Upon my demise...

I ask, to whomever discovers this digital amendment to my last will and testament, to carry out this final wish.
Among my possessions there will be a list. The names upon this list will be comprised of some of my deepest and sincerest friends...I want you to mail them a letter.
It is to read:
Dear (Insert respective name here),

Fuck you. Haha, I fooled you. For years, even decades, I've quietly played along with the charade. In these past few moments you probably thought of the breath leaving a dear old friend and anxiously opened this note, the last memory I would leave you with. I just want you to know that I loved you, but every day I contemptuously fucked, sucked, and seduced you in mind. It was a silent protest of the terms I had to accept to know you and with this note I can die happy knowing now we are even. My passion was subjugated and your fantasy destroyed.

Best wishes and godspeed,

Chad Thomas Webb

Christmas Eve Eve

It all boils down to this...I'm tired of being disappointed. It gets tiresome ladies. Maybe I've returned to my foolishly optomistic and unsatisfiable ways, but it's not really like I'm ravaging the countryside now is it. I'm beginning to lose the lesson again. Then again, even the beautiful suffer...so my fate is not merely my own.
I worry about the fact that I may be using relationships as a cure all, a mechanism of completion. Maybe I'm using the lack of soul-engulfing love as an excuse as to why I haven't really started the fantastic journey I keep claiming my life is going to take. It's easier to say someone's late or lost than saying that I'm too afraid or ignorant. It just feels so natural though. This expectation really isn't my imagination of what it would feel like, its tangible like a scar...a dull sensation that's a beacon to a whole cachophany of emotions. I cry sometimes with the weight of it, asking why don't I deserve it again.
Nothing is sexy anymore. I looked at the flexing and gyrating woman tonight, but it was more like starvation than savoring a fine meal. The scary part is that a man dying of thirst will drink sea water, only to have it drive him insane. Foolish and regrettable decisions lay ahead.

Whatever "it" is, will come back and bite you in the ass...

I've had quite a few moments where I've had my pride crushed by the great hammer of god's irony. The first instance of this I remember was at the GHA reunion some years back. At this point in my life I felt in shambles, I probably looked it too. While at the time I didn't notice it, I was particularly callous and selfish.
Then there was Catherine Goffreda. In opposition to my meotoric fall from the promise of my high school years and my obstinant hold to my "boyhood", she had become a woman. In the drama of that summer where I had first met her, she seemed like a sad character to me. She was enthusiastic, smart, and a contemptous overacheiver. Puberty had been rough to her and left her in a seemingly awkward transisiton between the girl of 10 and what I was looking at the day of the reunion. All that summer I had seen her been "liked", but not passionately admired.
The lession I learned that day and remembered with her coincidental reemergance into my life was that youth is something to be mourned with its passing, but only so much. It takes the time and scars of wisdom to appreciate the mechanations of your better judgement. So I find myself being grateful that I finally caught up to Catherine, or rather the icon of maturity she formed in my mind.

Why is it that in the end, all your ever left with appreciation for what you did and the doubt of what you didn't? Why do all the sorrows and joys that influenced you along the way fade?

There was this girl in line...

It's quickly approaching a year since I embarked to London, England and the more tourist parts of Europe. This day also happens to be the one made me think birthdays are rather morbid affairs. We ate and said congrats to the old man. He had made it through another year that contained moments in which he probably wished he hadn't and feared he wouldn't. How did this become such a bright occasion and one so central to one's personal calendar. I guess it could be interpreted as a "fuck you" to the cold and seemingly distant hand of death. Maybe I'm missing the point all together.
On this same day, I noticed I talk to people less and less. My usually rabid addiction to instant messaging has turned into cursory log-ins to see if a certain few individuals are on. They usually aren't or are just about to leave. So my days contain grad school disillusionment and meandering curiosity amongst the annals of the world wide web. This observation lead to another, one that I would have thought would be more shocking when it occurred. My life is rather unamazing. There seems to be a great deal of "grin and bear" attitudes around me. The end of 2005 seems to be wane of the cycles of many lives I know and love...is there a meaning behind all this...a Doogie Howser-ish revelation that I'm missing? Insight aside, these thoughts and the fact that I'm listening to the most effective and strikingly used song in cinema (in my opinion)led my thoughts to her. On the impending anniversary of my travels abroad, she finally came back to me...the girl from California.
Recently I've sifted through the events of my life with detective's eyes. I've been looking for small and seemingly insignificant clues that turn into head-smackingly obvious suggestions of where I should steer my life next. One of these clues led me to London and another overheard while eating breakfast one morning in Italy led me to that line. The subjective analysis of the events of that trip to Italy could have led me to do and think a thousand things. Become a writer, travel the world, paint the images trapped in your head, don't ever suffer the slings and arrows of the ineffective and disappointed etc... but no. A book, a glimpse of faux-attractive underwear, and an awkward admission of sexuality to a proud and affluent mother from Northern California became a siren's song that fades out and back in on my father's birthday.
She was reading Heidegger for her class on discourse, she had a body you could clean a fish with, and she slipped up in saying she liked taking it from behind from her Persian boyfriend. Her apolloian brother and I turned an expensive shade of scarlet and the mother just chuckled, amused by the fact that her daughter is a woman now. Led Zeppelin rang in my ears, I was going to California with an aching in my heart. And that's just what I intend on doing. West, where the promise of gold, kinky academics, and general good fortune has lured so many and now me. I'm not even sure if that's where the compass will end up pointing, it may be any mixture of West and the other principle directions. I do know that by "California" I mean the land laying over the horizon, the land where promise lays and the next chapter unfolds. Contemplating the perceived bleakness of my father's birthday and my friends' labors, its high time to feel amazing again. I wonder if Spring will contain the same daily wonder it held last year. Will it come in the promise of a new beginning? Will it come in the shapely form of a mad lover, whipping me into action? Will it come in the form of a piece of art that will change my life? To quote a journal entry dated February 15th, 2005, "I stand in a great many places being simply a pile of pitch and kindling waiting simply for a spark." I'm a hero waiting for a call and hoping I haven't already missed it. Hell I'd even settle for a sexually satisfying affair. It's been a long year.

