren’t the normal pills that one would take for that sort of thing, the Prozacs and Paxils and whatnot. No, my friend Weaver had broke his arm that month so he was awash in Vicodin, so much more than what he said he needed, so he was selling, and I was buying. And gobbling. And buying. And gobbling.

It was another month before I a couple of friends of mine would set me up with a New York City socialite, who would become my Vicodin for the next thirteen months. But I didn’t know that. I had time and my liver to kill. Time to somehow convince my girlfriend, who just up and left for San Francisco the week before, that SF was not all that it was cracked up to be. I was relieved in some ways, when this girlfriend split. Every day I never knew what I was in for, details withheld due to their ultimate irrelevance. But be fucked If you think I didn’t miss having that someone close to me. It gave me a boost like no other.

Drug.

That’s what the year 2006 was for me, just trying to delay feeling absolutely crushed, to fill the abscess with narcotic cotton, smoke some more cigarettes, take a monster bong rip. She would come back, I would say on, ha ha, my more positive days. On my more negative, I would poke my head out of the fog to stumble into a new living breathing being to stand in place and play the part.

Yeah, it’s called rebound, Edgar Alan Poe.

And ultimately I would find that rebound, see New York socialite. Which is a whole other volume.

But that in-between, a short twenty something days, filled with the blur of late night parties, The Catcher in the Rye and Johnny Weir.

Parties, because I could not stand being in my own home. I hated it. I’d only lived in that apartment a few months when my ex-girlfriend just started staying there every night, and even though she complained that it always felt like my place, it always felt like our home to me. And I hated still smelling her there. So, I spent as much time out of my house as possible. And believe me, I made it possible,

My ex and I were reading The Catcher in the Rye to each other in bed each night when she left in the middle of the story. It was not important that I had read the book a dozen times, and it doesn’t matter now that I have not read it since. What was important to me was that I, and you’re going to love this, finish reading the book out loud to myself. (I told you I was on a lot of pills.) But there was something that was keeping me from completing the task. Like if I did, that would be the last remaining shared experience that we would have, even though she was gone.

Johnny Weir, the adorable figure skating sensation, was skating int he Olympics that February and all my guy friends — my STRAIGHT guy friends — were all enamored with his flamboyant charisma. I’m still not sure if it was a joke, but I bought into it. In my haze, I friended Johnny Weir on MySpace, write a gushing letter to him, and then got immediately DROPPED.

It’s what everyone on pills does.

So when I watched this Johnny Weir documentary last night on the teevee, there were two things I thought. Now keep in mind I had not thought about Johnny Weir in almost four years, but I thought, well isn’t he as cute as a button. (Not my actual thoughts.) The second was what was going on in my life when the last time I actually thought about that Johnny Weir: that February in 2006.

And when I heard this morning of Salenger’s death, my nostalgia overcame me. I don’t know if I will have the actual power to write about this time in my life to make it compelling to anyone but myself. But I think I just gave myself the power to at least give a shit and try.

Oh, no. Not right now. I am too sleepy.

I had this extra ticket to any (non-Avatar) movie I wanted to see. I got it after a couple of years worth of movies at Regal Cinemas at regular price. What a deal! You mean to tell me that after spending five hundred bucks at your theaters I get to see one movie on the house? How can you stay in business??

Anyway, I flew spur of the moment to see Up In The Air. It was good. I liked seeing that girl from Rocket Science again, she was great. And Clooney never fucks things up. I’m not sure, but I think they – meaning whoever made this movie – wanted me to judge the protagonist as a pathetic, even deviant, person. I’m probably the only one in that theater who identified with Clooney’s character, and not only because at a 2pm showing of a George Clooney movie it’s pretty much all old ladies.

I’m not saying I identified with this character’s way of coping with how he is, I certainly don’t just fly around collecting miles 350 days a year. I’m just saying I get it.

But I guess they wanted to make him seem like a schmuck. Of course they do. The audience is all old ladies.

I didn’t so much dump Facebook as I put it in a bag in a cupboard.  Yeah, I fully intended this to be some sort of skewed punishment for Facebook being so rotten, but really, my decision was to (ha ha) harm those responsible for me receiving a butt load of spam the previous week. IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP I WILL SHOW YOU AND HOW GOSH.

And did I ever!

But see here, I have not participated in the Facebook jungle for maybe five days now, and honestly, you’re the big loser! Not me, Mrs. Lincoln.  You think Facebook can hold a candle to [NAMES OF THINGS I WOULD NEVER DO ANYWAY]??  Wrong!

What?

There is a lot of talk on the interweb (you are on it now, genius) about this Conan O’Brien thing with him getting shitcanned or whatever, and I have been reading the response that these IMPORTANT issues such as TV shows I don’t watch anyway on message boards.  And everyone is in agreement!  That Jay Leno is terrible.  Which is like saying [SOMETHING REALLY OBVIOUS].  But who cares. Look, I spent 90 seconds designing a t-shirt with a some a sentiment very close to this observation, and even I don’t care.

Hey man, I don’t really watch TV, and not in a “KILL YOUR TELEVISION” bumper sticker sort of way.  I am too distracted and I know that if I start  I will watch Law & Order for like 40 hours in a row, and think that the noises in the apartment below are caused by Ukranian pimps shuffling girls in and out of their makeshift fake i.d. lab -slash – abortion clinic – AND HADN’T I BETTER CALL THE PORTLAND POLICE AT THIS SECOND?

I do not like to get sucked into the TV world.  Recently, dreamboat actor James Franco was on General Hospital and now I am watching that nonsense (AGAIN) on Hulu.  It never ends!

So you read these message boards, and  people are all “yeah, Lost, yeah something something about Philadelphia, bla bla”, and i know all these shows can’t be good, right?  Why are these people openly endorsing a person set aside twenty-two to twenty-five hours out of their year just to devote to a televiosn program whose only real purpose is to get your neighbors to buy Cadillacs so you’ll want one too.

And don’t get me started on watching shit for irony’s sake – the Jersey Shore or whatever. I personally know enough despicable people already.  ”Have you seen the Jersey Shore?” “No, I’ve been to Doug Fir, thanks.”

You can’t say these things on the internets, because most of these people who love and vouch for these tv shows so much – ironically or sincerely –  are in their twenties, and I think there is a rule that people in their thirties are not allowed to tell people in their twenties how dumb they are. BECUASE NO ONE TOLD ME! AND THEY STILL DON’T. NOT YOU!

So today, I’m reading about what all the talk show hosts are doing in light of this BIG NBC fiasco, and someone I don’t know was doing the old vouching for a TV show thing, which, as I said before, not something I like to get involved with. But someone for the first time vouched for the new Late Night with Jimmy Falon, saying that I, too, should watch it BECUASE IT IS LIKE NO OTHER TALK SHOW ANYONE HAS EVER SEEN.  Now, this is completely false. I have seen a bad talk show before.

But I didn’t say that. No, the ghost of Mark Twain appeared to sing to me a song about hoot owls and pine cones.  And truthfully, once you get him warmed up, he can go all night.