Author: Teel

Do you have a Smelly Ass Hole?

Don’t try to lie, I know you do. So do I.

And so does everyone else I know.

Finally, a product fit for anyone to wear, the Smelly Ass Hole T-Shirt!

There is the Basic design and the Alternate design, as well as a fashionable apron that any cook would be proud to wear… Especially if it were the only thing they were wearing, and they’re in management.

Get it?

Anyway, share these Smelly Ass Hole products (the first in a line of products coming to you over the next few months) with anyone you know who has a Smelly Ass Hole of their own. They’re sure to appreciate the gesture.

I will only explain one of these links, and it is the one that took up the least of my time tonight.

http://www.frightnight.org/ – they give you a ‘random’ first panel and you try to create a thirteen panel comic that follows from it (theoretically in a horror/halloween/scary sort of way) before October 17th… So I emailed ’em for a ‘first panel’ and we’ll see if I have any ideas and/or time to work on them between now and then. I’ll do my best to at the very least to a stick-figure comic to submit.

http://www.metacortechs.com/ – I’m not saying much, but here’s a clue: See how deep the rabbit hole goes on this one. It may be “real”.

My mood has shifted, lifted, and this afternoon as I was closing up the store I found myself singing “Singing in the Rain” (well, a variation slash medely by Mandy Patinkin I haven’t heard in ages) to myself, and found the words “happy once again” echoed in me, resonated within me. There are some reasons for this and some non-reasons as well. Some of them have to do with an escalating level of self-abuse culminating in enough pain and suffering and potential damage beyond my self and my possessions and into the lives of those around me and those I care about … that being what seems to get me to turn around. I can stand all manner of torture and damage being done to myself by myself, but when my pain, my “bad” moods, my destructive and confronting natures get out of hand and begin to be directed at others, it’s too much, and I can’t but stop myself. My self-loathing (as far as my life’s experience has shown me) is my business and my business alone, but when it extends to actions and words that affect other people, it becomes other peoples’ business, too.

And perhaps I want too much to maintain a barrier between myself and others or perhaps because I actually care about other people, I don’t want to allow my own internal troubles to find their way into other people’s lives.

Regardless, despite what disbelievers would say, the trick to being happy is to decide to be, and somewhere in the last day or two I must have made that decision, because I could literally feel the “bad” feelings and low mood flowing out of me… I slept a long night, did not think about how I felt all day, and by the end of it couldn’t keep myself from noticing how well I felt.

And then there was 30 or 50 minutes where I was working on an email to Laura and I didn’t feel so hot … likely because although I have decided to be happy and am happy, there are still unhappy and confused and confusing things in my life, complicated and perhaps painful things on the horizon… and deciding to be happy does not wash them away… well, not while one is dealing directly with them. Then I sent the email off, and before long, I felt right as rain again.

Continue reading Not so bad anymore

So, yeah… I’m a little down lately.

This is either coincident with… or perhaps a result of …I learned recently that Laura has …weird issues with committment. Such that she is not sure she could be monogamous … or even go so far as to say that she will try to be ‘faithful’ to me. …And that there may be a measure of a shallow judgemental nature to her… by which I do not quite measure up.

Or maybe it’s this cold, confusing me by making me feel bad in a way that feels emotional.

Or maybe it’s because of my recent birthday… which actually went a lot better than I expected, overall… I mean, I got a lovely dinner, two cakes, a gift from Laura, a backwards sort of gift from Zoe that was just what I wanted, and these pants I’m wearing… but my whole life I’ve been not expecting to live past 50, and now I’m over half-way there, and … what is my life worth, after all these 25 years? I joke sometimes that I like to make people “suffer and cry” … that’s actually supposed to be Modern Evil’s “mission statement”: “Make people suffer and cry.” But I look back on my life, on the people whose lives I’ve intersected with, and rather than a net gain, I see a lot of suffering, confusion, and tears. And that’s just in the people around me. I’ve been trying to do better the last few years, to have a positive impact on the lives of the people I care about, to form worthwhile, lasting relationships with new people… but it’s devolved, I think. I don’t want to change the world, but I don’t want to be a total drain. And sure, I’ve got that novel written, but I think people are afraid to give me feedback on it, or … don’t know what to say at all. It isn’t a novel like anything I’ve ever seen, and apparently not like anything anyone else has seen, either. Who knows if people want to read something so different from what they’re familiar with? And I’ve sold a couple of paintings, but here’s my dark secret: I’ve never sold a painting (for money) to anyone I haven’t either been to bed with or who hasn’t expressed interest in same. It isn’t just my friends buying them (though it is just my friends expressing interest in them), it’s ex-lovers and potential lovers buying them. (I mentioned this to someone else lately, and their response was that I must be really good in bed. I guess. But I don’t really want to have to bed people to sell my art.)

It’s after ten now, and I feel like I should be downstairs, like maybe grandfather is getting angry… except I can’t remember ever seeing him angry, and I expect he’ll be calm and friendly whenever I get downstairs… but with a list of things for me to do.

My neck hurts. I think I slept on it wrong a couple of nights ago, and it’s been in pain since. Apparently there’s a glut of massage therapists in the Rim Country… but it doesn’t bring their prices down.

