Lord I’m Discouraged.
Lord[1] I’m discouraged. I’m depressed. I’m down in the dumps, gloomy, under the weather and over it already. I’m all of these things. The problem is that things are going great for me.
Don’t get me wrong- life is pretty darn swell, which makes me being depressed all the more strange. I have a beautiful wife, a pretty sweet job, and great friends. But I still can’t shake this almost existential dread that I’m feeling. There’s nothing tangible to it. I have no bank loan breathing down my next, no friends who are suffering and I don’t have to watch a close relative suffer the indignity of slowly dying in a nursing home. Instead I’m feeling this rock in my stomach and lump in my throat over something else- over the way things are.
That’s pretty heady stuff, huh? The way things are.
I’m almost thirty-three and that means that I’m chronically in danger of what idealism I have being torn away from me like it’s a baby being ripped from my teen-mother hands by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society (look it up, I’m to lazy to provide a link for my obscure and overly obtuse reference). I see the world and this country that I live in and share with other people and I feel like nothing good can come from me being locked on this mortal plane with such disgusting people. I see the most horrible and vile racism, greed and ignorance being passed off as the norm and it just makes me sick. I see people and institutions that I placed so much faith in giving up and selling out their principles and ideals for the sake of maintaining a status quo that seeks to destroy everyone but the ruling class. It used to make me sick, but instead now it just makes me sad.
Not sad enough to do anything about it, mind you. Not yet- and that’s when I get even more depressed.
I realize for a moment that there is a chance that I could come across as a raving lunatic, writing his manifesto before committing some woefully sad and anticlimactic act of revenge against the outside world that is such poison, but I doubt that I would ever do that. I’m too much of a pacifist to actually hurt someone. So if this long rambling starts to feel like the words of a borderline psychopath readying himself to climb a clock tower and starting to pick off pregnant women, fear not. I find that I wield a keyboard and Microsoft Word far better than I could a high-powered sniper rifle, and my home office is far more comfortable than a clock tower.
But just because I’m not filled with homicidal rage doesn’t mean that I can’t write a long-winded screed about how these unknown forces are troubling me, so here goes.
Liz the G.O.A.T.*
Dear readers of The Bugg Blog, what you are about to witness in the coming weeks is a torrent of sophomoric humor, witty insights, daily bullshit, odes to obscure music and even a few paragraphs about my wife every now and then all because of the pretty girl in the picture (the one on the right). Her name is Liz, and she’s started something very big. What has she started? I hear you asking through the tubes that make up the internet, and the answer can be found in this entry, just after the mucky muck about the last few days of my life. So read on!
Weekend Affirmation!
Sometimes I think that I’m crazy. Sometimes I think that I’m down and out and that I’ll never really truly be happy. Sometimes I think that my life is a big weekday crawl of work, toil and file notes and weekends where I sleep in too much and spend too much time driving. Sometimes I drink so much that I ruin the next day and sometimes I spend the next day wishing that I had had a few more drinks the night before. But then I have weekends like this past one and everything is fine.
Without going into even more detail about my personal and family life, I talked to Jessie in the spring and made a vow that I would do more with my nephews and niece this summer to help them have a great time. I want to find that perfect balance between letting them experience the things that I never had the opportunity to try when I was their ages (13, 9, and 7) and making sure that they are entitled little brats because of these experiences. I don’t know how I’ll know if I’ve done the right thing, but Friday night I think that I was definitely one of the good guys.
My nephews are at a peculiar age. They aren’t little kids, but they aren’t teens. Sometimes they turn into these rather complicated older kids in front of me, and other times they are just silly little boys. It’s hard to tell what they like and what they don’t from week to week. But when I heard that the WWE was coming to town, I had to take them. I mean, I knew I’d have a good time there, so why wouldn’t they?
The Facebook thing
It seems like everyone on the planet has a Facebook page, from idiots like Sarah Palin to awesome blogs like this one, and there seems to be no end in sight. For a lot of very practical reasons, the site is pretty darn useful. Bands don’t have to hang fliers anymore; I don’t have to remember birthdays or email addresses, and sometimes a cute girl that I knew in high school posts pictures of her in a bathing suit without her children in the picture. These are all completely awesome things, but there is a downside to Facebook. Sometimes Facebook makes me miss not being in touch with everyone.
Thirty-Two
Saturday was the birthday celebration for a great friend of mine who works a rather important job and thus doesn’t want his name being spread around on the internet (I refer to him as Batman when I’m online, unless of course I’m talking about the comic character, which I refer to as my friend’s name) and I got nice and drunk with my good buddy Bort for the first time in a while.
