Poems in Objects

Tonight I had to do one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. As I was building myself up to do it, I felt a sense of dread. I knew it would be difficult. I kept hoping that I was blowing it out of proportion, that it wouldn't be as difficult as it was, but I was kidding myself. My heart hurts and my stomach is turning and my hands are shaking, making it difficult to type. It's very fresh and images of us together keep entering my mind. It's hard to concentrate.

The taste inside my mouth is sour. I'm kinda hungry, but I can't really abide the thought of eating. I think I'll eat a cup of ramen before I go to bed, alone. For some reason, Ramen has become my comfort food. I guess getting back to being single before, I found some contentment in the simplicity of it. It was cheap and easy to make and actually, to my taste buds, tasted good. There was something liberating about the cheapness of the ramen that was all mine.

Kinda getting off subject, I know, but who's to say what's germaine to this ancient topic of loving and losing? Doesn't every tangent lead back to love? Doesn't every fear come from love and every love cause some sort of fear?

As he was leaving, I picked up an envelope with his name on it. It's his tip envelope from work. Someone, probably the receptionist, Amanda, had spelled his name "Jon," then, possibly realizing the mistake, put in a "^" with an "h." Or maybe it was always a joke. I don't know. But I'd seen the envelope a couple times in the last few days and never noticed that. It's something I would've mentioned to him. We would have both laughed about it. Laughter was what really cemented our attraction to one another in the first place. I remember on our first date sitting in the restaurant, Spring, laughing my ass off and thinking to myself "I haven't laughed this hard in sooo long."

So, as I picked up this envelope, had my little moment, I thought to myself, "this is going into the box. This is what tonight is." See, I keep a box of mementos. I keep a new one for every year. Historic days, both on macro and micro levels, I pick something up and put it in this box. Sometimes I hate myself for turning moments into objects. Am I compartmentalizing my feelings by transforming them into something I can put in a box? Am I celebrating life as much as I like to think I am? I don't know. Sometimes I think it's reductive, a travesty. To keep things in perspective, I have to say that I never think these things when I'm looking in one of my old boxes. I only look on these objects with reverence and fondness. My memory is so poor that I don't know of any better way to hold on to my dearest moments. And I have to say that he can never be reduced to a moment or a scrap of paper. This I know.

But yeah, it was hard, tonight. It was hard because nothing was truly wrong. I was not angry. I was not in love with someone else. I couldn't fault him if I tried. He's a wonderful man and I know I'm going to miss him. I'm going to miss our moments of intimacy that will never be replicated. I'm going to miss his silliness. I'm even going to miss his fake smoking and his slow clapping at every single thing I'd say. I'm going to miss the way he talks to my dog. The way Racecar gets excited when John comes home from work. I'm going to miss his Flemal Sandwiches and his cooking in general. Suddenly Ramen doesn't sound as good. But I know it will fulfill me - at least enough to get to sleep.

I'm pretty certain he's going to read this at some point, and that's very hard for me. Certainly harder for him. I'll continue to love him for a long time, but things just weren't right. Just as he does, I sometimes wonder if they ever will be. All along he had a fear that I was going to leave him. All along I feared that I would leave him, too. There were moments that I thought he knew, even wanted this to happen. I really did. Turns out I was wrong. I hope I wasn't wrong, too, about ending it in the first place. Will I ever know?

Meetro & Car Antics

Has anyone heard of Meetro? It's sort of an IM application that knows where your physically located. I guess it's intent is to be able to allow, say, people who are hanging out w/ their laptops at a WiFi cafe, to presumably see other people who are at the same cafe and, you know, chat, or something.

A couple weeks back this guy sent me an email saying that he sometimes reads my blogs (probably not the whole truth, but oh well) and would I mind checking out Meetro and writing about it.

It's something you have to download, so I was a little leery, and I didn't take action at first.

This past Tuesday I was at Filter Cafe in Chicago and this guy (turns out it was the same exact guy, in fact) walks up to me and hands me a card for Meetro. Weird, huh? So, I took it as a sign and registered. So far it's very beta. There aren't that many users, but I am sorta interested to watch it grow. The guy told me that there will be something about Meetro in tomorrow's Tribune, so they're expecting a huge influx of new users.

I'm hoping that everyone who subscribes to my blog signs up. I think that would be really cool. C'mon, let's be early adopters!

And in other news...

