Someone wanted to hear a drunk story, and I’m the most obliging soul you’ll ever meet. She got her own copy, and first — aren’t you jealous you’re not her? — but you guys are at least good enough for sloppy seconds.

It occurs to me that I don’t have that many really good drunk stories, mainly because I’ve been pretty good about never getting *that* drunk. And those few times that I have gotten *that* drunk, I get ****that**** drunk where there aren’t any stories to tell except that one where I vomit, pass out, and then rise from the dead three days later. A little like the Messiah stories, only more painful and a lot more expensive. Oh, and replace the chorus of angels with obnoxious voices in my head.

There was the first drinking party I ever went to, of course. I was 15 or 16 (keep in mind that I started school a little early and skipped first grade, so remembering how old I was at specific points in high school is disorienting sometimes), and there were a bunch of us at a friend’s house on a Friday night. Parents out of town, liquor cabinet stocked and loaded, and there was a package store in a rough part of town that would have sold to my baby sister if she was carrying cash. We were well set up.

This, coincidentally, contains the source of my dislike for all alcohols except vodka.

Specifically, the evil game called quarters, which, much to my dismay, I am terrible at. It seems that 10 years of soccer playing and training is not at all helpful to a sixteen-year-old aiming a coin at a shot glass.

So the night moves on, as does my liver, getting it’s first real taste of what’s in store for it later in life. (Hey, at least it had finally found it’s purpose, right?) Too many rounds of quarters, and everything’s starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. I can feel the potpourri of gin, tequila, scotch, and rum bubbling inside of me, warm and happy and I’m seven feet tall and bullet-proof.

The house we were in sits on top of a tall and fairly steep hill, with (for reasons I still can’t figure) no stairs. Just a long driveway and plenty of grassy slope. On reflection, being that drunk and thinking that I should go get something out of my car (parked on the road) was probably ill-considered, but what’s a sixteen year old to do (ah, I was driving — that settles the age issue)? The downhill wasn’t the problem, but rather the return trip; climbing that driveway was akin to mounting Everest. Much like the climbers who have conquered that peak, I apparently decided that I needed a rest about three quarters of the way up. A rest, and perhaps a good vomit. Yes, that’s exactly the ticket.

Thank god that my friend Jason had been standing at the front door of the house, waiting for Godot or something equally random. He was able to get to me and roll me over before the river of my stomach was able to creep back down the driveway into my almost sleeping self — forgetting about the little thing called gravity, I had thrown up uphill, and then laid down for a short nap.

Siesta interrupted, we went back inside the house and, as all good teenagers will do, proceeded to refill me. Can’t have anyone paying attention to the signs their body gives them, now, can we?

More quarters, and before too long, I’m in the back of the kitchen, refusing any more rounds for myself. Everyone else is still going strong, though — strong enough that someone has started using shot glasses as ashtrays, and no one notices (or maybe minds).

We suddenly notice that Tony, the biggest and surliest of the bunch, is missing, and has been for a bit. Someone recalls him going to the bathroom, and so Jason and Greg and I head off to find the missing drunken Italian (think Penn Jillette, squashed down a bunch). We hear moans coming from the closed door of the bathroom, and so, as good friends will do when concerned… we knock. And we hear what seems to be a cross between retching and a strangled “WHAT?” Silence, then we knock again. “Tony? You okay?” And once again, that horrible cross between speech and gagging.

Turns out that Tony was just trying to purge a little, but in his irritated and drunken state, had forgetten that he was about to vomit, and so turned annoyed toward the door both times to say “what?” Once to his left, and once to his right… Apparently determined to cover the of-dubious-taste wallpaper. Job well done…

The clean up for that party must have been a bitch and a half.

———-

Okay, not as funny as I thought. But it beats the time that I fell asleep in my apartment with the front door wide open. I woke up to go to work, and couldn’t find my car. Or my pants. Turns out that I had decided, about three blocks from my place, that I was too drunk to drive the rest of the way, and so walked uphill the last three blocks (I had already driven about fifteen miles from the bar). And for some reason had taken my pants off about a block from my house and left them hanging on a fence.

That story’s probably hilarious, at least to whoever knows what really happened that night.

That was the last time I got blackout drunk.

But, hey, the future is wide open…

Iranian paper seeks Holocaust cartoons: “A prominent Iranian newspaper said Tuesday it would hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West extends the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide as it did to the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.”

