Crankiness abounds.

I'm tired, even though I got more than 8 hours of sleep last night. My ear hurts, which hasn't happened in a couple of months, at least. It's being aggravated by the cold air blowing on my head. My back hurts, my ankle hurts, I have this thing now in my arm which makes it hurt. No idea why, it just hurts.

If I'm still recovering from my hangover I'm really going to get upset. My girlfriend and I went out drinking on Saturday night. We didn't make the ULA meeting; she had to go into work for the day and spent the entire afternoon there due to some fuckup by one of the ingrates they call management at the place. But we had a good time where we ended up. It was nice to be somewhere with good jukeboxes and normal beer instead of the crap and swill they serve up around here, even though we had to drive over an hour to get there.

Then yesterday I sat around the house while she cleaned up and cooked. I was stupid and didn't wear my ankle cast when we went to the mall to get her glasses and contacts, and by the time we got home, all that I could do was sit in the chair with my foot elevated and feel like an asshole while she slaved. She made spaghetti and meatballs, which, despite the guilt in my belly, was fucking delicious.

I feel like I'm about 63 years old and was just in a traffic accident. My whole body is falling apart. I missed two doses now of my anti-depressant, and, based on my memories of what happens when that happens, that makes me a fucking idiot. I also haven't been taking my Celebrex, and the monkey on my desk is wearing a piece of Busbar on his head. The only explanation I have for that is that I put it there. He looks silly, but then again, he is a monkey, after all.

Maybe I should eat the Busbar. I probably should.

There are few things more horrible than an earache, and therefore I'm going to start to simply wallow in this pain. Thanks for your concern.


- posted by seanmh @ 2:02 PM

 

I don't want to die and move to Florida.

I want to make people cry by writing something that they hate.

I don't want to pretend that everything is going to be all right. I want to know it.

I want to make someone understand.

I want to make someone stop and stare.

I want to make someone walk away thinking.

I want them all to just shut the fuck up.

I want a house in the woods with a subway stop in the basement. Preferably on the 1 and the 9 line.

I want to listen to every song ever written.

I want to read your poetry.

I don't want no peanut butter.

I don't want to really know how to play golf.

I want JAH to use me for sex.

I want to give you a brilliant headache.

I'm going to a meeting of the Underground Literary Alliance this weekend in Philadelphia. I have no idea what to expect. I'd never go alone, so I'm going with my beautiful girlfriend. They'll probably all talk to her and ignore me and then I'll have to squeeze in between them all afterwards at the bar in order to borrow 4 dollars from her purse for a beer so I can entertain myself under the television next to the cigarette machine. They'll talk about Hunter S. Thompson and Bukowski while I come up with witty first paragraphs to six more novels that won't go anywhere and will need lots of editing that I don't have time to do and she'll become the Joan Didion of our generation and I'll be stapling together the check stubs of her enormous royalties so we can put them in the filing cabinet that I finally got back from my ex-wife and she'll tell me how much she likes my writing and we'll be happy in love forever after.

Just.like.that.

I'll let you know how it goes.


- posted by seanmh @ 4:06 PM

 

Today is jumpy and etc et al. My knee is going a mile a minute. Maybe this is because of the new medication I'm on (not the Celebrex, no), also maybe lack of sleep and/or food.

In 500 years "andor" will be one word. Sure thing.

Not helping that the Ramones have been playing in my head since early this morning. I don't believe in a collective unconscious, but a few minutes ago I read a post in which someone mentioned "Beat on the Brat." How uncanny! I wonder if Jung could explain. Please explain, Jung, you shit.

I'm a Freudian myself.

So it appears that I'm being published in an online literary journal. This is a big deal for me. This guy who visits this literary forum that I frequent has this website. I found it interesting so I linked to his site from my personal site. A few weeks later I get an email from him asking for some of my writing. I was flattered. I still am flattered. It's a big deal, but only to me, but no one is sitting on my lap right now, and if she was, she'd be happy, too, so that's really all that counts, right?

