Festering Carbuncle

you have to feel bad to feel good

At football practice during my junior year of high school one of my teammates was telling me about his sex life. It is a common thing, high school athletes talking about their sex lives, both males and females, as I understand it. I always proclaimed to not believe in premarital sex, as it allowed me to stay out of most of the sex conversations, but I did confess to a few of my closest friends that I often had and enjoyed sex. These close friends and I shared tales of our experiences and offered tips for pleasing our mates and increasing our own pleasures. The aforementioned teammate was not one of my closest friends.

He was telling me about all of the sex he was having with his new girlfriend, and I was a little jealous, as his new girlfriend and I used to flirt incessantly, but never anything more than that. So, he's telling me about all of this sex he is having and about how much he doesn't like using condoms. He tells me that, in fact, he hates rubbers so much that he doesn't use them, but that it is ok because they only fuck in the hot tub, and pregnancy doesn't occur in the hot tub because the water just washes everything away. I chortled, or guffawed, whichever one it is that conveys what I mean, but stopped abruptly when I realized that he was not at all joking. I stopped laughing and I said, "Yeah, good thinking." I felt kind of bad for almost making him feel bad by laughing at him, but I also felt really good for making such a swift recovery and sparing his feelings.

It was so close to nine months later when they had their baby that I could never really be certain if they became pregnant before or after the conversation. Two or three years later, while drinking under age at a Chinese food lounge, I ran into the guy's cousin after being informed by the barmaid that they didn't allow people to buy the house a round. He told me they were still together, but that there was a lot of turbulence in their relationship. I bought tequila drinks for us both and confessed to this cousin how everything was all my fault. I was teary eyed when I told him, but he forgave me and I smiled.

 

 

Today when i was walking i saw some good things and i saw some bad things.
A little old lady fell over and a young kid of fourteen picked her up.
That was a good thing and a bad thing.
You gotta feel good to feel bad,
You gotta feel bad to feel good.
You gotta feel good to feel bad,
You gotta feel bad to feel good.

I went into a shop today and left the door wide open
And the woman behind the counter shouted at me to shut the door.
I said that it was very stuffy in here and her store needed ventilation
And after a while she smiled at me.
That was a good thing as well as a bad thing

You gotta feel good to feel bad,
You gotta feel bad to feel good.
You gotta feel bad to feel good,
You gotta feel good to feel bad.

I remember the first time i had a fight with my dad, a proper fisty fight.
I was a little bit taller than him for the first time, i was fifteen,
I remember hitting him on the chin
And he went into a coma for about twenty days but he came out of it fine,
Remembered me and everything, but there was no blood on his chin,
That was a good thing and a bad thing.

Feel bad, feel good.
Feel bad because i feel good.
Feel good, feel bad.
Feel bad 'cause i feel good.
Because i feel bad i feel good.
Because i feel bad i feel good.
Because i feel good i feel bad.
Because i feel bad i feel good.

Instant Replay

I generally don't go in for pancakes, but occasionally I will get the itch.  On one such occasion I bought a can of this:

Turns out I don't know how to not burn pancakes, but I also feel like if I cooked it I had damn well better eat it.  So, I had one burnt pancake every two days for at least eight days.  Later, I confessed to a friend that I was a horrible cooker of pancakes.  The friend told me that pancakes were easy to cook, so long as one accepts that you will burn the fuck out of the first one in the batch.  Arrrrggghhh!

I had a brain that felt like pancake batter

I stopped at the sub shop on the way home from work tonight, it is how I get sandwiches for dinner.  There were two short guys at the end of the line, looking like fraternal twins except one wasn't wearing a shirt.  I wondered if I should wonder aloud if that particular sub shop had a "no shirt, no shoes..." policy.  At the front of the line were two women in hats, one with purple hair, the other with orange.  It seemed safe to assume that they were lesbians.  When their sandwiches were made, the sandwich-making lady asked, "So, are you together?"  The other sandwich making lady, the one who desperately needed to know what kind of cheese I desired, I hushed her with a finger to my lips and a tilt of my head toward the couple.  "Of course we're together!" said the orange haired lesbian.  "A-ha!  I knew it!" I thought to myself, but then the purple haired one said, "Um, no, we're not together."  The orange haired one quickly added, "We're paying for the sandwiches together, but we're not, like, together...  I mean, we're sisters, so we are together, but, well, you know..."  The three of them laughed uncomfortably, unsure if they had mistaken themselves for lesbians or not.  The lady I shushed angrily demanded that I select a cheese immediately, or else there were to be repercussions.  I told her I would take the orange one.

Have twenty more one mores

It was twelve or so hours after submitting this post that I finally came to.  I hadn't been to sleep, and I hadn't blacked out, at least, I hadn't blacked out entirely: I still remembered what I had done, I just couldn't understand why. I was sixty miles from home doing eighty miles an hour with a streak of blood colored vomit plastered down the driver's side and a small pond on the passenger's side the only thing separating me from the Federal Correctional Institution. It was only ten in the morning, but it was already fucking sweltering hot, but it wasn't just the heat that was getting to me; I was sweating the sinner's sweat, a mixture of guilt and sundry toxins that dries to a salty crust at the back of the neck.

Everyone thinks of Oregon as green and wet, which it is for nine months out of the year, the remaining months, however, are dry and dead. August is the month that always sucks the life out of it all. All of the fields that look so pretty in all of the pictures die brown, even the lawns outside of the houses die and everyone stops mowing. We all, the denizens of this generally soggy state, die a little bit too, but in our cases it is mostly like murder. We choose what pieces of ourselves to let fester and turn to the drink to ease the pain of their anticipated absence. Sometimes the drink turns on us, causes us to lose faith in the one thing we thought we could count on. This demonstration of fallibility, over time, serves to strengthen our faith in intoxicants as we begin to understand that our temptation is both the proof and the strength of this fallibility, the entire basis of our faith. And to that, we drink!

Only slightly more complex than the Hokey Pokey...

I've been listening to this one song quite a lot lately, this one song that reminds me quite a bit of this other song, almost so much so that I would call it an associative climax, but not quite that much.

Regina Spektor seems to have realized that she will never in her life write a truly great song, the kind of song that might truly connect with anyone. Her response to this realization has been to sabotage any and all songs she should ever write, knowing that they will come out "ok" anyway. They might, actually, be better because of the sabotage, causing the listener to think, "Wow, if she hadn't fucked it all up, this might have been a great song." Of course, it wouldn't have been, it would have been a much worse song without that possibility of redemption. This is the genius of Ms. Spektor; she is not a brilliant songwriter, but she has an uncanny ability to recognize her own limitations, a feat far beyond most of us, and on top of it all she has the savvy to disquise her limitations as a playful jab at all of those stuffy perfectionists, the ones who just don't get that music is, deep down, just about having fun.

So, instead of posting the song that I have been listening to lately, I am posting the song that I have been reminded of because, well, because the songs that you hear because you hit the play button probably aren't quite as important as the songs that you hear because your brain tells you to hear them. Regina explains how it works here in this song, in case you were wondering. It is indeed more complicated than the Hokey Pokey, but it's still pretty simple, and the end result of both is the same: a broken heart and a lifeless corpse.