(Not the) Second Post Today

So, yeah. Why doesn’t anyone come around (to post) on the weekends? (* Update: While I was typing this up, I harrassed Lisa into posting. I have now changed my intended title… *) What is it you’re all doing that keeps you away? And why don’t you post about it on Monday mornings? (Well, I know, some of you do…) Is it too personal?

All this talk of being more or less personal in people’s online journals and blogs (not just on Modern Evil; I think something’s been going around…) has reminded me that I always intended Fuck Yourself To Hell to be intensely personal. No holds barred, as it were. That the title signifies something about the nature of the thing. That I’m going to be personal, detailed, and if you don’t like it, you can refer yourself to the title of the blog. That I’m going to post what I think and feel and what’s going on in my life as I see it and what I’d like to be going on in my life, and … whatever else I feel like posting, even if maybe I don’t know whether so-and-so will be okay with what I have to say about them, or what. I don’t know if I’ve ever been successful at this, here.

Perhaps at times, I have been. A post here and there, but usally not for an entire post, usually just a brief glimpse of what is going on inside. Not the whole picture. Not the whole story. Not the boring details that add up to make the end worth telling. In fact, I think it’s perhaps gotten worse since I realised so many people were reading FYTH. Did you know that since readership picked up from the same 13 friends and family members a day to all the parts of Modern Evil, FYTH has remained the most popular section of the site? That always at least as many people viewed something on FYTH in a day or week or month or year as viewed the front page of ME, often more. FYTH has fallen behind a little since I got the front page working to show whether or not anything new was on FYTH or the rest of the site, so that people seem to look there and click over to here, but it’s leagues ahead of any other blog or section of the site, even all 11 comics combined. And I think that knowing that of 250 readers a day visiting something on Modern Evil, 90% or more of them are reading FYTH, has effected what I post.

Has effected to censor me nearly as much, if not more, than knowing my mother was reading the site every day she was alive.

Let me try again…

I’m overweight. I don’t like to be this way. I came home from Phoenix and the next morning weighed myself, and I was 226. When I arrived in Pine originally, and for not less than the first month, my weight didn’t go over 218. And all of a sudden (or perhaps over as long as seven days at the longest) I put on eight pounds. Certainly the proliferation of easter candy at my ready fingertips had something to do with this, but this week, while I’ve lost three and a half pounds of the weight I put on, I’ve had more easter candy and other snacks available to me than I’ve had available to me in years. It isn’t just availability that brings me to overeat. It’s something else. Probably a combination of factors. Probably mostly stress.

It stresses me out to go to Phoenix. There’s pressure from my father. There’s tension between my father and his father. My grandmother always seems a little more out of sorts and a little more ornery when we’re there. My father always has some sort of tentative work that he’d like to be done while I’m there but we usually don’t get to, so it hangs in the air all around me all the time – this feeling that I’m supposed to be doing something, but I don’t know what or how, and even if I did, the world probably hasn’t been prepared yet. There is some relief in going to see movies. Movies have always been an excellent escape, and excellent relaxation tool, an excellent recreation for me. I love going to the movies. So when I’m in town, I try to see the new movies that have come out since I was last in town. And since I’m theoretically not in town very often, and thus don’t see my friends very often, I try to see as many of these movies with friends or family that want to see them as possible. Which becomes stressful because my dad sometimes makes plans for me without telling me, or because the way I find out about when I’ll be there and be available and such is ‘at the last possible moment’ – which means that i can’t really make plans with people. So that even the only positive thing I see in going there becomes a stress-inducing event.

And while I have other methods for dealing with stress, such as writing them out into this website, deep breathing, taking brisk walks, &ct, eating is also a coping mechanism of mine. Not as much as it has been in the past; I have reigned it in so that I am usually at least aware of my eating to try to address emotional issues and deciding that at least I’m not being destructive or harmfully reactive to the people around me adding to the stress… And am usually able to restrain my over-eating to a moderate level. That may not make sense to you, but if you can over-eat to excess, you can over-eat in moderation, too. I was so aware of it that I dreaded stepping on the scale when I got home, but knew I must, and knew I must do something about it.

