Broadcast me a joyful blog....

Am I getting in touch with my feminine side? Box of kleenex, barrel of Starbucks mochachino ice cream, Jerry McQuire on the television set and every time Amy Dalley's 'Men Don't Change' line-dances across the radio I begin to sing along with the hick lyrics:


Cupid works for the devil: be suspicious if he cries:
"You know sex is usually good."
Yeah, but it ain't always right.
Chocolate is a band-aid, no matter what they say,
Shoes don't stretch,
An' men don't change.


God love it. Uncle Mike and I are in the process of moving and as always, viewing your possesions heaped in moldy cardboard squares gives you perspective on what is important. What you can take with you. What you can live without. So much of emphasis in a material-driven society tottering with human loneliness at the same time. It astounds me. Astounds me more than hippie-elfs and mystic-recluses. What people value as externally important vs. the internal drive to feel as human as possible.

Good news is my health. The last twenty-four months have been open hurricane season on my body. I've been working roughly 60-80 hours a week, two jobs, trying to make bank, but blessed none the less. For a while I was working 8am to 2am everyday...heavily flooded with caffeine. Last May I actually had two days where I was forced to work 40 hours shifts intermittently and it just about floored me, only I'm always so zany and overly-exerted anyway...good news is that working odd hours forces you to write; compells you to analyze your life and acknowledge what you want to do with it.

But sleeps nice too. I've been averaging a stellar 10 hours a night and its UNBELIEVABLE. (Codeine-god love it. The miracle Vice!) My stress rashes and acne are also starting to subside. As is my caffeine intake. I don't care what anyone says, Starbucks imbibed under certain copious dosages equates nothing short of a lethal injection to the nervous system. Even certain powdry dust is nowhere in the same Java-area code as Starbucks. Of course that's debatable. I hate coke--I mean I really hate coaciane. Next to Heroin its the one drug that I've seen sew war havoc on individuals life. A good buddy of mine got heavily into it and he had a heart attack one night at age 24. He practically lost his septum too. He would just sit around and shove white-dust up his nostrils until they would bleed and he would then wedge flecks of cotton up there to quell the bleeding and then act like the reason his lips were crimson-coated was becasue of the altitude in the room.

But caffeine as well. I got my first coffee pot when I was fourteen and me, being the studious writer that I am, used to burn-out coffee pots in high school like a flailed academic rushing out his flat thesis. Trying to prove something no one really cares about. In high-school I wrote arrogant as all get-out "po-ems" (two syllables) and was a purported authority on everything. I probably should have come home with more wedgies. I probably sounded like many liberal art profs. today sound...overly important, solipsistic, academically-indulgent, vanity-driven. It takes a long ass time for the scholar, the poet, the artist to realize that the world of art (even the world) wasn't designed for their own personal carp and critique. Everything you do in life has to done for the benefit of humanity. It has to be done for the benefit of the other.

Example, suicides kinda run in my family. My mom trunk of the genealogical tree (ironically Czech...her maiden name was Bozac and her grandfather was sponsored illegally in America as a Bottlegger, employed by Al Capone himself) has been riddled with them--mostly attempts. Four years ago my cousin Joey killed himself and he was only eleven.

Anyway. I went through alotta personal-shit around the time of Joey's death. I missed about a week of class and I had a fuckwad french prof. who told me that he was sorry for my loss but that it wasn't his problem. He was correct, It wasn't, but it still pissed me off that he didn't seem to empathize. That he didn't seem to care. He was from Angola and had witness his own parents assignation at a very young age. He then had the gall to quote some existentialism verbiage a la John Paul Sartre about man's true teleos or prupose ended in dust anyway and how mankind was responsible for his own ass.

Ok, whatever, I had read Sartre, and me being the then academic-pedant that I was had also skimmed through Immanuel Levinas, a jewish-philosopher who was one of Sartre pupils. Levinas theories extrapolate from the ashes of the halocaoust and he agrees very adamantly with Sartre's no-afterlife views on the condition of mankind. Levinas branches off from sartre's bleakness by stating that mankind's true purpose in the world is to the capital-voweled Other or L'autre (in french). This is what intriniscally adds meaning to our lives...having an interface; harboring a rapport with other human beings. Helping them out as they help us out. Trying to cement a feeling of oneness in a planet that no-longer feels period, however terse that feeling may be....

I told my French Prof this and then I told him to have a good day, inserting a few choice vulgarities for affect, telling him to have a nice life. It was too late to officially drop the class and I received a volitional F. However, to this day, that conversation with my french prof. ranks as the most honest thing I've ever said, done or written in a classroom. And if I had to do it all again I would, but of course, I'd save my cousin first....