For the last few months, Bort’s been dealing with his life, the good stuff and the bad, and I’ve been dealing with mine, but it was really nice to hang out, have a few drinks and a lot of laughs. He’s still my best good friend. I could gush more about him, but it would do no good and only make me seem obsessive and coupled with the picture I’ve chosen for the main image of this entry could make me seem like I was a raving homosexual madman for Bort, which is not entirely true. I’m more casually gay for the guy.
Either way, my buddy Bort is a fucking legend. I wish that we could hang out more, but it is what it is. When we do hang out, we laugh, we talk and we get along so I’m not complaining. He was a friend that stayed around, and for that I appreciate him.
(Also, Saturday is his birthday!)
Have a good night/day tomorrow. I’ll be around in the evening to share an awesome musical discovery.
Be good.
The internet and the real world.
Years ago we bounced through life. We rubbed up against each other and sometimes we stuck and sometimes our momentum carried us far away. Sometimes we would call each other, sometimes we’d write. Sometimes we’d never see each other again and whatever experiences we shared in life turned into a hazy, sunny and warm memory. Sometimes it was ‘really nice to see you again’ and other times it was a confession of ‘hat[ing] that fucking guy’. Either way, that was how I (and most other people) related to these people who disappeared from our lives and popped up again like factoids on a VH-1 show (back when they showed videos!)
I remember people who moved away: Chris Martin and Ryan Rushing from elementary school, Robin Livingston and Suzie Lack from middle school, just about everyone from high school and a few choice people from my twenties- all gone. All blips that came upon my social radar or happened upon my own self- centered existence and then left.
As a kid, and even today it was bittersweet. These people left and I was heartbroken. These were friends- people I’d chosen to share things with in my life, people who came to birthday parties, or Christmas parties, or even it’s Friday night and we don’t need a fucking theme parties. I learned at a very young age because of this that people leave me for reasons beyond their control and that it sucks. I learned that you have to deal with it. I learned that change is inevitable.
Sometimes they actually moved far away (Suzie Lack moved all the way to Egypt) and sometimes they moved 10 miles away- which in 8 year old terms is like a million miles away (like Chris Martin). But they always were just gone after that like they were dead or something.
And then the internet arrived.
At first, the internet was like a friend making machine in reverse: you never found the old ones, but you made tons of new ones. But these weren’t “real” friends; the terms of an online friendship were such that you never got to admit that you made friends online. Online friends were people who lived as far away as Chris or Suzie, but you never met. Online friends were fat divorcees that you fucked at 3 AM after talking on AOL Instant Messenger. Online friends were diseased- socially at least. You didn’t mention, bring around, or even pretend that you had online friends to your real-life friends.
Over the last five or six years, the social networking thing has taken off, and now the internet is bringing together long lost friends almost every day. It seems like I’m constantly finding or being found by old high school friends or guys from my punk rock past. They come out of the woodwork looking heavier, happier and better dressed. They often have kids and take pictures of their wives holding them. They take pictures of houses and boats, of sunsets and Mickey Mouse. You find out who married who, or that Suzie died when she was in 10th grade. You find old flames and end up marrying them (hi Jess!). You agree to have a beer or coffee with people that you would have never done something like that with all those years ago, and nobody bats an eyelash. These are real friends.
Today, within fifteen minutes of each other, I ran into the internet’s past and present at my part-time job. I saw General Lee (the name has been changed to protect the dude’s anonymity) , an old acquaintance from the punk rock days. He introduced me to his kids and his wife. We talked about houses, dogs and bass guitars. We told old jokes about people we know and asked each other the usual “what ever happened to…?” type of questions. It was pleasant, bland, heart warming perfectly acceptable conversation. A few minutes later I ran into Mr. Roarke. Mr. Roarke is someone I know from a message board that I post on, and we exchanged a similar form of small talk, but it was somehow nicer. We discussed his trip to Haiti and the vaccinations that he has to get to travel abroad. We talked about what was happening around us and what a neat little tool Twitter is for connecting us to opportunities. We told a few jokes and went about our day. It was one of the more pleasant interactions that I have had with someone I barely know recently.
So why was I so reluctant to tell a coworker where I knew Mr. Roarke from, while I was perfectly at ease referring to General Lee and I’s common past? Is that stigma of online versus in real life friends still happening, or am I woefully behind the times? Was it just the 14 year old in me trying to eternally look cool that took greater pride in talking about playing in bands versus discussing retarded nuns on an internet message board?
These are questions I need answered people, so help me out.
Also, be good.