Due to my mother's recuperation - and subsequent inability to get around on foot - I've sort of taken over her car. By taking over, I've got access, and have taken over payments. She's got pretty high payments, which sucks. But she's gone on disability and therefore can't afford the payments. As a dutiful son, I'm taking over. Fortunately, I got a raise recently. I was just getting by and I thought the raise would finally give me a little more "fun" money. Turns out, with the new payments, I'm around the same place. Also, there are only 5 payments left, which sounds kinda good, but I sincerely doubt my mother is going to give me this car. So basically I'm renting it. Oh well.

Anyway, earlier this week, I started the car up to go to work. I noticed it sounded a little sluggish, but it started. I thought "ok, hopefully this isn't the start of something bad."

Then, I go to pick up some sandwiches for lunch. Again, there's this hesitation before the engine turns over. It's a little more prolonged than earlier in the morning. Ugh.

I get out of the sandwich place and the car won't start. DAMN!

So, I walk the 6 blocks or so back to my shop and tell my partner and I call up John to ask if he knows of a good place to bring my car to. He's off, so he offers to go check it out.

A little while later he calls me, tells me it's probably my battery and that he'll go get some jumper cables, pick me up, and we'll go get it started together.

He picks me up and we go to my car. He positions his car so that they're facing each other. We're on a relatively busy two-way street. Lots of traffic both on foot and in cars, so we have an audience.

We go through the actions of doing a battery jump. You know, connecting the cables starting the cars, all that. We've both jumped cars before - we know what we're doing.

So, I get in my car and try the ignition - nothing. Hmmmm. John gets in my car. We're both like, "why isn't this working?"

I look up and I see that some smoke is coming from John's car. I'm panicky going "look look up look at your car!" I sound like an idiot. So we both get out of the car and literally the cables have caught on fire. Of course my instinct is to get the fire away from the engines, so I go to pull the cables off but they're hot. I go into my car's back seat and grab this really cute Ben Sherman pullover and smother the fire and pull the cables off the batteries.

Naturally the pull-over is ruined. But John's car's grill has melted. It looks sooo bad.

We clean up our little fire mess and John's trying to figure out what we did wrong and I get in my car kinda like an autistic person and try the ignition and it starts. Weird.

So John takes his car to a body shop and I drive my car around for a while to see if the alternator will charge up the battery.

Ultimately, after work, my mother's car did not start again. So, now I am afraid to jump it again, but I have to get it from here to a shop to get it fixed. I have to find a shop to take it to in the first place, too. All this for a car that's not even mine. Now I sorta remember why I didn't mind having a car in the first place.

Scarrie - The Musical

Last night I won tickets to see the parodage (parody homage) Scarrie: The Musical. It turned out to be pretty fun. It was another of those Hell in a Handbag Productions. There was a pretty interesting crowd. The cast consisted of primarily trixies, which brought in all these trixies and their boyfriends, which meant that there was stuff to look at onstage as well as off.

In front of me sat four women who were a little older, like they'd have a twenty-something daughter in the show, perhaps. During intermission they pulled out a cellphone-shaped flask of some alcohol that must've been pretty potent. They took turns taking swigs and competed in making disgusted faces and taking pictures of themselves while they did it. It was quite cute. I wish I could've hacked into their digital camera and stolen the photos (ah, bluetooth piracy is so young, kids who are about 12 years old now will certainly be able to pull this off when everything's bluetooth enabled and all your digital photos will imediately be beamed off to a remote site, so you'll never have to use digital media again - just watch and wait).

Local talent David Cerda enjoys the local scene, so he's written in a cameo appearance for local celebrities. On this night, my pal Jason Paul of Boi Magazine and ChicagoPride.com made a cameo appearance as well as famed PodCaster Madge Weinstein. They're roles were to be Prom Chaperones. Apparently, they ad-libbed all their lines and gave the other "seasoned" actors a run for the money, resulting in them being practically hooked off stage as though they were on the gong show. Madge yelled out as she was being pulled off, "Fuck David Cerda!" It was quite funny. Most notably to Mr. Cerda himself, who had been sitting in the audience for the show and bust out laughing the loudest.

After the show, I met up with John at The Pepper Lounge.
Joining us were also fellow PodCast producers Fausto and Mark. They produce the Feast of Fools podcast which is getting quite a bit of notice lately (Fausto is in this month's advocate, even).

