My life is very lonely. I know this sounds like a dramatic statement, but it is just the way things have panned out. Believe me, I am not sad or self-pitying about it. In fact, I believe most people in the world are lonely. It's just a matter of how we deal with our loneliness. In my long life I have discovered many tricks and tools to help fight the loneliness. In this blog I shall share a few.
I know it's cliché, but one of the best things a lonely person can do is get a pet. Many fat sexless ladies choose cats. Gay men seem to prefer small yappish dogs, and the elderly parrots. I have chosen a myna bird. I'm not sure why exactly. I guess it's because they seem a bit dark and mysterious as well as one can teach them to speak. Mine was great until I attempted to teach it, "Welcome home Matthew." However due to some sort of miscommunication it says, "Welcome home fat Jew." This just adds to my feeling of not belonging in the world.
It is also helpful to frequent the same restaurant and grocery stores so you get to know the employees, thus making it easier to get into conversations with them. Believe you me no one wants to hear you pontificate about your political views more than wait staff and checkout girls. I have seen many a checkout girl roll their eyes with sweet pleasure when I say, "And another thing about these damn Republicans." Oh, and never underestimate the titillating joy the man behind you in line receives from your stories of how your myna bird learned the word, "nigga", from all the rap music you listen to.
Another thing I like to do is compose and mail myself letters. Nothing brightens ones day more than receiving a letter in the mail even if it is from you! Furthermore, it is a great conversation starter at the local restaurant you frequent. One can open the letters as the waiter approaches the table, which allows you to quickly launch into a conversation about your "nephew in Iraq". Who cares if you are lying! At least someone is listening to you for a change.
I often joke to myself, (I have to there never is anyone around.) That the worst thing about being alone is you can't put your dick into it. (Man I laugh, alone…by myself…with no one around) And though I haven't found a solution to this problem I do often post ads on Craigslist searching for company. However, no one ever responds thus making me feel lonelier. That is until I begin composing myself another letter as my myna bird calls me fat Jew.
My Blogs Hit The Big Time/Getting To Know me Through My Obituary
Folks,
All this week I am the featured Blog Writer for Funnyordie.com (Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's site. I posted a new blog, Getting To Know Me Through My Obituary.
To read it please go to: www.funnyordie.com/mattdwyer
I am on the front page on the right side. I will post something there once a day for a week.
What I just saw on television was bewildering to such a degree that I sat up and had to write this. See, I'm fighting a cold off or something and I was ready to spend a night on the couch watching movies, snacking and guzzling down liquids. When I turned on the TV I saw something on my screen that literally took a second for my eyes to adjust to. It was a woman perhaps in her fifties, scantily clad, horribly out of shape and barely wearing anything dancing around to seventies rock music with the grace of a drunk rhino. To top things off she'd go and sing back up for a line or two before returning to dancing like a stripper who had just been injured in a car accident. It was truly mystifying and hard for my brain to process. My first thoughts were, "what the shit?" "Is this for real?" "Am I suddenly in a Tom Waits song?" Then I continued watching this woman dance around with smile that had a painful subtext. The show ended and the credits showed her name, Francine Dancer. Of course I went to see if she had a myspace page. She does and here is the link. Not only enjoy her well-choreographed videos, but also her song on her profile that she wrote entitled, Magic Spirit. www.myspace.com/backalleysallypunkbunny (Sorry I can't make the link thingy work so cut and paste) Here is one video for you to enjoy
The Hangover Chronicles: Random Thoughts From a Booze Tattered Brain
My hangover continues and so does the whirling helicopter in my neighborhood. I swear the helicopter seems like a metaphor in a French movie. I feel as if I should be in black and white and occasionally peer through my blinds, look to the flying machine and mutter things like, "I should have loved my mother more."
These are random weird things that popped in my head today while I fought my hangover like a camper fights a bear.
Often I often feel like I am in a movie. Sadly I am always an extra.
If art does imitate life then my life is paint by numbers.
I am ahead of my time but only until day light savings time then I am like everyone else for the next six months.
If I am made in God's image does that mean God fucks with a T-shirt on?
My girlfriend got excited when I told her I wanted to put a baby in her. She got upset when I told her feet first.
I have a God complex, but it's canceled out by the fact I am an atheist.
I have been a best man at several weddings and I can honestly say from experience that during the toast that one should not talk about the bride's tits.
I often have the feeling something bad is about to happen then I wake up and realize I am right..
Recently while arguing with my mother she said, "don't forget I brought you into this life." To which I replied, "And for that I will never forgive you."
To break from my random thoughts there was also a lyric in my head from one of my favorite bands, The Silver Jews that says, "I am the trick my mother played on the world." They are brilliant check thier shit out.
