4 Ativan Long

Good morning, comrades. My blog has been silent for several days now, and what could be worse than Silent Blog Syndrome (SBS)? It's not due to newfound reticence on my part, or depression, or a date rape, or some such thing. Instead, Blogger.com was doing some sort of scan of blogs in order to find spam. They do it at random. It made it impossible to post for four days, which is fine. It gave me more time to look at naked people online and read about Nick Nolte at the airport, among other things.

As I perused the Internet and wrote endless replies to online discussion groups, I discovered a story that just made me simultaneously sad and curious. In the Loess Plateau region of China, there exists the custom of providing a "ghost bride" to men who died alone. The idea being that it's lonely in the afterlife, so a wife should be provided. No such concern exists for young women who die single. Long story short, a fellow "bought" a mentally-challenged girl from her parents, telling them that she would be married to someone and would have a better life. They agreed. Unfortunately, this white-slave trader couldn't find a living man to whom she could be sold. So instead he and his friends poisoned and strangled her (either one would have done it, methinks) and sold her dead body to an undertaker, who sold her for the equivalent of $2,077 to a family that recently lost a bachelor son. They were buried in the same grave so they could be together forever. When they caught the murderer he said that he had done it before and would have kept doing it, and that dead women often sell for more money.

This is not an easy world for women, with genital mutilation; honor killings, white sex slavery, institutional patriarchy, abortion restrictions, and on and on. It's not easy for men, either, but women definitely win the contest of who has it harder. Disagree? Reply to Gocrapinyourhat@shutup.com.

Last night I was watching No Pants Dance Off, writing to a friend (off email) and eating a can of peaches. Ate the whole fucking thing. I was a little disgusted with myself for drinking the syrup, and for watching No Pants Dance Off, and the "Pancers" (that's what they call the stripping dancers on the show, isn't that just so fucking witty?). It's a testament to the crap I'll watch so long as the possibility exists of me seeing a woman's ass. After 15 minutes, I gathered myself and turned the channel. It was so demeaning and stupid that's all I could take. Plus, a male dancer took the stage...that probably contributed to my leaving.

Alone in my room, except for Toulouse, I lifted my girth off my bed and floated over to my computer. At that point I turned on the movie Destination: Infestation. It's a Snakes On A Plane rip-off about ants on a plane. That had to go when there happened to be a sexy entomologist on the plane. E.O. White with tits and a vagina. Even I have limits. There's good camp and bad camp. The ants actually launched an attack on the captain, rendering him blind. They were super-intelligent ants, you see. But even a super-intelligent ant is probably no smarter than, say, George Bush. Anyway, the actors looked embarrased, and I took that as a cue to watch CNN.

Lately I've been up very late at night, and up early in the morning. The other night I didn't sleep at all. At around 3am I went for a walk, down to the diner on Broadway. That took me through a field used by an adjacent school. Walks like that are usually comforting, but this one led to tears. A little back story here. For shits and giggles I've been re-reading Marks' Human Biodiversity, a book I got at university. On page 44, near an article about evolutionary patterns in species and culture, I found some coffee stains on the paper. Just a few drops. It caused me to remember a friend of mine back then; Eve, a beautiful African-American woman with an admirable mind. We were having coffee at Wit's End, a cafe in the Wheatley building. I made a joke about something and she spit out her coffee (she was like that, very emotive). A couple drops landed on that page.

So that has been on my mind for two days. Sometimes, I see my work and school history as being something from my imagination. I find artifacts that reveal (or re-reveal) that I was once something more than I am now; that coffee, a name tag from the Socialist Scholars' Conference in NYC, a letter of commendation from the Fairmont Copley Plaza for helping guests during a flood, papers I wrote for school, etc. They always make me sick, and very anxious. Sometimes I'm compelled to vomit, as if I couldn't take the pain of being reminded of a lost love. The "lost love" here is my former self, when I was proud and had a modicum of ambition. I wanted to go to grad school for evolutionary biology.

So, with that in mind, I cried my fucking eyes out as I crossed that baseball field. So pathetic. I could embrace a lie and say that I don't know how I got where I am today. But I do. There are some blank patches in my memory, to be sure, but I remember most of it.

This is what they call a "pity party." Although I once almost got into a fight with a fellow in the men's dorm at The Arbour in Jamaica Plain (that's a locked nuthouse) because he told a friend of mine that she was having a pity party. I don't like the term, and that experience didn't help. She was talking to me about how her husband beat her, and she felt trapped. The story was graphic and upsetting. Some guy overheard us, and he chimed in about how she was having a pity party. I lost it. I remember getting in his face and the young lady pulling at my left arm, trying to indicate that it was ok, she wasn't upset. But I was. Finally, a Polish woman got between us and he retreated to another part of the wing. We spoke about it in group therapy. I have only one regret about that late winter afternoon; I wish I hit him.

Anyway. I'm a lucky man and shouldn't complain. I'm in love with a beautiful woman who loves me in return (rather important). Methinks that it's ok to ensconce oneself in self-pity now and again, so long as it's not a career. How about you, dear reader? Do you think the universe is picking on you? Or rather, like me, do you think it is indifferent that that is somehow worse? Do you find comfort in belief in god? I'm an atheist, but I don't hate god as some people think. One doesn't hate things that don't exist. If I did believe in god I would think of him/her/it as an under-achiever, as writer and pedophile Woody Allen once said.

Spalding Gray was in there somwhere, in these hours of existential angst and reflection. I miss him, and always felt close to him somehow, even though I had never met him. His suicide poured acid on my gentle wings and kept me from rising for several weeks after they found his body in the East River, two months after he had flung himself off of the Staten Island Ferry. I strongly feel that suicide will be the way I leave this world, but perhaps I'm wrong. Vonnegut thought that, as well, and he lived a long life.

I just noticed that I've eaten 4 mg of lorazepam while writing this blog entry. Sorry if it's boring.