I am still toying with the idea of actually producing a chapbook of my work prior to this book thing that's coming out in July. It will require a concerted effort as well as a bit of money, neither of which are exactly banging down my door right now. I wonder how I got so good at twisting metaphors. I think it must have been at the movies.

Now I've done it. Tapping the leg of my bad ankle has caused my entire bad foot to go numb. Ah, rats.



- posted by seanmh @ 3:12 PM

 

It's Presidents' Day (Washington's and Lincoln's both — they're oldtimers so we just combined them for irrelevence's sake) and I'm the only person in my cubicle group here at work. The Strokes is playing loudly. I've got a full bottle of water, a good day's worth of work on my desk, a bitingly painful back, and snazzy sideburns. For some reason I'm feeling creative today; maybe something will come of this.

This is something that somebody wrote in response to a recent poem of mine: "I see you wrapping your arms around the Earth. Right now, I see this in my mind, which is where I read the writings you offer. Show me the line that separates them."

Despite the lack of clarity in that comment, I was vaguely pleased with it, thinking it to be at least an attempt at a compliment. But the last sentence threw me. The "show me" thing is something that would come from a teacher, and it therefore sounds presumptuous to me, which I don't like, especially from someone I don't know. But reading that sentence made me feel like I must have been missing something in the first part of the comment. So I went back to examine it.

"I see you wrapping your arms around the Earth." That comes from some of the imagery i invoked in my poem, which talks about my childhood challenging of the "nothing is impossible" mantra. Okay, that's a nice thought.

"Right now, I see this in my mind, which is where I read the writings you offer." So this person sees that image in his mind. Well, great! That's the best thing a writer can hear. But then he says that his mind is where he reads the writings I offer. Aside from "writings you offer" being slightly condescending (along with the "show me" comment), I'm not sure what I think about his meaning when he says that his mind is where he reads my writings. I mean, sure. Well, I guess, but I'm not sure how this statement is meant to distinguish my writings from anything else this person experiences.

"Show me the line that separates them." This is completely nonsensical. Show him the line that separates what? The line that separates his mind from my writings? The line that separates the world from my writing or the world from his mind or, what?

It's possible that this person is inarticulate but thoughtful, in that he is getting ahead of his thoughts when his pen hits the page, in much the same way that someone will start laughing about something because his mind has made up a joke that only he understands, and when he tries to explain, he skips over the transition between what was said (what everyone heard) and what he turned it into. But I don't think that's the case. I think, instead, what we have here is the failure of a wanna-be poet to express himself in language that he thinks is artful and meaningful simply because it sounds pretty and vague.

I think what we have here is a poser.

Anyway, here is the poem that was responded to. It also drew another response that I didn't understand. Maybe it's me, but I doubt it. I call this one, "Mean Poem." I think you'll find it to be prescient.

it's possible
that you know what you're doing
but i'm not going to
bet the farm on it

as a little boy
i used to hear all the time:
"anything is possible!
you can fly to the moon
you can be the president
you can get her to like you
you can get an A."
and i would say,
"can i wrap my arms
around that building over there?
can i stand on one toe and
spin like a top?
can i jump between planets
with a shoelace in my teeth?"
and
the answer was always "no,
of course
not."
well then,
stop fucking with me.

i wouldnt make that bet
with somebody else's farm
i dont even have a farm
i dont even like to bet

and dont insult
my imagination
by telling me that
anything is possible -
because it's not,
seeing as you're still here.

- posted by seanmh @ 11:14 AM

 

And now I am under doctor's orders to ingest Celebrex, which is an arthritis medication, for a sprained ankle. On the upside, I have arthritic symptoms (pain, swollen joint), even though I'm assuming that I don't have arthritis. On the downside, he only gave me 14 pills, enough for two weeks at the most, and asked to see me again in one month. On the upside, the pills were free.

He also gave me some anti-depressants. We'll have to see how these affect my mood. Over the next two to three weeks you either will or will not recognize a shift in my outlook on life, which is currently this: Life is depressing and ridden with anxiety triggers.