Good for them. Someone should be searching out the most offensive hilarious cartoons about Jesus as a drug addicted Klan member, a retarded steak-loving Buddha, and Kung Fu Tse as a gay wife-beater in blackface.

Seriously. I’ve been reading blogs all week challenging everyone to post these cartoons everywhere. And I’m all for the freedom of speech. So let’s take this all the way, and make it equal opportunity HaHa. Let’s put The Aristocrats to shame with decadence and unabashedly mean jokes at the expense of someone’s heartfelt beliefs.

Look, words and cartoons and movies and music lyrics only have as much power as you are willing to give them. If you let people know that you’re offended by a cartoon that makes fun of your god, or derogatory terms for your race or gender or sexual orientation — well, you’re only feeding that beast. If you ignore the offending material — and after all, it’s just that and nothing that can really hurt you, by the way, and I’m pretty sure that gods are capable of taking care of themselves — then you starve the beast that taunts you, and eventually it shrivels up and dies.

But on the other side of the net, while I’m all for everyone’s right to say whatever they want, funny or not, there’s a line at some point, and it’s not easy to see. That line is drawn from intent, and this is where it gets sticky — how can we really know what someone’s intent is? We can’t, always — but in this instance, it’s clear to me that people know this is pushing buttons with many Islamic believers, and so they’re pushing harder. “What, this bothers you? So I guess when we put it everywhere, it bothers you more? Like this? Really?”

I remember seeing someone on BULLSHIT! saying that people have the right to say whatever they want; people don’t have the right (no matter how much this may crush you, it’s really not in any constitution, amendment, or law book that I know of) to not be offended. I can tell jokes about pedophiles or the Special Olympics all day long, with a picture of Hitler on my t-shirt and a tattoo of Jesus getting a blowjob from Moses if I want; if you don’t want to hear the jokes or see the shirt or tattoo, no one is forcing you to look or listen.

Repeat, for emphasis: NO ONE IS FORCING YOU TO LOOK OR LISTEN. STOP ACTING LIKE IT’S NOT YOUR CHOICE TO BE THERE.

But if I start telling those jokes with the express intent of pissing someone off, or hurting someone’s feelings, or putting it in your face … well, then I’ve crossed a line.

Does any of this make sense? Yeah, I know its a huge gray area, and that there are slippery slopes involved. That’s life — very few binary arguments to be found in the real world. Sorry, Christian Right.

But to those that are pushing to rub this cartoon in the face of Islam — you’d best be willing to laugh when it’s your god that’s the source of the HaHa. And you’d also best be ready for whatever comes out of your egging the situation on — you know what happens when you fuck with even the friendliest animal enough?

Eventually that animal is gonna fuck back. And you better hope it’s not one of the ones with a barbed penis.

Holy shite. Is this really Birmingham?

I’ve been warned that Chicago will be cold when I arrive this weekend, and I’m totally fine with that. Looking forward to it, in fact; one of my biggest gripes about living in the south is that we don’t really get winter. Ever. Once every few years, you get a week or two of sub-freezing temperatures, but for the most part, it’s a perpetual half-spring; just like everything else in the south, the seasons only have so much energy, and they only get half there.

This is one of the aforementioned weeks, apparently. While I would love it, normally, it comes after a week of what the weathermen have been referring to as “unseasonably warm temperatures.” Which is total bullshit, because January is also known as “time to start pulling out the summerwear.”

I still remember coming back from Chicago three years ago, where we had driven through ice and snow and played in constant twenty degree temps. We returned on a Sunday afternoon, and I had to run into the office for some inane reason or another, and I wore shorts and a t-shirt, and still got a little warm.

600 miles should not make such a difference, but it did. And does. Watch — I’ll return from what I’m forewarned will be lows in the teens to highs in the upper 60s or lower 70s. And once again, I’ll wonder why it was that I came back.

Been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks, especially since this weekend. Once you start telling people about your plans or intentions, those plans and intentions become solid and real, no longer ideas that you might give weight to later but something that you’re actually setting in motion. I needed to do that, the talking; I’ve put this off for years, eleven, twelve now, thinking about a move but never getting any further than that, and I apparently needed to kick myself in the ass to get the ball rolling.