Something for the Holidays

A Thanksgiving Prayer
by William S. Burroughs

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories—all right let's see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

the panic of the here and now

Betrayal, that's what really gets me going. Time and again I'm drawn into the lullaby and siren song of home. It's like a movie or a book or a lover, except it doesn't keep its promise of protecting me when I'm scared and alone. Why is this blog a simple forum for my collective bitching and moaning. I guess I have nothing to write about when all is well, or at least when all is not unwell. (Remove the post-modern dualities of that last statement and it makes perfect sense. Abscence of something is not proof of anything.)
I don't like being angry and I don't like the memory of combat, the ritual of familial strife. I sometimes wonder the taint I've added to my own life, both mentally and metaphysically, on those series of nights. I hated them and there were nights I wanted them dead. The same last-ditch reaction still lingers, I call it up from time to time. I receed into my mind and force the fury out. Its wave singes, tears, and obliterates all it touches. The parameters are different, but at its heart is a wish to make it all go away.
What shakes me is that there is a lack of respect. They're not strong, and they don't understand. One day I'll be pathetic (in its most loving connotation) just like them. I'll patiently wait for death to remove me from the things I don't understand and to allow me the anxiously anticipated moment where the ideal is captured, my world in memory is all I have left. The golden age of what I colored it to be.

There isn't a voice in my head or in my home telling me this will all be ok.

There hasn't been in a long time.

the weight and the heat

I appreciate sound bite quality of the my narrative most of the time. During others, I wonder if it makes me sound pompous and allows me to be taken less seriously.
I'm on to something with this "crazy" label. It has a keen way of fitting when not much else does. I can literally feel the connotation of the word changing in my head as I use it more and more often to describe myself and others.
Nuance is a lost art, with the exemption of its use in the world of "style". There is a difference though, between its subtle discernment and its conscious manipulation. It annoys me that so many people look stupidly at it, as if it wasn't there.
I wonder how many people, like me, are out there. There appears to me to be a dreamy multitude moving from lover and lover effortlessly. To them its a question of who, rather than if. I daydream about that kind of life, but I never seemed to have found it in my years of experience in the world of love. How many people look at the world immediate to them and see nothing with startling or even commonplace promise? Its awkward and unnatural to hope. Quiet resignation or surpressed neurosis are the order of the day. I miss the weight and the heat of love. The nuance of fucking in a tender way on days and nights where your soul needs affirmed in its belief that there is noise outside the chambers. Its tangible, its real in those sweaty brief moments. And then the color returns along with the many uses of life. Its not just that one thing anymore, it becomes evil, pathetic, and grand all at once. And the wave breaks and descends the path to that exscruiatingly slow halt and retreat.
I didn't think a day or a job would mean so much to me yesterday. I'm glad I didn't have it all planned out before.

The Phony War Against the Critics

A nice summation of my opinion of the Republican rhetoric on the war in Iraq.

...upon my liar's chair

What I fear losing/expect to miss the most is the person who makes time for me and enjoys my small and peculiar interests.
An unbridled sense of optimism saved my life, justly ensuring her role in it.
What I never had to lose was the soul-hugging, transcendent, and consumate lover.
What was missing was desire of both the holy and carnal designs.
What saddens me the most is that I know that this is going to be a long, unelegant, and painful affair.
I'll pay my penance for being silent too long.

Which Trainspotting Character Are You?