The Beach Chronicles: Post Script
The beach house we rented served its purpose: it had enough beds and space for all of us, the kitchen was functional and there was no noticeable damage to the place. But something about it was still off. The house was a garish green color and there were these bizarre paintings of mermaids done all over the house. Actually, bizarre wasn’t the right word for it-hideous was.
They were strange little folk art inspired paintings of mermaids, always three together or three individual paintings beside each other in the house, always with sea shells or tiny fragments of mirrors glued to them, apparently created by either the mother of the children or one of the children. I can’t fully capture the hideousness of the pictures.
We gathered from the pictures and the decor of the house that the father of this family was slavishly devoted to his children. Not in the way that most fathers are, but more in an “I never get to see the kids, so I’m going to make our vacation home revolve around them to make up for it” kind of way. On some level it was sweet, but on the level my friends and I were on (that of a group of selfish late twentysomethings/early thirtysomethings on a vacation/bender) it was rather strange and hellish.
From some of the art on the wall we deduced that one of the daughters was named Aynnie. Not Annie, but Aynnie. We think that she was named after Ayn Rand.
In the “no-no closet” (an out of the way closet, usually locked that the owners of the home keep their private goods in away from the renters) that we discovered open in the home there was a wealth of booze (which none of us drank, thank you very much). It all added up to something that none of us could put our fingers on.
Finally on the porch and in the cold wind and rain that arrived on our last day at the beach, my friend Miguel put it all together:
“This guy, he’s devoted to those fucking kids, that means he’s never around and the alcohol that’s in the house proves that he can’t be around them sober when he’s around. He’s an objectivist, that’s why he named his kid after Ayn Rand. This guy is a lawyer.”
And it made total sense.
Be good.
Actual Conversations with Bort
In the interim between living with Audrey and living by myself, I have been staying with my friend Bort. Together we sit and talk about nothing, watch bad movies, and ignore each other while using our respective computers. What follows is an actual conversation we had today while driving through a busy supermarket parking lot.
Me: Just park there (points at a empty space that reads “Parking for mothers with children only”).
Bort: I can’t park there, what if some bitch wants to park there?
Me: That’s why you should park there.
Bort: Asshole.
Now we sit and watch “I’m Lucky to be Alive” and he watches a chick with a rattan cane beat up a guy with no weapons on YouTube. It’s called Felony Fights and it’s just about his favorite thing. I love Bort.
The Duple Repository
For those of you that aren’t in my inner circle, one of my very good friends who responds to the rather curious and difficult to explain nickname Duple has been in China for the last 6 months, and I miss him terribly. However, in that time he has shared with me some things that are so funny that I have to share them. So, I thought what better place than here in a rather droll entry that makes no sense anyone but me. With that, I present the comedy of Duple.
On food:
“There is fast food all over the place but it does not remind me of home so much as it reminds me how not like home China is. The ingredients are the same but they never seem to put then together right. My egg mcmuffin was on a hamburger bun and was loaded with catsup.” (09/9/07)
“I found dog meat. I run past the store almost every day. The sign literally says (in Chinese) “three and dog meat.” but I was assured that they sell dog meat. I’ll post some pics soon with the sign included. the character for dog and meat are both look like the things they represent. Now I know what I’m shipping everyone for X-mas!”(09/12/07)
“Yesterday for dinner I had silkworm cocoons, a whole pigeon and a lot of beer. Tonight I had ‘the mouths of some kind of fish’, octopus and snails. the funny thing is that someone here saw sour cream in my fridge (I bought it at a western store) and almost threw up. The hell of it is the wacky food is more expensive than the more “normal” stuff. Why choose pigeon when chicken is cheaper? I’ll tell you why, to watch the American squirm.” (12/10/07)
“Tonight i went to a restaurant that serves both deer and ox penis. They have a menu (in english) I’ll take a camera next time I go there and get a picture.” (11/02/07)
“I ate dog yesterday. for real. answer your phones. It would be nice to have some free therapy about this. I did not mean to eat dog. It just kind of happened.” (12/9/07)
“I ate dog again tonight, how much will that cost at P.F.Chan’s?” (01/21/08)
On Chinese Women:
“I have been assigned to a pretty Chinese girl but I have no idea what is going on between us.”(9/11/07)
“I’m thinking of you Bugg, even though I am surrounded by hot asian girls, I am still thinking of you…”(12/14/07)
On the Chinese Government:
“In general I like the Olympics, right now the Olympics ensure that I will not be locked up in a Chinese coal mine for any shenanigans.” (10/10/07)
Most of these are “you had to be there” kind of quotes, but I find them hilarious. I hope at least one of these made you laugh. If you are reading this Duple, I love you and miss you. Call me soon. Like Tuesday.
Until later, Be good.