I will miss some things, I’ve been realizing. A lot of things, I’m sure. I think the only irreplaceable thing is the Exhibit(s) — Eric and Chance are unique among rarities, and the three of us and Carlos have a chemistry and a combined perspective that I’ve never found and can’t imagine ever finding again. There are things like Sidewalk (and my fairly intensive involvement over the past few years) — but that’s growing well into it’s own entity now, and there are still plane tickets for sale in September.

As much as I realize that friends and family can come visit, I count you guys in the category of things that would make me stay. I’m going to avoid using names, uncommonly — it’s really getting too confusing to remember which of you bastards are pseudonymous online and which aren’t. But I love you all; you’ve really shown me over and over that my cynical attitude towards mankind might be a little misplaced. Probably just ahead of it’s time, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. For now.

Except you, Wade. You’re a heartless bastard, through and through, and I leave both cats to you in my will. And my old wedding rings. And I use your name shamelessly.

Most of you know, even if you don’t admit it, that friends don’t come along very often. Acquiantances, sure — some of us have a billion of those. But real, true friends — not so much. And I’ve got my share plus two or three other shares worth. You should all know that I recognize that, and when I’m rich and famous and ruling over the midwest with Chicago as my fortified stronghold, you can all be part of my entourage.

If you need to prepare for the cold weather up there, that snow and ice and bitter chill that you’re all trying to warn me about (forgetting that cold is where I’m my best) — just come hang out at this apartment for a night. You’ll be all set.

He looks out of his window, the sill extending to the roof thanks to the snow that fell during the pre-dawn hours. As far as he looks, the street and the yards and the houses and the cars that line the hallways down the hill are blanketed in a pure, clean white. He’s thinking of a world overpopulated by angels, or maybe children in spring church clothes.

The sky from edge to end is still thick with cotton, but holes here and there reveal the rising sun. It’s going to be a beautiful morning, he thinks; an inch or two of powder wouldn’t stop any other city, but here in the south, life will grind to a halt for a day or so.

He wants to call her, to tell her about the snow, but his chldlike enthusiasm wouldn’t go over so well at 5:15 in the morning. Especially about snow, something she sees everytime she walks out the door.

But it’s not really the snow that he wants to talk about. It’s not really talk that he’s interested in, as much as hearing her voice on the other end of the line. Her beautiful voice, something in it that he can’t quite pin down, but it’s a voice that he imagines people fall in love with, that he could easily fall in love with. And that’s before he even thinks about the laughter, and her eyes, and her smile, and everything else about her.

The computer speakers sing about plane rides and time slipping through. So much work to get done, and so much play, too, but the moment seems right to just sit and stare at the slowly brightening winter painting just past the glass. Headlights in the distance are a sign that someone blocks away is putting tracks in the smooth white cover, and he remembers how quickly the real beauty in life can pass. He’s learned to focus, to pay attention to the rare, to slow down time in the moments worth living, but even that requires recognition.

At some point closer to normal waking hours, he will call her, just to hear her voice, and maybe a laugh before she goes.

Wishing for snow in the deep south is somewhat akin to jumping alleyways from short buildings. If you make it, happy day. But if you don’t, you’re just gonna end up miserable and wishing you had never thought about it in the first place.

And so here it is, about 38 degrees and raining a lot. That’s a lot of fun.

Waiting for vacations is never fun, but toss in weather like this, and the 3 1/2 days between me and the twelve hour drive out of here is just going to drag like no one’s business.

But on the other hand… Chicago calls, and who am I to refuse? That city is big, and I have no doubt would kick my ass if I got insolent and said “no,” so… Hell, that’s what new cars are for, anyway, right?

LiveScience.com – Caffeine Free: Blue Light Makes People Alert at Night: ”

There’s much more than meets the eye to how we perceive light, researchers have learned in recent years. The latest revelation: blue light helps fend off drowsiness in the middle of the night.”

She reads a poem to me, 600 miles away. I open my eyes, briefly, not wanting to fall asleep, not yet, not until she’s spoken her last word to me, and I notice: her photo is open on my computer screen. It’s the closest I can come to where I imagine I am.

I think it would be worth anything to have her voice here instead of bouncing off a satellite.

I miss that ache.

So much running through my head, and I find myself carefully sifting through the thoughts. Careful not to � to what?

I�m thinking too much.

Stop thinking and just do.

