A POST THAT KINDA HAS TO DO WITH FIBRO (PLUS JOY DIVISION)!

I'm going to be away from the desk for the next couple days, and would like to leave you (for the time being) with Love Will Tear Us Apart. I hope you enjoy the song, but that love will not, dear reader, tear us apart...

A programming note: I plan on making a new blog where I will post all my short stories that have nothing to do with fibromyalgia and actually start to post here, on a blog called THE FIBROMYALGIAN, about only fibro and everything related to it, which I haven't been doing much of recently.

What's my excuse for the dearth of posts and for posting so many lame short stories lately? The change of seasons has floored me and I've been sleeping all the time. I was on my feet for about eight hours last week.

Pity me.

I hope to improve or get on Aderral or Ritalin -- prescription amphetamines -- soon.

More to come! Till next, try not to enjoy:

Mixx it!

DONE!

I hate the fact that I'm putting exclamation points on my short stories just to make them fit the style of this blog... Just as I'm sure many of you are sick of me not writing about fibro and instead writing short shorts (use NAIR).

This is Done

“I love you l love you I love you...” I breathed into her ear as I came.

Her breath had slowed...

Both of us were done.

For years we had messed around, but this was the first time we had had sex... And in a way that used every aspect of the right-angled couch that sprawled along her one-thousand-square-foot basement...

It was supposed to be bad... Everyone we knew told us it would be. But it was like seeing the Fourth of July from the Point (which I would do much later and find analogous) in San Diego: fireworks everywhere... Unable to see it all, everything happening too quickly... The moment over before it began...

Ten years later more than made up for it.

I called her, drunk; I had had a dream in which she was killed.

It was 4 a.m. She picked up on the second ring:

“Calvin! I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”

“Why? Are you OK? You’re not hurt are you?”

“No... I had this weird dream.”

“I had one too. Just now.”

“Are you OK?”

“Good, now.


“So how have you been in the ten years since we last talked to each other?”

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AND SHE WAS!

It had not been a good evening. She wanted to stay in the apartment, I desperately wanted to be the fuck out of there on a Friday night like a normal goddam twenty-five-year-old.

We lived together in Tacoma Park, an ex-urb so close to DC you would smell the Potomac if your stood in the right spot.

She gave in and decided to drive us to a bar she had been to on Connecticut Avenue.

"Why are you taking this way? We're going around half the freaking Beltway. ...We should've just parked and taken the Metro, like I said before."

"This is the only way I know how to go where we're going -- and we're already driving, so just be quiet."

I was getting the shakes. And I couldn't let her see that. ...The alcohol withdrawal drove an impatience that bordered on insanity...

Still, who the fuck drives slower than the speed limit?

I held my tongue and wrenched my hands all the way to The Four Provinces, a not-so Irish bar. It took us forty-five minutes to get there when it should have taken fifteen. ...Or would have, if I had driven.

But she drove because both of us knew I was going to get loaded... I physically needed to at that point.

She parked her Beetle on the street a few blocks away from the bar. We walked, picking our way along curbs and jaywalking across four-lane streets, never touching.

We got a table for two once we were inside. I immediately ordered a Guinness plus one because the place was so busy I knew it would be a while before we saw our waitress again.

"Did you know Guinness has less alcohol in it that Busch Light?"

Her stare answered: How could you possibly think I would care?

She stared off and twirled the stem of her wine glass in her fingers.

God I wished she would just get drunk so we could fucking forget about everything...

I finished my first glass in three gulps and held up a hand to the waitress for a third.

I finally felt not-sick.

I calmed. Everything around me stopped being an assault on my senses.

I sat back in my chair and looked at her: her thin top gathered by a string that was knotted loosely around her champagne-flute neck; her witch-black hair so long it almost touched the ground; her eyes large orbs of undisturbed water on a night full of clouds, glistening.

I had never told her that I loved her. I wanted to, then.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that? ...You can't be drunk already."

"No, I'm not. It's just...

"...You look good tonight.

"You always look good."

"I like the band that's playing."

"So do I."

I cupped the hand she had around the wine glass and bent over the table. I kissed her on one of her cheeks, which felt delicate as paper-thin glass to my lips. Then we pressed our heads together, side by side.