On the upside, I have an inordinantly attractive girlfriend to whom I can talk about things that are implicitly yet profoundly important to me, and she helps me get through the day without enabling my psychopathically depression-filled tendencies. So, that's a plus.

In other news, I spent the last two days at training for my job during which time I doodled a half-dozen or so comic-book images about my life as a under-challenged and disappointingly-employed wanna-be writer. I will spend the next few months scanning front lawns on garbage days looking for an Apple-compatible scanner so I can post these comics. Wish me luck.


- posted by seanmh @ 1:35 PM

 

Let me explain something to you.

My ankle hurts. I just took a pill that will supposedly reduce the swelling in my ankle and, it is also supposed to do something about the pain, which seems to have increased today for no other reason than the fact that it's Tuesday. This pill is a prescription medication, which makes it something that the medical community has specifically endorsed. In fact, one could say I've been ordered to take this medication. Doctor's orders.

For all intents and purposes, this pill isn't going to do a damn thing. Whether I take it or not, the swelling in my ankle will eventually subside. It's possible that the anti-inflammatory properties of this pill will improve circulation in my foot and allow things to heal faster, but I'm not really going to notice much of that, and I doubt my foot is risking gangrene by me not taking the pills.

I get headaches relatively often, or at least often compared to what used to be the case, which was that I never got them. I rarely take headache medication, despite the constant commercial encouragement to do so.

You can go to a bar and order a beer. In fact, in Pennsylvania, if you want to spend less than a few bucks on some beer, you have to go to a bar. You can't buy less than a case of beer except at a bar. I have yet to see a bar in Pennsylvania that you can walk to, or that most of the clientelle will walk to. This is the case in most places, to be sure. They say that drinking and driving is a crime, but the details of our community infrastructure make this nearly impossible to avoid. So, when you drive to a bar, you are paying someone in the private sector to give you a substance that is inherently creating an illegal situation for you.

Cops get together over drinks at a bar after their shift and discuss the criminals of their day, many of which are so defined by their use or possession of illegal substances. Not illegal because of any impairment they've inflicted on people that has caused them to threaten others, explicitly or implicitly, with harm, but rather illegal by the very nature of their existence.

Alcohol is only illegal if it threatens others with some degree of physical or emotional harm (DWI, public drunkenness, etc.). But a drug like marijuana, or a drug like Vicodin, is illegal by its very nature. They are illegal drugs regardless of whether or not the person is even under their influence. They are illegal to simply possess.

And yet you have to drive to your local tavern to have a beer, and drugs which do essentially no good whatsoever are things that we are ordered to spend money on and consume.

I'm not going to summarily defend the use of what have been defined to be illicit drugs. Smoking too much pot turns you into a barely functioning individual. Taking prescription opiates is hell on your internal organs. Consuming psychedelic mushrooms severely impairs brain function and completely eliminates all reasonable responses to society.

But, they make you feel good, and what is so wrong with feeling good? Have we as a society so repressed ourselves that we consider feeling good to be a crime? This is essentially what we have done. Someone who's addicted to Vicodin isn't a "pill-head" or a "junkie," he's someone who likes to feel good and who's found a way to do so on a regular, significant basis. What is their crime? We can pretend it's that they obtained prescription medication illicitly, but that's not the real issue. If that were the case, then why make any prescription medication, except to avoid having patients take potentially harmful combinations of different pills? If it were the combinations that were actually of concern, then why arrest someone whose only violation was that they had one kind of medication?

I think that we like things a certain way. We like to pretend that the health industry isn't merely a business that happens to assist with the health of some people. We like to pretend that the laws that have been set up have been done so with a higher purpose in mind, and that it's not just because tobacco farmers made great politicians and wealthy lobbyists, or that the alcohol industry isn't simply a western trade with roots in European industry, unlike the opiates of the mysterious, spooky Orient.

Or that marijuana didn't became illegal simply because all the kids were smoking it. It's merely a substance. If rock music had been a substance, you can be sure it would have been outlawed before The Beatles came to America.

If I break this down, I can say this: a man in a uniform can arrest me for ingesting a subtance that will enter my body and leave my body without me even walking out of my home. This substance is just like a food item, except that it makes me happier when I use it.