Thoughts of leaving town have been floating around in my head all day long. And I finally pinpointed it, thanks largely to the temporal agoraphobia. It�s not that I dislike this place, Birmingham. I thought for a long time that I did, that I had problems with the conservatism, the religious oppression that runs rampant under the surface. The lack of cultural opportunities. The small town mentality. The limited potential, the glass ceiling. But as I got older, I began to realize that a lot of that is bullshit. Living in Birmingham is a macrocosmic parallel to living in Southside: I�m equidistant from big cities / the people in suburbs that I care to be close to; there is a great sense of familiarity and comfort; everything I want or need, while not within reach, is at least within driving distance.

I�ve gotten comfortable, settled, maybe even complacent.

Things are easy around here. Too easy, maybe. And I know that maybe that�s what people strive for, spend their lives working towards: being able to relax a little and knowing that things will come to them more simply and with less effort and thought. But is that what I want? At 34, no less?

I think I feel directionless because I�ve accomplished all I can in this town. All that I want to, I should say. And I wonder if there�s anything left here for me but the same things that I have now, maybe a little bigger or brighter, but still the same. I don�t feel the need to push myself, because there�s nothing to push for.

I�ve ended so many sentences with prepositions that I should probably turn in my writer�s card about now.

The thought of leaving scares me. I�ve been here so long that I�d be literally throwing myself into darkness on so many levels. And of course, there�s a fear of failure there, of having to return. But it�s more a fear of the unknown. Where do I even begin?

I don�t know. But I think it�s worth pondering, seriously and with all of my analytical skills. I�m afraid of what might lie ahead, but I think I�m more afraid of staying here and turning into what I�ve always wanted to avoid: a settler.

—

�This is not about love
‘Cause I am not in love
In fact I can’t stop falling out
I miss that stupid ache�

Fiona Apple, god bless her scrawny little self. I really like that last line.

—

Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are scattered on the table in front of me, and no matter how many sections I manage to assemble, I can�t seem to figure out what the greater picture is supposed to be. I can see some trees, but I can�t make out the forest. Ha.

Confluence seems to be a word that keeps popping back up lately. Parallels. Coincidence? Possibly. Probably. But what if it�s not? What if it�s something more, a sign?

Schizophrenics see signs where there aren�t any. And whatever happened to those crazy old guys with sandwich boards proclaiming the end of the world and its nighness (yes, I know)? How many crazy people know they�re crazy?

How many sane people question things this much?

I feel like I�m stuck in the middle of the truth and absolute delusion. Somewhere between a satisfied sigh and an anguished groan. Between a breath and a scream, even. Though that�s a cheese metal lyric, so I guess I should be careful there.

I recognize part of this feeling though. It comes with being a part of something grander but future unknown. It�s the anguish that I tell myself to push away, to ignore, in order to avoid missing out on the memories that mean something down the line.

—

Jesus. It doesn�t matter how serious the thought in my head is if the Buckwheat Boyz start screaming �Peanut Butter Jelly Time� from my speakers.

Bastards.

—

In all honesty, the future is dark and scary and filled with unknown. And I like it that way. It�s exciting and filled with potential for the first time in a while � and the good that could be waiting out there is enough to spur me forward. I’m not sure where forward is yet, but I’m looking.

—

Oh, and before I forget, a word to the men out there: yeah, the tantalizing pictures of legs and backs and breasts and all the other appropriately mysterious body parts are nice. Wonderful even. But the true beauty, that stuff that kicks you in the gut with a leg that makes Beckham nervous, knocks the air out of you and leaves you begging for one more? That�s in the eyes. And in the smile, the one that you can connect with a laugh that makes you forget anything and everything.

At the end of the day, that�s what we should all be so lucky to see.

We live in four dimensions, right? Up/down; left/right; forward/backward; and then the one that doesn’t fit in so well, time. And they’re all related, says Einstein — space/time continuum and all that. Wormholes and gravity affecting the passage of time.

I think.

Actually, I really hope so, because otherwise the following train of thought transforms from nifty abstract conceptualization into just another sign that I should never have experimented with drugs.

I’m watching as everyone around me is moving somewhere. Mostly forward; some parallel; a few backward, maybe, and quite possibly one might be moving up or down. Plans are made and set in motion. Things are accomplished. Life is lived and goals are achieved, or at least approached.

And today, just like many days over the past year or so, I feel very detached from that. It’s not even a case of running to stand still; it’s more like being a bug trapped in amber.

Talking with Trix the other day about fears, and I remembered one that I don’t usually think about — I guess it’s not really a fear, but a situation guaranteed to induce anxiety and panic. I can’t stand being bound — not handcuffed, but losing mobility in my arms or legs. I’m not really claustrophobic in the classic sense, afraid of small areas or tunnels or caves, but on a very extreme level I am. The idea of being encased in concrete, waking up in a morgue drawer, or even being tied to a chair with enough rope that I can’t move my arms or legs — these are thoughts that can make me break out in a cold sweat if I give them enough time. And one more for that list: being frozen in amber.

But this day isn’t about not being to move. I had an “Aha!” moment earlier in the day, when the lack of change in my life first hit me, and called this temporal claustophobia. But that’s not really right, is it? If I’m being a stickler, that would really be more a sense of having too much to do and too little time — being bound by the hands of the clock, as it were. More accurately, this is temporal agoraphobia. I’m looking around me and there’s nothing but open time, for as far as the eye can see, and I’m frozen, unable to move, panicked and shut down.

2006 has been a year filled with false starts for me so far, a lot of promising beginnings and quick, sudden endings. That doesn’t really bother me — if nothing else, the false starts help me keep the bipolar shit at bay, tucked neatly in the back of my head. But what does bother me is that I’m starting to second-guess everything now, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve always said that I’m a cynical optimist: I hope for the best but expect the worst. Self-fulfilling prophecy, without the prophecy part; say you’re something long enough, and you become that. Stare long enough into the abyss, and the abyss stares back into you?

Okay, that’s just ridiculous (he says, totally aware of all the other shit that he thinks but doesn’t call himself on…). But maybe fair enough, in a sense.

I know that this feeling falls back to a lot of the thoughts that I was having last summer, when I had a really bad attack of hopelessness (not in a suicidal depressive sense, but a “life is meaningless” philosophical sense). I wonder what the whole point of all this is. And, again, to repeat and reinforce myself, I’m okay with that. I’m even okay with the idea that there is no point to all of this, that it’s what you see is what you get and we might as well enjoy all we can since it ends definitively at some point.

What’s bothering me, standing in this open field of ticking clocks, is that I’m not really doing anything to move in any direction. Not forward, left, up, or even backwards. I’m just sitting still — partly because as much as I crave change, leaving the familiarity I’ve constructed scares the shit out of me, and partly because I just don’t know which way I should be going. Nothing’s really calling me in any direction right now, and wandering got old a long time ago.

It’s not that I don’t want to grow up; I just wish I could figure out what I want to be before I start.

There are times in life when I read Desiderata for comfort, to remind me of all things that I’m trying to be. It’s a great poem, if I haven’t mentioned it before… hovering halfway between new age and honest spirituality, and maybe leaning more toward one than I’m willing to admit. But regardless, it’s helpful. It’s serves to help me stay focused, to avoid the bullshit that my own mind creates.

But sometimes, I’m reminded of the truth beneath the surfaces that we choose to see. That the universe unfolds as it will.

Events converge and twist and wind their ways into a bigger stream. And we can choose to view those events as signs pointing us to something ahead, or misinterpret them, or ignore them altogether.

Being a skeptic is not easy, questioning everything all the time. It’s awfully hard to arrive at any answers this way, for those who think it might be a good path to follow…

At any rate:

These aren’t signs that are big and neon and flashing with catchy slogans. I mean, they good be, I suppose. But that would both take the fun out of it, as well as making the ignoring and misinterpreting pretty moronic.

On the one hand, my mind is trapped between the stuff of epic stories, universes created specifically to come together at the climax in a “howthefuckdidinotseethiscoming?” head-slap, and reality, cold hard facts, Chaostown, population: the human race. On the other, this is where I choose to live, holding hope in one hand carefully while I walk through the madness and horror that writhes between me and the end.

Creations. All of it. Nothing but what we put there, take away, and choose to acknowledge.

Challenges and obstacles. Tests. If you want something so badly, something that you’ve dreamed of since you were a child, something that fills your most vivid memories, how much will you sacrifice to obtain it? What will you gamble? How much risk will you take? How badly do you want it?

Badly enough to hope?

There is no obstacle strong enough to hold us back from what we want, if we want it badly enough to never give up.

Perhaps part of the universe unfolding as it should is eyes opening when they are supposed to?

I need a vacation. Chicago: snow, big city, blues, and, best of all, intrigue and hope for a better future.

And this summer, beach. I need to hear some waves again.