The Helicopter, My Hangover, Baby Boomers, Punks, and the Lust of an Anti-Semite
This is probably the hangover talking and the fact that I have had a helicopter hovering over my apartment for three hours, which is slowly eating away at my sanity. However, I just saw that ad with Denis Hopper were he talks about how the baby boomers are so cool they are even going to retire in an unconventional way. Can the baby boomers die all ready? Seriously, fuck you. If I have to hear one more time how great the sixties were and how you changed the world I think I'll throw up on my dick. Baby boomers, you are old. Let it go. It's over. No one cares. If you all were so socially conscious and into changing the world you'd all wrap your mouths around a tailpipe and take your lives so the rest of can enjoy social security.
While I am yammering how come all the people who are "punk rock" only embrace the drunken, unwashed, obnoxious asshole aspect of punk rock. How come no one ever embraces the Ian MacKaye, well-read, straight edge, socially conscious, bathing aspect of punk? In this day and age that is more antiestablishment than drinking yourself into a self loathing frenzy and then smashing your head into a wall because you, "just don't care." If you really don't care then follow the advice I gave to the baby boomers and wrap your mouth around a tailpipe. And just for the record, Crass wrote a song in 1977 called, Punk is Dead, it was and still is. Being punk is about as threatening as being a Dead Head. So please move the fuck on.
As a weird side note: How come no one ever grabbed on to the grunge philosophy and never let go? Wouldn't that be great to see, a bunch of forty year olds bopping around with their long stringy hair, flannels and doc martens talking about how they will never sell out. Sadly most of the artists from that era did. I include myself in this because I'd do an ad for the Hitler Youth if it paid well enough.
And speaking of anti-Semitism. People often think I am Jewish. Apparently curly hair and glasses equals Jewish. A few weeks ago I was working at my friends bar when the doorman's sixty-year-old very drunk uncle decided to hit on me. He kept singing me songs, and calling me his Jewish Princess though I told him about fifteen times I was Irish and not gay. At the end of the night as his nephew dragged him out he drunkenly leered at me and said, I love you my little Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew! The word "Jew" came out of his mouth with such a mix of lust and hatred that it left me cold and frightened. It still haunts me to this day.
Whew. The helicopter is gone now. It was so loud and abrasive I swear it almost gave me motion sickness though I have just been sitting here on my couch. Thank you for allowing me to release my illogical ramblings. I hope you are well.
He wanted to die at home, so his family and nurses set up the den with a bed and the machines that kept him alive so he could listen to the sounds of his house as he stared at the ceiling awaiting the disintegration of his organs. The doctors didn't know what exactly it was that plagued him, what made his skin feel tighter than a bongo, his innards strain, or what made him feel as if a spiked ball of light was rolling down the center of his spinal cord causing his body to arch. Nevertheless, they knew he would be gone by weeks end if not sooner.
He was surprised how well he was taking all this. He always thought that when he heard he had some fatal disease he'd grab onto doorways and scream like a lunatic being lead from a bar without being able to finish his last needed drink, but when he was told that he was soon to parish he shrugged, made an awkward noise without opening his mouth, and became quieter than he had been in years. The quiet wasn't due to the long pondering of his life or fear of death, but simply because he had nothing to say. He desired to have wondrous thoughts of life, revelations of what he should have done or how well he actually lived, but there was none of that.
Through a crack in the curtains he could see that more cars were parked outside than usual. He looked to the ceiling and listened to the voices in the other rooms. They seemed busier than usual, and more hushed than on most days. Usually the main thing he heard was his wife's strained voice offering coffee and sandwiches to the visitors, but now all he heard was faint mumbling and the occasional, "Are you sure?" He deduced that his final hours were upon him, and soon his last breath would exhale from him, and what was next was next, and there wasn't very much he could do about it but wait.
The next couple hours were tedious, as if he were waiting at the DMV for a test. He just laid there eyes fixed on the ceiling listening to the ever increasing mumbling that came spilling forth from the surrounding rooms. He'd get an occasional short visit from a brother, friend, or his wife who'd pat his head with a moist cool cloth, kiss his cheek and say that she loved him. Then out of nowhere he felt something he had never felt before. His liver, kidneys, and surrounding intestines felt as if they were lighter and began to twitch. With this came a pain, not an excruciating pain, but more like an annoying irritation, as if the boy behind you in class was prodding your inners with a sharpened pencil. His breaths grew shorter, and seemed to catch on the roof of his consciousness. He fought to keep his breath from growing louder for he didn't want to alert his wife that he was on the brink of his passing, because for some reason he wanted to leave this world as he had felt in it - alone.
