[June 28, 2021/4:32Pm.]
An afternoon boredom leads to afternoon anxiety, which forces me to pull out the Pen and scribble in this notebook. [my Pen is a proper noun.]
I’m writing this autobiography to literally pass the time, doing it out of boredom, and I seriously doubt time would pass otherwise. But I hope that the result will supply me with a salve for my hurt nerves.
I am nervous and neurotic. Nicotine neurosis. I’m at a loss for words. What should I say?
Muddled memory, manic mind. I’m trying to remember, recall, and write something that is mildly interesting. Ruminating and trying to recreate a compelling and climactic memory to write down on the pulp page.
What would make for good reading? I can’t remember anything. My memory’s a blank space, a hole in my head. I close my eyes and try to think, remember, recall. What do I see? Scribble and scribble and find out.
I never know what’s on my mind until I see it written down on the page. Huh?
My hands are shaking. I feel edgy, and not in a good way. Raw and exposed. I’m a hurt nerve right now.
Untangling the thought thread. Watch the nacreous notions float from the hole in the back of my head.
I need a cigarette. Bought a fresh pack of Decade discount cigarettes. All I want to do is sit on my porch, listening to the radio and chain smoking cheap cigarettes [$2.91/pack]. Get cranked and crunked on caffeine, write the evening off.
I don’t know anything about anyone but myself, and that’s fucking boring. Dismally dull.
[5:11Pm.]
I write. WRITE. WRITE! Thoughts spilled across the floor. I really need to clean it up in here, straighten up and get organized. It’s such a fucking mess.
[5:16Pm. ScHoolboy Q on the stereo’s shitty speakers.]
Bounce my brain to the beat. Smoking something for my nerves, my sixth cigarette. Hands are still shaking, too much caffeine? Probably.
In about ten minutes I’m going to call Mom. I don’t know why I call my Mom every night, probably because of some Oedipal bullshit. Mommy issues. K— [x-wife] always complained that I’m such a mama's boy. Am I? Maybe. I could probably spend the next few hours psychoanalyzing my Oedipus Complex, but why would I want to? I’d probably learn a few things about myself that I’d rather not know, deep down secrets I’m too afraid to face. Better leave this alone, let sleeping dogs lie.
Hands trembling, jitter-jangled and shook.
Collard Greens: feat. Kendrick Lamar. I turn the stereo up. Take two Ritalin, 20mg. Brain drugs. Getting speedy.
Alright, let me blow this bitch. Pop my top, tip my mitt, spill the contents of my brain. SCRIBBLE. SCRIBBLE. SCRIBBLE.
What else should I write?
[5:36Pm. r-Cali: A$AP Rocky.]
Mixed episode/hypomanic. Brain burns, drowning in flames.
I got to take as much from this ebullient mood as I can.
The lonely stoner frees his mind at night. He’s all alone.
I’m a fragmented man. It all falls apart. A million little pieces lying on the ground.
SMOKE!!! Neurotic nicotine.
Whoa, whoa! Slow down, breathe.
Trust me, it’s going to be okay.
Leprous light, the carcinogenic sunshine. It’s hot out here, sweat on my lip. All I want to do is smoke, chain smoke.
I feel like writing poetry. Scribbling down my manic memoir. Jot it down, write it out, write it down on the pulp pages of this spiral bound diary.
I feel like there’s so much to say.
I feel like I’m saying NOTHING.
I feel like I’m saying EVERYTHING.
Too much sound and fury, empty words. Senseless sentences. Artless. Manic gibberish, rambling and nonsensical.
Eh, FUCK THAT!!!
Fragments fall, raining down. Raindrops keep falling on my head. It’s broken, spilled apart. Disjointed. UGH!
[5:50Pm. Money Trees: feat. Jay Rock.]
I smoke one more Decade. Cheap cigarettes and chlorine skies. Not a cloud up above. The Sun smiles. Bird tweets in the trees, a Red Robin.
Mixed-episode. Up & Down & Up again, moods moving like waves. Morning melancholy, six o’clock soliloquies. Awake until 2:13Am and asleep until 1Pm. I’m not fully awake until 5Pm, and then I’m manic and ready to write until dawn.
Don’t go to sleep, stay awake. I’ll brew a cup of coffee for your head.
SMOKE. SMOKE. SMOKE. A chain of cheap cigarettes.
Here I am, sitting stone on the front porch.
I need someone to talk to.
Feeling all alone, lonely and this Diary is the only person I know who will listen to me.
I trust the Diary. She won’t talk behind my back.
She knows I need to get this shit out of my head.
She understands.
She won’t judge me.
She just listens when I need to speak.
SMOKE! SMOKE. SMOKE!!! One more cigarette before I go back inside.
Muddobbers buzz me, making me nervous. Do they sting? They look menacing and mean.
What else should I write? I don’t have to write. But I still think I need to. Need to write and save myself from suicidal boredom, overwhelming ennui. Scribble a salve for this anxiety.