So I’ve been trying my best to only eat when I’m hungry, and to stop eating when I’m full. Not to eat another helping at supper just because it’s the. To enjoy a chocolate or two in the evening, but not to just non-stop force-feed myself candies. Even when I’ve just ruined a $100-$150 piece of computer equipment and spend a couple of hours trying to fix it to no avail. And it seems to be working, okay, my weight was down to 222.5 this morning when I woke up, and I expect it may be simply 222 when I wake up tomorrow.

**********

The ongoing situation with Sara, especially re: the recent post and the follow-up comments, has got the both of us a bit riled up. (Is that right? Riled? I say it, but I don’t think I’ve ever typed it before… Anyway,) Worse, she’s at the end of her semester there, and is working on a 24 page final paper, and has approaching final exams, and has a complicted summer to look forward to… I hate to be going through any of this with her at this particular juncture in her life. I sometimes wish I could just put my feelings on hold and let her get through this week or two, then the months she’ll be wandering europe or doing summer school, and address this with her when she’s got a little more time. Except then I realise it’s that waiting stance that’s put me where I am with her, for the most part. My saying it was okay to put off this or that or the other with her, the being with her, for days, weeks, months, now years and years and years, and … I don’t know that she means to be ‘walking all over me’ or ‘taking advantage of me’, but after telling her and reassuring her for so long that I’ll always love her, I’ll always be there for her, I think she’s finally got part of the idea and taken it to heart, that she can just keep putting me off until she’s tried everything else in life, and then maybe – just maybe – if she hasn’t found something she likes better, she’ll consider what I have to say.

This isn’t exactly true. She’ll probably have some strong reaction and tell me I’m all wrong or I’m pushing her to hard or I’m expecting too much or … I don’t know. She’s a woman. I’m a man. I must be wrong. (* If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong? *) To a certain extent, yes, I am missing out on fundamental truths that everyone understands and no one can define. If they could define them, someone would probably explained it to me by now, right? I’m aware of my own failure in this way. I wish these undefinable things were at least expressible in some way. I wrote a plot device into my novel, the way Tink can kiss, because I wish I had the equivalent available to me. Because I wish I could kiss Sara and understand all the things she can’t find the words to express and I’ve been too dumb to understand on my own. Because I wish I could kiss Sara and she’d understand all the things I haven’t adequately expressed to her, all the things about me she doesn’t begin to know, and to feel the depth and fever and all that is my love for her, that she might see that it isn’t that I simply want ‘someone’, but that I live to want her.

I’ve just finished reading The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker (the very next Modern Evil Virtual Book Club book – we’re meeting 5/15/2003 – read it and join the discussion!), and in it are two central characters who from the moment they first laid eyes on each other knew they loved each other like no other, and that they were meant to be together. Throughout the book, this gets questioned, but it keeps getting reinforced as true, even unto the ultimate expression of human desire reshaping their bodies to fuse together into one flesh. Now, I know that Sara and I didn’t have that instant knowing upon seeing each other that we were meant to be together and that our relationship would bring us through hell and high water and holocaust together as these two in he book did, but I remember the first glimpses I had of her, not knowing who she was yet, dating someone else who happened to live in her neighborhood, and experiencing something I didn’t yet know how to describe. A feeling of something waiting, maybe, or of potential. It wasn’t like physical desire of seeing someone you want to hump, where you know there’s a potential for physical pleasure and beauty, and if you glimpse it but miss your chance at it you long for it and regret it’s loss – I saw her in passing, was in a situation where I could do nothing, not even say hello, knew there was something there, but was not worried. I didn’t put it together until much later, but there was no reason to be worried. She was the sister of someone I already knew, and we inevitably met for the first time, and for additional times after that. Thinking back (and my memory may just be too foggy) I don’t seem to recall any time since I realised how much I love Sara and the great potential for happiness and a great future between us that I have been worried about that potential not being realised. Frustrated that it is not yet being realised, but not worried that it ‘never’ will be. Perhaps it is something about love, feeding me confidence that everything will come out all right someday.