When I sat back both of us were smiling.

Mixx it!

BITCHES!

I've been in too much pain to sleep tonight. So I spent an inordinate amount of time writing this through the agony fog:

BITCHES

I had to go to the second-floor's bathroom because the first-floor's was completely mobbed. After waiting on the stairs for about five guys to come out I was able to go in.

I went to the one open urinal and started to think of when I was ten years old and the family went on vacation to Niagara. My stage fright was just abating when a guy stood at the urinal next to me and put a beer in a plastic cup atop the stained porcelain, directly beneath the pipes where the effluent water flooded down when you depressed the handle... And I could see the pipes sweat just above his drink...

My dick shrank until it was nothing but an oversized clitoris.

"Fucking bitches. I mean, man, you bring them out, you buy them drinks and then the bitches are like (he puts a childish expression on his face and speaks faux-apologetically): 'I'm kinda seeing someone.'

"Fucking fuck you bitch! Tell me that before I buy you five drinks!

"...I mean bitches, right?"

I was still trying to convince myself that I had heard what I had heard, which prevented me from responding.

"You've been there man. Watch out some bitch could be doing it to you right now."

He flushed, and with the sound of flowing water my dick reappeared and I pissed.

...If anyone would've taken the bet, my life was on whatever girl he came with not being the slightest bit involved with anyone...

I came out of the bathroom after washing my hands. The line for the women's went down the stairs.

I stood on a landing: "My friend just came out of here to go find us a table -- anyone have any idea where he went?" I asked, effectively, every girl on the stairs.

The girl standing right in front of me said

"Yeah, he went through there."

"Thanks so much."

I went through the door-frame-without-a-door and to the second floor's bar. I thought about how all my friends were downstairs... Christ, two of them had come all the way from the other coast just to see me...

But in my mind that schmuck was still pouring out bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.

I sat on a barstool, turned it away from the bar, and spotted the fucker quickly. He was sitting on a couch, which was across from another couch (both running parallel to my line of sight) on which other guys dressed exactly like him sat (khakis, undershirts that clashed with their long-sleeve, pinstripe, button-up Polos, anyplace-brown shoes). And there were girls with them -- one apiece. The "bitches."

Every one of the guys was more muscular than me -- accomplishing a feat fit for a ten-year-old. But I had skill and speed... But not enough to take down three guys who, when I punched them, would end up less damaged than my own knuckles.

I turned my barstool around and ordered a Stoli on the rocks.

I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, then turned around with the tumbler in my hand.

I was amazed to see the guy who had previously shit from his mouth leave suddenly to piss again... Or maybe to stumble around for a "bitch" who would appreciate his sensitive nature.

His presence on the couch had hid his leather bomber jacket from my view. It was draped on the couch's back.

I drained my drink and immediately began walking... slow, calm.

I had no idea what I was going to do, but found myself doing this:

I grabbed bathroom-boy's jacket by its collar and slung it over my shoulder, mid-stride.

"Don't worry about it guys," I said to the males (I would kill myself for calling them "men") on the couch, not looking directly at them, not looking away.

As I made my way to the stairs, down to the first floor and out to the insanity of Eighteenth Street Washington DC on a Friday night I didn't hurry, didn't complain when I was held up for a few minutes in the entryway by a girl who had lost her shoe on the stairs. I didn't look behind me.

I was either going to get the shit knocked out of me or I wasn't. I thought of the best position to take to cover my head and internal organs once they had me on the ground.

But I got outside and to the sidewalk to my amazement, and immediately crossed the street. I spun the jacket around my arm like cotton candy around a stick and held it close to my stomach so it couldn't be seen from behind.

Then I walked the mile downhill, home, never looking behind me.

When I got into my apartment, with the locks clacked behind me, I finally took a deep inhale and let out a long exhale.

Why was what I had just done so important to me? Why, from the word "bitch," did I have to harm that piece of shit in some way?

I tried on his jacket. Finding that it fit was an unexpected bonus...

I'm sure the douchebag chalked up his loss to a mindless act of theft...

But it's not about him and never was. It's come to be about the fact that every time I wear that jacket my shoulders go back and my chin comes up and I remember that I can overcome rational fear to do the irrational: what I believe is fair.