But mostly, I think it’s Laura. Not that she’s done something wrong, but that I hoped for too much, and I’m dealing now with my dashed hopes. I’m trying to deal, anyway. I’m trying to deal with convincing my mind and my heart that “pen pals” is the right phrase do describe us, nothing more. To figure out what that means. Mutual like, mutual lust, one-sided love, and … no committment, no expectations beyond the next letter or email, and apparently I was the only one who hoped that something more would or could grow out of this, to take us beyond pen pals. It’s my fault. I read too much into her words. I guess that’s one of the problems with letters is that I can read them again and again and again and think for hours and days and weeks about what she meant when she wrote this or that, and sometimes it doesn’t take long to see something that isn’t there… like when she says she doesn’t want someone else, she wants me… I accidentally read that to mean that out of her own desire she would automatically not pursue someone else… but I guess it must mean something else.

And part of my reaction has been that I no longer want to feel the way I do for her, I no longer want to feel like MY DESIRE has created committment in me to her, I no longer want to feel like I want more from our relationship than words on the page or the screen, I no longer want to feel like I shouldn’t go after someone else, bed someone new, I no longer know what to do… All of a sudden I don’t want to write to her anymore… I can write all of this here, publicly, but I can’t get myself to write it down on paper for her, or even in an email to her… perhaps because I don’t have a conclusion, because I am conflicted. There is something left … something, perhaps quite worthwile, which can occur between the two of us… on paper, in words, without committment of any kind or monogamy … friendship, I guess… but it’s so much less than I wanted, it’s so much less than my love wanted to grow to be, and I just have to figure out if it’s something I want, and if it is, what that means I ought to do, or if maybe I should just step back for six to eight years and see what’s going on with her then… and how that relates to … whatever it is I think I want by then, six or eight years from now.

You know, when I’m 2/3 of the way through the life I expect to lead.

I am supposed to be downstairs by now, I think. It’s one of those things. If my grandfather would call me to SAY he wanted me to come down and do something, that would be one thing. That would be great, compared to this. At least then someone would have said out-right what they want. As it is, I mostly just hear the occassional mean-spirited joke about my sleeping in… or nothing at all… when I don’t get dressed and ready for hard labor by the crack of dawn. Except … I know the crack of dawn is too early. Sometimes I do get downstairs by seven or even sometimes by eight, and more often than not my grandmother is still sleeping, and the door has a good chance of being locked because my grandfather woke up to take his pills at 4AM and has basically been resting or napping since. Other days I’ll get up and get dressed and down around nine and my grandfather has already been up and around and got a dozen things done, and he doesn’t say it explicitly, but he always makes me feel like I should have been up earlier to help him.

Or yesterday, my dad was up here… and I’d been out the prior evening hanging out with the only two people my age I know of up here until a little after 1AM, so I didn’t set alarms… normally my father will call when he leaves phoenix or when he gets to Payson, or at the least, when he gets here… and yesterday he didn’t call at all… I was woken by the sound of him running the big saw, cutting wood. And I certainly didn’t mind getting the sleep, I sure needed it, we’re all sortof recovering from a cold that’s been going around, and I’m not exactly a morning person when I’m down (I’m a little down right now; did I mention that?), so getting up late and staying up late make me feel a little … less bad, anyway, so … dad, if that was intentional, to give me extra sleep, then thanks, but … if you were secretly disappointed or upset that I wasn’t already up and around and working by the time you got here… you should have said something.

It’s all this … politeness … and not saying anything … but still giving me the feeling that I’m not meeting your standards … it gets to me. But maybe I’m being paranoid. I mean, stuff gets done. I try to get everything I’m told to do done in a reasonable period, and I try to do other things as well… Like, I can see that I should probably mow the grass, since it finally looks good to me, long and soft enough to want to lay down in it… and once I’ve mowed it’ll look neat and trim but … unappealing to me. I’ve always liked the look of ‘wild’ grasses, growing tall and wide and at various heights… tall enough that the wind can make waves across the lawn is even better… waves of green, undulating before me. But since the grass is just beginning to look good to me, I know in my mind that it is time to mow it all down. Because other people don’t think like me, I guess.

Where was I? Oh… frustrated that because it’s 9:30AM as I write this, I imagine my grandfather sitting downstairs wondering where I am, and at the same time I want to be back in bed, sleeping. I’m up because I set alarms to wake me up. … That’s so annoying to me… I don’t have a real ‘job’ I have to show up for on a set schedule, I merely have an obligation to do the things that need to be done around here, and yet … I feel obliged to set alarms to try to get myself out of bed and downstairs by about 8:30… too much earlier and sometimes I walk in on my grandmother naked… too much later and I walk in on a perceived attitude that I’m a disgrace for being so late. It’s frustrating to me that I’m living by alarms up here. Life should not be this way here. … Maybe I do it to myself. Maybe no one cares when I get up.

Because I’m just a quick call away. Press a couple of buttons on your phone and say the word and I can be up and dressed and downstairs in just a few minutes, and I can start the heavy lifting before I even eat, if you need me to. Of course, my grandfather will never see this, and I won’t talk to him about it, just like he doesn’t talk to ME about it.

What do you think we’ll do today? There’s a chance we’ll be building a box to put sheets of glass in, or maybe he won’t have the energy for that and he won’t give me anything to do. Which is good, but until he hasn’t given me anything to do, I feel like working on my own projects or interests is somehow a betrayal. Like, I couldn’t go do any work on a painting or my second novel right now because there’s this nagging feeling that maybe grandfather expects me to be moving 25 gallons of cat shit from one place to another.