Breathe. Inhale. Exhale through your nose. Breathe. Deep breath. Relax.
WRITE! Flow. Peel open your head and let poems fly out.
I keep smoking. DAMN!!!
[JPEGMAFIA: 1539 N. Calvert.]
Minutes measured in cigarette butts…8 butts have been burned off the clock.
My lungs are angry with me, coughing. Still smoking. Can’t QUIT! Won’t QUIT!
Fuck the place up.
This is definitely a mixed-episode. Evening hypomania. What should I do about this?
[6:17Pm.]
Methylphenidate. Took two. I hope these pills pump up my bewildered brain, ZANG!
What kind of story am I trying to tell? What sort of life is this? Who are you?
Evening existential crisis. Who am I, and what’s my place in the world? What am I supposed to be, what should I do? Do I keep writing? Will I ever figure out what I’m after? Dig? Who will I be at the end of this narrative? Who am I as I write this sentence?
I do not know. To thine ownself be true.
I want to know. Thou canst be false to any man.
[6:31Pm. In This House: feat. Gucci Mane.]
I swear this is my last cigarette. My muddled mind is putting pressure on my tongue. Stuttered speech.
My brain is a broken toy. It’s been played with too much, it’s worn out and old. Time to put these childish things away. Back in the box, put away and forgotten. Huh?
Follow the bouncing blue ball.
I work for a non-profit. Project 360 Youth Services. I’m the janitor, a volunteer youth mentor and I serve on Project 360’s Board of Directors. Been doing this for almost six years. I’m burnt out, bummed. I no longer take joy in any of this. But at least I’m involved in something, otherwise I'd be totally isolated and become a hermetic hermit. It gets me out of the house, and I get paid $240/month.
Where was I going with this? What am I saying?
We’re a grant based organization. We received a NAP Grant today. This grant will hire three full time employees and one part time position. The thought crossed my mind: Should I apply for the part time position? I could use the $$$. But do I want to work twenty hour weeks? This is something to think about. But I think: NOPE!!! Not really. I don’t think I’m capable of doing that type of job for twenty hours a week. Working with at-risk and homeless youth. Kids who cut. Suicidal sixteen year old kids. Teens with drug problems. Fucked up kids. I’ve been doing that for too long, and now I think it is time to begin withdrawing, moving on. I don’t have the patience, I’ve run out of empathy. Even for a paycheck, I just don’t think I want to do it, don’t think I can do the job. There’s not enough pay, I’d lose my mind. I think I’m retiring.
But I’ll keep on being the lowly janitor. I’ll keep on serving as the Secretary of the Board of Directors. I’ll keep signing checks. But I just don’t think I can handle working with the kids anymore. I just can’t relate. I don’t know when I lost it, but the joy is gone from the job. I don’t need the $$$ that bad. I can make do without it. A paycheck won’t make up for my lost sanity. NAH! I think I’ll pass this time. Not that they, Project 360, would’ve hired me. I probably would’ve been passed over anyways. BLAH! BLAH. BLAH!
What will I do now that I’m retired? Your guess is as good as mine.
[7:13Pm. Yankee and the Brave (ep.4): Run the Jewels.]
I’m stoned. Manic. I’m the poor man’s version of Henry Miller. [grandly delusional.]
Henry Miller was, I think, 39 going on 40 when he published and wrote Tropic of Cancer. He got a late start.
Didn’t Bukowski wait until he was 35?
Poetry came late in life.
I’m just finding my voice.
But I take comfort in knowing not everyone begins in their twenties. Not all of us are young geniuses. I’m a late bloomer.
I’m just getting to know myself.
I’m trying to become a man. Going to grow up.
Bloom.
[7:26Pm. Can’t Tell Me Nothin’.]
What do I do? Act more stupidly.
Time for an anxiety attack. Panic. Time to have a breakdown, fall to pieces. My nerves hurt, ache. $$$ is screaming in my ear. Money talks, only poor people listen. That's all I can hear.
Suck it up, bro. Man up! Don’t be such a pussy. Quit freaking out. Get your shit straight. Pull yourself together and get over it!
I’ve had too much caffeine. Jitter-jangled and shook. Cranked and crunked. Do something with this nervous, anxious energy. Put yourself to use. Do something. Should I smoke a cigarette? Hmmm?
Melancholia in the mornings. Down and out at 8:08Am. Bummed before I even get out of bed. Deeply depressed before I’ve even brush my teeth. Lethargic, slow. I can hardly get out of bed. Today I called in to work, didn’t feel well. Slept until 1Pm. Woke. Ablutions. Physical therapy at 2:45Pm. And here I am at 7:36Pm, mildly manic and anxious. Taste my thoughts. If it’s too nasty, spit it back at me.
Hypomanic hypergraphia. My Pen is screaming. He says: NOTHING.
By 8 o’clock in the evening I’m wound up, ready to write all night. Explore my neurosis. Psychoanalysis myself on the pulp page. The Pen’s my shrink. He tells me what my thoughts mean, explains the symbolism. He explains the plot, interprets the metaphors. What does any of this mean? Scribble and see.
[7:41Pm. Ride Wit Me: T.I.]
I think I need a cigarette. Can’t think. Post Malone.
[7:45Pm. rockstar: feat. 21 Savage.]
Feeling like a Popstar. Smoking cigarettes, seems like that’s all I do. Cancer. The odds are good. Death and dying. SMOKE!!!
[7:47Pm. Willie Burke Sherwood.]
Watch as I burst into flames. [‘Till I Collapse.]
My mind is a blown out, flat, tire.
My thoughts are sporadic. Spastic.
Can’t shut my mouth.
I’m going to write until my legs fall out from under me.
But first I’m going to take a short break. I gotta breathe.
My head’s too full, too loud. Static in the attic.
Sometimes I fear I forget to think. And it breaks my heart. I sigh. Hmmm?
Sing-a-long. Hum a tune. We’re off pitch and out of tune. I sing, scream.
Life’s just like, 1 2 3. Yeah. Yeah.
[8:58Pm.]
I’m too high right now. Should I be this honest, should I expurgate? Self-censor. Shut my mouth. I don’t have to say it ALL.
So. I’m listening to a Merge Records CD sampler: MRG 20 Yrs: 2009 promotional sampler. I ripped the CD out of some magazine that didn’t sell, I ripped this out of a magazine when I was a Borders Books employee, still living in 65807. I worked in the café: a Seattle’s Best Café. I hated that job, and during down time we had to strip magazine covers to send back the unsold issues. I think I got this CD out of a Paste magazine. Circa: 2009-2011. I was high on coffee all the time! I was manically making it through the day, and up all night taking Klonopin and chain smoking cigarettes, and trying to make poetry out of the night.
I tried and failed to make the night into a poem. I think? I know during that manic blur of a couple rocky years I wrote a collection of poetry.
It was the first version of Carcinogenic Sunshine [v.1.0]. Written during a manic month in June, a year before my divorce and overdose. The Klonopin blues, the black coffee binge. Marijuana midnights. I stayed awake for five days, all day and all night. I was writing poetry. I filled a couple of notebooks with my paranoid and poetic thoughts. I do not know what the fate of that first version of Carcinogenic Sunshine was. My [x] wife kept it, I don’t know why. She always hated my poetry, my prose. She thought it was just derivative Jack Duloz. A cheap version of Kerouac. I’ll admit that most of it was [it can be argued that this is too] cheap imitation. I still would’ve liked to have kept those poems, that collection, what happened to that spiral bound notebook. It’s probably trash by now. K— threw it away, why wouldn’t she?
In February of 2020, 3 months after I turned forty, the second edition of Carcinogenic Sunshine was published. Between Shadows Press was putting it out into the world. I found out from Tohm on a cold, 0 degrees outside, very fucking cold, day when I had run out of propane. I was nearly asleep and shivering when I got Tohm’s message. I warmed up. I was excited. I was 40 years old, and I was finally comfortable enough in my skin to put out my poems. I was finally going to publish.
In October of 2020, seven months into a self imposed quarantine, I was convinced I would die before my fortieth birthday. I was convinced I wouldn’t see Halloween. Expire at 39, six years older than Christ and not ready to die. I was driving the ladies at work batshit bonkers with my sullenness, my death paranoia. November 17 rolled around and I turned forty and I had lived, and so I stayed up all night and wrote prose poems in a graph paper notebook. I was grandly delusional and full of poetry. I was ready to begin sending my words into the world. I wanted to see what would happen if I shared myself, wholly and fully, vulnerable and exposed.
I was a forty year old, hackneyed Poet, and I was finally going to have a chapbook published by a cool press. It only took twenty years to work up the nerve. It took a divorce to have the confidence to publish. It took heartbreak to become a Poet. Poetry springs out of pain. Is that a naïve thought? A cliched and childish notion of the tortured genius. It don’t mean nothing at all. I’m still idealistic, I believe in the Divine Madness of the Poet.
I write. I’m hypomanic and hypergraphic. My Pen won’t shut-up. Can’t STOP! Won’t STOP! I scribble and scribble and write and write.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became a Sentence, and the Sentence became a Paragraph and the Paragraph turns into a Page and the Page turns into a Chapter, Chapter turns into a Novel. Does the Novel get read? Does anyone see this Book? Are you reading right now?
I’ll never know. I won’t remember.
I doubt you'll see this sentence. Publish, or perish?
DOUBT. DOUBT. DOUBT!!!
Do I believe in me? I don’t believe in anything. What do I believe? Are these Words to your liking? Do you like what you read?
I WORRY. wringing my hands. I pace the floor.
I’ve got the heebie-jeebies. What have I revealed to you tonight?
Will you read this, validate my fragile ego?
I begin again.
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