I'd wanted to go to Pepper because my optical shop's next art show is featuring Audrey Keller, who, in addition to being a wonderful photographer, is also a waiter there. I needed to deliver this show's postcards to Audrey, so it was a nice excuse to get some food and a couple delicious coctails from the wonderful and talented Linda Little, as well.

Anyway, I have to cut this short because I have to go to work, but the evite to Audrey's show is linked here, so all of you should try and stop by the night of August 5th and check out the show and my shop.

Sky

On the ride home from work today, the sky had this kind of eery post-apocalyptic yellowish haze. It was a filter that turned things to off-color versions of themselves. It's very surreal. It kind of feels like the way things look while dreaming, perhaps. Well, not really, because, heck, I don't really remember the details of a dream that way. It's just something that pops into my head because of the thoroughness of the filter. Every detail is the same as normal, only there's this slight difference. Like watching an old old reel of film, maybe.

New Old things

Things have normalized in quite a few ways, for the time being, in my life. My mom got released from the nursing home on Sunday. My sister's husband had a surprise 40th birthday party on Saturday night thrown by my sister. She had called me earlier in the week because she anticipated being hungover from the party, she asked me to drive mom from the home to our grandma's, but I couldn't because I had to work. I felt a little guilty for not volunteering to wake up early and do it and then go to work. That night when I went to sleep I had some difficulty because I was having visions of my mother struggling up the stairs of my grandma's house. Back before my mom had the surgery, she had struggled in front of me to get down three small stairs and started crying when her legs failed her, so it's pretty obvious where my anxiety came from.

Saturday night I was supposed to have gone to see a play way out on the West Side called Short Eyes. It was written by an hispanic writer named Miguel Pinero (don't know how to make the tilde over the n, sorry). On the way there, I went through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods and I thought for sure we were gonna be the only white people there. Ultimately, the landscape went from predominately African-American, to hispanic to relatively white by the time we got there. Anyway, we get there and it's sold out. I've subsequently found out that this play features a masturbation scene to climax, so if anyone's interested, we bought tickets for this coming saturday and I don't think it's sold out yet. It would be fun to have a group go. The whole reason I was going was a friend of mine, Andrew Kain (AK) Miller handed me a flyer about a month ago and said "come see my play." I'm one of those people who usually tries to follow through when someone has something artistic going on. Unless you're in a sucky band and you want me to come. Then I sometimes skip it.

So, instead of Short Eyes, John and I went to see War of the Worlds. Despite Tom Cruise being an absolute douche in real life, he's pretty good at his character. You know, the one character he plays? Anyway, he plays that one pretty well. Spielberg is just amazing. I didn't particularly like A.I.; this was better. There were moments when I was reminded of Close Encounters and some of the others. Either way, I recommend it, once again, despite Mr. cruise's douchebaggieness.

Right now, I am writing a 6-issue limited series comic book called Taag. It's sort of a fast-paced action story with a little sci-fi. There're lots of chase scenes and fight scenes and humor. A little tragedy, too. And love. I am about half way through the fifth issue's script. I already know how the series is going to end (unless I change my mind and give it more of a hollywood ending) and I already know the plot of the sequel story. I also have a concept for a script for another, probably longer series. Most likely 12 issues. For whatever reason, the comic book medium has been mostly what I'm interested in lately. These stories could translate into short stories, or even better, film, or whatever, but I'm just not feeling it that way. The worst thing about writing comic books is that you need someone to draw them. And unless you've got money or a job with a major comics house, nobody's gonna draw it for you for free. So, I dunno, maybe one day I'll find someone who likes it enough to draw it or, you know, a house will put it out.

I got a raise at work because I passed the board certification for being an optician, which is nice. Unfortunately, I've taken over car payments for my mom's car, which are about equal to my raise, so it doesn't really result in me having more money. I do suddenly have a car, though, which was not anticipated, and now I realize that I do like having one. I could basically adapt to either situation. If I didn't have a car, I'm not saying I wouldn't miss it, but I also wouldn't complain.

Awww

This guy just came into the store with his son. The son was pretty young, maybe 4 or 5. He was afraid of racecar, so I put him (racecar, not the boy) in the back room. The dad told the boy to ask what they were looking for. He wanted purple sunglasses for his mom. It was real cute. Too bad Dad didn't want to pony up for the Sunglasses though. When dad said that it was more than they wanted to spend, the kid was so crestfallen. Maybe they'll come back. Nahh, probably not.