Mixx it!

OF FIBRO AND NIETZSCHE!

No matter how fun one's job is, not doing one's job is more so.

I e-mailed that to a friend today and found it at least as profound as "Men and melons are hard to know," by Ben Franklin.

Today I am having a migraine hangover, which my younger brother described beautifully as "like the aftershocks of an earthquake," so I'm going to keep it lazy today.

Yesterday was King-Hell Fibro Day... I finally got my blood drawn so my new doctor, like three former ones, will rule out Celiac Disease as the cause of all that ails me. I didn't mind getting my blood drawn yet again, for reasons I've explained... And maybe it will pay off to be thorough.

Very, very thorough.

Then, because I had driven in the sun before my meds kicked in (OxyContin and Klonopin), I got a brutal migraine. I spent from two p.m. to six a.m. in total darkness, except for the television I was watching, turned down to a near-inaudible level. ...Only I and dogs could have heard it. Though the light and sound from the teevee were incredibly irritating, laying in bed, sore everywhere, my head going supernova, watching it was better than not... Without the idiot box (perhaps that name isn't completely fair because most of what I watch is on History International. ...Wait, why am I showing off my geekdom?) I was left in the dark to contemplate my misery. With the tele on I could contemplate my misery and why certain books and gospels didn't make it into the christian bible.

Enough self-pity.

For today.

I recently started reading Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, and e-mailed a few thoughts about it to my friend along with my proverb. I'm simply going to publish it here and call it a day.

Please feel free to comment on how wrong I am about Nietzsche's views. I read Thus Spake and some of The Antichrist a few years ago, and am sure to be a bit off.

Recycled e-mail, do your thing!:

Beyond Good and Evil is amazing. Nietzsche starts (after a few preliminaries) by saying that truth and morals are not arrived at by philosophers through thought, but that their truth and moral constructions are simply reflections of, and a service to, their prejudices and their own way of life. So their "discoveries" are actually their preconceptions.

So he puts all previous philosophical "findings" into a chamber pot and heaves them out a window.

Then he has the balls to wonder: What about the "evil" mankind does -- which it does most often and quite well... Why isn't "evil," in effect, good, in the sense that people have no predilection to do "good" (especially "good" as christians define it)? (I'm all-but sure he does not end his treatise with the belief that all that is "bad" is "good," but reformulates what is good based on what benefits humans and humankind, their/its happiness, and that everything else is bullshit.)

Nietzsche rails against all previous philosophers for simply carrying water for the ethical constructs of their time and place. Being an atheist, he is free to move into an ethics he considers "beyond good and evil," especially as the concepts were defined by christian philosophers. In fact, I think in The Antichrist he goes further, explicitly stating that everything the christian church teaches is against the good of all people: The seven deadly sins represent the seven ways of being that come most easily to humans. We are lustful, gluttonous (basically we enjoy eating, to oversimplify), greedy, slothful, wrathful, envious, prideful.

And if we weren't all those we wouldn't have survived long enough to invent religion.

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until the fourth grade, and was even an altar-boy for a few years. I didn't stop attending mass every Sunday until I went to college, when I was finally able to stop attending altogether. But what eighteen years of being immersed in christianity taught me, above all, was this: that everything I felt or thought or did was a sin to some degree.

Christianity teaches that all that makes one human makes them "evil." And what could possibly be more evil, more like the mouth on the figure in Munch's The Scream than that?

Christians are supposed to choose a mortal life devoid of worth so they can have a life worth living in heaven. Nevermind that the masses living lives in poverty -- and finding fucking glorification in it -- serves all world governments to a T...

...But Nietzschean philosophy is, of course, much more complicated than that (please disregard my personal tirade to make this e-mail coherent) -- and my account of "Beyond Good and Evil" is only a synopsis (that leaves out a lot) of the first half of the first chapter -- but it's interesting as hell (and not Dante's hell, which was a yawn... How can he be thought of as the "great master of the disgusting?" Gimme Hieronymus Bosch!).

It's also given me cause to consider myself a Nietzschean "free spirit" instead of simply an amoral beast.

Which is nice.

Mixx it!