Happiness is illegal in America. Tell your friends.


- posted by seanmh @ 1:49 PM

 

I have two shelves full of records. That might not seem like a lot. I see movies where a character has rows and rows of records, piled up on sagging shelves. I can't understand where they get all that music. I think even if all my CDs were records, they wouldn't take up that much space.

Maybe they would. I don't know.

I have three juggling balls. They are made of beads held together by sewn-up panels of vinyl. I can't juggle very well, but I'm working on it. I'm trying. Sometimes I practice.

I have a guitar that I rarely play. It was my brother's guitar, but he didn't want it anymore and so, several years ago, he gave it to me. I can't tune it, really, so I use an electric tuner that I bought when I was in college so I could tune my electric bass, which I also still have. I really never play that anymore. The amp stopped working on a regular basis a bunch of time ago; I think it was around the same time that I bought the electric tuner.

My girlfriend really shaped the place up today. It was her day off. She works most Saturdays. When I was home alone on my first day off yesterday, I did a lot of work around the house. I say this partially to make myself feel better for the fact that I didn't really help her today, but also because I sort of did some stuff yesterday. It wasn't a huge thing, but I did as much as I could. I have this badly sprained ankle thing and being on my feet around the house yesterday sort of screwed it up worse. I took off my sock last night and parts of my foot were blue. Today it hurts, and, also, my hamstring on that leg is really starting to tighten up, since I can't extend it when I walk.

So I spent a lot of today sitting in the recliner reading and watching television. I read some short works by Kafka and watched the NHL All-Star Game. I also did some writing, but very little. While my girlfriend was sorting through this immense pile of paperwork that has accumulated since May 2003 in various baskets, shelves, and not-so-hidden-enough corners of the house, she found two checks in unopened envelopes made out to me from the split of some crazy stock I own that I think has something to do with the couple of shares my uncle gave me when I graduated from college. The two checks totalled about $15. She also found a ten-dollar bill somewhere. So after she was done sorting through everything, we went out to eat at a local Mexican restaurant. They forgot her rice, but she had a nice dessert and I had two drafts and some good food. We're really poor, especially lately. It was a treat. The waiter sucked, so I only tipped him $2.50. The bill came to $22 with the crappy tip, so we still made out three bucks ahead of the game for the night.

I have about a dozen notebooks in a few different places throughout the apartment. I started writing in them about six or seven years ago. Early on, I found a particular model notebook that I really liked and so I've been using that one for a while now, so most of my filled-in notebooks look the same. In those notebooks is an entire novel and more short stories, sketches, reflections, poems and just nonsense than I can even begin to imagine. Maybe when I die they'll be published in a journal that someone will give someone else for Christmas, because it isn't the kind of thing that the gift-receipient would ever have bought for himself.

I don't know about that. But it's amazing that so many words could have come from someone like me who wasn't even very much aware that they were accumulating so quickly. The words have just sort of fallen into the white spaces over time, and now there sure are a lot of them. I think I probably have more words in notebooks that I've written than there are notes in all the records and CDs that surround me. And I can't juggle, but I keep trying, slowly, barely even realizing that I'm doing it, so maybe someday I'll be able to juggle fiery batons of steel.

Wouldn't that be something?


- posted by seanmh @ 11:40 PM

 

What I want to be is a high school English teacher. Teaching writing/composition would be okay, but I think I'd really enjoy teaching literature. Now I'm going to make a list of the books that I would want to include in my classes:

1. Notes From Underground
2. On The Road
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
4. Ham On Rye
5. Why Are We In Vietnam?
6. Sometimes A Great Notion

That's a good group with which to start. I think I'll also read some of Bukowski's poems in class, and I will demand that everyone bring in a book of their own to read a chapter from. You have to let the kids run the show a bit, or else they'll throw paper clips at you and call you Mr. Baldy McAsshole. Can't have that. Those little fuckers.

- posted by seanmh @ 12:06 PM

 

Okay, so now we're going to talk about the breast.