Though all this activity was going on within his body he was surprised how still his thoughts were. There were no memories of fishing with his grandfather, regrets of woman he should have slept with, or guilt about the one time he cheated on his wife with a chubby Mexican woman at a hotel bar who promised him she'd fuck him dizzy. He was disappointed that nothing of his life came washing over him. No regret, not pride, no fear, no joy. It was as if life had taken on the fluorescent hue of an office and meant just as little. He struggled in his brain to conjure up an image, a thought, smell, feeling, a face something anything that would give him some sort of emotion to carry into what was next, but nothing absolutely nothing came.
He arched his back, he felt a shift in his intestines and a mucous like liquid exit his sphincter, and with that he felt as though his liver's walls had become like wet rice paper and they began to slowly disintegrate as his kidneys began to expel a black ink like liquid. His eyes shot wide open as he took in a long, loud slow dragging breath of air as he felt the thumping of a loud hard light that hit the center of his being. He knew that this was his last moment, and with the last moment came a thought. It wasn't profound, it wasn't a beautiful memory, nor was it of a life well lived, but simply of a person he had almost forgotten. A woman. A woman he knew briefly for in his thirtieth year of life. They flirted, became friends, but never anything more. However, and though he did not know it back in his thirtieth year, he was in love with her. He loved her more than any person and he would have done anything and everything for her. However, he was never able to express this to her due to the ways of life, they got busy, moved on and met others.
Suddenly the light that thumped the center of his being began to expand through his veins, around his cells and into his marrow. His core began to shake and reverberate up towards his mouth were his last breath shot from him like a ping-pong ball flying from the twat of a Thai stripper, and as the light about him went dim he once again remembered the woman and realized, of all the things in life he would miss her the most, and then he passed.
Carl Standish was a man of great artistic integrity except he didn't do anything all that artistic – well at least to others. However, to him he made the most wonderfully flowing lists that could make ones eyes water with the raging beauty of how delicately and thoughtfully he placed the order of each word in his daily, "To Do" list. Grocery lists were his particular favorite to create. Sometimes he'd organize them by colors, or which foods were which German General's favorite to eat. One time his grocery list comprised only of things that were in the color palate of Caravaggio's paintings. However, no one would ever know this, but him.
His favorite list of all time was for his dry cleaning that was to be done on May 28 1952. It looked like this.
1) Wool grey suit jacket. 1) Grey suit pants. 1) White linen dress. (Red wine stains on left sleeve.) Block hat.
The "block hat" made him giggle at the absurdity of it all. For one, he didn't own a hat and so to him, in his brain, it was a social comment on the mental block McCarthy was having cleaning communism from America. No one he would ever get this, but if they did, they'd have giggled as well.
Carl's wife didn't understand his lists, but she understood their great importance to him. Whenever he showed them to her she'd stop whatever she was doing, eye them for a while, smile and then say, "You did it once again Carl."
Carl believed his wife to be the only person in the world who understood him, not just as an artist, but also the every corner of his being. Thus, to him, she was his soul mate. At her core his wife was loving towards him, but far from truly in love with him. Her true love died just prior to meeting Carl. He was stabbed in an alley fight outside a pub while vacationing in London. She only married Carl because he vaguely resembled her dead lover and he could provide her a decent life.
Though this relationship flowed nicely, was very cordial, and the sex was on par, it was bound to hit a bump in the road and that bump was Sunday, June 17th 1956. When Carl presented this list to his wife.
TO DO LIST 1) Breakfast at corner café. 2) Pick up Mother. 3) Stoll through park. 4) Take mother home. 5) Go to Cinema at 8:00 P.M.
Carl was especially proud of this list and though it was unseen by the average eye everything on this list was a vague reference to the subtext of an untitled T.S. Elliot poem. Like always his wife praised the brilliance of his list, and then something caught her eye. "Oh no." she said. "I can not make the cinema. I must meet my sister."
Shocked and confused Carl stared at her. She made several attempts to apologize to Carl and to ensure him his list was brilliant. That this was her error not his, but he did not to hear her. He went silent and grew despondent and over the following weeks his lists began to suffer.
One of his worst lists was in the late autumn of that year.
November who cares, 19something who gives a fuck 1) Wake up. 2) Shit. 3) Do some shit 4) shit shit 5) shit fuck shit shit fuck shit. 6) Shit fuck shit
For the months following this list Carl refused to shave, leave the house, and he barely ate which left his face gaunt, wrinkled and eventually he stopped making lists all together. The stress of this made his wife grow frail and frightened of what may be coming. She took up chain smoking and drinking shots of aperitifs from morning 'til dusk as she sat alone in a dark room in their now filthy home.
Then one blistering January morning Carl Standish awoke with the most brilliant list he could ever have imagined. It simply read:
