Out of Town News to Close

This comes from a friend of mine, in a recent comment left on a previous blog entry:

not sure if you know this, but "out of town news" in Harvard Square is going out of business. Figured it would be something that would interest you, as OOTN is one of the last bastions of non-ass in the whole square. Good bye, Wursthaus, good bye Bow and Arrow, good bye House of Blues(the original), good bye anything non-sucky. I guess the only thing left that I would go there for is Pandemonium.

I'd like to second what he has to say. Out of Town News was right outside of the T station, before you crossed over to the Harvard Co-op, or went the other way to the smoke shop Leavitt & Peirce. My father used to clean the Wursthaus after hours. I remember hanging out in the "pit" behind the T stop. That girl with a pet rat.

Harvard Square will continue to be in business, but whatever made it interesting is bleeding away. It hasn't sunk in yet...this OOTN business. It's more upsetting than Someday Cafe. Is Million Year Picnic and Tokyo Kid still there?

If so, not for long. Thank you, AC.

Family Circus Homage

Today, Darren has decided to take the day off and fight the Demon in his mind with a pitchfork and a small novelty baseball bat. Good luck, Dar! Until he returns, "Jeffy," Darren's psychotic pen pal will take over the blog. Enjoy the hi-jinks!

-Impy

Hi, I'm Jeffy.

The exciting and challenging act of being myself requires that I take many prescribed drugs. Just like that crazy fat fuck Darren. After one of the drugs killed my boner, I became a serial killer in a violent, pathological attempt to regain a modicum of dignity and, in a twisted fashion, regain the loss of what I've come to think of as my "manhood." I'm not above having sex with a houseplant or piercing my nipples at home with a meat thermometer.

I wish I could eat chicken wings all the time. We all like them, but I really like them, you know? I'm a bit worried. I asked Darren what he thought, but whenever he comes home and finds me in his flat, he's all about dialing 9-1-1 with his fat little digits.

J'accuse!

It is possible, but highly undesirable, to "fuck a duck."

My nipples are totally numb, so it wasn't a good idea, apparently. I'm sure it's temporary. In fact, one of my nipples rubbed off and fell out of my T-shirt near the Harvard Square T station, near the "Coop." If you find a nipple around there, it is so totally mine.

Can't be a lot of nipples just out there.

Low fat cookies are a scam perpetrated by an international cabal of Jews and Australians. The government!

Where's The Romance?

Some coffee is steaming in my favorite "Le Chien" mug next to me. It's a fearsome, strong blend that I'm inclined to make. Instead of cream or half & half I used some store brand dry coffee creamer. It's a real pro and con situation with this unsavory white powder. It keeps the coffee from getting too cold too fast, and makes it taste a bit richer. But no matter how much I stir and stir, there are little white balls floating around, like Japanese men in a jacuzzi. Each one needs special attention and must be squashed against the side. Also, strangely, like Japanese men in a jacuzzi.

It's a whole production.

But that's done now. I'm alone in my flat listening to the heat turn on and off. For such a small place we have an extremely powerful gas burner, or whatever you call it. The heat just appears. I'm a lucky man.

I've managed to string a few good days together, days without tears or self-injury or panic. If I feel compelled to burst out of my flat and into the night, where I can shout protests and insults at the moon, it never lasts very long; it's freezing out. Medication is helping, even if I do keep skipping appointments. I've got one this week, one I have to attend. The heart pill I take is especially helpful against panic attacks. As I said, a lucky man.

A modicum of melancholy is expected around the holidays, although it is an urban myth that suicides are highest this time of year. Actually, it's in the summer that most people off themselves. But this time of year does lend itself to remembrances, especially for one as sentimental as I. Atheists like myself (and there aren't many like me) romanticize the world to make the brutality and meaninglessness more endurable. Is there anything more romantic than tragedy? Is there anything more tragic than the pointless life we're all living? Anything more beautiful than two people finding love while framed by an endless void of time and space?

The most beautiful noise to me is Tchaikovsky's violin concerto. The Russians of his time were very Romantic, in music and literature. And borscht. The way people like to remember Tchaikovsky is that he was a homosexual in a time and place when that sort of thing was not kosher. Like Texas today, or South Carolina. So he struggled. He felt he was struggling against Fate. All Russians do, and why not? It makes you a hero just by living.

Tchaikovsky had a wealthy patron, Madame Von Meck, and they never met once. Sad, but to me painfully romantic. All this drama in a godless universe.

In the end, he may have committed suicide, or just had a drink of water that was teeming with germs. People were supposed to boil their drinking water at that time and place. It doesn't matter, though. His torment and struggle is perfectly evident in his music. Nothing I've read about Tchaikovsky, not even his letters, touches me like his music. This is news to no one, but music is powerful stuff.

My dead Russian friend was miserable and a closet homosexual who may have killed himself, possibly at the urging of his classmates at the Law Conservatory, who feared an embarrassing scandal if his sexual orientation were made public. I don't think he did, though. In my professional opinion, he simply drank the wrong glass of water.

Either way, he was around long enough to produce six symphonies (among many other opi). I'm fond of the last three in particular. Music critics will say that his 6th is truly special, and I'm inclined to agree. If you're unfamiliar with his music, I urge you to listen to the 4th symphony first, and then move to the 6th. It will aid in your appreciation, with perhaps a bit of consternation the price you'll pay. If you see the 6th performed live, don't get up to applaud until others do. Standing after the third movement and applauding is embarrassing as all hell.

I'm so lucky to live in a world where unhappy people can record, in a beautiful fashion, their interaction with the world. Happy people, too. I can listen in on, or read, whatever they felt compelled to shout out. Whatever they wanted remembered. A little bit of themselves and a little bit of shared experience. So we know what they were talking about.

Few artists know what to do with angst. Use it in a proper way. Record the fear but know well the desire to be unafraid. And have the scruples to detest hateful thoughts and actions but recognize that they live within most of us, maybe you. That will get your stomach roiling if you give the matter proper consideration. And never make the mistake of thinking that cynicism makes you wise.

A cynic is usually apathetic, and apathy is boring. Either way life is a struggle, so you may as well embrace what is either a pleasant fiction or a simple truth, that we're here to help each other get through life, whatever it is. It adds a bit of nobility to the cold fire of empty space, in the soft gray matter of our brains, and thus our minds. There's the romance, too.

Find one person, take his or her hand, and grow old together, all the while committed. It's a struggle, but there's romance there.

Stream of Stupidity

I'm floating with the deliberate speed of a turd down the toilet into a period of mild depression and increased suicidal ideation. I'm doing quite well, and putting up a sporting fight. It's either that or hang myself, and I'm terrible with knots. All thumbs. Besides, suicidal thoughts hold little sway with me right now.

I'm a lucky man and have absolutely no cause to complain. But I don't see these little missives from the frontal lobe as complaints.

This site is for entertainment purposes only.

Part of my mind is constantly occupied with this one question: Am I totally out of my fucking mind, but everyone is too afraid to say anything to me? It haunts me, and there are many other questions that float around with it, and they are all incredibly negative and withering. I know we all have some crazy thoughts, but I can top whatever you got.

It has a nice, tidy name. Bipolar disorder. Along with Avoidant Personality Disorder. They sound quaint. Bipolar disorder effects 2% of the population, but they advertise bipolar drugs on national television. So everyone has heard of it. There's a stigma, but it's not terrible.

Right now I'm daily flinging drugs into my yap, all prescribed. I'm on board with The Whitecoats. They are going to take the pain away. Shock your noggin and give you an English muffin. Who else is going to give you a deal like that? Huh? Then drugs to numb your delicate little brain and fragile little arms and lets. It takes the edge off a very edgy world. You can pop your balloon in a world like this in 2 seconds flat. So many pointy, edgy parts.

The French had a red balloon. He thought he would live forever like DeGaul, but he was popped at the Canne Film Festival in the late '70's.

I refer to the balloon as a "he," but in truth I don't think there is any sexual dimorphism among balloons. Not even alive. So that story can't be true. Newsflash, balloons are not living, sexual beings.

But I'm pretty sure the French had a red balloon.

The French seem to enjoy smoking, as it gives them some street cred among the existential nihilists in all those little cafes that everyone blows a load for. For which people blow a load. There. I'm an existential nihilist and I can't smoke cigarettes. I tried smoking Galoit cigarettes when my girlfriend smoked them. About 10 years ago. It didn't go over, the cigs or the relationship.

But the French. They just keep going to town on those things. The French make and eat a lot of cheese. It's like a law or something. Every family must keep a mold or fungus working its magic on a dairy product. I wonder how many French people have ever tried to smoke cheese. You know someone did. Personally I'd go with bleu cheese, if I were going to try.

Then you got wine. It's a whole thing.

Creative Endeavor

At about five this morning I woke up and it occurred to me that getting back to sleep just was not going to happen. As it happens, my father was also awake at this early hour, smoking his brains out and watching MSNBC, or the Today Show. One of those. It was too early to join him for coffee, and instead I leafed through the pages of my incomplete, unpublished and mostly unseen novel/script. Over the years some scenes were added while others were thrown in the trash. I like what I'm left with, even though it would make little sense to anyone but me.

A creative endeavor that intrigues and entertains me, and nothing more. And my poems, too. They are mostly unseen by any eyes other than mine, but I don't mind. It's a mercy to my friends, who have better things to do than read the overwrought poetry of Fatty McCrazy (me). My friend Clare wrote a 50,000 word novel just for the fun of it, for National Novel Writing Month a few years back. She seemed to enjoy it, and it was well done. The joy of writing for the sake of writing.

There are a few people out there who dislike me in the extreme, mainly because of my political disposition coupled with how I enjoy debating philosophy and politics. If you want to talk about Skinner's Problem of Evil, I'm your man. Existential nihilism, Keynesian economics, "The Invisible Hand" of laissez-faire economics, national health care, the Red Shift in physics, NAFTA, Obama, a woman's right to choose, gay marriage...whatever you want to talk about, I'm sure to have a strong opinion on it. Out there on the Internet, there are some people who want to pop me in the nose for my socialist/atheist philosophy.

These people get angry, because I'm much smarter than they are, and they mock my attempts at creative writing. It's one of the few criticisms that bothers me not a bit. Not a jot or a tittle. Most of what I write is for me, and it's writing that I like, not having written something. One I'm done with a short story or chapter or paragraph or line, I tend to just throw it out. It's not the key to heaven, and warrants at most a long last look. Then I move on to something else.

Writing for fun is a blast. Writing for others, to show off or tell a story, is an anxious festival of fear and loathing.

That said, I'm working on a summary of Last American on Earth. I'll show it to friends and family and get some feedback. If there is anything there worth a serious effort, maybe I'll work on that. I don't know.

Now if you'll excuse me, there is a fellow outside hammering and one of us has got to go.