me and kerwin went to albany bulb on saturday morning and filmed the new DUDE TALK

i don’t know if y’all’s ready for this’n!!

Oh man . . . I recently “starred” in a video for work . . . and uh . . . here’s kinda what it looks like!

I was supposed to be some 18-year-old kid named John—some young bunk trying to make a go of it at college! And John went off to college, and he done got himself all caught up in a catastrophic tailspin of anxiety and depression and loneliness! And so he went to his therapist, who was this very nice lady.

I sat in that chair and riffed on being sad and alone for maybe five hours. Mostly it wasn’t very difficult since, hell, god knows I’ve been sad and alone for pretty much my entire stay on this godforsaken ball of garbage called earth~

This right here is from a take of me saying some dumb trash that was mercifully cut from the final thing . . . and man, I gotta tell you, I could barely watch it. It makes me nauseous to see my face move and to hear words come out of my own mouth. It is so bad and awful.

I always remember Sir Michael Caine’s reaction to watching himself on screen in ‘Zulu’ (I just found the quote again!): “I’d always thought I was this handsome bloke with this great voice, and then this terrible geek came up on the screen and I realized my whole life was over. I’ve never been so depressed.”

Baby, listen: I don’t for one second think I am a handsome bloke with a great voice. I think I am a warbling clay-faced freak show on wheels. But the end result is the same: when confronted with a moving image of myself, and with the sounds my image makes, it all but confirms I am the terrible geek that I fear I am.

Anyway, the bottomless pit of my own self-hatred aside: This thing is apparently going to be on the therapist’s website soon. The videos are divided into short exercises. Maybe there will be fifteen videos or more—one for each exercise. I’m never going to be able to watch those things, man. It would make me puke my guts out.

It was a cool thing to do, though. I’m glad I did it! I’d never done anything like that before. I’m adding this little baby to my nonexistent film resume~

do people ‘look forward’ to things

do you??

i don’t think i’ve ever looked forward to anything in my whole life

i tried just now and couldn’t

just sittin here watching everyone get older

watchin everyone disappear!!

should i look forward to disappearing??

How’s this for having a job: Yesterday I paid off my gold tooth. When I had it put into my sad old head back in November, my insurance company absolutely refused to help me out, so I had to use a credit card that is specifically for medical expenses. I won’t get into how sad it made me to use a credit card to pay for a tooth that I need to survive, though hey, it sure did make me real heckin sad.

The thing with this credit card is that it mercifully deferred interest if I paid off my balance within six months. At the end of this month they would have started charging me interest on the damn thing. Interest! On a medical expense!

I woke up this morning and said to myself, I said: “Heck no, man. I ain’t payin interest on this thing.” And when I said “this thing” I tapped my gold tooth with my index finger, which makes a nice sound. So right then and there I paid off the whole thing. I closed the account. This gold tooth is all mine now.

You shoulda heard the reptile on the other end of the phone when I cancelled my card. They hate it when you do that. They’re prepared to do anything to keep their black lizard claws around your warm-blooded mammal neck. I said to the customer service rep: “Get bent, jerk!! Good riddance!!!!”

He hissed!

Well, baby, here I am: a man who has a gold tooth, and no reptilian creditors coming after him to take it back. I’m not free, but I’m free enough. I’m freer than I was before.

Doesn’t that count for something???

You ever notice how people are always trying to talk you out of sadness? I have known many well intentioned people who have attempted to do this to me. They’ll say, “Aw, it’s not so bad,” or “It could be worse, you know. . . .” or “Yes, but, just look at all you’ve got!!!”

It is difficult to hear your friend talk about their sadness because you don’t want your friend to feel sad. It is maybe also a natural inclination for people to want to absolve their friend’s sadness with optimism.

You get sad enough and it saturates every level of your brain until the whole thing is compromised, and then you’re left with a rotted-out pitch-black nightmarebrain where no good thing grows! At that point you can’t help but let all internal and external stimuli pass through that dark barrier you have created for yourself in the secret places in your mind. Everything is touched by it!!

And while I think it’s intoxicating to get way the hell down there, and stay the hell down there, and surround yourself with people who won’t disagree with you, and so on, it is truly not my inclination to talk someone out of their own sadness. Which is not to say I urge someone to continue their descent into total annihilation. But, hell, let them be sad if they feel sad. There ain’t nothin nobody can say to roll back someone else’s own dark tide. Y’all know that, right?

It’s just something I’ve noticed is all. I don’t have a whole lot going for me, but I have been told that I am The Guy To Go To if you feel bad and and just wanna be around someone who won’t try to sell you a vacuum cleaner, if you know what I mean. Yeah.

you know what phrase terrifies me a lot

no offense, y’all:

but it’s “midwest(ern) transplant”

UPDATE: “work in tech” is real bad too~

(i think combining the two would make me cry)