I never used to be impatient until I didn’t have Sara yet. I still have a great deal of patience. More than most people I meet, in most areas of my life. But there’s something about waiting for the next moment I see Sara’s face agin, the next chance I’ll have to hold her … it makes me long for that moment to come quicker. For time to pass faster, or for events to change to bring it about sooner or something. I am a painter, and my evolving technique requires me to have quite a bit of patience. I didn’t notice it until I was trying to explain what I was doing to some of the people who keep shop up here and could see me working on it… but there’s something to it. I’m working a lot with layers and textures lately, with variations of transparency peeking through to hidden layers of paint beneath… but to get these effects, i have to carefully work with transparent and pigmented media and with the right tools to get the texture the way I want it, and that’s fine – that even looks mostly like painting to people who see it, but I’ll get through and have nearly the entire canvas covered in color and texture and such in half an hour or less … and then I have to wait 8 or 12 or 18 hours for it to fully dry before I can start on the next layer, the thickening of the texture, the burying of the color. So I spend more time sitting around, watching or waiting for paint to dry than I do painting. By a factor of twenty or more. And it doesn’t bother me at all. It seems like a normal part of my process. In fact, it even gives me lots of time to think about and refine my ideas and techniques for what i want to do next, when the paint dries again. I’m very patient.

**********

I’m getting tired, I’m losing my trains of thought… It’s early, by the clock, not even eleven yet. Sara has been staying up so much later than I have lately. Last night she was falling asleep around the same time I was getting ready for bed… which is saying something because she is in Spain, 9 timezones ahead of me. Money is so frustrating to me. I wish it didn’t exist, sometimes. I want to be able to use Modafinil, to buy two and a half new gallons of medium for my paintings, to buy a replacement keyboard, to be able to pay my internet bills, to be able to afford the trip I have to take to Vegas in june for Art’s wedding and to San Diego in july for the Comicon, and so on and so on and so on, but all of these things take money.

Apple is going to make an announcement tomorrow, Monday. Probably about their new music service and a new version of iTunes that allows you to buy songs online for like, $1, and dl them directly to your computer and your iPod. Maybe a new version of the iPod. Maybe a new communications device. Maybe even the new keyboard and mouse they’ve been working on and taking patents out on. And I would really like to be able to have these exciting new things, these things I don’t even know what are or what the details of are. I’ve said before that I’d appreciate having an iPod up here. I’ve just killed my keyboard, so maybe this is just the right time for them to unveil a new one. Something so new they had to take out patents on its use. I hear rumor that their new mouse design, while still one-button, has a scroll wheel the likes of which you have never seen on a mouse.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. If not for money, I’d have modafinil, and wouldn’t be drifting out of consciousness. I could spend the rest of the night working on first writing out the rest of what I wanted to write out here, then working on re-writing my novel. And/or working on the drawings for New Comic. And still work tomorrow in the shop and on my painting and on the paino and on my reading and on trying to convince a major hotel chain to put Art and his soon-to-be-wife up in Vegas for free, and maybe on my correspondence school, if the package arrives in the mail. And then maybe sleep tomorrow night, or maybe not, if I have things to do and modafinil to take. It’s been tested to keep people up for up to a week with no noticable short-term side-effects, and to return them to a normal sleep pattern immediately after end of use with no apparent sleep debt built up. Think of how much I could get done! I do. But alas, it costs money, and is illegal to have or use without a prescription… I might not even be able to get it in or get it back from Mexico, since it’s considered a narcotic. Except that since it doesn’t make you feel high, it just keeps you awake, it STILL isn’t a street drug – it’s been around over ten years, now.

Sigh. But just enough money exists for me to cover my minimum debt payments and my phone bill and my correspondence course, plus my movies habit. My art hasn’t started selling yet, through the website or through the store (save Zuri’s commissioned work; thanks Zuri! I hope you love it! The SaveME banner has been updated!), and that’s the only way I could get extra money for things like drugs and art supplies. I am confident that they will eventually sell, but until then… I’m getting drowsy.

I’m going to go to sleep. Enough is enough, and this is enough for right now. Good night. More likely, good morning, as most of you probably don’t read this site in the middle of Sunday night…