Everyone is mad about the Breast. Janet Jackson showed her breast on national television at the halftime show of the Super Bowl, which made her breast appearance at approximately 8:40 pm Eastern Standard Time, or somewhere in that vicinity. Basically prime Prime Time.

The Breast made an appearance for approximately 1.5 seconds before the Super Bowl Halftime Show Director at CBS cut away.

Big.

Fucking.

Deal.

My favorite argument is the Coors Lite Football Commercial argument. This argument goes like this: If you're so fucking up in arms about the Breast, where is your moral basis? Where were you during the commercials for Coors Lite, which for the past two years have shown women in bikinis and snowpants and cheerleader outfits rolling around in the snow to maximum cleavage exposure. These commercials have been on during EVERY SINGLE football game broadcast for the past two years. Whining about the Breast is a little too simplistic, don't you think? It's not the idea of it that bothers you, is it? Ideas are a little too complex for you, aren't they? It's actually just the flesh of it. I understand. It's sort of like instead of hating some concept of homosexuality for a morally sound reason (not there is a morally sound reason for hating homosexuality, but that's another argument), you just decide to beat up that kid on the street. I understand how you think. People are simulating sexual acts in commercials and, in fact, on the very same stage as the one on which the Breast appeared. But I understand that it's complicated to formulate opinions about ideas. It's easier just to go for the fleshy thing hanging there.

Another argument I like to make is the Colin Powell argument. Seriously, Colin Powell, don't you have enough to do with making up reasons to attack nations or something? You actually manage to find the time to make a comment about a 1.5 second exposure of a breast? Where is our country headed when the leaders of our nation can find the time to comment on the Super Bowl Halftime Show? 1.5 seconds of a breast.

This leads us to the next argument, which is this one: the It's Just a Breast argument. It's just a breast, people. Every single person who's spoken out about this "incident" has seen a breast (with the likely exception of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue). All women have breasts, and all women have shown them to people. Many women have breastfed their children. It's likely even you have suckled on your mom's breast; possibly in public, too.

Another argument is the What About the Children argument. Lots of people say, "what about the children?" I say the same thing, but with a different tone. This is how I say it: "What about the children? They should go their whole young lives pretending that there's nothing underneath people's shirts? I have a young son. If he noticed the Breast, he probably would have looked at me with a face of surprise. I would have said, "Oops! She fell out of her shirt!" and he would have thought that was funny, that someone could "fall out" of their shirt, and we would have laughed about it for a while, before we continued to play with his cars. If he was any older, it would have been a great opportunity to discuss why women shouldn't go around flashing their breasts. If he was older than, say, 12 or 13, I'd have to ask him if he wanted to talk about it, to which he'd probably respond that he'd seen better in the magazine his friend brought to school the other day. Anyone who makes the complaint that it was on television during a time when children would be exposed to it is making that complaint because they want to demonstrate to the world that they are lousy, lazy parents who are obviously incapable of dealing with the fact that people have skin underneath their clothes. To me, this seems a simple truth, and one that a parent should be able to face: Clothes cover things.

Things I would get angry about if my sons were inadvertantly exposed to on television:

1. Actual sex acts, simulated or otherwise.

2. Violence. I actually probably have a lower threshold for violence exposure to kids than many people. My kids are young and I feel they need to learn that violence really hurts before they realize that violence can sometimes be funny.

3. Star Jones. Seriously. Gah.

There are so many other things to get angry about. Like the fact that Tom Brady keeps winning Super Bowls. Let's focus our energies in a more appropriate fashion, people.



- posted by seanmh @ 5:08 PM

 

The air conditioner at work is blowing on my head.

It's 30 degrees outside.

I'm sitting here, at my desk, which is not a desk as much as a table with a computer on top of it, with the air conditioner blowing on my head, trying to imagine that it's 90 degrees outside and the air conditioner is, therefore, appropriate, even comfortable or refreshing.

It's not working. It's 30 degrees outside and the air conditioner at work is blowing on my head.


- posted by seanmh @ 5:00 PM